“Hey, I didn’t say it was stupid.”
She sat down on our blanket and motioned for me to sit too. “So what do you think?”
Honestly, not kissing until marriage seemed really over the top, but at the same time, I couldn’t help but respect her for it. “You really wanna know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
I sighed. “I think it’s awful.”
“What?” Okay, so Ray Anne could cop an attitude.
“Wait.” I smiled. “Let me finish. I think it’s awful except . . .”
“Yeah?”
“For the incredibly lucky man who gets that kiss.”
Her pout rose to a grin. “Thanks. Seriously, it means a lot.”
I nearly tried to kiss her again but remembered that was a no-no.
“Owen?” I had a bad feeling about what was coming next. “I want us to stay good friends, and I’m worried that if I open up my heart to something more, it won’t end well.”
I didn’t get it. “Well, since we can’t even kiss, isn’t ‘friends’ the only choice we have?”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t even know how to be more than friends without fooling around. I want something more meaningful than that. And I want someone who loves the Lord like I do.”
She might as well have clobbered me in the face with a fistful of dirt. “Are you saying I’m not good enough?” I probably sounded hurt. ’Cause I was.
“No. I’m saying I’m not good enough—not strong enough—to date you. I think it would make it difficult for me to keep my priorities straight. And saving things for marriage—that would be really hard since you don’t believe in that.”
I guess that was her attempt at putting a humble spin on things, but to me, she was still saying I flat out didn’t measure up.
“Look, we both know I’m not a church boy and faith doesn’t come naturally to me, but I really am trying—more now than ever. And if you’re asking me to keep my hands off you because you’ve set your heart on saving yourself for marriage, I’ll do it. I’ll respect your wishes because . . .”
I almost took the coward’s way out and said something about how much I admired her.
“Because I care about you, Ray. A lot.”
THIRTY
“SOMEONE HAS SOME pep in his step today.”
I rolled my eyes. My mom could be so dorky. But I really was feeling the best I had since my world had imploded. I’d actually slept so well the night before that I’d pressed snooze on my phone, like, five times.
I lowered myself onto my motorcycle and made a mental note. Only six more Mondays before graduation.
I couldn’t imagine what the next phase of my life would be like, but I was 100 percent sure who I wanted with me.
I’d just started my bike when my cell rang. I hoped it was her.
Nope.
“Did you hear?” Jess was sobbing so hard it didn’t sound like her. “About Meagan?”
All my happiness hit the pavement.
“What happened?”
“She overdosed. She didn’t die, but they’re saying it doesn’t look good. She’s in intensive care.”
“What?” It was like my throat had clamped shut, but I still managed to talk. “She was better! Much better!”
“Sometimes it just seems that way.”
“No!” I couldn’t accept that. “I’m telling you—Suicide was gone!”
“Huh?”
“What hospital is she at?”
“I don’t know yet.” She cried even harder. “I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and drove around in a daze, my blood pressure rising like the Texas heat in July.
I’d tried to stop her. But she gave in, surrendered to the hate-filled lies of an enemy whose only motive is destruction.
Why couldn’t Lance listen to me?
Why didn’t the Watchmen intervene?
I’d known she was in trouble, but it hadn’t mattered. I saw her, clear as day, charging toward a steep, unforgiving cliff called suicide, but no one would help me hold her back. I had thrown her a rope, but she’d let it slip through her fingers.
I swerved onto the grass alongside a desolate road and parked my bike, breathing so hard I thought my lungs might explode. The pain of injustice burned inside my chest like I’d been impaled with a steel-tipped arrow.
I stumbled onto the grass. Pounded my fists into the earth.
“What’s the matter with you?” I lifted my head and raged at the universe and its supposed Maker. “How could you let this happen?” I picked up a good-sized rock and hurled it into the street, watching it splinter into a thousand rolling pieces. “If the Watchmen work for you, you suck at commanding your army!”
I kicked a hard mound of dried mud and glared up at the blue expanse. I didn’t care if I became fitted with a shackle. I wasn’t done talking.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted as hard as my throat would let me.
“GOD! I HATE YOU!”
I collapsed in the grass beside my bike, then slammed my elbow against my front tire over and over and over. I finally pulled my knees into my chest and rocked back and forth. It was quiet on that backstreet, no sound but an easy breeze. But my declaration rang in my ears, echoing across a realm where words travel faster and farther than light, and superhuman beings are always listening.
I wanted them to hear me. I’d meant what I’d said.
My phone rang. I scrambled to yank it out of my pocket.
“Owen?”
It was Lance. No hostility. Just sorrow. “Can you come to Central Hospital? Meagan—”
“I know. I’ll be there.”
I started my motorcycle and adjusted the rearview mirror. No shock to me, Faithless was watching me a short distance away with two more Creepers at its side. I gassed it.
Of course the press was there, reporting outside the hospital. If they were at all grieved by Meagan’s tragedy, I couldn’t tell.
I refused an interview.
Lingering outside the entrance was another nuisance: the crazed redhead—the most insane of all the protesters. He had countless chains—even more than my mom. He glared at me, and I scowled right back, way too on edge to put up with one of his outbursts. Good thing he kept his mouth shut.
Inside the hospital lobby, that dusty, soot-looking stuff was everywhere, blanketing the floors and smeared on the walls and chairs and couches. My classmates were there too, tons of them huddled together, and the powdered residue was stuck to them, on their shoes and clothes. A nurse walked by, and she was really covered—clumps of the ashy dust on her face and lips and all in her hair.
I looked down, and it was already stuck to my shoes. And I was so cold, my ears and nose and fingers were numb.
Out of the corner of my eye, the walls appeared to breathe. I looked closer and realized they were teeming with Creepers, crammed full, all shoving and shifting like worms slithering in a Mason jar filled to the top. No doubt feeding off an atmosphere of human suffering and death.
And despite the sunlit windows and lighting fixtures, the hospital was dim, like the air was soiled with smog. I was tempted to go back outside, but then I saw Ray Anne, her light so bright and cleansing that the space around her was clean. She walked to me, and everywhere she set her feet, she left clean footprints.
She hugged me, and I could take a breath.
“Have you seen Lance?” I asked her.
She pointed. He was exiting some double doors. People swarmed him, but he came straight to me, eyes bloodshot and puffy. Guess I’d underestimated how much our friendship meant to him after all. I didn’t know what to say, just put a hand on his shoulder. The dust from his shirt stuck to my hand.
He bit his lip, working to keep his emotions in check. “You can’t go into her room, but they said I could have someone back there with me.”
I didn’t want to go near her or anyone else spiraling toward death, but I followed Lance anyway. Even if things between us weren�
��t like they used to be, I wasn’t willing to turn my back on him. Not now.
The ICU was darker than the lobby, the walls just as possessed. We passed numerous rooms on the way to Meagan’s, and at first I mostly kept my head down—until I noticed something horrid. A sickly old man appeared bound to his hospital bed by thick, spiderweb-looking strands woven over his bony body. The grayish threads stretched out and clung to the walls. A Creeper hovered overhead, watching.
I forced myself to keep walking. The patients in the following rooms had webs too.
“Wait here. I’ll be back.” Lance went to Meagan’s bedside, and I peered in from the hallway. More webs. She was on life support. Had already been resuscitated once, I heard her parents say.
Meagan’s mom, normally an attractive woman, looked half-dead herself. And Meagan’s dad—well, let’s just say he was doing good to be standing.
Meagan was hooked up to all kinds of machines and monitors that beeped and blinked, and tubes stretched in every direction through the spidery threads. Her shackle was still in place, chains draping to the floor, and her jagged cords sprawled across her pillowcase.
Lance came back into the hallway. “The doctors say that we should . . . that we have to consider letting her . . .”
He closed his eyes and broke, sobbing on my shoulder. I had no clue how to console him, but I was willing to stick it out until the very end. Which probably wouldn’t be long now.
When Meagan’s brother showed up, having sped all the way from College Station, the environment became so intense and emotional that I had to take a break and walk away for a minute. Meagan’s family was falling to pieces, wailing. I couldn’t take it.
I wandered down the dingy hallway, my mouth completely dry, but I was reluctant to drink from the water fountain. The place felt contaminated. A few more steps, and something bright caught my eye. An elderly lady, propped up in her bed. A Light.
Nothing sinister on her body, over her bed, or in her room.
She looked a century old, but her radiance was extraordinary. It lit the bottom half of her bed with a shimmering aura.
Her neck was layered with wrinkles and covered in brown age spots, but it was visible—which was more than I could say for most people. I stood by the door, watching her sleep. I inched closer, intrigued.
Her room was peaceful and way cleaner than the hallway. I stepped in farther, my face and fingers thawing the closer I came to her.
“Is that you, John?”
I nearly had a heart attack when her eyes sprang open and she spoke. I looked over my shoulder. No one there. “Um, no, ma’am. I’m Owen.”
“Come here, son.” Her eyes drifted closed again, but she was smiling. Not a tooth in her gums. I stopped a foot from her bed. She reached with her wobbly hand, motioning for me. I stepped forward, and she gripped my fingers the best she could. Her knuckles were enormous.
“You remind me of my son.” She grinned again and squeezed my hand. “He died in the war. Twenty-three years old.”
“Oh.”
Her eyeballs were so deep set, it was like they’d fallen back into her brain. She fell asleep again. The light around her feet was bright enough to penetrate through the bedsheets.
“It’s so nice of you to come see me.” A sudden burst of consciousness.
“Sure.”
She tried to focus her cloudy eyes on me. Given the circumstances, it seemed okay to ask. “You have this incredible glow. Do you know why?”
She let out a raspy laugh that shook her whole body. “I’m going home soon.” Then she was out again.
Poor lady. From the looks of things, she was never going home again. But she had a lifetime behind her. Meagan’s life was just getting started.
I draped the nice old lady’s arm over her bony chest and slipped my fingers away. I stepped into the hallway, and an announcement blared through the intercom. I knew enough about hospital protocols to recognize that the term code blue wasn’t good.
Medical personnel raced by. Into Meagan’s room.
I had to get down there, for Lance. I raced down the hall.
What I saw next will never, ever leave me.
THIRTY-ONE
I STOPPED OUTSIDE the doorway of Meagan’s room. It was a hurricane of activity. A doctor hovered over her, clutching an electric paddle in each hand. The only thing louder than the monotone alarm of Meagan’s cardiac flatlining was the high-pitched squeal of the defibrillator charging.
“Clear!” the doctor yelled. She plunged the paddles against Meagan’s chest, jolting her body. Meagan’s mom fainted. Her brother was frantic, yelling at the doctors to keep trying.
They hit her a second time. Still no pulse.
Lance fell back into a chair and covered his face. I was a statue—frozen, numb with disbelief.
They shocked Meagan a third time. The doctor stepped back. No response.
But then everything changed.
Suicide sat straight up in the bed, extending out of Meagan’s torso. I rubbed my eyes, trying to comprehend it. But the realization was unbearable.
It had never left her, never truly detached. Instead Suicide had somehow pried its way through her skin and stuffed itself inside her body, sabotaging her night and day from within. The ultimate act of trespass.
Now that Meagan’s heart had stopped, Suicide used its long arms to hoist up and out of her, cackling in the face of her family’s anguish. It passed through the third-story window at the same time that two other Creepers oozed out of the webbed wall above Meagan’s bed. One pounced on her chest and tore her cords out of her head while the other ripped her chains off with one hand. They wrapped them around her shackle, winding and squeezing against her neck like they wanted to suffocate her even though she’d already stopped breathing.
One Creeper, Damnation, charged through the side of Meagan’s bed and stood on her—inside of her—at her waist, grinding its teeth, drooling on her. The other one, Thief, peered down from the opposite side, arched over her head.
Like calculated serial killers, they plunged their hands into her stomach, then pulled, ripping a shadowy figure out of Meagan, leaving a dusty, gaping hole.
My knees buckled and I hit the floor.
The shadow was Meagan.
Her soul. Kicking. Screaming. Flailing. Begging for mercy.
They dragged her off the bed, away from her body, and clawed at her with repeated blows. She fought back, twisting and straining to grab onto something. Anything.
“Daddy!” Her bloodcurdling cries sent tremors through my body. “Help me!”
Her pleas fell on deaf ears.
I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t comprehend it. Couldn’t stop the abduction being carried out ten feet away from me.
They struck her in the mouth, silencing her, then pushed her down to the dust-covered floor, whipping their heads back and forth now so fast that they became a dark blur.
Out of the ashen ground cover, a being emerged. He had the bodily frame of a Creeper but was considerably bigger. A face as pale as a corpse. No infected markings or letters.
He was draped in long, shredded garments that may have been light colored at one time but were now a filthy gray—completely saturated with that nasty dust and stained with what appeared to be splatters of dried blood.
A black crown of spiky thorns was pressed into his head, and he had wispy, long hair—even whiter than his colorless face.
Damnation and Thief released Meagan’s soul to this superior presence, then ran back into the wall like spooked rats.
All went silent.
I thought I was going to pass out. I struggled, disoriented, like I was outside of my body too. The pale Creeper’s presence was disrupting my equilibrium, throwing my senses out of whack.
He bent to the ground and lifted Meagan’s chin, gazing down on her with the most nightmarish eyes I’d ever seen—white pupils floating in a pool of black.
“Please, have mercy,” Meagan sobbed, shaking, laboring to speak. �
�Don’t hurt me. Send me back. I beg you!”
I waited, hoping against all odds. But her captor narrowed his ghostly eyes and snarled, answering her pleas with heartless contempt. The floor suddenly crumbled beneath them, and they sank down, swallowed by the ground.
“No!” I reached to her.
Out of the black crater, Meagan grasped with both arms, battling to cling to the hospital floor, her legs dangling into darkness.
“Meagan!” My body was so heavy I could barely move, but I managed to get into her room and pull myself toward her, stretching my arm as far as it would go.
She lifted her upper body out of the hole, and I grabbed for her, but my hand passed through hers. Hard as I tried, I couldn’t make contact. Her soul was in another dimension now, far beyond my grasp.
That instant, a white hand reached up from behind Meagan, spreading its clawed fingers across her forehead.
My eyes met Meagan’s, a final word on her shivering lips. “Owen!”
Her head jerked backward, and her arms gave way. I saw her drop, disappear into darkness. Banished from the land of the living.
“NO!”
I rolled onto my back and convulsed, unable to cope. Terrorized from limb to limb.
I saw Lance hovering over me, then all went black.
I don’t remember waking up or how I got into a chair, but I do know I was wrapped in a blanket, and a lady in scrubs had handed me a cup of water. I was seated by the nurses’ station, not far from Meagan’s room. Her empty body still lay in the bed, a hollow shell, her midsection ravaged just like Walt’s. No more monitors or lights or sounds.
Lance stroked her hand.
I heard a nurse say that someone from the morgue was on the way.
Lance bent down and kissed the back of his girlfriend’s hand, tears dripping down his cheeks. Then he backed away, into the hall. I shrugged the blanket off my shoulders and pushed down on the arms of my chair. It wasn’t easy to stand. Or to make sense of reality.
“Lance.” I meant to call his name but instead barely whispered it. I stepped toward him, working to keep my balance, struggling not to break down. He saw me and came the rest of the way.
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