But that irritating alarm kept going, and as he came more fully awake, he realized that he could hear others echoing up and down the tiled hospital corridor. A sickly yellow light came from two units set into the ceiling of his room, but it took him a moment to understand that these were emergency lights. The alarm came from the machine that had been monitoring his vital signs earlier in the day. It was no longer attached to him now—the nurse had disconnected it when she had last checked on him—but it had yet to be removed from the room. Now the contraption beeped and flashed. He figured it had a battery backup, and that the lights in the ceiling meant there was a fail-safe system so that people on other machines—the kind that kept you breathing, or your heart beating—wouldn’t die just because the wind had blown down a power line. In fact, any moment . . .
Even as the thought crossed his mind, the lights popped on, electricity in the hospital switching over to backup generators. He exhaled, relaxing the tension that had gripped him without his even being aware of it. The machine beside him was not keeping him alive, or even monitoring his vital signs anymore, but it had still unnerved him to think the hospital’s systems might go down.
People rushed by in the corridor, no one even pausing long enough to poke their head in to see him. Not that Norm minded. After a day or two of observation, they would send him home with instructions about changing his diet and adding exercise to his life, not to mention prescription drugs to cut his cholesterol. His heart attack had knocked him on his ass, but the docs had told him already that it didn’t seem to have done any significant damage. He needed rest and a new lifestyle, and there were lots of other people in the hospital whose condition required more attention. Norm didn’t mind at all. He just wanted to go back to sleep.
First, though, he needed to take care of other needs.
Careful not to tangle up his IV tube, he climbed out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom, wheeling the stand that held the IV bag along beside him. When he hit the switch, the bathroom light flickered on, and he caught sight of himself in the mirror and shuddered. Damn, he looked like death warmed over.
“Hello, handsome,” he sneered at himself. “Shit, you’re an old man.”
Still weak, but breathing without the same ache that had been in his chest earlier in the day, he shut the door and lifted the toilet seat. He sighed with pleasure as he let out a stream of urine, and shivered a bit as a chill went through him.
As he stepped out of the bathroom, hands still wet from washing, he went to click off the light and then changed his mind. He’d leave the bathroom light on to guide him if he should need to get up again, and shut off the other lights in the room instead. He wheeled the IV stand along with him as he closed the door, leaving it only slightly ajar, and then switched the lights off. Enough illumination leaked in from the corridor and from the half-open bathroom door to light his way back to bed.
Weak but content to be alive—feeling as though he had been given the gift of second chances—he made his way back toward the bed. The lights on the dormant monitor glowed steadily, and he wondered why no one had taken it away yet. He supposed they would remove it when they needed it for someone else.
As he reached the bed, he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned toward the window. In the darkened room, his eyes had adjusted enough that he could see a figure silhouetted against the darkness, framed by the rain that pelted the glass. Something twitched, flicking side to side like an eel moving through water, but above it, set into an oil-black patch of nothing, a quartet of sickly golden eyes peered in at him.
“Jesus Christ,” Norm whispered, staring.
The thing unfurled from the fourth-floor window like a flag and took the wind, vanishing with a flutter. Muttering under his breath, Norm hurried across the room. Part of him believed it must have been an owl—maybe two owls. Or bats. A voice at the back of his mind was already telling him to forget it, trying to persuade him that he had hallucinated, that there had been nothing there at all.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered. And what if it bites your face off?
The thought almost made him laugh. As he approached the window, he managed an uneasy chuckle. He should go back to bed, maybe call someone to have a look. But he had never been a coward, not even as a boy, and he wouldn’t start being afraid of things outside his window in the dark now that he was a grown man. Mortality might have come knocking on his door today, but Norm Dunne wasn’t going to let that turn him into some kind of pussy.
He pressed his forehead to the glass and looked out into the dark. He could see the edge of the parking lot off to the right, its lampposts partially dimmed by rain and a fog that had begun to rise. The rest of his view consisted of the rocky hill behind the hospital and the woods at the high edge of the property.
“You’re off your nut,” he muttered to himself.
Norm moved around, looking left and right, and then tilted his head to peer up at the stormy night sky.
Black figures darted back and forth in the churning clouds. They were hard to discern through the rain, but he counted at least four black silhouettes moving high up in the dark. They seemed to ride the wind, undulating as though draped in robes, circling like carrion birds in search of a feast.
Norm staggered away from the window. He wanted to fall back into bed and hide himself, but instead he wheeled his IV stand back across the room and snapped on the lights. His heart hammered in his chest, racing too fast, and a fresh ripple of fear went through him. He held a hand over the spot as he trudged back toward the bed and lay down.
His son, Tommy, had gone home for the night. The urge to call him and ask him to come back, to spend the night in the hospital room with his old man, was almost overwhelming. But Norm would not give in to that temptation. How could he admit to his boy that he was frightened—that something, maybe Death come calling, ready to collect him—had scared him so badly that he didn’t want to be alone? He couldn’t.
Just birds, he told himself. Too big to be bats. They were crows, you stupid son of a bitch.
Norman Dunne lay in bed and stared at the window, feeling smaller than he had in his whole adult life. There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light, his mother had always told him, back when he was a boy.
He wondered if she had lied.
CHAPTER 5
AMBER lay stretched out on the sofa in the TV room, cell phone clutched in her hand as if it were some talisman she thought would protect her from the storm. The floor lamp behind the sofa cast a wan golden light that did not do much to relieve the gloom that seemed to seep into the house from the stormy night outside. Her Gran lay asleep in her chair in the corner—which was where she could be found nearly all of the time that she wasn’t in bed—and a tiny trickle of drool wetted the corner of the old woman’s mouth. She might as well have been alone, and it wasn’t a night for being on her own.
She could have gone into the basement and visited her father, who was trying to get some exercise on the treadmill down there, or into the kitchen, where her middle-schoolteacher mom was correcting science tests, but laziness beat out loneliness tonight. She just wanted to stay there on the sofa, huddled away from the storm, trying not to think about the bizarre mass bird suicide from earlier in the day, or the vision she’d had during her seizure in Professor Varick’s class. Besides, as long as she could text, she wouldn’t be completely lonely.
The volume on the TV was turned up too high. Normally it would have bothered her, but tonight it canceled out some of the noise of the storm—the punishing rain that pounded on the roof and windows, and the occasional drumroll of thunder. But though she watched the television, she wasn’t really paying attention. Her great-grandmother had a love of idiot comedy, everything from the Three Stooges to Will Ferrell and beyond, and could often be heard chuckling to herself as she watched them, even though Amber was sure she understood very little of the English-language dialogue. Tonight she had flipped channels until she’
d found a moderately amusing and truly idiotic Jim Carrey movie from years ago, and then promptly fallen asleep.
What is the Jim Carrey movie where he has stupid hair? she texted to her best friend, Tami.
Her eyelids fluttered sleepily and the TV screen began to blur, but then her phone vibrated with the incoming text.
Isn’t that all of them? Tami had replied.
Amber sent back a ☺ and a moment later, the phone vibrated again. The message was from Ben. You seemed pretty shaken up earlier. You okay now?
An image of Ben swam into her mind, the way he’d looked when she had first had her seizure that morning, and she felt the urge to kiss him. If he had been there beside her on the sofa, she would have done that and more. Her attraction to him seemed to come and go, but at the moment, it was very much present.
You’re sweet, she texted. I’m good. Bored, which must mean I’m okay.
I have a cure for boredom, he wrote.
Scrabble? she asked.
Not the game I had in mind.
Amber hesitated before replying. How much did she want to encourage him? Knowing how fickle she was when it came to Ben, shouldn’t she draw a line? Probably, she should.
She grinned as she typed. Hmm. Something to ponder. Rain check for tonight, though. It’s late and nasty out and I’m already under the covers.
Cute. In your jammies?
Who said anything about jammies?
A long pause before the reply came. Tease.
Girls are evil. Didn’t anyone ever tell you? Now she was grinning so broadly it hurt her face, and the flirtation had stirred something deep inside her. Maybe she wasn’t just teasing Ben after all.
Some lessons I prefer to learn on my own, Ben replied.
Maybe I’ll let you buy me coffee tomorrow. ☺
Great. Let’s just pray for no kamikaze crows.
Amber shuddered, a ripple of unease passing through her. Her smile faded. Flirting had ceased to be fun.
Talk to you in the a. m., she texted.
OK. Night.
With her Gran snoring softly in her chair, Amber settled deeper into the sofa and let her brain drift into autopilot as she watched television. God, what a stupid movie. She clutched her cell phone to her chest the way she had seen some old ladies hold their rosary beads and let her mind empty of all of the tension of the day. But it didn’t stay empty for long. Memories and images kept slipping back in, and her brow furrowed with thoughts of her collapse in Professor Varick’s classroom, and then the creepy insanity at Starbucks, what Ben called the “kamikaze crows,” though it had been more than just crows.
She had a flash of memory from the hospital—she hated lying on those gurney beds; they were so damned uncomfortable—and then an image of Tommy Dunne rose in her mind. Poor guy, she thought. They weren’t exactly close, not these days, but she had always been fond of Tommy, and she felt badly that she hadn’t spared him another thought after she had run into him earlier and learned that his father had had a heart attack. Norm Dunne usually looked in need of sleep or a drink or both, but he had also had a pleasant wave and a smile for Amber, and not in a creepy, ogling way.
Scanning through her cell phone contacts list, she found that she didn’t have Tommy’s number. That didn’t surprise her, considering how long it had been since they’d talked. But then she remembered they were friends on Facebook and quickly used her phone to get online and access his page, where she found the number easily, and sent him a text.
Hey. I hope your dad’s doing better. Let me know if you need anything.
Jim Carrey’s antics unraveled on screen as she waited for a reply, but she received none. Soon her eyelids began to droop again, the yearning for sleep making her thoughts muzzy and slow, and she felt her head begin to fall forward. She bobbed several times, her breathing matching the cadence of her great-grandmother’s snores, and then she closed her eyes, phone still held tightly to her chest.
. . . AND she is standing in the hot rain again, Hawthorne burning with green fire all around her. The flames do not char. Instead the glass in the windows melts and runs and the brick crumbles and the wood warps and begins to grow sprigs and then branches, roots pushing down into the ground. Thorns appear. From inside those now windowless, malleable structures, people scream in the voices of birds. She sees a middle-aged couple and their young daughter through a second-story window, their mouths open, emitting the shrieks of murdered gulls.
The hot rain sears her flesh, but she does not try to find a place to hide. Her skin blisters and peels and the fat underneath runs like candle wax, but she is moving, searching. Running. Around a corner she staggers to a halt. Hundreds of people are in Melville Park, up to their waists in the floodwaters, in hot rain. Chaos has erupted. They are drowning one another. They are murdering one another. They are fucking one another. Some are trying to drown themselves, even as others look toward the bell tower of the abandoned Methodist church, reaching into the sky as though a lifeline will be thrown that will hoist them out of the anarchy, out of the blood and death and bestial rutting.
Amber walks among them like a ghost, untouched in the flesh but wounded in the heart. She looks up to see what has caused them to reach toward the sky with such hope, such elation, and a wave of sickness passes through her. She retches and falls to her knees, the floodwaters sucking at her. The water up to her shoulders, scouring her naked flesh until it is raw and pitted and bone has begun to show through, she stares at the clock tower.
The goddess clings to the face of the clock, insectlike. Her three pairs of breasts dangle, full of poison milk that trickles out and mixes with the rain. The indigo flames of her hair whip around her face in the storm. Her black lips peel back from her rows of jagged teeth in a lascivious grin. She is terrible and beautiful and repulsive all at once, and when she begins to chant, it is the sound of drums beaten in prayer and in bloody, barbaric victory. An ancient sound.
The goddess points a gore-encrusted talon into the crowd, and the darkness of the bell tower unfurls, shadows taking shape. The Reapers spring from their perches even as others fly down out of the storm, and she cannot decide if what flutters around them is fabric or skin, black ribbons of nothing that move of their own accord. Their limbs are sticks, bone piping. They are scarecrow things, clutching the curved blades with which they do the bidding of their goddess.
The Reapers sweep down into the crowd and begin their harvest, slashing and tearing, cutting the worshippers open to reveal a golden light within. The light streams into the Reapers and they consume it greedily, then jet back toward the clock tower to feed the goddess. She opens her thighs and her mouth and the Reapers pour the stolen light into her.
A man rises from the waters, somehow above the crowd. He stands atop the flood, a scroll open in his hands, and he begins to read. The goddess and her servants and her worshippers all fall silent, as though chaos itself is taking a breath, and then the goddess screams and leaps from the church, falling toward the man with the scroll, trailing poisonous mother’s milk and indigo fire in her wake.
Amber feels the water rising. She weeps and cries out. Something moves under the water, touching her, and she hears it whisper in her ear.
Navalica, it whispers.
And she turns to find the Reapers all around her, eyes lit with ghostly blue, carapace faces brittle and blank, sharp proboscises probing the air, all pointing toward their goddess, their anticipation palpable. They gaze at their goddess, stroking the small scythes in their hands.
One of them caresses her beneath the water, its probing touch cold as ice. But then her skin feels brittle and stiff and she glances down. It’s difficult to see through the dark water and so she raises her hand, lifts it to her face, and instead sees the black, bony claws of a Reaper. Amber shakes her head, backing away from the killers, the Harvesters, who have now all begun to whisper the same thing.
Navalica.
Amber finds she cannot breathe. But it is not the water suffocating
her. Shaking, she reaches brittle shell fingers up to touch her face and finds a carapace there, a stingerlike proboscis, the face of a Reaper.
She screams, and her voice is a shriek. Another dying gull.
Navalica.
AMBER jerked awake, heart pounding in her chest. Her cell phone flew from her hands and landed on the floor as she held her hands in front of her eyes. In the light from the television, she saw that they were ordinary hands. Woman hands. Her hands. Foolish as she knew it was, she touched her face, felt the familiar contours there, and wanted to weep with relief.
“What the hell?” she whispered, sitting up quickly, afraid of what she would see inside her mind if she fell back to sleep.
She sat on the edge of the sofa and tried to sort out what she’d seen in her dream, knowing it hadn’t really been a dream. There were too many elements that she had also seen in her vision, which came back to her now much more clearly than it had earlier in the day. Falling asleep had triggered something in her mind. Even as she considered this, the memory of this new dream vision began to blur.
“Jesus,” she whispered.
Her Gran snored loudly just then and Amber flinched, startled. Then she laughed softly, amused by her own skittishness. Gran continued snoring, but more softly. The rain pounded the roof and the wind made the house creak. For a moment, Amber wondered why her parents hadn’t woken her and Gran and ushered them both off to bed, and then she looked at the television and saw that the same stupid movie was on. She felt like she’d been asleep for hours, but it had been only minutes. A quick look at her phone and she discovered the time. 10:27 P.M.
Navalica, she thought.
Then she remembered the man in her vision. The one reading the scroll.
She knew him.
Professor Miles Varick.
Amber held her cell phone in her hand, stroking the screen with her thumb, worried about the lateness of the hour but far more worried about her own sanity. She glanced at Gran, at the peace on the old woman’s face, and envied her.
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