Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2)

by Kory M. Shrum

  I fold my arms across my chest but I keep my mouth closed. I don’t bother to remind him that Gloria’s failings will not keep us alive. And I’m not being difficult. I love Gloria. But I think Brinkley is asking too much—of everyone.

  “Gloria is amazing.” Brinkley speaks with sincere admiration, raising his chin ever so slightly. “She is the most talented and dedicated individual I’ve had the privilege of working with. She will figure this out. As soon as she gets a hold of herself, of the situation, she will beat his ass. Just like she did today. Bet he didn’t see that coming, did he?”

  Good point.

  “And I choose to believe in her and stand behind her in this until she finds her footing with this guy. We all have soft spots. And the strong overcome them. She’ll beat him. I know she will.”

  My cheeks burn. “I hope so.” And it is a sincere wish for Gloria—for all of us.

  “Good,” he says and pulls out a kitchen chair beside me.

  But I have to speak my mind—at least one last time. “What happens to Jesse when we all get killed?”

  “What?” His brow furrows as he rests his weight on his forearms. I can’t get over how James Dean he looks in this leather jacket.

  “What if we die first, before Jesse?” I ask. “How is she supposed to carry on if Micah kills Gloria? If someone kills you, or me? Who will stand between her and Caldwell then?”

  Brinkley looks so tired now with the pillows under his eyes. “I’ve made preparations, if anything happens to me. Have you done the same?”

  “Me?” I’m surprised by the shift in conversation and in his tone.

  “Let’s start with why you’re on Caldwell’s list,” he says. He pulls a piece of paper from the pile scattered across the table and slides it toward me. One of the few computer sheets deeply creased from folding. Sure enough, circled in red is my name: Alice Gallagher. I look from my name up to Brinkley’s dark, assessing eyes.

  I hold his curious gaze and try to decide how much he needs know. It isn’t out of some loyalty to Jeremiah and his group. I think it’s because I’m still angry with Brinkley for using Jesse the way he did, with such little regard for her safety. Withholding information almost feels like a way to punish him.

  “You know about the database that records the deaths, correct?” I begin. “It’s also an online community where information can be shared on message boards and certain chat rooms.”

  “Don’t tell me all you’ve been doing is—chatting?” Brinkley asks, and he sounds so suspicious.

  At first, but look at me now.

  “NecroNed runs a youth group for NRD-positives and young adults who aren’t death replacers. VegZombie, she lives in New York, also runs a similar support group,” I say. Brinkley still looks critical with furrowed brow. “The point is they aren’t all death-replacement agents. Many of them are just involved in the NRD community. And being involved in the NRD community, they know things. Just like I know things. It’s a good place to meet people in your own area with similar interests and goals.” It is how I met Jeremiah.

  Brinkley leans forward, catching my drift. “Like.”

  “Like I know Caldwell is up to something in the desert.”

  “What do you mean ‘in the desert’?”

  “Near Flagstaff, there have been reports of strange things happening in the desert at night, lights and explosions that make the ground vibrate even though no earthquakes have been reported.”

  “Sounds military,” Brinkley says. I agreed. “What connects it to Caldwell for you?”

  “A ten-year old girl, Molly, reported bizarre stuff happening in the Arizona desert and she identified Caldwell.” Of course, I don’t give Brinkley her real name or care to elaborate.

  “I’ve been sharing his picture around the site. Telling people to look out for him. I’ve also spread the word about suspicious replacements, encouraged people to bring more friends, assistants, whoever on the jobs to limit the possibility of an attack.” All the things Jeremiah thinks are pointless, but I disagree. Search and rescue is important, but so it heading off the problem so that fewer people need to be rescued.

  “It hasn’t gone unnoticed,” Brinkley says, motioning to Caldwell’s black list, stabbing a thick finger at my name.

  “Of course not.”

  But I wonder if that’s the real reason Caldwell considers me a threat.

  Jesse

  When I wake my muscles are stiff. Not quite as bad as when I replace someone and come back to consciousness after too many hours of rigor mortis. It’s more like that time Ally convinced me to go on a jog with her. What a dumb idea that was. I make little hissing noises with my teeth as I pull myself up in a sitting position from the cold floor. It’s mostly my head that hurts. I feel sluggish like I do if I take cold medicine and then wake groggy the next morning.

  And I’m thirsty as hell. My throat is so dry I don’t think I can speak even if I wanted to.

  I’m sitting on the floor of a large ballroom. The marbled floor is chilly with its polished stone. The soft rose-cream swirls are soothing. The walls are a beige color punctuated with austere white columns. Light streams through the windows in the ceiling letting me know that wherever I am, it’s still daytime. Other than that I can’t get a real sense of time or place. A strip of plastic flaps in a breeze like a wind-caught flag. I stare and stare but I can’t make sense of the plastic, like something you would lay down before painting a room.

  I pull myself to my feet and that lasts a whole minute. I hit my knees and dry cough back some nausea.

  “It’s the drug,” a voice says. “The sedation darts take a while to wear off.”

  I’m terrified to look up from the super polished shoes I’m staring at. My heart is beating so hard that I think I might die.

  “I feel your pain,” Caldwell says in the same pleasant tone. The kind of voice you use when making polite conversation or offering someone a drink. “Did you know those are the same darts issued by the military to capture us when the public panicked? They rounded us up like cattle.”

  If you’d died a year later, they would have never taken you at all.

  “Yes, but I didn’t, did I? So they simply took me when my wife called to tell the police I’d come home. I walked all the way from the funeral home to find the police waiting for me. Did you never ask why I was buried in a sealed box? Did it ever occur to you that nothing was in that box? Of course, these are mighty big considerations for an eight year old.”

  Just look at him. Look at him. I press my hands against my dirty jeans and manage a deep breath. I can’t bear to lift my head, but I do lift my eyes to meet his.

  Caldwell looks exactly like his pictures. His eyes are the same color as mine and that alone is enough to make me look at the columns on the right. I count them and try to steady myself. There are six between the large wooden door and the opposite wall, with room for six more between them. It’s a large room—and the reason why his voice echoes.

  “You look good for an old man.” My voice doesn’t sound as steady as I would like. “What do you use? The blood of infants? Virgins? Infant virgins?”

  Of all the things I could say to him, this is the best I could do.

  “We both have secrets,” he says. He offers me a hand but I don’t take it. I can’t.

  “I already tried getting up,” I say, and it feels like an apology, as if he deserves one. “I’m not one to repeat mistakes.”

  “Try again,” he says.

  I’m compelled to do exactly what he says and this time when I stand a small a wave of nausea rises but my rubber legs steady themselves, and so do my guts. Breathing helps. I just have to remember to keep breathing.

  “See? I told you that you could do it.” Here is his rehearsed smile. The one I’ve seen on television and newspapers. It’s the leader of the Unified Church I’m looking at. The god awful man who is responsible for the genocide of thousands. Tens of thousands and he’s only just gotten started. “I’ve had much prac
tice with these things.”

  “Just kill me,” I say. I try to be still except the dirt from Liza’s attack is all over me—in my hair, my ears and down the back of my shirt. It itches horribly like a tag in the shirt. Feeling dirty is its own kind of torture.

  “That would be rude,” he says with another playful smile. “Surely before I died, we addressed rudeness.”

  A flash of Caldwell, wearing my father’s blue mechanic’s uniform erupts into my mind—a slightly younger man, wiping his hands on a ratty blue towel and stooping to eye-level of his daughter as he gently reprimands her. The vision is so vivid, so powerful, my knees almost buckle.

  Don’t let him in someone warns. Gabriel. And I think I see the dark darting of a bird—or something—high in the skylights, closing in.

  “That isn’t how I remember it. I have memories of you—him—but not like that. You put that into my head,” I say.

  Caldwell grins. It’s the way I grin at Winston if I actually get him to sit or lay down for a biscuit—a bemused, patronizing kind of smile.

  “Actually, it was Henry Chaplain’s gift,” he says. “Mental manipulation.”

  Then I remember Liza.

  His grin widens into a menacing flash of teeth, like a fox seizing a rabbit. “I may have let Liza’s handler observe the ritual between Henry and myself. And Micah may have dropped a bit of information here and there at my request.”

  “You read minds too,” I say. “That’s the second or third time you’ve done that to me.”

  Caldwell takes a step toward me and I take two steps back.

  “Have you killed her already?” I say. I close my hands so they’ll quit shaking and I raise my chin a little more. Baby steps, Jess. Baby steps. “That’s the game here, right? Kill a zombie, win a prize.”

  He doesn’t answer. He watches me with those eyes and it really is the worst part. If we didn’t have that small similarity, it might be easier to see him only as Caldwell, the monster who kills people. But I only see those parts that remind me of before. The hazel eyes, the sun-kissed freckles and dark hair. His plastic surgery changed the other features, but not enough.

  Not enough.

  Caldwell blinks and looks away. “Your mind moves incredible fast. It’s dizzying.”

  He wipes a small bit of water from the corner of his eyes as if he’s held them open too long. It’s the fake smile again. The rehearsed smile that’s too quick to come and never stretches higher than the top lip.

  “Liza is not dead,” he says. “She seems less willing to challenge me than you.”

  “She thinks you are the worst of us,” I say. And it is more than that. Caldwell exudes a sort of power—the way my skin crawls and everything in my body says get away from him. Like magnetics opposing each other.

  Again he smiles. “You really want to know why she fears me?”

  “I know—” I start to say but he doesn’t let me finish.

  “You know nothing about me!”

  I take a step back, instinctively. Even this doesn’t protect me. He pushes a million pictures into my head of women and men being tortured. Fists pounding on the edge of a water tank screaming, drowning. People pushed down onto their knees and the muzzle shoved against their skulls, brains spraying out the other side, drenching the next person in line. Shot for no logical reason. Sometimes in the head but not always. Some strapped down and electrocuted. Some injected with drugs, chemicals, hallucinogenics. Blood. Terror. Amputations. Experimental surgeries. Pain. Screaming. Women screaming for their children ripped from their arms and pushed into the back of trucks. Men being carved open while awake, guts spilling onto the floor in a splash of red.

  I hit the floor, dropping hard. I can’t make the images stop. The images of The Reclamation. Being hunted like animals, running through the woods at night trying to keep ahead of the dogs chasing them. The things he saw. The things that happened to him—

  “They kept me for years after the public release. They knew they could keep the few who had no families, no one to miss them. If only I’d been there for months. If only.”

  “Stop,” I croak. I’m choking on my own spit. “Stop, please!”

  The images do stop. As quickly as they came they’re gone and I’m left with the high pitch buzzing of my own mind, like an ear that’s heard too much—a headache forming behind my eyes. I put my face in my hands and take ragged breaths.

  “Look at me.”

  I can’t. I can’t quit crying.

  “Look at me,” he demands.

  I look up but I can’t really see him through my bleary tears.

  “Let me be clear,” he says. Caldwell raises his hand as if to wave at someone behind me and makes a motion with his hand. The effect is immediate. A billion red dots appear on the floor between Caldwell and myself, then slide across the marble slowly up my dirt caked clothes.

  He is regaining control of himself. “Unless you want to be sedated again, I wouldn’t try anything. Take it from me. It is harder to shake off the grogginess after the second or third dart, even with metabolisms as strong as ours.”

  “Why won’t you just kill me?” I ask. I can’t quit crying. They were just memories but I can smell the singed hair and taste the blood in the back of my throat. My arms are tender from needle punctures that didn’t happen. My lungs burn from a drowning that didn’t happen. Only my mind believes it did. “Just kill me!”

  Because you want me dead, I know you do.

  He opens his mouth to speak, and I cringe. Terrified he will push the images back into my mind again, I curl into myself, but the images don’t come. Instead, a shrill feminine shriek echoes through the hall. Caldwell raises a hand and touches the ear bud I didn’t see before. I’ve seen Brinkley wear one like this.

  “You’ll have to excuse me,” he says with a haunting grin. “It seems she’s finally been persuaded to challenge me.”

  “Why won’t you just kill me?” I scream as he crosses to the big doors.

  “Waste not, want not,” he says, hand on the handle. Then he is gone.

  I wait for several heartbeats. I count them out. Only then do I allow myself the thought I suppressed moments before. The image of Caldwell with his ear bud—a sign of weakness. Of limitation. He can’t possibly hear all, see all, if he must rely on technology. He isn’t God. At the very least, he has to be close enough. And with one weakness, I have to hope that he has more. And weakness means a possibility. And possibility means hope.

  But hope is a dangerous thing.

  Ally

  Someone is banging on the door.

  I must have slept hard because I wake up in the dark. The last thing I can recall is waiting for my tea to steep and sure enough it sits cold and forgotten on my side table. My heart is hammering as the pug tries to snuggle in closer, but I’m trying to get out of all my blankets. I even slept in my coat. Poor Winston must be desperate for a walk.

  I come up on my toes to peer through the security hole on the front door and I’m not happy with who I see. Lane bursts in, taller than me by enough that he must bend down in order to clear the doorframe. It’s one of the few things that amuse me about Lane and Jesse, the enormous difference in their heights. I often wonder if he ever feels like he is dating a child.

  “Where is she?”

  I feel like I’m still half asleep. “How did you get into the building?”

  “Where is she?”

  “Tell me how you got in the building,” I insist.

  I’m tired of people making demands.

  “I followed a group of high college kids in. I could’ve gone home with them. They were baked out of their minds,” he says. “Now tell me where she is.”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  When he leans his weight against the side of the couch I think of Jesse’s kiss, that it happened right there, where he is standing, against the couch he is touching.

  “Brinkley says she is still on assignment. That she is supposed to be with Gloria. But I just went
to Gloria’s to check on her goddam house and she is there— without Jesse.”

  It never occurred to me Gloria might ask Lane to check on her house. But it made sense that you’d send a boy to check on your house in a less than perfect neighborhood. A tall, semi-intimidating boy with enough weight to throw around. But I’m equally mad that Gloria was released from the hospital and no one told me.

  Lane has no intention of stopping the train of words barreling though his mouth.

  “I see a small light on and think someone is in there messing around, so I go in ready to beat the shit out of some punk kid or a junkie looking to pawn a TV and who do I find? Gloria. Gloria in the basement, drawing with the speed of a meth-head and her face is all beat up like someone took a sack of bricks to it. And most of her pictures are of Jesse. Gruesome shit. And I try to get her to stop and talk to me but she won’t even come around—”

  “What?” I come out of thoughts.

  He shuts his mouth, surprised by my outburst.

  “You tried to stop her?” I ask. “You tried to stop her and she wouldn’t respond?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Shit, shit.” I yank my boots on without ceremony. Glad that I’m already dressed, I grab my keys and I’m out of my apartment in ten seconds flat. Lane catches up to me in the hallway, jogging after me.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “Come with me,” I say, and I don’t hesitate. I just start down the stairs, rushing toward the doors, toward the parking lot. “Come with me!”

  I tell him to come with me because if this gets ugly, and honestly I already know it will, I’ll need his muscle. If Gloria was dead weight, I couldn’t carry her out of the house by myself. But he could.

  “Listen,” he says, after buckling himself in. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you.”