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

by Kory M. Shrum

  She’s warm still and not stiff, so it’s easier to manipulate her limbs into the clothing. As I edge the denim fabric up on each hip, I feel a pulse in her abdomen artery. I press my fingers to her neck to confirm. Yes. Her heart is beating. It is the fast, panicked pulse of someone afraid.

  Don’t be afraid. It’s just me, baby. Just me.

  “I’m done,” I say. They turn around.

  “The farther we get from the grave the better,” Brinkley says.

  “We can’t drive out of here,” I say. “The car is shot.”

  “We’ll have to walk the three or four miles into town and get help,” Lane says.

  “Just walking would take us an hour. Dragging Jesse and Gloria will take longer,” Brinkley says.

  “It’s the best plan we’ve got,” I say. “We have to keep moving.”

  Brinkley carries Gloria across his back like a fallen comrade and Lane and I carry Jesse. But it is harder than it sounds and we aren’t getting very far. Our only hope is to head back toward the SUV and town and hope we run across Jeremiah and Nikki. My back aches, sore from hefting Jesse through the woods. Then I feel the press of her hand against the back of my neck.

  “Help me sit her down,” I tell Lane.

  “What’s wrong?” Brinkley asks.

  “She’s breathing,” I tell them. Her eyes are still closed but she is breathing. Her chest rises and falls in a slow steady rhythm. “She’s waking up.”

  I kneel and take her hand into mine. “Jess, baby? Can you hear me?”

  She squeezes my hand. My relief is immeasurable.

  “We’re here,” Lane says. He takes her other hand.

  The grip on my hand tightens and her mouth opens, sucking a deep gasping breath of air.

  Her eyes fly open. She leaps to her feet, knocking us both back, surprised.

  “What the hell?” Brinkley swears and tries to maneuver Gloria off his shoulders. But he’s too slow and we are too stunned. Jesse tears right past us and bolts back the way we came.

  “Not that way!” I scream after her as I watch her run back toward the danger. “Jesse, wait!”

  But she doesn’t seem to hear me. She is running as if her life depends on it.

  Jesse

  I can feel Ally. Ally pulsing, almost coursing through me. But how? And how is she here? I can’t bear to stop and find out. If I don’t keep running, I might explode. So I keep pushing, tearing through the corn. I’m aware of the shouting behind me but I can’t stop. Gabriel’s power is making my skin crawl like fire ants have built a colony under my flesh. In my blind panic, legs pumping, it takes me a minute to realize that the barn, the coffin, it is all behind me. All of it a dream—except for Gabriel.

  And I feel someone else—not Ally. It is not unlike feeling the blood pounding in my own skull. A present pulse tuned to my own frequency somehow and I turn toward it.

  I erupt into a clearing and see the house. It looms over the corn with its large white face and dark eyes reflecting the dying light. I could keep running, I could. But something about the child’s pulse—and it is a child, I realize, from the feel of it—calls to me. So I slow down. I enter the house feeling the sensation of the child pulling me toward it. Not just a child. Men, women—people I know. Somehow.

  It is hard to move slowly when I feel like I’m going ten directions at once. I lick my lips and swallow. I shake my hands to release tension. I do it all again—but it isn’t helping.

  My fingers trail over the flaking yellow wallpaper, brush cold door knobs and chipped wooden door frames of the hallway between the front door and kitchen as I try to steady and ground myself.

  The kitchen is cold and hollow, the counters stained and dusty. The refrigerator unplugged is pulled away from the wall. The basement door is already open a crack so I listen for movement before opening the door wider and stepping inside toward that pulse. I don’t hear anyone. The steps creak as I descend into the darkness, each foot scraping against the wood as it reaches blindly for the next ledge. It smells like damp rags and earth. And there is a chill that’s settled into the concrete walls.

  I reach up above and pull the string tickling the top of my head.

  Dozens of bodies lie in rows. It seems so strange to see them stretched out on the basement floor. It isn’t the sort of place to find dozens of sleeping people. And their breath is the only sound filling the dark space.

  The one that calls to me, the little pulse echoing my own rhythm, is lying in the floor between a man and woman. I lift her from the cold floor and realize who it is. Julia Lovett. She is soft and warm in my arms but heavy dead weight.

  “I don’t understand,” I whisper. “Why are you here?”

  Gabriel appears. I can feel him inside me yet I can also see him like a hologram projected from my chest.

  He stands tall beside me with his wings tucked away. His suit is immaculate as usual with the exception of a few stray down feathers clinging to the dark sleeves. His hair is shaggy and shoulder length, falling into his beautiful green eyes.

  I can’t look away from his face. “Who are they?”

  He wants more power.

  “Then why take them?” I ask. “They aren’t doorways. I thought only the partis whatevers are doorways.”

  Can’t you feel him? The power inside me swells and I almost drop the child in my arms. I do hit the ground, a jarring pains shooting through me when my knees connect with the cement.

  “No, no more,” I beg and still manage to hold the child.

  But he doesn’t cut off the power. He dials it up higher. I cry out and clutch Julia tighter. Tears stream down my face. It is almost like seeing something beautiful or moving and crying from the sight of it. It isn’t pain or sadness. Intensity. It is simply intensity.

  Quit fighting me, Gabriel commands.

  “You’re hurting me,” I whimper. “Please stop. Please.”

  He dials it back a notch and a small clarity comes. I open my eyes and focus on the people nightmaring on the basement floor. I can only really fixate on the colors of their clothes—a blue sweater. A green coat. Until more details, rather impressions come from the roll of power. It’s as if the power is probing the bodies like insect feelers, then giving me the data.

  “He is trying to make a door to my power,” I say. I glimpse the soft green flames burning inside them. Not quite the red of the living, nor the blue of NRD. The soft green of near death that remains for a person once they’ve been saved. And a few flames feel familiar. Like I know them somehow. But as I search each face I become more certain they are strangers, all except the child in my arms. So the others? “But not just my power.”

  He will terminate them once he realizes he cannot gain power this way.

  “We can’t leave them here,” I say. After my lovely time with Caldwell, I could just imagine what he had in mind for these poor people. And they didn’t do anything to deserve this. All they wanted was more time. And so do I.

  He can feel you.

  It isn’t much of a warning but at least Gabriel

  managed to say something before the pressure changes. Someone strong tugs hard. It’s as if the rope around the power inside me is yanked hard.

  Caldwell.

  He is a cold northern wind blowing across the desert. Gabriel stiffens and Caldwell’s threatening hold lessens. The tension is released in the line and I know that somehow Gabriel has done something to protect us from Caldwell. Or was it me? I’m losing my ability to distinguish between the two.

  “He’ll come find me now that he knows I’m out of the box,” I realize.

  Yes.

  I push myself to my feet and climb the stairs quickly back to the kitchen, still clutching the sleeping child. But I freeze when I hear a sound above me. Someone upstairs is moving in an unseen room.

  I don’t so much as breathe as I strain to hear.

  “We have to hurry,” I whisper, watching the ceiling. And Julia stirs in my arms. “We’re almost out of time.”
/>   Ally

  My heart hammers wildly. I’m huffing white pillars of smoke out of my mouth as I tear through the woods after her. Jesse is not an athletic girl. I go to the gym more in a week that she does in six months but she is flying through these woods. It isn’t natural, the speed she is maintaining and yet I’m watching her grow smaller and smaller in front of me. Lane is beside me, trying to keep pace and he has a small lead on me because of his longer legs, but he can’t catch her any more than I can.

  I marvel over the fact that Jesse can move at all so soon after a death. I’ve watched her moan and whine for days and days after a replacement leaves her stiff and grumpy. And here she is scaling fallen trees and branches like a monkey in its natural habitat.

  “Jesse, stop!” I say. I’m desperate for her to slow down. The distance between us terrifies me especially after we break through the clearing, past her grave into the opposite trees, the ones we knew to be full of Caldwell’s henchman. But she doesn’t stop here. It isn’t the grave she came back for. It is something else in the woods.

  My side burns. I can’t keep the pace I’m using to follow her. And at this pace she is gaining more and more ground.

  “Jesse, please!” I call out. I don’t know who might hear us on this side of the clearings. I’m still waiting for Jeremiah and Nikki to pop up or for one of us to trip over their bodies. In the woods it is so much darker. The last traces of sun are unable to penetrate the uppermost branches.

  Then she disappears. I can’t see her at all.

  “Jesse!”

  “Damn, do you see her?” Lane asks. His breath is as panicked as mine.

  “No.”

  I run harder and harder but she isn’t there. Then I see the break in the trees, the light suggesting a clearing or at least a break in the woods of some kind. I slow just a tad as I emerge, taking a precautionary look around, but it’s just an open field lined with corn. Thick high stalks of it. Then I hear the sound of the stalks swaying and I look up. A few yards ahead, something is knocking them down.

  Jesse.

  “Where did she go?” he asks me.

  “Shhhh,” I say. I motion for him to be still and quiet. Thank God he listens.

  I take a sharp left toward the sound of breaking stalks. This is terrifying, being in a cornfield as dusk runs its icy fingers over the earth’s collarbone. I don’t look anywhere but straight ahead, because the sound of corn rustling is making me sick with fear. I half believe that if I look to the left or right of me I will see some unimaginable horror in the corn, leaping toward me.

  When the corn ends suddenly, giving itself over to a grassy front yard, it is like coming up for air. I stop long enough to clutch the side of my burning ribs. It’s a large white farm house in the middle of nowhere. God, this is a horror movie waiting to happen.

  But then I see Jess, climbing the steps of the porch and entering the house. A house I am certain she’s never entered in her life.

  “Jesse!” I hunker low, looking left and right but I don’t see anyone. Lane mimics my movements.

  He must feel as exposed as I do. “Why the hell did she go into that house?”

  “I don’t know.” And am I really going to enter a strange house in the middle of nowhere just as night falls? Really?

  I make Lane go first and he pushes the front door open carefully and the groaning creak is hideous. Straight ahead is a door leading to a kitchen. I know it’s the kitchen because I can see the white sink illuminated beneath the window. To the right is a staircase leading up. On the left is an open archway leading to a room. It looks a bit like a living room or study: furniture and books. A fireplace that looks cold and unused, coated in a dusting of gray soot and ash. Ruins from years of neglect.

  I place one foot on the step to ascend the stairs, thinking I hear movement up there when a cold hand grabs my wrist. I open my mouth to scream my head off but the cold hand releases my wrist and clamps itself over my mouth.

  Jesse.

  It’s Jesse covering my mouth. I want to throw my arms around her. Squeeze the living shit out of her and maybe even cover her face with kisses—to hell with Lane. But I can’t because she is holding a child.

  “Jesse,” Lane whispers. He is just as visibly relieved as I am.

  “Don’t go up there,” she says. And she takes a step away from me, urging me away from the stairs by giving me room to step away. I don’t like the looks she gives the ceiling above our head. “It’s not Caldwell but someone is hiding up there.”

  Jesse holds a little girl. And not just any girl. Regina’s little girl. I need no other evidence to know this is Caldwell’s place in one way or another.

  “How did Julia get here?” I ask.

  Jesse offers me the little girl and I take her. She is heavy in my arms and I expect her to stir or wake but she doesn’t. I use a gentle finger to pull open her eyelid and realize she isn’t sleeping. But she is too warm to be dead and little soft breaths puff from her nose. She is drugged to unconsciousness. Maybe on the same sedative Gloria is on.

  “Caldwell’s been capturing people who’ve been replaced and he’s trying to use them to—” Jesse begins. “—to make their replacers ‘wake up’ or to access their power somehow. But he’s about to realize he can’t, and when he does, he’ll kill them.”

  I think of the list Nikki and I poured over searching for a connection.

  “There are more downstairs,” she says.

  “More people?” Lane asks and the second her arms are free he pulls Jesse to him. Normally, I can’t bear it. But it’s an awkward embrace with Jesse’s face pinched in annoyance. And that makes it bearable.

  Jesse pulls away from him and motions for us to follow her. Lane brings up the rear, still holding the gun Brinkley gave him ages ago and I’m behind Jesse holding Julia.

  There is a basement door inside the kitchen, just past where the hallway and kitchen meet. She opens the old, chipped door and enters. I want to stop her. Scream for her to, but floorboards above my head creak and I don’t dare. Someone is in this house and here we are creeping around. What the hell? I want to get out of this house, not descend into its bowels.

  Jesse pulls me into the dark, then Lane and closes the door behind us. For a moment we are in pitch black darkness with only rickety shallow steps beneath our feet. I’m terrified I’ll fall with Julia in my arms, but then the light flares to life and I realize Jesse isn’t beside me as I thought she was. She’d silently slipped down the stairs and pulled the rope chain before I’d realized she’d even moved.

  At the base of the stairs I gasp, and hug Regina’s little girl closer to me.

  I don’t count them all. They lay in rows, arranged, uniform. The fact that nothing else is in the basement tells me that furniture, old boxes, the things that collect in a basement in a normal house were removed to make room for these bodies or they never existed because this is a ghost house, some kind of phantom illusion. The two small windows at ground level on the far concrete wall are covered with aluminum foil, blocking out all light.

  “Are they alive?” Lane whispers.

  The anger boils inside me. “We don’t have a car. And we’ll need vans or something to move this many people.”

  Jeremiah should really be here. Where the hell is he? I was going to kill Brinkley.

  “What did you mean he is looking for a way to get to ‘people like you’?” Lane asks her.

  She doesn’t answer. And I have a feeling this is connected to the special traits Jeremiah was worried about but I just can’t deal with that right now. One problem at a time.

  “One by one,” I say. “We’ll have to carry them out and hide them in the cornfield. That way if Caldwell comes he won’t be able to find them, for a while at least. Then we will call for help.”

  “Who will we call?” Jesse asks.

  “I know people who can help.”

  Nikki. Jeremiah. And if they are dead then Parish will know what to do. We just have to get somewhere with some
cell reception.

  Lane kneels beside a body. I recognize him as one of Jesse’s replacements. Frank, I believe. A construction worker. Jesse watches me though the dark of the poorly lit basement. It isn’t the horrible animal eyes I saw earlier. It’s just Jesse. Yet—

  Then she breaks her intense gaze. “He will be here before we can move them all.”

  “Who? Caldwell?” Lane asks. Jess nods.

  Lane hefts Frank from the ground and starts to carry him out of the basement. With Julia Lovett sleeping innocently in my arms, her moist breath warming my neck, I follow him.

  I cast one last look at the swelling darkness, and listen to the vibrations of their unified breath. We are almost out of the basement when someone opens the door.

  All three of us freeze, panicked by grey light from the kitchen. But I recognize the face.

  “Oh thank God,” I say and squeeze the unconscious child in my arms. I ignore the burn in my arms and heft her higher.

  “Brinkley,” I whisper. “Where is Gloria?”

  “Here,” a meek voice says. Another shadow peeks around the edge of the kitchen door and relief washes over me.

  “The drug wore off?” Lake asks.

  Brinkley grunts. “Thank God. I couldn’t have carried her another step.”

  “How did you find us?” Lane asks. He steps into the light, still holding the large man. He’s strong. I’ll give him that.

  “I saw you go in,” Gloria says. And she doesn’t mean with her own two eyes.

  “You weren’t out for very long,” Lane says. “Shitty sedative.”

  “How long?” Jesse asks.

  “I’m not sure,” Brinkley looks at me and Lane for confirmation. “Less than an hour.”

  Jesse’s brow furrows in concentration. “He couldn’t have moved me from Heath to Chicago in an hour. Either he kept sedating me or he can move with people.”