DECIMATED (The Nameless Invasion Book 1)

by Sean Shake

It was a prison.

  63

  No, I thought, and released the eyeless creature.

  And now it did make a sound.

  It was hard to describe the sound, but I knew it for what it was, even if it sounded completely alien to me, I knew the emotion that it expressed, an emotion that it was now letting itself feel.

  That sound, was laughter.

  The eyeless creature stood in our little dome, pressing against the shadow ceiling and stretching it as it did.

  Its flesh clung to it in bits, the mask hanging loose and revealing something eldritch beneath.

  It had used me all along.

  Perhaps at first it had tried simply to possess me, to transform me.

  But then I had injured it. Or thought I had injured it.

  But I hadn’t injured it all, I had just showed it that I could set it free.

  Set it free from its mask, from its prison.

  And now I had done just that.

  Now my friends were going to die.

  Now I was going to die.

  I had failed.

  I had let myself be used.

  I went to my knees, hard, feeling the asphalt crack under them.

  I fell forward on my hands, clenched into fists, the blade digging into the asphalt, the shield still around us. I had failed, and now we were all going to die.

  Don’t let your emotions rule you, Gage.

  I was still reacting, wasn’t I?

  I breathed in deep, instead of trying to push everything away, I just let it be. I accepted everything for what it was.

  I looked up at the creature before me, the creature that was slowly losing its mask, its prison, and becoming something… other.

  It was growing in size, stretching at the shadow dome that enclosed it.

  But it was just standing there.

  I paid attention to everything, the sights, the sounds, the sensations.

  Around me were the horde, focused on the dome, not paying any attention to the SUV, or to Hunter’s corpse.

  They were all focused on us.

  Waiting, I realized. Waiting for me to drop the shield.

  They couldn’t get through it.

  And neither could the eyeless one.

  There was a shift then.

  If the eyeless one had been expressionless before, he was even more so now with his mask hanging in bloody tatters, his skull misshapen, his face a gory mess, but we still shared some kind of connection, and I could sense his unease, his realization.

  My realization as well.

  The tides had shifted, and now he was the one fighting against the current.

  “You can’t get out,” I said. Not a question.

  For all its power, it couldn’t break through my shield.

  It’d been trying to. It’d been growing, straining against it, but it had failed.

  And so had its minions.

  Whatever this shield was, none of them could break it.

  I had freed it, true. But now I had trapped it again.

  I felt emotion—anger—but it wasn’t mine.

  I let it rise. Let myself feel it.

  It was just a feeling. It had no power over me.

  I looked down at my clenched fist which was so black that it seemed as though I was missing a hand.

  Then I looked up at my adversary. “You grew too much, now you’re trapped by the shield. Can’t shrink again and come for me.”

  It was seven or eight feet tall, pressed against the stretched shield.

  Trapped by it, held in place.

  It wasn’t quite free from its skin yet. Perhaps if I attacked it again, cut at it just a bit more, it would be.

  But I knew I couldn’t kill it. I didn’t have that power.

  I knew this, because it knew this.

  But I could do something else.

  With a feeling like waking from a dream, I released my fists and stepped out of the shield.

  It remained, a half dome on the asphalt that I knew went all the way under, enclosing my adversary completely.

  Now, the creature did react.

  It screamed and thrashed, trying to break free, stretching against the dome, realizing it had lost me, had lost control.

  A control I had felt snap as I stepped through the shield.

  Not only did it trap the creature, but it severed our link as well.

  And that’s when I realized the horde around us was still.

  Just standing there, swaying slightly.

  Puppets, with their strings cut.

  64

  I rushed to the SUV, peered in through the shattered window. “Is everyone okay?”

  They had all been staring at the horde, but now slowly turned to look at me, as one, and despite my previous detached state, I felt my gorge rise. Were they puppets too, now?

  But then Abigail smiled. “Holy fucking shit.”

  “I guess that’s a yes.”

  “You had blades! And wings! I was right!”

  “What?”

  “From your hand. You had a fucking sword.”

  “You just now noticed?” Thinking about it, I guess I had never brought out my blade in her company, not where she could see it. In the truck it had been too dark, and we had been being chased by monsters.

  Emma didn’t seem surprised, but then, she never seemed to be.

  “How’d you think I fought them off at your grandparents?”

  She shrugged. “I don't know. Magic? Or you used Hunter somehow.”

  Hunter. Poor Hunter. “Wait here,” I said, and went to her corpse, not wanting to leave her in the road.

  But I was shocked to find her breathing.

  She was disfigured, her throat ripped out, her intestines stretching across her stomach and onto the asphalt, and her chest cavity torn open, but somehow she was still breathing, her lungs—one of which I could partially see—filling with air.

  “What the hell are you?” I said in wonder.

  Then I heard retching behind me, and I turned to see Abigail running to the side of the road and vomiting.

  Well, I’d told her to stay in the car. That’s what she got for not listening to me.

  Emma came up and stood on the other side of me, looking down at Hunter. “I guess they can heal from a lot. That’s the benefit of being cancer.”

  “Being a nurse, you must’ve seen worse than this, I guess, if you’re not sick.”

  “I’ve never seen worse than this as a nurse. I just have a strong stomach.”

  Abigail’s parents were by her side, her mother holding her hair as she emptied her guts of SunChips and the meal Mark and the others had provided.

  I stood and looked to the shadow dome, the shape of my adversary distorting it.

  Emma turned and looked as well. “What are you gonna do about him?”

  I shook my head “I can’t defeat him.”

  “You know,” she said, “to defeat someone doesn’t just mean to kill them. There’s more than one way to win a battle, to win a war. It doesn’t always have to end with death. Sometimes, life is the best punishment.”

  I looked at her, and saw something unfamiliar on her face, an expression I couldn’t read.

  But then it was gone, and it was the same Emma I’d known for days now, the same Emma I’d fallen in love with, and she smiled at me. “Come on, we should head back.”

  I looked around at the swaying puppets. “What about the rest of them? And him? I can’t just leave them here.”

  “Well,” she said, looking me up and down. “Don’t you get stronger when you kill them?”

  “It seems that way.”

  “Now it’s going to be easier than—what’s your saying?—shooting fish in a barrel. There must be hundreds of them. If the few you’ve killed so far have made you as powerful as you are, imagine what the rest will do.”

  I felt a smile slowly spread across my lips as I looked at the swaying crowd of puppets.

  65

  Epilogue

  We drov
e down the road, back toward the factory, while behind us over a hundred human corpses lay in the field on the side of the highway, now invisible in the distance.

  There was no way we could have buried them all, but I wasn’t going to leave them on the road, either.

  Putting them in the field was the best we could do.

  They’d probably be eaten by animals, but that was the fate of us all, eventually. Eaten by animals, or bugs, or bacteria, or fire.

  But eaten all the same.

  I rolled the tiny black dome—no bigger than a large marble—over my fingers. My adversary may not have been able to shrink himself, but I could shrink the dome, with him inside it. It was a solid black, and hard as glass now. No shape inside distorted it, nor could anything inside be seen.

  Just a regular old marble, to remind me of my old friend.

  A souvenir, Emma had called it.

  And it wasn’t as though I was going to leave him there in the middle of the highway.

  I was done being controlled, done looking over my shoulder.

  I would know where he was at all times now.

  I slid the dome—which had a deceptive amount of weight to it, though certainly not the several hundred pounds it should’ve had—into my pocket, and thought of Gabriel’s stone, the one now glowing brighter than ever in my chest. They didn’t look the same, but there was something there, some shared… connection.

  Even though the dome had been made from my shield, I was still able to form another one, in no small part thanks to all the power I’d absorbed from those puppets.

  After Abigail had gotten over her shock at seeing the blade—something she insisted she’d seen and mentioned way back when I first met her in their apartment—she had watched in awe as I’d dispatched them.

  Still not having had enough, she begged me to demonstrate using the blade, but this time wanting to see it up close—I had made her get back and stay in the car while I got rid of the puppets, just in case.

  So I did, cutting chunks out of the concrete highway divider.

  It was pointless, but her joy while she watched this was infectious, and I liked making her happy.

  After that she wanted to see how long it could get, and it was an effort of will not to make a joke about this.

  Even her parents were smiling.

  As for how long, well, again thanks to all the power I’d absorbed, it seemed endless.

  I’d extended it over a hundred feet before it got too unwieldy—a small movement of my hand creating a large one at the end of the blade—and I had retracted it for fear of skewering someone who couldn’t heal like a certain demon-girl could.

  A demon girl whose head was now resting on my lap as I sat in the back row of Abigail’s parents’ SUV, not driving for once, finally starting to believe Abigail about me driving being bad luck.

  Hunter’s wounds had seemed to heal with each puppet I took down, as though we were still connected somehow.

  Her wings had changed, too, growing black feathers with prismatic streaks.

  Just like my stone.

  Her wings were folded behind her now, one resting against the seatback in front of us, the other drooping to the floor as she lay on her side, face nestled into my stomach.

  She must have to be conscious to retract them, which she wasn’t.

  Another thing she wasn’t, was clothed, her panties having been torn off or simply demolished and eaten along with her flesh.

  But nor was she naked.

  Another change that had occurred as I’d killed those puppets and increased in power, was an inky black substance had begun seeping out of her skin, collating over her nipples and crotch, perhaps because despite her mythical appearance, she had been raised in the modern world, and thought of those as her most vulnerable areas.

  Because I got the feeling these inky black tendrils were a defense of some sort. Her own kind of shield.

  And in her unconscious state, it had used some deep-seated need to be covered as directive, and began there.

  And it was just beginning. Even now, a tendril barley thicker than a strand of hair stretched from the tiny patch over her groin, all the way up her stomach, and connected to the one not quite covering her left nipple.

  Dome stowed safely in my pocket, I wrapped my arm around her protectively, my fingers coming to rest at the spot on her back from which her now-feathery wings sprouted. I stroked the area gently, her bare flesh against my arm, feeling our connection grow.

  Her own arm, her right, was above her head, bent and draped over my thigh, and I saw the black dot on the back of her hand, tiny tendrils reaching out for her knuckles and beyond. Her left had an identical mark.

  That was another connection. Soon her hands would be as black as mine.

  Her breathing was regular now, and other than a few small wounds—and the scar from my blade on her left shoulder, the pale patch of skin around it—she had healed almost fully. Her guts were back inside, and her split chest was together once more.

  With my other hand I stroked her cheek, her face inches from my stomach, and watched the steady rise and fall of her breast, comforted by it.

  I didn’t know what she was, didn’t know what we were, but I knew that I loved her—not in any way I’d loved anything before, but in a new way. Perhaps in that way all those self-help books tell people to love themselves, to accept themselves. Unconditionally.

  I may have not known what she was, but I knew what she was to me: my heart.

  66

  A while later, a little before sunrise, Emma said we should stop and get some rest. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m tired, and sleeping in a car doesn’t sound very fun. And I’m starving.”

  Abigail’s parents wanted to push on, eager to get back to their own parents, but Emma was insistent we stop.

  So we did. First at an abandoned grocery store to stock up on food, then at the first decent-looking hotel we came across.

  As we got out into the chill early morning air, Abigail eating something other than SunChips for once—a sandwich from the supermarket’s deli—her parents and Emma unloading their bags from the car, I felt, for the first time in forever, safe.

  Content.

  Maybe it was my increased power, or having outwitted my adversary. But it was also a feeling of being free now. Like nothing was tracking me anymore.

  A weight off my shoulders. Off my chest.

  I could breathe again.

  I lifted Hunter, being mindful of her wings, and carried her inside the hotel.

  We grabbed master keys from an abandoned maid’s cart and took what looked to be two of the nicest rooms.

  Which, to be fair, weren’t that nice—it was just a roadside hotel. But they had a hot tub and pool, and still had power.

  Our rooms were close together, and we walked Abigail’s parents to theirs, where they hugged again, and her mother gave her a suitcase, whispering something to her as she did.

  She smiled, and then we left them to go to our own room. It was unspoken that we’d all share one.

  We had a bond now.

  In the room, Abigail carelessly tossed her CamelBak and a suitcase she’d gotten from her mother onto the floor next to the room’s only bed—a king—then plopped down spread-eagled onto it, letting out a sigh of relief, her half-eaten sandwich clutched to her chest.

  The room had a couch, and I gave this brief consideration, then shook my head and went to the bed. “Over,” I said.

  She grunted and scooted over, and I laid Hunter down on the bed next to her, carefully tucking her wings beneath her while Emma went into the bathroom.

  When I checked on her, I saw she had turned on the tap to fill the tub.

  There was also a separate shower, which she now turned on. Then she turned to look at me as I stood in the bathroom doorway, and stripped off her clothes while I watched, steam already filling the room.

  She got in, then met my eyes and smiled. Raising her hand, she bent a finger and gestu
red me to her.

  I stripped as I went and joined her in the shower.

  “Oh great, so I have to stay dirty,” Abigail said, standing in the doorway, one hand on her hip, the other still holding her sandwich.

  “Why don’t you join us?” Emma suggested.

  Abigail frowned, apparently not liking it when Emma was the one making a sexual joke. “Right. Ha ha.”

  “I’m serious.” Showing how serious she was, she stepped out of the shower, dripping water, and went over to Abigail, placing a kiss on her lips.

  Abigail stumbled back, nearly dropping her sandwich, and in the mirror I saw Emma’s reflection smile.

  “What’s gotten into you?” Abigail asked.

  “Nothing yet. But soon Gage will.”

  Abigail rolled her eyes. “Just hurry up so I can get changed and showered.”

  Emma and I had sex in the shower, with the bathroom door open wide.

  And it was sex, not making love.

  It was rough, primal.

  And amazing.

  Surprisingly for such a seemingly low-rent hotel—though this room was fairly nice—there were two robes in the bathroom, and we each put one on before going back out into the room, where Abigail was sat on the foot of the bed, sandwich finished, munching SunChips and watching TV.

  Hunter was still unconscious, lying where I’d left her.

  “Finally,” Abigail said, getting up from the bed and grabbing a small toiletry bag from the suitcase her mother had given her—the whole family seemed to be serious overpackers. “I wanted to go shut the door to block out the sounds, but I was afraid what I would see.” She shook her head at us. “What’s with you two and robes?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her. A second later I heard the lock click.

  Just as I was about to sit down on the bed, the door opened again. She came out holding our dirty clothes and threw them on the ground, my little black dome rolling out of my pocket onto the low carpet.

  It rolled all the way to where I stood beside the bed and went between my feet.

  Goal, I thought.

  It continued rolling, going under the bed. I expected a hollow little click as it collided with the platform the bed rested on, but the bed must not have had one, because there was no sound.