by Sean Platt
Brent was too terrified to scream anything. He kept firing his rifle, barely denting the onslaught.
Darkness overcame them.
He was then in a warehouse with Keenan and Lisa, the Black Mountain Guardsman he hadn’t seen since they were all on Black Island. They were at a card table, playing poker while gunfire erupted outside.
He found it odd that no one seemed the least bit concerned with the fighting around them. But then, just like that, some part of Brent knew he was in a dream. The same dream he’d had so many times before.
“Are you alive?” he asked Lisa.
She looked at him and said nothing.
So far as Brent knew, Black Mountain was something that didn’t even exist on this Earth. Perhaps she wasn’t one of the people Luca brought over, or brought back. She was a native of that world. Maybe she was still there, if anything could’ve survived. Or perhaps Luca brought her back to Earth with the rest of them.
If so, Brent didn’t know her last name or how he’d find her — assuming she wanted to be found. Maybe she was wandering around the country like some crazy person, trying to convince people of what she saw. Hell, maybe she was locked in an asylum.
Or maybe the government had her locked up to quiet her mouth.
Ed looked at Brent, brow furrowed, “Well?”
“Well, what?” Brent stared down at his cards. “It’s your turn.”
“No, I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“About Jade. How is she?”
This part of the dream was new.
Brent didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t lie to Ed, even in a dream.
“She’s … ” he started.
Gunfire ended outside and brought a knock at the door. The warehouse had turned into Brent’s tiny living room back in Manhattan.
Brent stood, curious. The knock and change of locale was also new to the dream.
Lisa grabbed a blade from the table and was off her feet, asking, “Who is it?”
Ed grabbed his shotgun but remained seated, one eye on Brent.
A girl’s voice came from behind the door. “It’s me, Paola. I need to talk to Brent. Please, Brent, open the door.”
“I don’t trust her.” Lisa looked back at Brent. “Isn’t she dead?”
Brent stood and grabbed his gun from the table.
“You sure you wanna open that door?” Lisa asked.
“Please.” Paola sounded urgent, seeming so real against the dream’s artifice.
Brent approached the door, reached out, twisted the knob, and opened it.
Paola was standing before him, but she wasn’t in the hallway outside his apartment. The door opened into a dark glass cell.
“Where are we?” Brent closed the door closed behind him, shutting off from Ed and Lisa to seal himself in Paola’s cell.
“We’re on the facility’s eighth level, and I have so much to tell you.”
Brent looked at Paola, confused. “Am I dreaming?”
She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
Brent woke in the darkness, cold, terrified, and trembling on Mary’s living room floor. He looked over and saw Teagan stirring in the darkness beside him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Paola’s alive.”
Sixty-Seven
Mary Olson
The darkness held a comfortable silence, and an icy chill that Mary felt tempted to curl into for the rest of her miserable forever.
Mary wasn’t sure how long she’d been lying in bed or how much of that time had been spent sleeping rather than staring into the gloaming that pressed on her lungs and left her so short of breath she could barely muster the will to want.
She reached out and sipped from one of the water bottles that Teagan had set on her nightstand. Mary could smell food there as well. The scent of roasted garlic made her stomach growl, but even with her body empty and her stomach chewing Mary from the inside out the thought of eating made her want to vomit. She thought she smelled sugar and cinnamon, perhaps a snickerdoodle. That made it worse.
She looked at the clock: 4:15 a.m.
Mary wondered why Desmond wasn’t beside her. She thought she’d heard him come home, but he could have had to go back. Work seemed to own him lately. She wondered if Brent, Teagan, and the kids were still there.
Mary felt an overwhelming guilt for burying herself in the room and avoiding contact with the world. It had been steadily creeping, but now the tragedy threatened to swallow her whole. They’d lost someone, too — their friend and Ed’s daughter, Jade. She had no right to hoard all the grief.
OK, Mary, time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get out of bed and do something other than this.
She undressed, turned on the shower to scalding, then stepped inside and put her head under the piping-hot water.
Pulsating water massaged Mary’s scalp and felt good on her skin, thawing the chill that had settled into her marrow, slowly bringing her back to life.
She sank to the shower floor, and let the warmth rain on her body, through her hair, down her back, all over every inch of her skin.
After her shower, Mary flicked a switch and turned on the overhead lights and looked at the plate of food on the nightstand. An apple, a sandwich that must’ve had garlic, and a small saucer with two cookies. It reminded Mary of the times during summer vacation when Paola would make her lunch and bring it to her office. Like Paola, Teagan always tried to overperform in the kitchen.
She smiled at the memory, and at Teagan’s sweetness.
Mary dressed in jeans and a charcoal tee, then crossed the room, sat on the bed and tore into the apple. It was crisp and sweet. Like the warm shower, it seemed to waken her.
Mary spun her head toward a soft knock at the door.
“Yes?” She wondered who else was up with the dawn.
“Can I come in?” Brent whispered to keep the house sleeping.
“Yes, of course.”
Brent stepped into the room, his hair a mess, eyes exhausted and hollow. He looked like he could use a shower. He shut the door softly behind him and turned back to Mary, seeming as if he had something urgent to say.
“What’s wrong?” Mary stood and set the apple next to the saucer.
“I’m not sure how to say this, so I’m just going to come out and say it and hope you don’t think I’m crazy.”
“What?” Anxiety rose to stab Mary in the gut.
“I don’t think Paola is dead.”
“What?” she asked, confused, and feeling as if Brent had just punched her in the stomach.
“Please, just hear me out. I had a dream, and in it Paola said she was being held on the facility’s eighth level.”
Mary stared at Brent, wondering why he’d raise her hopes then burn them by saying it was only a dream. “She died in front of me, Brent. I saw it with my own two eyes.”
Mary wondered if maybe Brent had snapped himself. He’d lost his wife, and Jade, and was trying to keep his shit together and be there for both Teagan and the kids. Maybe denial had bested him.
He shook his head. “I know it sounds crazy. But she also told me to give you a message, something that would prove I was telling you the truth.”
“What?” Despite her fighting it, a blossom of hope bloomed inside her.
“Paola told me about Hammy the Hamster, and how when she was in kindergarten she was afraid to go to school, so each day you put a drawing in her lunchbox of a hamster you called Hammy, who would give her a new message each day. Sometimes Hammy said, ‘I love you,’ and other times you’d have Hammy doing something funny like getting stuck in a toilet paper roll, with his little tail sticking out the back end.”
Mary felt as if the world had been ripped from beneath her — again. She fell back on the bed, only realizing she was sitting after she was.
“What? How?” were all she could manage, though Mary had a million brewing questions. “I saw her die. Who is holding her in the fac
ility?”
A name flashed in Mary’s mind before Brent could answer, a name she was ashamed to even consider.
Then he confirmed it.
“Desmond.”
Mary stared at him, barely able to breathe. Words were impossible.
Brent sat beside her on the bed as Mary gasped for air, her heart racing, fairly certain she was having a panic attack.
“Relax.” Brent set a hand on her back, rubbing it as if Mary were a child. “We’ll get through this.”
She closed her eyes, focusing on her breath until she was able to stop gasping for air. She found a deep breath then held it as if it could keep her floating in an ocean of insanity.
Calmly, Brent said, “Paola is OK, that’s all that matters. We’ll find a way to get her out of there and take care of this.”
Mary had a million more questions, such as how the hell they could break her daughter out of a top secret government installation? Why did Desmond do this? And whom did she see die?
But she had to focus on her breathing, in, count to five, then out, long exhale.
Once slightly calmer, Mary launched her questions, too many at once, bombarding Brent like a reporter at a press conference assailing a senator.
“Paola wasn’t sure why he’d done it. And she didn’t know anything about the girl we saw die. My guess it was an alien. Desmond’s infected. She thinks he probably has been since his return. Now he’s controlling The Darkness, and planning something big. Paola was standing in his way, so he’s keeping her hidden underground.”
Mary’s lone bite of apple rolled in the acid and started to rise. She raced to the bathroom, landed on her knees in front of the toilet, and retched up the only thing she’d swallowed other than spit in God knew how long.
How could I not have seen it?
I trusted him.
I loved him.
I … slept with him … with It!
Her skin felt clammy, and itchy, corrupted by the alien’s touch. Mary wondered if he’d somehow infected her with The Darkness as well.
A horrifying thought surged to the front of her mind, demanding her full attention.
Oh God, no.
She retched again, this time nothing but water.
“Oh God,” she said, over and over.
Brent opened the door. “What?”
Mary shook her head, wiping vomit from her chin, and stood. She went to the sink and started to wash, unable to meet Brent’s eyes in the reflection.
She couldn’t tell him what she was thinking. Voicing the thought might make it come true.
Mary had to steer her mind back to Paola, and figuring a way to get her daughter back. The last thing she could think about now was that the thing posing as Desmond may have gotten her pregnant.
Sixty-Eight
Boricio Wolfe
Boricio screamed as flames licked his insides.
Luca had laid both of his hands on Boricio’s arm. The fire had started there, then spread outward in every direction, waking numb flesh in its path. At first, the fire hurt. But then it felt strangely … good.
Luca was shaking, too, his whole body trembling so fast it was barely more than a blur.
But Boricio couldn’t tend to the boy, not while his brain was getting beaten by a barrage of memories shaking him free of the fog and confusion that had settled on him since waking up paralyzed.
Boricio watched as hundreds of memories unspooled at once, playing like a dozen screaming IMAX screens, with none of them making a cumdrop of sense … at first. But then shit started to click into place, and Boricio was putting two and two together like he had a goddamned Beautiful Mind.
Boricio remembered everything.
Remembered Guard Tard, the prison, the weeks of running away, and then the cause of his running — the horror that had happened to his Morning Rose. The alien infecting her.
Fire slowly receded, and time seemed to drip back to normal. The Boy Wonder slipped away from Boricio’s bed and collapsed, spent on the floor.
Rose stepped through the door and looked down at Luca. “What’s going on?”
The boy had aged nearly a decade, a ball’s hair over twenty. Luca didn’t seem to realize what had happened just yet, looking down at his Hulked-out outfit, pawing his body in confusion.
Luca looked up at Rose. “I healed him.”
She turned to Boricio, but it wasn’t his Morning Rose.
And it hadn’t been.
Some motherfucker had been pretending, wearing her body like it was goddamned Halloween.
It had lied to him.
Had made him feel safe. Loved.
Boricio wanted to do more than kill it. He wanted to destroy it down to the molecule, dig a ditch, and shit on its remains.
He looked down at Luca. “Can you give us a second, Hulk Junior?”
Luca, still clearly dazed, looked up at Boricio, then nodded and left the room.
The door closed, and Boricio sat up, moving his body for the first time since his arrival. His muscles were stiff, and pain prickled like a village of tiny needles, but at least he could move. Like the Boy Wonder said, he’d been healed, and now he remembered.
Boricio looked at the soon-to-be-dead thing pretending to be his Morning Rose, looking at him with her artificial loving eyes, and that sad smile she sometimes had when he fell into one his darker moods that he couldn’t explain.
“You’re healed.” She tried to smile, but Boricio saw right through it. He flinched and pulled back on her way to a hug.
“You … stay the fuck away from me.”
She stopped, her eyes wide. “What’s wrong, honey?”
Boricio swallowed, trying to keep his rage from making him do something stupid.
He cast his eyes around the room, taking inventory of all the shit he could use to send this monster into oblivion. He could gouge Its eyes and puncture Its throat with the pen on his nightstand. A brush on the dresser could be snapped in half and used as a blade. He could shatter the mirror and use its shards to slice the alien wide.
But the fucker didn’t deserve anything so pleasant, and Boricio longed to take his time, snaking his fingers into Its throat, then choking the fucker dead with his bare hands.
“I remember,” he said staring into the alien’s widening eyes.
He leaped on the creature, hands around Its neck, falling on top of it, straddling Rose’s body, staring into her eyes as he choked the impostor.
“Wait!” Rose’s voice cried out in a rasping gasp.
Boricio loosened his grip, just enough to tease it with mercy. “What?”
“I’m still in here, Boricio! It’s me, Rose!”
“Bullshit!” Boricio screamed, squeezing tighter.
“I am!” it insisted again. “We’re both in here. Just like with Luca. We can coexist with them, Boricio.”
“Stop it!” He pushed his fingers harder into her flesh, not wanting to know what the hell she, It, meant about Luca.
Rose’s eyes welled with tears as she vented an anemic, “Please.”
Boricio closed his eyes.
He couldn’t look his old Rose in the eyes as he killed her.
No, not a her, It!
He kept squeezing, tight, telling himself that his Morning Rose would prefer death to this corruption of body and soul.
But even as Boricio thought it, a large part of him longed for his Rose so much to maybe believe there was something left of her in the puppet. Maybe the alien was telling the truth. And maybe she could have her body back again.
No.
There’s nothing left of my Rosebud.
Don’t believe its lies.
She tried to say something.
“Die,” he said, squeezing his eyes shut, despite their will to open. “Fucking die.”
“Stop!” a voice yelled.
Boricio looked up, saw the old man, Art, aiming a shotgun at his head. “Get off of her.”
Boricio looked down at Rose’s face, her crying eyes, and coul
dn’t help but feel like a monster. Another part of him felt like he was being worked by the alien, being made to feel guilty. Using his love for her against him.
“Let go of her or I will kill you,” Art said.
Boricio let go, slowly, then stood, eyes on the old fucker, trying to figure the best way to get his gun.
The thing that wasn’t Rose stood, swallowing, wiping tears from her eyes, still playing victim.
Art turned to It. “What do you want me to do? Shoot him?”
“No,” It said. “Please, leave us alone.”
“He just tried to kill you.”
“I said leave us!”
Art shrank back like a dog being scolded then gave It the shotgun.
It took the weapon, training it on Boricio until the door shut and they were back to being alone.
It lowered the gun, meeting his eyes.
“I don’t want to kill you.”
“Well, I do want to kill you,” Boricio said. No reason to pretend, or try and outsmart an alien. This would only end with one of them dying.
“I wasn’t lying when I said she’s in here.”
“So, who am I talking to now, Rose or the alien? You said ‘she’s in here,’ meaning you were pretending to be her before.”
“No, now we are one. She and I. But the Rose you love is still in here. We’ve done nothing to her.”
“Yeah, is that so? Well, how about you just get out of her body. Find someone else to live in.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that. But I have another proposal. Why don’t you join us?”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.” He chuckled. “Boricio is the quarterback, and he aint’ throwing for Team Nasty-Ass Alien Goo!”
Not Rose smiled. Boricio wasn’t sure if it was some part of her smiling or if the alien was a condescending cunt. Boricio had had enough artificial mirth, of fuckers looking down at him like he was half-retard. People always thought they were better than him and smiled when, in fact, they were writing him off.
But nobody writes Boricio off. No. Body.
“Please, Boricio, don’t you want more than this? I know you. I know you’re so much better than most of these filthy, lazy, and supremely ignorant humans. You realized this early. That’s why you culled them from the planet.”