The tentacles were protruding out of her and everyone else around him.
“You killed him!” the woman screamed.
The fact that she was wearing a shirt that read GOD HATES FAGS.COM and had just stabbed him in the chest with a stake took away most of Pax’s sympathy. He tried to sit up but helpful hands pressed him back down again. He heard shouts to call 911. Shouts to get out of the way for the paramedics. Shouts that the cops were coming. Shouts telling people to get out of the way so pictures could be taken. Shouts of “God’s will, God’s will,” followed by malicious laughter. Shouting. All this useless shouting.
And through it all, the tentacles writhed and pushed, coming closer and closer.
“Pax!”
He gasped.
“Get off me!” he shouted.
He reached out for Scarlett, but he still couldn’t contact her. He sat upright, knocking a dozen souls backward, including the insane wife. Widow. The sound of Scarlett’s voice echoed in his ears. He could see what was happening to her, could see what was happening in her school.
I shouldn’t have let her go. I thought she had control over her power. I never thought she would…
He ripped the wooden stake out of his chest and dropped it carefully in some citizen’s outstretched arms. No blood. I must have turned it off when I turned off the pain.
“He’s a vampire!” someone shrieked. “He’s not bleeding!”
His cover, as they say, was blown.
“She just put a stake through his heart in broad daylight, and he’s still moving,” a dry voice responded. “I think that means he’s not a vampire, if you check.”
“What is he then?” the first voice shouted.
A feeling of dread, cold as ice, flashed across his skin. If he were human, he would have been covered with goose bumps. He heard a sound like the sky being ripped in half, if the sky were made out of bricks and sheet metal. The ground vibrated. Not much. But enough to make his stomach lurch and tears fill up his eyes. His head automatically turned west. Toward Scarlett’s high school.
He reached out in his mind, hoping to find Scarlett.
Instead, he found Lana, fighting off the tentacles of negative energy with fire. Nuclear bomb levels of fire.
He sort of remembered 9/11. At least, he thought he did. He’d been two. He remembered it as Dad watching a weird movie on TV and crying a lot and Mom disappearing for a long time, which made sense later. She’d been with the injured. But Pax couldn’t remember the planes hitting. Not really. What he could remember was the way the floor had felt when they had. Like the floor itself was shivering.
Like the ground was feeling right now…
He threw up a shield, shoving everyone out of his way. He knew he should stop and think things through so he didn’t fuck things up even worse than they were already. He also knew it wasn’t going to happen. He gathered his strength—his real, new astral strength—and he jumped toward Scarlett.
He jumped over power lines, he jumped over buildings, he jumped over cars and pedestrians. Surrounded by a glowing blue ball of power and heading toward black smoke and screaming and tentacles of negative energy rushing down the streets like a sudden rainstorm, he jumped.
Even though he knew he was already too late.
Scarlett woke up curled on her side, lying on something sharp and lumpy and uncomfortable. For a moment she thought she was at home in bed. She tried to settle down into the one comfortable spot in her shitty mattress but she just couldn’t seem to find it. The sheets were dirty and sticky, like… like someone had dumped a gallon of pudding underneath her and she’d slept on top of it. Some prank.
She tried to push it out from underneath her and came up with a handful of something that smelled like rust mixed with B.O. She tried to work out what flavor of pudding it was. But who makes post-apocalyptic pudding?
Not pudding. Blood.
She woke up with a gasp. Her period…
You don’t have periods anymore, remember?
She rolled to the side and got on her hands and knees. The floor tiles were black and tacky and broken, and the floor seemed to shift under her weight. Gray fog covered the tiles and smothered the light. But it wasn’t fog; it was smoke. She was surrounded by clouds of heavy black smoke that made her mouth taste like electrified dog shit. Her clothes felt like they had melted onto her.
She got her balance under her and stretched her arm out to find what she’d been lying on. She knew finding out was going to make her feel worse. But she had to do it anyway.
She touched cloth, the artificial fiber shit from the polo shirts they had to wear as uniform tops. Wet with a crust of crunchy bits on top. She flinched but patted around some more. Sirens whooped in the distance. Getting closer. Like time bombs. Not yet. Don’t get here yet.
Her fingers crawled across the wet shirt, trying to find skin.
Instead they found something… sticking out of the shirt. The shirt had been ripped open. Just past it was meat. A body. But she didn’t want to think about it as a body. So she thought about it as meat. Vegetarian. If she ever had to eat again, she was going to go vegetarian. Maybe this time she could make it stick. The horror diet. The meat was squishy and gross and not like steak at all. Probably because steak gets cut into chunks on purpose, and this was… ripped. Just like the shirt.
Bones. She touched what were unmistakably broken bones. And a tube that was so big she accidentally stuck her finger into it. She froze.
The smoke picked that moment to clear.
Jamie McIntyre. Her snobby, disdainful, cruel head was at even more of an angle at the end of her long neck than usual. She had a little lump under her chin, on the side of her neck. Broken? Probably. Her eyes were rolled up so only thin slits of the whites were showing. A big fleck of ash was stuck right on her eyeball. Her jaw had slid sideways out of some groove, exposing her lower front teeth and making her look like an angry chihuahua.
Scarlett tried not to look at the rest. Failed.
Jamie’s whole right arm had been ripped off. The bones in her shoulder stuck out like they’d been stretched. Her ribcage was smashed into a slope. Something had slammed into her at an angle and slid off sideways. Trails of blood led away from her… and to a massive pit in the floor. The floor. Something had smashed through the floor.
Scarlett had been lying on top of Jamie. Dreaming that Jamie’s body was an uncomfortable mattress.
Scarlett jerked her hand back away from the meat. Her stomach wanted to heave, but she shut it off. It wasn’t a real stomach anyway.
I did this.
No. The negative energy had done it.
Except it hadn’t. The negative energy didn’t use fire. She used fire. But she hadn’t been awake. She couldn’t have killed them all in her sleep, could she?
I did this.
She watched the smoke dissipate. She wanted to turn away but couldn’t. She had to see. Had to see what she’d done. She stood up. The floor tilted a little, and she had to take a step backward. But she had to be standing when she saw this.
The inside of the school was a… it was…
It was the aftermath of an action movie.
I did this.
The smoke spiraled out of the air. After a second she could see all the way through the roof to the sky. The walls were broken in, bricks scattered like a Lego set kicked to pieces by an angry toddler. Fires were burning all over the place. Sparks and ash fluttered up and down in the hot air, black snow mixed with fireflies, swirling around her. The air inside the ruined building was a slow, thick whirlwind. The air above her shimmered from the heat distortion. Wires dangled and spat out sparks and smoke. A computer desk teetered from the floor above her, one of the wheels missing.
And the bodies. Everywhere. Charred, twisted, shattered, d
ripping, shoved-aside bodies. Now that she was paying attention, she couldn’t seem to get the sound of moaning out of her ears. She wasn’t sure whether she was making that up or not. She wasn’t sure how anybody human could have survived what she’d done.
I did this.
Greasy-haired Matt? Gone. Mr. Vogel? Gone. The Bitch Queens and their court of football players? History. That blonde from computer class? She had no future now.
I did this.
Whatever it was they’d deserved, it wasn’t this.
Shouting. It wasn’t just ambulance and fire and cop sirens coming down the street now. It was shouting, echoing around inside the building. It sounded organized. Full of orders. Movement in the rubble, then a sudden spear of daylight. She had to get out of here.
Before Pax saw her.
Now she knew what samurai felt like when they committed seppuku, when they took their knives to their guts to cut out their intestines. Shame had settled in her gut, and she would have given anything to be able to slice herself open and let it come tumbling out in wet, stinking, black coils.
But she couldn’t. Couldn’t afford to let out the fire again.
Ever.
She gathered the heat around her. The least she could do was get the fuck out of here. Make the emergency workers’ jobs that much easier, not having to search for bodies in an inferno.
Slowly, with the ash and sparks still circling around her, Scarlett floated up on the hot air. It was a magical moment, if you ignored the bodies, and the shouting, and the smell of barbecue. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. She was too ashamed. She didn’t deserve to cry.
As her feet left the chunk of floor she’d been standing on, it tipped a little, lost its balance, and in one big grinding, crunching swoop, slid off the steel girder it was sitting on and crashed into the basement. Jamie, stuck to the tile, slid with it. Still dead with her eyes rolled back in her head.
The rescue workers were calling to each other. “What was that?” “Don’t know!” “Found one!” “Live one?” “Nope.” Hoses were being dragged in. Water gushed and sprayed and threw up rainbows.
Scarlett looked upward before she could see anybody else, blinking hard and trying not to run into pieces of broken wall. Jamie’s should be the last human face I ever see. That’s what I deserve.
The heat and smoke carried her upward.
Pax jumped on top of an office building and skidded to a stop among the thickly whirring fans and A/C units. The cement slabs under his shoes squeaked like he was in a cartoon. His hoodie gaped open down to the skin where the stake had punctured it, but at least his jeans were in okay condition.
He should keep going. Every second counted. He had to save people. Fix all of this.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t process what he was seeing.
Scarlett’s school had been blown to bits; he got that. The shattered, burning, red brick walls were all over the sidewalk and streets in massive chunks. The windows on the buildings all over the street were broken, and every few seconds one of the safety-glass panes would fall out with a wet, slushy snowplow kind of sound. The street was packed with emergency vehicles that streaked everything around them with red and blue lights. Buildings, shattered glass, terrified faces. The arriving vehicles started vomiting people in uniform even before they came to a full stop. Blue, white, black, gray streaked with yellow. Hard hats. Gas masks. White paper filter masks. Long hoses.
Tendrils of negative energy, waving and spinning in the air, as if writhing in pain.
TV cameras on people’s shoulders. Crowds with cell phones raised, taking video and stills. People running toward the emergency because they thought they could help and getting in the way of the actual emergency workers. He saw a firefighter punch a guy in the face, knocking him backward into the arms of a waiting cop.
But that wasn’t the weird part.
The weird part was that huge, impenetrably thick, black clouds of smoke were pouring into the building. Instead of, you know, out of it. Sure, a huge cloud of smoke was floating away from the building, but no more was coming out, and the stuff closest to the building was being drawn back in, like it was getting sucked up with a straw. A news helicopter was flying around the building in circles, trying to get some footage, bobbing up and down from the billows of smoke and heat.
The fuck was going on?
Something rose out of the building. Clouds—swirling, storm-like, black clouds. They were clustered in a ball around a solid, darker mass in the center. An octopus of clouds. The smoke was still streaming toward the building, but now the streams and clouds of black smoke were rolling toward the center of the clouds instead of down into the building. Something in the center was trying to hide.
A helicopter circled above the building, trying to shine lights down into it. The lights shone behind the cloud and the inside of the dark mass lit up for a moment.
The dark shape within the clouds was a five-pointed starfish with one stunted limb. A human body.
Scarlett.
He’d already known it had to be her. Had to be. But he hadn’t wanted to believe it.
The light shifted, and the inside of the clouds went dark again, became just another freak mass of cloud. But he knew what he was looking at now. He could see the form within the form. One of her arms moved and a long, thin wave of cloud rippled out toward the helicopter like a whip. As the end of it brushed against the bottom of the helicopter, a gust of wind sent the helicopter skidding backward, away from the tendril of black cloud. Something heavy fell out of the helicopter—people screamed—it smashed on the sidewalk. A heavy camera, that was all.
He could hear Scarlett sobbing, could hear her screaming at the helicopter to get away. Not giving a fuck about the people inside. Only caring about getting the bad people away from her.
Not understanding she was the bad person now.
He could pick out her face. Black, made of smoke. About as far from human as it could get. Blank, black eyes. Swirling hair. Open mouth, spewing out smoke. A few sparks in the center of her mouth, almost overwhelmed by the smoke. But for the most part, she was negative energy in the form of smoke.
She’d killed everyone in the building. Probably. Maybe one or two were left.
Maybe it had been an accident. Maybe it had been Lana’s fault, driving things so far out of control that…
It didn’t matter.
Scarlett gestured with both hands, pressing downward, and a wall of smoke dropped out of her cloud, covering everything on ground level. Smoke ran down the streets like a flood, covering up the ground floor of all the buildings nearby. People stood on their balconies and pointed at the smoke and screamed. Get inside, you idiots. From under the smoke the megaphones shouted orders, then coughing, then screams.
Then nothing.
Pax knew, no matter what was happening and no matter why, Scarlett had to be stopped before she could do anything else.
He had to take her down.
Chapter 10
The nurse’s aide rolled Julie over to her office in a wheelchair with one wheel that tended to shimmy as it rolled over the carpeting in the office area of the hospital. The door was open. Who’d been in there? Had she even remembered to close the door when she’d gone running after Pax… yesterday? She tried to tell whether the papers on top of her cheap, gray modular desk had been moved, but she couldn’t. Definitely more had been added, though.
The aide, a gray-haired Puerto Rican woman not much taller than Julie, wheeled her in, kicked up the foot pedals, locked the brakes, and helped lift her the two steps to her black leather executive office chair. Julie was dressed in a hospital gown, with her own beige bathrobe and slippers from home—Pax had brought them the morning he had visited. She landed on her rump with a puff of air from the chair and a groan from the bottom of her diaphragm.
Not straining myself, she’d thought fiercely through the pain in her sternum. Being bored was more of a strain than taking two steps. This is relaxing.
“You all right?” the aide asked.
“Fine,” Julie said through gritted teeth.
The aide flashed a fake smile at Julie. “You want help getting back, you call my pager. Four, three, three, seven. If you’re still here after I get off shift, the number will go to my replacement. You remember the number?”
“Four, three, three, seven.”
The woman, whose massive arms waggled past the sleeves of her teal scrub top, grabbed a whiteboard marker and wrote on the corner of Julie’s whiteboard. 4337. “You get in pain, you won’t remember it. So I wrote it down.”
No matter how hard Julie stared at the back of the woman’s head, her thick, twisted-up brown hair refused to catch fire.
“Thanks,” Julie said. Now get out, get out, get out…
The woman nodded and left with excruciating slowness, pulling the door almost, but not quite, closed behind her. Julie sighed, the air whistling past her clenched teeth. It wasn’t worth it to call the woman back just to shut the fucking door properly. She had a stack of insurance forms to fill out. An improperly filled-out insurance form could mean the difference between life and death for a patient…
Someone rolled their knuckles against the door, making it twitch inward.