Instead, there’d been another battle. Explosions. Fire. Rubble. Falling. Death, but not hers.
And oh, she was so tired now, she thought as she forced herself not to go back to her knees. When she forced herself to keep going, not toward that dead body in the window, but around it. When she stepped through the empty window and kept going toward the parking lot.
Oh, she was so tired.
And there was a man, dressed in layers of rags, who looked as though he’d gone through hell and back.
There was Jake.
70
The corridors echoed with the slapping of her sneakers against the floor. Everything about her hurt, and in another life maybe the pain would’ve been bad enough to keep her from moving, but now Kelsey ran. Behind her, the door slammed open. She took the risk of glancing back, sure she’d see someone staggering after her, but all that chased her was a surge of vines and flowers. They covered everything in front of them, tendrils digging into every crack and breaking apart concrete walls like they were made of paper.
She ran faster. Her lungs seized, and she choked, coughing out hunks of black and red that made her dizzy to see. But she kept her feet, reeling a few times against the corridor walls before finding her balance.
It was inside her. Had been inside her, all along, all these months when she’d thought she was safe. Others had breathed the spores and succumbed, but Kelsey had been all right. Until now.
Staggering, Kelsey heard the low panting gasps coming from her throat and couldn’t reconcile them as her own. Her teeth snapped at the air as her fingers clawed, and still she ran. Still she forced herself to keep ahead of the tumbling vines. She had no idea where she was, but there were signs and she could read them. There was that, she thought as she wavered on a set of stairs leading up. She could read. She could think. Rage clouded her vision, but she still had enough of her mind left to know that it was not her own fury, but that of whatever was working in her brain.
If she was going to die, she wanted to do it outside. Under the sky. Not underground, not here with a bunch of strangers, not in the dark that was rapidly getting deeper as the vines covered the lights.
“Dennis.”
She wanted her Dennis.
That was her only hesitation, that she should flee these caverns and leave him behind. He was with a group patrolling the perimeters. Maybe he was safe. Maybe he would survive this…
Kelsey burst through another set of doors into the wide open area that housed the shops and amusement park listed in the brochure that had tempted them to come here in the first place. She was close to the entrance.
She couldn’t run anymore. She went to her knees, skidding on the tile floor. Her jeans tore. Then her skin. She hit with her palms, then her chin. Pain. More pain. Behind her, the shush-shush of those vines. The flowers’ stench filled her nose and mouth, but she opened for it, breathing it in. She would die now.
She would die.
“Get up. Kelsey, baby, you have to get up.” Dennis was there, hand beneath her elbows, hauling her upright.
They ran together. Out the doors, into the parking lot. The vines came behind them. When they hit the open air, more exploded out of them, each splitting and reproducing. The flowers burst forth, bloomed and died in seconds, to be replaced by bigger blooms. More vines. The foliage took over everything, ripping and tearing and destroying all of it.
Above them in the night sky, a bright light replaced the moon. Kelsey stopped running. Dennis, pulling her, tried to keep going for a moment longer, but then he stopped, too.
Light in the sky.
Felt like home.
Something stirred inside her, twisting and turning, itching until she scratched at her skin. Dug her nails in deep, shredding herself open. Letting what was inside her out. Letting herself…become.
“Kelsey!” Dennis gripped her hand beside her. From his mouth came the first tentative tendril of red. Then more.
Their fingers linked. Palm to palm. Then, mouth to mouth in one last kiss that tasted of the flowers. She didn’t mind any longer. She ate it, ate of his face, breathed him in. Made him a part of her.
“I love you,” she said, but the words came out garbled and unintelligible.
“I love you,” came his reply, though she could no longer be certain if he spoke or if she just heard him say it in her head.
It didn’t matter. They were together, here in the end, and it was where she wanted to be. The vines burst out of them and all around them and inside them and over them and then there was only this and nothing else.
71
Oh God.
Oh God.
Oh God.
I will never talk to him again. I will never see him again. I will never hear him laugh or see him smile or feel the warmth of his hand in mine again. We will never touch.
Never again.
This is what she thinks, over and over, as she drives home. Her hands on the wheel, gripping tight. The swish-swish of the wipers clearing the window, though the truth is, Maggie is blinded by tears that fill and scald her eyes but refuse to slip down her cheeks.
She opens her mouth and takes in air, but there is no breath. It’s over. All of it. This thing that grew and grew until it consumed her has ended.
There is no more.
There are no other cars on this dark road. No lights but her headlights on the wet blackness. Swish, swish, the wipers swat away the rain. The thrum and hum of the tires is a wordless song that would soothe her under other circumstances. But there is no solace now. Nothing but the grinding, slicing ache in the spot where she once hung her heart.
Everything rises in her. She swerves to the side of the road. Toward a ditch. How easy it would be, she thinks, to run her car off this road. Off the side of a bridge. They’d blame it on the rain, wet roads, bald tires; maybe they’d say she fell asleep. Lost control. There’d be no blame, only sorrow at the loss of her.
He’d know though. Wouldn’t he? And would he grieve, if she were gone forever? Does it matter to him if she occupies a place in this world, when it will never in the same place he is? Will he grieve, she thinks as the tires spin and the car skids to a stop, as she opens her door to lean out and heave into the rain. Will he grieve?
The misery had faded, but never disappeared. She’d been able to recall it at a moment’s notice, if she tried, though she had very rarely allowed herself the luxury of that self-indulgent agony. Most other times it simply reared up and smacked her like a shovel to the face, always unexpected. A song they’d danced to. The whiff of his cologne on a stranger in a crowd. Once she’d been in the office supply store and saw a man who looked like him from behind — she’d actually reached for him only to jerk her hand back at the last second, knowing it could not be him. She’d gone to her car after that and sat for a long, long time, gripping the wheel and staring ahead of her without turning on the ignition.
She’d believed, that last time, that she would never see him again, but he’d shown up on her doorstep with a warning. And then again, when he’d been taken away by the men with guns, she had believed that was the last time they would ever be together.
But here he was again. The passage of time ought to have changed her feelings for him. After all, she’d spent her time and energy on making the best of her life in the years that had passed, and she’d done a damn fine job of it. Her passion for him should’ve faded or spent itself to emptiness in her dreams. The loss of everything else should have overshadowed the loss of him.
“I have missed you,” she said now. The truth came out of her as easily as water slipping over rocks. The words tripped on her tongue and past her teeth without so much as a snap of her jaw to keep them inside. “Oh, God, I missed you so much.”
“I missed you, too,” Jake said.
She bent her head and pressed her hands over her mouth to keep back the sobs. Maggie shook her head, shoulders heaving with each breath she took until she could look at him again. “I thought I would never see you
again.”
Incredibly, he smiled at that. “I always told you, you never know what might happen.”
She wanted to smack him. Or kiss him. Or both, one then the other. She curled her fingers into her palms, making fists she tucked into her lap to keep herself from touching him at all.
“Are you real?”
“I’m real,” Jake said, and finally took her in his arms. “I’m real, and I’m here. I told you I would come for you.”
She kissed him, hard and harder, clinging. He kissed her too, holding her as fiercely. They clung together in the ruins of the parking lot and went together to their knees on the pavement. Still kissing. Still clinging.
She pressed her forehead to his after a time, breathing hard. Eyes closed. “This isn’t real. It can’t be real.”
“When they took me, I stayed in that group for awhile before I escaped. I tried to get back to you, but you were already gone. I joined the other group, the one that raided yours. I knew they’d taken you. I knew what they planned for you.”
She opened her eyes, blinking against the light and smoke and her exhaustion and disbelief. “And you came for me?”
“I did.” Jake pulled her close, holding her so tight that every muscle ached, and she didn’t care. “I would always come for you.”
“The bombs…”
He shook his head, kissing her temple. “Not me. But I knew they were going to use them. I got here as soon as I could. I wanted to get you out before they bombed the place. I was too late.”
“But you weren’t,” Maggie said slowly. “You’re here.”
“I found you.”
“You’ll always find me,” Maggie said.
They looked at each other. Once, long ago, she’d gone with him to a Tarot reader who’d read their cards and then their palms, stroking calloused fingers across their skin without saying anything at first.
“You found each other,” the woman had said. “You will always find each other.”
They’d never spoken of it, not even to scoff. They’d left her shop in silence and gone to their hotel, where they’d made love for the last time. Maggie had never forgotten it.
Jake coughed.
Above them, the sky grew brighter. From everywhere around them came a low humming, replaced quickly by a high-pitched wail that hurt her ears. She wanted to get up, but couldn’t force herself to get off her knees.
“I love you,” Jake said.
She’d never thought she would hear him say it, and all she could do was kiss him again.
“I’m sorry,” Jake whispered into her mouth.
She wanted to ask him for what. Letting her walk away? Never following her? Never telling her he loved her before now? For finding her again? She didn’t want him to be sorry for that, never for that.
The taste of his kiss changed.
Something filled her mouth, not his tongue. Something bitter and sharp, the barb of a thorn. The meaty petals of a flower. Vines cascaded from Jake’s mouth and Maggie swallowed them. She became them. Together, they dissolved into purple and red and blue, but they did it as one, and with that, her last thought was brutal but simple. She wished she’d had the chance to tell him she loved him, too.
But as they were consumed and transformed and the last thing she felt was his embrace, Maggie thought that Jake already knew.
72
Abbie had planned to trap them, but they were too clever, so the best she could hope for was to sneak up on them. She had a knife, honed to hairsplitting sharpness. And she had her love, strong enough to give her the determination to follow through. That would have to be enough.
She’d seen only a few of the resurrected, but she knew enough to be certain her boys had been different. Always different. Now they stuck together, a pair. They stalked her, and she let them, sitting quiet in the yard with nothing around her to indicate any danger. She sat with her face tipped toward the sun, and when it went down and the moon came up, she listened to the sound of night insects and counted the beats of time between the cricket’s chirps. She didn’t need to count them to figure out the temperature, or that the nights were getting cooler, but she did it to pass the time.
Overhead, a light came into the sky. Brighter than the moon. Around her, through the trees, the leaves hushed and shushed. The sound of feet in the bushes told her they were close.
“Come here,” Abbie said without opening her eyes. “Come to Mama.”
In her hand, the knife.
The weight of a child on her lap. Another at her side, leaning against her. The heat of them was of sickness, and so was the stink. She gathered them as close as she could, waiting for a snarl or a bite, but neither of her boys attacked her.
She stroked their hair, feeling the softness of their skulls. The slick, bloated feeling of their skin over wounds that would never heal. Weeping, her eyes still closed so she would not have to look at the rot and damage, Abbie crooned a lullaby. She rocked them. They snuffled against her like animals, the wet press of their tongues on her skin repulsive and yet reminiscent of the days when she’d nursed them. She’d given them her body then to feed them. Would this be so different, she wondered, but only for a moment or so of delusion. She could not save them this way.
There was only one way.
She opened her eyes at last to find both her sons with gaped jaws, heads tipped back, eyes reflecting the not-moonlight. Their throats worked, humming. The noise grew louder. Then higher. Something stirred deep inside their eyes and in the backs of their throats, something slithered and wriggled in the shadows of their ears and in the deep pockets of open, rotting flesh.
“Forgive me,” she said, and she meant for all of it. Every bad thing she had ever done, every time she had failed them as their mother, and there were so many of those times that she’d long ago lost count.
“Forgive me,” Abbie said, and took the knife, which entered each of their skulls with no more resistance than cutting into pumpkins left to go soft on the vine.
“I love you,” she said as they both fell and went silent.
The pulse of light overhead went brighter. In the distance, the humming went on, the high pitched whine got louder, but it was all far away and not here. Nothing was here but the weight of her children against her and the stink of their blood and the burning salt of her tears.
All around her, the forest spoke. She knew the rancid, rotten smell of those flowers. She saw them blooming in the trees, on the crimson vines creeping across everything, taking it over. Coming closer. Covering everything. Soon, in minutes, even this bare patch of grass would be devoured by them, but against her, the children were still and silent.
Something stirred in her guts and tickled the back of her mind. A knowledge. Understanding. Abbie looked upward to the light in the sky and listened to it calling. She smiled as she pressed the knife to her own eardrum, pressing deep and deeper, the pain a spark that would become an inferno in a moment of pressure. She smiled and jammed the knife deep into her brain, cutting off the final spark that had made her Abbie, not giving anything else the chance to take her over.
In her last thoughts, she smiled, because she had done it. She had saved her boys from becoming whatever this was. She had saved herself.
And all around her, the flowers bloomed and died and bloomed again, and all that was left of everything and everyone was the hush and shush of growing things.
About the Author
I was born and then I lived awhile. Then I did some stuff and other things. Now, I mostly write books. Some of them use a lot of bad words, but most of the other words are okay.
I can’t live without music, the internet, the ocean or Coke Zero. I can’t stand the feeling of corduroy or velvet, and modern art leaves me cold. I write a little bit of everything from horror to romance, and I don’t answer to the name “Meg.”
* * *
Megan Hart is a USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly and New York Times bestselling author who writes in many genres including mainstream f
iction, erotic fiction, science fiction, romance, fantasy and horror. Learn more about her by visiting her website, MeganHart.com. Find her on Twitter at twitter.com/megan_hart and on Facebook at facebook.com/megan.hart. If you liked The Resurrected, please tell all of your friends to buy it. If you hated it, please tell all your enemies to buy it. If you’d like to tell the author about it, drop her a line at
[email protected], but remember that your mom told you if you don’t have anything nice to say, it’s best to say nothing at all.
Megan Hart, The Resurrected Compendium
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