Death's Awakening (10 page)

Fear hitched in her
chest. Soldiers?

She watched as patients
were taken from most of the cars in front of her. Sometimes they were
wheeled away on a gurney while others walked with assistance.

But a few cars later,
she watched as two bodies were taken and laid out on the pavement
beside their car. A woman got out of the driver’s side and
collapsed next to the bodies as soldiers placed white sheets over
them.

Parrish looked away.
She lay her head against the cool glass of the window until it was
time to move ahead.

Finally, the blue
Toyota up ahead pulled forward to the line of soldiers. The woman’s
son was lifted from the passenger seat and rushed inside one of the
tents. His mother opened her car door, but a soldier pushed it closed
and pointed off in the distance, directing her to some other area of
the hospital.

Parrish nearly cried
tears of joy as the woman drove away. It was finally her turn.

“Oh, thank God,”
she said to the man who appeared at her window. “It’s my
mother, she’s in the bac—-”

The man interrupted her
with his large, booming voice. He shone a bright light toward her.
“Open your mouth, miss.”

“Wait,” she
said, confused. “It’s not me who’s sick.”

She heard the back door
slide open and another soldier climbed halfway into the back to check
on her mother. The larger soldier spoke again. “Please, open
your mouth, miss. We’re just checking for any signs of the
virus,” he said.

His voice was strong
and his tone made Parrish feel the way she had in elementary school
when she’d gotten reprimanded for talking too much in the
cafeteria. He shined his light into her eyes and ran some kind of
digital thermometer across her forehead.

“This one’s
clear,” he yelled to his colleague. “What about the other
one?”

“Sir,” the
younger soldier answered.

Something in his voice
made Parrish stop cold. She turned and looked back at him. When his
eyes met hers, she knew. All the air was pushed from her lungs as if
she’d been hit. Her mouth fell open and she couldn’t
move.

“She’s
dead, sir,” the soldier finished.

All around her car,
soldiers in masks jumped into action, but Parrish was frozen.

Dead?

He couldn’t be
talking about her mother. She was just fine this evening. They’d
had dinner together and she’d been fine. Maybe she’d
mentioned being tired and having a sore throat, but sore throats
couldn’t kill you. How could she be dead?

Parrish unbuckled her
seatbelt, and tried to slip in to the backseat.

They were wrong. She
was just sleeping. She would show them.

But the men were
already taking her mother’s lifeless body from the car.

Someone gripped her arm
and held her to her spot, keeping her from jumping out of the car
after her mother.

“I’m sorry
for your loss,” the soldier said. “Can you please give me
her name and social security number for our records?”

Parrish shook her head,
unable to take her eyes off her mother’s face. Her eyes were
closed and a drop of blood trickled down from the side of her mouth.

“Miss?”

“She’s my
mother,” Parrish said. “She’s just sleeping. I need
to show you. If you just—”

Then the white sheet
went over her mother’s face and Parrish screamed. She jerked
against the seat and twisted her arm until she slipped from the man’s
grasp. She bolted into the back seat and through the sliding door of
the van. She jumped down by her mother’s side and lifted the
sheet from her face.

“Stop it,”
she shouted. “She’s okay. She just needs to see a
doctor.”

The men at her side
exchanged a look. She wanted to punch them in the face. They were
acting like they thought she was crazy.

She put a hand to her
mother’s forehead. “Mom? Wake up, okay? I need you to
wake up.”

But she didn’t
wake up. Madelyn Sorrows was gone.

Hands circled around
her arms and pulled her to her feet, away from her mother’s
body. A third man replaced the sheet over her mother’s face and
Parrish screamed again.

“I’m
sorry,” a voice said in her ear. “I’m sorry, but we
have to keep the line moving.”

Parrish, too weak to
struggle, watched as her mother’s dead body was lifted onto a
gurney and wheeled over to a pile of bodies covered in white sheets.

She was dreaming of the
woman inside the ice again.

Ever since the young
witch had come through the portal to this world, her dreams had been
so real. So incredibly detailed. Even now she could feel the cool air
rush across her skin.

“What do you want
from me?” she asked.

The woman trapped
inside the ice opened her eyes.
“I want you to set me free,”
she said.

The witch shook her
head and took a step closer to the center of the ice cave. “But
I don’t know how,” she said. Worry squeezed her veins.
Was she supposed to know what to do? What would happen if she
couldn’t do what this woman asked of her? The look in those
dark red eyes scared her. “I don’t know what to do.”

“
You have
already done more for me than anyone in centuries,”
the
woman said.

“How? I didn’t
mean to do anything. I was just following the old man.” She
shook her head again, sleep making her mind foggy. “I was just
doing as I was told.”

“
Don’t
lie to me, child,”
the woman said. Her eyes glowed
brighter.
“Why do you work so hard to make yourself seem
weaker than you are?”

“I am weak,”
the witch answered. “I have always been weak.”

“
Then you are
lying even to yourself. You have never been weak and you know it.
Your whole life, you have been underestimated. Taken for granted,”
the woman said. “
But deep down, you don’t believe any
of the things the elders of the Council have said to you about your
powers. You know you are capable of so much more than they believed.
Don’t you?”

The witch fell to her
knees in front of the block of ice. She began to cry, but the instant
her tears touched her face, they froze to her skin, then fell like
diamonds onto the floor of the cave.

No one had ever spoken
to her like this. No one had ever really understood.

“
When you
stepped through to this world, I felt your presence like a glowing
sun,”
the woman said.
“You became my hope and my
future in that instant. And who told you to come here? Who commanded
you to follow Tobias, the old man?”

“No one,”
she answered.

“
No one told
you. You made those choices on your own,”
the woman said.
“And who commanded you to kill him?”

The witch’s eyes
snapped to the face of the woman in ice. The Dark One with her red
eyes glowing. She swallowed, her throat tight and her hands
trembling.

“I didn’t
mean to kill him,” she whispered.

“
Yes you did,”
the Dark One said, her voice low like a growl. “
You felt my
presence the same way I felt yours. You felt my will, my power,
inside you. That’s why you raised your dagger to his chest. You
did it because I willed it. And the first drop of his blood that
touched this earth was the first step toward my freedom. The first
step toward breaking the seal on this earth and regaining my power.
Can’t you see that?”

The witch nodded. Yes,
she did see. It was beginning to make sense to her now.

When she’d
stabbed Tobias, she knew there was something, or someone, pressing
her to do it. Something that reached inside and begged her to do it.

“
You had a
choice,”
the woman in ice said.
“You could have
ignored my will. You could have spared his life and let him take you
back to the world from which you came. But you didn’t. You
chose to follow me. To obey me. And for this, child, I promise you
will be greatly rewarded.”

The witch stared down
at her hands, almost able to still see Tobias’ blood on them.

“
Before you
receive your reward, there is more work that needs to be done,”
the woman said.
“If you do my will, you will know a
power greater than anything you could have ever imagined. I promise
you that you will never again be taken for granted or treated
like a useless child.”

The witch looked up,
tears in her eyes. This is what she had always wanted for her life,
but never, in any of her dreams, had she expected to have to kill
someone in order to get the respect she longed for.

But the death of a few
seemed a small price to pay for what she might get in return.

When she looked into
the Dark One’s eyes, the witch knew one thing was certain.

She was going to have
to kill again.

Crash had been staring
at his computer screens for hours. Days. He’d only taken short
breaks since this whole thing began and his insomnia was in full
force. He wasn’t even sure how long it had been since he last
slept.

He pushed off with his
feet and his computer chair soared across the cement floor toward the
mini-fridge. He grabbed a giant-sized energy drink from inside, then
pushed back toward his desk.

Information was pouring
in now by the minute.

Facebook. Twitter.
Forums. Every single social media site out there was being flooded
with stories of the strange illness.

Most of it was the
same—people posting that someone they loved was sick or had
been taken to the hospital. Or worse. But Crash was looking for
something more. He wanted answers. Where had this virus come from?
How many were infected?

So far, social media
wasn’t giving him any concrete answers.

His friend Atomic had
finally responded to him, but he didn’t have much either. He
said he’d been trying to hack into the CDC mainframe for days
with no luck.

What they needed was
more data. Crash wasn’t even sure how he knew what to do, but
the idea for a new program popped into his head. His fingers flew
over the keyboard as he typed in code he didn’t even know how
to read two days ago. Suddenly, though, it all made sense to him.
Like a new language. Maybe he’d picked up more information from
his hacker friends than he’d realized.

He told the program to
start pulling data from several online sources, collecting numbers of
sick and hospitalized. Death tolls. He brought up a specialized map
and started feeding the data into it, creating a program that would
not only bring up the current status of the virus across the country,
but would also predict how many would be infected in the next few
days.

When he was finished,
he took in a deep breath and pushed back. Holy cannoli. How had he
even done that? The feel of it was exhilarating, like flying.

He shook his head and
took another long drink. Now, he just had to kill some time while the
program did its thing.

Crash opened a browser
on his fifth monitor and brought up YouTube. If people were posting
status updates and pictures all over the web, they were probably
posting videos too.

His fingers hovered
over the keyboard. What should he search for?

He thought for a
second, then typed in “virus hospital videos”.

Several videos
appeared, and he clicked on the first one, titled “Inside the
Quarantine, San Francisco, California”.

A hospital corridor
appeared and Crash leaned forward, clicking to make the video
full-screen. The video was dark at first, but as soon as the person
carrying the camera turned a corner, he gasped. The sheer amount of
sick people stuffed into the hallway was shocking. Some people were
laid out on gurneys, while others were slumped over in chairs that
lined the walls.

The screen bounced up
and down with every step and the movement was choppy and too fast. If
he had to guess, Crash thought it was probably taken with a cell
phone. Whoever was running the camera began to narrate and he was
surprised to hear a young woman’s voice. She sounded terrified.

“This is Angela
Burrow, I’m a volunteer here at San Francisco General
Hospital.” She quickly spun the camera around to her face. The
image moved so fast, Crash’s stomach lurched. When it settled
on her face, though, he felt the breath knocked out of him. Angela
looked to be about twenty years old. She must have been very pretty
once, but now dark purple bruises appeared around her eyes and her
lips were cracked and bleeding. Her skin was as white as a sheet.

“I showed up to
volunteer three days ago, just before the hospital was placed under
quarantine. No one has been allowed in or out in days and we’re
all going completely crazy in here,” she said. She glanced from
side-to-side, her face pressed close to the camera. “They took
our cell phones after they initiated the quarantine, which we all
thought was weird. Like they didn’t want anyone outside to
really know what was going on in here.”

Her voice quivered and
she cleared her throat.

“My supervisor
passed away this morning,” she said. A sob escaped from her,
but she cleared her throat again and kept talking. “I stole his
keys from his pocket and got my phone out of his office. There isn’t
much charge left, so I wanted to try to get this out before the phone
dies.”

The camera swung back
around as the girl walked down the hall, turned another corner, then
walked inside one of the patient rooms. Crash counted at least ten
patients crammed into the small room. There were only two beds, and
the rest of the patients were laid out on the floor with blankets and
pillows.

Angela panned the
camera around the room.

“This is the
section of the hospital where the doctors have put all of the
advanced stage patients, and as you can see, there aren’t
nearly enough beds for all of the sick. Every room in this section is
packed to the limit, and we have started moving overflow into the
hallways. There just isn’t even floor space to lay everyone
out. Some of these people don’t even have the strength to stand
on their own.”