Fury: Book One of the Cure (Omnibus Edition) (8 page)

Luke shakes his head, turning to the window. He inspects the edges, running his fingers along them with quick efficiency. When he can’t get it open, he uses his elbow to make a crack in the glass, then pushes the pieces out carefully enough to catch each one and place them quietly on the floor.

I don’t know what he’s doing but I wish he’d hurry up. The Furies are every child’s nightmare—actually they’re the stuff of adult nightmares, too. Everyone in the world is terrified of the very idea of such creatures, savages with no access to any thought or feeling that isn’t fury. Every once in a while a whisper will be heard about the monsters in the wild, men and women who crave the taste of human flesh and will go to any lengths to get it. It is said that this is what would become of us if we weren’t given the cure. But it’s just the government’s way of scaring people; everyone knows it has no basis in reality.

Luke has all the glass out of the window now, but the awful noises are growing closer quickly. He sticks his head out and peers around. We’re on the third storey, and the drop to the ground is dizzying.

“Okay, here’s the plan,” he says briskly. “You’re going to hop onto my back and I’ll climb out the window over to that power line there. Then I’ll swing along it to the foster facility, from where I can probably reach that old scaffolding and make it to the ground.”

“What?” An explosion of laughter erupts from me and Luke crams his hand over my mouth. “Are you completely out of your mind?” I gasp through his fingers. “That’s absurd!”

“Well what’s your idea then?”

I shake my head. “If by some miracle we make it to the other building, won’t we set off the alarms there?”

“That’s what we want. If the Bloods come, they can deal with the Furies for us, because it sounds like there are a lot of them.”

“Why are they here?”

“Because we are, I’d say. They must have smelled us.”

“Oh my god,” I groan, closing my eyes. I can hear them more clearly now. They’re shrieking with laughter and violence. Things are smashing and breaking and grunting and hissing. The sounds send a deep chill into my blood. “You really think you can make that climb with me on your back?”

“I’ll have to.”

“Let’s do it then.” Perversely, as soon as the decision has been made, I feel a wash of excitement flood me. Despite my depression, every ounce of adrenalin I have is flooding my system and calling to my survival instinct. It awakens and I grin.

Luke sees my expression and pauses momentarily. “You’re a lunatic,” he says softly, but in the gray light of the sinking sun’s absence I can see an echoing smile at his lips. He turns around and I climb onto his back, wrapping my arms and legs tightly around him. “Whatever you do, don’t let go,” he warns.

“I won’t.” It’s a promise I know I will keep. Nothing will pry my hands from his body except the safety of the ground.

Bodies burst into the room, scuffling and wrestling wildly. Luke swings out of the window and hangs onto the ledge. I pray they didn’t spot us.

The noises pause, and then I hear a low, scratchy voice. “Hold. I smell flesh.”

Fear explodes in my chest and Luke starts moving quickly, using the grooves in the bricks to climb sideways. I don’t know how he’s doing it—he climbs like a professional, finding the slightest grooves for his fingers and toes with quick confidence. It’s just as well, because the Furies have spotted us, their heads poking out the window.

One of them tries to follow, but he slips almost immediately and falls all the way to the ground, landing with a horrific smacking, splashing sound. I can’t look down, so I look back at the remaining figure in the window. He is dirty and unkempt, hair long and matted, eyes wild and teeth sharp, but he looks human, and that’s what’s truly disturbing about him. He gives a kind of blood-curdling howl, like I’ve heard wolves do on television. Within moments the window space is full of the beasts, clambering to get at us. Several more fall to their deaths and I shudder at the thought of the hunger in their bodies, so strong it makes them blind to anything else, even death.

Luke makes it to the power line and is about to touch it.

“Wait!” I exclaim, grabbing his hand and wrenching it away from the line. “Jesus, Luke—one touch and we could be dead! Just wait a minute.” I fumble with my boot and manage to get it off. Its sole is made of rubber, so I touch it carefully to the cord to try and de-energize it. If it has too much power running through it, we’ll be dead regardless of the rubber, but I’m hoping that since this building has been abandoned for so many years the power line has been dormant for just as long. Nothing happens and I sigh in relief. It’s still not safe to touch the cord, so I sit the boot over it, bending it as much as the stiff leather will allow. It should protect against any wayward jolts of power that have remained within the copper wires, but it won’t protect us if the power were to suddenly come back on, which is a real possibility, given wires like these can re-energize at any moment.

“You’ll have to grab each side,” I instruct Luke, who is sweating from the effort of holding us both to the wall. “Hold onto the shoe, but don’t touch the power line, okay?”

Luke grabs the shoe, but his hands are so sweaty that he struggles to keep hold of the smooth leather. Meanwhile, the crazy savages are getting more and more frenzied, and I’m pretty sure they’ll figure out how to get to us any second now. My mind whirls, and I pray that Luke is wearing a belt with his jeans. Carefully I reach down and find that he is. I undo the buckle and start pulling the leather out of its loops.

“What the hell are you doing?” he exclaims.

I have a mad urge to giggle but swallow it down. With the belt over my shoulder, I take my boot back and tear the rubber sole away from the leather, letting the boot drop to the ground. I place the piece of rubber over the power cord, then loop the belt over the top of this, pulling against it to make sure both will stay in place when holding our weight. This way the rubber will stop the belt from conducting any energy, hopefully protecting us until we can get to the other side.

“Here,” I say, gesturing for Luke to grab the ends of the belt. He twists the leather twice around his hands, making sure his grip can’t slip, even sweaty as it is.

“Okay hold on again,” he orders and I clutch his back tightly as we launch away from the building and fly through the air. Luke’s shoulders must be screaming in agony as they are wrenched nearly out of their sockets, but he doesn’t make a sound. The wind rushes against my cheeks, cold and sharp, making my eyes stream. The noises of the Furies turn into a distant blur as everything in the world shrinks to contain only the power line, the rubber, the leather and our two bodies. For several long, silent moments, these are all that exist. And then suddenly the wall exists, looming into view just as we are about to crash into it. I brace myself for impact, but Luke manages to throw his feet up and take most of the force in his legs.

I blink, unable to believe we’ve made it across. We’re not safe yet though—we still have to get to the scaffolding, and it’s a good eight feet to the right. Luke starts to swing our bodies back and forth, back and forth, gaining momentum with each motion. I hold my breath, terrified of what he’s about to try. He unwinds the loops of belt from around his hands and I realize that he is bleeding badly. The leather must have cut into his skin, but he ignores this, hurling himself through the air to grab onto the metal scaffolding.

His hands slip, slick with blood, and my heart lurches with the knowledge that we are about to fall. I lunge forward, grabbing the metal myself, and Luke manages to catch my waist and hang on.

A gasp of pain tears from my throat as I take his weight as well as my own. My vision turns to black dots. I am not, and have never been, physically strong. I’m too thin and I’m even weaker than people my size should be because I have an alter ego who sucks all my strength from me. So this would be a struggle for a normal person—for me it’s impossible. Luke is too big, too heavy, I can’t hold on any longer and when I let go we will both die. My arms scream and my hands begin to slip.

“Hang on, Josi,” Luke grunts, using my body to reach back up to the scaffolding. Hooking one arm around it, he uses the other to slide around my waist and take my weight. I sob in relief, literally all the strength in my arms gone.

“Can you hold onto me?” he asks breathlessly.

I try to loop my arms around his neck again, but they’re shaking so badly that I start to slip. Luke tightens his hold on my waist, taking a breath and starting the climb down using only one arm.

I hate how weak I am, how much of a burden I am to him.

Luke shimmies one-handed to the ground and I realize that the alarm is blaring—my own blood rushing in my ears made it impossible for me to hear anything else. Now it seems impossible I could have ignored the blaring racket. We hit the ground running and don’t stop running until we’re so far away we can’t hear the alarm anymore. We may have been spotted on security cameras, but we’ll have to hope they didn’t get any retina scans.

I know the only reason the Furies haven’t followed us is because they have a bigger problem to deal with now. I shudder to imagine the kind of fight that would occur between the Bloods and the Furies. They are contradictory in behaviour—the Bloods cold and controlled, the Furies wild and instinctive—but both are just as violent as the other.

“You okay?” Luke pants as we sag to a halt.

I’m too breathless to speak so I just nod. I take a look at the two of us and all my fear and adrenalin bubbles over into hysterical amusement. I burst into laughter and Luke looks at me like I need to be committed.

“We make a pair, hobbling along like this,” I gasp. “Me limping with only one shoe and two dead arms, you struggling to hold your pants up as you run.”

Luke starts to laugh too. He shakes his head, taking my hand to lead me home. It surprises me; I think he has forgotten how badly hurt his hands are—warm blood oozes onto my skin. I look at his face—he’s miles away, lost in thought, unaware of his wounds.

Suddenly I don’t know what I found so funny.

I know that very soon I will be in a lot of pain. But right now there is adrenalin flooding me, coating my nerves and making them numb, shielding them from what’s to come.

Josi and I stumble home and lock the door. We are both strung out and so wired that we can’t stop talking, talking, rapid-fire chatter about all we have just seen and done and the miracle of still being alive. We’re on a high, a release-of-terror high, blissful to ride, but when we crash it could be bad. I know this from experience, but I don’t think Josi does. She paces the apartment, retelling the whole afternoon in vivid detail—I never realized before but she is a born storyteller. Her hand motions are wild, her gestures unhindered by her injuries—these she will feel soon. Her words are full of color and they fill my head, better than the real memories.

What I am frightened of is the possibility of this sending her into another spell of depression.

“How did you climb like that?” she bursts out in the middle of another sentence.

I shrug.

“Come on! That was seriously like something out of a movie!”

Sighing, I shrug again. “Me and my bro used to do a lot of climbing.”

“You have a brother!” she exclaims too loudly.

I go into the kitchen and pour us both a finger of whisky.

“Who is he? What’s he like? Can I meet him?”

I hand her the glass and shake my head. “No, you can’t meet him,” I tell her softly.

She looks hurt by this, but nothing can keep her down for long right now. “How did you know the Furies are real?”

I shrug again. “You hear things at work. I took a guess and it was right.”

Josi exhales and I can see the quick way her mind has shifted into another direction, another pattern. I see again the way she saved my life with her rubber shoe, then with the belt and again on the other side, when she saved me from falling. I owe her my life, three times over.

As if our thoughts overlap, she looks at me and says, “Luke, I’m so sorry I nearly got us killed.”

My mouth drops open. “What?”

“It was my fault we were there in the first place. Plus I’m so weak I nearly dropped you.”

“What are you talking about? You saved my life, Josephine.” I wrap my hand around her arm, stretching it out and running my fingers along the length of it. “See this? You have practically zero percent muscle mass, and yet you still caught me, and you didn’t let go of that bar, and that’s because your determination is stronger than any muscle in my body.”

We stare at each other—there is a kind of wildfire in her eyes. I become aware that my hand is still around her arm, touching her warm skin, and I’m startled by the intimacy of the moment.

I pull away from her quickly, pacing to the other side of the room and trying to shake the odd feeling from my limbs. I need to be careful. The closeness between us is growing, and it’s dangerous. She is a child—I must make sure I don’t take advantage of her innocence.

“Luke, I’m not sure I could have held anyone else up. Without you I think I would have let go.”

The air gets stuck in my lungs and my body freezes. This is the first nice thing she has ever said to me—the first indication of any kind of feelings she might harbor. She has been so determined to keep me at arm’s length, to ensure that she doesn’t trust me, or even like me, that this is like a dam wall cracking. It smashes all of my stupid, naïve vows to put my own wall between us and makes me crave everything on the other side of the dam. Words escape me before I can stop them. “You’re like a phantom moving through my life. A dream I can hardly hold onto and yet can’t shake.”

The room is silent. I don’t turn around because I don’t know what I will see in her eyes.

I don’t know what makes a Fury the way it is, but I’m afraid that Josephine’s transformations mean she is becoming one. And if I blink she will vanish.

I look at my notes. There’s only one word written there.
Furies.

So that she doesn’t pick up on my obvious disbelief, I get up and move to the sideboard, preparing us both a cup of tea. As I dunk the teabags in the hot water, I mentally prepare my argument and the medicine I can prescribe for such extreme delusions. It is clear to me now that Luke must be a hallucination too—if one part of her story is, it seems safe to assume that all of it is. Or, if not a hallucination, then a concoction of her mind due to its past trauma.

As I pass Josephine the cup and saucer, I clear my throat. “Furies.”

She smiles, too sharp not to hear everything I’m trying to keep hidden. “Yes, Doc. Furies.” She smiles again. Her eyes are somewhere distant as she says, “Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I did imagine them. Sometimes I think I must have. I don’t know how something so wild could exist within a world like this, one that is so unforgivably void of life.”

I don’t tell her what’s on the tip of my tongue: that this is exactly what I see when I look at her.

The view, at this particular moment, is quite delectable. I’m surrounded by trees, dirt, leaves and bark. But they don’t get a second glance, because in front of me is Luke Townsend, shirtless, and
man
is he yummy. He’s wearing blue shorts and thick black work boots. Through his shirt I can see that the broad, lean lines of his back are slick with a fine sheen of sweat, and his muscles look taught and strong as he hikes. It’s becoming clearer by the day that I may have serious mental problems. I have to stop thinking about him.

I happen to hate hiking; especially in a dull, boring forest. And especially when we’re on a fool’s errand that will never bear fruit, and if it does, it’s the kind that will be utterly rotten.

We’re searching for evidence of one of my crimes. Any single one. This is about number five on the nightmare timeline. Not the worst, but not the best either. I woke up near here one morning, drenched in blood and dew, and I had to walk the twenty miles back to civilization, barefoot and naked. Plus I was nauseous, feverish and badly bruised. And the icing on top of the cake? I was fairly sure that for the first time I’d killed someone the night before. That was a great day.

“Luke!” I shout. “Slow down!” He’s a maniac, tearing through here, his long legs covering the distance with an athleticism I can only dream of. The excitement in him was there that first night I met him, and every day since. Something wild and strong and unknowable.

“Come on, Josi,” he calls impatiently. “We’ve barely started.”

What? We’ve been traipsing around the wilderness all day! If he actually thinks we’re going to comb every inch of this enormous expanse of land then he’s got another thing coming.

“I need a drink!” I yell. I see him sigh and reluctantly turn. The pack on his back contains all sorts of things, including a picnic rug that he spreads out. I slump onto it, exhausted. “Urgh. It’s
hot
.”

“God, you’re really fragile, aren’t you?”

“I’m not fragile—you’re a machine that never slows down! It’s weird, Luke. We haven’t found anything, so can we please go home?” I guzzle down some water and lie back on the rug, staring up at the canopy of green and brown. Pinpricks of light dance their way through the gently swaying leaves. As my eyes grow lazy and unfocused, the spots of light shimmer and swell until suddenly they’re a different color altogether. Blues and blacks and grays. It’s night. Someone is breathing loudly and moaning in pain. The heavy, steel scent of blood is in my nose and I’m hungry. The trees move and distort and there’s a scream—

I sit up abruptly, dizzy and nauseous. The colors are back to normal—the sun is out and it’s day again, but so glary it makes my eyes hurt.

“Woah—Josi? You okay?”

I might vomit.

“Breathe,” Luke tells me softly, placing a large, warm hand on my back. It brings me back to reality and calms me. I struggle to draw breath.

“I saw something,” I whisper.

“What?”

“I mean, I think I remembered something.”

“What was it?” he asks gently, moving his hand in soothing circles over my spine.

“Just … I was here. That night. I was right here, looking up at these trees. It was dark and quiet, and someone else was here with me.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know, I—I can’t remember.” My voice drops. “She was crying. Screaming. Bleeding. I must have hurt her.” I swallow. “Fuck, Luke, I feel sick. I want to go home.”

I start to get up but he takes my shoulder and stops me. “No. This is why we’re here. Don’t hide from it, or run away. These are your crimes. Your memories. So own them.”

“I don’t understand you,” I hiss, shaking my head and refusing to cry.

“We’re just going to lie here for a while and calm down.”

“Why does everything have to be calm?” I snap. “I hate calm!”

“Not everything has to be. Just this, for a few minutes. If we leave now you’ll be too afraid to go to another one of the sites.”

He’s right, but I don’t think staying will change that. I sit back down, furious with him. Luke always thinks he knows what’s best for me, but I’d like the freedom to be able to figure it out for myself. I want to make him lose his perpetual cool. I want him to shout or cry or laugh hysterically. I want to see a hint of the man who climbed out a third storey window and swung across a power line to get us to safety. The man who was brave enough to do all of that without batting an eyelid, the man who didn’t shy away from danger. Although, he didn’t lose his cool even then, did he? He was calm in the face of death.

I don’t know if that’s horribly twisted or completely amazing.

Luke says, right out of the blue, “Your hair makes me mental. Why don’t you just brush it for once?”

I look over my shoulder at him, indignant.

“Seriously, Josi—there’s like fucking rats’ nests in here. Look at this!” He holds up a chunk that isn’t far from becoming a dreadlock.

I jerk my head out of his reach. “For your information, asshole, my scalp gets really sore so it’s hard to put a brush through it.”

“Well I’ll help you when we get home because I can’t look at it for another second.”

“Jeez, what’s up your butt today?”

Luke looks like he’s about to say something and, for just a moment, I think he seems irritated with me. But that’s impossible. Unless his cure is malfunctioning. God I hope so. He closes his mouth with a snap and his eyes are completely clear of emotion. Guess not then.

“Nothing. Now that you’re sufficiently distracted from the memory, we can get going.”

“Ah, so that was your game. Insult me so that I’ll think about killing you instead of someone else.”

“Worked, didn’t it?”

“Yes. But I always think about killing you.”

“Great, then let’s go home and log today.”

I groan. Luke likes to log things. He puts everything in tables and journals and logs, and then stares at it all for hours at a time. Weird details, too. Stuff that I’d never give a second thought. But hey—he must do stuff like this for a living, so I don’t question it. Over the past couple of weeks when he’s not at work we’ve been doing a lot of research. Police records, protocol for the cure, digging up dirt on my old foster families and social workers. None of it has helped at all, but Luke insists that it will all come together somehow so he logs it, all of it. He’s a bit of a nerd, actually. I think I like it.

“So this vision …” I start.

“Memory,” Josephine interrupts.

I gaze at her sternly. “What you had is called a hallucination.”

She rolls her eyes. “I am quite aware of what a hallucination is, doc:
a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind, caused by various physical and mental disorders, or by a reaction to certain toxic substances, and usually manifested as visual or auditory images
.”

“Exactly,” I agree, trying to hide my discomfort. It’s not a nice feeling to know that your patient is a thousand times smarter than you are. Josephine’s IQ is so high that it classifies her as beyond a genius. It’s because of her memory, as is often the case in those with eidetic memories. Her knowledge is almost out of her control—her brain simply retains everything she has ever seen or read. Psychological or emotional disorders are perfectly normal responses to such high intelligence. It’s my job to ensure she doesn’t feel isolated because of her intellect.

“Therefore, by definition, what I experienced was not a hallucination, because it actually happened.”

“We have yet to establish that as fact.” She gives me such a filthy look that I spread my hands and add, “Give me some proof then.”

“I will,” she snaps. “If we’re both still alive next week I’ll make sure it’s my first priority to find you some.”

When we get home from our little romp in the wilderness, Josi heads straight for the shower and I sit down at my computer to log the day’s information. I’m creating a timeline of locations and crimes to fit corresponding dates. I want it all laid out with crystal clarity so that Josi can see it all for herself.

So far we have a collage of violence, pretty damn high on the gruesome scale. I have detached the words on the screen from the girl in the shower. I simply can’t see Josephine as the woman who committed these crimes, or else I’m likely to lose my mind. I think Josi has had to do the same.

Her memory loss is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it means we’re having trouble proving her crimes because we can’t get a good enough insight into what they are. On the other hand, it’s saving her sanity. If she had picture-perfect memories of killing people, I’m pretty sure that would make her a deranged serial killer.

If there is any hope—however slim—of preventing the transformations then I need to help her figure out what’s causing them.

For the one-thousandth time I hack into the government child protection database and pull up Josephine’s information. She was passed around foster homes for the whole first half of her life. This is listed as due to ‘behavioral problems and emotional instability’. In other words, the shithouse foster families who took her in solely to get paid for it couldn’t handle that she was a passionate, clever child, and bailed on her repeatedly. There is a picture on her file, and it flashes up on the wall when I tap it.

Looming above me, larger than life, is Josi as a five-year-old. She is horribly skinny, her eyes way too big for her face and full of a strange, hollow sharpness. She has a beanie pulled down to her eyelashes and she looks like she wants nothing more than to disappear.

She is angry; even at five, she is angry. She’s a hurricane of it, and I know in one glance at this photo that she’s been abused. I’ve seen it repeatedly in children who’ve been removed by child protection. No less since the cure.

We humans are violent. We’re savage, no matter what you do to our brains. No matter how you fiddle around in our heads. There will never be a future in which we don’t hurt each other.

And sitting here in the living room of my ridiculous, empty apartment, surrounded by things I don’t need or want, staring at a photo of a beautiful little girl, the truth—
my
truth—comes bubbling to the surface, and for a few long minutes I can do nothing to hide it.

I have a secret, one that Josephine can never find out. I must guard it with everything I have, every piece of training I’ve ever undergone.

It’s very simple: sometimes, in moments like these, my whole body is a flame of pure, unadulterated fury.

I was never given the cure, and I’ll die before I ever am.

When I emerge from my shower Luke is wielding a comb like a weapon. “I’m getting it now while it’s wet,” he threatens.

“Don’t you have things to log?”

“Already done. I’m a whiz.”

“Well, we didn’t learn much.”

“Sure we did—we now know that one of the victims from ’59 was a woman and we know exactly where it happened. Makes a difference. No more excuses. Sit down in the living room and hold onto a pillow, ’cause this is gonna hurt.”

I reluctantly sit down in front of the couch and brace myself, but it barely hurts at all. Luke sits on the couch behind me and is so careful with the long tendrils of black hair that it doesn’t pull against my sore scalp. After a few minutes he relaxes his legs on either side of my body. My heart starts to thump—this is closer than Luke and I have been since the night of the Furies. Ever since then he has kept himself at a clear distance—which has suited me fine, because when he is close I find it difficult to keep my thoughts straight.

Behind me he is big and warm and smells strongly of amazing things like spice and mint, and dirt and soap. He touches my head gently, like a caress, as he untangles each new lock. If I lean back just the slightest bit he’ll be holding me, and we’ll be like two normal people who touch each other. But I don’t, because I know that he’d just push me away and keep brushing my hair.

My stomach flips over in a way I’ve never felt before. It’s pleasant and unpleasant at the same time. I want to get as far from him as possible, or else I want to stay here within the space of his body for the rest of time. I’m confused and aggravated and he’s nothing, just calm.

“What else?” he asks softly, leaning close to my ear. “What else hurts?”

I want to tell him the truth. That everything hurts. That nothing hurts. That I can’t breathe. Instead I turn my head slightly toward his and say, “The bruises. They hurt the most.”

“Show me.”

My hands are trembling as I lift my shirt up at the back and lean forward so he can see. I don’t know why I’m doing this—the last thing I want is for him to see me like this, damaged and ugly and vulnerable. But I know that with him sitting so close, there’s no way I could deny him anything.

“Shit,” he breathes out softly when he sees the awful black and purple bruises that have gotten steadily worse over the weeks. Normally by now they’d be starting to fade, but this year they’ve stayed longer. I don’t know why and I don’t want to think about why. I feel his large hands against my skin and it makes me start. He runs them all over my back, along the worst of the marks on my spine. It doesn’t hurt because his touch is so light, and I feel myself being gentled like a wild horse.