Heartless (18 page)

I turned to Lucy, so focused on getting the pictures of the girls
just right
, and took note of how beautiful she was, as well. We’d often been stopped while walking on campus by boys who would stare into her blue-green eyes and say nothing more than a vague hello.

“You’re not safe here,” I said, looking around the room. “You’re a target.”

“I
know
.”

“Let’s
go
! Find some other way out.”

“Not yet. I’m not finished.”

“Lucy,” I said, forcing a useless sigh. “It’s too late for me now. Seeing all this? It lets me know that. So now I have one job.” I glanced around the room, at the lifeless girls on the tables. “I have to save you. But I can’t do that while we’re here.”

“You know…” Lucy said.

I never got a chance to find out what I probably
didn’t
know, though, because right at that moment, a bigger, more tremendous power surge ripped through the room. Light bulbs burst in their stainless steel cylinders. The computer in the corner buzzed and beeped in an alarming way. I was almost blinded by the light that flooded the room, and Lucy dropped to the floor, shielding her eyes and covering her head. Then once again static crackled around us, as loud as any thunder in a summer storm.

Too bad this thunder came in the dead of winter.

It ended almost as soon as it started, and we lifted our heads.

“Goddammit!” Lucy said. “This place is a funhouse of terror, isn’t it?” She pulled herself to her feet, slowly and carefully, gripping the nearest table for leverage, her phone still clutched tightly in her other hand.

“What’s next?” I asked, my voice shaky and weak.

As if in answer to my question, the lights went out, and Lucy and I were once again plunged into pitch-black. This time, even the computer screen went dark. We screamed again.

We couldn’t help it. In the darkness, surrounded by death, we screamed like helpless, little girls. I hated it.

Beside me, something moved. “That you, Luce?” I spoke into the darkness, loud enough that she heard me and ceased shrieking.

Her voice came from afar. Neither of us had kept still during our screaming; we’d fumbled around, trying to find each other, but failed. “No, I’m over here, next to the wall.” There was a dull thud. “What was that?”

I knew. I hated that I knew, but I did. “The girls. They’re waking up. The power surge woke them.” I sounded freakishly calm, even to myself. But I was surrounded by girls like me, and they were waking up. I could
help
them.

“Jo! Something’s touching me! Jo! It’s cold!”

“It’s okay, Luce. It’s just the girls.” I looked around me, and even in the darkness I could see their unsteady shapes, rising from their tables. My eyes were adjusting rapidly to the lack of light, and I found if I squinted just so, I could see pretty well. “Girls, it’s okay. Lucy, it’s okay. Everyone, we’re going to be okay.” I remembered how scared I’d been when I’d awoken. “I’m here. I’m Jo. I’m just like you, and I can help you.”

From around me came the rustling and banging of stiff, uncoordinated bodies sitting up and sliding off tables. There were crashes as some rolled and fell to the floor. Just like I had. And still I stood, motionless, speaking, watching. “I’m here to help. You’re going to be fine.” I spoke with a confidence I didn’t know I possessed.

I felt a hand on my arm. A girl stood beside me, unsteady and unsure. She was one of the blondes, and even in the pallor of her partial death, even in the darkness, she was beautiful. Her skin was supple, where mine was taut and gray. She reached with her other hand and held my arm in both of hers.

“Lucy,” I whispered. “Luce, come over here.”

“I can’t,” she whispered loudly. “I think I’m stuck. I can’t see you. Where are you?” She’d moved further down the wall, toward a corner, clearly not feeling the kinship that I felt with the girls. There were five of them between us.

I covered the hands on my arm with my own, and squeezed. “I know you’re scared,” I said to the girl attached to the hands. “But I’m here. It’s okay.”

Around us, the girls stumbled as they walked. They seemed to be targeting Lucy and me, which made sense. They were scared. They needed comfort. Then one let out a moan, and I smiled, remembering my own experiences in relearning speech.

“It’s okay,” I said to her. “Go ahead and moan if you need to. You’ll figure out how to make words again in a minute. Keep practicing.”

Around me, other girls took up the moaning. The sounds were guttural, primitive, and I wondered:
Did I sound that bad?

“Jo?” Lucy’s voice cut through the moans, though it was meek, shaking. She was terrified.

“Calm down, Lucy. We’re going to help these girls, aren’t we?” I squeezed the hands on my arm again, patting them as comfortingly as I could.

The hands on my arm began to squeeze. The blonde girl attached to them began to moan, quietly at first, and then louder, her voice blending with those already filling the room. She squeezed harder.

With horror, but without pain, I felt the fingers penetrate the flesh on my arm, reaching through until they hit bone. I felt the brittle bone break.

“Stop,” I said. “Don’t do that!” I tried then to pull her hands from my arm. I couldn’t. The girl moaned again.

It sounded different, though, than I remembered my own voice sounding when I first tried to speak. These moans were more animal, less human. Feral. Vicious.

And suddenly, I was scared. Really, truly, indescribably terrified.

G
oo oozed from the new lacerations in my arm, clinging to the fingers of the girl who held me in her vise-like grip. I was surprised; really, I thought I was all dried out by then. Fluid exiting my wounds was as baffling as the fact that the girl was trying to hurt me. My mouth opened, forming a silent O as I stared at her.

The other girls took up the moans. Animalistic, sub-human moans. The guttural sounds told me these girls weren’t waking up like I did. They were waking up as something else.

Lucy screamed. Louder than before, and more shrill. It cut through me like a warm knife through butter.

She lingered in the corner, surrounded by four girls, each shuffling toward her. She stood propped against the wall, holding out one hand like a football player stiff-arming an opponent.

A girl leaned in toward Lucy, her mouth open wide. In the dark, her teeth glistened. They looked sharp.
Did they sharpen her teeth? To points?

They did. Lucy screamed again.

The girl gripping my arm leaned toward me in the same way. Mouth open, ready to bite.

“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I’m nobody’s breakfast.”

I reached up and shoved my free hand into her gaping mouth, as far back as I could push it. She clamped down on my wrist, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t feel anything. So I kept on pushing my arm into her mouth until my fist reached the back of her throat.

I had no idea if the girl could feel anything, but she had a gag reflex.

She yanked her head away and let go of my arm, reeling back until she stumbled, cracked her head against one of the tables, and fell to the ground. She didn’t get up. I was free.

“I’m coming, Luce!” I shouted.

I ran, as best as my battered legs could, to my best friend. The girls between us were all focused on Lucy, readying themselves for an attack. They sniffed, they leaned in, they moaned, and she screamed.

I dropped one shoulder and slammed into the first girl. Domino-style, she fell into another, who took out another, until there was just one girl in my way. She was the closest. She moaned, and lunged.

Lucy dropped to the ground, and the girl crashed into the wall. I slammed into her from behind, and we both fell to the side. She tried to bite me, but I shoved her aside, pushing her halfway across the room as if she weighed nothing more than a notebook.

“You all right, Luce?” I said. She lay on the ground beside me, trembling and coughing.

“Yeah,” she said. “How’d you do that?”

“Don’t know.”

Adrenaline?
I thought, forgetting that I probably had none. I shrugged, then pulled myself to standing and helped Lucy up. Around us, the girls regrouped for another attack. “We need to get out of here.”

“You think?”

I slid an arm under hers, and she leaned on me. Together, we walked about as well as the freshly awoken monster girls. Which is to say, we were clumsy. At best.

But we had a bit more determination than the others as they continued their pursuit. I’d knocked many to the ground, and some were still too clumsy and disoriented to get up. They created numerous speed bumps, tripping up those girls who remained on their feet.

We also had a head start, heading away from the locked front door toward another door in the back of the room. We had no idea where it would lead, but I hoped it would be better than facing more robot-monster-girls.

Together, Lucy and I half-hopped, half-limped to the other door. We reached it with barely any wiggle room between us and the slobbering, drooling group of hungry girls.

T
he steps behind the door went down. Way down. They were steep, and lit by fluorescent lights on the slanted ceiling. But those lights flickered dangerously, as if they wouldn’t remain lit for long.

Every so often, the single, solitary door standing between us and the girls upstairs rattled and shook. They were coming for us, and there was no lock. The door never opened, though.

I guessed the girls didn’t remember how to turn doorknobs yet.

Lucy and I walked down, as quickly and carefully as we could. And down. And down. On our way, we stumbled, we tripped, we caught and clutched each other as my knees and hips gave out, and Lucy’s bad ankle refused to support her weight.

It felt like the stairs would never end.

“Do you think someone’s down there?” Lucy whispered.

“I have no idea,” I said. “But what choice to we have? Do you want to go back up there? Those girls tried to eat us.”

She shook her head, bit her lip, and walked on.

After fifty steep steps—I counted—we reached another landing. A huge room opened before us when we slid open another unlocked door. More fluorescent lights filled the room, though a faulty one in the center offered a strobe effect like a bad nightclub on a hot summer’s night.

Lucy closed her eyes and smiled as we entered the room. She placed her hand on my shoulder, letting me guide her, and she checked out for just a minute.

Her voice was dream-like. “I can almost hear the bass,” she said. “Remember last semester when we…”

“Danced on the speakers at the club? Yeah, I remember.” And I did.

I
was alive. Whole. Beautiful. Lucy and I snuck into a dance club using fake IDs and a cheap pickup line on the bouncer. We wanted to dance.

Boys snuck us drinks, and we were intoxicated with the atmosphere. It was electric.

Lucy climbed onto a giant speaker beside the DJ booth. All eyes in the room were on her as she danced and swayed. After a minute by herself, her eyes scanned the floor, locking on mine. Her best friend.

When she reached out her hand to me I took it. I let her pull me up beside her. I let her slide against me, and I let her dance. Soon I danced, too. Our hips shook to the thump thump thump of the beat as it rattled beneath our feet. Our bodies moved together, hands entwined, eyes locked only on each other.

We danced until the club closed. Until bouncers forced us down from our tower thrones. Until we were so hot and sweaty and thirsty we thought we’d die.

Together we stumbled home through the snow, back to Calvin Hall, where we collapsed in Lucy’s bed with our shoes still on our feet. We giggled and held each other and told loud, silly secrets until the sun came up, when finally we slept.

When I awoke, hours later, we were still holding hands.

B
ut we weren’t at the club. We weren’t even in the dorm. We were in a flickering basement room beneath a morgue disguised as a rustic mountain cabin. And we weren’t alone. Above us a group of monstrous girls waited to destroy us.