Nemesis: Book Five (16 page)

In all its glory, the building fell, dust and smoke rushing out before it. Junior kept his eyes closed as his aura's blue formed a large circle around him. The building crashed into another skyscraper across the street, the middle of it breaking in half, glass and metal pouring down like poisoned rain. All of it fell around Junior, building materials and broken pieces, breaking into even smaller fragments when it touched his aura, cracking and breaking around him instead of on him.

Fire bloomed in the street. Those running collapsed from the smoke filling their lungs.

Junior walked forward, his aura sweeping the wreckage away from his feet. These were only the first buildings. There were many, many more.

* * *

H
undreds of miles away
, Bynums understood.

Telepathy didn't tell them what was happening, nothing as mystical as that. Perhaps in their next stage they would achieve that level of evolution, but not in stage five. No, the strands told them. The strands communicated in ways that Bynums couldn't, because where one went, they all went. Junior, though the Bynums didn't understand his name yet, had brought a handful of strands with him. He planned it that way, not to seed more growth, but he wanted them—his army—to see what he meant.

Because he had spoken to them in the language they understood, the language of auras, but even so he didn't think they fully
understood
.

They did now though. Every one of them.

They saw their leader destroying the city, saw it as clearly as the strands they stood on. That's what he wanted from them, that ruthlessness, that
fight
. That's what his conversations had been about. What they saw all those miles away—he had been trying to prepare them for it.

The Bynums watched him march through the strange city, watched him destroy everything he wanted, and realized they would soon accomplish the same.

R
igley paced
.

She had never been a pacer. Usually, when stressed, she sat still, perhaps cross-legged in a chair if no one was around, and simply stared forward. She would lose herself in her mind, letting her thoughts take over.

The ones that whispered so much negativity and hate.

She couldn't sit still now, though. She couldn't go into her head, wouldn't let her thoughts take over. The thoughts in there … every one of them was much worse than she could remember them being in the past. Her mind was a hornet's nest, and the hornets were ready to attack any interloper—including Rigley.

Back and forth she moved across the bedroom. She knew that Junior had left, though she didn't know where he went. Or at least she hadn't in the beginning. It took her a minute to think through what she needed to do, which was hilarious given how much her life had always depended on the flow of information. She resorted to the television, wanting to understand what was happening outside the world, but it appeared that Comcast wasn't delivering service to her area of Georgia anymore. Perhaps her area of the country.

So she paced until she realized that she had a cellphone.

Which.

Was.

Hilarious.

The little piece of metal was practically her husband, as it spent more time with her than anyone else on Earth for years on end, yet she forgot about it somehow.

When she remembered, she rushed to pull it out, only to find it dead. So then she rushed to find a charger in the house—which she did. What she saw on the phone …

It caused her to pace even more.

Junior was destroying Dallas. Rigley had been there a few times, and her mind kept going back to the white X on the street, the one marking the shot that killed Kennedy. For some reason, she wanted to know if the X was still there, despite the pictures CNN showed her over the phone. She wanted to know if the collapsing buildings and the fire flooding the city had destroyed that piece of history.

Thinking about that was certainly better than going inside her head.

She paced and she focused on that white X, completely oblivious to the boy who entered her room. He didn't knock, but simply opened the door and then slowly shut it, the click of it barely audible. Rigley didn't know how long he stood there, only that when she looked up, he was there—staring at her.

Boy might have been the wrong term. Or maybe the right one. He was in that weird stage of life, late adolescence, at which he wasn't nearly a man, but was still too old to be called a child.

It didn't used to be that way
, Rigley thought, another flare in her mind completely disconnected from the reality around her.
Used to be, when you were eighteen, you were a grown man and went out and started your life. Now we coddle them until twenty-six.

"Hi," he said, making Rigley realize that she had been staring back at him, but saying nothing.

"Hi," she said, her body still for the first time in over an hour.

"Why are you here?" the boy asked.

You know his name, though. You know everyone's name in this whole business, because this business is your business and has been since the beginning. Bryan, that's his name. He's one of the original four.

"Hello?" he said.

"I'm here to help. To help stop us from massacring them. I'm what the Indians never had." She giggled as she spoke the last word, finding humor in the comparison, suddenly seeing hundreds of people with bumps across their skin and fevers burning their bodies, lying under the same blankets that gave them smallpox. "What about you? Why are you here?"

The boy paused for a moment, his eyes flashing just behind Rigley, to the wall, before coming back. "I'm here to help too. They brought me and Wren to help them understand
us
. Humans in general, I mean."

Rigley looked at the kid, her eyes narrowing.

Morena had said nothing about that.

But did she say anything at all about why these other two were here? Why the other boy was walking around with red eyes?
(And have you asked anything, Rigley? Or did you just let those little tidbits go?)

No, Morena said nothing either way. Rigley didn't like this though; suspicion of the boy, of the man, of the whole goddamn thing reared up in her mind like a King Cobra, flexing its neck for all to see.

"There's something though, something happening that I'm not sure she—Morena—knows about. I'm not sure we can even tell her." The boy walked across the room and sat down on the bed, still made, having not been slept in. "I'm scared to tell her, but we have to find a way."

"What are you talking about?" Rigley turned with him, her eyes following his movements.

"She's in danger."

"She is? What about her children?" Rigley said. More flares shooting into the dark sky of her mind, flares full of fear, because Morena's children must live at all costs.

The boy nodded, not looking at her, but staring down at the floor. "All of them, if we don't do something. She saved us, me and Wren, and I need to find a way to help her."

Rigley took a step toward the bed. "What is it, what could hurt the children?"

"You've seen the other person that came back, my friend, Michael?"

Rigley nodded.

"She thinks that Michael is inhabited by her lover, right? You've seen the two of them together?"

Rigley nodded.

"It's not him. Someone …,” he paused, closing his mouth and eyes at the same time. "Someone from outside, maybe the government? They're inside him. And when they're ready, they're going to kill her and her kids."

"That can't happen," Rigley said, her suspicions gone as if they never existed. The boy in her room, the other man that came with him—all of it not even a distraction. They mattered less than nothing. The children mattered. Saving them. Preventing whatever he spoke about. "We can't let that happen."

"We can't tell her though, not straight out. She'd kill us, she wouldn't believe us."

"How then?" Rigley asked.

* * *

A
lmost
, but not quite
, Bryan thought, which might have been the first positive thought he created since all of this began. He almost came unhinged, almost let all those little pieces of glass fall apart from the makeshift mirror he created. The pieces didn't fit and they cast a ghoulish image back at him, but they no longer crunched against each other as he walked. They sat firm on the wall, if only for a few moments.

And when he spoke to that bitch in the other room, they almost all collapsed.

She would have killed him, he saw that from the moment he walked into the room. She was out of her goddamn gourd, and with each passing second, he realized how far out. He stood there for a solid minute before she even looked over at him, just walking back and forth so fast that she might have been trying to rub holes in the carpet.

Her hair was falling out of her head, though Bryan didn't think she knew it. He didn't think she knew much, actually, about anything around her. A huge clump was missing in the back, revealing a pale, nearly white scalp.

And then when she looked at him, God—that was worse than anything else in the whole room. Because her eyes weren't empty like he thought a mad person's would be. Instead, longing filled them. Something very, very big was missing inside her, a hole that she hadn't ever been able to fill, and the way she looked right now, that hole might be spreading.

Once Bryan decided to act, it didn't take much to change her, which was scary.

The woman's face went from complete distrust to wondering how she could help in seconds. Bryan had never seen anything like it. Her … loyalty to those things out there was sickening; he didn't know if he was looking at Stockholm Syndrome or plain insanity, but that woman was all in on the alien's side.

Which was fine, at least since Bryan acted so quickly.

Because she would do anything to help Morena, and Bryan told her exactly what she needed to hear. He didn't see any way out of this, not at all—Morena's strength outweighed any maneuvers he, or anyone else, might be able to perform. That wasn't the point though; he thought if he played this right, used this woman correctly, he would get back to Thera.

Wren wanted Michael back and Bryan did too. The difference between Bryan and Wren, though, was that Bryan understood no one would make it back. Michael was dead. Wren was dead. And Bryan too.

Just die next to Thera
, he thought.
That will be okay.

Nothing could stop Morena, not Michael, not Wren, not the entire world.

* * *

S
he liked walking
.

Rigley liked it so much, she couldn't stop. Well, she briefly did when the boy was in her room, but as soon as he left, she got back to it. Moving was so much easier than sitting, than standing still, or anything else she could think of. As long as she moved … except she didn't have anything to finish the sentence with.

The boy … what was his name? Bryan! That was right. Bryan. A part of Rigley thought she should go to Morena about it and tell her what the kid said, but what if he was right? What if that red-eyed sonofabitch was …

And it clicked.

Only one man in the world could do what Bryan claimed.

Nononononono.

The word moved through her head like machine gun rounds through a jungle, ripping down everything they came in contact with. It couldn't be. She left him back there. Was done with him the moment she pressed that button. She did her time and paid her fines; Rigley was supposed to be free.

But he was in the house.

The boy didn't know that, not the whole story. He knew the thing wearing his friend's body was government, but he didn't know
who
.

Rigley did.

Marks.

She wouldn't ever escape him. He would follow her wherever she went, hunting her the way a starving polar bear will hunt a human stranded on ice. And if he found out she saw through his new disguise? Well, she would die then. He would kill her, and more importantly, he would kill all of Morena's children—sooner rather than later, because Rigley held no doubt that he would eventually destroy everyone she cared about. She thought she could run from him, even thought that she could escape. He would find her wherever she went in the world—whether in humanity's domain or Morena's. And did he know? Did he know that killing her didn't matter nearly as much as hurting the children?

She needed to keep him thinking that no one had any idea about his true nature.

And second?

Was the boy's plan the way to go?

It could work, she thought. If Rigley executed everything flawlessly.

And if not? Then Rigley died, as did Morena's children. She couldn't let that happen. No, only one option presented itself in the end, an option that she should have seen long ago—maybe she did and avoided it purposefully.

"I've got to kill him," she said, her voice a fast whisper, so that someone standing a few feet away wouldn't have understood. "Kill him for real. Kill him. Kill him."

She repeated the words over and over, keeping up with her feet that repeated the same steps over and over.