Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (34 page)

O
nly one thought possessed Rigley
. All of the self-doubt, the self-hate, and the destructive beliefs about herself fell away when faced with what she saw in the middle of those woods. Instinct ruled, and instinct said live. Instinct said do whatever it took to get away from that alien entity.

So that’s what she did; she took off through the woods, her feet pounding on the pine straw covered ground, not thinking about the men with weapons surrounding her. Not thinking about leaving Will.

Live.

Live.

Live.

Breath filled and left her lungs in huge swallows as her arms pumped up and down at her side—every cell intent on carrying her away from the horror behind. And it was a horror, there could be no mistake about that. What came from that orb, what was spreading behind her—
Goditshouldn’texistshouldn’tbepossible
, her frantic mind told her over and over again.

She didn’t know where she was running, not really, hadn’t even considered which direction to take. She saw Will fire his weapon, saw him miss, saw the lightning sparking in the air like an infinite number of lighters at a concert, and then she saw whatever was inside finally escaping. That was it, was all she could take, because she knew if she stood there and watched it any longer, she would surely lose her mind.

It'snakedit'soutohgoditwasn’tevenfuckingtangible.

Brush and tree limbs snagged her face and arms as she ran, but she didn’t notice. They scratched her, creating thin red lines that dripped blood in tiny trails.

She broke through the cover of the forest, standing in the field, though not where they had entered. She was about a hundred yards away from the SUV. Her breath heaved out in ragged sobs, and she felt her legs shaking for the first time since she started her mad dash. Rigley stood there trembling as the adrenaline that had pushed her on finally subsided some. She heard gunfire behind her, realizing that one of those bullets could have easily claimed her and ended all her worries. She hadn’t thought about a single one of them, though, during her run. Getting away from
it
had been all consuming.

The SUV, that’s where she needed to go. Then she had to make the call. She had to call Kenneth. There wasn’t any way around it anymore.

She started jogging again, heading to the SUV, her lungs still heaving and her legs not nearly as sturdy as they had been inside the woods. She needed all parts of her to pick it up, though, because the danger wasn’t over. Not nearly.

Rigley reached the car, her shaking hand grasping for the door handle. The sounds out in the woods were abating, and she didn’t like that at all. The gunshots were further in between one another and that meant—
YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS GET IN THE GODDAMN CAR
.

She pulled on the door, hard, her hand finally finding the grip it wanted, and the door opened. She climbed in, realizing for the first time that she didn’t have the keys to the thing. Her hand blindly felt for the ignition, trembling so bad she didn’t know if she would even be able to start the car but hoping—IT’S STILL OUT THERE, RIGLEY, IT HASN’T GONE AWAY, YOU HAVE TO LEAVE, YOU, YOU, YOU—that Will had left the keys.

Her heart nearly soared out of her chest and into her throat as she felt the cold metal beneath her fingertips.

She cranked the engine, not thinking about Will or Andrew at all. They were in the woods and the woods were lost. Nothing in them would ever get out, and nothing in them should ever get out, either. That place was contaminated and everything in it—including them—had to die.

She had to make the phone call, and as she put the vehicle into drive, she reached for the phone lying in the seat next to her. Her left hand on the steering wheel, shaking like an addict’s overdosing body, her right hand putting the phone to her ear. The wheels spun as she floored the pedal, grass and mud spewing up behind the SUV before the tires finally caught and shoved the vehicle along.

The phone rang in Rigley’s ear, barely above the cacophony of her heartbeat thudding away, beating at perhaps a higher rate than it had ever known. She hadn’t dialed this number before, though it was programmed in her phone before she ever opened its box. She had heard the voice attached to this number, though. She had heard it a few times, and each time it struck a fear in her that she didn’t think could be matched until she saw that orb opening in those woods.

She never heard the voice in a situation like this, though. Never heard the man speak when they were in such dire straits.

The SUV streaked across the field, leaving deep ruts behind it and ramping up the hill with enough speed to hit the bumper on the ground as it started ascending. Rigley glanced to her rearview mirror but she saw nothing besides the straw covered pine trees. She couldn’t see past them, couldn’t see what was happening inside them. From here, a car racing away from the scene, everything looked normal. Everything looked perfectly fine.

“Hello?” The line finally clicked on.

It wasn’t the voice she expected. The cheery voice that always hinted at an underlying psychotic thread weaving between every word. The voice was a woman’s. Rigley pulled the phone from her ear for a moment, checking the number, and all she saw across the face was RESTRICTED. She put it back to her ear as her car skidded out onto the pavement.

“It’s happened,” she said.

“Thank you,” the woman said before hanging up the phone.

B
ryan fell
.

His body collapsed with a suddenness and surety that only gravity could create.

His mind, though, surged upwards like a geyser breaking through Earth’s constraints. Up and out of the hole that she had shoved him in for so long, taking back the place that had been his, the place that he was given at birth, that no one was supposed to take away. Ever.

Bryan’s eyes flashed upward, for the first time in days his body back under his control, looking at the cave's small opening that he and Michael made all those years ago.

She’s gone
, he thought, but didn’t truly believe it. He had watched what happened in front of the other body, the one she took out into the center of the ash. He saw the orb shimmer and open, and he had felt her…evaporate. It was the only word that fit. Like she simply seeped away into the air, leaving no trace that she was ever inside Bryan.

From this cave, he couldn’t see anything but the tree trunks in front of him, that plus pine straw and shrubs sticking up from the ground. She was gone, from Bryan at least, but not from here, not from
Earth
.

She succeeded,
a part of him thought. He knew this as an innate truth, lying on the ground and staring out listlessly at the world in front of him. There were quite a few parts of him now. Before he had been a single entity, Bryan Yetzer. Now though, that wasn’t true—he didn’t know how it wasn’t, only that Bryan didn’t exist, not like before. A piece of
tha
t Bryan was in here, but there were a lot of other pieces too, like a shattered mirror. Once it had been whole, but now the pieces were their own entities, showing their own reflections, and he had no idea how to put them back together so that they fit.

I’ve got to leave,
another part of him thought. A part much more to the front of his mind than the last one. A part that saw what was happening around him and knew that the bullets he heard weren’t slowing down, and they weren’t discriminating in who they hit. He looked to his right, seeing Thera lying there like a life-sized doll. Her eyes were open, and everything appeared normal, except she looked like someone had simply disconnected her. No violence, no harm, just pulled her soul—or whatever spark kept her living—from her body. He reached down, slowly, and put his hand on her elbow. He wanted to pull her up, wanted to get her out of this hole, but he knew he couldn’t. There wasn’t any way to get her off the ground or out of these woods.

“I’ll come back,” he said. The closest part of him that he could find. “I promise.”

He pulled himself from the pit, his hands digging into the dirt above him, scrambling out in a way that Morena hadn’t needed to before, his muscles tired and sore and weak.

She was better than you,
one of the parts said.

Bryan lay in the dirt, breath struggling in and out of his lungs. He looked up to the sky, seeing the blue hiding behind the green branches of trees.

You could die here. It would be easy. Thera’s body is already in the hole next to you. Just lay here and there won’t be any need to come back. You both can meet, if not the same end, then a close one.

They felt good, those thoughts. They felt right. Because the weight of Morena’s oppression hadn’t lifted. If anything, it increased in mass, trying to pound him lower and lower, until there wasn’t anything left. And to get out of this forest would take an effort he didn’t know if he could muster. To go anywhere past this forest, once he reached the field—Christ, he couldn’t even consider it.

You told her you would be back, not that you would stay. You fucking promised.

He closed his eyes, taking in a breath and holding it. He let it out and stood on his feet. He knew where to run; he had spent too much time over too many years in these woods to not know.

He started running, his feet pounding mercilessly on the ground beneath. The bullets firing around him, the sounds of the forest, all fading to a gray background noise. Out of the woods, that’s where he had to go.

He had to find sky, pure blue, not disturbed by any of the darkness now surrounding him.

T
he man placed
the phone down on his desk. He didn’t look at it as he did so, but discarded it like he might a piece of lint on his suit. After placing down the phone, he reached to the cuff of his white shirt on his right hand, pulling it just a quarter of an inch to make sure it matched the position it had before he took the call.

He sat extremely still then, not moving any piece of his body. Even his blinking paused as he looked out his office window. There were thoughts going on in his head that few people in the world could follow, thoughts that centered around mathematical calculations and equations venturing from physics to his own derivations of calculus.

The world knew him by Kenneth Marks, though he never thought of himself by that name. Names were a peculiar, if understood, concept to him. It was around the age of six that he discovered this, realizing that someone else gave him the moniker, but that it held no more relation to him than the clothes he wore to school or the flesh that wrapped around his body.

The phone call had been about Rigley Plasken. He had known something was occurring in the south, but hadn’t spent much mental energy trying to understand it. Rigley had always been capable, even if harboring a deep fragility. He understood from their first meeting in South America that she would break, and he never pushed her to it, but always held a glee about the possibility. Even now, sitting here more still than any predator to ever watch prey across an African prairie, Kenneth Marks felt happy about what would come next for Rigley. She had been his direct report for the past fifteen years, and during those years, she performed admirably. Most people in the organization around him thought she would eventually replace him or rise to some position even higher than his. She was a young, talented, and hungry woman.

All of that was fine with Kenneth Marks. He held no ties to what others thought or wanted. They were as ephemeral as the name his parents bestowed on him. He never had any doubt what the end result for Rigley Plasken would be; his calculations just wouldn’t give him any real answers as to what type of fun he would have when that end came. He was excited about it happening now, though, about what was happening down south, in Grayson, Georgia. He allowed the information he had gathered about the town to filter through his mind, releasing it from its mental quarantine. He discovered long ago that the problem with most of humanity was that they had no focus, no ability to filter the constant interruptions of thoughts that flowed through their minds. He worked intensely for a few years at this—it was probably one of the most difficult things Kenneth Marks ever put his mind to—and in the end, was able to partition off what his senses brought him from what he wanted to think about.

Had he told anyone, ever, scientists from across the world would have flocked over Kenneth Marks to study him, as he was the first human—as far as he knew—who had the ability to control his brain’s growth.

As the knowledge regarding Grayson flooded him, he found that Rigley’s deepest fear would soon be realized. She was always going to break, but it didn’t have to be in such a perfect situation.

Kenneth Marks felt nearly giddy with excitement, and still he didn’t move, nor did his heart rate raise or lower from fifty-two beats per minute.

He filtered down her chain of command, looking at the organizational chart inside his mind, deciding where other points of weakness were and how he could manipulate them. Things weren’t going to end well in Grayson, the calculations told him that with a certainty nothing could change. He would have to enjoy himself as much as possible until things blew up.

That’s what this job meant to Kenneth Marks. Having a good time. That’s what his life meant, an understanding that separated him from other sociopaths.

That term itself had intrigued him for some time. A sociopath. He thought it silly, really, but it made sense in the same way that humanity named each other. It was how the world classified people that were different, putting them into a nice, neat package of having an inability to empathize.

Most of those classified with him cared about power.

Kenneth Marks couldn’t care less about power. He cared about having a good time.

That’s what life was about, after all.

M
ichael’s head felt different
. The feeling came on slowly, so slow that he didn’t realize it was happening, but now couldn’t deny it. It was more than his mind though; this feeling consumed his whole body.

A calm that he had never felt before.

He rode in the middle of the truck, still sitting next to Julie, all of them heading to Bryan’s house. He sensed the apprehension around him, understood that the people he rode with were frightened beyond anything they had ever known. He had been frightened too, perhaps not as much as Glenn was now—on the verge of accepting that his son and wife were dead—but Michael’s fright dissipated over the past hour.

He looked them over, seeing the tenseness across their jaws and brows.

What’s happening to me?
he thought.
I should feel the same. Bryan and Thera are both missing, and yet I don’t care.

Was that the right word? Care?

He didn’t think so. He cared about both of them; he just couldn’t bring himself to worry. About anything. Even now, they were heading back to a house that had been ransacked to look for a missing woman, and instead they could have been heading to a book reading for all the emotion running through Michael.

The truck turned into the neighborhood.

“I just keep thinking this isn’t safe,” Wren said from Michael’s left.

“I don’t care whether it’s safe or not," Glenn said. "I’m going back. You can drop me off here if you want.”

Would it be safe there? Michael felt a wave rolling out from his core, slowly, starting from a pinpoint of cool blue in the middle of his chest. It was the answer to the argument between his father and Glenn. And the wave told him that it simply didn’t matter if the house was safe or not. That it didn’t matter who was there or what they wanted, because…but the wave didn’t answer that. It didn’t tell him why he needn’t worry about anything in Bryan’s house, only that he needn’t.

“Christ,” Wren said. “Fine. Fine.”

No one else in the car spoke and Michael felt the tension grow just a bit higher, if that was possible.

Wren pulled the truck into the driveway, and everyone in the car—besides Michael—desperately peered out the windows to see if there was any visible danger. Michael’s head was slightly cocked as he studied the house himself, not looking at it like the others, but taking it in for what felt like the first time. Like he had never been here before, though much of his life had been spent in between those walls.

Something is wrong,
he thought, calmly, as if he was lounging on his couch during a Sunday afternoon.

The people next to him exited the car and he followed.

They all walked up the driveway, and Glenn grabbed the closed door’s handle, though the frame containing it was still shattered.

He pushed it open. Wren, Julie, and then Michael followed him in.

Michael heard the noise without seeing what the others saw, but he didn’t need to, because somehow just as he understood nothing in this house would hurt them, he understood what the noise meant.

“Oh!” Glenn said, his voice sounding both choked and excited, fearful and ecstatic.

His wife lay before him.

The people in front of Michael spread out, revealing Glenn, in a frantic motion trying to untie the ropes binding his wife. They were tight on her arms and legs, but nothing around her mouth, nothing to make sure she wouldn’t cry out—because whoever had done this wasn’t concerned with someone showing up here. Wasn’t concerned with much, Michael imagined.

Glenn and Rita hugged each other, her crying in soundless sobs, a large purple bruise covering the left side of her face. He was on his knees while she reached up, grabbing onto his back and pulling him close, sobbing into his shoulder, tears streaking down her face, not bothering to see who else stood in the room.

Michael looked to Glenn and Julie, both of them with wide eyes and pale skin as they stared at the battered and formerly bound woman.

What’s happening to me?
he asked himself, because he felt nothing that anyone else in this room did.

“
W
here is he
, Glenn?”

Michael listened to the conversation without saying a word.

The two of them, Glenn and Rita, sat on one of the couches that they had turned back over. The whole house was a wreck that Michael had never imagined possible—even the worst trailers in his neighborhood resembled nothing as bad as this house. Glenn and Rita looked at each other, still not bothering with the other three in the room.

“I don’t know,” Glenn said. “We’ve…” He glanced to Wren for a second, before going back to his wife. “We’ve looked everywhere.”

“Christ,” she said, tears breaking afresh from her eyes.

“You have to try and remember what happened, babe.”

She couldn’t though. They had been over this road, but the last thing she remembered was Bryan coming down the hall as he called her name. Nothing else, not until waking up with her body tied and screaming for help that hadn’t come.

“You didn't see what happened to the house?” Wren asked. “No one tearing anything up, no one breaking in?”

She shook her head. “The house was perfect. When I woke up,” her hand went to her face and she lightly touched the bruise. “I could see some of the house from where I was tied up, but I don’t know how it happened. Christ, Christ, Christ.” She grabbed onto Glenn, burying her face into his neck. “What’s happening?”

Glenn glanced over to Wren again, his eyes holding only pain.

“We have to find him,” Rita said into his shoulder. “We have to find him and then we have to leave.”

“I know.”

Julie sat next to Michael, no one really speaking much besides Bryan’s parents. Michael felt her turn to him though.

“Are you okay?” she whispered in his ear.

She’s noticed,
Michael thought.
She can tell you’re…distant.

He nodded, not taking his eyes from the people on the other couch.

Wren stood from his chair and walked into the middle of the room, his hands shoved in his pockets. “We have to make some kind of plan here. We can’t sit here forever, and I’m not trying to be an asshole about this. I know that we’re all probably in shock, all really
fucked
up right now, but sitting here isn’t going to get us closer to finding Bryan or safety.”

Michael stared at the flask in Wren's back pocket. It bulged with every other step.

Oddly, with people crying around him and a wrecked house, Michael was drawn to that flask. The flask was the reason for so much, though it was rarely ever used. The flask symbolized everything though. His father’s inability to pull away from the liquor inside, despite the circumstances. His father’s inability to deal with life on its terms, and just as the flask bulged in his pocket now, that inability bulged into everyone’s life around him—pushing in on the things that they wanted, their desires, their love.

Michael’s eyes went to his father’s face. Wren stared down at the floor as he paced, his mind probably working for the first time in nearly a decade. The concern there, when was the last time Michael had seen anything resembling it?

“What can we do?” Wren said, breaking the silence.

Michael’s thoughts ceased and so did the conversation in the living room. The house shook, the entire frame, seeming to almost wave as if it wasn’t made of wood, but rather those rubber inflatable figures that used car dealerships sit in their parking lots.

Julie let out a slight scream.

Michael looked over to Julie, realizing that the floor beneath his feet was rumbling. The building swayed and the floor felt as if it were a hungry stomach.

“What’s happening?” Rita said, pulling her face from her husband’s shoulder.

“An earthquake?” Glenn said, staring at the home that had sat still for the past five years, now acting like it might stand up and start walking down the street, all while doing a wavy little dance.

A loud shattering noise screeched from the kitchen, and Michael felt Julie grab his arm. He hadn’t even flinched.

“Earthquakes don’t last this long,” Wren said from his place in the middle of the living room.