Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (45 page)

R
igley didn’t have
to close her eyes in this place. It was the same, one way or the other. Eyes opened or closed, nothing but darkness looked back at her. When she first sat down—
and how long ago was that, Rigley? Because it feels like nearly a hundred years—
she had wondered why the room was named Grayson. It made sense, of course, why the room would be up here in this second story of her mind, but not why something so black,
so blank,
would need naming.

So she sat down and found some sort of meditative trance. Her body remained still in the hotel room, cigarette after cigarette being brought to her lips and slowly smoked without her conscious mind knowing it happened.

She realized though, eventually, why this room was called Grayson—and when she did, a tiny spark started on the first floor of the building. She knew it, the same as she knew that the upper part of the building had been constructed, though it seemed very, very far away to her. She didn’t know if it happened in the foyer or the kitchen of her mind, her bedroom or her bathroom, but something lit down there, and from up here in this black room, that felt just fine.

The room was black because the future
hadn’t
been decided yet. Because she could create whatever she wanted in this room and the black figure that stood behind her in
BOLIVIA
—he hadn’t entered here. The rest of the world could stay outside, could burn downstairs, but in here…the Grayson room was hers.

A light, green this time, appeared in the distance. A sign, really, because the light was made up of words, and the green looked so much better than the red decorating the rest of this place. It looked so much more inviting, so much happier, that Rigley almost jumped in excitement. There had been terror on this floor, and for the first time she thought there might be something else on the higher levels of her mind. Something that she might enjoy, something maybe even to embrace.

Rigley stood up and started walking across the black expansion, heading to the green sign, which held two simple words.

THIS WAY
.

“
R
igley
?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Are you at the hotel?”

“Yes.”

Kenneth Marks paused for the briefest of moments, so brief that no one could have noticed it, but he felt something different in Rigley’s voice, and while anyone else on the phone might not have been able to notice it, the difference screamed out to him like a tornado siren in some nearly deserted town. There was nothing to get in its way, nothing to do but trust that the siren was right.

Kenneth Marks just didn’t know what it meant.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Just waiting, I suppose. Smoking a cigarette.”

Kenneth Marks paused then, not moving, but looking out the window and staring at the empty parking lot around him. She was being honest, he thought, but yet lying too. He closed his eyes and replayed her words through his mind, slowing them down, listening to the cadence, to the vibrations of each syllable as they came over the airwaves, doing his best to pick up anything he may have missed.

“Is anyone there with you?”

“No. Who would be here?”

And that was it. She was lying to him for the first time. Someone was there, in that room, and Christ Almighty who did this bitch think she was to lie to him? Especially at a time like this. Not that this time meant anything different to him, but it should have meant something different to her.

“I think we need to talk about what our next steps are going to be,” he said, letting the coolness from his mind spread over the momentary spike in his calm. She could lie right now, if she wanted. She could have someone in that room—though Kenneth Marks truly had no idea who it might be, maybe some soldier she picked up from downstairs to have a quickie with—but in the end, he would have his fun with her. “I just dropped Will off; have you spoken to him?”

“Yes, last night.”

Not lying.

“He’s going to do his country a great service by going in there, and it’s time for us to prepare in case something goes wrong.”

“Okay,” she said.

And just like that, Kenneth Marks knew he had lost some element of control in this. Rigley was as compliant as ever, like a heroin addict being led by a needle, but at the same time what mattered most was missing. She didn’t
care
. He could have told her that he resurrected her daughter and the little girl was currently sitting to his left, and she would have said
okay
in the same manner.

“I’ll be there within the hour, Rigley. Be ready to give me your thoughts on what we should do next.”

“Yes, sir. Of course.”

He hung up the phone, the car already moving back down the highway.

“Jenna, send someone up to her room. Whoever is in there besides her, kill them on the spot.”

Jenna said nothing, just began typing into her cellphone.

Will really was the important piece, because speaking to that creature mattered more than anything else in this whole enterprise. Conversing with it in a way that Kenneth Marks had never been able to converse with anything on this planet. Because they were kindred. It was, in some way, an evolution of this human species, the same as he. Perhaps he was the gap between it and the rest of the creatures populating this planet. It could tell him; it could instruct him on what came next.

And still, he didn’t like this about Rigley, despite her new place in the land of insignificance. He wouldn’t let her
not
care, simply because he had waited too long to have his fun. The carnival had come to town, and Kenneth Marks would send everyone around him to buy tickets to every fucking ride he wanted.

T
here were
good people involved in this. Perhaps Will had forgotten that over the years. Perhaps, to him, everything they did—while in the end it served a greater purpose—lived in the deep shade of a huge tree, and in that darkness was the only way their acts could be tolerated. In darkness, darkness thrives. Outside that tree's cover, darkness didn’t thrive and people went on with their lives as best they could. What Will didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that perhaps not everyone in the shade lived the way he did. Perhaps not everyone in the shade made a young woman kill a man with no way to defend himself. Perhaps some people held onto a moral code despite everything that went on around them.

General Knox seemed to be one of those people, the one’s that Will forgot.

“You know what this is?”

Will nodded.

“Good. Put it in between your gums and teeth. If shit goes wrong, bite down, and it won’t take but a few seconds for you to die.”

Will took the tiny pill from his hand. “Cyanide?”

“No, more advanced formula now. Cyanide had a tendency to cause seizures. This is more like what they give to dogs and the guys on death row—just quicker.”

“You’ve seen it work?”

“Once.”

Neither of them said anything else about it and that was enough for Will. If the man said he’d seen it, and it took seconds, then that was fine. He just didn’t want to bite down on something that no one had seen actually work in the field.

The two of them walked through another tent, this one the makeshift armory that Knox put together the day before.

“Take anything you want from here. Marks won’t know.”

He stood maybe ten feet from Will, looking on as he walked along the tables full of weapons.

“If you get a shot, you should take it,” Knox said.

Will picked up a pistol and pulled back the slide, looking inside. “What does he want with it?” There was no need to elaborate on who
he
was, nor the
it
.

“I don’t know,” Knox said. “There’s not a protocol in the world telling him to send you in there like this, though.”

“I can’t really say much about that. We haven’t been following protocol on this thing for a while now.”

“Maybe not, but I don’t think you sent any unarmed men in there after it, either.”

The whole conversation was for nought. Will wasn’t innocent, though he wasn’t insane either.

“Do you have the gear he wanted me to wear?”

“Yeah, someone is gathering it now. There are optical cameras on it, so be careful what you look at with it—try not to look at any of these weapons unless you absolutely have to.”

Will placed a pistol in the back of his pants and strapped a knife across his thigh. He walked down the table in silence, finding two grenades on an arm band. He looked up at Knox. “Starting to feel a little like Rambo,” he said and smiled.

“He make it out of all those movies?”

“I think so,” Will said as a somewhat awkward silence fell over them. This wasn’t a movie and he wasn’t Rambo and no amount of joking would change what came next. Even these weapons were silly. Will, as well as Knox, had seen what it did to a few hundred men and a horde of tanks. A pistol and a few grenades weren’t going to harm it.

Then again, Will knew—despite what Knox said about shooting the thing—that the real purpose of arming himself wasn’t to hurt it. The real purpose was to be prepared to kill himself.

T
he camera rested
on Will’s temple, which was good and bad. It meant he could control what the camera saw but also meant that he would have to be extremely careful at what he looked at. Moving his vision to the gun at his side would show anyone looking that he brought weapons. He wasn’t going to make it out alive; he knew that, but also knew what would happen if Marks realized Knox strapped him up before sending him out. Will only knew Knox for a little while, but there was kinship between the two of them.

The Humvee pulled up to the edge of the town line.

“It hasn’t tried to come out, huh?” Will said.

“No. For some reason it seems to be abiding by the lines drawn, keeping inside Grayson and not venturing out to any of the other towns.”

Will saw smoke floating into the sky in multiple places. One was where the forest had caught fire, another where the plane went down, and the third where the creature attacked the division. Will didn’t know which plume of smoke was which, but knew that it all happened in the matter of twelve hours or so.

“He’s not going to be able to keep this quiet,” Will said.

“I don’t know,” Knox answered. Only the two of them sat in the vehicle, Knox offering to drive him. “I don’t know what all he can get away with, but I’ve made it a point to not underestimate him.”

Neither of them said anything for a few seconds. Will didn’t want to get out of the vehicle, didn’t want to start his walk into the town, though he knew it was coming. He wouldn’t be able to stop it, not now, no matter what he did. Would Knox stop him if he tried to back out? But it was a pointless question because there were things to attend to inside Grayson, even if only his own penance.

“Is that what happened to you? Did you underestimate him? That why he’s got you in this spot?”

Will didn’t look away from the smoke.

“I didn’t know about him.”

Knox nodded as if that’s all he needed to hear.

“Alright,” Will said turning back to the driver’s seat. “Appreciate it.” He stuck his hand out and Knox grabbed it.

“Radio me when you’re coming back and I’ll come get you.”

Will only smiled and then opened the door, stepping out. He didn’t look back as Knox drove off. He waited though, listening to the vehicle move into the distance, until he could hear nothing of the engine, knowing that he was completely alone. They'd agreed that Knox would turn on the mic once he was gone, and so Will had to assume it was recording.

“Now what do I do?” he said. Instructions were sparse, because despite what Marks wanted to happen, he didn’t know what the hell to do in this town. No one did, and wasn’t that why Will ran at first? Because the only thing with any control was the thing trying to kill them?

He laughed.

At this point, all he could do was hope that the Buddhists were right, that this was just one moment in an endless span of lives, and so to get twisted about it—even about an alien perhaps shoving some kind of probe up his ass—was pointless and not to be considered. Because if they weren’t right…well, he had a lot to worry about.

“We’re all Buddhists now,” he said, talking only to himself and not losing his smile.

He stepped forward, walking down the street, heading into the town that almost certainly held his death. About fifty feet from his starting point, he came to a stop. He didn’t know what made him stop, or,
exactly
what made him stop. Something was different, and he didn’t know where it happened, only that gradually he couldn’t deny it. Where he stood now
felt
very different than where he started.

He looked from left to right, taking in the trees on either side of him, taking in the road. He listened to the air moving through his nose, filling his lungs before being ejected back out into the world. This place belonged to that alien. Whatever it had done out there in those woods was spreading, all the way to the very edge of the city. He might not have noticed had he not walked in from the outside, but standing here, he understood humanity didn’t rule this part of Earth anymore. Just as Great Whites owned the ocean, that creature owned this place.

Will didn’t look back. His life was down this road, not behind him. His life belonged with the alien now, and so he walked to meet it.

T
he noise blared from below
. Morena heard the words because they interrupted her thought process and she found herself slightly annoyed at it. She didn’t know where the words came from or who had the vocality to scream them at such a reckless level, but she didn’t want to descend to the ground to find out. She liked the view from where she was; it allowed her to think about what the future of this place would hold.

She hung just below the cloud line, her ship beneath her feet. She understood the theory of clouds, but her first interaction with them left her feeling more and more curious. She couldn’t see through them, but yet she couldn’t actually touch them either. When she put her hand to the cloud, she simply moved through it as easily as she did the air around her.

This was what brought water to the world, these white things that looked like mountains in the sky, but were closer to a gas than anything solid. She imagined young Bynums would enjoy their time among them, that games could be played in these things, games which could never be played on their own planet. Something about that brought her a lot of happiness. Something about possibilities for her species that weren’t available before.

The world laid out before her eyes and she was able to view everything that humanity created and everything the earth brought to being on its own. They were very, very different looking things. Dead versus living. It was an interesting concept, one that she hadn’t considered before, that Bynums never evolved through. She wondered if she had not shown up, who would win between the dead creations of humanity and the living from the earth, because without a doubt they were in direct opposition even if none of the forces recognized it. Alas, it didn’t matter any longer, because she was here, and when the Bynums spread, this discord could end.

Things would move rapidly soon, once her children’s coalescing finalized. They would spread beyond this small town and overtake everything in front of her.

She had been daydreaming when the noise from below began its incessant bellowing.

The words screamed at her, telling about some man that she needed to contact, as if she didn’t know exactly when the man entered, and exactly where the man moved now. She needed to find out where the noise was coming from and stop that before she ever decided to see about the man the voice spoke of.

And the feeling of the other.

That was more important than this new person walking around underneath her rule.

The other was still here, though she didn’t know where. She could pinpoint any human she wanted in this town, but had no idea where the other resided. Only that it was here and it was like her.