Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (46 page)

And that it was increasing in its likeness of her. The whole feeling began small, but grew as she stood below the clouds, thinking about what this future world would resemble. The noise brought her out of the wishful thinking, and now she felt the presence of the other strengthening.

She couldn’t stay here all day waiting on her children to gather. There was work to be done to make way for them, even if it was unnatural work. Work that shouldn’t be undertaken during a normal birth. The noise, she needed to quiet her surroundings. The human because it would be easy. And then the other.

M
ichael stood
by the side of the bed.

He needed to bring Bryan over because Michael couldn’t cross to Bryan’s side. Michael was stuck here, for now, though he didn’t feel any nervousness about it. However, the only way he could speak with Bryan would be to pull him over, and they needed to talk.

He didn’t reach forward and touch him, but whispered, “Bryan.”

It took a few seconds, but Michael could feel Bryan searching for the way to his name, trying to find the voice that called him. Finally, he opened his eyes, and color bloomed in his body even as he lay in his mother’s newspaper-gray lap.

“Bryan,” Michael said again, and Bryan’s eyes found where he stood. “Hey.”

Bryan looked around the room, seeing the same shocking things that Michael had when he first awoke.

“Christ,” he said. “I’m fucking back here?”

Michael smiled, unable to help himself because of the frustration streaming through Bryan’s words. Even the words themselves, what they meant, couldn’t drown out the humor.

“And you’re here too?” Bryan said, turning back to Michael.

“I don’t know where here is.”

“Neither do I, but it’s not a place we want to be. Thera and I came before.” His voice dropped, the funny frustration dying. Hurt resided in him, though Michael couldn’t feel the same. Michael knew where Bryan’s hurt came from, but he didn’t feel it himself—not for Thera, not for anything.

Bryan sat up and looked back down at his body still lying there, as gray as his mother.

“That’s weird.”

“The whole place is,” Michael said.

Bryan looked up at him. “Those things, have you seen them, are they outside?”

Michael nodded.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Bryan said. “Those things, they’re dangerous, beyond dangerous. Even Morena knew it.”

“Morena?”

It was the first word that he didn’t understand.

“She’s the alien. It’s her name or her title or something. I don’t know. It’s what she thinks of herself as. It doesn’t matter right now; what matters is getting away from those things.”

“Come here,” Michael said and he started walking around the foot of the bed.

“What?”

“I don’t think they can see us. Come look.”

Bryan stood up but didn’t start walking. “No, Michael. I’ve seen them. I don’t know if they can see us, exactly, but they know if we’re here. They didn’t come for us before because Morena was here too.”

Michael walked back to where Bryan stood. “Just look,” he said and grabbed his friend's arm, then pulled him through the wall. They stood in the yard, looking at the infinite number of gray bodies. Michael felt their energy, the intensity of it growing greater even since he had walked out before. “I think they hear us, but I don’t think they can see us.”

“Fuck, man. Fuck,” Bryan said.

Michael dropped his arm.

“You feel it, Michael? You feel that? They know we’re here.”

“I know,” Michael said, neither the energy from the creatures in front of him nor Bryan’s panic affecting him. “It’s okay, Bryan. Just breathe.” Michael looked out at the things for the second time. They did want him, Bryan was right about that, but he didn’t think they could find him yet. They would, eventually, but not right now. “We have some time. I need to know about what happened the last time you were here.”

“Dude, what the hell are you talking about?” Bryan said, turning to Michael. “You need to know what happened here last time? No you don’t. We need to get out of here, to get out of the goddamn United States if possible.”

Michael didn’t know how to explain to Bryan what this was, because Michael didn’t know either. He only knew that Bryan was wrong, that they didn’t have to leave right now. That understanding Morena, understanding this place, was much more important than anything else.

“There’s not a lot of time,” Michael said, choosing his words carefully. “I can’t describe much more than that, but I do know that if we waste our time here, we won’t get it back and I need to understand this place. I don’t know why and I don’t know what any of it means, only that…”

He trailed off as knowledge came to him.

There was something here, something besides these gray shades. Something that was closer to him than to them.

“Someone is in here,” he whispered.

“What?”

“There’s someone in here, someone like us. What is this place?”

Bryan shook his head. “She thought of it, Morena did, as the Ether. I don’t know what that means, but I know she hadn’t been here before. It scared her, this place—or at least made her cautious.”

“What is she?” Michael said, not looking to his friend, but staring almost as blankly as the creatures in front of him.

“Power,” Bryan said. “She’s all knowing, all powerful. She’s God, Michael. The closest thing to Him that humanity will ever see.”

“Come on,” Michael said, and walked back into the house, not needing to see if Bryan followed. “How long were you here?” he asked as he stepped through the wall.

“You can’t tell time in this place.”

Michael felt the truth in his statement, even looking at Bryan’s body lying on the bed. He saw it, but time could not be passing at all. It could be a still picture, or a live one—yet still not allowing the passage of time.

“What does she want?”

Bryan cocked his head to the side. “What’s happening to you?”

Friends since they really understood what friends were, the two looked at each other. Michael knew neither of them understood what was happening, though both were in different parts of this journey.

Journey? Is that what this is, Michael?

A strange word, especially given the world around them, given the way things had spiraled from a normal autumn to…this.

He didn’t know what was happening to him, but he knew it wasn’t happening to Bryan. That perhaps Bryan wasn’t on a journey, or maybe Michael had stepped onto a new path, one that Bryan couldn’t join. One that nobody he knew could join.

“I don’t know,” he answered.

“She wants this planet. That’s all. Nothing else.”

B
ryan opened
his eyes and looked up at his mother. He saw her in color, and warm relief filled him.

Until he remembered what Michael said.

I can’t go back yet.

“Baby, are you okay?” his mother said.

Had Michael spoken those words? Or was Bryan dreaming?

“Honey?” his mother said.

“Where’s Michael?” Bryan asked.

“He’s in the living room with Wren.” His mother’s hand continued petting his hair, not wanting to let him go. Even as he sat up, he felt her muscles tense, trying to hold him close. Everyone in the room stared at him, though none spoke.

What had he just seen? The first time he was over there, in what Morena called the Ether, there had been no doubt. Thera was there with him. They conversed. Even his mother, though she would never remember it, had been there. But this time? How could he know for sure, and how in the hell would Michael have gotten there?

It had to be a dream. The whole thing. Michael standing there, both of them staring out at the shades, and not a thread of fear running through any part of Michael. Bryan stood up from the bed and walked to a window, pulling back the curtain and looking through. The yard was empty, nothing but grass and other houses looking back at him.

Michael couldn’t come back. That’s what he said, but he hadn’t said why.

No, he did. He said why. You just need to remember.

“Bryan, what is it?” his father said from behind him. Bryan didn’t turn around, didn’t pay any attention to the question. He had to remember what Michael had said in that other world, because it seemed important. It seemed like whatever he told Bryan might mean the entire world.

“Bry—”

“Hush!” he said. He let the curtain fall closed, and then only stood there staring at it.

He tried to trace his mind back, from the moment he opened his eyes on this side to the moment he opened his eyes on the other. The side with nothing but gray looking back at him. Gray and then Michael standing there in color.

I can’t go back yet
, Michael said.

What are you talking about? You can’t stay here.

I have to, for a little while longer. There’s something here I need to find.

What?
Bryan said.

I don’t know
.

It had to do with Morena. Michael didn’t know who she was or what she could do, but Bryan remembered that, remembered Michael saying:
she knows I’m here
.

Bryan didn’t know what that meant, but Michael believed it. He didn’t understand how Morena could know anything about him. Michael wasn’t important to her; in fact, in all the time Morena controlled Bryan, she never once thought of Michael. So why would she know who he was now? Why would she care?

What do you mean?

Listen to me, Bryan. For a second, because you have to go back. She’s going to look for me because she can feel me, like I can feel whatever is over here on this side. I don’t know if she can find me, but she’s going to try. When you get back, you have to make sure she can’t find me. You have to make sure you keep me away until I can come back.

Bryan blinked a few times as the words streamed out of his subconscious, filling his mind.

He didn’t know if he had actually stood in this room, in some kind of alternate reality with Michael, but he knew those words didn’t feel invented. They felt like Michael spoke them, and as they rolled back through his consciousness, they felt more important than anything else Bryan could think about.

He turned from the window and whipped across the room, not looking at anyone else, not saying a word. He moved through the hallway seeing nothing, but trying to find his friend.

Wren’s head lay to the side, sleeping, with Michael in his lap. Bryan heard the feet coming behind him, heard his mother and father coming to see just what in the hell had gotten into their son.

“We have to get him out of here,” he said. Wren didn’t open his eyes and he didn’t know if anyone behind him had heard. It was a statement to himself, as semi-understanding came to him. He didn’t know exactly what Michael meant by Morena knowing he was here, but if she had any knowledge that Michael and Bryan were close, it wouldn’t take her long to come to this house. “We have to move him.”

Wren opened his eyes and brought his head up. He blinked a few times, taking in the people around him.

“What are you talking about?” Julie said.

“We have to get out of this house. We have to get far away from it.”

Wren’s eyes came alert, the sleep inside them replaced by a quick lightning.

“We’re not moving him.”

“If we don’t move him, he’s going to die. She knows about him, or something about him.”

“Who?” Glenn said.

“Her. Morena. And she wants him, I think.”

W
ill hadn’t known
the speakers across the town would be let loose. That had to be something from Marks and not Knox, though it would have been Knox’s hand that actually turned the things on.

He had wondered for the first five minutes how he was to actually make contact with the creature, whether he was just supposed to walk around until maybe he saw the thing surrounded in green. He should have known better, that Marks would have a plan, and apparently, it rested on technology created perhaps in the fifties, when bomb shelters were thought to be necessary, and there needed to be some way to communicate when the Commies arrived.

“WE WANT PEACE. PLEASE MEET OUR DELEGATE. WE WANT PEACE. PLEASE MEET OUR DELEGATE. HE IS ON THE ROADS, LOOKING FOR YOU. WE WANT PEACE. PLEASE—”

The words went on and on, a recording that simply started up again once it reached the end.

He is on the roads
.
That’s descriptive, Marks. Really well thought out.

Will didn’t think it would matter too much, because he thought that the creature that laid waste to an entire army division wouldn’t have much trouble finding him if it wanted to.

There wasn’t much for him to do, really, except walk on the roads just like Marks described. He saw no one else on the streets, and imagined the rumbling underneath him had something to do with it. He wondered how many people were left in the town?

How many that will never leave are you responsible for?

He saw the answer to his question in front of him, and the irony wasn’t lost on him. Three cars off to the side of the road, and not parked because they were going on a bike ride in the woods next to the road. Parked because whoever had been driving suddenly found themselves with a hole in their head, or perhaps their neck, and weren’t exactly able to continue on the path they had meant to follow.

Will kept walking, though as his feet moved closer to the cars, he wanted to stop, which was different. How many bodies had he seen in his life? How many people had he killed? It was part of the job, and yet as he saw the holes in the car windows, a near panic rose in him. He didn’t want to go forward; he didn’t want to see the people in the cars.

Where had they been going?

Why didn’t he let them go?

His feet wouldn’t stop though, because he still had a mission to accomplish. His feet were going to listen to the pathways ingrained in him from years of training, the pathways that said you finished the goddamn mission. And those feet were taking him right to the cars that held Will’s corpses.

This is why you came, isn’t it? For either redemption or punishment, but at least partly for these three cars in front of you. Don’t be scared now, Will, because you weren’t when you ordered the men out here with sniper rifles to ensure that no one left.

His feet stopped moving as he stood in front of one of the cars. A Honda Accord, green, looking like it might have been just a couple of years old. The front windshield was missing, or at least missing from the spot it had been in when it rolled off the assembly line. Now the windshield was in tiny, tiny pieces spread out randomly across the laps of the people in the two front seats. A woman and a man, both with as much life in them as the pieces of glass contained. Their skin was a shallow gray, their eyes staring openly into a world that they could no longer see. Will smelled the ripening flesh, but he didn’t put his hand to his mouth or nose to ward it off. The man had a hole directly in his forehead. A small entry wound, though the headrest of the seat was stained in dark red, from where the exit hole obliterated the back of his head.