Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (8 page)

He walked over to Lane, about thirty feet closer to the ring’s edge.

“What is it?” Will asked.

“The readings. You seeing the same thing, Andrew?”

“Yeah, same thing on mine.”

Lane sighed and brought the little gadget he held up to where Will could see it. The thing had a green background, and single lines running across it horizontally with different lengths.

“What the fuck am I looking at?” He asked.

“This shows all the readings that anyone has ever picked up. Any material that’s ever been analyzed by one of these, in any part of the world, is warehoused. Add that to all the data that’s been collected since we’ve had the capability to dissect it, and you’re looking at about twenty to thirty years of analyzation.”

Will didn’t care about any of that, about the explanation, though the fact that he needed telling showed just how much these guys understood about him. They knew the stage of life he was in, and we’re politely trying to help him along.

“Just tell me what I’m looking at.”

“We’ve never seen this before. Whatever landed here, nothing like it has ever come to Earth. I mean, the genetic makeup of the object…not a single piece, a single strand, is coded in anything else we’ve ever experienced.”

R
igley looked in the mirror
, not seeing herself at all.

She stood in the fifth floor bathroom at work. She had been washing her hands when her phone vibrated on the counter; she didn’t even bother drying them before picking it up.

They say this is brand new.

I think one of them said the word ‘incredible’.

That was what made her lose sight of herself in the mirror, the word ‘incredible’. She sent seasoned people down there to Will. People who had seen a lot, been around the world to see it, and were on the way up in their careers. People like that didn’t describe things as incredible. People like that weren’t awed. People like that should be stone.

“There’s more, of course,” Will said. “People have been here. A few at least, and I’m fairly certain they heard us arriving and took off right before we got to the site.”

“Did you catch them?” She asked, already knowing the answer.

“No.”

“Jesus Christ, Will. Have you done any kind of recon with the locals?”

“The scouts are on it now,” Will said, and then went silent.

“This isn’t good.” Rigley didn’t know if she was talking to him or to herself. She turned around and leaned against the counter. She quickly checked the bathroom, confirming her assumption of being alone held true.

“I have another twenty-four hours. I’ll have more information for you over the next two.”

Rigley nodded, though no one was around to see it. “What do you think?”

There was a pregnant pause. Rigley waited, hoping that the prognosis would be decent, manageable.

“I think we’re fucked,” Will said.

“How fucked? Bolivia fucked?”

“Worse. Bolivia was bad, but in the end, it lacked intelligence. I think this thing has that intelligence. I think that whatever landed here is smarter than us.”

“Bolivia was smart, too,” Rigley said, knowing that it was only part true. There had been elements of it that were smart, that were adaptable, but no one who lived through that could say it was smarter than humanity. More persistent, maybe.

Will didn’t say anything back and she knew why. She was bullshitting, trying to coat a broken house with paint to make it look better. The house would still collapse no matter what color the inside walls were.

“Just fucking fix it,” she said into the phone and hung up.

She was breathing heavy and her hands shaking.

Just fucking fix it
.

Had she ever felt like this before? Not in Bolivia, but things had been very different back then. She had been different.

Why the change, then?

Had she even noticed it? Fifteen years or so, moving up in this organization, and had she thought herself the same as when she started? She was still young, not like Will, not venturing into the world of retirement—but was he changing? She didn’t think so; if he had, then she couldn’t tell. He sounded the same. He acted the same. Her though? That was the question.

Tears came to her eyes.

“You can do this,” she said into the empty bathroom. “You can do this.”

Her voice shook just as her hands did. They were words, just empty words in an empty bathroom, and neither her body nor mind believed them. A week ago, she had been fine. A week ago, life was going on as it should, and then this thing came crashing down, and now her world was in danger of collapsing.

You know why you’re shaking; you know what it’s from—

But she wouldn’t hear that. Wouldn’t listen to it for a single goddamn second. Not here in this bathroom, not alone with tears about to stream down her face. She wouldn’t ever hear that again. That time was long gone. That was back in Bolivia and there wasn’t any need to ever bring it up again. What she did in Bolivia didn’t have any bearing on what she did now.

“You can do this,” she repeated.

It took Rigley a while, but the shakes finally stopped and she put on the face that the outside world knew.

R
igley didn’t know
when her mind began forming rooms inside her head. It was sometime after her child, after Bolivia. Before, her mind had been one large open room where she was free to wander as she pleased. Room might not be the correct imagery, because a mind can never be a single room, but a wide open mansion. No upstairs, no downstairs, just a huge home and she could see everything inside it.

The stairs came first. One morning they were simply there and they hadn’t been when she went to bed. She didn’t think too much about them because they led nowhere, simply a massive staircase that spiraled up into the air and ending abruptly. If she were to climb to the top and step off the staircase, she would fall back to the houses’ floor.

She should have known. Of course she should have. One couldn’t keep walking through a home when evils lived in it. The mind couldn’t always handle everything that the body put it through, and for Rigley, when it couldn’t handle it anymore, it started building.

The staircase first, and sometime after—not a long time, because this kind of construction needed to be finished quickly—the upstairs. No bannisters, no rooms, no ceilings that blocked Rigley’s view completely. Just hallways that connected to those staircases, long winding hallways that led to nowhere, but looped back on themselves. Still she didn’t venture up the stairs, there wasn’t any need to. She only watched her mind as it built, without her consent, without her input.

The rooms came next. Doors that were too big, that stretched in unnatural positions, not quite level and not quite proportioned. Doors that looked like someone on acid might have created them. No lights were built into the hallways, and the ceiling of the first floor began spreading out too, blocking her vision of the dark and large second story.

At last, she couldn’t see the construction anymore, because her mind had blocked it off from her. The only thing she could do was to walk up those long stairs and peer hard into the hallways—that is if she wanted to see what was up there. She hadn’t, for years and years, she had lived in the bottom floor of her mind, content with what it let her see, not needing to venture into places that might not be…healthy for her.

Now, though, she thought it might be time to go up those stairs, to see what she hid from herself, what she let herself forget.

Rigley stood at the bottom, looking up, seeing the airy light of her first floor disappearing into the stuffy dark of the second. And how many floors were there? How far did the darkness extend? She took her first step onto a stair that she had avoided much of her life. The second step was no easier than the first.

T
he country was dirt
. That’s the first thing Will thought when he arrived. He knew the history of the place, had read up extensively on it over the past few days. Simon Bolivar running around down here, killing the past regimes and then new ones sprang up. New ones spouting words like communism and republics of the people. It all meant the same thing,
meet the new boss, same as the old boss
.

If anyone doubted that, all they had to do was look at the dirt. The whole country, the one named after the man who supposedly saved South America, was a pile of dirt with people living in it.

His mom would have told him he didn’t know the first thing about what these people had been through, and she would have been right. Will’s mom was dead, though. She said a lot of things when she was alive and a lot of them were true, but the important ones weren’t, were they? The important ones, those had been lies, so it was hard to take what she would have said now and listen too much to it.

The city was dead, so that could be one reason it looked so God-awful to him. It wasn’t as dead as it could be; something lived here, but the people? Nothing resembling a person lived in this place besides the people in the line of cars he was a part of, all rolling down the street.

The whole goddamn thing had started from a meteor shower. That’s what really amazed Will. A few rocks falling from the sky, and now a pink mess covered the city.

Don’t touch it. None of it.

That’s what all of them had been told, every one of the mechanics brought down here. They had all sat at tables and listened as a general prepped them for what they were going to see. They looked at pictures and watched videos, watched the pink sponge grow across people faster than ants could squirm out of a hill. Will saw the pictures, but it didn’t prepare him for this. He didn’t think anything could have prepared him.

The pinkness of it—that startled him almost as much as what it had done. Bright pink, almost neon, like one of those signs at a shitty strip club, lighting up and saying
Girls Inside
.

The whole city looked like one of those signs, a big bright international sign saying
New Fucking Owners.

No one knew what this shit did, besides spread like a virus. The buildings were covered in it, looking like pink nets draped down, flowing into the streets. Indeed, the tires of Will’s vehicle ran over the pink tendrils right now, but they were coated with a substance that seemed to retard the growth of it. Had the tires not been coated, the entire vehicle would be filled with the pink, almost powdery, growth. It would probably be growing out of Will’s eyes by now, his brain not just coated in it, but the invader actually filling in his synapses.

Or was it synapsi?
He thought, smiling.

They were here to destroy this stuff. That was his objective. Kill it. All of it. And do it in a way that kept the rest of the world from knowing about it.

I
t was odd
, looking out his own eyes, but not being able to control anything. His brain still worked and he was still inside his brain, so it made sense that he could see everything, but yet only as a passive observer. Bryan thought it might be like a movie, during the time when he waited for her to wake up, but now he realized this wasn’t a fucking movie. That was his arm moving, those were his legs walking; it was his brain thinking these thoughts. All of it coming from something else, another entity propelling him forward.

He thought he knew the name of the thing controlling him. Although, he wasn’t sure a name really described her. A name was a human trait, but this thing was
not
human. She thought of herself as Morena Var, but that was more a title than a name, Bryan thought. She was Morena, but she was also a Var—though he didn’t know what the title meant.

An alien possessed Bryan.

It was a shocking thing to understand, but the more he thought about it, the more he realized there was no other explanation. He wasn’t having some kind of mental illness mishap, this was no Earth driven parasite inside his mind—and how he wished either of those were true. He would much rather,
much rather
, have something made from this planet causing a delusion, than to know the truth.

The truth: an alien, from outer space, had taken over, and there was nothing he could do about it.

Morena had been walking him around for the past five or six hours, driving him from place to place. He watched, silently, scared to speak up. He caught glimpses of her thoughts, but they were…different. They weren’t linear like his, but seemed to…

He couldn’t fully describe it; her thoughts didn’t flow from A to B, but rather combined A and B, creating a new letter. She thought holistically, encompassing multiple timelines and points of view in one single vision. So when he caught glimpses of those thoughts, he barely understood them. He didn’t know what she wanted, why she was here, why they were running around this town—none of it.

An alien controlled him.

That thought never turned normal, never became something he could simply accept. Each time it came to him, it felt like the first, nearly sending him into the panic that he feared so much now.

They were currently in the public library, with Morena bent over a book. Bryan could see it was a geography book, but he didn’t understand how she took in the information. The first page was open, and she stared at it, had been for the past five minutes, not moving, not flipping to the next page. Something was happening inside his head, he could feel it, though again—he didn’t understand it. It felt more like energy than anything else, like excitement, except it also felt like a rapid game of Tetris. Like millions and millions of different shapes were falling into place all at once, without a single gap in any of them.

He looked at the page, unable to do anything else, and growing more and more antsy by the second. He wanted to speak to her. Wanted to say something, and the fear that had kept him from doing it since she woke up this morning was wearing thin underneath that want.

What was the worst that could happen? Outside of death, it didn’t seem like much more could be done to him.

Morena closed the book and sat there staring at the cover.

“Hey,” Bryan said.

Morena lifted her head up slowly, Bryan watching as his eyes scanned up from the table to the space in front of it. He didn’t know what to say next, but he knew that she hadn’t been expecting his thoughts to come through so forcefully. That was why she moved her head up from the book, the only physical sign she showed at the surprise.

“What are you doing?” he asked, feeling stupid as he did it, but literally having no idea what else to say.

“Bryan,” she said, still seeming to taste taste the word.

“Yes. That’s my name,” he said, feeling eerily calm. Maybe it was that he had sat inside himself, in a corner of himself, for the past eighteen hours. Maybe it was that, really, nothing else could be done to him. “What are you doing? What the hell is happening?”

He watched the world tilt as she cocked his head to the side slightly, perhaps his mind mapping out for her the physical response to confusion.

“You’re an interesting creature,” Morena said, her voice sounding (
is there sound in here, Bryan? Inside your head?
) like a song, like a child playing a game. “I’d like to know more about you, while we’re here together.”

“The fuck are you talking about? Know more about me? You control me!” He almost laughed at the ridiculousness of her words.

“There’s a block of sorts, I’ve found. There are things I can access, important things, but not the most important. Your language, that comes to me easily. How to move that metal machine outside as well. But you, Bryan, I think you hold a lot of it in your…you call it a mind, the piece of you that I haven’t taken over.”

“I’ll tell you everything you want to know if you just let me go,” he said.

“Let you go?” The creature asked, sounding genuinely surprised for the first time.

“Yeah. Just give me back my body and I’ll tell you everything you want to know about me. I’ll tell you everything you want to know about this whole damned place.”

“You don’t know what I need to know about this place,” she said, slowly, sounding like she might understand what he meant. “These things you refer to as books know more, but I’m not sure they can tell me enough either. What I want from you isn’t about this place, but about your kind.”

“Well, yeah then. I’ll fucking tell you all of that if you let me go. Deal?” Bryan still sounded confident, but he wasn’t feeling it. In a matter of ten seconds the way she talked to him shook his ease. She spoke in a way Bryan never heard before; she spoke as if nothing else in the entire universe mattered, as if her voice started life and ended worlds.

“There’s no where else for you to go, Bryan. You’ve nearly reached your end. Do you not understand?” she asked.

“
W
hat is that
?” Morena asked.

The goddamn thing had been buzzing all day. Just a constant vibration inside the garments this body wore on its legs. She understood
what
the thing was; she hadn’t phrased her question correctly to Bryan. She wanted to know what she should do with it. There were conflicting…patterns she could follow here. One said that she could ‘answer’ it and the other said she could continue to ‘ignore’ it. But the thing kept vibrating and was beginning to annoy her. She thought about breaking it, but realized that could quickly become a problem if it was deemed unacceptable—which patterns inside this creature said it might be.

“It’s a phone,” Bryan said.

She hadn’t expected him to speak to her earlier in the day. It was a pleasant surprise, one that she welcomed, though he had gone into a tailspin shortly after learning that he wasn’t to be released. She found it humorous that he thought it was a possibility, him somehow being allowed to take over his own body again. He wasn’t happy to find out that wouldn’t happen, to say the least, but he was talking again now.

“Why does it continue vibrating?”

She felt him laugh, the creature’s sign for enjoyment.

“Don’t answer it,” he said, a smile permeating his mind.

That wasn’t the truth. She felt it completely and at once. There were two separate ‘minds’ in here, as Bryan thought of it—hers and his, but they were connected. Not intimately, but the connection allowed her to understand certain things, and right now, it told her he was being dishonest.

“Bryan, I need you to tell me the truth if we’re going to…get along. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” he said, still sounding happy. “Don’t answer it.”

Morena saw what she wanted almost immediately. Bryan wasn’t removed from his body, just removed from the controls. She stood up, leaving the book in its place, and headed to the sign marked as a restroom. A weird concept, to say the least, but she had accepted the nature of this body. She walked through the doors, feeling Bryan’s smile fade some as she did. She found a stall and went inside, shutting the door, then locking it.

She didn’t even consider speaking to him again. This creature didn’t know who she was, the lineage that made Morena—but he would soon.

With her right hand, she took hold of her left index finger, and in one, quick motion, pulled back the nail from the flesh underneath. She pushed the left hand forward, allowing the blood that immediately started flowing to drop into the toilet beneath, the clear water beginning to turn a hazy red from the moment the first drop spread.

Multiple things happened at once, though she took them all in, understanding every piece. The first was the sound of the nail peeling back—like dry paper ripping. The next was the immediate sensation of pain flooding this shared brain, though she stepped back from that casually, not allowing it to affect her.

And the last was the howl erupting from Bryan. He screamed so violently that, indeed, Morena couldn’t truly back completely away from it—it shook their shared brain. Bryan had never known pain like this, Morena was certain of that, didn’t even know pain like this existed. The blood continued to drop into the toilet and Morena stared down at it, sure to get both the finger and the red tinged water in her view. She wanted him to look at it, to understand.

His screams weren’t stopping, but continued to grow, panic taking over now.

Morena stopped the blood from flowing, controlling his brain in a way that Bryan never could. She felt the phone vibrating in her pocket again, but it would wait. They needed to come to an agreement here. Bryan still screamed because the pain hadn’t ceased yet; she let it go on, allowing his shock and fear to nearly reach a point of no return, and then she cut off the connection between the dying cells and Bryan’s feeling of them.

His screams didn’t quit as quickly as the pain, but they subsided, slowly, as he came to realize he didn’t hurt anymore. The blood wasn’t flowing, though the finger was still raw where the nail used to be.

“It’ll heal,” she said. “What you need to understand is that it doesn’t hurt me to hurt you. That when you lie to me, I will continue to do this. I will hurt you until you don’t understand the difference between pain and normalcy, because all you will feel is torment.”

He didn’t reply, but she felt him panting, though the lungs in his body breathed slow and steady. His mind was dealing with the aftereffects of near overload.

“Do you understand, Bryan?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Now tell me, what do I do with the vibration in our pocket?”

“Answer it.”

“Good,” Morena said. “What is happening? Why is it constantly vibrating? What should I expect on the other end?”

“You’ve gone off the map,” Bryan said, calming now, duly chastised, a reluctant but submissive prisoner—as Morena needed him. “People are calling because they don’t know where you are. You didn’t tell my parents. You haven’t talked to any of my friends. People might be worried; I don’t ever disappear like this.”

She realized her mistake immediately. She also realized that the connection between the two of them wasn’t nearly as deep as she originally thought. This should have been understood from the beginning, that these social creatures would keep tabs on each other—but she had missed it, and she didn’t think Bryan had even tried to hide it. She didn’t understand this world or these beings.

“So I answer it and speak to whoever it is? What do I tell them?”

“You’ll need a story, something believable for why you’ve been out of pocket.”

“Out of pocket?” she asked.

“Why no one could get in touch with you.”

She nodded as she reached down for the toilet paper. She tore some off and wrapped it around her left index finger.

“Okay. Let’s talk to them,” she said.

“
W
hat the hell
, Bryan?” Julie asked, nearly shouting. “I’ve called you like fifty times. Literally, fifty. Where the hell are you?” She didn’t even give him a chance to respond to the first question before hammering the rest of her thoughts through the phone. Pissed didn’t begin to describe what she felt.

“I’m at the library,” Bryan said, his voice calm, not matching hers in any sense—not even defensive.

“The library? What for? Why haven’t you answered any of my calls?” Julie wanted him defensive, wanted him angry, because she planned on fighting about this. She planned on screaming at him until he apologized and then maybe not talking to him for a day or two.

“I was studying some and put my phone on silent,” he said.

She didn’t know how to respond. There wasn’t any apology in his voice, wasn’t any
let me try and make this okay because I know I messed up
. Guiltless came to her mind, the word encapsulating his voice. He didn’t say anything else either, just let his last sentence hang there.

“You didn’t tell your parents where you were going,” Julie said, not knowing what else to say. The anger in her subsided, being replaced by exasperation at his complete lack of care. “Your mother’s worrying like crazy; she’s been calling you too.”

A few seconds passed and then he said, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice the exact same as when he picked up the phone.

“You don’t fucking sound sorry,” Julie said.

“I, um, I’ll be home in a little bit. Would you like to come over?”

Julie pulled the phone back from her ear and stared at it, not sure if she was even talking to Bryan. How many fights had they been in during the past two years? Enough to know the routine, enough to know Julie’s temper. And here he was asking her to come over, like he’d done nothing wrong, like everything was A-okay.

She hung up the phone and half threw it to the kitchen table. She stared at it, waiting for it to ring, waiting for at least a text message to come through. Nothing. A solid two minutes passed before she looked away.

What the hell was that? He sounded like a spring wind, not a care in the world, as if the whole world wasn’t freaking out while looking for him. His mother had been about to call the police after the fourth hour of no one being able to get in touch with him. Julie talked to Michael, and even he sounded worried—which was strange in itself. Yet Bryan invited her over to his house like all was forgiven. This wasn’t even a, what are you doing, you might be cheating high school nonsense type thing—Julie was legitimately worried, as well as his entire family.