Shattered (Alchemy Series Book #3) (2 page)

I remained upright by sheer willpower alone, as I stepped into the elevator. My hand hovered over the penthouse button before I pushed the casino main floor level instead. I'd been existing on a couple of hours of sleep a night. The moment I recharged even a little, the adrenaline drove me awake again.

The doors to the casino floor
slid open like the curtains being pulled back on a play about the end of the world. Huddles of people had continued to show up after we left and were still arriving by the hour, their homes destroyed. I wasn't worried about the amount of people that showed up, I was worried that there wouldn't be more. There was no way of telling how many people were left. By our current estimates, which were really no more than guesses, ninety percent of the population was gone.

Sabrina, the resident Keeper doctor, had made a makeshift office in the g
ift shop, right off where the main gambling floor used to be. She was tending to the people that came in and Kever was arranging sleeping accommodations. I knocked on the open door and her head swung up from the teenage girl she was tending.

"How's it going? Can I do anything to help?" I a
sked her. Sabrina looked as bad as the rest of us. It didn't seem like anyone slept anymore.

"It's going," she said with a shrug. "Can you hang out a minute?"

I nodded, relieved for an excuse to stop for a minute. I slumped into the chair off to the side, as I waited for her to finish stitching up a cut in the brunette girl's arm.

"Okay, Colleen, that should take care of it," Sabrina said as she s
tepped back and the girl stood.

I tried not
to stare but I couldn't help notice the girl's huge purple eyes once she stood and looked up at me, recognition on her face. She knew who I was. The woman the humans called
The Plague
.

Sabrina laid a hand on the girl's
shoulder. "Remember what I said to you. Just come to me, okay?"

I saw
the girl nod and I recognized the look on her face. She'd never ask for help. Sabrina had probably dragged the girl in here practically by force.

Sabrina shut the glass door as the gir
l left, and sat down in the chair next to me. We had been on friendly terms before New York happened, or
the shattering,
as people were referring to it. We'd gotten a lot closer in the last week. She was just one of those people who radiated an emotional stability that you gravitated toward in times of upheaval.

"What's wrong?" I asked as she paused. We we
re sitting in a room with two glass walls, and even though she'd draped fabric over them to block the view, you could still see in from certain angles. Her hesitancy was making me nervous, but I made sure to school my features and not reflect any concern that would scare an onlooker.

"Some odd things are happening,
" she rolled her eyes, realizing what she had said sounded ridiculous. "I mean, beyond the storms and the rippers…"

The rippers were the dark grayish
, lizard skinned beings that wandered the area. They had already taken out a few Keepers on our way back. They'd killed Ben within the first two days of appearing, as well as some wolves that had been making their way to the casino. No one could even count how many defenseless humans they'd gotten, or perhaps no one wanted to tally that number. I wasn't sure what was scarier about them, how
easily
they killed or
how
they killed.

"This is t
he thing; we all know that this is a strange new world." We both instinctively glanced through the largest gap to the group of humans congregating outside the room. "But, it's not just the world changing for some."

"What do you mean?" The purple eyes of the girl reappeare
d in my mind as I guessed where she was going. When did humans start having purple eyes?

"There have
been a few odd things I've seen with some of them. The eyes on the girl who was just here, which I'm sure you noticed, were purple. She said her eyes used to be blue until a day ago. "

"Is there anything else?" Eye color chan
ging was weird, but our environment had changed so perhaps not that weird. Maybe color changes were similar to getting tanned skin in a sunnier climate.

"This o
ne is even stranger. A mother brought in her baby, who she thinks is growing a tail."

"A tail?"

She nodded. "It's just a nub but she swears it didn't used to be there. I believe her."

"How many people do we have here now?"
I asked. Sabrina had been on the front lines since we left to go to New York. It didn't matter what time I came here, she was already here before me, helping someone. She saw every person that walked through those doors and was a habitual note keeper.

"
My last count was three thousand humans, give or take a hundred."

"And are those t
he only two cases so far?"

"That I know of."
The way she said it implied she suspected more.

"Still, it's not even one percent of the population. I don’t think we should
worry anyone, just yet." Anyone meaning Cormac. I knew that was why she had told me. Neither of us spoke his name because then it would be an actual decision not to tell him. This way, it was just a passing conversation.

"Cormac seem
s to be running a little hot since you guys came back."

"T
hat's a nice way of putting it," I told her and cemented our decision to not go directly to him with her concerns. "I've got some things to handle. Call me on the funny phone if you need me." The funny phones that ran signals through the towers Cormac had erected were the only communications left. Satellite was gone, cable gone…everything…just gone.

"You should get some sleep," she said.

"Yeah and so should you," I said with a smile; for some reason, I found it funny at that moment that neither of us would probably see a bed anytime soon. "I need to go check out the gasoline supplies. Figure out how much longer we get to keep our electricity for." I walked to the door and held it open as she joined me, walking out to fetch another human patient.

"Sounds like a plan." She straightened the stethoscope hanging around her neck as she walked past me. "
I'm going to go stitch up a couple more bodies."

I watched Sabri
na gather up another ravaged refugee before I headed off to the garages where the generators were housed.

I didn't like to linger on the main floor
, where the humans hung out, for too long but I was detoured when a loud clap of thunder drew my attention outside. Dark stood at the main entranceway, where he was stationed. Cormac had posted men at every door, but not to keep anyone in, this time it was to keep things out. 

Dark was our resident wolf adoptee who
, after helping The Keepers, was persona non grata among his own. Dodd had taken him under his wing and even given him his spare bedroom. Good thing too, because it was a packed house these days.

"How long has it b
een doing this?" I asked as I watched softball size hail inflict even more damage to an already wrecked city.

"About an hour or so,
" he said, and  flipped his almost feminine blond locks out of his left eye and absently petted the real wolf, Abby, who sat by his feet.

"You feel okay
?" I asked, noticing his slightly flushed skin.

"I think I ju
st ate something off. I'm fine."

I knew a brush off when I heard one and
I let the subject drop. I'd heard rumors that the wolves were having a hard time holding their form, lately. Whatever it was, it was putting a serious strain on his system.

I rested my forearm on the glass of the door
and I leaned in, trying to get the best view of the area outside. The strange large cracks that ran up and around the building really looked like a moat now as they filled with water. I couldn't remember the last time Vegas had seen so much rain. For a city that normally got a little over four inches annually, we'd already met our quota for the next twenty years.

"Any sign of
rippers?" I asked, knowing Dark would already be familiar with the new slang.

"
No sign of anything."

"It'll be dark out
, soon," I said as I watched the sky become tinged with purple.

Dark nodded. "The night crew will be on soon
. Cormac upped the count to five per entrance."

There
had been a few sightings of rippers in daylight, but they were overwhelmingly nocturnal creatures. Maybe they hid somewhere until nighttime, like some sort of demented vampire breed. A schedule had been set up for watches and there was always someone on during the day anyway, just in case a random one showed up on the horizon.

"
You know, this isn't your fault," he said after a few minutes of silence had passed.

"Yeah, I know."
And that was my cue to go. I wasn't ready for a conversation on how much of this was my responsibility. I tried to smile like I meant it as I pushed off the door, leaving Dark to finish his watch shift.

The casino was huge and it took me about ten minutes to get to the area that housed the generators and gasoline supplies. Pa
t, one of the engineers on permanent staff, was already there, going over the monster machines. I'd met him several times when he had been working on fixing up the portal room, after my oopsy moments. He was Keeper-born, but a dud; what they call Keepers that don't have any abilities. I was pretty sure it was a name no one used openly, kind of how they only called me
the plague
behind my back.

"How long
before lights out?" I asked as I looked at the line of gasoline containers. They looked impressive until you realized how much juice these things burned.

"At our current rate of cons
umption, I'd give us another week, tops," Pat said, his face showing concern.

"We need the
scouting party to go further out to collect gas." All the electricity had died sometime around the time the New York tear was closed. We weren't sure if it had been the severe storms it that had kicked up at that moment, or something about the Magic that affected it, but The Lacard power had been running off a generator ever since.

Scouting parties went
out during the day to retrieve any supplies they could find, but there was a limit to how far they could go and still make it back before nightfall, when the rippers came out in force.

"
Even if they find some more, it'll fix us for a while…but then what?" Pat dropped to his haunches as he tinkered with something on one of the larger generators.

He was right. The oil fields were abandoned. Refineries? Abandoned.
Whatever existed now was all there would be for the foreseeable future. I'd never thought about it before, but civilization needed a certain amount of man power to keep everything running. Even if we managed to eliminate the ripper problem, we still didn't have enough bodies to drill for oil, mine for coal, man the power plants and refineries, farm food or do most of the things needed to continue the life we had taken for granted. 

"Then we figure
something else out," I said with much more confidence than I felt. "We do whatever we have to."

I couldn't remember when I finally crashed, only that I was lying in Cormac's bed in the penthouse and I didn't know how I got there. It was dark and the wind was howling outside like it did in a hurricane. And, for a split second, I forgot what the world had become. I rolled over to look out the wall of glass, expecting to see objects flying through the air with the rough winds. Instead, ten rippers hovered outside the window and reality kicked me in the gut.

My involuntary screa
m pierced the air. Cormac ran in the room and immediately went to the window, pulling the drapes closed.

"I'm sorry," he sai
d after the rippers were out of view. "I forgot to close them when I brought you in here."

"
It just startled me." I sat up in bed, pushing my hair out of my eyes. I looked at the clock that read one in the morning. "How did I get here?"

"You fell asleep while you were talking to Pat. He said you
were leaning against the wall talking one second and then you were out, sleeping right where you stood." He walked over and stood at the foot of the bed. "Just to warn you, he's a little freaked out."

"Why?"

"You were emitting some of that white smoke stuff again while you slept. He said it was coming out of your nose when you breathed out."

"Shit."
Somehow, that wasn't overly surprising to me. Everything weird happened while I slept and I had zero control over it. This pattern had caused me problems my entire life.