The Resurrected Compendium (38 page)

The guy stopped moving.

Maddy slipped her fingers into what was now pretty much nothing but a mushy mess. She cupped the hard thing, like a stone…no, not a stone. More like an egg. She took the egg thing out of his head again, or at least she tried, but the harder she pulled, the more the threads wound themselves deeper into his brains.

Now he twitched and jerked against the tape and the ropes, hard enough to rock the chair. Hard enough to break free. With the egg thing still in her fist, Maddy refused to let go until with one hard yank, it sucked itself back inside the guy’s head just as he busted all her special knots and shoved backward in the chair.

Maddy got out of the way as fast as she could, which was faster than the guy in front of her, what with his skull broken open and his brains starting to slide out. He tried to grab her, but she easily ducked his swinging arms. She kicked him in the knee, then the other one. Both cracked and he went down. Then she hit him over the head with the hammer she grabbed up from the table.

“Hey,” she said to the back of his head. “You in there. Whatever you are. That body you’re in is a mess.”

The man didn’t move, but his brains sure did. All those black threads wriggled up to the surface, weaving around the egg thing. Maybe to protect it, she thought as she bent closer.

She spoke gently and stroked her fingertips along it the way she’d done to those baby bunnies whose mother had abandoned them. Dad said she shouldn’t have touched them, that’s why the mom wouldn’t come back to take care of them. Maddy’d wanted to raise them, but Dad said it would be too much work and they’d probably die anyway, but Maddy had insisted on trying. One died, but the other one didn’t. Well, not until she let it go in the back yard when it got big enough, and Ev ran it over with the lawn mower.

“What are you?”

It didn’t answer her, and she wasn’t surprised. She stroked it again, soft touches. Love hands, her mom had called it.
 

Touch the baby with love hands Maddy
.
His name is baby Jameson.

This time, when she pulled out the egg thing, all of its little black threads let go and got sucked, not back into the dead guy’s brains, but into the egg thing. It sat in her palm, smooth and grey. It didn’t make a sound, it didn’t move.

Maddy held it at eye level, no longer worried about the man at her feet. He was really dead, now. She stroked the egg thing again. This was what had made him get up and walk after he died, and it was what had made him sick and killed him in the first place. It had made him super strong.

 
Whatever it was, it had a lot of power.

She cupped it in her two hands, studying it. The flower she’d plucked off it had already shriveled up and died. The wriggly tadpole things and the black threads were gone, inside the egg thing. The surface was sort of rubbery feeling. She turned it over and over in her hands, trying to figure it out.

It reminded her of one of those puffball mushrooms that grew up in the yard. Small, round, brown, usually with a tiny hole in the top — and if it didn’t have one, you could just tear one. When you tore it open and squeezed it, a burst of powdery stuff shot out. You had to be super careful to wash your hands, because mushrooms were poison.

What would happen if she cut this open to get at the stuff inside? Was it poison? There was only one way to find out.

With the sharp tip of her fingernail, Maddy cut a slit in the surface of the egg thing. She squeezed it, a little like one of those old plastic coin purses you
 
could win for a few tickets at the carnival, so the hole gaped open. Then she squeezed it harder, the way you did those puffball mushrooms.

What flew out wasn’t powder. It was those little black wigglers, now each with one of those black threads attached. They shot out of the egg thing as she squeezed it, a cloud of them. Maddy’s head filled with the sound of a radio tuned to the wrong station.

She breathed.
 

She breathed.

She breathed it all in.

NINE

49

Kelsey had never known her father. According to her grandmother, may she rot in hell, Kelsey’s mother had been such a whore she’d been impregnated by the spunk of a dozen men and spawned a genetic abomination. Not pretty on the outside, even uglier on the inside. Kelsey knew that was a biological impossibility, obviously, but she’d also long ago stopped wondering who might’ve fathered her. It hadn’t mattered…and now she supposed it never would.

“She met him at work,” Dennis explained in a low voice. “She was in research and development, he was in another department. They both had top secret clearance, that’s what she always said.”

Kelsey’s brows rose. “Sounds like a real love match.”

“Oh…she never loved him.” Dennis laughed. “She said he was a motherfucking bastard, a useless waste of oxygen. Umm…she liked to call him a suppurating pustule on the ass of a syphilitic hermaphrodite.”

“Oh, she loved him,” Kelsey said after a second. “At least long enough for him to make her hate him.”

Dennis blinked at that and scrubbed a hand over his hair before cupping the back of her neck. “I never met him.”

“But you know what he looks like. Even like…that.” She pointed toward the vision on the monitor.

The guy’s head lolled, tongue hanging out, but eyes bright and fixed on the camera like he was looking straight at them. It gave her the creeps worse than anything she’d seen so far — and Kelsey had seen a lot of stuff. The guy was dead, but there he was, standing outside like he was waiting for someone to open the door.

“Pictures. She had some pictures.”
 

Kelsey glanced at him with a small smile. “She loved him.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Dennis frowned.

She thought hard for half a minute before answering. “Maybe?”

He looked at her. “Why?”

“Well.” Kelsey chewed her lower lip for a second. “At least she loved him and she didn’t just screw him. Or get knocked up by someone she didn’t even care about.”

The figure in the monitor swayed. The ones behind him had been standing motionless for the past half an hour. Now one fell down. Flat on its face, arms and legs sprawling. The sound of it must’ve been like a pumpkin hitting concrete, she thought, recoiling.

Dennis shook his head. “They can stand out there forever, I don’t care. Eventually, they’ll all fall down.”

“What do we do?”
 

“We’re safe in here,” Dennis told her. “Even if he is somehow smart or something, even if he remembers about the traps and defenses, look at him. Dude can barely walk, much less get past any of that stuff.”

Kelsey yawned, the back of her hand covering her mouth. “Dennis, I’m so tired. Where can I get some sleep?”

“You can use my bed.”

“It’s not big enough,” she told him flatly, no hint of flirtation, not even a ghost of a smile.

He paused. “Mom’s bed’s a queen.”

Upstairs in his mother’s room, Dennis carefully pulled down the covers with his good hand and waved her into the bed. Kelsey took off the borrowed jeans and shirt, leaving her in a tank top and boxers. She settled on the edge, staring at him until he looked away. She didn’t lay back.

“I don’t want to sleep alone,” she told him.

“Someone should…watch.”

Kelsey didn’t let this deter her. With a lift of her chin, she inched back and patted the mattress beside her. “You’re exhausted too. Come to bed with me.”

He shifted from foot to foot, still not looking at her. “Kelsey…”

“Dennis,” she said sharply. “I need you.”

Without another word, she scooted to the other edge of the bed and turned onto her side facing away from him. She waited, eyes closed, heart beating fast, for him to leave the room. After a long minute though, the mattress dipped. She felt his warmth behind her, though he wasn’t even close to touching her. She heard him breathing.

Kelsey knew men. She knew how they walked and talked and most of the time, how they thought. She knew them because she’d gone about the study of them as intensely and with as much effort as she’d put into her schoolwork. What men liked. What they wanted. She’d shaped her body, colored her hair and whitened her teeth to make herself as pleasing to them as she could, because men were very often the key to getting what she wanted.
 

What she wanted now, no…needed, now, was for Dennis to hold her.

When he didn’t move toward her, she shifted, inching backward. Reaching behind her, she took his arm, slipped it around her to tuck his hand against her belly just below her breasts. She held it there with hers. With still an inch or so of space between them, the position wasn’t as comfortable as she wanted. She moved closer.
 

At his sharp intake of breath, she paused. His breath caressed the back of her neck. More heat rose. His fingers twitched against her.

Kelsey shifted again. Slowly, slowly. She pressed her butt against his crotch, wiggling just a little to get comfortable.
 

Dennis sighed.

Tears pricked her eyes, so she closed them. Her breathing slowed. He didn’t move. She wriggled just a little closer, waiting.

When he made no move to slide his hand up to cup her breast, or to push himself against her — and he was hard, she could feel that with no trouble, when he made no effort at trying to make this simple embrace into something more, Kelsey pressed her free hand to her eyes to hold back the sting of tears.
 

“Dennis,” she breathed in a voice low and hoarse, sort of shameful in its need. “Please touch me.”

He shuddered, actually shook. Like he was disgusted. He made like he meant to pull away, but when she tightened her fingers in his, he stilled.

Without looking at him, Kelsey slid their joined hands down the flat stomach she’d worked so many hours to make taut and tight. How hard she’d struggled. The meals she’d missed, the surgeries. Now her hip bones jutted, her stomach concave. She could laugh. All it took was the end of the world to make her model-skinny, and here she was with a man who didn’t seem inclined to want her.

She pushed Dennis’s fingers beneath the edge of her borrowed boxers to cup her. The low noise he made in his throat encouraged her to curl his fingertips against her. Just…there.

Slow, slow, slow. She guided his fingertip in tiny, steady circles. She waited for him to move on his own, to go too fast, get too eager, to try and slide inside her from behind…but Dennis only did what Kelsey wanted him to do.
 

It went on and on, the pleasure rising incrementally, second by second, until she couldn’t stop herself from moving against him. Arching, Kelsey rolled her hips. He was so hard against her, but he didn’t even try to get inside her, it was driving her crazy and yet she couldn’t make herself shift or open for him. All she could do was keep his fingers moving on her.
 

She whispered his name, turning her face to give him her mouth. Dennis didn’t kiss her. She let go of his hand to slide her arm up and around the back of his head. If his hand had stopped moving between her legs, she’d have screamed — but it didn’t. He’d found her rhythm. Just right.
 

Just…there.

Oh, how long it had been since she’d felt anything but fear or pain or utter exhaustion. It made this pleasure all the sweeter. It rocked her. It turned her inside out. In fact, she wept with it, or maybe there were other reasons for the tears, but whatever it was, she tasted salt when she came.

Long, silent seconds later, she went still. Dennis breathed against her neck, his hand still tucked between her legs. Kelsey blinked and wiped her face, not sure of what to say.

When it became clear Dennis wasn’t going to speak, she rolled to face him, her thigh nudging between his. She thought about reaching between them to touch him, but something in his eyes kept her from it. Instead, she cupped his face.

“Dennis?”

Dennis settled a little into the pillow.

“Thank you.”

He looked uncomfortable. “You don’t have to thank me.”

She pushed her thigh a little higher. “Don’t you want…me?”

Kelsey had thought she was a pretty good judge of when to be coy, when to flutter her lashes and dip her chin to make a man feel like he was in charge. She knew when to be aggressive, too. The perfect mix of madonna and whore. She had no idea how to deal with a man who seemed bent on resisting her.

Dennis didn’t move, though he sure looked like he wanted to. He swallowed hard, his gaze shifting from hers. He closed his eyes after a second, as though the sight of her was too much. “Yes. No. I mean…you don’t have to do this.”

“I want to,” she told him and got up on one elbow to look into his face. “Dennis. Look at me.”

He did after a second, though clearly with reluctance. Kelsey moved away to give him some space. She frowned, trying to understand him and still unable.

“I want you,” she said simply. “I want to do this with you. I don’t know how to be more blunt except to say Dennis, please fuck me.”

He snorted, his body jerking, and sat up. He twisted away from her. The movement was so swift, so sharp, she didn’t have time to react until he’d completely given her his back.

“What did I do?” She cried.

“It’s not you.”

She put a hand on his shoulder, careful not to squeeze too hard. “Then…what?”

He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’ve never…I mean…it’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I don’t know how.”

She laughed; it was the wrong thing to do of course. Men never took kindly to laughter when it came to bedroom matters. But she couldn’t help it. “Oh, Dennis, you definitely know how.”

She’d been with men who’d have slapped her for that laughter, but Dennis’s mouth quirked up on one side. “No.”

She nodded, taking a chance on moving a little closer. “Oh. Yes.”

He ducked his head, not looking at her again. His shoulders hunched. “You probably think I’m the biggest asshole alive.”

“Because you’ve never slept with someone?” Truthfully, she found it surprising and endearing and charming and adorable.