Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (27 page)

B
ryan watched
the woods around him, amazed at what was happening. Had he been in control of his body, his jaw probably would have hung loose. He didn't even have the awareness to look for Thera, to see what she thought.

He was watching something out of a movie, something like
Predator
, when the muscular men with paint on their face showed up to kill the alien. None looked like bodybuilders, most of these people were thin—some wiry, some filling up their shirts, but all of them had paint covering their face. Brown and green, blending with the thick forest that Bryan had grown up playing in, acting like he was one of these men as they ran around shooting fake guns. He had been chasing Michael back then, but these men were chasing an alien.

These men were chasing him and Thera.

"You seeing this?" Thera asked.

"Christ yes."

Morena had spent the fifteen minutes in between the first two people they saw and the arrival of these new men finding a place to hide. She wasn't leaving this area, but she didn't trust herself to go directly out into the middle yet. Bryan could sense some of this, could sense her disappointment in herself, perhaps for walking out here in the first place, so brazenly. The confidence she felt with herself didn't extend to Bryan's body, or Thera's. She knew she would die if something attacked her.

Bryan knew of places in these woods that none of these men would ever find, places that it took he and Michael years to search for or build. It was easy for Morena to find them even though the first two spots she went to had been overgrown from when Bryan used to romp around in these woods. The third, though, looked nearly the same as it had when the boys were twelve.

It had been fucking tough to build. Months of work, but everyday after school, the two of them showed up with shovels and garden tools. It was an accident that they found the damn place, Bryan tripping over it when he was chasing Michael (who seemed to never trip in his life, but just glided over the ground like Marty McFly on a hover-board). It was a rock, and when they examined it closely, it stretched ten feet in either direction, but yet the vast majority of it was only a few inches thick, with dirt underneath it. The 'base' of the rock stretched further down into the Earth, and when the two of them started digging, they realized they were basically creating a foxhole. So they dug enough room for them to slip inside, and then dug out nearly an entire room. They brought benches, disassembling them to slip through the entrance they created (necessary for it to be small, so that others playing guns with them would never see it) and then reassembling once inside. The rock overhang kept the elements out, and while they found a squirrel inside from time to time, that was pretty much it.

Somehow, the damn thing had held up over the course of six years.

Morena went to it, and then both Thera and Bryan's bodies slipped through the twelve-inch gap.

The benches were still there, and the place smelled of fresh dirt. Pieces of the walls had fallen in, and Bryan immediately saw the bones of small animals, but that was it. This was their fort of old, the greatest one they ever created.

And now Bryan had brought this thing here, this royalty from another planet, this murderer.

Both Thera and he, or rather their bodies, stood, peering out into the woods as they watched the swarm of men settling in. They carried sniper rifles, knives, pistols, and a number of weapons that Bryan couldn't name.

"Who are they?" Morena asked, speaking for the first time in an hour.

"That's what we call the cavalry, Morena," Bryan said.

"Don't play games with me."

"He means they're the people here to stop you. It's a phrase," Thera said, clearly trying to keep Morena from inflicting some kind of harm on Bryan. Thera was always going to be the smartest of the group, but Bryan didn't care right then. Seeing these guys, all of them looking like they meant to do serious damage, brought him hope. They were like a big Fuck You to Morena and everything she thought or wanted.

"How will they stop me?"

Bryan's cheer died. He hadn't considered that, because despite his proximity to Morena, he still considered himself a completely separate being. Something that would go on living even if she died. But that wasn't true—not right now at least. If she died, it meant he died, because she was inside him. These people weren't the cavalry, they were goddamn executioners.

"Those things they're holding are called guns. They'll shoot you and that means basically to put small metal objects in our bodies. We won't live through it."

Bryan couldn't help but admire her, even now, with death fifty feet from them, Thera was teaching, telling an entity that she completely hated what this all meant. She was the smartest of them, and maybe she was the best of them too.

"How long will they stay?"

Bryan laughed, unable to stop himself. "Until they fucking find you, Morena. They're not here on a camping trip. Look at them, they're here to kill and they mean to do it."

No one spoke as they watched the last of the men find their spots, many of them lying down and placing camouflaged tarps over themselves.

"It's over, Morena. They're going to win. I don't care who or what you are, you're not walking out of here alive. I don't know how you do what you do, but if you can reverse it, if you can return to wherever you came from, do it now. You don't have to get us all killed in this." And it was the truth. There was no way out of this, not for her, and not for Bryan or Thera if she went forward. She could let them go and she could live too, maybe, if she wanted.

"What does your book about The Makers say? Ye have little faith?" Morena said.

T
he core
of the Earth had radically changed, even though no one on the surface knew it. The molten lava that burned red and blue inside no longer held those colors. The heat still lived there—Makers, yes it did—but the rocks that had melted and churned over millions of years were no longer rocks.

They were food.

And the core a breeding ground.

The core, of course, didn't mind the change. The core was the Buddha, allowing life to happen and having no wishes or wants as to the outcomes. It was the people above that put labels onto change, the people above that felt an immense need to hold onto what they had. The core felt none of that, like a mountain that watches land masses move and wars destroy the surrounding landscape.

However, what had changed the core, what was using it as food and birthing itself again and again, cared deeply about what came next. Indeed, one could say it cared as much as the humans above.

The white strings that first shot out across the circumference of inner Earth had multiplied over and over, filling the core so that a tremendous pressure was now placed on the surrounding rock. The strings were searching, all of them in one hive mind, looking for a beacon, the beacon that would say to
arrive
, to
come forward
. They couldn't find it though; there seemed to be nothing above, as if they had been born into a dead world. That couldn't be possible though, the spore that created them had to come from something, from a mother somewhere. They had spoken to this mother, had told her what they needed, but…

Only silence above.

They wanted their mother, desperately so. The strings needed a release, and a controlled one, or else the pressure inside would simply explode all around, and this entire planet would end up no more than separate rocks floating through space.

The strings couldn't stop their multiplication, couldn't slow down what they were meant to do, especially not with the food source available; all of it happening because The Makers built it inside the strings, made it their purpose. Nothing stops purpose, that's what they understood and it frightened them a great deal as they couldn't find the beacon.

They couldn't find their mother.

And without her, they would die.

M
orena understood time
in a way that she never had before. Her life, the life of everyone from Bynimian, stretched on and on, especially compared to this species here. No one from her planet measured their life in terms of years, but in thousands of them. Millions, even. Time was a gift from The Makers, but for her species, it wasn't an expensive one, or at least Morena hadn't thought so.

Now, though, standing in this hole with these two bodies, she understood how expensive that gift was and how foolish she had been to think it an afterthought in The Makers' creation. There was nothing but time right here, time to look at these frail creatures crawling around on their bellies, concentrating so hard on killing her. Time to listen to the hopes and fears of the creatures she inhabited. Time was everywhere, and yet there wasn't nearly enough. Because soon, very soon, her children would die.

She knew that meant she would die as well, but that was ancillary, unimportant. Even Briten, whom this had all begun over, his death while more important than her own, didn't matter. Her children mattered. Her people, the future of their species, mattered. And if she didn't do something, if she didn't figure this 'the fuck out'—as Bryan would say—then they would certainly die and her bloodline was over.

Morena wouldn't allow it to happen.

She would spread.

She would spread throughout this whole town if that's what it took, but in the end, she would welcome her children to this planet.

Morena considered both of the bodies available to her for a brief moment, but in the end, the male would be the most efficient. He was stronger and faster, and that was all that mattered over the next few minutes. She quickly plotted where she would go, understanding intricately how quickly she would have to move to avoid detection. It would be shockingly close, but she still possessed another body inside the hole that would keep her alive. If the male died, there was still the female.

Chilras' face came to her then, as if her ghost had somehow followed from across the universe, not giving up her admonition, refusing to let Morena do what was needed.

What had the old Bynum said in Briten's hearing? That they weren't a violent species. That they had never gone to war before. That it was against their makeup.

Paraphrased, but yes, that was the gist. And here Morena was, prepared to murder this entire forest and everything outside of it, without hesitation. Her mother had never been in this situation, in a dirt hole on a foreign planet—neither had Chilras for that matter. She gave her statements sitting high in a chair, looking down on someone she despised. In this hole though, looking out at a species who meant to kill her and her entire kind, the tint with which one saw the world changed. No longer a rosy red, but a necessary gray. She had not been born to do this, to murder, but she had been born to protect. To be a mother.

Chilras would never know what that meant, and so her words could die with her.

There were no other choices.

Morena used the male's body to climb out of the pit; she did it carefully, so as to not make noise, with a control over his muscles that he would never have been able to master. She left the female behind, though she heard both of them struggling inside her.

She crouched in the dirt, looking around the woods, her mind having mapped out exactly where all her enemies were. She watched them enter carefully, and now the forest was like home to her, able to walk through it without the lights on, not worrying about bumping into anything.

Morena only needed one. Things would move rapidly then, if she could get just one.

She stared straight ahead, not needing her eyes to tell her where to move. To her right, seven hundred paces, was a lone man. He had a tarp of some kind over him, something to blend in with the leaves and pine straw. Could she make it that far without being seen by anyone? There wasn't time for those questions anymore; if she waited much longer, all would be lost.

She went, her body low, focusing every bit of her willpower on moving the male's body precisely. Before, each time she moved within this shell, she had been somewhere else—always trying to understand the world around her or thinking about the future. Now, though, there was no future outside of the next step. Each one needed to be perfect. The pit she hid inside was in a good spot, outside the perimeter of where the guns pointed; she was coming from behind them.

Fifty feet away, and this body still lived. She crouched again, looking at the man lying face down. His rifle positioned forward, looking down the scope for something that was supposed to show up in front of him. Fifty feet was all she had to travel, but the closer she got, the more likely he would hear, the more likely someone would see.

She moved, one foot in front of the other, closer now to the men waiting to kill her than to the safety of the hole. Her eyes never left the man in front of her, the two people inside her mind relegated to a distance so far that she couldn't hear them at all. Only the person on the ground mattered, only getting to him.

At ten feet away, her step finally made a noise that traveled to the man's ears.

He turned slightly, his head looking over his shoulder, but not moving his weapon. Had he turned his gun with him, he might have had a chance.

Morena fell on him with the cold mind of a snake. He tried to get to his back, to fend her off with his fists and whatever weapons he held, but when her hand moved over his throat and those tiny needles pierced his skin, there was nothing left for him to do besides accept the life flowing into him.

"
C
hrist
," Rigley said, standing beside Will.

She was looking at the body on the floor. A person, a Lane Unknown. Someone might know his last name, maybe even Rigley, but Will didn't. He had grown close to the man on the floor, somewhat at least, over the past week. Today had been a bad one, for all involved, and now Lane was dead. Andrew stood in the room with them but had said nothing since Will and Rigley showed up.

"You knew him, didn't you?" Will asked.

"Yeah," Andrew said.

"For how long?"

"We started together. Our first assignment."

Will didn't say anything, just looked at the broken human in front of him. His brain most likely hemorrhaged, and that's why he died. They had become lax, all of them in this room. They became concerned with what was happening outside and not inside. Will had put Andrew downstairs to look at the mapping, leaving Lane up here by himself after nearly two days without sleep.

Will glanced around the room, looking for pills, but he knew he wouldn't find any. He hadn't left any for these two.

Lax.

That's what caused this. It wasn't the man on the floor's fault, not entirely. Part of this was on Will, Andrew, and even Rigley.

"What are we going to do with the body?" Rigley said.

"We'll leave it for now. We can't remove it until after dark anyway."

Rigley walked across the room, stepping over the dead body, and going into the bathroom. He thought she was going to vomit, but instead she just poked her head in, making sure no one was trying to hide—though why they would ever do that, Will couldn't tell.

Will had seen a lot of dead bodies in his life, more than anyone else in this room, that was for sure. For some reason though, he couldn't pull his eyes away from this one. The blood leaking from his ear, Lane's broken skull.

"You don't know where they are?" Rigley said as she came out from the bathroom.

"No," Andrew answered, his eyes also looking down at Lane’s body.

"Can you two stop staring at him for a second? He's dead and there's a good chance we'll all end up the same if we don't focus. How the hell are we going to find them?"

Will's eyes snapped up to Rigley, hearing words that sounded like her five years ago. Not like the woman that had been in charge of this assignment.

How would they find them?

"There's not a lot of places for them to go," Will said, thinking out loud. "Their homes? They might try to escape on foot, maybe trek through the woods if they recognize the roads leading out are monitored. I think the question is, how important are they?"

Rigley's eyebrows raised slowly, almost comically so, as if she had just stuck her hand into something she couldn't see, but that whatever she felt was certainly not what she expected. "Have you lost your goddamn mind, Will? How important are they? If they escape, it doesn't matter what we do here. If there's any possibility they're contaminated, at all, then the hammer isn't going to come down in Grayson-Fucking-Georgia. It's going to come down across the southeastern coastline. So I'd say they're pretty goddamn important."

Maybe she was right, though Will didn't think so, but regardless, she had pulled back the curtain that hid her mind just a bit. It wasn't much or for long, but he had been able to peek inside. He didn't know everything, but the hammer, that's what frightened her. The fact that it might not be just about Grayson, that somehow this might grow outside of the town.

The phone in his pocket vibrated. He reached for it, his eyes still on Rigley's.

"Will," he said.

"In the woods, people aren't answering."

"What do you mean?"

"I've been radioing down there, and so far, I haven't been able to get in touch with five of ours. I've spoken with others, and I'm making my way through the whole list, but I wanted you to know about the five."

Fires sparking up everywhere. Will couldn't go to any one place without another spot bursting into flames and needing his immediate attention. There was too much to manage, and even with Rigley's little return to form the past few minutes, there wasn't enough of Will to spread around. He needed help, but there wasn't anyone to ask.

"Keep the line open." Will hung up the phone. "Something is happening in the woods. People aren't answering when called."

M
ichael had been looking
at Julie for the better part of two hours. The sun was sinking now and the air growing cooler, but he wasn't going to move her anymore. They would sit out here until she woke up; Michael didn't know anything about medicine, but he wasn't going to attempt moving someone that might be seriously injured. She had been out for a long time, almost too long, and Michael worried that something irreversible might have been done.

That scared him, the thought that she might not wake up, and he hated the reason why it scared him. It was more than the thought that she might die, though that certainly weighed on him; the fear though, the part that refused to move her because he might add to her injuries, sprung from how alone he would be if something happened to her. Bryan was gone. Thera was gone. Wren…if he had ever been here at all, certainly wasn't someone Michael could turn to. All he had was Julie.

Another thirty minutes passed with him glancing from the dying sun to Julie and back again. Michael hadn't left the motel because there wasn't anywhere to go. There weren't any woods for him to hide in, and he wasn't going to try to hide behind a dumpster or something else with no real means to keep them from being seen. Instead, he went up, carrying Julie to the top of the building, and then finally finding a staircase that actually opened onto the roof. The final door hadn't been locked, and Michael could only put that down to the fact that the motel probably saw twenty people come through it a month, that and luck. He didn't really care.

He lay her down on the concrete and took a place next to her.

No one had come up, and if they had, there wasn't anything Michael could have done.

When she stirred, finally, Michael's eyes filled with tears. He didn't say anything, but just looked at her body moving for the first time in hours. Her eyelids fluttered and then she was staring across the dirty cement of the motel's roof.

"I'm here," he said.

She looked slightly up at him from where she lay.

"We're on top of the motel. I don't think anyone knows we're up here."

"What happened?" Julie asked, her mouth sounding like her tongue was tossing around gravel as she spoke.

"I was able to get us out, but I couldn't find anywhere else to go."

Long seconds passed with Michael just looking at her, tears still in his eyes, not spilling over but not drying either.

"Why does my face hurt so bad?"

"One of them hit you."

"Why?"

Michael didn't want to say. Everything else he'd said and done—even killing the guard—didn’t feel as daunting as what Julie was asking him. "You went at them. You, I don't know, you were screaming at them and one of them just reached out and slammed you into the wall." But he wasn't answering her question, not really. Factually, yes, but substantially? No.

He watched as she slowly made the connections, not speaking, but thinking through her last memories before blackness took over. And when it clicked, Michael knew, because she brought her hand to her mouth as her eyes widened, tears welling just as Michael's had.

"No," she said, shaking her head.

Michael looked away, down to the roof, unable to hold her stare, unable to watch the birth of horrible knowledge in her face.

"No," she said again.

The tears came then, heavy and full like the moon in a clear sky in some foreign desert. Michael scooted closer to her, wrapping his arm around her shoulders and pulling her close—that kind of demonstration of emotion nearly as alien to him as the orb he saw in those woods. Julie kept her cries quiet, not wanting them to be heard beyond this lonely cage of theirs. Michael didn't know how long it took, but he knew when her visible anguish finally subsided, it was fully dark outside.

"We have to try to get off here tonight," he said, not removing his arm from her shoulders.

She nodded.

"I guess we should try to find my father." Michael didn't know if that was true, if they should try to find Wren at all, but he also couldn't think of anything else they could do. Certainly using phones was out of the question. Bryan and Thera as well. Wren was all that was left, and that just about fit with everything else happening in this whole goddamn situation.

Julie said nothing, and in the moonlight, it was tough for Michael to make out the blue and purple colors of her face. They appeared only as black, half of her head looking charred with ash.

M
ichael didn't wear a watch
, and without a phone, he was wishing he'd made that simple investment. He didn't know the time, only that the moon was slowly moving across the sky. He couldn't see sunlight yet, and that was good. When the sun finally made its return, Michael needed to have found them somewhere else to hide. If not, their little escape would be over. When the day returned, his former captors would find him and Julie.

The walk to his father's house had been long. That's all he really knew. One foot after another with Julie walking right beside him, and both of them dropping to the ground any time a car drove by on the road. His calves trembled now and he had never wanted anything as bad as he wanted sleep, but he couldn't think about that. He couldn't dwell on sleep because he couldn't have it.

The trailer was dark, not a single light on in the entire thing, at least none that Michael could see. He and Julie stood across the street, their bodies close to one of his neighbor's trailers, peering around the side but not daring to venture out into the open. Michael didn't see anything obvious, but even the thought that someone might see him was too much to consider.

He didn't know what to do, though. It didn't look like his father was there, even his truck was gone. So they could hide here behind this trailer, but not forever. The sun
would
come up, and people
would
come out. He and Julie would be seen.

For the first time since this all started, Michael felt a crushing hopelessness. Somehow, up until this point, he had kept a kernel of hope inside his mind, a hope that they would get out of this. That Thera and Bryan would get out of this. That whatever was happening would end, and they could find their way back—all of them—and if not to normalcy, then something close. Looking at his trailer from across the street, the moonlight casting its white glow across the cracked asphalt, he understood that there would never be normalcy again. Not for him or Julie, and probably not for anyone in this town.

This was as normal as life would get, and Michael thought that the people inside the trailer he now hid behind would soon be brought into his new world. That the people who stole him would come for them as well.

He didn't even know if Wren was alive. He heard them say it, but that was hours ago, and in all that passing time, they could have easily killed him.

"Do you see anything?" Julie whispered from his side. She wasn't trying to peer around, just standing with her back to the white metal of the trailer.

"No." Just an empty house.

"What are we going to do?"

"I don't think we should go in there," he said. "Not without knowing if someone is waiting for us."

The headlights made Michael jump as they filled up the dark road in front of the trailer. He didn't know the time, but this was the first car he'd seen in his neighborhood. It moved slow, so that all he could see were the headlights as they grew larger and larger. Michael didn't think anyone could see him from the road, especially not in a car, but even so his breathing stopped.

He saw the hood of the vehicle as it rolled into his line of sight, slowly growing larger with each turn of its wheels.

And then, as if he'd been staring at one of those trick pictures—the ones with dual images, he saw what was in front of him.

His father's truck.

Joy burst into his brain like a cop using a no-knock warrant.

He looked behind to Julie, but she wasn't with him, didn’t seem interested in the slightest about whatever vehicle was rolling down the street.

"Stay here," he said, completely not caring if this was some kind of trick, unable to hold back from rushing to the road. He stepped out from behind the trailer and started a silent jog across the small yard, his hands waving above him, trying to get the vehicle to see him. He didn't want to shout, but he would if he had to. He would do whatever it took to get that familiar truck to halt.

The truck stopped and the door opened.

Michael couldn't see who was inside, couldn't see who stepped out, only that someone was coming for him. Michael stopped then, fear and caution finally grabbing hold of him.

The person ran through the shadows, not saying a word; the truck had stopped in the middle of the road with the door wide open. Michael wanted to run, wanted to turn and flee for his life, but he only stood there, stuck in the moonlight the same as the vehicle.

And then his father was hugging him, wrapping his arms around Michael, saying words that Michael couldn't understand and didn't try to. The only thing Michael knew for sure was that he wasn't crying, yet his face was wet from touching his father's tears.