Escaping Grace: A Turning Grace Novel (8 page)

Or was it because I was hungry?

Tristen turned my face toward his. His fingers ran through my curls before he found the back of my head and gently forced me to lean in closer to him.

I relaxed my body, kissing his soft lips once he leaned in close enough. The sun was going down, and my room was quickly losing light. We were finally completely alone.

His hand found my hip and he slowly pulled me closer to him. Our mouths opened and closed into each other’s, and I believe that was the moment I realized how much I loved kissing.

A sting in my stomach made me tighten my belly muscles.

No. Not hungry. Not now.

Our legs intertwined, our movements became in sync. I rested my hand on the back of his neck and pushed my body as close to his as I could.

I felt him kick his shoes off the edge of the bed before he got up to untie my Chuck Taylors. I sat up halfway and watched while he slowly slid each shoe off, squeezing my feet when he was done. He looked up at me, bit his bottom lip and grinned.

Another ache shot across my stomach, a little sharper than the one before. I gripped my comforter tight till it passed, making sure he didn’t notice.

I focused my attention on his sexy smirk. My heart began to feel like it was going to jump out of my throat. It was racing at the thought of this moment being THE moment. The moment my innocence card could be given up.

He crawled back onto the bed, grazing his fingertips all the way up from my ankle, to my leg, to my thigh, then to my hip as he gently lay on top of me. He kissed my neck and I closed my eyes, feeling a tingle radiate through my chest. His teeth lightly brushed against my skin. I threw my head back, allowing him more room to do what he had to do.

I bit my lip, but it wasn’t for the euphoric sensation Tristen was causing. The throbbing in my stomach was becoming constant. 

His kisses flowed up to my chin, then my jaw, and back to my lips. I allowed my hands to roam free on his back until I found the edge of his shirt. I pulled it up over his head without even thinking, only that it was getting in the way.

His skin was so smooth, and I could feel the muscles in his back…so firm.

A sudden burst of pain emitted from my lower abdomen and my fingernails dug into his skin. A moan escaped my throat from the pain that was becoming too unbearable to hide.

Tristen must have found this sexy or something because he didn’t stop kissing me. He let out a low groan, then found the edge of
my
shirt and began to pull it up.

This was where I had to stop him.

“Tristen.”

He stopped immediately and looked at me. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. I just scratched you.”

He smiled a devilish smile. “Um, Grace…I am totally okay with that.”

I sat up and moved away from him.

“What’s wrong?”

I grabbed onto my stomach and tried to concentrate on his face, but this was proving to be hard. The room was beginning to spin and bile was rising up from deep within. I immediately put my hand over my mouth to somehow stop the gag that was forming in my throat. Suddenly, I could smell a familiar odor. I pulled my hand away and studied my fingernails before smelling them.

A delicious scent entered my nostrils, and I started to shake when I realized what it was. I had just scratched Tristen’s back with this hand.

“Grace, you’re pale. What’s wrong?” he asked, placing a hand on my cheek.

I turned my head away. I didn’t want him to touch me. I wanted him to get away from me. But the sweat was beginning to drip from my scalp. I was getting hungrier by the minute. I needed food, but I couldn’t talk. The hunger was reaching up into my mouth.

Tristen must have realized what was going on and got up to head for the door. A second later Number One was picking me up off the bed and carrying me down the hall.

I rested my head onto his stiff chest. He smelled sharp and clean.

Tristen was following close behind. No shoes, no shirt. A grocery store would not have allowed him in.

The nighttime breeze found its way between me and Number One, and it felt really nice on my clammy skin. Number One kept a straight face. He was on a mission. His pace was steady and fast.

“Tristen, stay outside!”

“But, is she going to be okay?” Tristen asked with obvious concern.

“Yes. Just stay here!” Number One ordered.

I closed my eyes, trying hard to keep from seeing the world twist and turn.

“Is she okay?” There was another voice, but it wasn’t Tristen’s.

“No, she needs food.”

Number One set me down.

“Here, I’ve got her.” It was Ian. I could tell by his accent.

I leaned against him and cradled my face into his neck. I was shivering. I couldn’t keep my teeth from clattering.

I felt a hand on my cheek, but I wasn’t sure who it was.

“Hey, hurry up and bring the food! She’s fading out!”

Chapter 7

The Progression

I opened my eyes. A hand was resting on mine. My eyes traveled from the hand, to the arm, to Tristen sleeping in a chair. I glanced over at my other hand. An IV was taped to it, with a tube going up into the IV bag that was hanging above my head. I was in the Z lab.

I sat up slowly, trying not to wake Tristen. I maneuvered myself out of the bed quietly, taking the white sheet and wrapping it around myself. I was naked under a gray gown, which was tied in the back, but I could feel the cold air on my exposed butt.

The floor was cold too.

Luckily the IV bag was on wheels. I walked over to Tristen who was sitting uncomfortably in the chair. He was passed out, and I didn’t want to wake him.

I watched him for a moment. The sleeve of his t-shirt was slightly rolled up, allowing me to see the tattoo on his arm. I never got to really look at it before, now that I thought it about. The intricately detailed bird rising up from a pool of fire was beautifully drawn, and the colors were vividly bright. I remembered that night at Eric’s apartment, when he shared his story about the phoenix and the love for his grandfather. It made me smile to think that I knew exactly how important that tattoo was to him.

I took another sheet off my bed and covered him with it before kissing his cheek.

How did I get so lucky to find someone who would want a relationship with me after everything I have done? And all the crap that came along with it.

I walked out of my room into an empty, quiet hallway. The lights were dim. It must have been really late at night.

Dr. Roberson came out of a room at the end of the hall. His head was down looking at a folder. I began to walk toward him, pulling my IV stand with me.

He finally looked up and smiled when he saw me. “Grace, what are you doing out of bed? You should be asleep.”

“What happened?”

“Come with me. We’ll go to my office.”

I followed him back into the direction he came from. Once inside his office, I sat down on his couch. He pulled his stethoscope from around his neck and put it into his ears. He sat next to me to listen to my heartbeat.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel fine. Why am I here?”

He pulled the stethoscope out of his ears and wrapped it back around his neck. “Well, you passed out.”

“Why? Am I getting worse?”

“Yes and no.”

Well that wasn’t confusing at all. “What do you mean?”

“You were my first subject, which means that you have had this condition longer than any of the other subjects here. It would appear that your condition is progressing.”

“What do you mean progressing? Are you going to send me to East Cocos?” That word QUARANTINE came to mind.

“So, you heard about that. No, I am not sending you over there. Those subjects are very sick.”

“What happened to them?”

“There was an incident. A minor one. Unfortunately, they were affected. But we are taking good care of them, and they should be healthy enough to come back to this part of the island soon. No need to worry about them. What is wrong with them won’t happen to you.”

An incident?

“So, what’s going to happen to me?” A part of me didn’t want to know the answer to this question. I knew I was getting worse. I could feel it. My appetite was not what it was back home. It’s deeper now. The Need was getting stronger.

“Let me begin by educating you on what is happening in your body. As I’ve explained before, you are experiencing a need for something that you don’t have. Your body is trying to replace the part of you that isn’t alive. When you get hungry, your brain goes into survival mode. Now, you don’t get hungry like I do. You become starved immediately, almost to the point of feeling as though you haven’t eaten in weeks. Your body begins to shut down. The same would happen to a person who was starving to death, only it would take longer for them to expire. This is why you feel terrible when you feel even slight hunger.”

“However, because Serum Z is in your bloodstream, you will never
starve
to death. Instead, survival mode will kick in. You will come out of what we call the hunger coma and begin frantically searching for what you need.”

“So basically, a zombie who stumbles around in search of human flesh?” There was no way Dr. Roberson could tell me this wasn’t a scene from a zombie movie. I was a zombie. There was no doubt about.

“If you are referring to the movies, then yes. I will agree with you on that. You would pretty much perform the same way they do. But Grace, this is real life. And you know I don’t like the term “zombie”.

I ignored that last comment. “Would my skin start falling off? Like the zombies in the movies? You said I would perform the same way they do. Would I look like them too?” This was a pretty horrifying thought. I could just imagine my skin sloughing off my body, blood gushing out of every orifice. And my hair! If this was anything like how zombies were portrayed in movies, I would pretty much become bald! Maybe I had ambitions to make people
look
that way for TV, but I sure as hell didn’t want that to happen to me in real life.

Dr. Roberson inhaled before answering. “Yes.”

Okay, I wasn’t expecting that.

He continued. “Your body would not be capable of healing. The parts that required the nourishment to stay alive would no longer work, causing your body to deteriorate.”

“So once I get what I need, I will go back to normal, right? All of those nonworking parts would start working again.”

“Sadly, no. If you got to this point, then it would be too late for your organs. And once you got into that frenzied state, your mind would no longer function the same as a normal human. All reasoning would be lost, and the only thing that would make sense to you would be to keep nourishing yourself with what you think you need. Unfortunately, we have yet to reverse this from happening.” He sounded disappointed about that.

I looked down at my hands. “Well, what do we do? How do we stop this from happening?”

“You eat more. And you eat as soon as you feel hungry. It’s as simple as that,” he said plainly.

“That’s it? Won’t it just keep getting worse and worse? Will I have to eat all day long?”

“As long as you get the right quality and quantity, you shouldn’t get any worse than you are. The plan is to up your food intake. We are also going to…play around with what you eat. Maybe serve you something other than boar. We have other sources of food on the island. We’ll see what happens then. But that is why you are here, Grace. This is a research facility. We are researching. We are finding better ways of dealing with your condition. All of the subjects here will eventually get to the point where you are at now, of needing more and better sustenance. But because you were our first subject, and you’ve had Serum Z in your bloodstream longer, you are experiencing it sooner.”

On the morning of my departure, he clarified a lot…like what happened when I died initially and that my “condition” wasn’t a virus or contagious. All of what he was telling me now was more information than I was excepting Dr. Roberson to give me in one night. But since he just mentioned me being his first subject…I mean
patient
, this was my chance. “What happened to the second patient? The one that was injected after me.”

Dr. Roberson got up from the couch and walked over to his desk. He took off his lab coat and placed it on the back of his computer chair. “He died.”

“Why? Didn’t you inject him?”

“We did. But, he was alive when we injected him. It was part of the research. We wanted to see what capabilities Serum Z had. We wanted to know if it could help someone who was only injured.”

“And it didn’t,” I stated.

“No, it didn’t. He died right after the injection. This is when we learned that a subject must be deceased in order for Serum Z to do what it was originally designed to do. Revive.”

“What happened? Why was he injured?”

Dr. Roberson leaned up against his desk and folded his arms. “Car accident.”

I nodded once and looked away. There was nothing more I could say. I felt bad for the poor guy. He might have been able to live without the serum.

“Will I ever die?” Eric came to mind. If Tristen didn’t stop him, could Eric have ended my life right then and there? Or would he have just continued choking me without any end results? I could almost see the confusion on Eric’s face when he realized after ten minutes that I was still alive. Another ten minutes would pass, and then he would become frustrated at the fact that I just wouldn’t die already.

Dr. Roberson cocked his head to the side and frowned. “You don’t like the idea of being immortal.”

I looked down at my hands again. Although his statement was true, I felt guilty for feeling this way. Obviously, he was very proud of his discovery of eternal life. Now here I was, allowing him to feed me and give me a place to stay and take care of me, and I wasn’t completely on board with his amazing discovery. I was sure he felt offended.

“Immortality is not for everyone. It is something that should be earned. An offering that should be given to people who deserve it. A person who has done wrong in their life, things that cannot be forgiven such as murder or acts of violence, should not be given a second opportunity to live. But a person like you…or Ian or Maddi, a person who deserves to have a future, should have the chance to live it out. You all were threatened to be taken out of this world much too young.”

“But what about Estelle? She was already so much older.”

“When I approached Estelle regarding Serum Z, I was taking my chances. I wanted to find someone who was nearing the end. And it just so happened that she wasn’t ready go.”

Well, she was now.

He came to sit next to me. “Living forever isn’t about living forever, Grace. It means that there is a prospect of doing every single thing we ever wanted do in life, and then some, without the threat of having it all taken away suddenly.”

I had a gnawing feeling that Dr. Roberson was trying to convince me. “But, what if that person doesn’t want to live forever? Is there a way to end it, or are we just stuck here?”

I didn’t know why I was so against a never-ending life. I wasn’t a very religious person. It wasn’t like I knew for sure or even truly believed that there was a heaven up there for my soul to fly up to. I didn’t know if there was a golden gate where you stood in line and waited to enter before you could meet the Creator of all things.

But it just didn’t seem like it was the natural order of things. It didn’t seem right. What could you possibly do with hundreds and hundreds of years under your belt? You would have seen and done everything you possibly could before it just got too boring. Or worse. What if you ended up alone because you were the only one out of your friends and family, the people that you truly cared about, to have Serum Z in your bloodstream?

He slid his glasses closer to his face. “A subject injected with Serum Z could live indefinitely, provided that the subject does not come into contact with flames or combustion, or machinery, tools, and anything that could cause decapitation.”

His answer was so textbook, but I understood exactly what he was saying. “So in other words, if I catch on fire or someone cuts my head off, then I’m done,” I confirmed.

“Yes.”

“So, I can get shot in the heart or choked without dying?” I could suddenly feel the grip of Eric’s hands around my neck.

“Essentially, yes. Your heart will stop from the bullet, or you could stop breathing from strangulation, but after a minute or two, your heart will start beating and you will start breathing again.”

I opened my mouth to ask another question, and then realized that I was fresh out. He stumped me. I didn’t know what to think. I was the alien in a science fiction film. The boogeyman in a horror movie. The jerk chasing after you that just wouldn’t die, no matter how many times you shoot him with a shotgun. I was freaking Jason from
Friday the 13
th
!

“You should really go get some rest. It’s getting very late,” he said as he moved over to the door to open it.

I stood up, thoughts of my immortal future reeling in my mind. I began to walk out of the door back toward my room when I felt a slight tug behind me.

“Grace, don’t forget your IV stand.”

I turned and grabbed it without looking at him. I just needed some sleep.

~~~~

I took a deep breath in before opening my eyes. I stared up at the ceiling. I didn’t have dreams as much as I used to anymore. I guess that would be a good thing considering how morbid and real they felt just a couple of weeks ago.

I watched Tristen sleep for a bit last night before finally dozing off. Maybe that gave my mind some kind of peace.

Muffling sounds of people’s voices came from the other side of the closed door to my room.

I glanced over at the chair Tristen was sleeping in, only to find that he wasn’t in it. Hmm…maybe he got hungry and went to find something to eat.

Speaking of something to eat.