Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (41 page)

He wanted to make actual contact. He wanted to speak to it, to converse, and to see if the feelings inside him were correct. If perhaps he had met something in this universe that matched his intellect, his detachment from the trivialities of this life.

He knew what he needed to do, but doing that would eliminate any ability to see if those feelings inside him meant anything. Now, bombing the entire state would lead to less enjoyment.

What to do, what to do?

But the decision had already been made. He needn’t do any calculations in his mind to understand which path he would choose. He had already chosen it. The moment he saw that magnificent creature, he knew. To hell with the rest of this planet. He would have his fun.

They were going back into Grayson.

M
ichael listened as Bryan spoke
. Listened as well as he could.

Things had progressed.

Michael could think of no other word that described his own state of mind. Such a detached, uncaring word.

Thera was dead.

Julie’s parents were dead.

Some kind of alien walked in the forest.

And only the most basic of emotions rolled through him at all. A twinge of sadness at Thera, though he understood what her death meant—that he would never, ever speak with her again. Julie, the girl he traveled through all of this with, she now sat next to Bryan, trying to get as close as she could. Michael felt no attachment, no togetherness from what they went through. His father, the only one who seemed at all concerned about him, could have been a piece of furniture.

The colors were leaving now, though Michael still saw them. To him, it appeared as if they had finished exploring this world, and now needed to be somewhere else. They moved slow, as if there was no set time they needed to be there. Michael tried to focus on his friend, but it was hard to pull himself away from watching the colors leave.

He wanted to tell the people around him, wanted to tell Wren. He tried earlier, but it went nowhere, because whatever these things were, no one else could see them. He tried to explain, tried to make Wren see what was in front of him, but it only ended with his father thinking Michael was dealing with PTSD.

Maybe he was.

Even that thought didn’t perturb Michael, though.

Because whether this was PTSD or there were actually innumerable ghosts made of extravagant colors swimming around them all, he couldn’t pull his eyes from them. So many colors, and none of them the same. Different shades, even if only minutely, so that when Michael thought he couldn’t possibly find another shade of blue, it would float by him.

Most of them passed through the house now, through walls and windows as if the structures didn’t exist.

He watched the orange color though. It wasn’t moving like the rest. It paused near the ceiling, and though it had no eyes nor body, Michael thought it was looking at him. How many different versions of orange had he seen today? He couldn’t count them, but he knew this one. The one that wrapped around his hand, the one that touched him.

It remembered him.

It moved slowly, just as slow as the others trying to leave the house, but this one headed toward Michael. It passed through other colors and other colors passed through it, but the intention was clear. Michael was its end goal.

He didn’t move, didn’t even blink, and finally it paused directly in front of his face. He could see through it, see the wall behind it, but yet felt he was looking at something very much alive. Something with intelligence, at least enough to recognize and remember him. Enough to decide it wanted to come back to him—these things weren’t following directions, but moving with free will.

He breathed in and as he did, the orange cloud moved with the air, following it through his nose. For a single moment, perhaps less than a second, panic gripped him. He nearly stopped breathing, but then the panic left, and he sucked in the orange as he had every other breath in his life.

Bryan was speaking. Telling them what happened. Telling them they needed to leave.

Michael loved Bryan. He wanted to listen. Wanted to be there for everyone next to him. But he couldn’t. Because something was happening. He felt it moving from his lungs to his bloodstream, flowing into his muscles and bone. Through his brain. A pinprick of great light appeared in the middle of his head, like a hole into heaven. Warmth flooded out of it, warmth almost too much to handle—but not quite enough to burn. It grew, and as it did, Bryan’s story faded away. The colors around Michael faded away. Life as he knew it faded away until there was nothing but that great light shining in every crevice of him.

I
t was unbelievable
.

That’s all Wren really knew. That he couldn’t believe what Bryan was telling him. An alien crash-landed, somehow took over him and Thera, and then fought off a group of soldiers before finally causing some kind of volcanic eruption. Wren had never heard anything nearly as ridiculous. This wasn’t flying saucers or probes. This was an alien invasion that started with the boy in front of him.

And yet, even though he didn’t believe it, he knew it to be true. Because he had seen the man show up at his house, seen him ready to murder Wren right on the stoop except for his neighbor across the tiny lawn. Because the next day someone showed up to kill him.

The rumbling that never ended was because of a goddamn alien out in the woods near the high school.

He unscrewed the cap on his flask without knowing it. He didn’t bring it to his lips though, instead only smiled and shook his head as he looked away from Bryan.

“You don’t believe him?” Glenn asked, hearing the slight chuckle.

Wren didn’t look up. “No, I believe him. Every word. It’s just fucking ridiculous when you think about it. The end of the world happening two miles from us.” He raised his eyes to Bryan. “I’m sorry, keep going.”

“I ran. I just ran because I didn’t know what else to do and Thera, she’s still out there. She’s still in that hole.” The boy started crying then, putting his face in his hands. Wren felt for him, he truly did, though empathy was too much. This whole damn experience showed him that, and Linda hadn’t spoken up yet about it, thank God. He felt for the kid, but he didn’t empathize. He didn’t know how.

Michael. He didn’t know what the hell was happening to his own son, and worry didn’t describe the thoughts ripping through his head about him, but no empathy there either. Wren had none. He had lost the ability to relate.

He looked down at the flask, seeing the cap open. He screwed it back on. The flask gave him ten years that he couldn’t remember. Ten years that drowned out the pain of Linda’s voice, ten years that he begged for. But it fucking took, too. It took and took and took and hadn’t even told him it would. Or maybe it did and he’d been too drunk to notice.

Rita went to Bryan, putting her arms around him again, though he didn’t take his hands away from his eyes. Glenn stayed where he was, on the edge of his seat, and Julie remained standing behind Bryan, her hands on his shoulders, her face still a swollen balloon of black and blue.

The only person not there that should have been (
besides Thera,
Linda sniped) was Michael. His son sat slightly behind Wren in a chair, having been separated the entire time. Having self-segregated himself from the group as he talked about colors that no one else could see.

Wren wished Linda would speak up now. Wished she would tell him what to do, give him some kind of advice. But there was nothing besides the Thera comment. Only his voice echoed through the halls of his mind.

Bryan was right.

They needed to leave.

Wren just didn’t know how and everyone around him was so concerned with Bryan’s welfare, they weren’t thinking about next steps. Despite his distance, Michael was the only one in any similar mindset as Wren, the only one that might be able to think about finding safety. Bryan wanted to leave, but shock weighed on him heavier than a conscience guilty of murder.

And with that thought he felt the grip of the frying pan in his hand, felt the weight of it.

No, don’t think about that. Not now.

Wren turned his head over his shoulder, looking to Michael.

Perhaps it was the slow infusion of liquor, or perhaps it was what the liquor had stolen over the past decade, but Wren managed to remain calm for much of this. That ended as he looked at his son.

He saw it for a single second and no one else did because their eyes were elsewhere. He saw it and a fear that could destroy universes flooded him.

Michael’s eyes were white.

Totally, as if two perfect white globes had been placed in his head, so white that they almost glowed. He looked sightless and mindless as he stared out into the world, unable to see anything without a pupil. It only lasted a second, though, because they shut like doors thrown closed by gods.

Michael fell from the chair in a heap, lying there for a few seconds, and then he started shaking. His whole body jumping with currents that no one around him could see.

W
ren’s hands shook
.

Not like Michael’s body and not like they would from withdrawal. They shook from the nervous energy his brain couldn’t stop shooting out to his body. The flask sat on the kitchen counter and they all stood amongst the broken plates and trashed cabinets. Four of them, because Michael couldn’t stand. Michael couldn’t open his eyes. Michael could do goddamn nothing but lay on the couch Wren put him on.

Rita paced, kicking shards of broken dishes and glass out of the way as she did, creating a path across the kitchen. Bryan stood in between his father and Julie, Julie’s hand gripping his.

“We need to leave,” Rita said, nodding. Now that her son was up and moving, the thought finally fucking occurred to her, apparently. “We have to get out of here if what Bryan says is true.”

Wren looked to Bryan, but the kid only stared at the floor, so he turned back to Rita.

“Now you want to leave?” Wren said. “When Bryan was lying out in the lawn or sitting in there on the couch, telling us how badly we needed to, you weren’t trying to get out. Now my kid is lying in there on a couch and not moving, but you’re ready to go?”

Rita didn’t stop pacing and didn’t look at Wren, though he stared at her. Anger was in him now, and it was a different feeling than what he thought anger to be. Normally anger came laced with vodka, but this was sober anger. Usually he wanted people to shut up when he was angry, but now he wanted an answer.

“Hey, Bryan—I don’t mean anything by it. It was fine that we waited.” Wren turned to Glenn. “Are you wanting to leave now, too?”

“We need to at some point. We can’t stay here. I mean the goddamn floor is still shaking, Wren.”

Rita kicked another piece of glass out of her way, spreading her path further along the tiled kitchen floor. It scraped across, crashing into other objects before coming to rest against the wall.

“We can carry him,” she said.

“Yeah? What if he has another seizure? What if he breaks something while we’re moving him?”

“What if we stay here and that thing in the woods comes for Bryan?” She stopped walking, finally meeting Wren’s eyes. “I’m not letting that happen.”

“She’s right,” Glenn said. “Michael could get hurt if we move him, for sure, but he could die if we stay. We could all die.”

“Where was this sense of urgency when Bryan was immobile? Why right now?”

“Because we’re thinking more clearly,” Glenn said.

“Fuck this,” Rita said, stepping off her path and into the mess of the kitchen floor. She headed to the phone and Wren felt his heart leaping from his chest and into his esophagus.

“NO!” he screamed as her hand went to the phone on the wall, picking it up even as the words left his mouth, paying him no mind at all. She put the phone to her ear and reached up to dial.

Wren didn’t move though he wanted to. He wanted to throw her through the goddamn wall, but instead he just watched as she dialed out.

“There’s no tone,” she said.

Wren stared, mouth open, his adrenaline rushing through his veins even as he heard there wasn’t any reason for it.

“No dial tone?” Glenn said.

“No.” She still held the phone to her face.

“There was earlier,” Wren said. “The power is still on. Someone cut the phone lines.”

No one said anything for a few seconds, the only sound coming from the air conditioning blowing through the vents.

“They wanted us to call out before. They wanted information. Now they don’t. They don’t want us talking to anyone,” Glenn said. Wren looked at him, the same realization coming to his own mind. No more information was needed. All the information anyone ever wanted came from beneath their feet as the whole goddamn world shook like some kind of winter wonderland Christmas bowl. Whoever was in charge didn’t need to hear from any of the wonderland’s inhabitants now.

“It doesn’t matter,” Bryan said.

All eyes in the room went to him, though he didn’t look up.

“What, babe?” Rita said.

“It doesn’t matter. Phone line or no phone line. Leaving or staying. We can’t run from her. We could go to Mexico, but eventually she’ll find us. It doesn’t matter where we go or what we do, she’s coming, and she won’t stop.”

M
ichael looked
like he was asleep.

Wren stood at the end of the couch, looking down at him. He had left the kitchen, saying he needed some time to think. He couldn’t remember the last time he told anyone that—time to think. Standing over Michael, what was he to think about? Glenn was right. They had to go. It didn’t matter what Bryan said; the boy was scared. They couldn’t stay here and wait on that thing to show up, even if it would be dangerous to move Michael.

He walked around to the front of the couch.

Michael lay on his side, Wren having turned him that way to keep him from possibly choking on his vomit. The old Jimmy Hendrix method.

There wasn’t any humor in the thought.

There wasn’t any humor in Wren at all.

He was scared to open his son’s eyelids. He hadn’t done so since Michael fell off the chair, hadn’t told anyone what he saw either. Those blank eyes, white as a dry erase board. He hoped it had been his imagination, and now he didn’t want to know the truth. He didn’t want to open Michael’s eyelids and not see the brown eyes his son was born with. Not see Linda’s eyes that Michael inherited.

Wren lifted his son’s head up and sat down, letting Michael lay across his lap. The boy didn’t move at all.

He spent the past ten years trying to forget his life. He spent the past two days trying to find it. And now, holding Michael, he realized he was about to lose it. The past day he’d spent with Michael, had he touched him at all besides the first hug when finding him? Had he spoken to him at all? Had he done anything that a father should do, especially one who so desperately wanted his son to just be alive?