Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (48 page)

R
igley opened
the door on her own volition, and that in itself felt
amazing
. The rest of the time she had been up here on this floor, she had been propelled forward by some unseen force, unable to decide anything for herself. Now, though, she was in control. Now, she would be the one making decisions.

She stood in a hallway; she didn’t know if it was the same one as she used entering these rooms or a different one. The names of each room still hung over each door, red light casting down to the dark floor, but she wasn’t going back to them. The place was still cold, but it didn’t bother Rigley as much. Maybe she was used to it, or maybe she was just happy to finally control where she went.

The sign above the last room had said
THIS WAY
, but now that she stood outside it, she saw no other signs except the ones behind her, the ones above the rooms she just left.

Forward then
, she thought, and walked down the dark hallway. If it simply ended, she wouldn’t know until she was free-falling into some cavern of her mind, because except for looking back, there was no way to tell how far she could go.

She walked though. This place had scared her before, but now, it was her home. Indeed, it was her mind, the first home she ever had, and, she knew, it would be the last one as well. It was dark and cold, but it was still hers, and she didn’t think she would fall. She thought if she kept walking, eventually she would find where the sign that read
THIS WAY
wanted her to be.

And eventually, she did.

She approached two staircases on opposite sides of the hallway. One went up and one went down. She stood in front of them, facing the one that went down, and seeing the light of her mental living room at the bottom. She saw a couch and a painting and knew that all she had to do was take that first step onto the staircase and she would make her way down there. Just one step and this whole nightmare, this whole mess would be behind her. She had faced it, had come out the other side, realized her deeds and now she was faced with going up or down.

If she went down, she was going back to Kenneth. That’s what she knew without a doubt. She might have faced everything behind her, but when she reached the bottom of the steps, Kenneth would be waiting there just as he had been waiting for her in front of the door marked Grayson.

She turned around and looked up the other staircase. Only blackness stared back at her. No light showing the end of the steps, no feeling about what she would find if she moved up there.

Only that Kenneth Marks wouldn’t be there. He was the other way, not this one.

And wasn’t that what really mattered? Staying away from him? Away from what he wanted her to do?

Yes. That was what mattered now. Before it had been to get through those rooms, but now that she was through, she had to keep living, and she didn’t want to live in fear of Kenneth Marks.

Up the stairs would lead her away from him, even if she didn’t know exactly where to. Which was okay. Life was full of such choices.

R
igley felt good
.

For the first time in a long time, she felt happy.

She didn’t fully understand why, but did that really matter? What mattered was that after weeks of a deepening depression, she finally felt her hand reaching up from those dark waters and feeling glorious air above her. She just needed to push herself a few feet higher and her head would emerge, her mouth able to breathe again.

The rest of it didn’t matter, because she felt happy.

Kenneth Marks sat next to her in the hotel room, and both of them stared at the television at the front of the room.

Will was on the TV, or not him exactly, but what he was looking at.

“What happened to the sirens?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Rigley. I’m in here with you,” Marks answered.

He
wasn’t happy. That was clear. Rigley wondered if Will was happy, but guessed that he probably wasn’t either. How could he be, walking around in that town? They both knew what awaited him and Rigley felt bad about it. She hadn’t felt bad for anyone for a long time, hadn’t been able to, but in the education that occurred on the upper floors of her mind, she had found the space to hold compassion for others. She wished Will wasn’t there, wished that he wouldn’t die at the hands of some alien creature, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.

Marks’ assistant stood just behind them, out of Rigley’s eyesight.

Rigley was beginning to wonder how she would get rid of the two of them. Before, even just a few hours before, the thought wouldn’t have even come to her. It would have been banished from her mind, not even entertained. Now, though, it made such simple sense that she didn’t know why she wouldn’t have considered it before. She had to get out from underneath Marks’ thumb because she had some things she needed to do inside Grayson. Those things wouldn’t be the same as what Will was doing, of course, but they were more important. Will was doing Marks’ bidding, but that was over for Rigley.

Will had tried to tell her, but she wasn’t ready to hear it. He tried to tell her that she had to think for herself, had to stop living in fear, but she dismissed it as a lunatic’s ravings. He had been right though, and she saw it now. She doubted she would get the chance to tell him, but as she watched his steps fall in front of each other on the television screen, she hoped he knew.

You were right, Will. There’s no reason to be scared. Of anything.

Rigley watched the screen with the same enthusiasm and lost wonder that a child watches a Disney movie. She was going to be okay, and she hadn’t felt that in such a long, long time.

K
enneth Marks could barely watch
the television in front of him. It was one of the most important times of his life, and yet Rigley was seriously aggravating him. Something was different, the same something that he had noticed on the phone, and yet he still didn’t know what. He had been sitting next to her for an hour now and still couldn’t understand exactly what happened.

Before he left, she had been his. Before he left, Rigley was clay and he the potter.

Now, the clay had hardened and not in the shape he wanted. It was as if someone else had taken over the creation of the pot while he stepped away, instead of waiting for him to return.

She wasn’t…frightened of him.

It was something so simple, and yet so complex, he was having a tough time adding up exactly how it happened. There was something missing in his calculations, something that he wasn’t seeing, and he didn’t know how to go about getting the information without inflicting pain on Rigley. And that wasn’t the type of fun he wanted to have. At least not yet.

She stared at the television screen, and while he did too, his periphery told him everything he needed to know about her current state of mind. The way she held herself showed a confidence that he hadn’t seen since he arrived, and the questions she asked relayed a devil-may-care attitude that Kenneth Marks sincerely didn’t like.

“The President doesn’t know why I’m doing this, Rigley,” he said, his voice holding the same happy tune as always.

“No? You didn’t tell him?”

“I told him I was doing it, but not why.”

“That’s a bit dangerous, isn’t it?” she said.

“Maybe.”

He wanted to grab her hair and slam her head through the television screen. To keep smashing it until the glass broke and cut through her skin, until her face turned black from the electricity burning her flesh. Right then, in that moment, he wanted Rigley dead in a way that he had never wanted anyone to die. Because there wasn’t a single ounce of fear running through her body at the suggestion that Kenneth Marks had gone rogue. At the hint that what they were doing down here was for his pleasure, and his alone.

It
should
have frightened her; Rigley wanted nothing more than to be let off the hook for this mess, to not have to drop a bomb that was going to kill millions. She had her fill of killing in Bolivia, so full that it brimmed over the edge of the cup and spilled onto the table.
That
was the bruise Kenneth Marks wanted to press on, wanted to squeeze until she screamed and begged for mercy.
That
was where the fun lay.

So him saying that he was doing what he wanted down here should have sent alarms chiming in her head, should have let her know that things wouldn’t go any other way but the way
he
wanted.

Instead she asked him if it was fucking ‘a bit’ dangerous.

“Rigley, do you know what happens if Will doesn’t get me the information I want?”

“I imagine we’ll need to drop the hammer.”

Kenneth Marks didn’t move a single muscle in his entire body. He kept looking at the television, seeing Rigley from the corner of his eye.

He didn’t know what she was doing exactly, but a deep, deep certainty came over him that if she decided she was in control of this situation—of
her
situation—then he would show her what Will had already realized. He would show her what evolution meant when it looked you straight in the face.

W
ill had to laugh
.

The scene before him was too ironic. If he didn’t laugh, he was going to shriek, and he didn’t want Marks to hear that. He would shriek and shriek and shriek until his vocal chords ruptured, and then he would fall to the ground and expire as he kept trying to scream through his mouth.

Sherman had returned.

Not exactly, but close. Sherman had been pink, and this stuff white. Sherman looked a little more like moss than these white strings. Sherman ate through buildings, but this stuff seemed to be content with draping itself on anything it touched.

Still, Will had to wonder—no, had to believe—that evolution made whatever these two different species were so similar, at least in their early stages of life. He was seeing another species take over his planet. Take over his home. Take over the place he had spent his life trying to protect.

He was careful not to touch the white strands, careful to stay far away from them. They grew a bit faster than Sherman had, fast enough that he could watch them if he stood there. They moved in a singular direction, seeming to have more order than Sherman had all those years ago, and so far, they hadn’t decided to move toward him. He didn’t know what would happen if it reached him, but thought that it would probably resemble what happened to anything else it touched. He would be a statue covered in white, papery strings.

“God help us,” he said, still laughing.

What else could he say? What else could he think? If God didn’t help, then there would be no help, because Kenneth Marks wasn’t in the business of helping anyone, and somehow he had ended up in control of this shindig.

Rigley and Will had thought they beat whatever took hold in Bolivia, but it was back, just a different color. A different name. And in the twenty years or so separating the pink from the white, what had Will done?

Step after step, his mortality came to him.

“I deserve to be here,” he said, moving to the opposite side of the street, away from Sherman 2.0, as he was coming to think of it. It had latched onto a street lamp, circling up like some kind of invasive plant. He didn’t feel any real heaviness about his statement. Indeed, perhaps for the first time in this whole nightmare, he felt some relief. Because it was over. The life that he had lived up until this point, rushing from one job to the next, deed after deed without real thought of the after affects.

Nearly every major religion believed in karma of some sort. And this was his. And that was okay, he supposed.

He told Rigley he didn’t feel sorry for what he had done to her, and in that moment, he hadn’t. That wasn’t the only thing he’d done, but perhaps it was the largest lesson he tried to teach someone that was innocent. And she had been. Whatever she was now, back then she had been young, and making a choice that she didn’t understand—so he wanted to make her understand it.

He had built up some karma over the years and now he was about to meet it, he supposed.

Yet, maybe, he could do something over the next few hours. Regardless of the things he’d done, the people killed, the cities destroyed, it had been to keep this planet—this home—as humanity’s. Marks sent him down here for his own purposes, but Will had a few things he could use to stop this. Most likely, he was as good as dead, but perhaps, when he met it, he could do what he had started all this hoping to do. Keep their home as their home.

He heard it before he saw it.

Will stopped walking, not taking another step, his reaction time not having dulled in the slightest. His eyes went to the sky, where the noise came from—the sound of wind in a turbine. He saw her then, the ‘it’ in his mind replaced by what surely had to be a female. Twenty feet up, just above the buildings he walked past, she stood as still as he, seeming to float in the sky. The same creature that he had watched on his phone, the same one that had destroyed countless lives in a matter of seconds, the same as Will had done in Bolivia.

She was beautiful. And terrible.

“I’m here!” he shouted up into the sky, though he didn’t think it was necessary. She stared at him the same as he did her.

She moved slowly as she came for him.

M
orena remembered the man
. He was the same person that had looked at the host, at Thera. He was the first representative of the government. The first one to show up searching for her.

He looked different, was wearing something on his head, but Morena didn’t sense any danger from the device.

This was the man that wanted peace.

This was the government.

This was the threat to her people.

Morena landed gently on the ground, ten feet away, and walked to him, her aura spreading out, bringing his emotions into her. He was scared but also excited. Morena understood then that men like this were different than the one she had lived inside, different than Bryan. Men like this craved spectacles, greatness, triumph.