Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (13 page)

But then again, it was real to her at
the time, wasn’t it?

A thought occurred to
Isaac, his jaw going slack at the possibility. He sat up and
reached for her hand. “Alessa – maybe this
isn’t
totally new. I mean, the
producers were messing around in your head when they programmed the
stitch, right? So what if they, I don’t know, somehow knocked
something loose… and then when you saw the ‘ghost,’ it unleashed
some ability that was locked away inside?”

Alessa raised an eyebrow. “Explain
that?”

Isaac jumped to his feet, his hands
clasped in front of him as he paced back and forth, reasoning out
his hypothesis. “They always say that we use so little of our
brains, that there are whole sections of it that no one has any
idea what they’re even for, right?”

“
Right…”

“
Well, what if some of
those unknown sections contain extrasensory abilities that we just
don’t know how to use? What if seeing a ‘ghost’ basically trained
your mind to
use
those abilities?”

Alessa reached for his palms and
pulled herself up, though she still didn’t look convinced. “So
you’re saying that what happened on the drama basically tricked my
mind into unlocking some long lost ability to feel the emotions of
dead people.”

Isaac squeezed Alessa’s
hands. “I know it sounds crazy. But you can’t deny what just
happened – what’s
been
happening to you ever since we left Paragon. Whenever we go
somewhere that people have died – or died tragically at least, from
the virus – you’re feeling things you shouldn’t be able to
feel.”

Alessa considered for a moment. “What
about the woods, though? And the beasts? How do they fit into
this?”

That was a good question. “I’m not
sure,” Isaac replied. “Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with
them at all. Maybe we just misattributed what you felt since it
seemed like that could have been the only source at the time. But
who knows? People could have died all over those woods, right?
Maybe the creatures really were just wolves or something, and what
you were feeling was totally separate.”

She looked skeptical. “Wolves with
human footprints?”

“
I don’t know, Alessa! I’m
trying here – I need more time to figure that part out.”

“
Okay, okay,” she replied.
“Thank you for trying to come up with an explanation. I just don’t
understand
how
this could be possible.”

“
Well, think about it,”
Isaac reasoned. “In order for the producers to get all those new
memories in your head, your brain has to be in this open,
impressionable state, right? So maybe it’s still recovering from
that state, and then you see what you think is a ghost, and some
distant part of your brain is like, ‘Oh, I know how this works,’
and just kicks in. And then every time you saw a ‘ghost’ after
that, it was like building a muscle – getting that part of your
brain stronger and stronger until finally it’s able to do it
without you even trying.”

Alessa nodded her head, thinking.
“Fake it ‘til you make it?”

“
Exactly!” Isaac
continued. “And then we’re out here –” he gestured with his arms at
the expanse of the world, “– where so many people died of this
terrible virus… and you’re just picking up on their presence or
something, because you inadvertently trained your brain to tune
into this other frequency that we normally can’t perceive. Like how
a dog can hear different sounds than a person – just because you
can’t hear it doesn’t mean it’s not there. So just because
I
can’t see these
ghosts, or whatever you’re seeing, doesn’t mean they’re not there –
I’m just not equipped to sense them like you are.”

“
But wait a minute,”
Alessa interjected. “You were seeing my ‘ghost’ during the drama,
too. So why didn’t you develop this ability as well?”

Isaac thought for a moment. “Well,
everyone has natural inclinations, things that we’re better at than
others. I’ve never really been intuitive, not like you. You’ve
always been empathetic, very good at reading people. Maybe this is
just an extension of that, only you’re doing it with dead people
now,” he shrugged.

Alessa considered. “Okay, I see where
you’re going with this. I guess it kind of makes sense. It’s better
than no explanation, at least.”

Isaac was fairly pleased at his
revelation, but one thing was still nagging at him – the creatures.
That was the one piece that didn’t quite fit with his neat
explanation that Alessa was somehow connecting with the dead.
Alessa had seemed to think that she was feeling the creature’s
emotions, but those beasts were – unfortunately for Isaac and
Alessa – clearly very much alive.

He’d have to give this some more
thought.

Alessa let out a loud
sigh. “What if those things – those beasts –
had
been waiting in there for us? We
would have been sitting ducks, me balled on the floor like that.”
She shook her head in frustration.

“
I’ll keep you safe,
Alessa, I promise. The next time it happens, you just concentrate
on getting through what’s going on in your head, and I’ll take care
of everything else.” He squeezed her hand. “We’ll get through this
together, okay?”

Alessa nodded. She looked drained. “I
just want to find this base for Regina and go home. I need
Janie.”

“
I know,” Isaac
soothed.

“
Do you think this could
work? This mall?” she asked, her voice small.

Isaac shook his head. “I don’t know,
Less. It’s kind of out in the open. It wouldn’t be easy to come and
go unnoticed, if anyone was looking for us.” Not to mention what
that room had just done to her – Isaac wasn’t eager to repeat that
episode anytime soon.

Alessa sighed. “I’m just so tired of
running, Isaac. From Paragon, from the creatures, now from this.
And the virus, too. It’s a miracle neither of us have gotten
sick.”

Isaac nodded – he’d been harboring
worries about that, too. It’d been quite a few years since the
outbreak, but there wasn’t much known about how this virus behaved
in the long-term. Could it still be viable out here, even without
any living hosts to carry it? He probably should have been more
careful not to touch anything in that medical center…

And as that very thought occurred to
Isaac, he was overcome with the powerful urge to sneeze. A thick
dollop of phlegm cleared his throat in the ensuing rush of air as a
shroud of fatigue settled over his body.

Recovering from the sneeze, Isaac
looked up at Alessa, the same sheer terror he felt staring back at
him from her eyes.

Isaac’s heart dropped into his gut,
and he realized in that moment what a terrible mistake he’d
made.

14. CHRONICLES

“
Nikhil – how’d you end up
here?” 14 had asked.

Nikhil stretched his legs out in front
of him on the cold cement floor and rested his head against the
thick metal door of his cell. He let the note drop to the floor in
the sliver of light by the crack and watched the swirling dust
above it with half-closed eyes. He’d need to think for a minute
before he could answer.

They’d spent so much time the past
couple days dissecting their time at ESU that Nikhil had almost
begun to forget that wasn’t his real life. The problem was that he
had trouble remembering what was.

Finally, he reached to the far side of
the door and rolled the tip of his pen across the hinge to refresh
the “ink” on his makeshift pen. He curled over the shaft of light
illuminating the note and scratched his reply. “Not sure,” he
admitted.

14 didn’t seem satisfied with that
response. “After the outbreak – you came with family?”

The outbreak – that helped.

“
With friends,” he
replied. He remembered being on a camping trip with buddies from
high school, celebrating their recent graduation. They’d gone
backpacking for the summer to commemorate their newfound freedom.
Sitting around the fire one night, he distinctly recalled the
crackle of the radio and the blare of an emergency broadcast
signal.

By that point, if he remembered
correctly, their cell phone batteries had been long dead and they
were tens of miles from civilization, so they’d had no way to
contact their families and find out if they were all right. By the
time they’d blazed a trail out of the woods weeks later, the world
was in chaos.

“
Couldn’t get home,” he
elaborated. “Headed to the quarantine zone instead.” There had been
plenty of people traveling that direction, and they’d been lucky
enough to find some friendly strangers to give them a
ride.

Tragically, Nikhil’s three friends had
come down with the virus along the way, so by the time he’d shown
up at the gates, Nikhil had been truly on his own.

“
Which unit were you in?”
14 asked.

“
97 – the old library.
You?”

“
63, the middle
school.”

Nikhil couldn’t believe
how much of this was coming back to him. He remembered now that
there’d been a disproportionate number of the 100 or so efficiency
units assigned to people in their teens and twenties – it seemed
that the virus had favored – or rather,
not
favored – older adults and the
very young.

But with over a thousand people in his
unit alone, there hadn’t been much time to get to know the others
his age. Within days of arriving he’d been assigned a series of
demanding work shifts assisting with the construction of the walls
around the compound, and it’d been all he could do just to make it
to the right bed in his crowded dormitory before passing out each
night. Even if he and 14 had been in the same unit, it’s unlikely
he would have known who she was.

“
You come with family?” he
scratched onto the note.

Evasive as usual, she disregarded his
question and instead asked another of her own. “How’d you get
caught?”

That one was harder to answer. Nikhil
wasn’t even sure how many years he’d been in the prison
now…

He sent back a single question mark as
his response.

But 14 persisted. “Were you a
rebel?”

“
No,” he wrote. He knew he
hadn’t heard of the rebellion before the prison.

14 tried another angle. “Before or
after the dramas?”

Nikhil considered. He knew
he’d been
on
quite a few different shows since he came to the prison, but
did he remember ever
seeing
them before that?

Yes – he did remember. Actually, that
was the reason he had gotten into trouble to begin with. For some
reason he’d felt out of it when reporting to a work shift stocking
supplies at the medical center, and all he could think about was
the cliffhanger season finale of a new show – the very first one in
the few years since he’d come to Paragon – that had aired the night
before. Lost in his own thoughts, he’d somehow stumbled into a
restricted area – his mind flashed back to a vision of screaming
patients being injected with something by official-looking doctors.
Before he could even process what he’d seen, he’d been whisked off
and dumped in a bar-lined cell. And he never did find out what
happened on the next season of that show, either.

“
Just after Season 1,” he
replied.

14’s note came back quickly. “That was
~5 years ago.”

Five years? Wow. Nikhil couldn’t
believe how much time had gone by. The years had really bled
together in his head. He could barely recall any event to
distinguish one year from the next, except for the dramas, of
course – though he didn’t know which order they’d happened in. He
felt cheated.

“
What have I missed?” He
almost didn’t want to know.

14 sent back a fresh scrap of
paper.

“
Not much. Work, new drama
every few months. ‘Happy’ drugs in the food.” Drugs. Nikhil
wondered if that was why he’d felt so confused the day he got lost
in the medical center. He did remember having a big lunch that
afternoon.

Her note continued, “Secret leaders
with secret plans, resources wasted, people abused. Rebels
fighting. It’s rough.”

Rough sounded like an understatement.
“What kind of abuses?” he asked.

Her reply came slowly, like she was
hesitant to share. Nikhil wondered if he’d somehow struck a
nerve.

“
Constant hard labor.
Withholding food. People disappear sometimes, like you. Secret ring
of forced concubines…”

Wow. As much as he hated not having
control over his own life, a part of Nikhil wondered if he was
better off as he was. At least when he was on the dramas, he could
forget about all this – he got to live in the moment, to feel some
modicum of influence over his fate. Even if he realized after that
it was all a lie, it still felt good at the time.

Being incarcerated was miserable, but
the parts in between usually weren’t so bad.

“
What will the rebels do?”
he asked. He still didn’t know much about their objectives, besides
what little he’d been able to wrangle from 14.