Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (16 page)

“
I love you, Isaac Mason,”
she wept, “I will love you always. You did, you did take care of
me. More than you can know.” She reached for his hand and wrapped
his fingers in her own, holding them against his panting chest. “I
love you,” she repeated.

Isaac shook his head. “I can’t,” he
coughed. “I can’t leave.” The words came out in a rush, the mucus
bubbling in his chest.

“
You can,” Alessa wept,
releasing him with finality. Her voice a coarse whisper, she
promised once again, “You
can
.”

And then he was mercifully still,
falling into a much needed repose. But to her horror, Alessa knew
this wasn’t over yet.

17. BRINK

The night wore on, Isaac still but for
the ragged pulls from his chest. And Alessa waited in silence, her
tears run dry, waited for the bleeding that she knew would mark the
end.

She was numb now.

The occasional shuffle outside the
tent – a footstep, a heavy puff of breath, the crunch of a stray
piece of garbage – would draw her attention. It may have been the
wind; more likely it was the creatures. But even the threat of
being torn limb from limb couldn’t seem to break through the
impenetrable shell she’d withdrawn into. There was only one place
she could be now, one thing she could do. And she was there, in
this tent, doing it – waiting for Isaac, her Isaac, to
die.

She passed the long hours considering
her prospects with anesthetized objectivity, weighing the choices
she could make as if they were someone else’s, as if she were
watching this scene unfold on one of Paragon’s dramas.

What would this Alessa character do
now? If she managed to avoid contracting the virus – which was a
big if, at that – she would have two options, the strangely
detached third party in her head reasoned.

She could let go. She could forget
about the future she’d envisioned with Isaac, put the era of Isaac
to rest along with his broken body, and move on. She could turn off
her love for him – turn off her love, period – and fuel her passion
with rage instead, rage against the virus, rage against Paragon,
rage against the shattered world around her and all of its sorry
mistakes. She could pick up the gauntlet, finish their mission, and
go home. She could devote her life to the cause and forget
everything else.

Or, she could let the misery take her.
She could acknowledge that in all likelihood – between the
impending war with Paragon and the constant threat of the virus –
she would lose Janie someday, too, that pretty soon there wouldn’t
be anyone or anything left for Alessa to love, that there was no
point in going on at all. She could recognize that living on anger
was no way to live – that it would be better to die from love than
live as an empty shell. She could let the beasts prowling outside
this forsaken tent take her. She could be with Isaac again,
forever.

But even as these two paths warred in
her head, something else popped into her consciousness unbidden.
Joe. She was plagued with thoughts of Joe, of the day he was taken,
of the moments they’d shared, of the love for him that’d been
quietly building in her heart until he was so abruptly torn
away.

There was a third option, she
realized. She could do what she and Isaac had done after losing Joe
– she could grieve. Then she could hold the shattered pieces of
herself together and move forward. And then one day, maybe, she
could love again. That was what Joe would have wanted for her, and
so she’d done it then. And that was what Isaac would want for her
now.

But she didn’t know if she had the
strength to do it. Could she really lose them both, and
survive?

She sighed, a long, shuddering, broken
thing that told of doubt and defeat and death.

Alessa sat in the vacant silence,
slowly turning over her options in her mind, when without warning
an earthshattering wail sounded from behind the tent.

Sharp claws of terror dug into her
heart, her body tingling as adrenaline charged her system, and
Alessa was finally shaken from her languor.

The shock of feeling was a floodgate,
and suddenly she was overwhelmed with emotion – all of the sorrow
and fear and anger she’d blocked out the past few hours, but
something more, too. It was like all of those feelings were somehow
doubled, and punctuated with a primal tinge that punched up their
intensity. And mingled with it all was bitterness, longing, and
just a subtle thirst… for blood.

No, Alessa realized, she wasn’t ready
to let go just yet.

She eased Isaac’s head onto the ground
and slid out from under him, grasping the knife from her bag and
crouching into a powerful coil, preparing to strike. If the
creatures were coming for her now, they would get the fight of
their lives.

And then just as suddenly as they’d
come, the intense feelings that had poured through her only moments
ago disappeared, and she was left only with a keen sense of being
alone with Isaac once again. Some deep instinct told her that the
beasts were leaving, and the tension in her body eased.

But a strange feeling
lingered a moment in the creatures’ wake, a subtle sense of smug
satisfaction that settled over Alessa like a silken scarf trailed
coyly round her neck. And it was not Alessa’s satisfaction by any
means; lying next to Isaac, she was certain she had little to be
happy about in this moment. But that feeling
was
somehow familiar. She tried to
place it, some wisp of memory taunting her from just out of
reach.

And then, just like that, the feeling
was gone, and Alessa was left to lament the long night on her
own.

18. DEFENSE

It’d been days since Nikhil had heard
from 14, and he was starting to get anxious. Where had they taken
her?

The thought of losing his only link to
reality tortured his every waking moment. His mind hadn’t felt this
clear in years, and he was terrified of falling back into the
swirling jumble of disconnected memories that threatened to swallow
him at every moment.

14 had been helping him to remember,
teaching him to pick out what was true from what had been
implanted, to discern what experiences had taken place in his real
life versus what had been scripted for him on the shows.

It’d been two nights now since he’d
heard from her, and already he felt himself slipping back. He
didn’t want to lose himself again.

And the hunger didn’t help, either. He
couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten – everything he did,
everything he thought, felt slow. He was running on empty,
literally.

Pacing back and forth in his cramped,
cold cell, a bleak thought occurred to Nikhil. What if they had
stitched her?

She could be on another drama by now,
all memory of him completely erased. She would never come back for
him; she wouldn’t even know who he was. And Nikhil would be left
here to rot, to sit in the dark alone as his mind deteriorated
around him. The thought chilled him, blocking out even the sharp
pangs in his stomach.

At one point Nikhil had been resigned
to his fate, had been prepared to lose himself in the muddled
depths of his own subconscious. But no more – 14 had changed that,
had given him hope. He was starting to remember who he was, and he
wanted his life back. She couldn’t leave him now.

He paced, and paced, and paced. Every
few steps he threw himself at the base of the wall, scrabbling his
fingers across the tiny hole searching for a new note, frantically
trying to peer through it into the blackness beyond. And when he
found nothing, he got up and paced again.

Finally Nikhil began to grow weary,
the hysteria fraying his nerves and draining his resolve until he
could think only of sleep. He flopped onto the stiff metal cot, his
too-long legs propped up on the wall in front of him, and settled
in to wait.

Some time later, the slot in the
bottom of his door slid open and a tray clattered onto the floor.
Food!

He rolled off the bed and eagerly
downed the dry toast and cold soup, carefully setting aside the
single napkin in case 14 came back.

And in that same moment, the blessed
sound came – paper sliding through the wall.

Nikhil snatched up the note, hungrily
moving into the light of the door to consume her
missive.

“
Still there?” it
read.

“
Where have you been?” he
replied, underlining the last word for emphasis.

“
Sorry – ran out of
paper,” she responded.

Nikhil breathed a sigh of relief. So
she’d been there the whole time, just waiting for the prison to
deliver another of their infrequent sorry meals so she could filch
a new napkin. Nikhil had been diligently saving them as well, but
he’d sent his last scrap through the wall days ago. It seemed
they’d need to be a little more careful about conserving their
supplies going forward.

“
Thought you’d been
stitched,” he admitted.

She sent back one of her little smiley
faces in return. “I’m okay,” she added.

But despite her cheerfulness, Nikhil
knew the day would come when one of them was sent for. They were
living on borrowed time, after all – as soon as the producers had a
new role to fill, the prisoners were at their beck and call,
however unwillingly. Nikhil was dreading it.

“
I don’t want to be
stitched again,” he confessed.

There was a pause before her response
came, as if she’d weighed her reply before sending it.

“
You can resist it,” she’d
written simply.

But those four little words had set
off a bomb in Nikhil’s cell. He could resist the stitch? He didn’t
have to allow Paragon to dictate the rest of his life? He could
fight back?

He could fight back.

The realization settled over him like
a light spring rain, little droplets of resolve trickling over his
body until his every inch was finally soaked through, dripping with
determination.

He could fight back.

“
How?” was the only word
he needed.

Her response came quickly.
“Concentrate on something real, a memory. You won’t lose it. Then
everything else will come back.”

Was it really that simple? Nikhil sat
back against the wall, the knot in his stomach slowly releasing as
he realized he might actually be able to do this.

He finished the last slurp of cold
soup and put the bowl down, sliding the tray over the ground with a
scrape until it butted against the slot in the door. He stashed
14’s note and the makeshift pen under the cot, just in case the
guards happened to peek in when they came to reclaim his
tray.

Sure enough, within moments the slot
in his door slid open once more and a gloved hand reached inside
toward the tray.

But then a snarl and piercing cry of
pain rang from the hall, and the hand quickly withdrew.

The screams continued, a man’s voice,
shrieking in distress. It sounded like it was coming from nearby.
Nikhil heard footsteps rushing away from his cell and he dove to
the floor, peeking through the opening.

Across the hall and a few cells to the
right, a guard was on the floor, his face a grimace of agony. His
arm was buried to the shoulder through the slot in the cell door.
For one infinite second, Nikhil and the guard locked eyes, and
Nikhil thought he finally understood the meaning of the word
terror.

A second guard – the one Nikhil
supposed had just left his own cell – was leaning over the writhing
form of the first. He pulled, but the first guard’s arm wouldn’t
budge. Finally, the second guard stood up. All Nikhil could see
were his feet, but he heard the distinct rapid click of the guard
feverishly punching keys on the pad beside the door.

A whooping alarm sounded and the hall
flashed red, and then he heard a deep clang – a lock being
released. The first guard was still screeching, his body flopping,
his eyes wide with horror; a part of Nikhil was glad he couldn’t
see what was happening to the arm on the other side of that
door…

But before he could contemplate that
gruesome thought much longer, the door to the cell swung open
slightly, the guard still face down at its base, now almost still
except for the occasional twitch.

Nikhil watched as the second guard
stepped back, his knees bracing. The bang of four gunshots rang
down the hall.

A vicious, spine-tingling
howl – part rasping scream, part savage growl – sounded from inside
the cell. It was the same inhuman roar Nikhil had heard all those
nights ago, the same chilling noise that had haunted his
nightmares. What was Paragon
keeping
inside these
cells?

The alarm wailed and the sirens
flashed as more boot steps came pounding from the far end of the
hall. Nikhil jumped as something – something big and impossibly
fast – darted out of the open cell and landed on the guard with a
thud, his gun clattering uselessly to the floor. More shots rang
out from the other soldiers, but Nikhil couldn’t tell what was
happening – the guard and whatever was attacking him had landed
outside of Nikhil’s narrow field of view.