Shudder (Stitch Trilogy, Book 2) (37 page)

But the Developer saw more. Phoenix
may be young, and she may be a woman, but she was smart. That was
why he had chosen her.

The Economist uttered a small cough.
“There’s another thing…” He cleared his throat. “How about the
issues with, uh, those… mutants.”

The Developer groaned. He was sick of
hearing about this. “What issue?” he replied. “Just keep tossing
them outside the gates – it’s the easiest way to dispose of them.
Plus, I’m sure they’ll add a little excitement to the rebels’
plans.”

The General snickered.

“
Are you sure that’s
safe?” The Economist looked pale.

The Developer turned to the Draftsman
for an opinion. “The walls are high and strong,” the Draftsman
confirmed. “I’d be surprised if any of them could breach the
compound on their own.”

The Economist still looked worried.
“W-what if they work together?”

“
Together
?” the General blurted. He
laughed dismissively, as he was wont to do at anything the
Economist said. “Please. They’re no better than
animals.”

“
But that wasn’t
always
the case…” the
Draftsman pointed out.

The Doctor sighed. “Just because they
started out as human doesn’t mean they are any longer. They’ve
shown no signs of intelligence up to this point. Why would that
change?”

The Draftsman didn’t seem
exactly convinced. “Do we even really understand what these
creatures
are
?”

The Doctor shrugged his
shoulders, his white hair glinting in the light. “The memory
alteration research mentioned some, well,
unfortunate
side
effects…”

The Developer interrupted him. “To
answer your question, no, we’re not 100% certain what causes the
mutation.”

“
The onset of symptoms
appears to vary by individual,” the Doctor explained. “Once they
hit a certain threshold, well,” he snapped his fingers. “Something
seems to snap and their brain just can’t take it
anymore.”

“
I’m really not worried,
though, to be honest,” the Developer reassured them.

The Doctor nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes.
As we perfect the technology, this will happen less and
less.”

“
Plus,” the Developer
added, “the more terrors there are running around
outside
the compound,
the easier it will be for us to keep the people
in
.”

The General nodded in agreement, but
the Economist just sighed. “Okay. I guess in the worst case we can
tell everyone that it’s due to an evolution of the
virus.”

“
Zombie apocalypse,” the
Developer concurred. “The people eat that garbage up.”

“
Very well, then,” the
Doctor concluded. “Does anyone else have any other matters to bring
to the table?”

The remaining Engineers all shook
their heads, and the Developer pushed back his chair and rose. His
right fist at his shoulder, he waited for the others to stand and
mirror his position.

“
You know what to do,” he
directed.

“
For Paragon,” they said
in unison. “Always.”

“
For Paragon,” the
Developer repeated quietly to himself. “
Always
.”

39. STOWAWAY

Alessa had spent the better part of
the ride to Raptor in the second to last car, wedged cozily between
her sister and Isaac in one of the few less-crowded corners of the
train. By now the morning’s excitement had worn off, and most of
the exhausted rebel group had taken to carving out small places on
the floor to rest their weary heads.

Alessa had napped peacefully like the
rest of them for the past hour or so, the rhythmic chug of the
wheels lulling her into a deep and restful slumber.

But at some point something had woken
her, some disturbing, incongruous urge that’d crept stealthily into
her subconscious. The thought had faded the moment she’d sat up
with a gasp, and now she couldn’t remember what it was. But an
unsettling feeling had whittled its way deep into her gut, and she
couldn’t seem to fall back asleep.

Alessa eased her way from under
Isaac’s arm and slid out from between him and Janie. An errant knee
brushed against Janie’s back, but to Alessa’s relief, her sister
simply muttered a half-dazed grievance to herself and fell promptly
back to sleep. Good, Janie needed her rest.

Stepping carefully over the dreaming
bodies strewn about the floor, Alessa carefully picked her way
toward the rickety door that connected this car to the last. The
sidewalls of that car had been damaged in the fire that’d landed
this relic of old-world transportation in the museum where the
rebels found it, and as a result, a brisk wind howled through the
car, chilling it to an uncomfortable temperature. The rebels had
decided to use it for storage of the few possessions that’d been
permitted on the train, but Alessa thought the fresh air might do
her some good.

She was irked to find that the door
latch was rusted shut. Luckily, her knife was still in her pocket
from the morning’s raid. She wedged the sturdy tempered blade
between the latch and the wood and struck down on the hilt with her
elbow, positioning her body to muffle the sound as a courtesy to
the sleeping passengers. When the bolt finally sprang loose with a
pop, Alessa glanced around warily but was pleased to find that no
one appeared to have been disturbed.

She scooted through the narrow door
and the one following it, and closed both quickly behind her,
blocking the next car from the roar of the blustery draft circling
the carriage through the wide gaps in the smoke-stained
walls.

Alessa leaned back against the door
and closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. The chilly air burned her
throat, in a good way – she felt refreshed. But the strange feeling
in her chest stubbornly refused to subside.

As Alessa opened her eyes once more,
she thought she caught a shadow scurrying behind some of the boxes
and bags piled toward the back of the car. Was someone
there?

“
Hello?” Alessa
called.

There was no answer, of course,
besides the low lament of the wind. She must have been imagining
things.

Or maybe not.

Something
thumped
behind a tall
pile of boxes, and Alessa jumped.

It was probably just a bag come loose,
she told herself. Plenty of cargo had shifted during the bumpy ride
through Paragon’s tunnels.

But then why was her heart pounding
against her ribs like this? Every muscle in Alessa’s body tingled,
and she’d learned not to ignore her instincts. Something was wrong
here.

Suddenly Alessa recognized something
pulsing through her mind, a familiar mix of frustration and
confusion and fright, punctuated by something else, the memory of
some sharp metallic taste…

Blood, she realized. She was tasting
blood.

It was the creatures.

Alessa’s brain kicked into overdrive,
everything slowing down around her as she considered her
options.

She could flee, run back to Isaac and
Janie and the safety of the numbers huddled in the next car. But to
do so she’d need to squeeze through the narrow passageway flanked
by the cargo lining the door and fight her way back through those
clunky latches. Turning her back to these beasts would be suicide –
and if she got trapped with them in close quarters she was
done.

She could call for help, hope someone
in the next car over would hear. But she could barely hear her own
thoughts over the bellowing of the frigid wind. What were the
chances anyone would come to her rescue? Plus, she’d be revealing
her position to the creatures. If they hadn’t noticed her yet, she
might still be able to take them unawares.

That was it – Alessa
needed to get
them
before they got
her
.

She ducked back against the wall and
scanned her surroundings for some kind of weapon that would give
her a little more distance than her knife.

There – an old broomstick. She
snatched it up and snapped the light wood across her knee, leaving
a jagged point at one end.

Hoisting her makeshift spear to her
shoulder, Alessa crept forward, her footsteps soft and silent under
the crashing of the wind. She was only steps from the back of the
car now – the creature must be just beyond this final stack of
cartons.

Alessa kept her distance. She knew how
fast these things were, and she needed enough time to thrust the
spear ahead of her in case it attacked.

Suddenly, the beast revealed itself
with one tentative step out from behind the box. It stood at least
six feet tall, muscular and strapping, its posture crouched but
upright, like a person – though there was nothing human about that
face.

The creature eyed her curiously with
huge, swollen eyes, bulging three times the size that any person’s
should be, as if they were pushed out of its head from behind. Its
mouth hung open limply, revealing a bevy of sharp, jagged, spiky
teeth. And where there should have been ears and hair, there were
only shriveled lumps of flesh and scaly, blistering
skin.

Every impulse in Alessa’s body
screamed at her to attack, to take this infinitesimal scrap of an
opportunity to put her enemy down. But she froze, the shaft of her
weapon clenched in her fist, her lungs unable to take a
breath.

Two images forced their way into her
mind – the very same ones, in fact, that had pierced themselves in
her brain earlier that day:

Her own face, laughing; and a younger
version of Isaac, dazed beside his overturned bicycle.

“
No, no, no, no, no, no,
no,” Alessa whispered to herself, an incoherent muttering prayer as
she sunk to her knees, her spear clattering to the floor beside
her.

She simply couldn’t articulate it any
other way. Her eyes had to be lying, her head had to be
wrong.

Because if they weren’t, what they
were showing her was unspeakable, the nightmare of a nightmare come
horrifyingly true.

Even without the visions
in her head – even before she realized it’d been
him
beside her the
entire journey – she would have known, would have recognized the
piercing blue of those eyes anywhere, the mirror of his
brother’s.

The monster standing before her was
Joe.

A NOTE TO
READERS

Dear Reader,

First off, thank you SO
much for investing your time in the Stitch Trilogy.
You
are the number one
reason I write. There’s nothing I’d love more than to hear your
thoughts on Alessa and Isaac’s adventures, so please be sure to
swing by my website,
www.samanthadurante.com
,
to stay in touch and catch up with lots of great extra content that
will tide you over until the conclusion of the series!

I also wanted to take a
moment to share with you something I learned since becoming an
author. As you may know, the Stitch Trilogy is my first foray into
publishing fiction, though I spent many years before that (27, to
be exact) as a
reader
of fiction. And one thing in all those years that I never
realized is how much
power
I had as a reader to make my favorite authors a
success.

As I’ve recently discovered, us
authors are wholly dependent on you, the readers, to make or break
our careers. I’ve been blessed to find a vocal group of fans who
have shouted from the rooftops about Stitch, on their blogs and
Facebook pages, their Twitter and Goodreads accounts, and the
reviews they’ve so generously plastered all over the internet. And
with their help, I’ve been able to reach many other readers who
would otherwise have never come across my work. (If you are one of
these people, THANK YOU!)

The fact of the matter is that an
author – especially an independent author like me – is only one
person. We can write ‘til the cows come home, but without a strong
community of readers to support us, our work would never get off
the ground. And this is something I never realized as a reader, the
opportunity I held in my hands to contribute to something much
larger than myself by sharing the joy I felt in reading.

I thought I was just one
of thousands, that my voice was inaudible under the din of mass
media and professional critics. But in this age of social media and
global communication, that simply isn’t true. Only a very small
percentage of books are ever featured in a magazine or on TV, and
the rest – particularly those without the marketing budget of a
major publishing house behind them – never reach the millions of
people who would love them if only they knew of their existence.
And that includes many, many
great
books.

So if you enjoyed Shudder – or any
book, for that matter – take a moment to tell someone about it.
Write a quick review, send a link to a friend, tweet a short
message to give the author a shout-out.