The Fall of Never (57 page)

He forced an image to appear in her head then: a dark, hidden corner where Kelly sat, curled on the floor with her legs drawn to her chest, her eyes blank and sightless, her mind taken from her. Could she spend a lifetime like that? An eternity?

—This is the extent of the power I’ve taken from you so far,
he spoke up in her head.
Little by little, I keep taking more. I can’t kill you, but I can kill this little one in the bed here without a second thought…and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

“You know that’s true,” he said aloud.

She turned to face him and saw that something had materialized in his hand. It was a plastic fork, she saw. Only one of the tines remained. Yet unlike the other forks, this one was exaggerated to three times the normal size, the remaining tine nearly as long as the blade of a knife. Tauntingly, Simon brought the fork up to Becky’s face. Kelly tried to summon a burst of energy to propel her body off the wall and at the creature, but she was powerless to do so. Like a vein, she was slowly being drained.

My life or my sister’s,
she thought.
There’s no other—

Something slammed inside her head, wracking her body, and causing her legs to shoot out in front of her. There was no pain—just the clear presence of something new flooding into her head, quickly spreading to cover her brain like a web. And with it came thoughts—

(dear you need to use me can you use me can you feel me I am here to help you I am here to help)

—and she felt her strength and control return to her and flood through her entire body like a shock from an electric cable. Again, her nose burned with citron. Her eyes stung and her head felt strangely full, as if filled with more thoughts and emotions and ideas than she was capable of supporting. This wasn’t Simon, she understood. This was something else, some other, and she could faintly recall the feeling of a third mind entwined with the community mind that was hers and the monster’s. A third mind—and she could suddenly feel her lungs stretch and breathe from far away…her ears and eyes hear and see from a place she did not occupy…her hands and fingers and flesh feel from a body that was not hers—

She pushed herself away from the wall and gathered her legs up under her. Like an unsteady sailboat in a raging storm, she waved on her own as the world swam back into focus for her.

Simon felt it, too. “What is that?” There was a tremor of fear in his voice. “In our head—” His words died in midair as his hand holding the fork to Becky’s face swung around and planted the utensil deep into his own chest. It entered his body with a wet crunch. Black ink sprayed his neck and hand, his chest, and across Becky’s bedclothes. In shock, he pulled his hand away, the fork still impaled in the center of his chest, the wound spurting ink-colored blood. He shuddered and brought his eyes up to meet Kelly. His pupils filled his eye sockets, black as hot tar, and equally as sightless.

—How…

“It’s my mind,” she breathed.

A thick rope of syrupy blood dripped from the wound and pattered on the floor. Some of it splashed Simon’s feet. The contrast of black on white looked almost premeditated, like the work of a skilled painter.

Another burst of energy washed through her and she felt herself reclaim some of her mind that Simon had wrapped his mental fingers around. She tugged it back to safety, frightened and amazed at this sudden resurgence of power.

It’s someone else,
she thought.
Someone else is inside me, helping me.

Her eyes fell on Becky’s lifeless form and Kelly knew it wasn’t her.

Nellie Worthridge bucked once, twice, three times. Carlos, close at her side, pulled away from her, terrified of touching her in such a state. In his mind, he couldn’t help replay the scene of him grabbing Nellie’s arm and pulling the woman from his wife…and the surge of power and thought that rose and crested in him as he did so.

“She found her,” Josh whispered. He looked in a daze, his eyes focused on Nellie’s pained face. “Nellie found her.”

“You can tell—”

“I can feel it. It’s in the air, all around us. I can almost see…”

Carlos too found he could almost see: it hung in his mind like a screen on a wall, projecting the flicker of blurred images eager to solidify themselves. A girl—a shape—a room—darkness—the beating of a giant, invisible heart…

“She’s with her now!” Josh shouted. Something popped behind him, and Carlos noticed a slender crack on the far wall begin working its way from the floor to the ceiling. It struggled at first, gaining momentum.

This place will come down around us,
Carlos thought.
How long can we keep this up?

Again, Nellie shuddered on the bed, her face twitching as if in pain. Watching her, Carlos became cognizant of his unimportance, or his complete and utter smallness. What could he really do? If this woman died right here in front of his eyes, what could he really do for her? And would he even want to touch her?

He watched the crack creep slowly up the wall. Soon, a second one appeared.

Kelly moved toward Becky’s bed. Simon watched her with the distrust and surprise of a wounded child. His image stuttered—blinked—once, twice, three times. The plastic fork still jutting from his chest, he’d backed himself as far back against the wall as he could manage. She could hear his breathing now; it came in wet, labored wheezes, like a flooded engine trying to turn over.

Behind her, Becky’s bedroom window slammed shut. The pane cracked. Kelly did not notice.

“Get away from her,” she said. Her own voice had taken on a second layer, a mixed tonality, as if she were speaking with two voices at once. With her mind, she slammed Simon’s head against the wall. It hit with a sick thud. The wound at his chest had spread and darkened, the flesh peeling back in curls of carbon-like cloth being burned in a fire. An arrangement of nerves in his upper chest and neck bulged out as if inflated with air, pulsed, expanded, retracted.

Becky jerked beneath the bed sheets. Kelly caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned to face the girl. In her mind, she barely caught a fleeting thought—

(kellykellyhelpmekelly)

—like a passing wave. She closed the distance between them and hung over Becky’s subtle form like a guardian angel.

Becky…

A wet, wrenching sound made Kelly look up. She saw Simon yank the fork from his chest and stumble backward like someone starving for oxygen. The chest-wound was a blind eye. Again, the bundle of nerves pushed his skin taut, pronouncing the tiny mushroom-shaped nodules just below the surface. He howled.

That’s pain!
Kelly’s mind screamed at him.
You want to be real? How do you like it?

Simon’s face collapsed in a twist of rage and he swung the pronged fork in an arc toward the bed. Had he been closer, he would have driven the fork straight into Becky; however, the force of Kelly’s mental shove had sent him back against the wall, leaving him out of reach. Instead, the fork slammed into the IV bag that hung beside Becky’s bed, tearing it from the stand and pinning it to the wall. The rubber bag exploded in a gush of clear fluid that splashed in every direction. Again, Becky’s body stirred beneath the bed sheets.

“Out!”
Kelly screamed.
“Out of my fucking head! Out! Out!”

She dove across the bed, hands hooked into claws and scrambling for the creature, her mind a blotted Rorschach of alien passions and thoughts filtering in from all around her. She struck the floor on the other side of the bed hard but barely felt it, still clawing at the flickering image of the ghost-boy. She leaped to strike, but only hit the wall as Simon’s form disintegrated before her eyes. Like a nuclear charge, she felt his presence pass through her body and exit out the other side.

Spinning around, she saw him coalesce at the foot of Becky’s bed, his injury widening, his skin now flecked with ruptured vessels and protruding bone. Black blood appeared at the creases of his mouth, his forehead, around his eyes. He gnashed his teeth with a sound like crushing gravel. His head, crooked and misshapen, bulged. Kelly felt a tremor in her own head, could feel her own veins throbbing at her temples. Simon’s grip on her brain was strong, his fingers wedged deep and seemingly immune to extraction.

“You’ll never touch me,” he said, his voice ragged and abrasive, cluttered with a mix of emotion neither he nor Kelly ever knew he possessed. In agony, he moaned and brought both his hands up to the gaping crater in his chest. This skin on his hands was pulled like wet bands across his bones; even from such a distance in the dark, Kelly could make out the jagged and tumor-ridden crags of his fingers, his entire hands, and the wasted bands of muscle in his arms.

“I’ve already touched you,” she told him. “I’m doing it right now. You’re dying.”

“You could never kill me.” His voice was breathy and struggling. “You’re not strong enough to kill me. You never were. The best you could do was block me out and forget about me.”

No,
she thought,
not anymore.
That foreign power was still with her, still burning at the back of her head, committed to Kelly’s survival.
Who are you and where did you come from?
She didn’t know; all she
did
know was that the upsurge of alien power was saving her life, and slowly eating away at the monster before her. By herself she would have been ineffective against her own creation, weakened by the allocation of a single brain and mind. The manifestation of this other power—this foreign possession from nowhere—was all that was driving her now. And she feared what might happen if she lost it.

“You’re only so strong,” Simon said, the tone of his voice suddenly very much like her father’s. She felt him pull again inside her head with enough force to wrench her neck, and she broke out into a fresh sob, pain shooting down her spine.

I’m fighting you,
her mind moaned.
I don’t know how I’m doing it, but I am.

She closed her eyes. In her mind, her body was nonexistent.

Pull.

All she could hear was the beating of a heart. It came from everywhere.

Nellie’s nose began bleeding. A minute after that, a white froth pooled from her lips and dribbled down the side of her face. Now remarkably still, the old woman’s entire body hummed with electricity like a live cable. The stink of oranges hung pungent and moist in the air. The tips of her fingers were turning blue, and her ears had pushed back into the sides of her head.

She won’t survive much longer,
Carlos thought,
and there’s nothing I can do.

From the opposite side of the bed, Josh looked up at him with black-ringed eyes. He’d caught Carlos’s thought as it traveled through the air in the space between them, driven solely by the radiance of Nellie’s power. The room bustled with it.

“She’ll live,” Josh said. “They both will.”

“Josh…”

“No,” Josh said, shaking his head. Pulling a tissue from his pocket, he bent over Nellie to wipe some of the spittle from her mouth, but recoiled as soon as he came within inches of her. “Jesus!”

“It hurt?”

“She’s charged. You wouldn’t believe—”

Nellie’s eyes flipped open. Her mouth worked at nothing; no sounds came. Her pupils the size of pinpoints, the sclera a milky yellow, she stared blankly at the ceiling. The muscles in her face contracted, relaxed, contracted again.

“Shit,” Carlos groaned. The current in the air, all the while unfailing and resplendent, now hitched and seemed to bounce off Carlos’s body in heaving waves. There were patches of weakness: he could feel them like the relaxation of tension against both his body and his mind.

The old woman’s body hitched, as if shocked with current, then fell still. Her eyes appeared to glaze over as they stared at the ceiling. With disturbing quickness, the drone of her power drained from the room, leaving Carlos feeling empty and spent.

Josh felt it, too. “Christ, no.” He moved closer to the woman, now capable of doing so without discomfort, and shouted Nellie’s name inches from her face. “Doc…”

“I don’t know what…” Carlos also moved closer, gently took her wrist to check her pulse. As if bitten, he pulled his arm back. “Still strong,” he said.

“Still…” Josh’s words died in the air. He looked straight at the doctor then down at the old woman. And without pause, he reached down and grasped both Nellie’s hands with his own. He bucked, cried out in pain, his head thrown back and his eyes pressed shut, but he did not let go.

“Josh!” Carlos reached across the bed to grab him. His fingers grazed Josh’s arm and he tried to wrap them around it—

(thegunwatchthegunhehasagunandyou’regoingtodie!)

—his brain suddenly engulfed in a vision: spilled food and drink; tiled floors; a tortoise-shell mirror in the ceiling; a greasy-haired boy with a smoking handgun. Carlos shuddered and pulled away from Josh, his mind still buzzed and reeling. It was like touching fire: after removing his hand, it still burned.

Josh dropped to his knees beside the bed, his hands still clenched around Nellie’s. And like the jarring of a stalled vehicle springing to life, Carlos felt the air grow sharp with static again.

He’s charging the battery, letting Nellie use up his life,
Carlos had time to think before a chunk of the ceiling nearly landed on his head.