“Gene,” she whispers. She can barely say the next words. “Is this really the end?”
I can’t say anything. I can’t even nod. I can only look deep into her eyes.
We fall into each other, embracing with crushing strength. We hold tightly, as if to form a shield against the brutal and gruesome end that will surely and swiftly come.
I pull away to look into her eyes. I want to see only her, not the horrific outside.
Sissy stares uncertainly at me, then gives a shaky smile.
I return the smile. “I wish this was all a horrible nightmare. And then we wake up and everything is gone, all the buildings, all the duskers, and it’s just you and me.”
“And we’re lying in green meadows,” Sissy says, her eyes drawing close, wet and soft and glimmering, “a rainbow over us, the sun warm and sweet in the pure blue sky. Our cottage a short walk away, beside a gentle brook.”
“Trees, too. Fruit trees.”
“And milk and honey and—”
“—sunshine.” I lean forward and our lips touch with tenderness, an antidote to the violence that is to come. Regret and sadness rise up in me, and then we’re kissing hungrily, lips pressing with desperation, as if to make up for the kisses we should already have shared, as if to compress all the thousands of denied kisses from the years that now will never come.
The sun disappears, its wilting rays suddenly cut off. The world plunges into darkness.
And now the walls and floor begin to vibrate with more force. Sissy and I pull apart. The duskers—the thousands of them—have reached the Domain Building and are now slithering up its glass walls. They skid across the glass like leeches, gaining traction on one another’s smeared flesh. As they climb higher, their slimy yellow-pale bodies further darken the building’s interior.
They reach the top floor in less than a minute. Panting with exertion, rib cages jutting out of membranous skin. Mushed against the glass, they gawk at us with eyes agog, the squeak of slipping, sliding skin on glass deafening. Many are thumping their fists against the windows in an attempt to break through, even slamming their foreheads into the glass. But on the slippery wall they lack the traction necessary to deliver a sufficiently forceful blow.
Loud thumps suddenly explode from inside the Panic Room. Duskers have flown up the chute from the floors below and into the tight confines of the Panic Room. There’s no time or room for them to spin around; another flurry of bodies follow quickly behind, ramming them until more than a dozen bodies are crammed into that tight space. And still more press in from below. No wonder Ashley June booked out of there. I hear the squish of flesh, the breaking of bones. Arms, hands, faces, legs, mashed up against the glass, too packed to move even a finger. Nothing moves in there except one blinking eye.
Cold enshrouds us. Bestial wails assail us from every direction.
“Look at me, Gene.” Sissy’s eyes are warm and steady, her fingers interlacing with mine with crushing force. “Don’t look anywhere else. Just at me.”
Wet, squishy sounds. From under the glass floor, beneath my feet, a sea of pale bodies. Like raw fatty meat stored in clear plastic bags, their flattened faces glare at us, lips misshapen and pinched white. Oodles of saliva shine wetly between narrow creases and folds of bodies.
Metal beams groan, the shatter of glass drawing closer.
“This is it, Sissy.” I wish I didn’t have to shout. Not now. Not to Sissy. And the only thing I want to say to her is, Forgive me for letting you down, forgive me, forgive me.
She nods before I can say more, as if she can hear the thoughts in my head, as if she understands. And her eyes suddenly seem more alive than ever, full of daring. She says something I can’t hear.
“What?” I shout.
And a small smile touches her lips, full of sadness, full of release. She leans in and shouts into my ear words never uttered to me.
“I love you.”
Forty-nine
I DON’T WANT to die. I don’t want her to die.
I don’t want us to die.
And suddenly, I know how we live.
Fifty
I RACE OVER to the table, pulling Sissy along with me.
“Gene?”
There’s no time to explain what I’m doing. In the dark, it takes me a second to locate it on the table. There. I grab it—the hypodermic needle Ashley June left for me to use. I thrust the needle into the crook of my arm, depress the needle halfway down.
“Do you trust me, Sissy?” I say.
“What are you—”
I pull her shirt sleeve up, inject her. She doesn’t resist or flinch, only stares at me. I push the remaining fluid into her bloodstream.
And it hits me right then. A spasm of cold wetness shudders through my viscera, a cold blast that suddenly, on a dime, turns boiling hot. My bones, cells, the electrons within those cells, all set aflame. My legs turn to ash as I slump down onto the tabletop. My body slides to the ground.
Sissy kneels next to me. “Gene? What’s happening to you?”
Lying on the floor, I feel the sway of the Domain Building, its oscillations keening wider and wider. I hear their howls ratcheting up in volume, so many of thousands of them, their screams mirroring the frenzy in my own head.
“Gene?”
Hard to speak. But the pain subsides for just a moment. “I injected us with concentrated dusker serum. We’ll turn really quickly, in under a minute.”
“What? Say that again?”
“We’re going to turn. Human to dusker.”
Her eyes widen with horror. “What the hell have you done?”
“No, Sissy, listen. This is the only way we survive.”
She stares down at her arm. At the spot I injected her, right above the branding. Her eyes huge with disbelief. “You’ve turned me into a . . . dusker?”
“No, listen, Sissy.” I clutch her arm, hold on desperately like it’s a rope over a canyon. “This is the only way we survive. Once we turn, we become them. We won’t smell. We won’t stick out. We’ll blend in seamlessly. Don’t you get it? We won’t be prey. When they break in, they won’t be able to find us. We can get the hell out of here.”
“But Gene,” she says. “We become them. I’d rather die—”
“No. Listen.” I lean in closer. “Once we’re somewhere safe, we ingest each other’s blood. We’ll re-turn. We’ll become human again.”
“How can you be so sure—”
“We’re the Origin. We’re the cure!”
“I know that! But you still shouldn’t have—”
“I don’t want to die, Sissy!”
“And I don’t want to live if it means becoming one of them!”
Now I grab both her arms. “This is the only way David has a chance to survive.” Something in her eyes relents at the mention of his name. “We get out of here alive, we book for the Palace. We get him out of that tank. Think of him, Sissy!” An idea comes to mind. “Once we get back to the Palace, we find the Origin weapons and use them on each other. We’ll re-turn much faster that way.”
Her chest rises and falls, uncertainty swimming in her eyes.
“We can do this, Sissy. We won’t forget who we are.”
Her eyebrows knit close together, a deep vertical line creasing between them. Her hands suddenly clench. “Gene, it’s beginning!” she cries as her body arches upward, her back bending and locking in place. I reach for her, wrapping myself around her, ease her down to the floor. Her arms start to thrash, smacking me across the face, as cold-hot sweat gushes out of her pores like lava ice. Then she calms, in the eye of the storm I entered a few seconds ago.
And which I am now leaving. The internal burning comes even hotter now, scorching my bones but somehow freezing the marrow. My vision goes white, then red, the colors reversing themselves like a photograph negative. Acid for blood, hot coals for organs, boiling soup for brains.
Never forget, I start to say. But the words are mush on my burning tongue, and my tongue is swollen and unwieldy. Then a cloud blooms in my vision, terrible and horrific, a thousand petals of black that burst into pollens of poison. I’m turning, it’s overtaking me, it’s a mistake! And then my body goes limp, and—
Fifty-one
IT IS OVER. The turning is over.
So suddenly. It doesn’t feel like a slow disintegration. But rather, a quick correcting, like a separated shoulder popped into place. Instantly righted.
I thought I’d feel a foreignness about this new turned body. As if, within my own skin, I’ve been converted into an alien. But instead, for the first time in my life, I feel a settlement.
Like a knuckle cracked. Like an invisible blockage in my nasal passage suddenly, finally cleared. Like a film of mucus between my heart and soul wiped away.
The smells come to me, rich and vibrant and luxurious, in 3-D, in 5-D, textured threads flowing through my nostrils and felt by the tendrils of every olfactory nerve. Identifying, sequencing, separating, splitting, savoring. My whole life, I had only scratched the surface of the olfactory nirvana that swirled in the world, fumbling with cheap, blunt knockoffs. But what I smell now I could luxuriate in for hours here in the dark.
Except it is not dark. Not anymore. When I open my eyes, the night has become day. The darkness bleached into a crystalline clarity, not a single pocket of black. If anything, the outside light, already muted from the covering of bodies cloaked over the building, is too bright, the glare causing me to squint.
In wondrous clarity, in a way I have never really viewed her, I see Sissy. Still in the eye of the storm of transformation, she’s backing away from me. I don’t know why she looks terrified of me. But the lines of her face are cleaner, her hair and skin purer.
And I smell heper.
It wallops my senses like an overpowering deluge of opiate wonders. Wave upon wave flung onto me, centering and energizing me to a degree that makes adrenaline seem like a sedative. A desire is carving out a large vacuum in me that. Must. Be. Filled. It consumes everything, makes sexual lust seem like a mild itch in comparison.