“Then shoot me!” I shout to Ashley June. “Shoot me with the Origin dart.”
“No—”
“Do it!” I shout. “Do it or I shoot myself.”
“You don’t understand. She has to die!”
“No! It’s you who don’t understand. Both Sissy and I have to live. We’re the Origin. We’re the cure!”
Ashley June lowers the dart gun. “You and this heper girl—you’re not the cure. You’re the contagion. What your father discovered wasn’t ‘the cure.’ It was a virus.”
“What are you talking about?”
Everything starts to shake around us. The masses have arrived, and they haven’t slowed down, not even as they reach the outer fortress walls. They buffet against the walls, over and over, until the walls, unable to withstand their collective might, collapse. Pale bodies race across the grounds, blanketing the Palace in a sheet of membranous white.
Sissy. Her heper flesh shuddering, ripples of fat and muscles moving irresistibly up and down her body. Only a few more seconds before I will have lost complete control.
“Shoot me!” I yell. “Shoot me with the dart!”
“No!”
Muzzle still pressed into my chin, I start pulling the trigger.
“Gene!”
I don’t know what causes me to look up. The urgency in Ashley June’s voice or the oddity of hearing her speak my designation. But when our eyes meet, a strange resignation settles upon her. As if she’s just realized something. Slowly, and very deliberately, she places the dart gun on the floor.
Then her legs crouch, and her back arches as she prepares to launch herself at Sissy. Everything about Ashley June’s body is tense, like a drawn bow. Her eyes, though, as she gazes at me. Softer than I’ve ever seen them, with a strange quality, almost a sadness, blazing in them.
“Look to the moon,” she says. “The truth is in the moon.”
And then she springs toward Sissy, a blur of action, her eyes rolling back, her clawed paws slashing forward.
I see them both as in a photograph, this moment frozen. Ashley June silhouetted against the window, her hair flaming behind her, descending on Sissy; and Sissy trying to rise, pushing off the floor with her sweaty arms.
I pull the trigger and the shotgun explodes.
Fifty-six
THE BLAST CATCHES Ashley June with enough force to send her flying into the window. The glass craters under the impact of her body, bulges out like a cracked eyeball, but does not break.
“Don’t,” I say.
But she does. Ashley June picks herself up, her legs buckling. Her body riddled with holes, her eyes clenched in excruciating pain, she’s blinded by the flash. She had not known to shut her eyes against the blast as I had. She sniffs the air, her nostrils flaring. Trying to locate Sissy.
“Don’t.”
Ashley June keeps moving. Right toward Sissy.
I fire another round. A warning shot, into the window. It blasts a huge hole, one body length in diameter, right next to Ashley June. Wind gusts through. Whistling, it blows through Ashley June’s hair, and the strands seem to reach out to me like bloodstained, pleading arms.
“Don’t.”
She crouches down to leap at Sissy.
I shoot again.
The blast pummels Ashley June almost right out of the hole in the window. She is only able to stop from falling outside by spreading her arms and catching herself on the ragged rim. Her eyeballs have disintegrated; viscous white liquid leaks out from the corners of her shut eyelids. Like tears.
“Please,” I say.
She leaps, once more, and I pull the trigger for the last time.
The blast swallows up my hellish scream.
She’s flung outside into the open sky. For a long moment, she hangs suspended in the great wide emptiness of the night. She looks so alone. And then she falls. Shards of glass sparkle around her, twinkling, blinking, then are no more.
Fifty-seven
I PUT MY mind on lockdown. Refuse to think, to acknowledge the horror of what I have done. There is only what must be done next, and quickly, before the heper odors, still thickening, overcome me. The dart gun.
I scuttle across the floor to where Ashley June laid it down. My neck is cracking, head flickering from side to side, drool seemingly pouring out from my pores now. Desire revolting against my will, beginning to get the upper hand. With trembling hands, I turn the dart gun around until the muzzle is pressed against my leg. I pull the trigger. A sharp sting on my thigh.
Ice flames sweep over me.
I don’t even remember collapsing to the ground. When I come to, Sissy is leaning over me, cradling my head in her lap. Five seconds might have passed, or five hours—it feels like both, it feels like neither.
“Gene,” Sissy says, “it’s okay now. You’re okay now.” She strokes my sweat-dampened hair away from my forehead. Everything is dark. Everything is night again.
I turn over and cough, heave out a stream of chunky putrid yellow. I’m vanquished, strength obliterated. My legs, thin and stilt-like, sticking out of a body that already feels clumsy and distended. Gravity, so heavy on me.
The suite is shaking. The whole obelisk seems to be canting. They’re in. They’re in the obelisk, racing around the spiral staircase.
“We have to hurry, Gene.”
I nod, and she helps me up to my feet. I avoid looking outside, at the masses pouring into the Palace, at the gaping hole in the window through which Ashley June had been shot.
“Sissy,” I say hoarsely, and her name on my tongue again feels as natural as it is comforting. “The enclave. We use it to escape. It’s programmed to head to the train.”
She nods.
Screams wail up the spiral staircase inside the obelisk. Harsh, grating, predatory.
“Hurry,” I say. I stumble over to the enclave, fish out the tablet. The controls are self-explanatory, thankfully user-friendly. Just get in, press GO.
But Sissy is staggering to the other end of the suite, her legs wobbly and uncertain.
“Sissy!”
The screams from the staircase intensify. They smell us.
Sissy runs back, cocking the shotgun.
“Forget shooting them! There’s too many. Just get in!”
But she’s only remembering what I have forgotten. She aims high at one of the tanks, fires away. The glass shatters, a partial break, but the thick liquid gushing out widens the break further, until the whole tank collapses in a spill of glass and green liquid.
David slides out, his body runny as the tank liquid.
Sissy grabs him before he hits the ground. But he slips out of her arms, slick as oil, and I’m already there, catching him before he hits the floor. I flinch back in horror at the touch of his skin. It’s ice-cold, flaccid, folds of wet skin layered on top of each other.
Sissy is pulling off the oxygen mask. David’s congealed skin around his mouth is pried off with the mask, a soggy, stringy pulp offering no resistance.
“David,” Sissy says, her voice somewhere between a gasp and a cry.
I grab her arm. “Let’s go, Sissy.”
But she doesn’t. Not even as screams—hundreds of them—reverberate up the obelisk. She’s hunched over David, pounding his chest.
Then, in the midst of the cacophony of screams, comes the most beautiful, miraculous of sounds. A cough.
From David.
Thick, soupy phlegm rises halfway out of his mouth before falling back in.
“David!” Sissy yells, then turns him over to his side, starts thumping his back. “Cough it out, David!” She flings her eyes up at me in panic. “He’s choking on his own vomit.”
The mob of duskers less than twenty seconds from bursting into the suite.
But there’s a way to slow them down.
“Get him into the enclave!” I shout. “Now, Sissy!”
“Not until he stops choking!”
I sprint to the doorway, unclipping the Origin grenades I’d taken earlier. Flip open the switch, depress the button. A beep-beep-beep immediately sounds, getting faster and louder. I throw a grenade down the stairway. I hear it clang, bounce. Then nothing, as if swallowed up harmlessly by the soup of bodies. Dark shadows now race along the curved walls, heads, bodies, claws.
A flash, a loud bang.
Followed by cries of pain. They’re blinded by the concussive explosion of light. And for a few, there is a different kind of pain. The pain of being punctured by Origin shrapnel deep into their bodies, of being rapidly re-turned by the Origin serum.
I toss the other—and last—grenade down the stairs. Go for broke, hold nothing back. Another flash, more screams. I spin around. No time to waste inspecting my handiwork.
Sissy hasn’t moved. She’s still pounding David’s back, and large gobs of vomit are spewing out of his lungs. White-green-yellow bile that’s rotted and gestated new bacterial life-forms, gushing out of his mouth. The stink of it horrendous. Eyes still closed, arms limp, legs splayed out lifelessly before him. If you told me this was only postmortem spasmodic vomiting, I’d believe it.
I yell at Sissy, “We have to get into the enclave now—”
Screams erupt again from the stairs. These are human screams, the shrieking holler of a newborn. The grenades worked. The shrapnel have re-turned duskers to hepers. A few of them, anyway, their skin embedded with Origin shrapnel, bodies bent over in pain, as they are transformed back to hepers. Only to be quickly devoured.
We have to move. I pick up David and cradle him to my chest, his head hanging limply as if in surrender. No more, no more, just leave me.
A dusker flies through the doorway, its feet scrabbling for traction on the marble floor made slick by David’s vomit. Its feet slide out from under it as it goes crashing against the wall.
More time. We need more time.
I set David down, leap toward the contraption the Ruler had used to confine himself. There—dangling from a cord, the remote control for the glass partition. I press the button as even more duskers streak into the suite, slipping and sliding, their claws skittering under them as they also slam against the far wall.