When I looked up, he was coming right toward me. I glanced to the front door and saw my next-door neighbor standing there. He was looking in, his eyes wide, but he wasn’t doing anything.
“Help!”
The dead man turned and saw him. For just a second, the old ginger man looked calm, almost confident, but as the revivor closed the distance, his eyes went wide and he just stared, like he was frozen.
With a loud snap, the revivor’s palm split apart and a big, sharp blade shot out of it. It arced over his head with a whistling sound, and the next thing I knew Red was gasping as blood began to gush out of his neck. The blade whipped around again and he grabbed his belly as a squiggly red mess spilled out into his bloody hands.
The big guy pulled me away, and I heard my neighbor’s body fall wetly onto the floor. He reached into his pocket with his free hand and pulled something out, yanking the cap off of it with his mouth and spitting it onto the floor. It was a needle.
I struggled, but he was too strong. I felt a prick as the needle stuck into the side of my neck.
He pulled the syringe away, and all of a sudden he convulsed. His eyes bugged out and his whole body started to shake as the fistful of my shirt slipped from his hand and I fell back onto the floor. When I looked up, Karen was there, standing behind him. She had something black in her hand with two prongs sticking out of it. She had stuck them right in the guy’s side, and I heard an electric popping sound.
She pulled the prongs away and the popping stopped. I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t move and I fell over onto my side.
The guy turned around toward Karen. She tried to stick him again with the stun gun and he hit her hard, causing her to stumble, waving the stunner blindly. He batted her arm away and shoved her down onto the floor.
“Karen?” I mumbled, trying to focus. Blood was coming out of her nostrils and she was trying to get up as his foot stomped down and kicked the stunner away. I looked up in time to see the blade pulling back.
“Wait!” I screamed, holding up my hands. I tried to scramble back, putting myself between them as he got ready to cut her. “Wait! Don’t!”
He paused for just a second and looked from me to her, then back to me. I saw an orange light flicker behind his pale yellow eyes, and for a second it looked like he was reading something only he could see.
“I can fix it!” I said. Karen was shaking her head, and her eyes were starting to clear.
“Zoe, don’t….”
With some effort, I managed to get back up on my feet. He watched me as I staggered a few steps closer to him.
“I can fix it,” I told him. The orange light continued to flicker in his eyes, and the blade was still poised like it was ready to strike.
“I can make her forget,” I said.
“I know you can,” he said.
The orange light went out, and with a loud snap, the blade disappeared. His hand went back together and he relaxed his fingers.
Before he could change his mind, I went over to Karen and dropped onto my knees next to her. With my remaining energy, I concentrated until the brightness came.
“What are you—”
“Sleep.”
Her eyelids got heavy, and she started to sink back down onto the floor.
“Zoe, no….”
“Sleep.”
She rolled onto her back and went limp, her breathing becoming slow and easy.
“You didn’t hear anything tonight,” I told her. “I was never in trouble and you didn’t come up here to help me. You didn’t see anyone else here tonight.”
“Okay …”
“As far as you will remember, no one was here.”
She nodded and I wiped my eyes, then leaned in closer so I could whisper in her ear.
“If I don’t see you again,” I said, “thank you, Karen.”
She murmured something in her dreamlike state, but I didn’t hear what it was as the big, cold hand came down and grabbed me by the back of my shirt. I was lifted up off the ground as everything went black, and all I could do was hope that whoever he was and whatever he wanted, he would just take me and go, because if he decided to kill her, there wasn’t anyone left who could stop him.
10
Rise
Nico Wachalowski—Guardian Metro Storage Facility
I woke up to the sound of something sputtering softly, then a single drop echoing as it splashed into a puddle somewhere below me. It was somewhere dark and cold.
“Hey.”
The voice came from out of the darkness. It was deep, but female.
There was a tingling in my face and my neck that ran all the way down my arms and legs to my hands, fingers, and toes. My head was resting on something hard, and my back hurt. Everything hurt.
“Hey.”
Something nudged me in the ribs. Something hard. Messages scrolled by behind my eyelids, and I cracked them open. The room was mostly dark, but the walls were flickering with a dim light. Turning my head slightly, I saw a young woman was standing over me. She wore black leather boots and skintight jeans. She looked down at me, muscular arms hanging by her sides. It was the girl, Calliope.
“Are you dead?” she asked.
“No.”
“You want me to call somebody?”
“No.”
My whole body felt like it had taken a beating, but everything still seemed to work. A deep pain dug into my chest when I tried to sit up, forcing me to roll over onto my hands and knees.
The box that had contained Faye’s body lay open, and the empty sac of fluid from inside was plastered to the floor like a giant piece of skin. I scanned around, but she was gone. All that was left was the padlock key from my pocket lying next to the discarded chain. I tried to check the chronometer to see how long I’d been out, but it looked like every system had reinitialized. I checked my cell phone instead. An hour had passed.
“Was anyone else here when you got here?”
“No, just you.”
“Did you pass anyone on the way in?”
“No.”
Great.
