I couldn’t hear my own words. The whine got louder and louder, and the room spun faster and faster.
The lights went out, and it all stopped. The tone in my ears was gone and I could hear the hum of the air system again. I opened my eyes, and the ceiling had stopped moving, for the most part.
The words appeared and floated in front of me.
The headache was gone. The tremors were gone. I looked around. Noelle still stood there watching me.
“What happened?” I asked. She didn’t answer.
“Hello?” My voice echoed in the room.
I didn’t feel drunk anymore, which was weird. I didn’t have the shakes anymore either. Instead I felt clear, clearer than I had in a long time, and maybe even ever.
It was so quiet, a quiet like I’d never known before, and after a minute, I realized why. That constant stream of sensation that always lingered in the back of my mind was gone. Noelle was standing a few feet away, but I couldn’t sense her. I couldn’t sense any of the stray thoughts that were always there, like white noise in the background. The sensation was gone altogether. It was as if I’d suddenly woken up blind and deaf.
For a second I felt panic, but then, just like that, it vanished and instead I felt something else: relief. I felt profound relief.
“It’s gone,” I whispered. Noelle smiled a little, but she didn’t look happy.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It felt good. I remembered once, years ago, the first time I’d come face-to-face with a revivor and I realized I couldn’t sense or control it. I remembered how scared it had made me feel, how lost I felt without that ability. It was different now. Now it felt liberating. If I didn’t know the future, then I was under no obligation to try to change it. I didn’t have to feel any guilt for not being able to change the things that couldn’t be changed. I didn’t have to live in fear.
“It’s gone,” I whispered again; then something moved under the skin in back of my neck. Phantom fingers wormed into the muscle and sent a shiver down my spine.
Something shocked me. My whole body jerked, and I almost fell to the floor. Before I could wonder what happened, the skin on my face felt tight all of a sudden. My lips peeled back and pain pricked at my gums.
Something was wrong. Inside me, something was very wrong. The scratching in the back of my neck started to burn. I reached back, and when my hands touched the back of my head, I felt the skull melt away under the skin and hair there. Heat trickled down into my stomach, and under my fingers the skin pulled tight across the knobs of my spine.
Pain pricked my gums like needles and I felt my tongue peel down the middle into two pieces. My cheeks collapsed as the skin pulled taut around my neck, and the walls around me shifted from green to a colorless gray.
The word flashed more urgently, then winked out. The crawling under my skin stopped.
My head felt big and heavy. It wobbled as I turned, and when I did, I noticed a strand of drool had oozed down from my lower lip. When I wiped it with my hand, I saw something black in it.
I turned again and caught my reflection in the steel of the headset panel. I tried to scream, but nothing came out.
“This is how it begins,” Noelle said.
I stared at my face, distorted in the polished metal of the switchbox. My neck was shriveled to a bent stick, and my head bobbed at the end. I could barely support it. The back of my skull had melted away under the skin. My lips were pulled back to show my teeth. The gums pulled away and there was blood there, and saliva that drooled from the end of my chin. It was what Ai and the others had termed the Vaggot Deformation.
My eyes stared out of sunken sockets, the whites spotted with broken black veins. I turned back to Noelle and tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the sounds. All that came out was a guttural wheeze.
“Without the building blocks it requires, it tries to use the tissue around it,” she said. “It fails, but drags its victims into a state between life and death, and the spread never stops.”
I got a flash of streets full of surging bodies, eyes blank and staring, and deformed heads that shook at the end of crooked necks. They moved through the wreckage of an abandoned city, not understanding the things around them.
“The living are forced underground,” she said. “You are seeing the last remnants of humanity.”
My reflection worked the swollen halves of its black tongue as I tried to speak. Noelle stepped close to me and looked into my eyes.
She leaned in and put her arms around me. I felt her cold hand on the back of my vulture’s neck, and rested my chin on her bony shoulder. I felt her breath in my ear as she whispered one last time.
“Someone has to do it,” she said. “You know in your heart this is true. Destroy the city, and you can stop this. It’s the only thing that can stop this. You have to—”
The room warped in front of me. I staggered forward as Noelle disappeared. The green concrete walls faded and I was back at Alto Do Mundo, in the war room, where Penny stood shaking me.
“Zoe!”
I touched my face. It was normal. I ran my hands over the back of my neck. I was okay. It wasn’t real. None of it was real, but …
“What happened?” Penny asked. “What did you see?”
I turned and vomited onto the tiled floor. Even as I retched, I couldn’t shake the horrible feeling of being trapped in that deformed body.
“Zoe, come on. We’re leaving.”
I looked around and saw that men in black body armor had surrounded us. They all had automatic rifles and were standing at attention. Ai had approached us, her face pale as she stared into my eyes.
“What did you see?” she asked.
“I …”
“They’re swarming out there,” one of the guards said. “We’re not going to be able to get past them!”
“The blockades are to keep us in until he can destroy the towers,” Penny said. “Heinlein’s satellite is recharging to fire again right now. We don’t have a choice. We have to leave now.”
“What did you see?” Ai asked again.
“I know what I have to do,” I told them, trying to spit the puke taste out of my mouth.
“We don’t have time for this,” Penny said. “We’re going to the roof. Come on.” No one moved.
“Tell me what you saw,” Ai said.
“You were right,” I told her. “The city is going to burn …it will be gone in an hour.”
Ai didn’t answer. She didn’t push any further. She didn’t make me say the last part of what was going through my mind, the part I didn’t want to think about.
Penny put one of her arms around my waist. She pulled me along as we began to move again.
“Is that true?” she whispered in my ear. “Are we too late? Is this it?”
“Yeah,” I said. I saw the mistake we’d made, the same mistake made over and over, but I’d seen it way too late.
It was true.
