The Heavens Rise

rushed up to meet him as he dropped himself feet-first into the tank.

27

TANGIPAHOA PARISH

OCTOBER 2013

Ben could feel them.

There was nothing quick or predatory about their movements, nothing to suggest they were penetrating his flesh or following some primordial instinct to enter his bloodstream and make their way to his brain. First they drifted toward him, then they formed tendrils down his limbs, up his neck and over his face, and within a few minutes it felt as if a veritable blanket of them had embraced him from head to toe. But there were no pinprick stings, no tiny bites. On their own, they were too small for that, and it was the clumping of them—the flocking, as Noah had called it—that rendered them visible at all.

According to her journal, Nikki and Marshall had been in the water together only a few minutes, so that was all it took, right? Just a few minutes was all he needed. But Ben held himself below the surface, just as he used to do when he and Nikki were kids and they would compete to find out who could hold their breath the longest. It was fear that kept him from surfacing, but not fear over what he’d done. Too much of the world had been cracked open during the past few hours for him to be seized by such a childish and reflexive instinct. No, he was simply afraid that if he surfaced too quickly, the little bastards wouldn’t have enough time to work their magic.

But then he heard the sound of Nikki sobbing, as familiar to him as if they’d never been separated; the same raw, chesty sobs she’d let loose when choir practice was interrupted and she was told that her grandmother had died. When he broke the surface, gasping for air, feeling wet clumps of the little fuckers sliding down his cheeks and up his nostrils—not sliding, crawling—she was cradling her father’s corpse in her arms. It looked like she was preparing to flip Noah’s body into the tank. But that wasn’t it; she was just desperate to hold him, but she didn’t want to cradle his gunshot-blasted head on her lap, so she’d slid her arms underneath his lower back, despite the awkwardness of the pose.

Then she saw Ben, floating several feet away, with only his head above the surface. He braced himself for judgment of some kind, but instead, he saw a flash of recognition in her eyes that stalled her violent tears. She was scanning the rippling surface of the tank. The tendrils of Elysium parasite had formed a starburst pattern around his head.

“I knew you would do this.” Her voice was choked. “The minute you knew about it, I knew you would do something like this . . . I knew you would want to save the world with it. So I tried to keep it a secret and do my best to save you.” She was fighting tears again. “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? After the life I’ve lived . . . I’m still so afraid for everyone else. And that’s the worst part. You can’t use it on the people you love, not even to make them save themselves. It’s just too dangerous. You can’t. You just can’t . . .”

Ben hoisted himself from the tank, did his best to ignore the sensation of a thousand microorganisms sliding down his slick flesh as he made his way to her. Without moving from where she sat, he yanked on her father’s body suddenly, until his head was resting on her lap. His face was unharmed and she avoided touching the back of his skull. Instead, she ran her fingers gently down the bridge of his nose, and Ben wondered if she was trying to draw solace from the fact that Noah’s death wouldn’t be marked by the same hideous transformation as the loss of her mother.

“He was dying,” Ben finally said, and he was amazed, a little disappointed, to find that his voice sounded exactly the same. “The thing he turned Jeffrey Cross into, it attacked him. His wounds were infected and he was . . . he was dying, Nikki.”

“If only it had been the fountain of youth,” she whispered.

Because there was nothing else he could think of to do, he sank down behind her and wrapped his arms around her chest, and in her ear he whispered, “I missed you. I missed you so much.” His words felt pathetic and inadequate. He closed his eyes to see if they would resonate, for him, at least. And they did, a little. Nikki shook with more sobs. He gently pulled her to her feet, then he took her hands in his. As her sobs continued, he placed his forehead against hers because he could think of nothing else to do but say her name over and over again.

He was trying for a speech, a strategy, a pitch. But all he kept seeing over and over again was Anthem’s apartment building blowing sky high like the redbrick house in Beau Chene. All he could see was Marissa, possessed, drained of herself, dragging him into that boat propeller. And all his grand plans and clever words kept collapsing in on themselves. There was a great freedom in all of this somewhere, a clarity that would push the shadows from the path ahead.

“It’s Marshall, isn’t it?” Nikki finally whispered. “He woke up.”

“Yes . . .”

She nodded, but she was struggling for breath. Then she took his hand and they started to run.

•   •   •

Ben was astonished that Nikki owned a cell phone and a car. After what he’d just been through, he would have been less surprised to learn she’d spent the last eight years sleeping under bridges and darting between rooftops courtesy of dragonfly wings. But instead she’d been making cell phone calls on the shiny iPhone she passed to him as soon as he asked for it, and gliding along highways in the sleek black SUV that sat parked on the other side of the ruined chain-link fence enclosing most the property. The Keep Out signs along the fence now looked as mold-bruised and weathered as the once welcoming signs for the old zoo, and the SUV’s silver grille glinted in the bouncing beam from Nikki’s Maglite.

He’d managed to call Anthem’s cell twice by the time they reached Nikki’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. Straight to voice mail each time. He couldn’t tell if the twisting deep in his gut was just fear, or the first bloom of his immersion’s side effects.

Once he’d braced himself against the Jeep, he looked back on the warren of shadows they’d just escaped from. It was the first time he’d seen the place in its entirety, given that he’d been driven through it in a series of forced blackouts. The building they’d just fled was one of several dilapidated one-story exhibit halls that made a semicircle around a courtyard of cracked concrete. The dry fountain at its center sported a giant statue of an alligator dressed up in some sort of festive, plumed hat, its forelegs lengthened into arms that opened to welcome the dark.

“You’re going to get sick soon,” Nikki said. It was her explanation for shoving him into the backseat, and he didn’t fight her, just curled up onto the leather and screwed his eyes shut as the Jeep’s engine revved beneath him and gravel and twigs spat out from underneath the tires.

“How long?”

“We’re a half hour from New Orleans.”

“How long will I be sick, I meant.”

“Ben, I don’t know. It’s been eight years. I wasn’t in the habit of infecting people.”

“How bad?”

“Like the flu, I guess. I mean, you won’t be incapacitated but it’s not going be pretty and you’re gonna want a bathroom . . .” She fell suddenly and abruptly silent, and when he rolled over onto one side, he saw she was struggling to keep her eyes on the road, the sobs threatening to take control of her again. “I wouldn’t have stopped you, for Christ’s sake. I would have let you make a decision. He didn’t have do that. He didn’t have to—”

“He would have done it anyway. He was planning to do it from the moment he brought me there. Some people are dying, and some people are done. He was done. That’s what he said to me, Nick.”

“I could have stopped him.” In the faint green glow from the dashboard lights, he could see she was focused on the rutted road. “I could have stopped him from going after Jeffrey Cross. He had a list, Ben. Did he tell you about that part? We were in Bangkok—”

“He showed me the pictures.”

“I found a list in his lab. A list of people who’d loved my mother as much as he had. That’s why I left him. We’d been experimenting on psychopaths and he wanted us to come home and switch to his old friends.”