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“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.
