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I dragged in a steady breath. “Shea?”
“I’ll be right here, girl,” she whispered from the couch. “Just get it in here, and I’ll take care of its health.” The springs creaked beneath her shifting weight. “There’re more out there, aren’t there?”
Goosebumps shimmied down my spine. “You feel it, too?”
She couldn’t feel aphids like I could, but nymphs?
“Pinpricks woke me,” she whispered. “In my gut, you know? I’m still feeling that a little.”
Pinpricks? She must’ve experienced a watered-down version of what I’d felt. Lucky her.
Jesse shoved his face in mine. “What are you not telling me?”
“Um, so there might be more nymphs, or I don’t know, aphids out there? But they’re not close enough to trace.” I turned the knob. “We’re losing time talking about it.”
I didn’t wait for a response and threw open the door, armed with a flashlight. As expected, Jesse and Roark flanked me. When I gave them a narrowed glare, they let me lead but held their weapons out and raised around me like a cage.
I wasn’t a doctor, and the only time I’d encountered a sleeping nymph was in the minutes and hours following an injection of the cure. Did nymphs need normal sleep like humans?
This one lay on its back, eyes closed, breaths even, its ghastly pale face slack with unconsciousness. I shone the light over the skeletal body. Not a stitch of clothing. Hair fell in clumps around its head. Her head. She looked as if she’d been living in the wild for two years. Probably not far from the truth.
I nudged her head a few times with my toes. When she didn’t respond, I handed the flashlight to Roark, hooked my fingers under her armpits, and dragged her hundred-pound body inside.
Roark locked the door and joined us on the rug, moving the light over her corpse-like frame. Her complexion glowed as white as the moon, and under all that dirt and grime, I bet her shoulder-length hair was blond. Blue and red veins forked beneath paper-thin skin, her organs and bones grotesquely visible where her body wasn’t caked with mud and blood.
No matter how many times I encountered a nymph, it was always horrifying. Her femininity was there, in the roundness of her small breasts, in the delicacy of her face, and in the dark patch of hair between her legs, which made the gruesome effects of the infection all the more apparent.
She just lay there, neglected and sick, withered away to bone and skin. Did she have a husband? Children? What were her dreams? Her hobbies? Where did she grow up? What was her name?
I wanted to cover her, to protect her modesty from our eyes. She was a woman, or would be again soon. A woman waking up in a nightmare.
Shea read my mind and pulled a blanket from the couch, tossing it over her and tucking the frayed edges beneath her chin. “I looked like that when you found me?”
I laced my fingers through hers and squeezed. “Without the pasty skin.” I shared a smile with her. “And way more attitude.”
She sighed. “Now what?”
“She won’t wake for hours. Maybe a day.” Roark paced to the broken window and peered outside, his brogue thickening. “When she does, we’ll fill in the gaps and make her whole again.”
The memory loss, the flu-like symptoms, the survival training, all while protecting her from aphids and men. A mountain of work for the four of us. My bones ached just thinking about the road ahead.
But tonight, we needed to focus on boarding up the window and door. And preparing, waiting, for whatever was still out there.
We didn’t have to wait long. As Jesse pounded the last nail into the cabinet door on the window, I dropped to my knees against an onslaught of tremors.
I could sense them clearly now, dozens of writhing links, the threads reaching from across the property, each one connecting to a charging aphid. Hungry, rabid, and heading this way.
“Aphids are coming.” Scrambling to my feet, I grabbed my bow and two quivers—mine and Shea’s, leaving a few arrows on the floor beside her bow.
Some of the vibrations were fading, but for each one that slipped away, more flickered into place.
Darwin brushed against my leg, nudging me with his nose. I gripped the fur around his neck and wrapped an arm around my middle. “Shit, there’s a lot of them, but I think some are dying.”
Jesse met me at the door, and the sound of his arrow sliding into place whispered past my ear. “Something is killing them?”
“Yeah. Maybe?” Could it be Michio? Human men? I couldn’t feel him or hear the boom of gunfire, but beneath the frenzy of aphid transmissions, I sensed something non-aphid. Like a cold breath. A hush of something human but not. “There might be another nymph out there, so watch what you’re aiming at.”
