Crucified: The Rise of an Urban Legend (Swann Series Book 9) Page 5

  You won’t lose it, I want to say.

  “Whatever you’re feeling,” I tell him after his lips unseat mine, “I’ve been there. I can help you, even if it’s just being a good listener. Even if it’s just you telling me how you’re feeling. You might not know it, but having me to usher you through this transition will help you see you made the right decision. With you, with me, with us.”

  “Is this how it’s going to be with us?” he asks, his voice more certain, more appreciative.

  “Yes,” I say, moving myself against him, upon him, but not sexually. “It’s going to be like this, but better.”

  His fingers find me, walk down my arm; our hands interlock, our fingers curling into each other. I used to read romance novels and dismiss the meaning of holding hands early on. It’s not like kissing, or making cookies, it’s just …different. This is an act of love, of tenderness, of safety, and right now, this means the world to me.

  “When you put it like that, I have to say, this removes all doubts, all concerns. With you and I that is. Not my father. I just really want him to understand and accept my choices.”

  “That takes time, trust me.”

  “He’s going to shit circus clowns the second he sees me,” he says, the rigidity finally leaving his voice.

  “Then I’ll go with you,” I tell him, mildly amused by the bad joke. “He already doesn’t like me, or trust me, so whatever anger he has to give, I’ll take the brunt of it, then you can deal with what’s left.”

  “He’s definitely going to flip his lid. I wasn’t kidding about him shitting out circus clowns. Seriously.”

  “If he manages such demonic trickery,” I reply, “we’ll deal with it together. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says, more solemn.

  Within moments his breathing settles, then changes. Swallowing the tension, I quietly let him drift off to sleep. For a long time I just snuggle against him, inhaling the scents of his new body, moving my hands on him to make sure he stays real, that he stays mine. For nearly an hour, I lay there wondering if such a thing as my happily-ever-after is even possible.

  I think maybe it will be.

  No, I think it is.

  Rather, it will be if he agrees to take the Fountain of Youth serum. Everything would have been so much better if only he didn’t have that bomb in his brain. Holland, I think, as if his name is a disease.

  Holland, that shifty, shifty wizard.

  When at last I slip into that unconscious void, I fall into neither a restful dream, nor a dreamless slumber. It turns out the corridors of my brain are teeming with memories, like some kind of hoarder’s space that’s taken on too much junk and is now spilling into the walkways, the living spaces, the whole of my consciousness.

  These memories of mine won’t stay tucked away any longer. And right now, they’re weaving the heavy tapestry of a God-awful nightmare. A nightmare that is no fictional construct, but rather an abysmal truth set upon my dreams like some sort of fast acting cancer. What bleeds out of my brain as I sleep are the deplorable memories of the future, a future Alice Jr. sent me forward in time to see.

  For the first time in awhile, I feel The Operator stir, then wake…

  Chapter Five

  These horrors I’m suffering in my sleep, they’re the collective memories of the future I experienced. The unfolding revulsion of it. The grim, destructive wonderment of it all. Ensnared in the web of this nightmare, the memory holds me prisoner, trapping me willfully in this dream state, not letting me go. It makes certain I know that by not killing Hitler at the end of the second World War, the future I experienced—this future I’m seeing right now—is my fault. This memory now masquerading as a nightmare is showing me how the world wept just as it fell to fire and bloodthirsty ruin.

  In the dream, I’m standing on a sidewalk in downtown Manhattan, right across the street from something that used to be a park. The world around me is a wintery scene of raining ash. One look and I know this is a nuclear winter. The air is suffocating, stifling. It’s burning my lungs and eyes; it has me in a fit of coughing right off the bat. My hand goes to my mouth, covering it. I try to wipe a few grey flakes off my tongue. It’s useless. My hands are dotted with the ash as well. It’s all in my mouth, settling on my eyelashes, dusting my hair.

  Then I hear it. Rather I sense it before I hear anything. Out there, in this grim, steel colored nightmare, things are moving swiftly, using the gloom for cover.

  Distant, feral screams make me squirm. Are those even human sounds? The high-pitched bestial cries pepper my skin with goosebumps.

  The word savage springs to mind.

  Then the word enemy.

  My eyes run to black, my hands claw at my sides as instinct takes over and I prepare for whatever is making these unseen cries. To my left, jolting me into an even greater awareness, there is a howl of pain, wet ripping sounds, then the gurgled moaning of someone’s last moments of life. I try to see through the haze, try to see the source of all this barbarous noise. The sounds change, almost like breaking bones and tearing. And then it sounds like licking and chewing.

  It’s when a regular looking business man in a three-piece suit suddenly appears across the street that my attention shifts. I zero in on him. If I had shackles, they’d have risen already. If I was an animal, a low growl would have started at the back of my throat. His entire demeanor is GQ perfect, but the lower half of his face looks like he’s been bobbing for apples in vats of blood.

  “What the hell are you?” I ask, loud enough for him to hear.

  His head cocks sideways, moving to an odd, almost unnatural tilt. One eye holds me while the other looks around. WTF? Then both eyes find me and he starts to yawn. Except that’s no yawn. Half his face pulls open with a bloodcurdling shriek that has him hunching over and rigid. He’s like an animal calling out its prey.

  Oh, God.

  This thing launches at me, moving so fast I almost can’t see him. I know I need to eviscerate this unhinged mutant, but I’m so taken aback, so terror stricken, that where I should be been mounting a counter-attack, I’m instead jolting awake in my bed and letting out an embarrassing, high-pitched yelp.

  In bed next to August, I sit up fast, sweating, panting, shaking. For some reason, my eyes burn from the air inside the nightmare and my lungs feel clogged with wet cheese-cloth. On the nightstand is a glass of water.

  I down the thing in a couple of gulps, still thirsty, still in shock.

  I can hardly believe I was there. The way I ejected myself from the dream, however, was not the way I ejected myself from that reality. Alice Jr. was there. When I traveled, I mean, not in the dream. Instead of that thing coming after me, Alice Jr. went after it, putting it down with fire.

  She then stalked back to me, white dress filthy, and she said, “This is all on you!” A different version of an older Alice was there, too. Both girls hit me with hard eyes. Alice Jr’s were the worst, though. They were obsidian black and cruel, so chock full of stress and disdain I could not pop my time travel device into my mouth and swallow fast enough.

  Back when I was there, more things materialized through the fog; Alice Sr. then did something I did not even know possible. The last thing I saw before returning to this timeline (and back to August), was a massive pillar of fire shooting out of future Alice’s hands, hands that were like industrial flamethrowers.

  Lying next to August, listening to him sleep, I’m so glad I’m home and not in that awful future that Alice and her younger, mini Charles Manson self sent me to. My head is still in that place, the memories still too fresh.

  I close my eyes, seeing this appalling future as plain as day.

  The way future Alice looked when I was there, she was going to burn all of Manhattan by day’s end. I didn’t blame her. I was terrified of what I was seeing. Unable to even fathom how I could have caused something this horrifying. Then, when that GQ thing’s face split open across the middle revealing an extra long tongue and rows upon rows of sharpene
d teeth, parts of me panicked. Even The Operator woke up for the show, but decided not to look too long.

  “You forget all the in-between years,” The Operator said to me. “You forget why we moved into the clouds.”

  I wanted to tell him this was all new to me, that I wasn’t the eight hundred year old me I thought I’d left behind, but what would be the point?

  The less I had to converse with that nut cake the better.

  Ever since I returned from the future, I can’t stop thinking of these creatures, the war torn section of New York, this hell I supposedly created. Those things had to be genetically modified creatures, right? I can’t think of another explanation. Unless they were something else entirely? Maybe this future was the product of some war between good and evil and those creatures were detestations coughed out of hell by Satan himself. The way their faces could just tear open to row upon row of razor sharp fangs…

  “You alright?” a voice says to me. August. I didn’t even hear him wake up.

  “Nightmare,” I say, my throat still chalky.

  He rolls back over and goes to sleep, leaving me to think of all the things I’d rather tuck away into the deepest recesses of my mind. The point is, you can’t tinker with genetics and not expect bad things to happen. Perhaps this is what this future is: mutations gone very, very wrong. Perhaps the way to stop these unholy anomalies is to just stop Holland once and for all.

  But it’s not just Holland.

  There are geneticists like him everywhere. Well, not exactly like him, but smart and willing to conduct off-the-books human trials on people like me. People like Rebecca. And Skye.

  Being as quiet as possible, I crawl out of bed, slip out of the room and walk down the hallway to my old bedroom—Rebecca’s room now. The door is ajar and I can hear her sleeping. Part of me thinks I should handle this a different way, but the whole Skye issue has been on my mind. Rebecca has a child she knows nothing about.

  The baby…good God, I can only imagine its life with Alice Jr! At the time, I knew young Alice was a menace to others, but I never stopped to consider how she’d be with children. What was Holland thinking making her the child’s ward? Out of preservation for Rebecca’s already fragile mind, I’d masked and buried the memories of her childbirth deep inside her head. I hadn’t thought much past that. It was barely even a conscious decision I made. What I wanted most was to protect her. To keep her from falling into a Maggie-level depression.

  I simply acted on instinct.

  Like an erased hard drive, though, the data still remains tucked away but veiled. Can I reveal this to her? Just give her access to these memories once more? Everything would come roaring back painfully, emotionally.

  Would the memories hit too hard?

  Sitting beside her on the bed, I close my eyes and enter her mind. Finding the memories is not hard if you know what to look for, and I know exactly what to look for. Accessing different areas of her brain, I slip the threads of memory into an ongoing dream she’s having.

  The intrusion hits her immediately.

  Sometimes, when your dreams shift (almost with no rhyme or reason), you have to wonder if this is random happenings of the human mind, people like me interfering, or others giving us hints about our lives. Doing what I’m doing, it makes me wonder if my own dreams have ever been invaded. Well, invaded by someone other than the reptilian hybrid from Dulce, New Mexico.

  Rebecca turns on her side, her breathing quickening, her body trying to pull itself inside itself. Then she rolls completely over and wakes up. I slip out of her mind as she draws a sharp breath.

  “It’s just me, Rebecca,” I say, trying to calm her.

  “Are you okay?”

  Wiping my eyes, I say, “You were having a nightmare, I think. I just wanted to check in on you.”

  “I dreamed that…I was…having…”

  “A baby?”

  She sits up, not blinking, not taking her eyes off me. “How did you know that?”

  “How did it make you feel?” I ask, calmly, my tone even and casual.

  For an eternity she just sits there, looking at me, looking down, trying to understand her feelings. “I felt scared, I guess.”

  “For the baby?”

  “For the baby. For me. Do you think this is…maybe…are dreams punishment for doing things you shouldn’t have done?”

  My lips form a smile and I scoot close to her, pull her into a sideways, sisterly hug. “I know you and Jacob had sex. It’s okay. This isn’t that, Rebecca.”

  “How—”

  “The tough thing about being me is I know so much. Too much if you want the God’s honest truth. The great thing is that all these people who look normal and act normal and both live in judgment of themselves and others, they’re just as messed up as you and me. Probably worse. Which technically means we might not be all that messed up after all. Perhaps we’re all just normal. And that’s why I don’t judge you.”

  “You don’t?”

  “What do you think I was doing while you guys were in the pool yesterday and August and I were changing?”

  A short laugh puffs out of her.

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Up and down, in and out.”

  Her girlish giggle cracks me up. Half of me wonders how she’s even processing all this being mentally so young. She’s catching up, I tell myself. This is the most reasonable explanation I suppose, so I guess I should probably go with it.

  “So…maybe dreaming about that…I don’t have to feel bad?”

  “What if that was not a dream but a memory, about a baby. Would you want it to be true? Would you want a child?”

  She thinks about this for a long time, then says, “I don’t know, maybe. With what happened to me though, do you think I’m ready for that?”

  “No. But you have the support system if you need it. Christian, Orianna, me.”

  “I don’t know how Jacob would feel.”

  “You can’t tell him,” I say. “Not about any of it, any of us. Ever.”

  “I know.”

  “What if this was real, and the baby wasn’t just yours? Maybe it was ours. The family’s, and we all raise her together? That would make it so you wouldn’t have to tell Jacob anything, not until he’s ready that is. Not until you decide whether or not he’s the one.”

  “I think if Jacob made the baby, he’d help take care of it, too.”

  “What if it wasn’t his baby?”

  “Whose would it be? Are we still talking about the dream? Wait a minute, what are we talking about here?”

  Now this is where part of me says to stand on the proverbial brakes, but the other part of me knows Skye is being babysat by a pint-sized, vaginafied Charles Manson who—for some completely insane reason—still carries Skye’s dead sister in her backpack. The fact that Holland hasn’t put the kibosh on that super creepy shit already makes me want to do very bad things to them both. Then again, maybe Holland thinks if he lets her carry the baby corpse, it’ll keep her from killing Skye.

  “The dream was real,” I tell Rebecca, my mind made up, “the memory of the child is also real.”

  “No, it was just a dream.”

  “Your child was one of three children Dr. Heim put in you as an experiment.”

  Pulling the blankets around her, fear crawling into her eyes, she says, “Savannah…don’t say these things.”

  Tension consumes me in spite of the fact that I don’t want it, that it’s counterproductive to this impromptu conversation.

  “She’s not safe, Rebecca. She’d be safer with us here, and that’s why I let you have that memory. It’s also why I buried all the other memories of this. I want you safe first. I want you taken care of. Now that you’re okay, we need to take care of her.”

  Her eyes are already flooding; she’s already pulling away.

  “Baby, don’t do that,” I say reaching out for her. She draws back even further. “You don’t have to retreat.”

  She’s crying now, curl
ed into herself beside me, sitting up, but wanting to hide under the covers. “It’s just a dream,” she says, reaching one last time for an easier explanation to the dream than I’ve provided her.

  Repositioning myself in front of her, sitting on the bed with my hands on her knees, I say, “Some really, really bad things happened to me, things that are just as awful as what happened to you, but different. Good things can happen to us, too. You know that. We can take these lives of ours and balance them out, but it will never erase the past.

  “That’s easy for you to say,” she says, sniffling.

  “Sweetheart, our past won’t let us go. It’s a reality we must accept. And the people in our past? They love us and they need us, and that’s why we have to be strong for them, why we have to be better people.”

  “I didn’t have a baby otherwise I’d remember it.” She’s practically hiccupping out now, but at least she’s keeping the volume down.

  “Do you want to remember?” I ask her.

  Lowering her head, she shakes it back and forth and I can see the pre-teen in her. It doesn’t matter, though. I’ve just decided that. I’m going to get Skye and bring her home no matter what. I’ll tell Orianna and Christian in the morning. The more I think about it, the more I know for certain she can’t spend another day with Alice Jr.

  “Well when you’re ready—and one day you will be ready—I can help you with your memories. Until then, just know that everything I do for you I do because I love you.”

  She won’t look at me, but I hear her as she says in the faintest voice, “I know.”

  I move her hair out of her face, tuck it behind her ears, tilt her chin the slightest bit so she can see me eye to eye. “I love you.”

  She pitches into me with a hug that is so real and so teeming with emotion it makes me wonder if there will ever come a time for me to have a child. Even though she’s older than me, technically, she feels like the child I rescued. She feels like my child. Which means my love for her is unwavering, unconditional.

  “Go back to bed,” I say.