Divided Read online

  1

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  Hunter was alive.

  I watched, helpless, as the alien stabbed its hand into Hunter.

  But Hunter was fighting back.

  The black fluid on her body pulled away from her breasts and crotch, leaving her naked, and concentrating itself on her left hand, where it formed a claw. She pushed this into the alien’s body, and the alien screamed, withdrawing its hand from Hunter, stopping whatever it was trying to do.

  It hurled itself over me off the bed, and a moment later I heard the door open.

  No. I couldn’t let it get away.

  Hunter collapsed beside me, injured.

  Don’t let your will be defeated.

  I won’t, old man. I bloody well won’t.

  I rolled over and fell off the bed, slamming into the floor, the thin carpet doing little to cushion the fall.

  I found myself staring at the platform the bed rested on, and for some reason this bothered me.

  For some reason, this was wrong.

  I pushed myself up, pulling my knees under me and resting on them and my hands, my head hung, feeling so heavy.

  Blood fell from the wound in my chest onto the carpet, staining it red.

  The room was brighter now, and I turned my head and saw the door lay open.

  Right, she ran away. It ran away. It was getting away.

  And I had to catch it.

  My face hit the carpet with a thud, shaking my brain, waking me up, knocking me back into consciousness.

  I was in the same spot, though this time I was turned slightly, and my eyes faced the dresser by the bed.

  There was a little black marble there, behind the dresser.

  That’s where you went, I thought. You’re supposed to be under the bed.

  This bothered me. For some reason I kept thinking, No noise. No noise.

  I found myself reaching out for the marble. It seemed so comforting. It called to me.

  Then before I could realize what I was doing, I had swallowed it.

  A compulsion.

  Dust and hair stuck to my tongue and the roof of my mouth, and I spat, trying to clear it.

  But the hair stubbornly clung, all that came out being blood.

  I got up again, and this time when my face hit the thin carpet, I was facing the door. Closer to it, but still so far away.

  Then the sun started setting outside, the room growing dimmer.

  And then it was night.

  And it was time to sleep.

  2

  “Gage.”

  The voice was far away.

  “Gage! Wake up. Please. I need you.”

  My head throbbed and I felt like if I opened my eyes I was going to vomit.

  But I opened them anyway.

  Hunter’s face was above me. My eyes locked onto the scar on her left shoulder, the one angled down toward her heart.

  My heart, had been broken. Had been destroyed.

  I had been deceived. Betrayed. I’d—

  “Gage. Do you hear me?”

  I tried to sit up, but my body was in agony and I barely got even an inch off the bed—how’d I get back on the bed?—before falling back down.

  “I’m alive,” I got out.

  Then I just laid there, eyes open, trying to breathe. I stared past Hunter’s face at the ceiling.

  It was a pink ceiling. Not a bright pink. A pale one, but still pink.

  The room was bright now, though whether lit by sun or artificial light I couldn’t tell and didn’t care to turn my head to look.

  “Abigail…” Hunter said, “something’s wrong with her.”

  I blinked, focused on Hunter, my mind starting to grind into gear, the fog lifting.

  I pushed myself up again, this time scooting up on the bed and bracing myself against the headboard.

  Hadn’t I fallen off the bed? Had Hunter lifted me up here all by herself?

  I looked around the room.

  It was empty, the door shut and locked, but the curtains over the closed windows pulled open, letting in bright sunlight.

  Then I looked in the other direction, at Hunter.

  She was naked now, those black tendrils having moved from her body to her left hand, forming a claw.

  She saw me looking at this, and held it up between us. “It is a gift from you, I think.” She met my eyes. “From killing all those hellspawns.”

  I noticed her wings were gone. She must’ve sucked them back into herself, used them to heal.

  An image of scissors stabbing into an eye socket flashed in my mind.

  But the eyes I was looking at were unblemished. Crystal clear, if slightly inhuman. “Your eyes…”

  She lifted a hand and touched one of these. “Another gift from you. I felt it in my brain, I know you’re not supposed to be able to, but I did. And thanks to your power, I was able to heal even from that.”

  There’s always something you can’t heal from, I heard in my mind. The voice of my enemy. But not my adversary, for I defeated him, trapped him.

  No, this was the voice of the woman I thought I loved. The woman who I thought loved me.

  The woman who wasn’t a woman at all. She wasn’t even human.

  “Abigail,” I said, scanning the room for her.

  “She’s in the bathroom. She’s…” Hunter shook her head. “I don’t know what Emma or whatever that thing was did to her, but it was… It’s changed her.”

  “She’s alive?” I asked.

  Hunter nodded slightly. “I don’t know how she resisted her. She doesn’t have powers like you or I.” Her eyes flicked down to my chest, and I looked down myself, and in so doing realized I wasn’t wearing anything.

  There was a scar where the alien stab me. Already?

  I touched it, touched that spot that had held the stone and was now empty—no, not empty—then frowned and looked up at her. “What happened? Did you—”

  She shook her head. “I found you like this. I sense there’s something changed about you now. It scares me. I was worried it wasn’t going to be you anymore when you woke up.” She looked at her left hand, her fingers ending in sharp black glistening points. “That’s why I kept this at the ready. Just in case I had to…”

  I reached out and touched her, cupped her cheek. “It’s me.”

  She placed her right hand over mine on her cheek and nodded. “We need to do something about Abigail. She’s…”

  “She’s what?”

  “I don’t know if it was seeing her friend change or something more sinister. I can feel something about her, but I don’t know what it is. Whatever it is, it’s changed her.”

  “Changed her in what way?”

  “I think she’s gone crazy.”

  “But her neck. All that blood. How?”

  “I don’t know. That thing tried to cut into her skull, as though there was something she wanted. It didn’t seem like she was just trying to kill her.

  “I stopped her, and that’s when she—it, when it tried to… I don’t know. Convert me? Control me? Replace me. Yes, that’s what it felt like.”

  I was still in a lot of pain, but my mind was clearing.

  Something else was happening too. I felt… strange. Felt a darkness, a rage, not descending upon me, but trying to rise out from me. “Trying to get into her brain?” I asked.

  Hunter nodded.

  I remembered an unexpected spot on an x-ray in a makeshift hospital, and wondered just what exactly it had been.

  Wondered if that doctor had
had any response from any of her colleagues.

  But right now I had to make sure that girl who had gotten the x-ray was still alive.

  And so I got up off the bed.

  Hunter didn’t try to stop me, just climbed off with me, putting her hands out in case I needed her support.

  I did, but not in that way.

  “Abigail?” I asked, knocking on the bathroom door.

  “Abigail Abigail Abigail,” came the reply.

  “is everything all right in there?”

  “Die die die.”

  I glanced at Hunter.

  “See? I don’t know what happened to her.”

  I tried the door handle. It wasn’t locked.

  I carefully pushed the door open, preparing myself to duck out of the way in case she came charging out with a pair of scissors.

  Scissors. I should’ve checked where they were.

  I glanced to the hotel-room door. It was locked, the U-shaped loop swung over the bolt.

  That thing, that alien, was out there. But it was probably long gone by now. I wanted to chase after it. To find it. To make it pay.

  But first I had to take care of Abigail.

  I pushed open the door.

  Abigail was sitting in front of the tub, knees to her chest, naked and bloody.

  She was rocking back and forth, her mouth around one of her knees, teeth digging into flesh.

  I couldn’t tell if the blood there was fresh from her bitting, or old from the wound in her neck.

  I also couldn’t tell the state of the wound in her neck. It wasn’t gushing blood, but I could see the ragged skin there where the scissors had pierced.

  I approached her slowly. “Abigail?”

  She kept rocking, kept biting into her knee.

  I crouched down as I got close, bringing myself to her level, holding out my hand palm up. “Abigail, can you give me your hand? Can you do that for me?”

  Her eyes flicked up to mine, then back down to the floor.

  She didn’t stop rocking, didn’t unlatch her teeth from her knee, and I saw now that the blood was fresh, saw she was biting through the thin skin there.

  I got closer, turned my hand and placed it gently on her shoulder.

  She didn’t jerk back, didn’t react at all.

  I brushed her red hair—which was now dark with blood—from her pale face, then tried to pull her knee away from her mouth.

  But she wouldn’t let go.

  I had to put my fingers in her mouth, risking her biting them off, and pry her jaw open, unlatch her teeth from her own flesh.

  I finally got her mouth open and her head pushed away from her knees.

  But when I tried to unwrap her arms from her knees and push them down, she chomped at me.

  Then she laughed, and then started crying. “Emma. She’s gone. Emma’s dead Emma’s dead. Emma’s killing dead. Dead killing all dead. We all die dead. We all—”

  “Shh. It’s okay.”

  I wrapped my arms around her, her knees between us, and she started crying harder, babbling incoherently.

  I let her cry for a while, though not too long, and then reached over her and turned on the tub.

  When the water was warm I slipped my hands under her knees and back and lifted her over the rim and gently lowered her into the tub.

  “Is she gone?” I asked Hunter, hoping she would have a sense for it. Because I didn’t.

  Or not exactly.

  When I tried to reach out as I had before, I got—

  It was hard to describe. Static? A force? Something fighting back against me.

  “I can’t tell. I don’t think so. But then, I also feel something. But that thing is gone. It’s like it somehow left a trace, a residue.”

  “Hand me that,” I said, gesturing at a wash cloth.

  Hunter looked down at Abigail as she handed it to me. “She’s different.”

  “Obviously.”

  “It’s… bothering me.”

  I looked up at her. “Do you feel she’s dangerous?”

  “To who? Us? No. Someone else? Almost certainly.” She shrugged.

  Using the cloth I washed the blood—there was so much of it—off of Abigail’s skin so I could get a better idea of her state.

  If only you had a nurse.

  I pushed the unwelcome thought away.

  I wasn’t sure if I should have Hunter go get Abigail’s mother. It probably wasn’t a good idea to let her see her daughter like this.

  Then I realized I didn’t even know if Abigail’s parents were still alive.

  Had that thing gone and killed them after it had tried to kill us?

  Don’t think you can know the enemy. Never assume motivation. Never ascribe your own motives to something foreign.

  Great, old man. Thanks for that helpful information.

  He was right though. I didn’t know what the alien wanted. Didn’t know if she had meant to kill us and failed, or if this was part of her plan.

  I was paranoid now about playing into someone else’s hand. I’d done it two times too many already.

  The wound in Abigail’s neck was bad.

  Very, very bad. I could see things I shouldn’t be able to see inside her neck.

  I wasn’t sure why she wasn’t bleeding from it. By all appearances, she should have been.

  But she wasn’t.

  And she was still alive, too.

  I was grateful for this, but also confused.

  I looked down at the wound in my chest. The scar.

  Then I looked at Hunter, her perfectly clear eyes.

  But this was different.

  Yes, Hunter could heal from apparently anything—There’s always something you can’t heal from—and I could heal as well, though not as well as Hunter.

  But Abigail hadn’t healed. The wound was still there, just not bleeding.

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  I finished cleaning Abigail, scrubbing the blood off her skin and out of her hair, then got her out of the tub and wrapped her in a towel.

  She had been silent this whole time, staring blankly, never looking at me, but now as I wrapped the towel around her she started crying again and fell into me, pressing her head into my chest, her cheek against my scar.

  I wrapped my arms around her and held her until the tears stopped.

  “Dead. Killed dead all dead killed all all killed dead. We all die dead die dead dies day. No death likes dead but days dark do death depart.”

  Hunter and I exchanged a look.

  We didn’t need a psychic bond to know what the other was thinking.

  I got dressed in my dirty clothes, and got Abigail dressed in clean ones from her suitcase.

  Hunter refused, and instead caused the black from her hand to spread out over her body, covering her crotch and nipples.

  “Looks like I don’t need to make a superhero suit after all. You gave me one that’s part of me.”

  I looked down at my hands expecting to see black. But they were just my hands again. Normal.

  My stomach lurched. I held up my hand, made a fist.

  Nothing happened.

  No blade came out.

  The same for my left: no shield appeared.

  “She took it,” Hunter said.

  I looked at her. “Right. Of course. Is that what she’d wanted all along? Is that why she pretended?”

  “She wanted something. She’s the reason we stopped here. For some reason she didn’t want us to go back to the factory first.”

  With Abigail and I dressed, and Hunter at least partially covered, we went outside looking around for… anything.

  There was nothing.

  We walked Abigail to her parents’ room and knocked on the door.

  It was shut and locked, which was a good sign.

  I hoped.

  I had my fist ready as the door opened, and it was only when I saw Abigail’s father’s tired face that I remembered that I was no longer the sword or the shield.

&nbsp
; He rubbed his eyes and squinted at us. “What’s—” Then he saw his daughter. “Abby,” he said, worried, sleep fleeing from him. Words poured out of him in one long stream. “Oh my God what happened are you okay?”

  “Die death die,” she sang. “We all die days times death dark depths don’t dry deficits.”

  He looked at me and then Hunter and then back to me. “Is this some kind of joke? Is she—”

  I shook my head. “It’s no joke. Something happened to her.”

  “What? Oh my God what happened to her? You’re supposed to protect her.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Where’s Emma?” he asked, looking around.

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what to say, but luckily I was saved from having to answer as Abigail’s mother came to the door.

  She gasped when she saw her daughter and reached out for her.

  Abigail hissed at her then laughed when her mom withdrew.

  “Abby…”

  Abigail started crying again, collapsing to the ground, tearing at her clothes, biting into her arm now instead of her knee.

  “Oh Abigail stop,” her mother said, going to her, wrapping her arms around her tightly and holding her there.

  “Stay here with them,” I said quietly to Hunter. “If anything—”

  Hunter nodded, silencing me. “I know. Hurry back.”

  We didn’t have a connection like we did before, but we did still have one.

  It was just different now.

  Darker.

  Deathly days die, I thought nonsensically in Abigail’s voice.

  3

  I left Hunter and Abigail with her parents and went outside, scanning the area for signs of life.

  Or death.

  My heart stopped when I looked over the railing and saw something by Abigail’s parents’ SUV.

  I ran down taking steps three at time and jumping the last few.

  Don’t be fooled, Gage. Never allow yourself to be controlled. Act, don’t react.

  I halted, fifteen feet away from the body.

  Emma’s body.

  She lay naked, face down on the asphalt, her hair over her face, obscuring it from me.

  She was no longer that strange alien thing, but once more Emma.

  Or something that looked like Emma. Something that looked like that nurse that it turned out I had probably last seen when she went to take a shower all the way back in the prison infirmary.