Twenty-eight
Sasha retreated to a back bedroom and sat at the
window looking up at the night sky. Wallace leaned against the door
jamb with his hands stuffed in his pocket.
"I keep trying to remember what happened,"
she said. "It's hard
enough some times to remember even the ordinary things, like my mother, or
Duke. Or school, or what it felt like to throw snowballs on the
playground at school during the winter."
"That's all you need to think about," Wallace said,
trying to be firm with her. "Remember the way things used to
be. We'll take care of the rest."
"I don't feel like I used to. There's nothing left
but you. Things will never be the same again."
"Not the
same. Better."
"You and Melanie talk about things I don't
understand, things I don't even want to understand. Maligoth. I know
that name, Wallace. Maligoth is a god. I remember him from the dream.
The city was so beautiful. And the people..."
Wallace waited to hear more about the people.
Instead, Sasha shook her head and pulled her knees to her chin and said
nothing.
Not wanting to leave her alone, Wallace lay back on
the bed and closed his eyes. He supposed it wouldn't matter if he tried
to catch a nap, but under no circumstances did he want Sasha to wander off
by herself.
He awoke sometime during the night to find her gone
regardless. He rolled out of bed reminding himself that he was being
watched, that if Sasha was in any danger, Melanie and her people would
know. Nothing could move in the house without being seen, Melanie had
assured him.
He searched the house upstairs and down. He found
her clothing folded in the bedroom alongside a small suitcase Melanie had
provided her. He found her negligee and robe at the top of the basement
stairs.
He found Sasha where he most feared he would find
her, wandering naked in the basement. Light filtering down the stairwell
highlighted the contours of her body. When he first saw her, for one
fraction of an instant, he failed to recognize her. She was leaner than
he remembered. She moved with a liquid, graceful walk that was not
typical of her.
Wallace paused halfway down the stairs. He could see
his own breath in the cold. Temperatures outside had dropped into the
fifties, and more rain had been promised for the week.
"Sasha?"
She shied away from him, vanishing into the shadows.
He went after her, startled by her behavior when she grabbed for him from
the darkness and pulled him to her. It was the light she was trying to
avoid, knowing they were being watched.
Her nails dug into the flesh of his neck. She bit
him on the neck, kneading the muscle between her teeth and pinning him
against the musky smelling wall.
"Sasha, no! Not like this! Not here, for God's
sake! It's freezing!"
He was freezing. Sasha's skin was hot to the touch.
"I saw them," she cried breathlessly. "I saw your
mother and that fat man from the church!"
Wallace turned to stone. "Sasha, they can hear.
Please stop."
Her heart raced wildly, pounding through her chest
and his both.
"She bit him! He was screaming and there was blood
all over, but he couldn't keep her away!"
Sasha fell suddenly still. At first, Wallace thought
she had regained her senses.
"And then someone came and helped her. Wallace, they
were so hungry..."
She sank to her haunches and backed into a mass of
cob webs.
If memory defines identity, Ghaedor had said. Sasha
remembered, not memories of her previous existence, but memories of her
transformation.
The sharp tang of ozone caught in his throat. From
behind him, a sudden wash of blue light cast his shadow against the wall.
He looked around to see the basement wall replaced by a dark dirt tunnel
roofed with tree roots.
Further into the tunnel, he saw movement. The dirt
itself seemed to come alive and surge forward. It flowed and it shrieked
with the collective cries of a solid mass of onrushing hordes of rats.
Sasha's disorientation evaporated in an instant. She
beat him to the top of the stairs, grabbed him by the wrist when he
faltered, and all but lifted him off his feet pulling him through the
doorway.
Teeth grated against his ankle. A half dozen of the
rats burst into the kitchen before she could close the door. They
launched themselves in unison at Sasha, and with a shriek of terror, Sasha
became a whirlwind that spun through the kitchen in a frantic effort to
dislodge them from her bare flesh.
Wallace would not have had the reflexes to defend
himself. Sasha tore the creatures to shreds with her bare hands. She
paused only once, taking a respite of a second or two to reach for a
butcher knife from a wood block of knives on the counter. She slashed the
next two leaping rodents in midair. Only in that instant did Wallace take
note of the size of the creatures, and the fact that they were not rats at
all, but something larger, more lean and reptilian in appearance, and far
quicker.
"Wallace, run!"
He ran for the front door, his body an unwieldy mass
of lead, and his legs unresponsive blocks of wood. Sasha danced about
him, fending off the frenzied attack of three remaining creatures,
throwing off flecks of her own blood as she spun and lashed out with the
knife.
Then Wallace was outside, and the front yard was
ablaze with light. "Code four!" a man's voice roared from
somewhere outside. "Condition red!"
Sasha leaped at him. At first, Wallace thought she
had gone mad and was attacking him. She caught him about the shoulders
and sent him plunging backwards off the front porch. Fleetingly, he saw
one of the reptilian creatures arc through the air toward his throat, its
legs thrown back, his slender head extended and its jaws agape.
A dart fired from off to one side caught it in the
ribs. The creature's thrashing body struck Wallace alongside the head and
rebounded unconscious into the yard. The last of the creatures launched
itself off the porch. It touched down once, leaped again and vanished
into the dark, empty cornfields.
Wallace scrambled to his feet, looking wildly about
for Sasha as men in uniform fatigues ran to his aid.
"She went back inside!" someone called out. "What
the hell is she doing?"
Wallace beat the crowd into the house. He slipped on
the blood and gore covering the linoleum on the way back down the basement
stairs. If she had gone anywhere else in the house, she was safe. If she
had come back down here, she was dead.
She stood in the middle of the basement, framed like
a bloody goddess in blue light. Wallace ignored the swarms of rodents
rushing to take down prey foolish enough to have returned to their lair.
There was nothing he could do to save either of their lives in that
moment, but he reached for Sasha as she stepped into portal. He caught
her by one arm and snatched her back to die in her own world.
In the next instant the portal collapsed. The
severed body of one of the reptilian carnivores dropped twitching to his
feet.
