Domino Falls (31 page)

“But some of them turn into something else?” Sonia said. “And you caught one?”

Wales nodded. “Oh, yes.”

The icy block of fear in Sonia's chest thawed a degree or two. “Can we use them for a cure?”

“A . . .” Wales looked at her, confused, then barked his pathetic laugh again. “A cure! Yes, that's it, exactly! They are the cure, Sonia. They are the cure for
us.
”

Wales's blue eyes suddenly cleared, instantly sober. “I'm tired of this game, my dear,” he said. “Untie me.”

Sonia tried to flash a seductive smile, but she doubted the look on her face was anything except petrified. She counted the levels of freaks in her head. “So, you have a fifth-level freak. Where is it? Is it here?”

Wales yanked at his wrists, hard. Sonia was good with knots, but Wales was strong and persistent. “Let me go!” he shouted. “Do you know the penalty for disobedience?”

The true personality emerges,
Sonia thought, wishing the sudden anger in Wales's voice hadn't sent fear shooting across the back of her neck. She could imagine what happened to anyone who got on Wales's bad side.

“Where's Rianne?” Sonia said. “What are you doing to those girls?”

With a loud grunt, Wales slipped one of his ankles free of its bind and swung it over hard enough to knock Sonia from the
bed. Luckily, she missed the corner of the night table when she landed, splaying awkwardly to the floor. Wales thrashed on the bed, working to untie himself.

Panting, Sonia patted herself for the parting gift Deirdre had given her, the same kind she'd given her daughter when she sent her to college. When Wales turned his head to examine his bound wrist, Sonia lunged back up to the bed and jabbed her hidden Taser into his neck.

Wales let out a strangled yell, convulsing. Sonia watched his odd writhing, intrigued, until she remembered to pull the Taser away.

“Stop!” Wales said. Begging. How many people had begged this bastard? Had he listened to their pleas?

“Tell me the rest,” Sonia said. Quickly, she tested her knots and felt satisfied that they would hold. While Wales caught his breath, she quickly tied his foot again. “Where are those girls? What do you want with them?”

“Ambassadors,” Wales panted. “To spread—”

“I don't believe you,” she said, and pressed the Taser into his crotch.

The reaction was fascinating. His entire body clenched like a fist, muscles roping up on his pudgy body at the same time that a huge wet spot appeared on his pants.

“Please, please.” He was slobbering now. “Sonia. Please. I don't know what you want. You don't know what you're doing. This won't make any difference. It's too late—”

Sonia Tased him again. “Waste my time again, and I'll fry you.”

Wales sputtered wordlessly, and Sonia gave him a not-so-gentle slap to bring alertness back to his eyes. “All right, I'll tell you!” he said, his words slurred, and Sonia realized it was too late to ask herself if she really wanted to know. “Some of them
do go out! Do you want me to send Rianne away to safety? I will. I'll send Sissy too.”

“What about the rest?”

“I'm trying to . . . ease the transition. Prepare them with training. Meditation.”

“What does that mean? Prepare them for what?”

“To . . . help them cross over. Willing disciples won't need to feed. They can go . . . gently. And they simply . . . change.”

Sonia couldn't speak the question in her mind:
Change into what?

“They're nothing to fear!” Wales said, his words slurred. “They're us, through the looking glass! You can meet him yourself. He'll tell you how he used to be an artist.”

The world fell still. “It . . . talked to you?”

“Yes, don't you see?” he said. “Not the poor, mindless creatures trapped in the transition! He's made it across, to the next stage. Others of us can do it too, if only we will embrace and believe without fear. Of course there are casualties! I keep my failures underground. But he said even if it's only one in a thousand, it's our best hope for the future.”

He said.
The words chilled Sonia's blood. An ugly notion planted itself in her mind, steeping Wales's words in horror. Was all of it about the words of a freak? Or something more insidious than mere words?

“When did you say you first started painting?” Sonia said.

Wales looked confused but relieved, as if he believed he was finally converting her. “It was . . . a little more than two months ago.”

“And when did you capture this thing?”

Sonia knew the answer before Wales spoke, saw awareness flicker in his eyes. “About . . . nine weeks. Yes, about two months ago.”

“And you started painting all of a sudden?” Sonia said. “What about the ambassadors? When did that start?”

Even in the bedroom's dim lighting, Sonia saw color draining from Wales's face.

“About then,” he said. “The same time. The idea came in a dream.”

“How did you capture this thing?” Sonia said. “Where was it?”

“In the woods, just outside the fences,” Wales said, his face growing pasty. “I dreamed the place where they found it, and I sent my men. It was rooted, but . . . it was talking. None of the other rooters could talk. And this wasn't the memory of babble, like the fresh ones—it could reason.”

Sonia backed away from the bed, wishing she could back away from Wales, the ranch, and all of Threadville with a single step. Hadn't he learned anything from his movies?

“You incredible idiot,” Sonia said. “Who captured who, Wales? You brought that thing here after a dream? Is that when you started snatching people too?”

“No, you're wrong,” he said, although his eyes were wide and empty. “I'm still me. I'm not—”

“What does it want?
What does it want?
”

“It wants to help us!” Wales said. “The change is coming! We can't fight, but it can eat our fear! You can be a part of it, Sonia. You can help change the world.”

Sonia found out every horrifying detail she could from Joseph Wales, then she pressed the Taser to his flabby belly and kept it there until he could speak no more.

A
neatly
piled stack of Thread literature waited on the library table, but the officious Gold Coat who had led Kendra to the library walked right past the tables.

“I've been asked to take you to the Collections Room tonight,” he said.

Kendra was excited, until she wondered why they'd agreed so easily to take her exactly where she wanted to go. The Collections Room was where she had felt the strange vibration during her first visit. When the Gold Coat opened the door to the dimly lighted chamber, she hesitated.

“You're a lucky girl,” he said. “Tonight, all of your questions will be answered.” Kendra wondered if he knew why she was really there.

When Kendra walked into the room, its soaring ceiling seemed to swallow her. The room was crammed with mixed-media paintings and sculpture, one stranger than the next; discarded household items contorted into faces and limbs, with
a sameness to the flat features. The oddly lighted room was crisscrossed with shadows.

When the Gold Coat closed the door behind her, she was afraid to check the lock.

Kendra had walked only two steps inside when she felt the certainty that she wasn't alone. No movement or sound, but she knew. She searched the shadows for a human figure, but saw no one. She was about to call for Rianne when she heard a voice.

“Kendra.”

The whispered voice bubbled as if it were underwater, and Kendra's body went to stone, except for her thrashing heart. She felt small and alone.

Kendra opened her mouth to ask who was there, but no sound emerged. Her hand was reaching back toward the door with a mind of its own.

“No need for fear, Kendra,”
the voice said, impossibly reasonable despite its cloak of strangeness.
“We should have grown beyond fear by now.”

Kendra froze, her eyes darting to her left. Something was moving in the shadows with great deliberation, making itself seen. The figure was nearly six feet tall, with an oversized head. Another careful motion, and Kendra realized that the head was the size of a man's, but it balanced on a too-thin neck and limbs.

She stood fewer than ten yards from a skeleton with shiny, sun-reddened skin—or skin reddened by
something.
He blinked before disappearing from the light. His eyes were like balls of blood. Infected! One of the talkers, which meant he was probably a runner. The Gold Coat had led her into a trap!

Kendra's mouth fell open as she sucked at the air to breathe. What now?

The door was closed behind her, so she would lose precious seconds of escape time if she tried to go out the way she'd
come—but was there somewhere else she could run? Kendra remembered teeth sinking into Grandpa Joe's calf and wondered: Would she kill herself on the spot somehow, or try to tell Terry first? Remembering Terry filled her with grief.

Kendra was shocked her legs weren't in motion already, but her mind paralyzed her with a question:
How did it know your name?

“I see you have infinite questions. So inquisitive. You are interesting to me.”

It wasn't going to spring at her! The creature had moved no closer, still half hidden in shadows. It glanced at her, but kept its face turned away, as if in shyness.

This
was
a freak, wasn't it? But if it was a freak, that wasn't all it was. This freak was nothing like the others. Instead of rotting flesh, this one's skin was as slick as a baby eel's. Her eyes quickly searched the room again, and she realized that the odd figures looked very similar to the creature before her.

“Is this your art?” someone calm and reasonable asked. “Or Wales's?”

She was talking to it! And the creature still hadn't sprung, although it began a slow rocking from side to side.

“Wales?”
the watery voice said.
“He paints like a child. And color-blind! I don't think he knows it himself. He's good for a purplish flourish now and again.”

“So the other artwork . . . isn't Wales's?” Her voice surprised her again. How was one part of her conducting a conversation while the rest of her was preparing to die?

“You are far too fast to be so slow, Kendra.”
The
sssssssss
sounds were more reptilian than human. Kendra backed toward the door. If she went slowly, she thought, it might not chase her.

“Who are you?” the other Kendra said, the one who remembered how to speak.

“I was called Harry. Now? Call me Harry if you like, but I have no name.”

Harry. The simple name was absurd.

“What happened to you, Harry?”

But she knew, she realized. She knew what had happened to Harry as well as she knew what had happened to her parents, and Grandpa Joe. Then her certainty went beyond intuition to a blurry image that suddenly sharpened in her mind: an art studio, breaking glass in a dark bedroom, a man's cries against a woman's attack. His girlfriend. Locked in a bathroom, accidentally freed by a newcomer. Blood. Kendra saw all of it.

Her breath died in her throat. What had just happened?

“Now you know,”
he said.
“Just as I know your story.”

“You can talk to my head?” Kendra said, using the only words that fit.

“Talking is easy,”
he said.
“Communication is harder.”

“I can't see you,” Kendra said. “Come into the light.”

“I don't care to. There.”
The remaining lights died, left her groping in shadow. Kendra heard no sound, but she felt the creature move toward her. Patient. By inches, the creature was closing in on her.

Kendra took another step away, could feel the vibration of the wooden door just beyond her, a beacon if only she had time. Her hand groped toward the knob. “I don't like the dark,” Kendra said, hoping she didn't sound like she was begging. “Turn the lights back on.”

“It disturbs my senses,”
the voice said.
“I have . . . a different aesthetic now. I prefer darkness to light.”

“What are you? Tell me!”

“You know me,”
he said.
“From your dreams.”

“No!” Kendra said, surprised to feel genuine irritation inside
her terror. “My dreams are just . . . pictures. They don't tell me anything!”

Soft laughter floated from the shape in the darkness, its most human sound so far.
“Fear makes you raise your voice. There is nothing for you to fear, Kendra—not you, nor any of your people. We are the same, in the end. We are one.”

“We're not the same,” Kendra said. “You got bitten. You're a freak.”

The creature bristled, its voice sharper.
“That is the word used against us, to make us monsters,”
he said.
“You casually fling such verbal violence, and then question our motivations?”

“That word isn't what makes you monsters,” Kendra whispered. “Look at what you've done! You've killed millions of us! Billions!”

The creature sighed.
“The innocent, mindless thrashings of a newborn entering a strange world. It was not supposed to be this way.”

“How was it supposed to be?”

Finally, Kendra's hand brushed the doorknob. She tried to turn it, but as she'd feared, she was locked in the room with the creature.

None of it was an accident, she realized. If this creature was influencing Wales's art, how could she know she hadn't been influenced too? She'd seen Sissy's vacant face at the town meeting. Had this creature done that to her? What about Rianne?