Fluorescence: The Complete Tetralogy (38 page)

I strained to pull myself upright, but I couldn’t focus. My head felt heavy. Everything around me was spinning. Light flashed through my arm, the color a more potent blue than I’d ever seen before.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand.

Warm. Crimson.

A nose bleed!?

I hadn’t even taken a damn hit.

“Are you okay?” Alice brushed my wet hair out of my face and wiped the rain from my forehead.

“Yeah,” I said, wiping my mouth again. Tasting iron.

Lightning flashed. The back of my hand glistened red. I took a deep breath and sat back on my ankles.

“So,” the stranger said, looking down at me, “are we gonna
play nice now? Or would you prefer to keep bleeding?”

I bit my tongue. If only I hadn’t been too weak to fight back. My body was so drained.

“I don’t know what they said to you up there,” I wheezed,
laboring just to breathe, “but you’ve lost your mind. There’s no one here. Who the hell are we supposed to start? This place is abandoned.”

“Oh, there are people here,” he said with a chuckle. “You just have to look for them.” He pointed at Kareena. “Seeker! Why don’t you make yourself useful and start seeking?”

“I’m not your bitch.” She clenched her fists. “I don’t have to do anything.”

The amber light sparked in his chest again and Kareena gasped, stumbling backwards a few feet.

“Okay. Okay,” she yelped, before he could use his fluorescence
against her. “Whatever. Just please don’t hurt me again.” She bent down at my side. “I’m sorry, Brian.” She wrapped her arm around mine and Alice took my other hand. They helped me to my feet.

“Thanks.”

Alice stuck close by me and helped to steady my steps as we followed Kareena through the streets. The stranger lingered close beside her, threatening her with a nasty glare every time she stopped to look back at us. His golden light—though faded considerably—lingered. A dim, haunting glow.

I wanted him dead.

We didn’t even know his name, but he was a turncoat. Forcing us to do the Saviors’ dirty work even though he had no idea who we were or what we’d been through.

“There!” Kareena called out, pointing down an alley in the distance. “I see someone.”

We followed her down the alley until we came to a pair of blurred outlines huddling together. Children. Orphans, or homeless. Or both.

I felt a flush of warmth in my arm. Blue light flickered through my fingertips.

“You need to heal them, Brian,” said Kareena, motioning
for me to go ahead of her. “They’re ill.”

“What the…” I coughed hard. The trauma to my body had made my lungs tight. “The hell do the Saviors want them for? They’re probably homeless. Sick. They need help, not this! Not this curse!”

“It’s none of your concern.” The man crossed his arms. “Let’s call it a social experiment, shall we?”

Chapter 22

“
D
o it!” He jabbed me in the arm and I swerved toward him, clenching my teeth and tightening my fists. The smug look on his face had me one second away from decking him again.

But, on second thought, I couldn’t risk it. Not after what he had just done
to me. I couldn’t deal with the feeling of my organs hemorrhaging again. Pressure choking me. Crushing
my insides. Jesus, I’d thought I was going to die.

“Alright!” I replied. “Stop pushing us around.”

There were more homeless people. Young ones. I healed them and Alice did the rest. Most of the adults weren’t infected. One very old infected lady had made a shelter of moldy cardboard boxes and plastic tarps. Being forced to
start such devastated people was like some kind of sick torture.
Payback for the rebellion we’d staged earlier, perhaps.

“Do you even know what they want them for?” I asked. The stranger sneered and turned away from me. “Have you even thought about it? About what they want with us? Why all of these people?”

“Shut up.” He shot me a penetrating glare. Golden light sparked beneath the open flaps of his jacket. “Shut up and do your job.” He zipped up his coat and propped the collar up around his neck, shaking his head and grumbling to himself. The cold was probably getting to him, too.

Alice and Kareena had gone up ahead to start someone else. I had stayed where I was, keeping a close eye on him.

My drenched leather jacket did little to keep out the rain. It kept coming and going in short bursts. Thunder rumbled beneath our feet, and white streaks of lightning shot across the black sky every so often. I wanted to go home. I wanted to take a shower and go to bed early. I didn’t even care about…

Work.

Damn it. I was going to be late, if I even made it in at all.

“What’s your name?” I asked, trying to break the silence while also keeping an eye on Alice up ahead.

He looked at me and furrowed his brow. I still couldn’t make out his face clearly, but he had facial hair—a goatee, what looked like a trimmed mustache and some narrow sideburns. Dark skinned. Hispanic?

“David,” he replied flatly. “Now stop asking questions.”

“Brian.”

Maybe telling him our names would humanize us—make us real to him. “The tall girl is Kareena and the shorter one—”

“Alice. I heard you earlier. She your girlfriend or something?”

I didn’t know how much I wanted him to know.

“You could say that.”

“Oh?”

“It’s complicated.”

“So is life.”

I shrugged. David seemed like a normal guy. Now that he’d stopped barking out orders and tearing up my internal organs.

“Do you have family back home? Wherever that is.”

“That’s enough!” His nostrils flared. “I told you to shut up.”

I pressed my lips together and heaved a sigh, exhaling through my nose, mustering every bit of patience inside just to keep from snapping at him.

Up ahead, faint green and pink light marked the girls in
the darkness as they headed back toward us, their fluorescent
glows growing brighter as they drew nearer.

“I think that’s everyone,” Kareena said, quickly looking at David for approval. “Right?”

“Yeah. I started them all,” added Alice, her voice trembling. “Even the kids. Even… a really little one.” She looked exhausted. Broken.

David crossed his arms and looked down at them. “Are you sure? You got everyone?”

“Yeah,” Kareena confirmed. “I’m sure. Now… can we go home? Please?”

“They will choose when we can leave,” David said. “Once
we’ve finished the job and only once we’ve finished the job.”

“They said they were done,” I added, moving in to take Alice by the hand. She was cold as ice. Shaking. I wanted to give her my jacket, but it wouldn’t have done any good. We were both soaked. “We need rest.”

“What do I have to do to get you to stop talking?” David said, gritting his teeth at me. “Seriously. Shut up, kid.”

“I’m not a kid!” I growled.

Alice squeezed my hand.

“Shh,” she whispered. “We’ll get home soon. Don’t worry.”
She shook her head and swept her wet hair out of her face. “Let’s get out of the rain.”

“Alright,” David said.

Finally, something we could agree on.

We made our way toward an overhang on the other side of the street. An abandoned pizza shop.

The thought of food reminded me how hungry I’d gotten
since we’d arrived.

Kareena hunched over, wringing the water out of her hair. Her skimpy little midriff-baring jacket was dripping with water. I felt sorry for her, but Alice and I weren’t doing much better. We were all drenched.

I took another look at David—his profile outlined by a brief flash of lightning.

What was his story? He was cocky, pushing us around like we were dogs. Maybe he was just like us. Scared.
Confused.
Tormented by them.

Maybe they had threatened him or…

“What are you looking at?” David asked, his voice rising above the clattering rain on the overhang.

“Nothing. Sorry.” I looked away.
Awkward.

Then again, maybe he was just a creep.

Standing there with him, I didn’t have a clock to tell time, but it felt like at least a half hour or more passed. Maybe it did. Maybe it just felt like an eternity because of the darkness. The rain. Drenched like drowned rats and starting to feel like we were, in fact, carrying a plague.

Kareena stood beside me, leaning against the door of the pizza shop, biting her fingernails. She kept glancing over at David, as if she thought he might attack her again. I wish I could have assured her otherwise, but I couldn’t. I’d try to stop it, at least. Jesus, I’d try.

Alice huddled close to me, her heavy locks of wet hair clinging to my jacket. Her cold hands tucked between the flaps of my coat for warmth. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. We couldn’t be out in this all night. We just couldn’t. We’d get hypothermia.

I opened my eyes and turned around to look at the storefront window. The glass was intact. I tugged the handle of the door. Locked. Through scum and dirt, I saw the push bar had been chained to the walls with a padlock from the inside. No one could get in or out.

I cupped my hands on the glass and pressed my face into them to peer inside. No lights, but the place looked dry. I took a few steps over and flattened my hand against the larger section of the glass storefront window. Ice cold. Solid glass. A bolt of lightning lit up our surroundings and a few hairline cracks gleamed in the glass.

“Move back,” I said to Alice, perking up the collar of my jacket and taking a deep breath. I braced myself as I drew back and then rammed my shoulder into the window. Glass shattered to pieces. I grunted, rolling my arm to shake out the pain. Subtle blue light tinted my fingertips and then faded away.

“Shit!” David staggered back. “What the hell?”

“We’re not staying out here all night, damn it!” I replied. “Not on my watch.”

I stepped over the window pane and tried to avoid a huge piece of glass on the tile floor. Remnants crunched beneath my sneakers and I swiped my foot across the debris
to shove most of the fragments to the side. I spotted a broom
nearby and used the handle on the inner edge of the window
to break off remaining shards. “Careful, Alice.” I lent her my arm for balance and helped her step over the window pane.

“What do you think you’re doing?” David asked, raising his voice again.

“Getting out of the rain. We can’t take this. The damn Saviors are taking their sweet time tonight and we can’t wait for them anymore.”

“We can… break stuff?” Kareena asked, creeping through
the window behind Alice.

“Don’t touch anything else,” David said, standing outside
the store looking in. “Where are you going? Get back here!”

“Come inside,” I replied. “It’s a little warmer here. No draft.”

“Probably rats,” said Kareena with a shudder. “Or roaches.
Ew.”

“Shut up, Kareena,” I said. “Seriously? Your intuition is just—”

“Brian, please.” Alice took my hand again. “Don’t yell at
her. She’s scared, too. We’re all cold. We all want to go home.
Even you, right?” She looked over at David, still standing outside.

“Yes,” he said. He ducked down and stepped in through the window pane.

“What the hell is taking them so long?” I sat down on a barstool and spun around once. It let out a rusty, ear-piercing screech and I flinched. I shrugged off my jacket, draped it over my shoulder and slid off the stool.

The place had been ransacked a long time ago. Broken
dishes on the floor. Cash register stuck open. I walked
behind the bar and dug around beneath the counter, moving carefully in case there was more broken glass. All I wanted was a flashlight.

The streetlamps outside projected a dim glow on our surroundings, but the shadows were difficult to maneuver through. Any amount of light would help. My phone would work… if it would turn on.

“These might help.” Alice came over with a stack of grungy dishtowels. I took one from the top of the stack. It smelled old and musty, but looked clean. I wiped the rain from the back of my neck and shook my head.

Kareena’s lips wrinkled at the sight of the dingy towels.

“Wait,” she called as Alice turned away. “I’ll take one, too. Sorry.” She wrapped it around her hair and twisted it tightly.

Alice nervously offered one to David. I rolled my eyes.

Let him freeze.

“Th-thanks,” he replied, caught off guard.

Alice always thought about others, even when things got tough. Even when they didn’t deserve her kindness.

“Thanks, Alice.” I held onto her towel while she shrugged
off her coat. Then she handed the dripping wet, heavy-as-hell thing to me and I draped it over my arm so I wouldn’t lose it. She dried her hair with the towel as best she could and we sat down at the only table we could find that hadn’t fallen apart.

My muscles hurt. The humidity didn’t help the heavy feeling in my chest. I could feel my fatigue wearing on me.

Kareena sat on a barstool, etching something into the bar
with the tine of a fork. The scratching sound made my skin crawl.

David sat a few seats over, watching us with tiring eyes.

Alice rested her head on my wet shoulder and I wrapped an arm around her.

Thunder rumbled quietly in the distance. The patter of raindrops on the roof ceased and I looked toward the front window. The rain had stopped.

My body tingled and I sucked in a breath.

Everything blurred.

I hit the ground hard. My wet jacket squelched as it landed
on the asphalt. Bright street lights blinded me. I shielded my eyes with the back of my hand and scrambled to my feet.

“Brian!” Alice screamed.

Two blazing white suns were coming straight at me.

I dodged the car and tumbled into the grass on the side of the road, the blare of a horn piercing my ears.

“Are you okay?” Alice helped me up and handed me my jacket. A fresh tire mark ran across the sleeve.