Nemesis: Book Four (13 page)

R
igley looked
out at the land.

She had never seen anything like it before. The area before her looked like another world, like something that shouldn't even be considered land. White ropes covered it. Green dominated Earth for the past however many millions of years, even with the color of concrete, brick, metal, and asphalt making a strong attempt over the past two hundred years or so. Here, though, in this place, these white strands had done in days what men weren’t able to do in centuries. She saw no more green, no more man made colors either. Only white, and from a distance one might think it was snow. But once Rigley got close to it she saw it was nothing like the powdery substance that fell from the sky.

Tiny white… creatures… lived in front of her. She couldn't consider them anything else. This wasn't the Sherman she saw in Bolivia. These things wiggled and moved like worms, straining to grow forward. She was maybe ten feet from them, but from where she stood, they would meet her feet very soon. The Sherman had spread, but not like this, not with such individuality in each of the little strands she saw.

The only thing disturbing the white color, maybe a few football fields into the landscape, were the same colorful bubbles that Marks had seen in the bag. She couldn't see inside any of them, their distance too far, only their different—beautiful—colors.

Rigley found a gap between the soldiers outlining the perimeter of the growth. It looked to be about a half mile, and she knew that they could see her, one soldier on either side. It would take them time to get her though; each of them carried huge backpacks, similar to flamethrowers, except fire didn't shoot out the end of their weapons. Rigley couldn't see exactly what they blasted the growth with, only that it appeared to be working, because each of the soldiers were further into the white fields than Rigley. The growth thrived here, but it died where the soldiers stood.

If they tried to catch her at this spot, they would be far too late. She wore a large hazmat suit, just as they did, but she planned on walking straight into the ‘white cake’, while they would need to skirt it.

And here was the moment of truth, because she had to trust that the creature on the other side of that cage—the one holding onto Will's body—had listened to her. She had to hope that the creature heard and would allow her safe passage. If not, this growth would eat her the same as it had the men who showed up with flames. A lot of hope, but that was more than she'd had in the past ten years.

Rigley looked down at her hands.

They were still, so different than in the bathroom where she found herself shaking when this whole thing started.

She looked up for a second, to the left and right. The men had stopped shooting their mystery substance and stared at her. Probably communicating over an intercom, discussing what to do.

"Come get me," she said and smiled.

Rigley started walking into the white growth, and somewhere a parrot laughed.

T
he growth
—though it didn't think of itself in that way, it just
was,
without name or need for name—felt the human walking on top of it.

The cold killing its brethren, killing
it
, made the growth frantic. It saw no way out of this, saw no way to combat the death all around it. Except for heat. For more heat. It yearned for warmth the way a newborn child yearned to be comforted.

It grabbed onto the human's feet, moving across the plastic hazmat material, sinking deep through it and into the shoes beneath so that it could get to her feet. At the same time it sprang up her legs, digging through the jeans while other strands propelled themselves even further up her body. It felt the warmth, felt the necessary fuel needed to grow faster, perhaps to outrun the cold attacking it nearly everywhere.

The growth would dig in here, dig into this person, and find peace for a moment.

The first tendrils plunged into the human's skin, tiny drops of blood seeping out around the small holes they made.

Warmth. Warmth. Warmth.

They felt cells trying to speak with them, trying to communicate, describing…

And the growth stopped.

It didn't pull out of the human, but it didn't move any further in either. It listened as the cells relayed who this human was. The pause ran on long, creating a desperation similar to a dog staring at a steak that it can't have but desperately wants. Because the strands
wanted
her. Wanted to feed their growth with her heat, but their mother—she told them about this human. Their mother told them that if she arrived, they weren't to touch her. They were to grant her passage. They were to protect her if need be.

Mother wanted this creature and nothing else mattered. They didn't
have
to listen to their mother, but they trusted her, believed she would lead them away from this pain and to the warmth they craved.

The strands couldn't speak, but if they had the ability and knew the English language, they probably would have slung curse words as they recognized what they must do. They slowly backed out of the human, who stood as still as a venus fly trap waiting on dinner. The white strands backed all the way down her body, retreating to the ground where they had rested before. The holes in her skin were still there, but the strands left salve as they departed, helping to stop the blood flow.

The strands left Rigley alone, with nothing to stop her from moving forward.

M
orena's eyes
still focused on the glowing orange beneath her, but she stopped seeing it.

She heard the strands speaking to her, their language nothing that anyone besides Morena could ever understand, but one that she felt intuitively. She would miss them when they were gone, when the world was as it should be. She would want them back.

She had no reason to mourn their pending loss, though. Things were meant to be a certain way, and nothing Morena wanted could change them.

Because the woman, Rigley, had arrived. She was crossing the white desert Morena created. And maybe she could use this woman. Morena had no doubt that if the woman lied to her, Morena could kill her easily. But there might be a chance Rigley was telling the truth. If this woman thought that peace could exist between the two species, then Morena could use whatever information she possessed to protect Bynums—no matter what it took.

Get her. Protect her. Use her
.

The words weren't her mother's or Briten's. They were hers, the ruler that she was becoming, the ruler Bynimian needed. A saying she picked up from Bryan swirled around her mind, trying to land. It seemed apt, seemed to possess the truth of the situation.

If this woman told the truth, if she had grown tired of war, then Morena would use that—twist it until she wrought every bit of usefulness from it. Bryan's saying… Morena
understood
it with a sincere clarity.

Humans had made their bed. It was time to sleep in it.

W
ren stood
at the open motel door; his son only a few feet away.

He wanted to step out, but at the same time, didn't want to move a single muscle. He always viewed his son as small, as something that he could control. Even when the fights started a few years ago, Wren saw his son as a beta, and he the alpha. The past few days—maybe the sobriety brought it on or maybe Wren finally gave a shit about something besides vodka—he had come to see his son as an equal. Now, though, looking out at Michael standing on the breezeway, he was shocked to find himself a bit scared of his presence.

He seemed bigger somehow, though that was impossible.

Still, Michael's back looked to surge with muscles, bulging out of his shirt.

You're imagining it. This is withdrawal. It's the way he is leaning against the railing.

Linda wasn’t speaking though; Wren heard his own voice. Linda wouldn't lie to him.

Wren blinked and then shook his head a few times, trying to make sense out of what was happening. His kid had stood up from the bed, left the room without speaking, and now leaned on a balcony, looking like he had been lifting weights for the past five years instead of working at a chicken shop.

"Michael?" he said.

Michael didn't turn around, didn't show any hint that he even heard the words.

Wren took a step out onto the breezeway, letting the door close behind him. What was he going to do, run from his son? After everything Wren did to get him here? That wasn't even a possibility.

"Talk to me," he said, and even though he wasn't running, he didn't reach to touch Michael. Still, no response, nothing but silence and the sound of the road in front of the motel. "You've got to tell me what's going on." His voice sounded weak to him, pleading and frightened. And, goddamnit, he was. He didn't want to be here, didn't want his son acting like this. He didn’t want his wife dead. He didn’t want anything that happened in the past ten years.

Here he was, though, with all those years lying behind him on a trail of empty, plastic vodka bottles, leaving him in this exact location, staring at a son he didn't know, and one that was in serious trouble.

Fuck this
, he thought.
Fuck all of it.

It wasn't the bottle he went to, though. He didn't turn around and use his key to step back in the motel room. Wren stepped forward and put his hand on his son. He might be bigger, or he might be the same size he'd always been, but Wren wasn't going to let fear dictate him any longer.

He touched Michael's shoulder, and then almost took it away as quickly as he placed it down. Heat radiated off Michael's shirt, unnatural heat. Hotter than someone working out, and yet as Wren looked at the back of Michael's neck, his own eyes widening, he didn't see a drop of sweat anywhere. Wren left his hand sitting there, but said nothing.

He watched as Michael turned, Wren's hand falling away.

Wren thought he had been frightened before. The fright he knew before was a gust of wind compared to the hurricane wrapping around his brain now.

Michael looked back at him, but with red eyes instead of the brown he was born with.

R
igley leaned
down for the third time, pulling up her pant's leg, and looking at the flesh beneath. She had taken off the hazmat suit completely—it served no purpose with holes in it. The wounds should hurt, but didn't. Tiny red holes dotted her calf, and a sticky clear substance covered each one. She didn't dare touch the viscous substance, or anything for that matter—she only looked.

She felt those things digging into her, pressing down with an intensity that showed her just how alive they were. They dug in more like starving wolves than some plant life form. It had been weird, to say the least, feeling their hunger, their
need
. She hurt, but she also understood a bit more too; wolves eat to survive, and some of that resided in the creatures deciding they would make her their lunch.

Yet, that didn't encompass everything, though; Rigley felt something that wolves didn't have the capacity for. Those things, those strands, they dug into her not only for themselves, but for the pods emerging from the white landscape. They were concerned with something other than themselves; compassion was in them.

As Rigley looked at her skin, she thought she understood that feeling. No,
thought
was the wrong word. She knew she understood. Perhaps all mothers realize that feeling, the willingness to sacrifice for their offspring. Rigley didn’t understand the exact relationship existing between the strands and the pods, but she respected what she saw in them.

She had been scared when she stepped into the white spread.

But now, she was starting to feel at home.

She felt like she might belong here, because mindless plant-like creatures showed more compassion for their fellow kind than half of the human world. She hadn't doubted her choice since starting this journey; anything was better than working under Marks, but thinking about those strands, about the knowledge they passed over to her, she
knew
she had been right.

As Rigley looked up, her heart thumped up against her ribcage. She released her pant's leg, letting it fall lazily back in place.

There it was. There
she
was. A mile off? Maybe less?

The green color that Rigley had seen in the video spread out like a sunrise before her. It stretched in either direction, up and down, and
she
in the middle of it all. To the side of the alien stood another one, with a bright blue color surrounding it.

There's two now
, she thought, though the thought moved through her mind like a feather floating across the wind.

She didn't look at the blue one; it was peripheral. The green, it enraptured Rigley, calling to her, pulling her in, because of its magnificent spread.

This is why I came
. The thought said nothing about the other predominant reason she had come, to try and instill peace between the two groups. Because when she decided on this path, she had wanted two species to live together, to stop needless deaths. Perhaps that want still existed, but perhaps not. Perhaps only the green filled Rigley now.

"
W
e found her
," Knox said.

Kenneth Marks looked up from his phone. He didn't turn his head to look at the general; he didn't like the tone coming with the voice, one that said Kenneth Marks wouldn't like
where
they found her. He was reading the news mindlessly, categorizing what reporters said about the quarantine, but not really giving it any true focus. He had been trying to figure out where Rigley went, letting Knox look with satellites and search parties. Knox wasn't happy about that, of course, but Kenneth Marks didn't care in the slightest.

He was going to find Rigley.

Yet he couldn't piece it together in his head. Something happened to her, and he thought it might be structural inside her brain. Not just a personality shift, but an actual reshaping, reconnecting of her mind. If he could open up her skull and poke around, he could probably tell exactly what happened, and then there would be no need for him to sit here and think about where she might have gone. He would know.

Perhaps that bothered him more than anything else. Not where she was, but that he couldn't figure it out.

"Tell me," he said. The silence had hung in the air for a while as Kenneth Marks thought, which just reinforced his original assessment of what Knox knew: Knox didn't want to tell him.

"She's inside the white cake."

Kenneth Marks looked over at him, terror birthing in his stomach like a stillborn baby. "What do you mean?" he said.

"She's inside the perimeter."

"Is the white cake taking her like it did the rest?"

Knox smiled at that and looked down at his tablet. "That's the damndest thing. It doesn't look like it's harming her at all."

Kenneth Marks stood up and walked over to the General. The tablet showed an overhead view, a still photo, zoomed in, though he could only see the top of Rigley's head. Brown hair and not much else.

"Look," Knox said, his finger pointing to the other figure in the scene. You could see much more of it, the green waves rolling across the screen almost like a gas. "And here." He pointed again, to another creature, one with a brighter color surrounding it, if not as expansive as the other.

Kenneth Marks said nothing, only felt the terror spreading out of his stomach. Up his esophagus. Into his lungs. Down through his legs and into his groin.

Madness.

That's what he saw. Total lunacy. He hadn't been able to find Rigley through his own thoughts because none of this made any sense. The structural damage to her brain, it had to be the prefrontal cortex, completely ripping through her executive decision making capability. He couldn't cope with insanity, because he wasn't insane, and Rigley clearly was.

"She's switching teams," he said.

Kenneth Marks saw Knox look up at him, though he didn't look away from the tablet.

"What do you mean?"

"Look at her, General. Why is she out there?"

Knox's head went back down. "You're fucking kidding."

"No, General. I'm not. She's there to…."

He trailed off as he thought how he wanted to finish the sentence. He didn't understand insanity, couldn't grasp it or the decisions that Rigley would make from here on out. Still, he needed to have some idea of what she
might
do.

"There to what?" Knox said.

"To help, I think." And that felt right. Kenneth Marks had been missing the underlying motivations behind Rigley. She was there to help it; whatever loyalty she held for the human race had fallen away, much like Kenneth Marks'.

Were they similar now?

He dismissed the notion immediately; she and he held no more similarity than an insect and himself. She had lost her mind, snapped—and he found happiness in that. Perhaps she hadn't broken the way he wanted her to, but this… this escape showed that she wasn't what Kenneth Marks would term healthy. So she had broken, in her own way, and that was good. He only hoped that he drove her there, that his pressure and prodding created the opportunity for this break to happen. That would give him a little more satisfaction, despite the position he found himself in.

But he wasn't done with her.

Not at all.

She didn't get to walk away into the sunset, thinking that she avoided her punishment.

Kenneth Marks didn't look up from the screen, but said, "Go get her. I don't care what it takes. She comes back to me."

K
enneth Marks felt
unsure for the first time in his entire life. It was a feeling as foreign to him as the one of kinship when he first looked at the alien flying above the tanks. Even when he couldn't map out the entirety of what was to come, he never felt unsure, because he was always so far ahead of everyone else. Now, though, he felt behind for the first time in his life.

He walked on the parking lot’s black asphalt, alone. Tents lined the pavement every fifty feet or so, with men coming and going; Knox’s men working on subduing the enemy. Even that little bit of genius had surpassed Kenneth Marks. He hadn't thought of the cold. Knox had.

His hands rested in his pocket as he walked, his head down, looking at his feet move slowly across the white parking spot lines.

Now, Rigley was gone, and he didn’t see that either. Hadn't even thought it possible. He felt embarrassed, really, thinking that for a moment he felt Rigley was upstairs in that hotel room banging someone. All of this happening directly under his purview, and yet he had no idea.

He needed to prioritize and then he needed to act.

Fine.

Kenneth Marks' mind moved intensely slow as he walked, matching his stride, grinding through every piece of information he could find. He didn't want to miss anything. His next move had to be perfect, and as he prepped for it, he took in everything that his mind had segregated.

Once he decided his steps—prioritization and then action—his brain roared to life. Humanity would never see anything like it; an act of such glory that God sinned by making it so private.

Neurons fired at rates nearing triple what other humans could accomplish—indeed, by Kenneth Marks’ calculations, it was the closest that anything would ever reach to hitting the speed of light. More, the sheer number of his neurons created something of a computer in his mind, much more so than any other brain on the planet.

He closed his eyes as he walked, not picking up his physical speed any, even as his mind lifted off the ground and began to soar.

More troops.

Corner her in the center of Grayson.

Save Rigley.

Force alien to his will.

Dispose of Rigley and Knox.

That was the order in which things would flow from here on out. Knox wanted troops and so did Kenneth Marks, and when this creature had nothing left, he would grab Rigley out of the alien's clutches, then
make
the alien bend to what he wanted. Perhaps Rigley wanted to help her, but Knox only wanted to help himself. The alien could have this world once she took him into her counsel.

And then Rigley and Knox would die.

He nodded to himself, as his mind kept forcing its way forward, figuring out exactly how he would trap the creature in what used to be woods, trap the creature where it first landed. He didn't care if the entire United States military watched when he trapped the creature. He would give her the ultimatum in front of them all, because she would choose his side—she was, like Kenneth Marks, full of too much logic not to. And then they could both turn around and wipe out the army staring at them. The army Kenneth Marks would use to get him to the center of Grayson.

Everything would still work out the way it should. Kenneth Marks would have his fun. He would have his birthright. He would have what his intellect entitled him to.

He opened his eyes and pulled the cellphone from his pocket. He found the President's number.