The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  A woman’s crying in the front row, both her hands up, her head bowed, her mouth working. Testify, bitch, like that would ever matter. Nothing else matters. Nothing.

  Matters.

  And I turn on my heel in these ridiculous shoes, you think I don’t know how I look? It’s a gimmick, a game, it’s a reason for any of you to listen to me, because none of you would’ve given me the time of day if I didn’t have some moronic reason for you to pay attention.

  “Pay. Attention.”

  Pay attention.

  I can’t stop coughing, and I bend over, I open my mouth, stuff is coming out of me with every racking heave. It’s dark, it’s red, there’s blood, it tastes bitter.

  It smells wonderful.

  It was those flowers.

  Oh, fathergod, you brought me to this place and you made me do things, you showed me choices, you made me into what I am today, why can’t I stop coughing?

  Why can’t I get this crap out of my throat, it’s in my nose, my fucking lungs, it’s choking me.

  Why can’t I

  17

  Ryan had stopped pushing the channel button on the remote. The TV showed a man wearing white from top to toe. Abbie knew him. Renton Foster, standing on a stage in what looked like a tent, in front of what was easily a couple hundred people. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. She didn’t care.

  Her ex-husband might be breathing, his heart beating, but he was not alive. There was nothing in his eyes…at least until she sagged and the chair leg knocked against the recliner, and he finally looked at her.

  Then, his gaze filled with rage.

  Before Abbie could do more than hike up her grip on the chair leg, Ryan was out of the recliner. His hands went to her throat, thumbs digging deep into the sensitive flesh. The only reason he wasn’t able to choke her to death within seconds was because she’d tripped backward as he lunged, taking him down with her, and she rolled so that he lost his grip. Her leg twisted under her. Pain ripped through her, but she could deal with pain.

  Her ex-husband was on top of her, snapping his jaws an inch from her face. Abbie gagged on the stink of his breath and turned her face to avoid the silver strand of drool escaping his mouth. His teeth grazed her jaw. His knee nudged between her legs, then up over her belly to pin her. Ryan put his full weight on her. She couldn’t breathe.

  She was going to gray out completely, but before that happened, she was going to do her best to get him the fuck off her. Abbie hit Ryan in the back of the head with the chair leg. The wood broke over his skull, barely shifting him even as blood spattered onto her face. He snapped his teeth again, this time catching a good chunk of her flesh in his bite.

  She couldn’t scream. She didn’t have the air. But she could bite him back.

  Abbie sank her teeth into his throat. She’d tasted blood before, but only ever and always her own. She didn’t know if someone else’s blood was supposed to be so rich and bitter at the same time, but she knew it was wrong for it to fill her nose with the mingled smell/taste of those flowers. She shoved as she bit, and Ryan rolled with her on top of him.

  Abbie spat and spat again, the edges of her vision going red. She knew the signs. Unconsciousness was inevitable unless she could calm down and catch her breath. She couldn’t afford to pass out. She took the broken chair leg and raised it over her head.

  She brought it down.

  It caught him in the throat, pinned him to the floor as he jerked and twisted, and she rode him in a sick parody of lovemaking. He bucked, hands scrabbling first at the stake in his throat, then at her. Abbie batted his hands away, yanked out the chair leg. Thrust it again.

  Behind him, on the TV, she caught a glimpse of a close up on Renton Foster’s face, startling enough in its sudden hugeness to distract her from killing the man she’d once loved so much she’d gladly have died for him. The television speakers emitted a horrid, low groaning she’d been ignoring but now saw was not some sort of feedback. It came from Foster’s throat.

  And there, in front of a couple hundred witnesses and countless watchers at home, Renton Foster’s face exploded.

  Half a minute, thirty seconds, it took an endless eternal lifetime for her to scramble backward off Ryan. He lurched upright, hands swinging and grasping for her, but she knocked them away and kept moving out of reach. His mouth worked, voice a low, guttural shout. Once he’d said her name with love in his voice, but there was nothing but loathing and fury in it now.

  “Abbie!”

  A string of garbled curses vomited from him on a gust of that sickly sweet flower stench. Abbie coughed at it, her gorge rising. She backed away, not risking even a glance toward the kitchen or her boys. Ryan moved toward her, too fast, still too strong.

  He grabbed her, fingers pinching into her upper arms. He shook her until her teeth rattled and she bit her tongue. And then he bent his mouth to hers. She thought he meant to kiss her.

  The black, stinking cloud erupting from his nose and mouth covered her face in seconds, and though she tried to hold her breath, Abbie’d already sucked it into her. That taste was back. The stink. She felt small, wriggling things against her skin, and she writhed in revulsion. Whatever had been inside him, whatever was coming out of him with each thick, retching cough, was…alive.

  Oh, God, it was alive, she felt the sting of them on her cheeks and forehead and inside her nose and mouth and throat, a myriad of infinitesimal pinpricks. Pain in her lungs, sharp but brief. She spat and fought. One of her fists caught Ryan in the jaw, and he staggered back.

  He went to his hands and knees, head down. He didn’t move. He made no sound.

  Abbie scraped at her face but whatever had been on her was gone. Absorbed into her skin, she thought with a violated shudder. She spat again and scraped her palm along her tongue but found nothing left there either. It was inside her, that stuff.

  Not for the first time, though. And though she waited a minute to see if it would affect her, if she would start to flail and rage, even the taste and smell faded. She breathed in and out, felt the familiar constrictions, but nothing new.

  Roaring, Ryan boiled up from the ground. His face was a ruin, eye sockets bleeding and black, mouth split at the corners. The flaps of skin in his neck exposed the pink tube of his trachea. Guttering spurts of blood splashed. His hands had hooked into claws, grabbing for her.

  Abbie punched him square in the face. Her fist sank into him, like punching a watermelon gone too soft in the summer sun. It knocked him back but took her with him, her fist trapped in his his runneled flesh. She yanked her hand free with a cry of disgust.

  She hit him again.

  And again.

  She hit him until he stopped moving and she was covered in his blood and scraps of flesh and shattered bits of bone that should’ve been hard and sharp but were soft and spongy, instead. Breathing hard, Abbie stood over the ruined mess that had been her husband and waited for him to pull a Michael Myers or a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Voorhees, to rise up at the last minute. Unkillable.

  Ryan didn’t move.

  Abbie scraped the gunk off her hands against the couch cushions. She blinked rapidly, focusing on her breathing, keeping herself calm. She didn’t want to faint. Or puke. Oh, God, he was all over her…

  “Mama?”

  She whirled and ran on stumbling feet to Benji, who knelt by his brother. Jordan was still not moving. Abbie went to her knees to cradle his head in her lap. She smoothed his hair back from his face, which had gone much cooler. His eyes behind the closed lids moved, like he was dreaming, but the lashes didn’t so much as flutter.

  “Is he going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know, baby. I hope so. Tell me what happened.”

  Benji shot a terrified look toward his dad, who still crouched on the ground in an ever-widening puddle of blood from his shredded throat. “Daddy and Jordan went out to check on the shed after the tree came down.”

  “Did you go with them?”

  “No. Daddy said