The Resurrected Compendium Read online

  Instead, there’d been another battle. Explosions. Fire. Rubble. Falling. Death, but not hers.

  And oh, she was so tired now, she thought as she forced herself not to go back to her knees. When she forced herself to keep going, not toward that dead body in the window, but around it. When she stepped through the empty window and kept going toward the parking lot.

  Oh, she was so tired.

  And there was a man, dressed in layers of rags, who looked as though he’d gone through hell and back.

  There was Jake.

  70

  The corridors echoed with the slapping of her sneakers against the floor. Everything about her hurt, and in another life maybe the pain would’ve been bad enough to keep her from moving, but now Kelsey ran. Behind her, the door slammed open. She took the risk of glancing back, sure she’d see someone staggering after her, but all that chased her was a surge of vines and flowers. They covered everything in front of them, tendrils digging into every crack and breaking apart concrete walls like they were made of paper.

  She ran faster. Her lungs seized, and she choked, coughing out hunks of black and red that made her dizzy to see. But she kept her feet, reeling a few times against the corridor walls before finding her balance.

  It was inside her. Had been inside her, all along, all these months when she’d thought she was safe. Others had breathed the spores and succumbed, but Kelsey had been all right. Until now.

  Staggering, Kelsey heard the low panting gasps coming from her throat and couldn’t reconcile them as her own. Her teeth snapped at the air as her fingers clawed, and still she ran. Still she forced herself to keep ahead of the tumbling vines. She had no idea where she was, but there were signs and she could read them. There was that, she thought as she wavered on a set of stairs leading up. She could read. She could think. Rage clouded her vision, but she still had enough of her mind left to know that it was not her own fury, but that of whatever was working in her brain.

  If she was going to die, she wanted to do it outside. Under the sky. Not underground, not here with a bunch of strangers, not in the dark that was rapidly getting deeper as the vines covered the lights.

  “Dennis.”

  She wanted her Dennis.

  That was her only hesitation, that she should flee these caverns and leave him behind. He was with a group patrolling the perimeters. Maybe he was safe. Maybe he would survive this…

  Kelsey burst through another set of doors into the wide open area that housed the shops and amusement park listed in the brochure that had tempted them to come here in the first place. She was close to the entrance.

  She couldn’t run anymore. She went to her knees, skidding on the tile floor. Her jeans tore. Then her skin. She hit with her palms, then her chin. Pain. More pain. Behind her, the shush-shush of those vines. The flowers’ stench filled her nose and mouth, but she opened for it, breathing it in. She would die now.

  She would die.

  “Get up. Kelsey, baby, you have to get up.” Dennis was there, hand beneath her elbows, hauling her upright.

  They ran together. Out the doors, into the parking lot. The vines came behind them. When they hit the open air, more exploded out of them, each splitting and reproducing. The flowers burst forth, bloomed and died in seconds, to be replaced by bigger blooms. More vines. The foliage took over everything, ripping and tearing and destroying all of it.

  Above them in the night sky, a bright light replaced the moon. Kelsey stopped running. Dennis, pulling her, tried to keep going for a moment longer, but then he stopped, too.

  Light in the sky.

  Felt like home.

  Something stirred inside her, twisting and turning, itching until she scratched at her skin. Dug her nails in deep, shredding herself open. Letting what was inside her out. Letting herself…become.

  “Kelsey!” Dennis gripped her hand beside her. From his mouth came the first tentative tendril of red. Then more.

  Their fingers linked. Palm to palm. Then, mouth to mouth in one last kiss that tasted of the flowers. She didn’t mind any longer. She ate it, ate of his face, breathed him in. Made him a part of her.

  “I love you,” she said, but the words came out garbled and unintelligible.

  “I love you,” came his reply, though she could no longer be certain if he spoke or if she just heard him say it in her head.

  It didn’t matter. They were together, here in the end, and it was where she wanted to be. The vines burst out of them and all around them and inside them and over them and then there was only this and nothing else.

  71

  Oh God.

  Oh God.

  Oh God.

  I will never talk to him again. I will never see him again. I will never hear him laugh or see him smile or feel the warmth of his hand in mine again. We will never touch.

  Never again.

  This is what she thinks, over and over, as she drives home. Her hands on the wheel, gripping tight. The swish-swish of the wipers clearing the window, though the truth is, Maggie is blinded by tears that fill and scald her eyes but refuse to slip down her cheeks.

  She opens her mouth and takes in air, but there is no breath. It’s over. All of it. This thing that grew and grew until it consumed her has ended.

  There is no more.

  There are no other cars on this dark road. No lights but her headlights on the wet blackness. Swish, swish, the wipers swat away the rain. The thrum and hum of the tires is a wordless song that would soothe her under other circumstances. But there is no solace now. Nothing but the grinding, slicing ache in the spot where she once hung her heart.

  Everything rises in her. She swerves to the side of the road. Toward a ditch. How easy it would be, she thinks, to run her car off this road. Off the side of a bridge. They’d blame it on the rain, wet roads, bald tires; maybe they’d say she fell asleep. Lost control. There’d be no blame, only sorrow at the loss of her.

  He’d know though. Wouldn’t he? And would he grieve, if she were gone forever? Does it matter to him if she occupies a place in this world, when it will never in the same place he is? Will he grieve, she thinks as the tires spin and the car skids to a stop, as she opens her door to lean out and heave into the rain. Will he grieve?

  The misery had faded, but never disappeared. She’d been able to recall it at a moment’s notice, if she tried, though she had very rarely allowed herself the luxury of that self-indulgent agony. Most other times it simply reared up and smacked her like a shovel to the face, always unexpected. A song they’d danced to. The whiff of his cologne on a stranger in a crowd. Once she’d been in the office supply store and saw a man who looked like him from behind — she’d actually reached for him only to jerk her hand back at the last second, knowing it could not be him. She’d gone to her car after that and sat for a long, long time, gripping the wheel and staring ahead of her without turning on the ignition.

  She’d believed, that last time, that she would never see him again, but he’d shown up on her doorstep with a warning. And then again, when he’d been taken away by the men with guns, she had believed that was the last time they would ever be together.

  But here he was again. The passage of time ought to have changed her feelings for him. After all, she’d spent her time and energy on making the best of her life in the years that had passed, and she’d done a damn fine job of it. Her passion for him should’ve faded or spent itself to emptiness in her dreams. The loss of everything else should have overshadowed the loss of him.

  “I have missed you,” she said now. The truth came out of her as easily as water slipping over rocks. The words tripped on her tongue and past her teeth without so much as a snap of her jaw to keep them inside. “Oh, God, I missed you so much.”

  “I missed you, too,” Jake said.

  She bent her head and pressed her hands over her mouth to keep back the sobs. Maggie shook her head, shoulders heaving with each breath she took until she could look at him again. “I thought I would never see you