Page 124

A place where the women could spread out and safely live? Maybe not safe from men, but at least aphids wouldn’t be able to reach them without crossing a guarded barricade.

The tension in my spine loosened a little. “How far away?”

“A hundred and thirty miles east.”

Jesse stepped beside me, his bow on his back and his arms crossed over his chest. “And if men already inhabit the area?”

“If they meet my requirements, they can stay.” Link smiled, his eyes edged with a cruel glint. “If they don’t…”

He left the rest of that sentence hovering on the upper floor like an ominous cloud as he stomped down the stairs with his terrycloth sac of dismembered flesh.

A few minutes later, the pounding of a hammer reverberated through the house. Somehow I knew what he’d done, but it didn’t make me any less disgusted when I walked outside later that night to help the men bury the dead.

Yep, Link had nailed the dicks to the front door, one on each side. Every time I stepped in or out, the mutilated reminders swung in my face.

The shriveled meat hung on the door while we all slept crammed like sardines in the living room night after night. While we ate the meals Eddie prepared for us day after day. They blistered in the sun while Paul worked on the engine of an old school bus. While Hunter gathered food and medicine. While Link, Roark, and Jesse interviewed the arrivals of new men. And they attracted flies and made a nesting ground for maggots while the rest of us prepared to transport eleven recovering women one hundred and thirty miles east.

The stinking, rotting flesh sagged on the door for a week.

The week after that, the nymphs came.

I knew it was coming, but I was powerless to stop the pressure of hundreds of anguished whispers. As the nymphs grew closer, my body crumbled into a ferocious fit of convulsions. My veins froze up, my muscles seized, and my bones turned to ice. For a panicked moment, I thought I would plummet to the floor and crack my head, but Roark’s grip around me was as inflexible as a straitjacket.

Cradling me in his arms, he ran out the door and into the sunlight. I was aware enough to recognize the yellow paint on the bus and the heavy fume of exhaust. Then a dark fog surrounded us.

Amid the hellacious agony of the nymphs’ pain, I remembered Paul had boarded up the windows of the bus. We must’ve been inside it. That was the plan anyway. When the nymphs were close enough for me to identify their numbers, we would load our women into the bus and drive them to Arkendale with the trail of nymphs behind us.

One-hundred-and-thirteen nymphs. That was how many I’d counted before I lost consciousness the first time.

Expecting so many to follow us was a Hail Mary shot in Hell, but at least the aphids wouldn’t fuck with them along the journey.

I heard the whimpers of the women around me. Felt the kick of gravel beneath the spinning tires. But beyond that, I wasn’t able to focus on anything other than the icy daggers skewering my insides.

Roark’s mouth touched my brow. I could feel that, concentrated all thought on it. The heat of his breaths, the softness of his lips, melting the pain, calming me. But not for long.

The trembling returned, shooting unbearable spasms through my entire body. An arctic wind slammed against my skin, and a metallic taste coated my tongue. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t keep warm, couldn’t open my eyes.

“Shea!” Roark’s voice punched like a jolt of electricity on the top of my head. “She’s having another seizure!”

It felt as though my organs froze solid, dead and splintering, too late to thaw out. I screamed at the agony, trying to shove free and unable to make my arms or legs work.

Everything went black.

The pain disappeared, and I floated in a vacuum, watching myself from above, circling around my distressed body as it writhed and tumbled into the emptiness.

A bright wash of light flooded my senses, illuminating my house in Missouri. Hundreds of cracks forked across the stone facing, each fissure in the foundation sprouting leafy tendrils that stretched upward, swallowing my beloved home. The driveway crumbled into broken slabs, the concrete pieces tilting, giving way to the soil pushing free beneath it. And there, in Annie’s window on the top floor, waited the dark silhouette of a man, the outline of wings behind him, and the black unfathomable caverns of his soulless eyes.

The dream flickered, like a light bulb turning on, turning off, on, off, until all I saw was that pulsing globe.

Light bulbs didn’t glow in the real world, but I was certain I was no longer dreaming.

“Where am I?” Ow, fuck. Had I swallowed razorblades?