Page 36 of The Inheritance
It burned like battery acid.
I swallowed. Fire sliding down my throat. I chopped the meat smaller. The last thing I needed was to die choking on stalker’s heart.
The pieces of raw flesh landed in my stomach like rocks. My hands trembled. I retched and forced it back down.
I’d managed to down one and a half hearts before the shivers came. Cold clutched at me. My teeth chattered, my knees shook, and I could not get warm. I slumped against the cave wall, shuddering. Bear trembled, turned, and crawled to me.
Tears wet my eyes.
Bear slumped against me and rested her head on my thigh. I petted her. We shivered together. Time stretched, each moment sticky and viscous.
The shivers attacked in waves now. They washed over me, broke into stabbing pains, faded, and came again.
I had to stay awake. Something told me that to sleep was to die.
I shook Bear. She looked at me with her warm eyes.
I forced my quivering lips to move. “You have to stay awake.”
The shepherd looked at me.
“Stay with me. I’ll tell you a story. You were born into this new age. Your parents were probably born into it as well. You don’t know, but it didn’t use to be like this. It used to be… nice.”
I stroked her fur with trembling fingers.
“I remember when the first gates opened. The government called them anomalies back then. One of them was right downtown. The military cordoned it off. Shut down half of the business district.
“At first, everyone was alarmed. There was news coverage, and theories, and the markets crashed. But the gate just sat there, not doing anything. Roger and I drove by to look at it. It was huge. This high-rise-sized, massive hole in the middle of the city, swirling with orange sparks, strange roots and branches twisting along its boundary, just out of reach. I remember feeling this overwhelming anxiety. Like looking at the tornado coming your way and not being able to do anything about it.
“I asked Roger if we should move. He said, ‘Let’s talk about it.’ Roger was my husband and my best friend. Neither of us got along with our parents. I have no siblings, and he didn’t talk to his brother, so it was the two of us against the world. We discussed it on the way home. Our jobs were here. We’d just bought the house two years before. Tia was doing well in school. Roger’s company was twenty minutes from the site, and I was north of it, so if something happened, we’d have time to get out. We decided to stay.
“For two months the gate just sat there. People stopped talking about it, except to complain about the traffic. Then one day – it was a Monday. I don’t know why crap like this always happens on Mondays – one day, I had this long Zoom meeting with the San Diego office, trying to sort out the new advertising campaign. I kept hearing raised voices and then San Diego went offline.
“I came out of my office. Imagine the conference room crammed with terrified people, and they are all staring at the screen, glassy-eyed and completely quiet. There was a newscast on tv, and the journalist sounded so high-pitched, she was squeaking like a terrified mouse. The anomaly had burst and vomited a torrent of monsters into the city. Downtown was a warzone. Bodies torn apart, cars upside down, and creatures that had popped straight out of a nightmare streaming across the screen…”
I remembered the burst of hot electric panic that shot through me. I knew in that moment that whatever plans we made and the future we thought was coming had just died, smashed to pieces with the hammer of an existential threat.
“I stumbled away from the room and called Roger. He answered right away. He said, ‘Pick up the kids and go home. Straight home, Ada, no stops. I’ll get there as soon as I can.’”
My eyes had grown hot. I swiped the tears off with the back of my forearm. My fingers were stained with stalker blood, and I didn’t want it in my eyes.
“These are angry tears. The fucked-up thing is, I remember his voice, Bear. I remember how he sounded. Strong and sure. And I miss that. I miss that voice, I miss the old him, and he is a fucking shithead, and I will never let him back into our lives, but there it is.”
I swallowed and checked Bear. She looked at me. Still alive.
“I left the office. The streets were choked with cars. I’m on the corner of Grace and Broadway, right by that pancake place, and a cop is in the middle of the intersection, and this herd of people just tears out of nowhere and stampedes down Grace. The crowd runs past, and the cop is on the street on his back, not moving. I saw that man being trampled to death. Then a body falls on the street from above. I look up, and there are six-legged things crawling on the building to my right and yanking people out of the windows, and up ahead, just past the IHOP, there is a high-rise apartment building. And it shakes, Bear, and then people start raining from it, jumping in desperation and just smashing onto the street. And I know it’s about to fall, so I jerk my wheel right, and tear down Grace Street in the direction the stampede had come from, because I have no place to go, and something tells me not to follow the crowd. It was hell on Earth, Bear. I don’t know to this day how I got out.
“I pick up Tia, get to Noah’s daycare, grab him, and drive home on autopilot. At some point we pass Target, and it’s on fire. We get to our house and huddle in the bedroom on the bed. The kids are scared, so I turn Netflix on and for some reason it is still streaming despite the world ending. We watch and wait.”
I sat in that bedroom and thought what life would be like if Roger died, and every time I imagined losing him, it felt like someone had cut my soul with a knife. Until today, those were the worst two hours of my life.
“Finally, I hear the code lock, and then Roger walks into the bedroom, wild eyed, disheveled, but alive.”
The relief had been indescribable.
“I hug him, but he doesn’t hug me back. He just stands there, stiff. I thought he was in shock. I make some frozen pizzas, we eat, and we stay with the kids watching Netflix. Roger is distant. It’s like he’s gone into some inside place where nobody is welcome. At some point he leaves the bedroom. I wait until the kids fall asleep, check my phone for news, and then look for him.
“He is sitting on our front porch. He has a pack of cigarettes, and he is chain smoking, one after another. He quit when I was pregnant with Tia. Ten years later, that fucking pack still bothers me. I didn’t make him quit. He chose to do it. Either he had a secret pack – and who keeps a hidden pack of cigarettes for six years? – or he’s been smoking on the side and hiding it from me. Why?
