Nemesis: Book Four (2 page)

R
igley's foot
reached the top of the staircase first, and then carried the rest of her body up with it.

The whole staircase had been dark, like she was walking into a blackhole. Yet when she reached the top, light burst from everywhere, illuminating a room—the only true light she had seen since starting her climb from the first floor. The light had no single source, or at least that's how it appeared. It seemed to come from the walls, ceiling, and floor—but more, it seemed to come from the very air itself—as if it continually created a soothing, warm, white light.

Rigley didn't move, she just took it in, the light not blinding her as the warmth it provided spread across her skin.

There was something on the other side of the room. It looked tiny from where she stood, like some kind of miniature statue. It might have been a mile away, give or take, but it was the only thing in this room, the only thing that she could see anyway. Everything else was just pure light.

Rigley didn't want to move, afraid that if she did the whole situation might change. That the light bathing her would disappear, that the warmth she finally felt in this cold place would die, leaving her with goosebumps and questions. There weren't any questions right now because she felt peace, she felt at home.

Some part of Rigley—not her conscious mind, but somewhere in a deep recess of her brain, perhaps only a few cells communicating with each other—felt something burning downstairs. Down what now seemed like an infinite number of flights, in a place that she resided a long, long time ago. Fire burned down there, and it would bring warmth too, but not the kind she felt now.

The problem, what those little cells spoke about, was that nothing could put the fire out. Maybe there had been a time, right when the kindling first began, that Rigley could have returned downstairs and doused it. Now though? No way. The fire was growing, consuming more and more with each passing minute. The brain cells didn't know, necessarily, what started it—but that didn’t concern them: they knew that it would reach her, sooner or later. That the bottom of a house cannot continue to burn and the top of the house stand.

It was a ways off though. There was that at least.

And the rest of Rigley's brain? It wanted to enjoy this room. It was curious for the first time in this place, instead of the dread that filled it for so long. Dread at the pictures, at the statues, at the voices. Now, her brain was curious about what stood on the other side of the room.

And that felt good.

Being here. In this room.

So why not enjoy it, since the fire would reach her eventually? Rigley paid the little itch of those few cells no mind. She was here now and she was going to enjoy it. She would live it up in here, and whatever was on the other side of the room could join in if it wanted. And if it didn't? Well, no need for it to stay.

This was Rigley’s home, finally, and for once. She owned this room, no one else.

Rigley started walking across the floor, noticing with a huge sense of relief that nothing changed as she did. She headed for the object on the other side, feeling happy, feeling alive.

G
eneral Knox looked
down at the tablet in front of him.

The drones' images revealed what his scouts had already told him. The satellites couldn't peer into any area that the strands spread to. Something inside that territory blocked all external imagery. Drones though, tiny advanced ones, could fly through and send back videos and still pictures. That, plus the boots on the ground that Knox dared to let get close enough to gather information.

Knox saw the white strands when he dropped Will off, but when he returned to the base, he saw nothing like them. The satellites showed him a city with a crashed airplane, smoke coming up from different places, but otherwise, a normal city. That's when Knox knew he had to do something else to get eyes inside Grayson. The drones showed him something similar to what he saw with his own eyes, which was truly terrifying. Knox wasn't shaking, wasn't really even feeling nervous, but even so, what he looked at scared him.

The strands grew out in every direction, taking over the city, moving further and further into the surrounding area.

How fast is it growing?
he asked, not even questioning whether or not it lived, knowing that nothing built this, but it
grew
. Whatever was in Grayson, whatever wrecked his division, had been very much alive, and it wasn't a goddamn architect. Those things down there were growing, and now they were stretching out beyond their incubator.
But how fast?

He would need to move everyone, push them further back. They weren't ready to attack this, didn't even know how. Men died when they went up against this thing, died without a hope of survival, and Knox wanted to avoid more of that until they knew how to fight it.

Knox grabbed the phone from his pocket and entered Marks' number.

It rang once and his secretary picked up.

"Is he there?" Knox asked.

"One second."

There was a click as she put Knox on hold.

He sent a scouting crew out to look at the things growing across the roads. No one touched it, though they managed to cut a piece off, where it quickly grew over the device used to collect it. The detached piece sat on the table in an airtight sealed container. So far the white strands hadn't been able to open the container, hadn't been able to spread outside of it, but the strands rapidly grew across the entire inside of the see-through container. Knox looked at it now, seeing it was still, yet knowing with certainty if he cut open the box, the stuff would begin taking over the room. It was trapped right now, but the moment Knox released it, the consumption of Earth would continue.

The consumption of Earth
.

He didn't like the thought at all.

"Hello, General Knox. How are you?"

Knox leaned on the table, his right index finger beginning to tap.

"Have her pull up the incoming data."

Silence fell over the line. Knox knew the woman was listening in on the phone call, and doing exactly as he said.

"Interesting…" Marks said. "How far are you away from it?"

"Ten miles."

"You've sent people to look at it?"

"Yes," Knox said. "We have a sample; it didn't die when we cut it off. We're going to need to back up, move everyone further away from the city, because at its current rate—"

"It'll reach you in about five hours," Marks interrupted, his voice sounding like he spoke to himself rather than Knox. Knox hadn't been ready to give a time of when he thought it would reach them, only that it would happen soon, but he didn't think Marks was off in his estimate. "Go ahead and start moving now; I want you to stay ten hours ahead of its growth, no more, no less."

"Do you want us to attempt to retard the growth?" Knox said.

"No. Don't touch it. Analyze the sample and send me what comes back."

"What happened with Will?" Knox didn't want to ask the question, but it had been hours since he dropped the man off in Grayson, and if he was dead, Knox wanted to know.

"Will?" Marks said. "I imagine he's on his way back right about now."

T
he strands knew
they were safe.

The species that had been here with them either left or were assimilated. They generated a good bit of heat, and when the strands plunged into their flesh, the heat actually stimulated their growth. It was time to start moving further out though, because they needed room. A lot of room.

The strands stretched on for miles, all the way from the new center of Grayson: the hole that dropped into the depths of the earth. A near infinite number of them branched out in their search for new space, with new pathways being created every few minutes.

If one took an aerial view of the picture, the world around Grayson, Georgia would look like a land covered in pure, white snow—a snow so thick that not even houses or trees could be seen. The strands covered the area like a white blanket, and from that same aerial view, one would see circles of colored bulbs on the snow. The bulbs didn't touch—they spread out by up to a hundred feet sometimes—but still made concentric circles centered around the hole that the strands erupted from.

The bulbs grew smaller as they moved out from the hole, with the ones closest now approaching the size of grown men. Each bulb contained a color, though the ones born first from the white strands also contained something else visible to the eye. A creature, floating upright with eyes open, though whether they could see anything was unknown. Not even the strands knew, because that wasn't their job, and certainly none of the creatures inside the bulbs would ever remember if they could see while in the womb. Eerily, though, if one looked at the creatures in the bulbs, their open eyes stared straight ahead at a world they didn't understand, one that their DNA hadn’t evolved from. Eyes, perhaps sightless, that looked through a haze of color—without any emotion floating across their faces.

The Bynums inside appeared human shaped, though deep color swimming around them made the details of each one hazy. They were growing larger, and the strands did know
that
, sensed it, because the creatures’ birth was coming. Quickly. And the more space that the strands gave them, the safer they would be.

The strands needed room, because many, many more bulbs needed to birth. The strands didn't know how large an area they traveled across, only that they would continue growing until they couldn’t any longer. The more area they possessed, the more bulbs could sprout, and the greater their species' chance of survival. The strands wanted to start with a large number, and to do that, they needed space.

M
orena lowered Will slowly
to the ground, which was to say she lowered herself. During the descent, she rapidly assimilated all the information she could from the man's mind; it felt very different from the other humans she possessed since landing here. The others had been in a sort of disarray—possessing some rudimentary elegance, yet, disorganization permeated all the thoughts and information mapping. This man, this
Will
, was different. His mind kept things regimented, with classifications and entire areas sectioned off.

She didn't care about much of what went on in his mind; indeed, a lot of it was the same as her other hosts had been. What she wanted to know was who sent Will; she wanted to know where he was and how she could get to him.

It wasn't that simple though, she quickly realized. She wouldn't be able to travel to this man, Kenneth Marks, because she wouldn't be able to get out of Grayson without being stopped. The government—though Will thought of them as 'the military'—would be waiting for him, and consequently for Morena. She would need to deal with them before she found Kenneth Marks.

Will's feet touched the ground, or rather, the white strands covering the ground. The strands didn't react to the stranger's landing; they knew their mother controlled this body. Even as her own body levitated high above Will's, still in the clouds, she began moving him down the street. She carefully avoided the pods, to touch one now would be catastrophic for the Bynum inside, but it wasn't difficult to step clear of them. Each one shone inside Morena's mind like a tiny star, illuminating her with their beauty. Even if she needed to walk next to Will, the two of them matching step for step, she would do it to make sure no harm came to her children.

She didn't know what she would do when she met this man, Kenneth Marks, only that she wouldn’t give him what he wanted. The information she found inside Will's head didn't illuminate
what
he wanted, because Will didn't understand Kenneth Marks. Morena came to see that this
operation
, as Will termed it, wasn't… legal… which meant sanctioned, she thought. So Kenneth Marks was operating outside the rules of this society when he sent Will in to find Morena.

It didn't matter, really.

She would find this man, the one apparently in charge of the government coming after her, and she would deliver her terms through this intermediary. Then Kenneth Marks could either comply or… force Morena to make way for her children. She didn't think the human understood that; she thought, from what she gathered in Will's mind, that the man wanted to use her for something. To use her for… his own purposes. She couldn’t describe it any better. Morena thought there might be some fun in explaining to Kenneth Marks that his purposes meant nothing in this new world. She thought someone like him might find that hard to understand.

She left Will's mind, leaving him on autopilot as he walked across the white strands that held her children. She looked out of her own eyes, seeing the clouds again, yet she had no time to focus on them. She had turned off that awful voice, found the human they sent in, and now she needed to look for the other, the being she felt that shouldn't exist on this planet. She had a bit of time until she would be needed here, in the present, and so she had to find this other creature, needed to understand whether it was friend or foe, whether she could trust it to help or whether it needed to die.

It felt…
less.
Like it had faded some, but still there—not dead, not completely gone, just not as strong. Did that mean it was leaving? And if so, leaving this area or leaving the planet? Morena didn't know the answers to any of these questions, but they were imperative. She had to find it; that was the bottom line. The next great threat to her colonization might reside in this other being.

Morena looked down and started her descent, watching the clouds rise around her, covering her vision, though her aura still brought in all the information she needed. As she passed below the cloud line, she saw the world beneath, a white sea of tendrils reaching out across the land, stretching over everything, allowing no other colors to show through—none besides the pods they carried. The white shot up and then fell back to the ground as it covered houses, trees, and every other object it touched.

Beautiful
, she thought.

Her feet touched the ground; she could see Will in the distance, walking a bit stilted. She would never get the hang of these human bodies, not fully, but that was okay. Either they would listen to Morena or they would vanish. The time when she needed to spread through them was nearly at an end.

Morena turned to the left, letting Will's body walk its own path.

To the left, that's where she felt the thing the strongest, the other. And suddenly, her aura rang out with something that she had missed. Bryan's house. He lived to the left. She hadn't thought much of him since she separated from him, truly she didn't even know if he survived. But where he lived was in the same direction as the pull she felt from the other. It could be just a coincidence… or maybe not.

Morena walked, heading to her left, finally thinking about Bryan again.