We will rise, p.8
We Will Rise, page 8
“Back in the house!” Julie shouted. “Quick, before—”
The advancing ghosts did nothing obvious, but the front door slammed violently shut, and she heard the soft snicks of locks engaging.
“—something happens,” she finished.
“We have to put her down,” Nick said. “We need our hands free.”
To do what? Julie thought. Wave goodbye to each other? Even if these people weren’t…whatever they were, there were too many for the three of them to fight physically. Julie had taken some self-defense classes, but she’d never been in an actual combat situation. It was her job to help people, not hurt them, and even though she didn’t think these ghosts qualified as people any longer, she still wasn’t sure she could bring herself to harm them. They had to do something, though, so together she and Nick gently lowered Emily to the ground.
“They’re going to kill us,” Oliver said. “Make us like them.” He looked down at his laptop, scowled, and rapped a knuckle against its surface. “No, that will not be nice!”
Julie had no idea why the kid was talking to his computer, and right then she really didn’t care. She and Nick took up defensive positions in front of Emily, although what they were going to do to protect the woman, she had no idea. Give the ghosts a stern talking to? Just because all of you died horrible deaths, it’s no reason to hurt this poor lady. She’s already gouged out her damn eyes this morning. Isn’t that enough pain for one day?
As if the ghosts had read her mind, they said, There can never be too much pain.
They smiled.
Julie thought she might piss herself there and then, but she caught a flash of movement off to her right. She turned in that direction and saw a man jogging on the sidewalk. Like the ghosts, he wasn’t dressed for the weather – My Chemical Romance T-shirt, shorts, socks, and running shoes. He was Asian, somewhere in his thirties, lean, in good shape. She thought she recognized him, but she couldn’t…. Then it hit her like a hammer blow to the gut. It was Brian. Her brother.
When Brian reached the sidewalk in front of Oliver’s house, he veered into the yard and continued jogging toward Julie and the others. He looked good. No, scratch that. He looked goddamn great – especially for a dead man. He’d died three years ago, while he’d been out running. He was much more into the activity than she was, but he was the type who always threw himself a hundred percent into everything he did. He’d graduated near the top of his class in med school, and had landed a residency at an excellent hospital in Cleveland. His health was top notch save for one little thing: he was extremely allergic to bee stings. He always carried an epinephrine auto-injector with him wherever he went – except for one summer day when he’d decided it would be pleasant to run in a park that had trees, a large pond, and flowers. Lots of flowers. Julie didn’t know why Brian had left the injector behind. Had he simply forgotten it? He hadn’t been stung since he was a boy, and although he’d nearly died then, three decades had passed since. Had he relaxed his guard too much, figured that the odds of him getting stung as an adult were so low that it wasn’t necessary to drag an injector with him everywhere he went? The odds of him getting stung were a hundred percent on that day, though. A bee got him on the back of the neck, just one little sting, but that was all it took. He was found and rushed to a hospital, but he’d died there less than an hour later of anaphylactic shock. It had been a goddamn stupid way to die, and one that might’ve been easily prevented if he hadn’t left his fucking medicine behind. Brian had such a bright career ahead of him – he’d intended to become a neurologist – and he could’ve helped so many people. Julie had been close to her big brother growing up, and his loss had devastated her. But now here he was, as the old song went, ‘looking better than a body had a right to’. Especially a dead body, one that had been cremated, its ashes scattered in Lake Erie.
The group of dead patients turned toward Brian as he drew near, and they bared their teeth at him like a pack of snarling wolves.
She’s ours! they said.
Brian responded, mouth unmoving, and Julie realized she’d been hearing the ghosts’ thoughts in her mind all along.
She’s my sister.
Brian came to a stop when he was within ten feet of the dead patients. He raised his arms, held out his hands, and the flesh of his palms burst open, releasing twin blasts of small objects that looked like…thorns.
Not thorns, Julie thought. Bee stingers….
The storm of stingers Brian had unleashed struck the ghosts and embedded in their undead flesh. They cried out with their thought-voices and raised their arms to protect their faces. How can ghosts feel physical pain? Julie wondered.
Brian continued blasting stingers at the ghosts, moving closer as he did so, but he spared Julie a quick smile.
Because they’re getting hit with ghost stingers, he said, as if it was obvious.
Feeling as if her sanity was teetering on the brink, she nodded, as if what her brother had said made sense.
The patients were covered with stingers now, and their flesh – or whatever substance encased their bodies – was beginning to blacken and swell. Their forms seemed less solid than they had only moments earlier, and as Julie watched they began to fade, becoming increasingly transparent and insubstantial until they were gone. The stingers that had missed them and fallen to the lawn disappeared as well.
The flesh on Brian’s palms closed over, and then he gave her a little wave, as if to say, See you, turned, and started running again. He ran down the driveway past the medic, got back on the sidewalk, and continued running until he was lost to sight.
The three of them – Julie, Nick, and Oliver – stared in the direction Brian had taken. Emily lay on the backboard, quiet, as if she too were struggling to process what had just taken place.
“What the fuck was that?” Nick asked.
“I have no idea,” Julie said. “Come on. We need to get this woman to the hospital.”
She hoped Nick wouldn’t argue with her. She wanted— no, she needed to return to some semblance of normalcy, to do something, anything so she wouldn’t have to think about what had happened. Because if she didn’t distract herself, if she continued thinking about those vengeful patients and her dead brother – who was now filled with bee stingers – she thought there was an excellent chance that she was going to scream.
“Yeah,” Nick said. “Sure.”
Together they bent down, picked up the backboard, and continued carrying Emily toward the medic. Once they got her onto the wheeled stretcher and secured the backboard to it, they put the stretcher into the medic. Nick jogged to the driver’s side, and Julie climbed into the back and prepared to close the rear doors. Before she did, she gave Oliver one last look. The kid stood in front of the house, holding the laptop screen up. It looked like he was talking to someone, and Julie wondered if he was Skyping. If so, it was kind of odd. Wouldn’t it be easier to just call someone on the phone, even if you wanted to video chat with them?
Then something emerged from the screen. A hand, followed by a wrist, and then a forearm. The hand reached for Oliver’s cheek and gently caressed it. Oliver closed his eyes and smiled.
Chapter Eight
Mari returned to the kitchen, feeling as if she were walking through a dream. She tore a sheet of paper towel off the roll on the counter, wadded it, then pressed it to her bleeding lips. She did this automatically, her mind too filled with images of what had happened in Noelle’s room to have space for any other thoughts.
I want to go home!
She walked into the dining room. Lewis still sat at the table, empty plate pushed aside, staring at his phone screen. She walked to the other side of the table, slid out the chair opposite his, and sat. She said nothing, thought nothing. Her lips throbbed but the pain barely registered. She kept the paper towel pressed tight against the wound and looked at her husband, her expression blank. Lewis didn’t look up from his phone.
“The whole world’s lost its goddamn mind,” he said.
His words held no meaning for her. He continued speaking, still not looking at her.
“Reports are coming in from…well, from everywhere. People are seeing visions, I guess you could call them. No one knows what they are. People claim they’re being visited by the ghosts of dead family and friends, but these ghosts are pissed. They’re hurting people, even killing them. I thought it was some kind of hoax at first. But I’ve checked a half dozen different news sites – reputable ones – and they all say the same thing. It’s fucking insane.”
“I saw a ghost,” Mari said softly, voice partially muffled by the paper towel. “At least, I think that’s what it was.”
That got Lewis’s attention. He looked up from his phone and frowned when he saw Mari was pressing the paper towel to her lips.
“Are you okay? What happened?”
Mari’s mind was slowly starting to clear, and she understood that Lewis was asking about the injury to her lip. But before she could answer, he said, “What do you mean you saw a ghost?”
“I heard a baby crying, so I went down to Noelle’s room. She was there, Lewis. In her crib. The room was cold, so I picked her up to warm her. She…she wanted….” Mari lowered the paper towel from her bleeding lips. “She did this to me.”
He leaned forward, as if to examine her lips more closely. He opened his mouth, and she thought he might say something like What the hell are you talking about? or Did you have a stroke or something? But she wasn’t the sort of person given to fanciful thinking, and Lewis knew this. Plus, he’d read all those news reports.
“Show me,” he said.
A jolt of fear burned away the last of Mari’s mental fog.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said.
She didn’t want to go back into that room, not for any reason. And if Lewis went inside, would he even see Noelle? He hadn’t heard her crying. He hadn’t been the one she wanted. She hadn’t wanted to crawl inside him. Would Noelle reveal herself to him at all?
“Why isn’t it a good idea?” he pressed.
“She’s angry, Lewis. So very angry.”
He fell silent then. She sensed that he was appraising her, and she could guess what he was thinking: that losing Noelle had finally driven her over the edge. Suddenly she did want to return to Noelle’s room. For the first couple months after Mari’s miscarriage, Lewis had been supportive and understanding, but the longer her grief had gone on, the more he began to become impatient. Yes, it was a tragedy, but these things happen. It sucks and it sucks hard, but you have to get over it, have to move on.
Get over it.
Move on.
People who offered this empty advice had never experienced true grief, the soul-deep sorrow that sat at the center of your being like a ravenous black hole, threatening to pull you in and devour you. And it hadn’t only been Lewis urging her to move on. Her mother, her sister, her best friend at work…. All of them had told her the same thing. They all had children, but none had lost a child, not like she had. None of them understood the pain. But Lewis had been – was – Noelle’s father. If there was anyone who should understand, it was him.
She was no longer afraid. She was angry – just like her daughter.
She rose from her seat, came around the dining table, grabbed Lewis’s hand, and pulled him to a standing position. She did not do this gently.
“You want me to show you? Then let’s go.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she turned and began pulling him after her. She led him out of the dining room, through the kitchen, and down the hall to Noelle’s room. Once there, she let go of Lewis’s hand and gestured toward the closed door.
“After you,” she said.
She was aware that the way she was acting wasn’t making a good case for her sanity, but she didn’t care. She needed Lewis to see, needed him to understand, but no way in hell was she going to go inside first.
He looked to the door, then back to her. He pointed to her lips. “She did that.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
“But…even if she is in there, she’s just a baby, right? She wouldn’t be strong enough or coordinated enough to hurt anyone.”
“Whatever she is, she’s not a baby.”
Lewis looked at the door again, and she could feel his resolve wavering. He might still be unsure about her story, but it wasn’t as if it existed in a vacuum. He’d read those news articles. It galled her to think that he put more stock in accounts posted by random reporters than he did his own wife’s experience, but she supposed she’d feel the same if their roles had been reversed. She thought he might change his mind, decide that it wasn’t worth taking the risk to go into their daughter’s room. He’d return to the dining room to get his phone and do more research on what was happening, maybe go into the living room and put on a cable news channel to see what they were saying. When Lewis was uncertain about something – or when he was anxious or afraid – his way of coping was to gather as much data as possible. It gave him a feeling of control, made a problem seem smaller, less intimidating.
But he surprised her. He took hold of the knob, turned it, and pushed the door open.
Cold air – far more frigid than it had been only a few moments earlier – blasted into them. It carried a foul odor with it, a scent of infection and rotting meat that made Mari gag. She grabbed hold of Lewis’s arm and tried to pull him away. She no longer cared if he believed her about Noelle. Let him think she had completely lost her mind if he wanted. It had been a mistake to come back here, and they needed to leave now, while they still could.
“Close the door!” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
She pulled harder on his arm, but Lewis resisted. He shrugged her off, then stepped into the room.
“Sweet Jesus…” he whispered.
Don’t do it, she told herself. Don’t follow him. But he was her husband. She couldn’t let him face the thing their daughter had become alone. She went inside.
The room itself looked the same as the last time she’d been here – crib, dresser, curtains, sea animals painted on the walls – but now it was filled with crisscrossing lengths of some sort of rubbery tubing, twisted into a corkscrew shape and threaded with thin blue lines. No, not lines. Veins. It was an umbilical cord, an impossibly long one that stretched back and forth across the room like some hideous version of a spider’s web. It was anchored to the walls, ceiling, and floor at various points by some kind of thick greenish-yellow substance that looked like pus. Now she knew where the horrible stink was coming from.
Noelle crouched at the center of this web, the cord – which her father had never gotten to cut – protruding from her small belly. The flesh around it was red and swollen, and blood and pus leaked around the edges. The cord was infected, Mari realized, all the way through, from one end to the other. She had a crazy thought then: were she and Lewis looking at the ghost of Noelle’s actual umbilical cord, the one that had tethered child to mother for the short time she’d grown within Mari’s womb? Noelle had been so small when the miscarriage occurred, and her cord would’ve been equally as tiny. But whatever was taking place in their home – and evidently across the entire world – wasn’t bound by logic or natural laws, at least none known to Mari.
Noelle’s eyes fixed on Lewis, and she cried out with her thought-voice. Daddy!
Lewis shook his head, raised his hands as if to ward her off, took a step backward. “You’re not our daughter! You’re some kind of fucking monster!”
Noelle’s features scrunched tight in fury and she blasted a new thought at them. BAD DADDY!
As if in resonance with Noelle’s anger, the umbilical cord web began to quiver. Sections of the cord lengthened, bowed outward, stretched toward Lewis like spiral-shaped serpents. Coils swiftly looped around his arms, legs, neck, and torso. They drew tight, pulling his arms out to his sides and lifting him several inches off the floor. He turned his head to look at Mari, tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was a strangled gurgle.
Mari tried to go to him, but the lengths of cord in front of her drew closer to each other, becoming a thick tangle, and no matter how hard she pushed against their hard, slick surfaces, she couldn’t budge them. All she could do was watch as Noelle lifted Lewis higher into the air. Noelle scuttled forward, moving through her web with inhuman speed until she was nearly nose to nose with her father.
Noelle stood on one section of the cord, holding on to another with both of her tiny doll hands as she regarded Lewis, her features still contorted in anger. The skin of her abdomen around where the cord protruded was swollen, and pus oozed from the edges of her belly button. Keeping her brown eyes fixed solely on Lewis’s, she reached down with her right hand, grasped the cord, and gave it a quick, hard shake. Vibrations rippled along the cord, up and down, back and forth, until they reached the coils that had ensnared Lewis. They tightened, pulled, and Lewis tried to scream, but no sound came out. The coils then yanked Lewis in multiple directions, and his body came apart with horrible wet tearing sounds. Blood sprayed the air, and Mari screamed as Noelle clapped and giggled in delight. Warm drops struck Mari’s face and hands, splattered her clothes, and she thought, I’m wearing my husband’s blood.
The coils continued to grip the pieces of Lewis’s body, blood running from their ragged ends, pattering to the floor like crimson water. The expression on Noelle’s face was no longer one of dark joy at watching her father come apart like a shoddily made toy. Now she looked hopeful. She let go of the umbilical cord, stretched her hands toward Mari, said, Mommy? in a plaintive, almost pleading tone. Mari knew what she wanted. Noelle was asking her to come pick her up, hold her close, open her mouth and let her go home….
