The Fall of Never(140)

Behind her, Becky’s bedroom window slammed shut. The pane cracked. Kelly did not notice.

“Get away from her,” she said. Her own voice had taken on a second layer, a mixed tonality, as if she were speaking with two voices at once. With her mind, she slammed Simon’s head against the wall. It hit with a sick thud. The wound at his chest had spread and darkened, the flesh peeling back in curls of carbon-like cloth being burned in a fire. An arrangement of nerves in his upper chest and neck bulged out as if inflated with air, pulsed, expanded, retracted.

Becky jerked beneath the bed sheets. Kelly caught the movement from the corner of her eye and turned to face the girl. In her mind, she barely caught a fleeting thought—

(kellykellyhelpmekelly)

—like a passing wave. She closed the distance between them and hung over Becky’s subtle form like a guardian angel.

Becky…

A wet, wrenching sound made Kelly look up. She saw Simon yank the fork from his chest and stumble backward like someone starving for oxygen. The chest-wound was a blind eye. Again, the bundle of nerves pushed his skin taut, pronouncing the tiny mushroom-shaped nodules just below the surface. He howled.

That’s pain! Kelly’s mind screamed at him. You want to be real? How do you like it?

Simon’s face collapsed in a twist of rage and he swung the pronged fork in an arc toward the bed. Had he been closer, he would have driven the fork straight into Becky; however, the force of Kelly’s mental shove had sent him back against the wall, leaving him out of reach. Instead, the fork slammed into the IV bag that hung beside Becky’s bed, tearing it from the stand and pinning it to the wall. The rubber bag exploded in a gush of clear fluid that splashed in every direction. Again, Becky’s body stirred beneath the bed sheets.

“Out!” Kelly screamed. “Out of my f*cking head! Out! Out!”

She dove across the bed, hands hooked into claws and scrambling for the creature, her mind a blotted Rorschach of alien passions and thoughts filtering in from all around her. She struck the floor on the other side of the bed hard but barely felt it, still clawing at the flickering image of the ghost-boy. She leaped to strike, but only hit the wall as Simon’s form disintegrated before her eyes. Like a nuclear charge, she felt his presence pass through her body and exit out the other side.

Spinning around, she saw him coalesce at the foot of Becky’s bed, his injury widening, his skin now flecked with ruptured vessels and protruding bone. Black blood appeared at the creases of his mouth, his forehead, around his eyes. He gnashed his teeth with a sound like crushing gravel. His head, crooked and misshapen, bulged. Kelly felt a tremor in her own head, could feel her own veins throbbing at her temples. Simon’s grip on her brain was strong, his fingers wedged deep and seemingly immune to extraction.

“You’ll never touch me,” he said, his voice ragged and abrasive, cluttered with a mix of emotion neither he nor Kelly ever knew he possessed. In agony, he moaned and brought both his hands up to the gaping crater in his chest. This skin on his hands was pulled like wet bands across his bones; even from such a distance in the dark, Kelly could make out the jagged and tumor-ridden crags of his fingers, his entire hands, and the wasted bands of muscle in his arms.

“I’ve already touched you,” she told him. “I’m doing it right now. You’re dying.”

“You could never kill me.” His voice was breathy and struggling. “You’re not strong enough to kill me. You never were. The best you could do was block me out and forget about me.”

No, she thought, not anymore. That foreign power was still with her, still burning at the back of her head, committed to Kelly’s survival. Who are you and where did you come from? She didn’t know; all she did know was that the upsurge of alien power was saving her life, and slowly eating away at the monster before her. By herself she would have been ineffective against her own creation, weakened by the allocation of a single brain and mind. The manifestation of this other power—this foreign possession from nowhere—was all that was driving her now. And she feared what might happen if she lost it.

“You’re only so strong,” Simon said, the tone of his voice suddenly very much like her father’s. She felt him pull again inside her head with enough force to wrench her neck, and she broke out into a fresh sob, pain shooting down her spine.

I’m fighting you, her mind moaned. I don’t know how I’m doing it, but I am.

She closed her eyes. In her mind, her body was nonexistent.

Pull.

All she could hear was the beating of a heart. It came from everywhere.



Nellie’s nose began bleeding. A minute after that, a white froth pooled from her lips and dribbled down the side of her face. Now remarkably still, the old woman’s entire body hummed with electricity like a live cable. The stink of oranges hung pungent and moist in the air. The tips of her fingers were turning blue, and her ears had pushed back into the sides of her head.

She won’t survive much longer, Carlos thought, and there’s nothing I can do.

From the opposite side of the bed, Josh looked up at him with black-ringed eyes. He’d caught Carlos’s thought as it traveled through the air in the space between them, driven solely by the radiance of Nellie’s power. The room bustled with it.

“She’ll live,” Josh said. “They both will.”

“Josh…”