The Rising(68)

That we aren’t alone.

That they were here once.

And would be coming back.

Marsh’s mind drifted, leaving him feeling almost disembodied. Trapped somewhere between the past and present. A sad little boy certain of things no one else believed trapped in the body of an old man. As an adult he’d built a private army, a modern-day Fifth Column, tasked to exterminate the vermin but had fallen short. Just like the time as a boy he’d doused his plastic toy soldiers with lighter fluid and lit them on fire, only to have his mother extinguish the flames before they burned.

In that moment Marsh thought he saw something in a corner of the ravaged FedEx Office, trapped between a crevice of shadows and the first of the dawn light sneaking in through the windows. An almost translucent figure that looked ash gray against the white wall: tall and gaunt with an irregular dark seam down its center, as if the two halves of him had been sewn together.

“You were thinking they may not be enough,” he said to Rathman.

“Sir?”

“After I mentioned I’d summoned all our teams to the area—I saw it in your eyes.”

Rathman stripped off his gloves, surveying the room yet again without denying Marsh’s words. “You were more correct than you could possibly realize, sir. The first thing you told me.”

“What’s that?”

“That we’re going to war.”

Marsh looked back at the corner where the sad boy inside him had glimpsed the ash-colored creature. But the old man saw nothing now.

“In that case,” Rathman was saying, “I’d like your permission to bring in some more soldiers.”

“Of course, Colonel. As many as it takes.”

“It’s not just numbers, it’s also experience.”

Marsh glanced about the wreckage once more. “With this?”

“With anything. That’s the kind of men I want to call in. Special operators who know their way around combat.”

“They’ve never encountered what they’ll be facing here,” Marsh reminded him.

“Close enough, sir,” Rathman said.





69

GONE

SAM AWOKE HUNCHED AGAINST a tree, Alex nowhere to be seen.

“Alex,” she said hoarsely through a mouth that felt all dry and pasty, imagining what her breath must have smelled like. “Alex!”

He was nowhere to be seen, having left her sometime in the night. She pulled herself to her feet, found her legs so gimpy she could barely stand.

“Al…,” she started to cry out again, but her voice drifted off before she finished.

He was gone. They’d slept leaning against one another and clinging to the warmth that the other’s body provided. She’d dreamed of this night for so long, never imagining it would come at so steep a price. But they had slept holding tightly to one another, afraid to let go, as if they might slip away. Or maybe he’d never been here to begin with and this really was all some crazy dream or illusion, an alternate reality starting to clear amid the dewy mist with the sun’s touch.

“Hey, you’re awake.”

Sam spun around so fast, her wobbly legs nearly gave out. She held fast to the tree just in time, as Alex made his way into the clearing.

“Where the hell were you?”

“Had some business to attend to.”

Sam realized he was zipping up his fly. “Oh.”

“I was up before,” he told her, “when the sun first came up. I found a stream, just down a path over there. Come on,” he said. “Fresh water, at least.”

Alex didn’t say a word about how torturous his night had been. Every time he drifted off to what passed for sleep, he saw the ash man, what Raiff had called a Shadow, split in half, talking literally out of both sides of his mouth at once.

You must come with me, Alex. You’ve evaded for this long, but now you’re ours again. We won’t stop. We’ll never stop.

The ash man wanted something from him, something Alex had no conception of. Raiff thought it might be something he knew instead of an actual object. Maybe the ash man didn’t know for sure, either.

“Come on,” Alex said, taking Sam’s hand, “you look thirsty.”

He led her through the trees deeper into the forest. Before long, Sam heard the soft sound of water slipping over rocks and moments later the stream came into view. Thin and shallow, looking more like a man-made drainage culvert than something natural.

Sam dropped to her knees and splashed her face, feeling herself coming back to life. Then she started drinking and couldn’t stop. The water was bitingly cold but refreshing and she kept raising her cupped hands to her mouth, as much of it spilling down her shirt as finding her lips.

Sam caught Alex half smiling at her, at least briefly. “What?”

“You should see yourself.”

Sam stiffened, only then thinking what she must’ve looked like after a night outside in the elements. She sniffed at her clothes, as if they might yield something.

“I said ‘see,’ not ‘smell.’”

“Don’t look at me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a mess.”

“Meaning I must be one too,” Alex managed.

“It’s different for you. You’re a guy.”