Fractured (21 page)

The cry died in Maria’s throat before she could scream it. Someone else screamed for her.

“Fuck!” one of the men yelled. He looked scared, white as a ghost. “Fuck!” He stumbled to his feet, ready to take care of Darius.

Darius was laughing, a deep, horrible, throaty laugh that reflected off the walls. The demon was here, through his body.

Maria watched two men go over to Darius, frozen in horror. This couldn’t be. She was meant to stay here for Rick. They were going to be together.

As if in a dream, she watched as they grappled with the monster, who just laughed in their faces at their attempts to subdue it. In slow motion, she watched the zombie’s maw latch onto the neck of one of the men, and rip his throat from his neck like it was a predator. The monster laughed while the man quickly died.

The other man tackled Darius, bringing him to the ground. It became an all-out wrestling match before everyone. One of them was going to die, and it didn’t look like it was going to be Darius.

Maria couldn’t move. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Others got up to help, but it was going to be too late. The man was going to lose.

More movement caught her eye, and she turned towards the doorway.

Impossibly, Jeb, the man whose throat Naomi had crushed, had slithered along the walls of the break room, unnoticed by anyone during the struggle. He was dead—just like Darius—and yet, he wasn’t
still
dead. He was a puppet, just like everyone else who died.

Like Rick...

Mesmerized, Maria focused on him. Her warning to the others was caught in her throat. She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. She was both terrified and transfixed.

Jeb’s head, his neck still crushed, turned to look at her. And winked.

It took a moment for Maria to realize what he was doing. Why he had slunk over to the door to the outside world. When his tied-up hand reached for the doorknob, turned, and flung open the door, pushing aside all they had used to barricade the door like it was twigs, she started screaming.

The fire came in like a tidal wave and consumed them all.

*****

Bash ran until she couldn’t run anymore. She was disoriented and it didn’t help that she was in a wing of the hotel she had never been in before. She kept running into walls or getting turned around. She clutched her left arm, trying to stem the bleeding. She was going to have to stop soon, or else she was going to die from blood loss and end up a puppet like the others.

Other than her footsteps, the hotel seemed to be empty of people. She couldn’t hear any movement other than her heartbeat. Whatever had happened, they were alone in this hellhole of a hotel. It was like another dimension or some world that Abyzou had dreamed up for them.

Maybe it was something especially for her. After all, Rick had told her she was cursed.

She ran her fingers along the wall, feeling around for anything that could be an unlocked door. Somewhere safe for her to hole up in. All of the doors she found were locked.

Was there no one who had accidentally left a room open?

She gave a sob of relief when she found a door handle that jiggled. It was unlocked. She threw caution to the wind and opened the door. No raging fire here either—it must just be limited to the restaurant and outside the hotel. She was glad for that at least.

The room smelled musty and wet, like she had stepped into a cleaning closet. As she felt around the shelves, she realized that it was indeed some sort of janitor’s closet, complete with rolls and rolls of toilet paper and paper towels.

She found another chair and barricaded herself in the closet. She didn’t know what would happen if something did find her in there. She’d be trapped with no way out, but she was more worried about what might have been following her in the hallway.

She grabbed a roll of paper towels and started dealing with the gash on her arm. There was so much blood, she was sure she had left a trail behind her into the closet, which would be bad if something was hunting her.

She had to stop the blood flow, or else she was going to die. And even if she could stop it, was she just going to keep deteriorating like Scott?

She used most of a toilet paper roll to wrap her arm. She knew that it wouldn’t be enough. At least she had it covered for now and she had hopefully slowed the bleeding enough. It was going to have to do until she found help.

With the adrenaline rush gone, Bash was suddenly very tired. She leaned back against a shelf and sighed heavily. Sooner or later, she was going to have to leave the safety of the closet, and that meant going out and facing the demons that could be out there.

Demons...

She frowned and drew her knees up to her chest. The voice that spoke to her through Rodney’s corpse had called her “sister”. Like Lily was talking directly to her.

Bash shivered.

Had Naomi been right? Was it her sister who was possessed by Abyzou? How was that even possible? When would that have happened? In the movies, there was always a turning point for a possessed character, where they started acting strangely.

What was Lily’s turning point?

Bash tried thinking back. Was it when she had started dating Seth? Lily had been interested initially, and even though she had given her blessing for their relationship, she had always acted weird around them, probably because she still had feelings for Seth. No, it went back even further. Lily had always been distant. Bash rifled through her memories. Before her parents’ death, before all that.

That only left one possibility.

Has Lily always been possessed?

The thought was terrible. Suddenly, both Bash’s and Lily’s lives seemed like a lie. If there had always been an evil presence in Lily’s mind, twisting her personality, changing her into something with horrible intentions, then Bash had never really known her true sister.

“I’m so sorry, Lily,” she whispered. Tears flowed at the absolute helplessness of their entire situation.

She hadn’t been there for Lily, not really. She had always chalked up her sister’s self-destructive behavior and lack of ambition in life to Lily just being Lily. She realized that no, it had actually been something else entirely.

Darius and Rick and so many others had paid the price for it. Lily was paying the price too. She’d never had a normal life. She probably never had the chance to think for herself. All of her destructive behavior—that must have been from a demon in her mind telling her what to do, twisting and manipulating everything until she could only see the way it wanted her to see.

She had never known the real Lily.

She leaned her head on her knees, sobbing freely. Her bad arm fell to her side, forgotten in her despair.

Eventually, whether it was due to exhaustion or blood loss, she slipped into uneasy nightmares.

Light entering through her eyelids made her jump within the dream. A nightmare. She looked up, transported into a vision of the past. She was sitting on the floor of a hospital ward, frantic doctors and nurses running about. Someone was screaming.

Bash got to her feet and followed a nurse over to the table. Her mother was on the table, her feet propped up into stirrups in a birthing position. Her father, white with fear, was holding her hand. There was so much blood.

A glance between a doctor and a nurse said it all: Something was wrong.

Her parents knew it too.

“It’s too early,” Cheryl was sobbing, grabbing onto Eric for dear life. “It’s way too early for this to happen!” Eric’s hands on hers were white knuckled. He was too shocked to say anything.

“Now, Mrs. Martin, I need you to push,” the doctor said, sounding unnecessarily harsh and detached. He knew what was coming, and he wasn’t going to waste bedside manners on it.

“Nooooo...” Cheryl cried. “No!”

“Cheryl,” Eric whispered to her, trying to be calming. It was no use.

Bash watched in horror as her mother gave birth to a bloody mass that didn’t move or react at all. Stillbirth. The mass that had been her brother or sister was carted off unceremoniously while Cheryl lay on her side, sobbing into Eric’s shoulder.

Bash stumbled, puking up the remains in her stomach, even though she hadn’t eaten in who knew how long. The scene was just too terrible for words, and while she had never vomited in dreams before, the need here was just too great.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her good hand. Suddenly she was standing in a doctor’s office, where her parents were listening intently to the obstetrician telling them some terrible news. For some reason, Bash’s hearing wasn’t working properly again—all she got where echoes, never anything that formed words. Judging by Cheryl’s and Eric’s expressions and the doctor’s sympathetic tone, it wasn’t good news.

Cheryl dissolved into tears again. Bash looked away, not wanting to see her mother in such emotional pain.

“That was the second miscarriage, as awful as the first.”

Bash gasped. She looked up to see her father standing beside her—the version of him that had died in the car crash, complete with the shard of glass that had gone through his right eye socket. She looked back at both of her parents who were consoling each other at the desk. When she looked back at this version, all she could see was regret and death.

The scene around them changed again. They were back in the doctor’s office, her parents appearing about a year older, wearing different clothes. The news from Cheryl’s obstetrician was still the same. Cheryl broke down again.

“How many were there?” Bash found herself asking. She remembered her mother mentioning a long time ago that they’d had a lot of trouble having kids. She’d never dreamed it was like this.

“Six,” the dead version of her father said, his voice flat and bleak. “Each one took their toll on your mother.” Instead of speaking cryptically, this time Eric was talking directly to her. He even turned his head to look directly at her. “The doctors begged her not to try again, that her body was unsuited for carrying a child to term. I didn’t want to continue either, but Cheryl...she wanted so badly to be a mother. How could I say no? And that was our downfall.”

The scene shifted again, this time to a small apartment building in the middle of the night. Bash watched as her mom woke up in pain, tearing the sheets off her body to find them bloodied. A lump formed in her throat.

“It’s awful,” she whispered.

“Yes, your mother nearly went mad with grief,” he told her. “The one thing she wanted more than anything, she couldn’t have. After the fifth miscarriage...”

The scene shifted to show Cheryl in the hospital again. Eric came in through the door and held her hand, talking to her in muted tones. Bash watched her expression. It was despondent. She was devoid of all hope.

“I told her that we should adopt,” Dead Eric said. “That even though they wouldn’t be our biological children, they’d still be ours and she’d still get to be a mother. We had even started the paperwork for adopting a baby girl from Russia. Then Cheryl fell pregnant again. And this time...”

The sixth and final scene changed, again to a hospital room. This time, Cheryl was curled up on her side, asleep. Based on the IV in her arm, she was probably heavily sedated. Eric was sitting next to her, his elbows on his knees. Even though he had dark circles under his eyes, his expression was grim, determined. Like a decision had been made.

“This last time, I wanted her to finally fulfill it,” Dead Eric said. “I wanted to make all her dreams come true. For her to have everything she ever wanted.” He cast his one-eyed gaze down, ashamed.

Bash watched him, alternating between the Eric in her vision and the dead one standing before her.

“What did you do?” she asked slowly, her voice razor-edged. She was terrified of the answer, because she had no idea what it could be.

Dead Eric looked at her, his expression sad. “I’m so sorry,” he said apologetically. “That’s why I wanted to show you this. To show you why I made the mistake that I did.”

“
What
did you
do
?” Bash repeated, her voice stronger. Instead of fear now, anger replaced it, and she latched onto that. It fueled the fire inside of her and she used that to replace any other feelings she could have had. Her head pounded with an oncoming headache. “What did you do, Dad?”

“I never meant for her to hurt you, Bathsheba. I didn’t even remember it. Not fully. Not until it was too late.” He looked at her. “You have to save her. You have to save Lily.”

Bash woke up with a start, throwing her world into blackness again. Her heart was pounding. As far as she could tell, she was still in the janitor’s closet. The pounding that she had thought was in her head was actually inside the walls. Something was moving through the ducts again.

Rick,
she thought with a trill of fear. Or it could be Rodney, trying to finish her off. Or any number of things. She considered the possibility that it was her group, but this movement didn’t seem loud enough or erratic enough to be them.

Could whatever it was tell that she was in there?

She stifled a moan of fear, and pushed herself further into the shelving area.