MY BLOOD EVOLVES Chapter Three: Fresh Dirt
In the movies the light finds you. It drifts down warm and gold and it hovers at chest height, polite about it, and you get a second to look at it and understand that your life is about to change.
The blue thing hit Noah Reyes at about the speed of a car.
It went in under his sternum and it didn't come out the other side. He was standing and then he wasn't, and the taquito left his hand and landed somewhere in the grass, and that was the last anybody ever saw of it. He'd think about that taquito years later, in a room with no exits, and he'd laugh until he cried.
Cold. That was the wrong part. Everybody tells you light is warm. This was the cold off the inside wall of a freezer, and it was in his ribs, and it was spreading, and it had edges.
He lay on his mother's grave with his knees pulled up and both hands flat on his chest like he could hold something in, and he made a noise, and above him the sky kept tearing.
Then somebody spoke. Very quietly. From somewhere behind his eyes.
"Oh."
Noah stopped breathing.
"Oh, no. You're a kid."
The voice was tired. That was the part he could never explain to anybody after, not to the people who asked and not to the people who made him write it down. It didn't boom. It sounded like a guy at the end of a double shift who's just been told there's one more thing.
Then words came, except they weren't sound. They were just there, hanging in the middle of his vision in a color his eyes had no receptor for.
[BINDING: 4%]
[BINDING: 19%]
[BINDING: 61%]
"I'm gonna be honest with you," the voice said. "I don't know what this is either."
The cold went up through his throat and the back of his jaw and into his scalp, where it stopped and sat, small and specific, like a thumb pressed hard against the side of his head. Then it let go.
He didn't think about that again for six hours.
[BINDING COMPLETE.]
[I'M SORRY.]
The cold quit all at once, like a hand lifting off him. Noah rolled onto his side and threw up on a stranger's grave.
*****
He got his phone out on the third try because his hands were doing something new and interesting.
Screen fine. Full bars. He dialed 911 and got a recorded woman, very calm, very professionally sorry, explaining that all circuits were busy and asking him to please try his call again later.
Later.
He looked up at the seam running from one horizon to the other, at the stars sliding along it like water finding a drain, and thought, how many people just got that message.
That was when he heard the fence.
It came over the wrought iron on the east side in three pieces of movement and none of the three made sense in order. Noah grew up with dogs on the block and deer in the greenbelt behind the Kroger. He had a working idea of how a body with legs gets over a fence. This poured over, put itself back together on the grass, and stood.
Seven feet, maybe. Something like a deer's ribcage worn on the outside, wet and dark, and inside the cage of it a smaller shape moved on a schedule of its own. Too many joints in the back legs. No face anywhere on it. Just a smooth glossy knot where a head goes, turning slow, the way a satellite dish turns.
It tasted the air.
Then it walked past four graves, close enough that he could smell it, pennies and pond water, and stopped at the fresh dirt.
And started to dig.
Every part of Noah said the same word at the same time. Run. His legs were already halfway through agreeing. The gate was ninety feet. The Corolla was past that. Twenty seconds to the car, forty to Delaney, and the thing would still be here doing whatever it was doing and he'd be alive.
He looked at the dirt coming up in wet handfuls.
"Hey," said Noah Reyes, to the apocalypse.
It stopped digging.
"Yeah. Hey. Get off her."
*****
It turned its head toward him and he knew right away, all the way down, that he'd made a mistake.
His body quit on him. That was the first thing that happened, before any of the rest of it. His legs went soft and his bladder let go a little and his breath came out in these short useless sips that didn't reach the bottom of his lungs. He was nineteen years old, standing in a funeral shirt, eight feet from his mother, and he couldn't make his knees work.
He threw the grave marker.
He didn't decide to. His arm just did it. A piece of white plastic with a printed card in the slot, and it hit the ribcage and bounced off into the grass, and about half a second later Noah realized he'd thrown his mother's name at it.
Then it came.
He didn't dodge because he didn't know how. He fell down, which worked out to about the same thing, and it went over him, and something on the underside of it opened him up along the left ribs. Four lines through the shirt and into the meat.
He screamed. Not a fighting noise. High and cracked and embarrassing, and it kept going after he wanted it to stop, and he could hear himself doing it from a long way off.
"Help," he said. On his hands and knees in the grass with blood running into his waistband, saying it to a cemetery at ten o'clock at night. "Help. Somebody. Please. Please, somebody."
Sirens across the city. Not for him. Nobody was coming for him.
He crawled. Got maybe eight feet toward the gate before it stepped in front of him, and it didn't even hurry, and that was the worst thing that had happened to him in a day that already had a funeral in it. It wasn't fighting him. It didn't think there was a fight. It looked at him with the smooth place where a face should be, and then it turned around and went back to the dirt.
He wasn't a threat. He wasn't worth killing yet. He was something it would get to.
Noah lay in the wet grass and watched it dig his mother up.
Fourteen months. Fourteen months of the pill schedule and the sheets and the pump that sounded like the fridge, the sponges, the little cup, her hand at 4:12 in the morning while a nurse said the word. He'd done all of it. Every part of it, and he got one day off work for it, and here was the world, six hours after they closed the ground over her, taking her back out.
"Please," he said. He didn't know who to. "Please, please, please."
He got up.
He got the folding chair off the stack because it was there and it was metal. He was crying so hard he could barely see the thing he was swinging at, and he hit it across the ribcage and the noise was enormous, a church bell noise, and he hit it again and again and the whole time he was saying something that wasn't words in any language, just sound coming out of him.
The chair bent. The thing took it out of his hands and threw it over the fence.
Shovel. Standing up in the dirt pile. He grabbed it and swung like a baseball bat because a baseball bat was the only swing he'd ever learned, and he missed, and the blade hit a headstone. The shock came up the handle into both wrists and his hands opened on their own and the shovel was gone in the grass and the thing was on him.
He got thrown. His face hit granite and skidded, and he ended up pressed against somebody else's stone with the letters printing into his cheek, EUGENE, and something wet and heavy standing on his back pushing the air out of him.
"Sorry," he was saying into the granite, over and over. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
He wasn't talking to Eugene.
"Mom," he said.
It came out of him small. Nineteen years old, face down in a graveyard, calling for his mother. She was forty feet away. She couldn't come.
Something in his chest went cold again, the way it had when the light hit him.
"Kid." The tired voice. Close. "Get up."
"I can't."
"I know. Get up anyway."
The weight came off his back. It'd gone back to the hole. It kept going back to the hole.
Noah pushed up onto his elbows and looked around at what he had, because that was the one thing fourteen months had actually taught him. When the thing in front of you can't be fixed, you quit trying to fix it and you look at what's in the room.
What was in the room was a lowering frame with two nylon straps still threaded through it, sitting where the crew left it because they were coming back Wednesday. Straps rated for six hundred pounds, because that's what they hold.
He crawled to it. Pulled a strap free with his teeth and the one hand that still worked, shaking so bad he lost the loop twice, and got it around the base of Eugene's headstone and cinched it down, and then he lay flat in the grass with the other end wound around his fist.
Then he had to make it come at him.
That was the part he never told anybody about either. Not the fighting. The three seconds where he lay there in the dark with his heart going like a bird in a box and had to open his mouth on purpose.
"Hey," he said.
It didn't hear him.
"HEY!"
It came.
It came so fast that his whole body tried to let go of the strap, and he held on out of pure stupid animal panic, and the nylon came up out of the wet grass into its back legs at a full sprint. Six hundred pounds of rated strap against a thing that had never once thought about the ground. It went down hard and it went down wrong. One of those extra joints came apart with a wet branch sound and it screamed, and the scream wasn't an animal. It was a room full of people all saying one syllable at once.
Noah got the shovel.
He hit it eleven times. He counted later, off the marks. He kept hitting it long after it stopped moving, standing over it in one shoe with blood in his waistband and his face open, and the only thing he could hear himself saying, over and over, was:
"Get off her. Get off her. Get off her."
Then his arms wouldn't lift anymore and he sat down in the dirt next to it and threw up. There was nothing left. He did it anyway.
*****
[+40 XP]
[LEVEL 2]
[+3 UNSPENT POINTS]
Noah stared at the letters floating in the dark over the body.
"What," he said.
"Yeah," said the tired voice. "I saw it too."
"What is that."
"Man, I don't know." A pause. "And I wanna be clear, I'm not being cute about it. I really don't know. I was walking, and then I was falling, and now I'm in a nineteen year old and there's a number."
"There's a number."
"There's a number," the voice agreed. "I think it's yours."
Noah looked at his hands. Shaking. Split across three knuckles. Under the blood and the grave dirt something was moving in the skin, a faint blue running up the veins of his wrists, going out slow like a coal.
The four lines in his side had already stopped bleeding.
He crawled the six feet back to the fresh dirt and pushed the loose handfuls into place and patted them flat, both palms, over and over, way longer than he needed to. Set the marker upright. Wiped the card clean with his thumb until the name was readable.
"Sorry," he said. "Busy night."
[FOREIGN BLOOD DETECTED.]
[NEW BLOOD TYPE ACQUIRED: UNCLASSIFIED]
[SLOT 1 OF 1 FILLED.]
[HUMAN: 99.4%]
Noah read it. Then he read it again, and his hand came up on its own and swiped at the air in front of his face, the way you swat at a bug, because that was the only thing his body knew to do about words that weren't there.
They didn't move. Nothing moved.
So he looked down at himself instead. At the four lines in his side that had closed on their own in under a minute, which he'd been carefully not thinking about. He put two fingers on them. Smooth. Wrong.
"Hang on," he said. His voice had gone up. "Hang on, hang on, what was it before?"
A pause.
"A hundred," Ellery said.
Noah sat down in the dirt beside his mother.
"Slot," he said. "It said slot. One of one."
"I see it too." Something turned over behind his eyes, careful, the way a guy checks a room he's been shoved into in the dark. "There's more if you look at it. Don't ask me how I know that."
He looked at it.
[SLOT 1 OF 1. LOCKED AT CURRENT COMPOSITION.]
[ADDITIONAL SLOTS ARE NOT EARNED. THEY ARE PAID FOR.]
[A FILLED SLOT MAY BE OVERWRITTEN. THE PREVIOUS TYPE IS NOT RECOVERABLE.]
"Paid for with what?"
Neither of them said it. The number was right there, four feet in front of him in a color that didn't exist, and it had already gone down once tonight without asking him first.
"So I get one," Noah said slowly. "One. Ever. Unless I trade for more. And if I take something new the old one's just gone."
"That's how I'd read it."
"That's a terrible system."
"Yeah," Ellery said. "It really is."
Noah looked at the thing he'd killed. At the wet ruin of the ribcage and the smaller shape inside it that had finally stopped moving on its own schedule.
"Okay. So what'd I even get? What's it do?"
The words redrew themselves, slower this time, and when the answer came it wasn't written the way the other lines were written. It came out crooked, like something trying to describe a color to somebody who's never seen one.
[FUNCTION: it knows where the buried things are.]
"What," Noah said. "What does that mean, what does that even m"
It turned on.
It didn't ask him. There was no button, no word, no moment where he agreed to anything. It just came up in him the way a song comes up when somebody says the first line, and all at once Noah Reyes knew, without looking, without counting, exactly where every body in that cemetery was.
Four hundred and eleven of them.
He felt them the way you feel a stair in the dark with your foot. Rows and rows of them under the grass in every direction, deep ones and shallow ones, old ones gone soft and new ones still whole, the little ones near the fence in the section with the pinwheels, all of it, a whole city of them laid out under him in a grid he couldn't stop reading.
And eight feet to his left, four days new, close enough to touch through nothing but dirt.
His mother.
He knew where her hands were.
Noah made a sound and got up and got about four steps before his legs went and he came down hard on his knees in the grass, both arms wrapped around his own head, trying to press it out, and it wouldn't press out, because it wasn't a picture and it wasn't a sound. It was just a thing he knew now, the way he knew his own name.
"Turn it off," he said. "Turn it off. Turn it off, turn it off, I don't want it, please, turn it off."
"Kid." Ellery's voice, low and very careful.
"TURN IT OFF."
"I can't." A pause. "That's what the slot means. It isn't something you carry. It's something you are now."
Noah knelt in the wet grass with four hundred and eleven people underneath him and one of them the woman who used to make him pull the car over for sunsets, and he did the only thing left.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. So how do I put it back. The number. How do I get it back to a hundred."
Ellery didn't answer.
Noah sat there a while and let that be the answer, and wiped his face with the back of a hand that was still mostly his.
Then he stood up, because there were sirens now from every direction at once, layered, and out past the fence the city was doing something it had never done. The lights on the west side went out a block at a time. Something enormous was standing on the interstate. Above all of it the seam had stopped being a seam and had become an opening, and things were coming through it in numbers, silhouetted and patient, like birds settling on a wire.
"Kid," said the voice, and it had gone very quiet.
"Yeah."
"That thing you just killed." Ellery paused, and Noah would learn, over the years, that this particular pause always meant the same thing. "That was the smallest thing that's coming."