Fractured (18 page)

“
Vaya al diablo
,” she muttered.

C
HAPTER ELEVEN

“You’ve got to find a way out of here.”

Seth opened his eyes at the familiar voice. He grinned when he realized who it was, the first time he had really grinned since they’d been trapped.

“Darius,” he breathed, happy to be talking to his best friend again.

It took him a moment to recognize where they were. They were outside the hotel, standing in a light snowfall near the edge of a forest, the entire area engulfed in a fog. Even outside, everything took on a sinister tone, although the hotel looked oddly peaceful against the oppressive night.

Darius stepped out from the shadows into his view. Seth regarded him for a few moments, strangely calm, despite his friend’s ghastly appearance. Darius looked like an actual zombie. He was like a more intact version of Rick. Char-grilled skin, no hair, eyelids or lips.

“You’re dead,” Seth said slowly, still in that strange calm.

He got the feeling that if Darius had lips, he would have smiled. As it was, the dead man just shrugged, ashen skin sloughing off into the snow. “It happens. You know as well as I do that our souls are pretty much worthless these days.”

Seth winced.

“I’m dreaming,” he said, slightly disappointed. They weren’t outside the hotel. Somewhere in that hulking building, he was asleep, still trapped in there, still at the mercy of a horrible nightmare.

“You are,” Darius said. “But your physical body is in a nightmare as well. The veil between worlds is very thin, which is why you can see me. You’ll see some other fucked up shit before you’re done.”

“I don’t understa—” Seth

“You won’t understand,” Darius said earnestly. “But you
need
to get out.”

Seth snorted derisively. “How?”

“I’m a dead man, not a fortuneteller or a spy. You just have to get out. As soon as you can. Abyzou wants you most of all.” Darius looked pensive. “She already has me.”

“You believe in the demon theory as well?” Seth didn’t know how his friend would have known about it, as he had died before that conversation had occurred. Then again, this was a dream, so what Seth knew, Darius would have known too.

“Stop being stupid about this and admit it,” Darius groaned, reminding Seth very much of the zombie he resembled. “You believe in the good old professor too, don’t lie. You may not want to think about the supernatural or the stuff you can’t control. Yet it is you who controls your fate now. And you have to get out of there. Alive.”

“Why does she want me?”

“Heh. She loves you, idiot. She’s loved you this entire time. We were all too stupid to see it.” Darius waggled his stump of a finger at him. “You two share a common fracture on your soul. She kills children. You...well, you know what you did.” Seth cast his gaze downward. Darius was right, as usual.

“We knew there was something different about her,” Darius continued. “We just didn’t know how much. We’re paying for it now.”

Seth narrowed his eyes. “Lily?” he asked incredulously. “You’re talking about
Lily
.”

Darius nodded solemnly.

“
She’s
Abyzou?”

“Possessed by Abyzou,” Darius corrected so flatly and without emotion, it was hard to believe they were talking about someone’s life.

The enormity of it was terrifying. Acknowledging the possibility that a demon was behind all this was bad. Asking Seth to believe that Lily was possessed by said demon was something else altogether.

Seth clutched his head, feeling a horrible headache coming on. “What do we do?”

“Get out,” Darius said simply. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

“What about you?”

The expression on Darius’ face turned sour. “It’s too late for me,” he told Seth. “Save yourself and Scott, before he gets too sick. Bash, too. She doesn’t deserve this. Lily can’t be saved. Bash can.”

Someone was screaming, their echoes piercing the dream world around them. Seth turned his head away just as the snow started dumping on them in the woods. Only this time, it was big red flakes that clung to the world around them, dusting it in...

Blood?
Seth thought, his stomach clenching in fear. Was this blood?

“Too late for me,” Darius repeated, softer now. “Too late. Get out before I come after you too.”

Seth woke up. In one instant, it was blaringly loud, and the next, silence. His heartbeat thudded in his chest as he listened for something. Anything. He almost believed that he had imagined it.

“Seth.”

Bash’s voice came out of the darkness next to him. At her scared, blank face, he sat bolt upright, grabbing her hands. Her eyes were wide with fear, and even though she couldn’t see anything, he knew that something was wrong.

“What happened?”

She shivered visibly. “The professor—Naomi—she’s dead.”

“
What?
”

He scrambled to his feet to walk over there, but Bash grabbed his hand before he was out of range, keeping him there.

“Don’t,” she whispered. Her unseeing eyes were trained on the group of people on the other side of the room, like she had witnessed something terrible.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t go over there.” Her voice was small. Tiny. She was really scared.

“I’ll be right back,” he assured her. His hand slipped out of hers as he trudged over there. She let him go.

Three people were huddled over Naomi’s body, while a loose throng of people stood nearby, watching in horror at what was happening. Even Maria was standing just outside of the semi-circle. She was shaking her head, muttering in Spanish.

Naomi’s body was a terrible sight, twisted and wracked, swollen purple. Her mouth was open forever in a silent scream, blood still frothing from her lips and her nose. For a second, Seth wondered if she had been the one who’d woken him from his dream, however, she looked like she had been dead from something like rabies for
weeks,
not within the past few hours.

He blinked and shook his head. Why was time so hard to follow here?

“What happened?” an older man—Jeb, Seth remembered from their introductions earlier—asked.

“I don’t know,” a girl about Seth’s age answered. Her voice was shaky, whiny. She looked on edge, like she was going to have a nervous breakdown at any moment.

Hell,
I’m
about to,
Seth thought.

The third person, a man who was older than Jeb, stared in silence at Naomi’s still form. He was huddled on the floor, rocking back and forth. Seth got the impression that he hadn’t come over there to check out what had happened. He had been there through the whole ordeal. The man’s lips were moving in his silent mutterings.

“How did this happen?” Seth asked.

“I told you, I
don’t
know,” the girl repeated. Tears welled up in her eyes and fell down her cheeks. “I don’t know. Professor Edelstein was just sitting here, talking to me, and then she...she...” She covered her face in her hands, freely sobbing now.

“Naomi started having trouble breathing,” the third man said, his voice crackling and soft. “Like she was having an asthma attack. She was rifling through her purse, trying to find an inhaler. She didn’t have it. And by the time I started doing something, she looked like that. Dead as a doornail.”

“Someone just doesn’t end up like that,” Seth insisted. “There has to be a reason.”
Has to be.

He knelt by the body.

“Don’t touch her,” the man muttered. “Don’t touch her.”

Seth looked at him, bewildered. The man’s eyes were wild, and Seth realized that he had lost his mind.

Then, what had been Naomi’s hand snaked its way up and grabbed Seth’s hand with crushing intensity. Seth turned back to her, too late. The corpse grabbed his head with its other hand and forced him down to her face and suddenly, for a horrifying few seconds, Seth was kissing her bloody, frothy, twisted mouth. He could taste death and smell the decay all over her body, filling all his senses.

The girl issued another scream of her own, and Jeb was muttering in terror, “Oh
hell
no.”

The corpse finally released Seth, smearing him with saliva and dried blood. He gasped, back-pedaling from whatever
it
was. He was trying to wipe away the dead thing’s fluids, but it felt like he was never going to get rid of it. He watched in horror as the corpse sat up on its own accord and pinned him with its dead stare.

“My love,”
it told him. It grinned horribly at him with too white teeth for its horrible, purple mouth.

“Wh-what?” Seth asked. “Who are you?”

The corpse licked its lips in ecstasy. “
Abyzou
,” it whispered hauntingly.
“I send my regards. lover.”

Seth watched the corpse in horror. “What?” he whispered. Was this really happening?

“By the way,”
she cackled,
“the children tell me they still bleed, Seth. How does that make you feel?”

Seth fought the urge to throw up. He never thought anyone would ever mention that again. He and Darius had promised to not to. S
he couldn’t mean...

The creature said,
“Yes,
those
children, Seth.”
The corpse threw her head back and laughed. “
It’s okay. We’ll make children of our own. We were always meant to. Our fractured souls—
”

“Fuck you,” Jeb said, breaking into their conversation. Amazingly, he wasn’t too fazed by the walking and talking corpse. He was on his feet, and landed a kick across the corpse’s face. The thing let him land one kick, but when it reeled, looking back at him, the eye contact was enough to make him falter and that was all the time it needed.

The corpse lunged at him, wrapping its purple, bloated fingers around his neck. Jeb fell backward, landing on his back, the corpse on top of him, choking the very life out of him. The man was struggling, but it wasn’t going to do him any good.

That spurred Seth to take action, and regardless of his shock, he was able to get to his feet and try to pull what had once been Naomi off Jeb. Other people joined in, trying to pry the vice-like fingers from the man’s neck. Even with four people trying to get the corpse off him, Jeb’s life was fading away quickly as his eyes rolled into the back of his head.

In desperation, Seth backed up to give himself enough room to kick at the corpse’s head to knock it off. He landed kick after kick to the head of Abyzou’s puppet, but it wouldn’t yield.

Jeb’s struggles became less and less panicked. They were losing him.

In one last attempt, Seth put everything he had into the kick. The corpse’s head crumpled under his foot, spilling fluid and brains all over Jeb. But Jeb wasn’t going to mind—the thing, whatever it was, had succeeded in crushing his windpipe, killing him. The two corpses lay on the floor next to each other.

Seth backed up, panting heavily. He couldn’t believe what had just happened.

The girl was crying and the crazed man had scrambled away during the struggle.

Naomi was dead and came back to life. Now they had three corpses that could apparently come back to life at any moment—Jeb, Darius, and the man that had tried to leave first. He didn’t doubt that it would happen. It was only a matter of time.

That must have been what Darius had meant by saying get out before he came after them.

Seth stalked back over to Bash, grabbed her hand, and forced her to her feet.

“We’re getting out.
Now,
” he hissed at her. He didn’t care that he was afraid of what was happening outside. He didn’t care that all those other people were afraid and that he had said they were going to wait until help arrived. Help
wasn’t
going to arrive. They were going to die off, one by one, coming back as more zombies until none of them remained and they were all under Abyzou’s spell.

“What?” she asked. “But you said—”

“The rules are changing, Bash,” he said. “I don’t want to wait for death.”

She looked back at Scott. “But Scott—”

Seth’s throat closed up when he looked down at his baby brother, who was still unconscious. Scott had a green sheen to his skin now, his breathing ragged. He realized that they needed to get out because Scott was going to pass the point of no return, if he hadn’t already. He looked too sick to move. They could try for the antibiotics, although after everything... He knew that they had to get out as soon as possible.

“I’ll get him.” Truthfully, Seth had no idea how he was going to be able to take care of both Scott and Bash, but that was beside the point. He only knew if he had to stay there another minute, he was going to go insane.

“Rick—that
thing
—” he quickly amended, shaking himself. That thing wasn’t Rick anymore, and he wasn’t going to pretend it was. “…that thing took Lily through the walls, through the ventilation system and they didn’t get burned. At least we know we can get out of this room through the ducts.”