Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition) by Charlotte McConaghy
Pace looks at me like I’m a lunatic. “On the wall. For the holding facility evacuation.”
I don’t remember the wall or an evac. But I’m vaguely remembering a mission now, just snippets to retrieve a group of kids scheduled for the cure. We’ve done a few of those, though, so I’m not sure if I’m remembering old missions or the one Pace’s talking about.
Goddamnit. “What happened, Pace? Just fucking tell me!”
“Woah, chill. Take your temper elsewhere.”
Sure enough, Hal spits up his food and starts shouting loudly like he does when anyone raises their voice around him.
“Just go away, will you, Luke?” Pace snaps, so I do, mumbling an apology.
Okay, so it was a mission to free the new kids. Presumably we took them down the outside of the wall, as Josi and I talked about a few times. And I know everyone thought she’d been killed, I just don’t know how.
I make my way to the tech room. Teddy’s asleep with his face pressed to one of the tablets, his squished cheek projected up onto the wall behind him. I sit at another table and start going through our old surveillance footage from the cams in Josi’s contact lenses but everything from the sixteenth of September has been wiped. She’s about ten steps ahead of me and it’s infuriating.
She hasn’t wiped the radio feeds though. I pull up Teddy’s from that day and listen to it with headphones. I hear him giving information to our operatives in the field, talking about normal banal stuff. My voice is on there – which is unnerving because I don’t remember speaking the words – and there’s lots of Josi giving instructions. From what I can tell she’s getting the kids out and yes, taking them over the wall.
Then I hear Blue say, “What the hell?” And the whole thing changes. Voices grow quick and urgent. Things like hurry and go and get them under.
I hear a conversation between Josi and Pace.
Get them home.
Duh.
I’ll meet you there.
What? Why?
The car.
Dual, no!
There’s time. I can make it.
They don’t matter! They’re not ours!
Get everyone safe, Pace. Don’t argue.
Then I listen to Teddy’s hysterical urging for her to hurry, to leave it, that this isn’t safe, there are too many, it’s a suicide mission.
I hear Josi asking where’s Luke, over and over, I hear Teddy saying he can’t get any response from me, I hear him sobbing her name and then suddenly the feed goes dead.
When I take the headphones off I feel dizzy. Teddy is awake and watching me worriedly.
“What happened?” I ask him, but it doesn’t sound like a question.
He doesn’t try to avoid it like everyone else has been doing. He says, “They took her.”
“Who did?”
When he tells me the answer it feels like I’ve known it all along. It feels like it was always going to happen, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“The Furies.”
Chapter 15
September 17th, 2067
Josephine
It’s hot. I don’t know where I am. Pain holds my head captive and I’m not sure I can open my eyes. In fact, I think they’re swollen shut. The sound of footsteps is all around me. I can’t see so I concentrate on what I can hear. Breathing. Lots and lots of breathing. There is a huge group of people surrounding me. A chill runs down my spine as I feel myself being lifted off the cold ground. I’m carried and the hands that hold me have fingernails that puncture my flesh. I know they’re not my people because they’re not talking. There are no voices being raised to give orders or ask questions. It’s too silent with only the rustle of limbs and the thump thump of my blaring pulse.
Where’s Luke? My head’s too fuzzy and I can’t remember what happened or how I got here—
The wall. I remember the wall. And Luke didn’t come. He wasn’t answering Teddy’s radio pleas, which means something went wrong on his end and god what if he’s hurt what if he’s dead?
I’m carried a long way with this terrible fear in my heart. I can taste blood and bile in my mouth. I count the seconds so I can work out how far I’m being taken but it’s a stupid endeavor because I have no idea where I started. I know the scent and feel of the tunnels, and I know that this isn’t them. I’m above ground somewhere, but I can’t think of how that’s possible. It lasts a long time. I move in and out of consciousness. I vomit from the nausea of being carried and the pain in my head. The mess goes all over me but my carriers don’t stop or comment.
Finally the air outside grows cool enough for night and we stop.
There’s a crack and a sting on my face. Someone has slapped me.
“Wake,” a deep female voice commands.
I manage to open one of my eyes just a crack. Enough to let the dim inky light of twilight fill my head. Enough to see the moon high above, just a wink of it. It hangs red, tinged with blood, and I understand all at once, like a blow, how this has happened. It all comes back to the blood moon. Somehow, it’s what has kept Luke away.
And instead of devouring me outside the wall like I assumed they would, the Furies have bewilderingly kept me alive and carried me god only knows where, and now as I peer up at them I see just how many there are and know that even though I may still be alive right now, it can’t possibly last long.
*
September 22nd, 2067
Josephine
My veins are empty. The percentage of fluid that is meant to make up a human body is on average sixty. I think I have dropped well below that. I think I might be steadily drying out and very soon I will be at zero percent. I will be a shriveled husk of a creature preparing to become dust, the very same as what she is lying upon. I will dissolve into the ground and the sky. Into a world of endless endless dust. When my eyes worked better I saw dust in every direction. When I could taste I tasted it in my mouth and nose. When I could hear more than the sluggish thump of my slow heart I heard it swirling on currents of wind. My skin, now too raw to distinguish sensations, felt the dust flick and press and coat it. There’s no water left in this world. There is certainly none left in me. My mindless mind takes up residence in the ocean but I don’t have the imagination to even keep it filled. Instead it turns swiftly to a dry bed of salt.
I am done. Turned inside out and wrung dry. I’m at my end and I have no power to forestall it any longer.
The hands that appear above me are unfathomable miracles. They trickle fresh cool water into my parched mouth and somehow I am returning to the edge of life once more. I can’t make sense of it until I see the eyes above and recognize that every blood vessel in them has burst. The red of them is the brightest thing in this yellow gray world.
The red is how I remember where I am.
And I wish simply that I’d been left to die after all.
*
September 23rd, 2067
Josephine
I sleep feverishly and dream of the beach.
In this dream I walk on the sand, my bare feet sinking in the coarse dunes. But beneath me the earth begins to tremble. The sand vibrates with swaying patterns until from beneath it rise hundreds of adders, their scales coiling out and out and out. I gaze at the roiling, slithering ground beneath me and—
I wake from the nightmare to something far worse.
*
When I finally lurch into consciousness it’s with the undeniable knowledge of not having eaten anything for days. I’ve hardly had anything to drink, either, except that trickle of water that kept me from the very brink of death yesterday. I feel wretched, worse than wretched. Some of my bones are broken. My head screams and screams and screams. The skin on my body is so raw that the air itself burns upon it. I stink of vomit and shit and urine, so that my guts churn and I nearly lose what precious little fluid I still have. But the swelling of my eyes has finally gone down so for the first time I look at the enormous world around me.
What I see makes my
Yellow, windswept plains stretch in every direction. I’m no longer in the hot barren dust bowl that sucked every drop of moisture from my body, but in quite a different landscape. The sky is a pale gray and the air feels cooler than I expected it to. There is a crispness to the world. An edge of frigidity. It’s not the air, though, that makes me cold deep inside.
It’s the pit of snakes I’ve woken within. Only they are worse than snakes because once upon a time they were human.
There are hundreds of them and they sit in clusters. They’re quiet, unnervingly still. If every instinct in my body weren’t telling me otherwise, I might make the mistake of thinking them normal humans. But they’re pale and filthy, their clothing tattered to within an inch of its existence, and their eyes – their eyes are the bleeding red eyes I’ve come to loathe.
A sound leaves me before I can stop it.
Hundreds and hundreds of those crimson eyes turn to me. Panic explodes like a tidal wave and it doesn’t matter that I’m starved and dehydrated and severely wounded. It doesn’t matter that I’m surrounded by hundreds of them or that I patently have no way out. This panic turns me wild and desperate and before I even make the decision I’m on my feet and I’m running.
They reach for me and I feel their cold, sharp nails bite into my flesh. They’re quick and I’m laughably slow. I scream and sob and try to struggle but weakness has caught up to me and I find myself abruptly on my knees. “No,” I sob. There’s no strength or courage in me now. No calm. I wanted to die bravely for that family but instead I’ve survived to become a seething mass of fear. Pissing, shitting, puking, trembling fear.
One of them takes my hands and wrenches them behind my back. I feel rope binding my wrists painfully. I scream again, struggling and falling, but without my hands I land flat on my face. A booted foot prods my shoulder and shoves me over; pain sears through my collarbone and I know it’s one of the broken ones. My ankle might be broken too, and several of my ribs on both sides. I give a pitiful sob of pain and then allow myself to weep uncontrollably. Dignity is lost – I think it was long gone already.
One of them is closer than the rest. A woman. I know her face. I’ve seen it before. I haven’t thought once about it since that moment but she was at the Inferno attack, watching me. She was the one who uttered those low, crawling words. Pure flesh.
I flinch and try to wriggle away from her. Dirt mixes with my tears and saliva and smears my face. I can hardly see through it but it doesn’t matter, I don’t want to, I want to curl up and disappear, I want the pain to end, the unbearable potency of terror, the humiliation of such terror, I want it all gone and to not have to look at this woman’s disturbing face. I don’t get what I want – I’m sure it won’t be the last time.
She kneels and peers at me. The blood vessels in her eyes have burst like in all those of her kind, but I can also see the veins beneath her pale skin and they look horribly bruised. That face, it’s one of nightmare. She bares her teeth not in an angry way but in a feral way. I’ve never seen anything so terrible.
The woman lifts me to my feet – she’s remarkably strong – but my knees buckle. It takes two of them to drag me over the brittle grassy hill. I don’t know where we’re going but I don’t have the energy to do anything except weep. We move through the entire crowd of Furies, who look at me but make no sound, and up an incline. On the way down I’m dropped and crash to the ground. With no way to stop myself, I roll. Pain again, much worse now as all my wounds are impacted simultaneously. I wonder as I tumble over and over if you can die from pain. Luke told me you couldn’t, once. He said pain was only pain, it wasn’t even real, but right now if I were in any position to, the thought would make me laugh. Pain’s more real than anything.
Sudden cold strikes me. And wet. I stop rolling and realize I’ve fallen into water of some kind. I gasp and try to find my bearings so I can plunge my face in and drink greedily. It’s amazing how quickly I feel it inside me, how much of a difference it makes to my body. I have to use my elbows to make sure I don’t drown face first in the foot of water, but soon I’ve guzzled enough to fill my belly to bursting.
Someone pulls my hair to jerk me upright. On my knees, I see a small stream winding its way through the low hills. I have no idea where we are, except to guess that the cooler climate must mean we’re north of the city and inland away from any view of the sea. But if I follow this stream it will take me to the ocean. Follow the ocean and I’ll find my way home.
I’m wrenched to my feet and pulled away from the stream. Only half a dozen Furies are with me, but who am I kidding? I wouldn’t be able to beat one in this condition.
“What do you want?” I ask.
No one replies. I didn’t expect them to. They just shove and pull me back up the hill to where I see that the rest of them are on the move. Together like a swarm of locusts they run. The earth rumbles with their footfall. The woman and her group of five men press in around me and start to follow. I have no choice but to hobble along with them as fast as I can. My battered body groans in protest; I can hardly bear the agony of my left ankle. But there’s no way out of it. When I fall they prop me up. When I slow they prod me faster. After hours of this I vomit again, nicely dirtying my recently rinsed clothing. I don’t know how I keep going, aside from the Furies. I don’t know how I manage to stay conscious. I’m not sure where my thoughts go, but they’re far from my body.
When night falls the group stops and I collapse.
I must sleep because I wake with the moon high. It’s losing its red tinge as we move away from the blood moon – it must be late September. I watch it instead of facing my surrounds. The temperature has dropped drastically with night. I’m shivering and there’s a hollow hunger pain in my stomach. But as I lie here I feel marginally more myself than I have in many days, and I start to formulate a plan. It’s not anything, really, but it’s going to keep me alive. The simple necessity of it will be my survival: I will live long enough for my body to heal and strengthen enough to escape. I won’t allow myself to starve to death. I won’t let my mind drift away and give up. I’ll simply bide my time and look for an opening. I just have to hope that opening comes before the Furies find a use for me.
*
September 28th, 2067
Josephine
If my calculations are correct, I have been with the Furies for ten to twelve days. I drink water regularly from the stream we’ve been following north, and I eat strips of some kind of meat that they silently offer me. It’s raw so I cook it on the fires they build for warmth. I have no idea what the meat is, but the fact that they’re not eating it makes it safe to assume it’s not human. Josephine and human meat do not go together. It will not be happening.
I’m kept in the center of the huge group at all times, unless I’m being escorted to drink. My ribs hurt less, as does my collarbone, but my ankle is getting worse the more I have to trot along on it. It has swollen to the size of an apple, and has a concerning purple tinge. Each night when we stop I lift it high and wish I had an ice pack.
Hell if I know where we’re going in such a rush. It feels more urgent every day.
The Furies eat less than I do, because there is no live meat anywhere, except me, of course, who they ignore. They are starving faster than I am, but only once have I seen the result of that. Yesterday one of them dropped dead and the others finally had a feast. They’ve been running faster today since devouring the body of their fallen comrade. And hey, who wouldn’t be on top of the world after that?
I’ve decided that to keep my spirits up I will sing, or tell stories, or crack jokes, and I’ll do all of this out loud so the Furies can hear me and know they haven’t broken me. I’ll do it out loud so that I can at least pretend I’m not talking to myself.
I start with true stories, anecdotes not from my life but from Luke’s. I tell the Furies, not because I like them but because I like my husband, about all the things Luke used to break an
I tell of sea creatures and winged people and ships riding the clouds through the sky. I tell of a girl with a moon for a heart and a boy with wires and cogs beneath his skin. This girl and boy set off on a journey to find the last birds together, to follow the world to its end, and along the way they meet all kinds of extraordinary friends. A hare with violet paws that lead a path for them to follow. A hot air balloon driver who can only speak in verse. A pair of conjoined trapeze artists and their lovers, the ghost-hunting twins. Best of all they discover, after a seemingly endless mission, a flock of swallows who dive in such joy that their bodies make painted patterns in the sky.
I talk and talk and talk. I don’t care that it costs me energy or breath. I don’t stop.
*
Miracle of all miracles, this afternoon I spot something on the horizon.
“Look!” I exclaim, jumping up so I can see over the dim-witted heads of my companions. “What is that?”
It turns out to be a road, and on this road sits a pub and a petrol station. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly neither is functioning. The Furies stop outside and a handful go into both buildings. I follow and am immediately flanked by my guard – the same five men and one woman who’ve been with me since the start. I go into the petrol station first, seeking food of some kind, although what could have survived the last twenty-five years or so is a mystery to me. There’s nothing left on any of the shelves but a thick layer of dust. I kick through it, finding my way behind the empty counter and into the staff office. This is filled with old, disused tech and a few photos of people who are long since dead. I do manage to find some tins of tomatoes, chickpeas and lentils, amazingly, but I have no idea how I’m going to get them open. I hand the tins to my guards, wanting to test what they’ll do, and amazingly they hold them. Huh. They obviously don’t want me dead because they always cooperate when it comes to feeding me.