Death's Awakening (7 page)

Maybe there was still a
way home.

The door to her room
opened with a creak and Parrish pulled her headphones from her ears.

“I told you not
to come in without knocking,” she said, jumping up from the
bed. If her mom came bursting into her room without asking one more
time, she was going to seriously lose it.

“It’s just
me,” a soft voice said.

Parrish relaxed and
moved back toward her bed. Some of her schoolwork was spread across
the comforter. She brushed it to the side in one big pile and sat
down.

Zoe walked in and shut
the door behind her. Her hand looked so small on the doorknob and
Parrish smiled. She was like a little porcelain doll, but when she
picked up her bow and violin, she was transformed. She could play
something soft and heartbreaking like Barber’s Violin Concerto,
but she could also bring out the strength of a composer like Bartok.
That little girl had more talent in her pinky finger than Parrish had
in her whole body.

She was really going to
miss her.

“Are you guys
about ready to go?”

Zoe shrugged and hung
her head. Her long hair fell across her shoulder, partially covering
her face. “Dad said we should leave in a few minutes just in
case there’s any traffic.”

Parrish nodded. “Are
you nervous?”

Zoe crossed the room
and sat next to Parrish on the bed. She had to raise up on her
tiptoes just to reach high enough. “A little,” she said.
“I think Mom and Dad are more nervous about it than I am. They
keep asking me if I have everything memorized and if I want to run
through the Tchaikovsky one more time.”

Zoe sighed, then slowly
placed her little hand in Parrish’s.

Parrish bit the inside
of her lower lip and blinked back hot tears. She squeezed her
sister’s hand and sniffed.

“I wish you could
come with me,” Zoe said, her voice trembling a little.

Parrish swiped at her
eyes with her index finger. This was stupid. She was not going to
cry. It would be nice to have the house mostly to herself for the
next few months. Her mom was staying home for the first two weeks,
then she was joining Zoe and their dad in London. Her mom’s
sister Stacey was flying out to stay with Parrish for the rest of the
length of Zoe’s tour. Three months with no parents.

Three months of not
hearing about Zoe’s talent and Zoe’s practicing and Zoe’s
dedication. Every. Single. Minute. It would be heaven.

So why did her eyes
sting?

Maybe she was just
still feeling emotional about what happened the night before with the
man. She wasn’t sure what had happened to him. Was he still
alive?

Seeing him collapse
like that really shook her up. For some reason, it made her want to
keep her sister close to her. To not let her go.

Zoe leaned against her,
putting her head on her arm. “Do you think they’ll let me
order room service at the hotels?”

Parrish laughed.
“Probably.” She sniffed again. “You gotta eat
something, right? It’s not like you’re going to have a
full service kitchen or anything. Well, except when you get to
Australia. You’re in an apartment there for a couple weeks,
right?”

Zoe shrugged. “I
can’t remember.”

“Well, hopefully
you’ll have a better memory when it comes to Tchaikovsky.”
She nudged Zoe with her elbow.

Her sister looked up,
her lips pressed tight and her eyes narrow, pretending to be mad.
Parrish stared right back at her, eyes locked. Their faces serious.

It was Zoe who laughed
first. Even her laughter was musical.

It filled the room and
tugged on Parrish’s heartstrings. “I’m going to
miss you, you know that right?” Parrish said.

“You will?”
Zoe’s big brown eyes were brimming with tears, something
Parrish didn’t see very often. In order to be a top performer
at the age of ten, you had to have nerves of steel and incredible
control over your emotions.

Something about those
tears broke Parrish’s heart.

“A little,”
she said, then winked as she swallowed back another rush of emotion.

Zoe giggled again, then
threw her arms around her. Parrish hugged her back, so tight she was
probably cutting off the poor girl’s circulation.

“I love you,”
Zoe said.

Their dad called out
from the bottom of the stairs and Zoe let go and hopped off the bed.

“I better get
going. Are you going to come downstairs to say goodbye to dad?”

“Sure,”
Parrish said. She stood and followed her sister into the hallway, but
then turned back to her room, remembering. “Wait.”

Zoe paused at the top
of the stairs as Parrish ran back into her room and pulled a small
box out from under the bed. She couldn’t believe she’d
almost forgotten.

Parrish walked toward
the staircase and handed her sister the tiny box. “For when you
get lonely,” she said.

Zoe pulled the blue
ribbon off the box and tied it into her ponytail. Parrish laughed. It
was a tradition with Zoe. She always tied gift ribbons in her hair or
stuck those stick Christmas bows to her forehead or her shirt.
Sometimes she liked the bows and ribbons on the giftwrap more than
the gift inside. Parrish had very carefully chosen this blue silk
ribbon months ago when they first learned about Zoe’s upcoming
tour.

Zoe pulled the top off
of the small box and gasped. With shaking fingers, she pulled the
silver necklace out of the box and let it dangle in the air between
them. Parrish smiled at the surprise and joy on her sister’s
face.

The necklace itself was
nothing special. Just a plain silver chain like any other. It was the
pendant that was special. A silver infinity sign with two birthstones
embedded in the loops. One for each of them. May’s emerald for
Parrish and an amethyst for Zoe’s in Februrary.

“So you’ll
know I love you for infinity,” Parrish said.

Zoe’s tears came
freely now, tumbling down her pale cheek. She rushed toward Parrish
and threw her arms around her. Parrish stumbled back slightly, then
hugged her back.

“Zoe, come on,”
their mom called up from the hallway. “You’re going to be
late.”

Parrish pulled away and
smiled down at her sister. The truth was she kind of wanted to hate
her for how talented and perfect she was, but she couldn’t. She
was probably the only person on the planet Parrish could truly say
she loved with all her heart.

“Get going,”
she said. “Have fun.”

“I will,”
Zoe said. She wiped her tears with the back of her hand, the necklace
clutched tight. “Love you.”

Zoe took off down the
stairs and Parrish followed. She gave her father a hug and stood with
her mother in the driveway as he and Zoe drove away, sadness heavy on
her heart.

The microwave dinged
and Crash rolled his chair across the cement floor, barely taking his
eyes off his monitors. He threw the pizza onto a paper plate, grabbed
a Sprite from the mini-fridge and rolled back to his desk.

Each of his six large
computer monitors showed something different, but everywhere he
looked, the news was the same. The chatter amongst other doomsday
preppers was that cases of this new super-flu had been reported from
coast-to-coast and everywhere in between.

The prepper forums and
underground news sites claimed absurd numbers of hospitalizations in
big cities like New York and Houston and Chicago, but the major news
networks and health organizations were denying it.

Even social sites like
Twitter and YouTube had started blowing up with hits for this virus.
Those who knew about it were scared as hell.

Crash opened a new
browser and entered a ten-digit password. A second password box
popped up, but instead of entering a new one, he clicked on the tiny
icon of a bomb hidden in the bottom left corner. He needed to talk to
his buddy Atomic. If anyone would know something that was more
off-the-grid, it would be him.

He entered a message on
the secret forum and waited for his friend to appear. It could be
minutes or it could be hours. He never really knew.

Crash leaned back,
putting his hands behind his head and stretching. He hadn’t
left his apartment in a couple days. Not since that grocery store
fiasco. But that wasn’t really all that different from normal.
He had enough food and water and other essentials stocked up to last
him and four others nearly six months if it came down to that.

He grabbed the TV
remote and flipped on the big-screen on the other side of the small
basement apartment. He scanned the headlines running across CNN’s
ticker, but there was no mention of a deadly virus or a super-flu
that had hospitals backlogged. Why were they keeping this shut down
so tight?

He ran a nervous hand
through his already-messy black hair. It was probably about time for
a haircut, but he didn’t care. He’d been out on his own
for two years already, which meant no mom to nag him about getting
his hair cut or tying his shoes or getting out in the sunshine every
once in a while. That last one had been his favorite. His mom had
always been nagging him about getting outside. She said it wasn’t
good for an Asian boy to be so pale.

Crash laughed at the
memory, but then shook it off. Now was not the time to get sad about
his mom’s death. He really needed to figure out what was really
going on out there. He opened his favorite forum again and started
reading through the latest thread about the virus.

Some people were
convinced this was a government conspiracy, like something out of
some low-budget movie about the end of the world. A deadly government
experiment-gone-wrong or some shit.

Others seemed to think
it was the next Black Death and that a third of the population was
already screwed. That’s why the news wasn’t reporting it.
The virus spread so fast that by the time anyone knew what was
happening, it was already too late to really prevent anyone else from
getting sick. If they came out now and told the truth about it, riots
might break out and people would be too scared to go to work. Society
would shut down faster than a church on judgment day.

So far, no one had
really come up with any real evidence. As usual, these forums were
all about speculation and wild-ass guesses.

He spun around in his
chair. His mind was spinning just as fast.

This was exactly the
kind of thing that had been haunting his dreams for the last two
years. When his mom died, the state sent him to live with a foster
family because there was no one else he could stay with. He was first
generation Japanese-American and almost all of his family was still
in Japan. So, even though he was already sixteen when his mom died
and even though he’d been basically taking care of himself
since he was five and his mom started working two jobs because his
piece-of-crap dad skipped out on them, the state made him go live
with a foster family.

That’s when the
dreams started.

It wasn’t like he
dreamed the exact same thing every night. They were more like
variations on a theme. The end of the world brought on by a deadly
virus.

But sometimes, they
felt like more than just dreams. They felt like warnings.

After a few weeks of
screaming his head off in the middle of the night, his foster family
had forced him to go see a therapist. A total quack who claimed his
dreams were nothing more than a manifestation of his fear of being
abandoned. It made sense, sure. His dad had abandoned him as a child
and now his mother had done the same thing. Even if it was cancer who
took his mom away, it still sort of felt like abandonment.

But Crash knew there
was more to it than that. The dreams were too real. Too terrifying.
Then there was the matter of the others. Four others who would
somehow find their way to him.

And now it was all
coming true.

Crash took one bite of
his food, then set it aside. He needed answers about what was really
going on out there.

He slid his chair back
up to his desk and started a new message.

The clock in the corner
of the screen read two-fifteen a.m.

Parrish opened her eyes
to darkness. She sat up and listened. Silence filled the air around
her, but just as she started to relax, she heard it again.

A moan.

Her eyes popped open
wider and her throat closed in fear. She’d heard a similar
sound the other night.

Craning her neck, she
looked toward the clock on her bedside table. 2:15 A.M. She propped
herself up on her elbows and listened, not even wanting to move. She
wanted it to be a dream.

And she had been
dreaming. Something that filled her with a strange sadness even now
that she was awake. Something about a man who seemed so familiar. And
a purple stone.

Another moan, this time
followed by a crash down the hall. Breaking glass. Parrish threw the
comforter from her legs and raced down the hall to her parents’
bedroom.

“Mom?” She
pushed open the door. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness.

“Parrish.”
Her mother’s voice was a whisper.

Parrish trembled
inside, a twinge of fear taking up residence in her ribcage. She felt
along the smooth, cool wall until she found the light switch, then
flicked it up.

Her eyes burned in the
sudden light. She squinted toward the bed, but it was empty. Her
mother’s pillow was drenched, as if someone had tossed a glass
of water on it.

The large comforter was
pulled off to the far side and the corner of it moved, pulled down
out of sight. Parrish crawled across the bed, her mouth dry.

Her mother lay on the
floor, her eyes wide and full of terror. Coughs shook her thin frame
as she struggled to sit up. A stream of red blood flowed from her
hand and arm. Confused, Parrish scrambled the rest of the way across
the bed and leaned over to help her up. Was she cut?