Estranged (41 page)

Xamic weakly grabbed her arm in his
own, trying to pull her off even as he stared at her with wide,
boiling eyes. But in this moment, Kalei was stronger.

As she reached her darkness forward,
Kalei thought about Terin, she thought about Fenn, she thought
about two little girls who died, and a little boy who was scared
for his life.

She closed her darkness around his
heart and crushed it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Revelations

The man opened his eyes and blinked a
couple of times as the grey ceiling took shape above him. He became
aware of smoke crawling across its surface, consuming the stone sky
until all that remained was a black cloud. He watched the smoke
swirl and spin, nearly hypnotized by the undulating
motion.

Am I alive? ...

He slowly rolled over and pushed
himself up off the floor. The room was a disaster. Metal shelves
lay askew, some resting on top of each other in a pile of twisted
metal, none of them erect, their contents skewed about the floor
around them: cans of vegetables, kitchen supplies, even a scattered
first aid kit. A grotesque form, perhaps a body, lay burning atop a
pile of boxes, the fire spreading to the other items in the room.
To the right of the body – kneeling before it on her hands and
knees— was Kalei.

Her face was contorted in pain, tears
streamed silently from her eyes. He started to get up – he needed
to say something to her – but he stopped himself. There was
something moving on her neck, just visible above her black jacket.
He thought it must have been a shadow, but then he realized her
sleeve had caught fire, sending up dark smoke as it ate through the
material at her elbow. Instead of putting it out, Kalei reached up
and violently ripped the jacket from her body, tearing her arms
from the sleeve and throwing the garment at the opposite
wall.

She sat there in her tank top, fists
clenched on her knees as she gasped for breath. Starting at her
neck and spreading down to the rest of her body, he could see black
figures dancing and writhing across her skin. It was hard to tell
in the dim light, but they looked like... swirls. Lines twisted in
on themselves until they formed a swirl at one end. And there were
dozens, swimming across her body like so many tortured fish in a
pond.

He was confused. None of this made any
sense. He must be dreaming...

Kalei stood up and walked away from
him, disappearing into the billowing smoke.

He watched the spot where she had
vanished, losing himself again in the roiling clouds. He started to
cough, then realized he needed to get out before the smoke
suffocated him.

Perhaps I am
alive.

He groped his way across the floor, up
the stairs, and along the hall, the smoke blocking out most of the
light from the ceiling bulbs. Eventually, he crawled out into the
alley behind the restaurant and lay there, coughing and catching
his breath. Then he heard screams from the street, followed by
gunshots, shouts, and the sound of a car alarm. He scrambled to his
feet and ran toward the commotion.

Out in the street, it was complete
chaos. Several men in business suits were running as a group of men
and women in tracksuits were chasing them down. Standing on a car,
a woman with an assault rifle sprayed everything she could see with
bullets. A child was hunkered down behind a newsstand. Behind a
car, a teen was holding a bleeding knee and screaming at someone to
stop.

So many people were dying and killing
everywhere.

And in the middle of the madness, he
saw Kalei calmly walk up behind the woman on the car and place a
hand on her exposed ankle. The woman collapsed.

He blinked. Kalei was no
longer beside the car. She was across the street, the joggers
falling to the ground around her. He rubbed his eyes.
There was no way – that’s more than a hundred
feet.
He told himself it must have been a
trick of the light. Smoke was billowing just as thickly out here,
and only one streetlight still lit the road while its siblings were
dark and damaged.

As the last jogger finished his fall
to the ground, the sound of gunshots ripped through the air again,
and he saw Kalei flinch as dozens of bullets ripped through her,
flesh and gore exploding out the back of her body. Her clothes
became shredded, the abandoned mail truck behind her covered in
blood. He started to run forward, he wanted to cry out, but then a
terrible pain ripped through his chest, bringing him to his knees.
His breath labored, he forced his head up to see what had happened
to Kalei, expecting to see her fall. But she stood tall. In the dim
light of the lone lamp, he couldn’t see a mark on her.

She faced her attackers, a half dozen
young men and women who looked like they had just been let out of
high school, and she fixed them with a cold stare as they continued
to rain bullets into her lean form. The girl in the middle, a
regular Barbie, began to shout incoherently. The men and women on
either side seemed to be saying something in return, but he
couldn’t make out the words over the gunfire. And still Kalei stood
there, oblivious to the bullets tearing through her.

Then, the street went
quiet.

The man on the right began
to curse and hit his gun, his friends continued to pull their
triggers, but the guns only made empty clicks.
Out of ammo
. Kalei didn’t react to
the silence; she was like a grim statue, fixed to the pavement. The
young woman in the middle blanched, the others stared at Kalei,
their eyes growing wider with every passing second, until the group
finally broke and ran.

A heavy hush fell over the street as
the footsteps faded. All he could hear was the sound of the teenage
boy’s whimpering. Kalei stepped into an alley opposite of where he
stood and was soon lost in the shadow.

Fenn pitched forward,
horrified by what he had seen.
That
couldn’t have been... Kalei... what happened? What
are
you!

His black-nailed hands reached up,
trying to contain the tears that fell from his eyes.

He sat there for ages, trying to wrap
his head around what he had seen, trying to understand the ripping
pain he felt in his heart and in his body. After a while, his open
palms closed into fists and he stood up and punched the brick wall.
He felt pain shoot through his arm, and he thought he heard a
knuckle crack, but the fresh, physical pain gave him a moment of
clarity.

He decided he didn’t care what Kalei
had become. Estranged, Untouched, Monster, whatever she was; that
was his wife.

He was going to find her, and discover
what she had become.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Epilogue

Kalei returned to Solitary. Behind
her, the city was quiet. At her hand, the errant Estranged were all
disabled until the Wardens could pick them up. The Untouched? Dead,
turned, locked within their houses. Terror and shock were all that
remained in the city.

Solitary confinement was empty now.
All of its former occupants had vacated when Xamic’s seeds had
triggered. Much the same had happened in Tech Town, Downtown, in
the city itself. At Xamic’s command, the entire city of Celan had
erupted.

Whatever Tusic, or SWORDE, or anyone
had believed the device to be, in the end, it was just a decoy. He
had other ways to send his signal. As Walker was causing
intermittent blackouts to the ear cameras as part of his updates,
Xamic was wandering the city with a different device. A signal
jammer, which specifically targeted SWORDE’s ear cameras. Who could
have distinguished Xamic’s blackouts from Walker’s?

This was how he had managed to visit
almost every Estranged in the city and plant his seed. Just a
little pocket of darkness, tucked away into the victim’s mind,
ready to alter their brain chemistry and drive them to a voracious
frenzy when Xamic remotely released his signal. He could do things
like that. He was the genius of the darkness. He was its inventor.
And he was dead.

As Xamic’s killer, Kalei had now
inherited not only his power, but his knowledge and his memories,
as jumbled as they were with the memories of his
victims.

But now things were different from
anything Xamic had anticipated. Now, the darkness no longer sat
within her like water in a glass. It was her. It infused her skin,
her eyes, her hands, her heart. It couldn’t be contained or moved;
there was too much, there was nowhere to move it. From the feel of
it, Kalei fully expected to look down and find that her skin had
turned full black, but instead, for reasons she couldn’t fathom,
the darkness revealed itself sparingly, dancing across her skin in
the form of living swirls.

But the swirls were a mere decoration,
an icing to cover the mayhem underneath. Hundreds and thousands of
dead memories pressed in against her mind, victims from both that
day and days departed. Terin’s victims, Xamic’s victims— they would
not stop. They would not tire. They wanted to be heard; they needed
to be remembered.

Somewhere inside the chaos sat Kalei,
more broken and desolate than she ever thought possible. Fenn was
dead, at her own hands. She couldn’t bear the blood on her hands.
So she let go of Kalei, content to let that poor, ravaged soul be
buried by the others. It was too damaged to be
recovered.

As she walked through solitary, she
grabbed a new remote off the counter. She sat down within one of
the small circles on the floor, and she raised the glass. Her eyes
fixed on the far wall and her swirls danced and flexed across her
skin like so many companions. She began to lose herself in the
steady ebb and flow of countless memories, each one fighting for
dominance.

Then one memory slowly pushed itself
to the surface. It was Terin’s; he was talking to a new recruit. He
told the boy, “You know you touched her. But what you don’t know is
whether or not you killed her. Look inside yourself. If you find
her memories, you know she is dead. But if you cannot... the
chances are, she is still alive, living as an
Estranged.”

Kalei stirred from her desolation. She
heard what Terin was telling her. If Fenn’s memories were among
those thousands, then all really was lost. But if not...

She closed her eyes. For better or
worse, she had to find him. If not here, in her memories, then out
there, among the Estranged. But the search had to start here, with
these tormented souls. Kalei took a deep breath and plunged into
their world.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT

About the
Author

Is that it? Is that the end of Kalei
Distrad?

Maybe.

Find out more by getting in touch with
Alex Fedyr through your favorite websites:

Website:
http://alexfedyr.com/

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AlexFedyr

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/alexfedyr

Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/AlexFedyr