“I don’t think we—” Dr. Park began in a chiding tone, but the woman cut him off.
“It may well make him more manageable. Anyway, we’ll give him enough to fill whatever hole is in his memory.”
Armo heard the woman walk slowly around, from his right side to his left, then back. “You must admit, he’s a nearly perfect specimen. Big, strong, and not overly bright.”
Armo frowned at that but quickly resumed a blank, unconscious expression.
“I don’t know about that, Colonel,” Dr. Park said. “According to his school record, he’s a rather difficult character.”
Colonel Gwendol
yn DiMarco, US Army, laughed. “Then I suppose it’s a good thing he soon won’t be quite human.”
CHAPTER 6
Hanging with Dead People
SHADE KNEW SHE was being watched.
She opened her eyes slowly, peeking at first, and seeing just what she expected: Gaia sat in the easy chair.
Shade’s heart pounded slow and heavy, a bass drum playing a dirge. Booom . . . Booom. She did not move her arms or head, perhaps could not move them with dread running through her veins and arteries like a drug, like a poison. Only her eyes were hers to command, and she looked only at the girl.
Gaia sat silent and still. The only movement was the slow dripping of blood that ran down her forehead to encircle her eyes before pooling and then spilling down her cheeks. Blood tears.
But then Gaia’s mouth began to move. It was as if she was chewing something too big to fit in her mouth. Her teeth bit and then ripped at something Shade could not—
—and then she saw!
It was the arm she had ripped from the first and only adult to enter the FAYZ. It was the arm and Shade could see it, could see Gaia’s teeth stripping blackened, crispy skin. The arm did not bleed, but blood drops fell from Gaia’s face and she grinned as she chewed, and grinned as she looked directly at Shade.
And the arm . . . the arm was growing in length even as Gaia tore the wriggling veins from the flesh, it grew and changed and now there was a shoulder, a white, feminine shoulder, not a man’s shoulder—a woman’s shoulder—and now a neck. Chills raised goose bumps all over Shade’s body and a low moan formed in her throat, a moan she could not quite force out, a sound that wanted to escape but couldn’t.
No. No. Noooo. Nooooo! NOOOOO!
The arm had made a shoulder, the shoulder a neck, and now the hair, now the auburn hair and an ear and in that ear the earring Shade had bought her mother on Mother’s Day and—
“NO!” The sound came this time, a muffled cry, as if she were forcing it up through mud.
Shade’s whole body tingled, but it was no longer chills but something strange and new and . . .
Gaia grinned and turned the partial carcass in her hand to face Shade, turned it slowly, slowly, an ear, a cheek . . .
“NO!”
Suddenly Shade slammed into something hard. A second impact a second later as she fell onto her hip.
She was awake. Gaia no longer sat in the easy chair.
Awake.
Shade breathed a shaky sigh of relief. It had been a nightmare.
Then she saw her legs and screamed.
As had become Cruz’s habit, she headed to Shade’s house. It was a stunning day, one of those days you got in autumn in Chicagoland, when the sky was a perfect robin’s egg blue, and the air was as crisp and clean as a hotel sheet, and the leaves were a carpet of gold and red beneath trees that would soon be outlined by snow or glistening with ice.
Cruz paused once to write that down in her Moleskine. Then she ran up the back stairs and knocked at Shade’s kitchen door, which Shade opened instantly, as if she’d been lurking.