Bits & Pieces (Benny Imura 5)

No.

What stopped David was something else. Something he saw. Something she saw him see. Something so . . . so terrible.

He looked into her eyes.

And saw her.

Dead, but not gone.

Destroyed, but not chased out of the ruin of her body.

There.

Still there.

Trapped inside the cage of her own stolen flesh. A prisoner who was still chained to the input of all five senses. She could see everything, smell the blood, taste the black poison of whatever lived within the plague, felt the deadness of the dying heart in her chest, and heard David’s voice.

“Please,” he said. It was not a plea to have her do something or to get something, or even for help.

Please.

It was a prayer to whatever fractured power still ran the universe, that what he saw in her eyes was a lie.

Only a lie.

But the bride knew that it was not a lie. She was still in there. Her body was not her own, would never again be hers to control. And yet she was still in there. Lost. Trapped.

Aware.

And David saw that. He knew it.

If the world had not already been falling apart, that’s when it would have collapsed.

They had been married for less than a minute when the driver of the limo had come blundering in, collapsing against the last row of people. Already bitten, already bleeding.

One minute.

David was her husband, and she was his wife. His bride.

He looked into her dead eyes and saw something, saw the truth that maybe no one else knew. He saw it because it was like him to see those kinds of things. He was always the type who got to know people on a deep level.

It was what made people love him. And trust him.

It was what broke his heart for the second time in minutes. It was what made him drop the cross and stagger back, clamping a hand to his mouth to stifle the scream that he so badly needed to let loose. It was what kept him from killing her.

And it was what drove him from the chapel, the scream finally breaking from him as he burst out into the sunlight of his first day in hell.

Now the bride went where her body went. She fought with it. So hard, so hard. Trying to wrest back one single bit of control. A finger, a step, a turn of the head.

But it was like being buckled into a runaway car. All she could do was experience the horror.

Every moment.

Every hour.

Every bite.

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