The Trap (The Hunt 3)

And it hits me right then. A spasm of cold wetness shudders through my viscera, a cold blast that suddenly, on a dime, turns boiling hot. My bones, cells, the electrons within those cells, all set aflame. My legs turn to ash as I slump down onto the tabletop. My body slides to the ground.

Sissy kneels next to me. “Gene? What’s happening to you?”

Lying on the floor, I feel the sway of the Domain Building, its oscillations keening wider and wider. I hear their howls ratcheting up in volume, so many of thousands of them, their screams mirroring the frenzy in my own head.

“Gene?”

Hard to speak. But the pain subsides for just a moment. “I injected us with concentrated dusker serum. We’ll turn really quickly, in under a minute. ”

“What? Say that again?”

“We’re going to turn. Human to dusker. ”

Her eyes widen with horror. “What the hell have you done?”

“No, Sissy, listen. This is the only way we survive. ”

She stares down at her arm. At the spot I injected her, right above the branding. Her eyes huge with disbelief. “You’ve turned me into a . . . dusker?”

“No, listen, Sissy. ” I clutch her arm, hold on desperately like it’s a rope over a canyon. “This is the only way we survive. Once we turn, we become them. We won’t smell. We won’t stick out. We’ll blend in seamlessly. Don’t you get it? We won’t be prey. When they break in, they won’t be able to find us. We can get the hell out of here. ”

“But Gene,” she says. “We become them. I’d rather die—”

“No. Listen. ” I lean in closer. “Once we’re somewhere safe, we ingest each other’s blood. We’ll re-turn. We’ll become human again. ”

“How can you be so sure—”

“We’re the Origin. We’re the cure!”

“I know that! But you still shouldn’t have—”

“I don’t want to die, Sissy!”

“And I don’t want to live if it means becoming one of them!”

Now I grab both her arms. “This is the only way David has a chance to survive. ” Something in her eyes relents at the mention of his name. “We get out of here alive, we book for the Palace. We get him out of that tank. Think of him, Sissy!” An idea comes to mind. “Once we get back to the Palace, we find the Origin weapons and use them on each other. We’ll re-turn much faster that way. ”

Her chest rises and falls, uncertainty swimming in her eyes.

“We can do this, Sissy. We won’t forget who we are. ”

Her eyebrows knit close together, a deep vertical line creasing between them. Her hands suddenly clench. “Gene, it’s beginning!” she cries as her body arches upward, her back bending and locking in place. I reach for her, wrapping myself around her, ease her down to the floor. Her arms start to thrash, smacking me across the face, as cold-hot sweat gushes out of her pores like lava ice. Then she calms, in the eye of the storm I entered a few seconds ago.

And which I am now leaving. The internal burning comes even hotter now, scorching my bones but somehow freezing the marrow. My vision goes white, then red, the colors reversing themselves like a photograph negative. Acid for blood, hot coals for organs, boili

ng soup for brains.

Never forget, I start to say. But the words are mush on my burning tongue, and my tongue is swollen and unwieldy. Then a cloud blooms in my vision, terrible and horrific, a thousand petals of black that burst into pollens of poison. I’m turning, it’s overtaking me, it’s a mistake! And then my body goes limp, and—

Fifty-one

IT IS OVER. The turning is over.

So suddenly. It doesn’t feel like a slow disintegration. But rather, a quick correcting, like a separated shoulder popped into place. Instantly righted.

I thought I’d feel a foreignness about this new turned body. As if, within my own skin, I’ve been converted into an alien. But instead, for the first time in my life, I feel a settlement.

Like a knuckle cracked. Like an invisible blockage in my nasal passage suddenly, finally cleared. Like a film of mucus between my heart and soul wiped away.

The smells come to me, rich and vibrant and luxurious, in 3-D, in 5-D, textured threads flowing through my nostrils and felt by the tendrils of every olfactory nerve. Identifying, sequencing, separating, splitting, savoring. My whole life, I had only scratched the surface of the olfactory nirvana that swirled in the world, fumbling with cheap, blunt knockoffs. But what I smell now I could luxuriate in for hours here in the dark.

Except it is not dark. Not anymore. When I open my eyes, the night has become day. The darkness bleached into a crystalline clarity, not a single pocket of black. If anything, the outside light, already muted from the covering of bodies cloaked over the building, is too bright, the glare causing me to squint.

In wondrous clarity, in a way I have never really viewed her, I see Sissy. Still in the eye of the storm of transformation, she’s backing away from me. I don’t know why she looks terrified of me. But the lines of her face are cleaner, her hair and skin purer.

And I smell heper.

It wallops my senses like an overpowering deluge of opiate wonders. Wave upon wave flung onto me, centering and energizing me to a degree that makes adrenaline seem like a sedative. A desire is carving out a large vacuum in me that. Must. Be. Filled. It consumes everything, makes sexual lust seem like a mild itch in comparison.