At first there were just a few. They glanced around the park, as if confused about how they got there. Then they began to amble slowly toward the stage. They came in all different shapes and sizes. All different hair and skin tones. All different clothing. And with them came a brutal need building inside me to get out of the car. To go closer. To let thefuriaewreak vengeance for us both.
But I resisted that urge as the crowd grew. As Lenore kept talking, telling her new, ever-swelling audience about the things she hadn’t been allowed to say at the Savage Spectacle, thanks to the restrictions of Vandekamp’s collars—a predicament her audience no doubt remembered from personal experience. In front of a thousand bodies spread across the grounds in thin clusters, she talked about being rented out as entertainment at parties. About being used, and ogled, and fondled. She told a crowd of three thousand about the first time she was put on the full-contact roster. The do-whatever-you-want-to-her roster. Then she told a crowd of five thousand strong about the day they paralyzed her through her collar and ended her pregnancy against her will.
By the time the grounds were full of surrogates, humans had started to catch on. A military truck pulled up with the screech of tires, and soldiers jumped out of the bed shouting orders. Waving rifles. Trying to clear a nearly silent crowd that seemed, at least to them, to have assembled out of nowhere.
Hundreds of surrogates turned toward the intrusion.
The soldiers pointed their rifles at each other and fired.
I flinched at the thunder of gunfire. And again as the corpses hit the ground, a few hundred yards away.
Then the surrogates turned back to Lenore, mesmerized by her voice. Driven to stay and listen in silence. And that, I decided, was enough. I got out of the car, my heart pounding in my ears, and I could still hear birds chirping despite the size of the eerily quiet crowd.
Then I closed the car door.
Thousandsof heads turned my way.
A murmur rippled through the crowd, and my heart tried to claw its way up my throat. The ripple made it all the way to the front, and Lenore stopped talking, though she couldn’t have seen me very clearly from so far away.
Suddenly, almost as one, the crowd began to move toward me, and the motion was like the undulation of a wave headed for the shore. Only the wave was made of living bodies, and I was the shore, and that wave would soon crash over me.
So I waded in on my own terms.
At first, a path opened up for me, while they all stared, and that pulling sensation deep in my gut began to spin like a broken compass. There were so many targets, thefuriaedidn’t know where to begin.
I made it about a third of the way into the crowd before their fascination became the inevitable need to touch me, and the first hand grabbed my arm.
Thefuriaelashed out so hard and fast that I felt the impact as a psychic backlash, repelling me from the target of her vengeance like two magnets placed with like ends together.
In my peripheral vision, even as a dozen more hands reached for me, I saw the arc of arterial spray as the first surrogate severed her own carotid, splattering a dozen forms all around her.
Heedless of the gore, they reached for me, and one by one, their hands fell away. Blood arched into the air. Bodies thumped to the ground. And still they came, stepping over the corpses of their own kind. Slipping in blood.
Falling at my feet over and over.
I could no longer see Lenore. I couldn’t see anything over the forest of bloody bodies that had sprouted around me, limbs reaching for me.
The murmur of the surrogates’ need became a roar as hand after slick hand stuck out from the press of the crowd. From somewhere came a spray of bullets, followed by agonized screams, and I wasn’t sure who’d been shot—more soldiers, or members of the crowd too distracted to make them turn on each other.
Lenore started speaking again, from the microphone, and her voice felt different this time. The urge to go home was gone. Now her voice made me want to stay and watch. To see. To believe that the scourge of humankind—the agents of blood and chaos that had been preying on us for thirty years—were finally getting their due.
I stumbled left, and something tugged me right. I fell, and a bloody hand pulled me up. And as soon as they made contact, they turned on themselves.
Then thefuriaeroared inside me, overwhelmed, and everything changed.
The next surrogate that reached for me turned away, and instead of clawing his own throat out, he fell upon his neighbor. Then the next, and the next and the next. Suddenly, instead of falling in on me, the violence of the moment rippled out from me, like waves echoing from a rock thrown into a pond.
This new savagery was brutally efficient. But it cost me. My arms felt like they weighed a ton and my legs were too heavy to lift. My eyes tried to close. My throat felt dry.
Thefuriaewas draining me to feed her vengeance. This could not last.
I could not last.
I went still in the center of the chaos, covered in gore, and threw my arms out. I let my head fall back as blood continued to pour forth around me. I let my eyes close.
And I prayed that it would be enough.
Gallagher
