THIS MIGHT BE the third time Juniper has come back from the dead, but he’s hardly used to it. His mattress is soaked with blood. His body has holes ripped in it. He keeps trying to open his eyes, even as sleep grabs him, drags him down into its brain-crushing depths. Tired isn’t the right word. Spent, emptied, husked, they’re not adequate either. Grave. That’s how he feels. Very grave indeed.
Something rouses him. A voice calling his name. He only wants to sleep, but his eyes creak open and through the scrim of his eyelashes he sees her. Her face hanging over his. Sarin. Her face creased with age and worry. A gray light filters through the blinds. The clock on the wall ticks its way toward 8 a.m. When he says her name, his voice comes out a croak that gives way to a cough. His chest rattles and he hacks something up that he promptly swallows down. All of this happens in the space of a few seconds, but miles and hours might as well separate them, since he feels as though he is living in some muted, slowed-down version of the world.
“You’re going to be okay,” Sarin says. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Juniper doesn’t believe her. Stab wounds aren’t something she can simply rip out of him. His eyelids want to close, and he can’t fight them any longer—and when he opens them again, the clock has swirled its way to nearly noon. At first he believes he is in a hospital and then realizes Sarin has transformed his bedroom into a kind of triage unit. All the lights are on, the room painfully lit with ghost-white fluorescence. And blood bags dangle over him like a bunch of balloons, their lines siphoning into his neck and elbows and thighs. He feels a tingly honeyish warm—from the blood rush or from some morphine prick.
He tries to sit up, and cannot, a half dozen different parts of him threatening to tear. His vision goes momentarily pointillist with the pain, as if trillions of atoms separate by an inch before crashing back together. He fumbles the lip of the sheet back to reveal the iodine smears and black stitches that make the puffy, red wounds look like eyes closed in suffering.
Sarin comes in through the door to stand beside his bed. “Everyone thought you were ugly before. Look at you now.”
Even smiling hurts. “I’m Frankenstein’s creature.”
He wants to ask who did this, what happened, but his mind remains muddied up with the nightmare he just woke from. When Juniper died the first time, everyone wanted to know where he went, what he saw. He saw something then. An ocean of light. This time he saw its opposite. It came to him more vividly than any dream. The only word that feels right is prophecy. He experienced Portland as it would be.
Buildings burned and smoke dirtied the air. From different corners of the city came gunshots and screams and broken glass. A bus sped along and crashed through—one after the other—the cars abandoned in the streets, until one of its tires blew and it listed into the corner of an office building that cleaved the grille like a hatchet. In this apartment a wife knifed the cock off her husband, and the husband sheared the nose and nipples off her, and in this condo a boy jammed a pair of scissors through the neck of his father, and in this office the boss pulled the registered .357 from his safe and one by one executed the men in suits who hid beneath the desks in their darkened offices. A pregnant woman hung from a telephone pole, her skin purpled and swollen. Bodies hung everywhere—from balconies, from trees, from street signs—like the ornaments of some terrible holiday. And bodies lay everywhere, on the sidewalks and in streets and parks, more of them every minute as they fall from sniper fire or plummet from open windows, their arms and legs and necks twisted at unnatural angles, like the broken dolls of an angry child. Dogs and cats and crows and even a drift of long-snouted hogs fed on them. A gas line erupted and buckled the pavement, and from below came gouts of fire that made the air ripple.
And in the center of the city, in the Pearl District, where the Rue once stood, there rose a black tower. It pulsed and twisted, like a hungry root that reached thousands of feet and flowered in the sky, spreading into a pewter-colored lightning-lit mass of clouds a hundred miles wide. Every now and then something would crawl from it or fly from it or unpeel from it or ooze from it—and take to the city, looking for something to hunt down, play with, rape, tease, feast on.
This—Juniper knows, though he wishes he didn’t—this is what was coming. This is what they were fighting. This is what he tells Sarin when she sits at the edge of his bed and touches her hand to his cheek. The woman—the reporter, Lela—enters the room with her arms crossed and her dog panting at her side. His words are clumsy and slow from the morphine. His eyes keep wandering from her face to the Halloween decoration he taped last week to his window, a grinning devil. His tongue feels as dry as skin and his words come out in a garble, but Sarin nods in understanding.
“We’re not going to let that happen,” Sarin says.
Lela doesn’t strike him as the crying type, but she’s crying now. Her cheeks are streaked and her face blushed. At first he’s brain-addled enough to believe she feels for him, and he almost tells her, “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.” Then he realizes something. The absence of something. The missing among them. Lela’s sister. And her niece. Cheryl and Hannah. They were here last night. They were here when this happened.
Sarin explains. Cheston is gone. Cheryl is dead. Hannah is missing. And a virus has compromised the system.
A line of packaged syringes and bottle of morphine sit on his night table. She rips the plastic off one, needles the bottle, sucks in a fat thirty milligrams. “This is the part where you try to get out of bed and play hero. But that ain’t happening. Not today.”
He wishes he could argue with her, but he feels—with all of these blood lines feeding into him—as helpless as a tangled marionette. He doesn’t fight her when she stabs the syringe into his thigh, thumbs it empty. “Then what?” he says.
“You’re going to rest. I’m going to take care of it.” She shares a look with Lela. “We’re going to take care of it.”
“What are you going to do?” The morphine hits him hard. His eyelids feel suddenly burdened with concrete. He closes them, just for a second. All pain vanishes. His bed softens, as downy as a cloud; he is floating.
Sarin’s throaty voice speaks to him through the dark. “Stop them. Save the girl.”
Juniper cannot open his eyes. He teeters at the edge of an unconscious void and doesn’t realize that Sarin has already left him, that he speaks to an empty room when he says, “Or die trying?”
Chapter 20
THE TWO WOMEN spend the morning helping each other. Clearing out the shelter and locking its doors. Nursing Juniper. Pulling down Cheryl from the cross and bathing her body and toweling it off and combing her hair and wrapping her in a sheet that molds to the shape of her face.