Prologue
Infestation
It was 10 a.m. on October 31, and the day was knife-sharp and bright in the way that only happens on sunny days in autumn. The sky was Carolina-blue and dotted with puffy white clouds. A cool wind carried both red maple leaves and a distant smell of firewood.
A bell rang from the grounds of a school which was laid out in a small patch of green in the middle of a forest, sheltered on all sides by old hardwood trees. In an earlier time, it might have been a meadow filled with goldenrods, sundrops, milkweeds, and stinging nettles. Now it was mostly cut grass with an occasional weed interloper, but something of the wild still clung to it. Perhaps it was the cottonwood seeds and dandelion tufts blowing in the wind or the low hum of cicadas that could be heard from the trees in the distance. It had a lushness that was both seductive and vaguely nauseating.
The main road to the school led through the woods to the front of the building, where it ended in a horseshoe-shaped drive and a mini parking lot for dropping children off. At the entrance, a large sign in royal blue read Pineville—Home of the Bobcats in italicized gold letters.
The school consisted of three buildings arranged in a U formation with the largest building in front, making up the bottom of the U. This red-brick building housed administrative offices and the library. The two other buildings were painted white and housed classrooms. Children were visible through the windows, sitting quietly at their desks. It was how school should be, with children studying and nature outside waiting to be explored. Maybe it would be that way again someday … but that wasn’t what was on the agenda for today.
A teenager was standing still in the parking lot, sniffing the air. He was handsome, bronze-haired, and athletic. Almost no one would have guessed that he was ill. Even fewer would have suspected that he was plagued by both pain and voices in his head, surviving each day only by taking increasing levels of painkillers and antipsychotic drugs. Maybe one person in ten million would have been able to see that the boy was not alone. He was accompanied by wisps and shadows. Some of these had a humanoid form, but others looked more like scraps of spiderweb or clumps of dark cotton. A few looked like bloody balls that rolled in, over and around his body with movements that looked purposeful. Others would have defied description using anything as carbon-based as shape or color. He knew that these shadows were doing more than making him sick. They were shredding his soul in a way that would last far beyond his mere death.
As one particularly large shadow pushed through him, the boy stopped and winced. After a moment, he sighed, and shook his head. Moving from the parking lot toward one of the classroom buildings, he passed by the administrative building, where a few of the staff glanced at him from the window and smiled. He was well known and liked, and no one would think twice about his coming to school a bit late.
He walked quickly toward the classroom building on the far right but didn’t enter it. Instead, he walked to the other side of the building, toward the end that was facing away from the office. Here he found a single exit door. He opened his backpack and pulled out a chain and master lock, which he attached around the handles of this door. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to hold for long. After securing the lock, he went back around the building to the front entrance and pulled the door open. The noise echoed on the tiles of the hallway that connected the classrooms. There were only the two exits, one at each end. It would have been enough in case of a fire—but this was not a fire.
He closed the door behind him. His head was pounding now, as his heart sped blood to his body, completely ignoring the sedative effects of the drugs he had taken. The voices in his head were unusually silent but in the deep recesses of his mind, he heard another voice. It was a deeper voice, sad but certain.
“Save them from this pain,” was all it said.
As he came to the first room on his right, his teacher from a previous year caught sight of him and smiled. As she did so, a small ball of blood dropped from her nose, landing on the floor and skittering toward him. The boy smiled and nodded back.
Without hesitation, he pulled a handgun from his bag and shot her in the head.
Chapter One
Coffee Grinders and Charms Speak
“Brains. Don’t. Explode.” Her mother’s voice didn’t so much creep up the stairs as stomp, bouncing and gaining volume with each step.
Amelie pulled the covers up over her head, trying to block out both her mother’s voice and the harsh light of morning. She had fallen asleep “flying” inside her head last night and awakened this morning doing the same thing. Thinking about flying, some of the soft feeling of those moments returned to her, causing her limbs to tingle and her forehead to throb in a sensual way. Sadly, such memories were always fleeting and couldn’t survive the light of day, or a morning with her family.
“It’s what the paper says!” her father yelled back to her mother.
They would continue at this volume all morning, even though they were in the same room. She would have thought that they were both partially deaf, if her mother didn’t have the ability to hear every single snarky comment that Amelie made under her breath.
Without warning, the shrieking sound of her father’s coffee grinder assaulted her ears. Why her parents continued to use that old, secondhand coffee grinder was another one of her family’s great mysteries. Her father had found it at a garage sale, and it was love at first sight. She counted the grinds until the magic number of sixteen had been reached and it became mercifully silent.
Amelie rolled herself out of bed and into a sitting position on the hideous dark blue shag carpet that covered the floor of her room. Like every morning, the sensation of the rug bothered her skin. It was an industrial grade, so it was course and spiky. The light from the window next to her bed felt too bright and the noise of her family making breakfast bordered on intolerable, even after the coffee grinder stopped shrieking. The smell of her father’s Polo aftershave drifted up the stairs, assaulting her nostrils.
Bedtime was Amelie’s favorite time of day. Her stomach, always sensitive and prone to distress, had settled down for the day. The glow of twilight streamed through her window, accompanied by the songs of cicadas and tree frogs. Bedtime meant flying inside her head, exploring other worlds and other galaxies. It was her bliss time. Morning, on the other hand, sucked. Morning meant having a headache every day until about 10 a.m., and a stomachache for the remainder. Morning meant school, teachers and frenemies. Morning meant breakfast with her redneck family. Morning meant being awakened by that piece-of-shit coffee grinder.
And thus she began her morning ritual, as it had been taught to her at the Cone Mental Health Facility, by someone who wasn’t a nurse.
Amelie closed her eyes and dug her fingers into the carpet. She took deep breaths as she imagined herself being surrounded by a layer of clear Plexiglas. She envisioned it surrounding her body, starting at her head and then dripping down until it reached her feet. After one layer was completed, she began another. Sometimes she wondered if this was how a turkey felt as it was being basted. Basting or no, the noise around her started to become less jarring, the rug less scratchy, and the light less harsh. With each layer of mental plastic that she draped over herself, the sharpness of the world around her became dulled. Of course, everything else was dulled too, but life had taught her that this was the price she was required and willing to pay for some semblance of normalcy.
The only thing that the plastic shields didn’t seem to dull was the internal physical discomfort which had always plagued her, but Amelie was used to this. There was always something not quite right in her body and it could take multiple forms. Headache, stomachache, indigestion, nerve pain, tonsilitis, cystitis, colitis … pretty much anything that ended in -itis was always on the menu. When she had been young, her mother had taken her to the doctor’s office. The doctor had attributed all this to Amelie being “high strung”, which her mother translated into “Amelie’s fault”. So she had learned to accept these things as a part of her day-to-day life, and to ignore them as much as possible. By age seventeen, she was already an expert at both pain management and mother avoidance.
When she was finally able to open her eyes without squinting, and the noise had subsided to a reasonable level, Amelie got up and went to sit at her powder-pink-and-white dressing table. While it was usually tidy, today it had a copy of the SAT results that she had printed off at school yesterday. This paper stood out amid the normal residents of her dresser such as her brush, comb, and jewelry. If someone in her family saw these results, it might result in discussion, but no one ever came into her room. That was partially from a lack of interest, and partially from a pointed directive given by a social worker years earlier.
Amelie brushed her curly, wheat-colored hair upward and into a ponytail, as she began the second part of her ritual. She imagined a second set of eyes behind her actual eyelids and firmly shut them. She then surveyed her pale face in the mirror and put a little powder on for the shine. She didn’t bother with makeup. In fact, the very thought of makeup was darkly amusing to her. She wondered what it would be like to have a need for that, a desire for that kind of attention. It gave her that “rabbit running over a grave” feeling. Shaking it off, she got up and grabbed clothes from a random hanger in her closet.
The rest of her family was in full motion by the time she got to the kitchen. Their kitchen was small enough, but with her brother joining both her parents in it, there was room for little else. Her father was leaning against the kitchen counter waiting for her mother to pour him his cereal, while he read his newspaper. This wasn’t nearly as highbrow as it sounded. The newspaper was really a magazine filled largely with celebrity gossip. For a grown man, he was weirdly addicted to what celebrities had been doing over the weekend.
“Hey Amelie, you hear about what happened in Virginia?” her father said. “Boy went crazy and shot up a school. Then after all that, one of the cops went crazy in the parking lot and shot up the crowd that was waiting.”
Amelie’s mother responded before Amelie was required to do so.
“A cop? Again? Who the fuck are they letting into cop school?” Opal snapped, as she banged around in the kitchen looking for something. “And what the hell is wrong with the schools? There was a school shooting in Arizona not two weeks ago.”
“Yeah, well the paper says it happened ’cause they was both sick with something. It says the shooter boy’s brain exploded.”
“Like I said, no one’s brains explode,” her mother said with authority.
“Says right here,” her father said, pointing to the paper. “Doctors say his brain looks as if it just exploded. And the doctor here says what made the kid crazy could be contagious, and the cop caught it.”
“That’s dumb. If the cop went crazy, it was from stress.”
“Well, that don’t explain his exploded brain,” her father muttered.
“BRAINS DON’T EXPLODE,” yelled her mother. “I work for a doctor and—”
This was the beginning of her mother’s recurring rant about how much more she knew about medicine than everyone in the house—nay, in the world. Amelie tuned her out.
Her brother Will was digging in the fridge for raw eggs, which he had recently decided constituted a healthy breakfast. Amelie didn’t know from what friend, or movie, he had picked up this little piece of propaganda and didn’t care. Nor did she bother to inform him of the dangers of salmonella. It would serve him right if he got sick, but he never did. He had the intestinal fortitude of a cockroach. She squeezed by him for long enough to grab a cereal bar from the cupboard and some ham from the fridge. After a moment’s hesitation, she also grabbed a can of Red Bull. She could feel her brother smirk behind her back.
“Hey, isn’t that like three days in a row for you with the Red Bull?” he asked, with over-the-top sweetness. “Your SAT’s done, you ain’t got no good reason for it anymore.”
“So you’re saying I have a good reason,” Amelie muttered under her breath. Then quickly clamped her mouth shut, annoyed with herself. She had broken her golden rule with her family—say as little as possible and avoid all physical contact.
Will lunged at her in a pretend play fight, but she ducked quickly under his arm and edged into the foyer where she collected her books from the side table, shoving them, along with her breakfast, into a backpack.
As she had finished packing her bag and was turning toward the door, a brighter version of her brother’s voice stopped her.
“Hey, Ame, wait up. You workin’ tonight?” her brother asked as he rounded the corner into the foyer with a glass of yellow goop in one hand and a box of Lucky Charms in the other.
“Yes.” She responded through clenched teeth, turning toward the door. She knew what was coming. It was a well-rehearsed scene that got played out at least a couple of times a month. What he wanted was for Amelie to provide him and his friends with free drinks.
“I thought my buddies and I could come by the steakhouse and say hi.” He grinned at her.
She knew that this very grin got him laid more often than was good for him. Actually, as he was 6’2”, blond, and athletic, he didn’t even have to grin to get laid—breathing was usually enough. But when he grinned at her this way, it always made her feel nauseated. She suspected he knew this, though she was fairly sure he didn’t remember why.
“Probably not a great idea. I’ll be too busy to talk to you,” she said, putting her hand on the doorknob and hoping to make a quick escape.
“For god’s sake, Amelie. He’s your brother. Would it hurt you to help him out a little?” her mother snapped from the kitchen.
Yeah, Will’s my brother. I’m well aware of that, but are you?
She almost said it but bit her tongue in time.
This was not like her. Life had made her an expert at feeling nothing and expressing even less. She mentally slammed a cage down on those thoughts as hard as she could. Before she could completely lock down, she felt her inner eye open wide. Several of the words on the Lucky Charms box Will was holding began to glow, and not just a little. The word calories was lit up like solar flares. When he turned the box slightly, the word sugar flashed like neon from several spots on the ingredient list along with the words bad and low.
Damn. Not today, she thought.
“I’ve got to go, I’m going to be late,” she muttered as she pushed through the screen door.
She was letting her family get to her more than usual today. None of their behavior was unusual. Her family was being typical of her family. Her reaction to this incident was what was unusual. She could usually keep her visions at bay fairly easily. This made the visions her “simple” issue. If she kept her shields up and her inner eyelid closed, she didn’t see them, and yet they had slipped through this morning. There was no reason for it, unless she was reacting to something yet to happen. Great. She would have to watch carefully today.
Despite her uneasiness, the sight of her old green Toyota Corolla made her smile. It was old but it was in good condition, and she loved it. She opened the door, threw her books in the passenger seat and started the engine. It didn’t purr, it growled, but that was fine with her. Her smile got broader as she backed out, knowing she had twenty minutes of alone time before she got to school. This was her second favorite time of the day.
She didn’t see the wispy shadow that raced from the bushes and toward her car as she drove away … or notice that her heart was beating off rhythm.
