Chapter 25
Elias thought this must be how a snake felt after molting its old skin. Little slivers of the old Elias remained like stringy bits of meat stuck in his teeth, but the rest had been cast aside. Or perhaps swallowed and digested.
The fire truck rumbled along the road. The rain had begun to taper off.
At the wheel, Alfie Hannigan continued to sing.
The little boy, Benjy, sat between them.
Neither of them attempted to speak to him, which was best, because Elias might have screamed or killed one or both of them, and Root would have been furious.
The itch to kill made his skin crawl, inside and out, like there were insects in his guts and in his flesh.
In any nightclub, when performers sang a song he particularly liked, Elias wanted to join them.
The urge to open his mouth and join the music had always been there, but he’d kept that secret because he knew his singing voice was akin to the cries of a sheep being slaughtered.
The need to kill felt something like that, a profound yearning, every muscle in his body aching for it.
But unlike his desire to be part of the music, this was something he knew his body could do.
Rip flesh, claw throats, drink blood, break bones.
He shuddered with the delicious thought of it. The old Elias continued to shrink within him, numb with shock and grief, and the pain in his bones kept worsening.
What am I now? The question might have been prompted by the old Elias, but the creature he’d become also wanted to know.
“Creature,” he whispered, echoing his thoughts. The word felt right. As he spoke, he tasted the drying blood on his lips and shivered.
The fire truck’s headlights illuminated the road ahead, scattered with at least four bodies. Alfie didn’t slow down. The fire truck’s wheels bumped right over the corpses, and Elias wondered how they died.
Half a mile farther along, around a corner, they came upon more bodies. A figure crouched over one of them, digging hands into the dead man’s cracked-open chest and painting its face with viscera. It was the monster Root had sent ahead of them with orders to bring Maggie’s head.
The fire truck came to a shuddering halt. Alfie waited, face blank. No words had been spoken, but it seemed he had new instructions.
“Fight the need, you fool!” Root shouted from the roof of the fire truck. “Stop that!”
The creature hissed at him but dragged itself away from the corpse and took to the sky again.
Elias trembled with envy. He pressed his face against the window like a dog panting to get outside, staring at the dead people, wishing it had been his hands dug into their chests, his mouth tearing at their necks.
A tiny shudder of revulsion passed through him.
What am I? What the hell am I?
But he knew. He’d known when Root had first attacked him on the way to the train station in Buffalo. He’d known the moment Root had sunk its teeth into his throat. And if not then, he’d certainly known when he’d died and then opened his eyes again.
The urge made him tense. His toes curled. His fingers clenched.
A little farther on, two men—perhaps a father and son—stood at the end of their property and watched the fire truck approaching.
The headlights caught the neighborly concern on their faces as they craned their necks, looking off into the night, though they could not have seen the wreckage of the train from here.
Alfie didn’t slow down, but Elias opened the fire truck’s passenger door.
Damn the speed, he couldn’t stop himself.
He opened his lips, and a shriek like a falcon came from his throat as he dove at the older man.
The thing that Root had sent ahead descended on the man’s son.
The fire truck’s brakes hissed. Root leaped down from the roof before the truck came to a stop.
“We cannot do this,” Root said. “Master your hunger!”
But the instinct was too strong. Elias drank from the man, cutting off his screams, then dug into his chest.
A loud roar interrupted them, and they all looked up to see a second fire truck coming down the rise ahead.
The driver saw them and tried to stop. This other fire truck turned, attempting to avoid a collision, and flipped.
The scream of metal against the road blistered Elias’s eardrums. Sparks flew.
Almost instantly, injured firemen began to drag themselves out of the overturned vehicle, and this time, even Root could not overcome instinct. It ran toward the wounded, with Elias and the other of their kind.
When the screaming began, it sounded so much like music that Elias wanted to sing.