Ravenous Dusk Read Free Page B

with stars and roving searchlights, and that wondrous other light from on high, what the Radiant Dawn patient Stephen had called the moon ladder, that had touched her just before the earth opened up and swallowed her. She could still see that soldier, the one who'd come back for her, could still feel the fumes of that exhilaration when she'd thought the world had seemingly decided it had tired of fucking with Stella Orozco and wanted to make things right. Now the soldier was probably buried alongside her, and no light would ever touch her living skin again. This was not the end she would have foreseen for herself, stupid girl, and that was what hurt most of all.
    Why are you alive right now?
    She was a survivor. She had taken one misstep into her new life, and lay in the grave, unable to die. That fits, God. I'm alive because there's nobody else, who knows I'm here, nobody else to laugh at my joke. If I laugh, if I admit it— Good one, God, you really had me going there for a minute— then I'll be allowed to die.
    How did you survive?
    Her fucking brain, again, whirling away on imponderables while her body slipped away. Lie still and conserve your energy, your air supply. When you feel stronger, start tapping on metal, if you can reach any. They have trained rescue dogs, they have scent detectors, they have ground-penetrating sonar, for Christ's sake.
    Not for you.
    Save your strength, and stay positive. You will be rescued.
    Have you ever been rescued?
    Who the fuck are you? She asked herself, but she knew. It was the voice she'd always heard when life or death hinged on choices. It was the voice that had guided her through orphanhood and foster homes and a solitary life of hard-fought serenity. The voice that had abruptly cut off when she discovered she had terminal cancer of the liver. Her Guardian Angel, come back too late to do more than poke and prod her in her failure.
    Nobody is coming for you. You have to get out of this yourself.
    Tell me another, Guardian Angel.
    You are made anew. You are as strong as your will to survive. You have been given a gift.
    Her hand scuttled across the papier-mâché nightmare of her face, stretched taut over the bones except where knots of deep tissue trauma formed new features. Her fingers faltered in the alluvial ruts carved into her cheeks by tears. Incredible, that halfway to death, already mummified and entombed, her body had decided to splurge and let her have a good cry. Her breath fluttered and a whole rack of steak knives pressed against her lungs. That'd be her broken ribs, unless she was impaled on a bunch of iron rebar, too. "Thank you, God, for this precious gift," she whispered. "When I get out of here, I've got a present for you, too."
    That's the spirit.
    Fuck you too, Guardian Angel. I want to die.
    Then die. All is a matter of will. You want to live, so you will live.
    "With what?" she screamed aloud, coughing up a tempest that only got worse as her blood-flecked breath stirred up the dust coating her tomb. "I have no legs! I have one arm, and I'd have to chew my goddamned legs off to get free—" she paused for breath, coughed up sand "—but the pressure…from the concrete…is the only thing keeping me from bleeding to death."
    If it is too much for you, you may die. But if you want to live—
    "What, goddamit? What?"
    You must dig.
    She had no retort, for it was true. She would not, could not die down here. Her new body would not allow it. Death for her would not be the sad little thing that came to claim other hapless accident victims, usually before they regained consciousness. Like Prometheus on the rock, or a vampire, she would linger forever down here. Powerless to save her, her new, improved body could only infinitely prolong her suffering, unless her old mind got her out. Even as the brittle bundle of sticks that apparently was her hand pawed the matted hair from her brow and set to probing the shattered stone floor of her tomb, she knew she would get