The ringing in my head became a loud hum. The hum softened and I heard car alarms screaming in the parking lot.
Faces blanched with terror stared from the motel windows. Red auras bobbed like bubbles. People clustered in the exits to my left.
I brushed away the glass sticking out of my body. Skin hung from my right temple and I held the flap in place. Blood oozed from the wound and the countless other cuts in my skin. The blood ran down my face and dried to brown flakes that broke apart into powder.
A wave of nausea rose in me, hot and crippling. My knees weakened.
But I couldn’t rest. I had to flee. The police would be coming soon. My naked vampire eyes would give me away.
A familiar chopping sound cleaved through the hum in my head. The sound echoed over the parking lot.
A black Jet Ranger raced into view above the trees. The helicopter turned sideways and I recognized the man sitting in the open copilot’s door. Goodman.
His red aura blazed like the fiery plume of an artillery rocket. He wore a headset and pointed at me.
Three black Suburbans swerved and halted on the street. Men in black uniforms sprang from the SUVs, submachine guns at the ready.
Two of the men stopped and took aim. I didn’t wait for the bullets. I sprinted in the opposite direction, dove over a BMW sedan, and somersaulted onto the ground. Bullets whizzed overhead.
I took off again for the trees and bounded left and right like a hunted jackrabbit. I raced away at vampire speed, my arms and legs a blur. The faster I ran, the more intense the nausea became.
When I reached the trees, I jinked right. A dozen bullets hacked at the leaves where I would’ve been.
I loped through gaps in the brush. The shadows felt cool. The nausea subsided.
Overhead, the helicopter followed me. Another SUV tracked along the edge of the trees. A splash of light reflected from grass on the open ground beyond the trees. The growth of trees and brush funneled to a point in the clearing. Once out from the brush, I could break into a run but not fast enough to lose the helicopter. How long until Goodman and his thugs cornered me?
But if I stayed here, they’d surround me. So I broke from the trees and raced over the flat ground. Sunlight splashed over me, brilliant and biting, and I felt like an ant frying under a magnifying glass. The nausea returned, and I wanted to stop and heave.
But I had to keep running and escape. My skin burned hotter with every passing second. What was happening?
I held up my arms and hands. My skin faded from brown to a creamy pallor. The spot on my forearm where the spider had sunk its fangs puckered and started to ache. My body felt like acid was pumping through my veins.
The effect of the spider bite had worn off. Sunlight was now as dangerous to me as fire.
Vomit welled in my throat. My kundalini noir thrashed like a snake smothering under a hot rock.
The shadow of the helicopter passed over me. The darkness provided a brief second of relief. The sunlight blazed onto me again, feeling even more intense and menacing.
The SUV circled from my right and charged into the clearing. I cut left and sprinted toward a wooden fence overgrown with honeysuckle and ivy. I hurtled over the fence and raced across someone’s backyard.
The air scalded me like I’d been thrown into an oven. I choked down the urge to retch.
Still I ran. I hurtled over another fence and got snagged in kudzu.
The helicopter hovered above a wall of myrtle in front of me. Goodman watched from behind mirrored sunglasses. His hands moved in animated gestures. A Suburban halted beneath him.
I tore free from the kudzu, turned left again, and raced over a wooden deck to crash through a set of French doors. A family sat at the dining room table. I leaped onto the table, my feet stomping a casserole dish and stacks of pancakes. Scrambled eggs and syrup splashed across the room. The three kids and dad screamed. The mom threw a serving spoon that bounced off my head.
I sprang from the table and bolted into the living room.
Inside the house, the nausea vanished. My skin felt as if I’d been doused with cool water. I wanted to stay and rest but the moment I stopped, Goodman and his shooters would close the trap.
I catapulted off an armchair for the front picture window and smashed through the glass.
Sunlight felt like a cauldron of lava. I tumbled over a hedge and landed on the grass. My feet pumped over the lawn and I raced onto the street. My scalded skin turned pink.
A new wave of nausea squeezed my insides and my kundalini noir felt like it was shoved up my throat.
My flesh was about to smolder. The pain was like getting skinned alive.
The street led to a dead end against the beach dunes. Beyond them lay the Atlantic Ocean. The helicopter flew close, keeping pace as if we were tethered by a rope. I scrambled over the dunes and through the sea oats. The blue horizon of water promised sanctuary. I pushed myself to run harder across the flat trace of sand to the surf.
The helicopter crabbed sideways toward me. Goodman brought an assault rifle to his shoulder. I hopped to my left. The spray of bullets churned the ground inches from my feet.
The sun reflected off the sand and burned my skin. My eyelids wanted to shut tight to protect my eyes and I fought to keep them open.
The roar of the helicopter sounded like a demon from hell. A second volley of bullets tore at my legs, ripping flesh and shattering bone.
I tumbled forward and smacked wet sand. I sprang up and tried to stand but my shredded left leg buckled under my weight.
The Jet Ranger slipped through the air. The shoreline waited thirty feet before me.
I couldn’t make it. The agony of my burning flesh, the nausea, and now my mangled leg, overwhelmed my will to flee.
Not now, Felix. Survive. Survive. Come back and fight. I rolled upright and limped into the surf.
Two of the Suburbans raced toward me down the beach.
I hobbled into the oncoming waves, into the water that would rescue me. The surf lapped at my ankles, then my shins, and finally my knees.
Bursts of rifle fire tore into the water around me. I dove forward and clawed at the sandy bottom.
Chapter
33
Waves broke over me, and I disappeared into the dirty foam. Gritty water stung my eyes and clouded my vision. The sunlight streaming from above cooked my back. I scrambled across the silted bottom and groped for deeper water. At last, my skin cooled. The riptide pulled me from the beach toward darker depths.
I expected the water to refresh me, but instead I felt my strength ebbing. I kept my face down and floated across the sandy bottom, limp as the sargassum clinging to my body.
My shattered left leg dragged through rocks and sand. I let out a howl of pain. My scream became lost in the cloud of bubbles blowing out of my mouth. I clutched at my leg, but moving only made it hurt worse so I let it dangle.
I was spent, down for the count.
Goodman’s ambush, my wounds, and my loss of protection from the sun had sapped my will to fight. The current pulled me around the southern side of Hilton Head Island. My kundalini noir lay slack inside my belly.
I didn’t know where the current would take me. Bermuda? The Canary Islands? I didn’t care, just as long as I never came back. I only felt the now. Time lost meaning.
I was filled with a miasma of apathy. At least when you’re desperate you thrash about in panic, because you think you have a chance to save yourself. But I had no chance. Hope had been crushed out of me.
I retreated over familiar emotional ground, harsh, forbidding, desolate, to a shuttered place in my past.
When I was a sergeant in Iraq, in the early months of our invasion before the war deteriorated into a complete fiasco, my platoon lost two men when their Humvee was struck by a roadside bomb. That evening, I couldn’t find the words to console their team leader, my own soldiers, or myself. There wasn’t anything-other than clichés-to explain the sacrifice.