Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

He hung in the vacuum, surrounded by white.

Plucked. God’s fingers holding him. Lifting him.

Dangling and dying amid the fuzzy white all around him and the shady blackness of his dreams within.

Flickers of non-dream. The real invading his final sleep. Strings of meat, of tendon and vessels hanging from his arm. Hanging like wire. Wire and blood everywhere.

A twitch. A thrumming pain. A dream of aching, of burning and freezing, of thawing and cooking, of hell and heaven.

A universe of pain, full of aching.

An aching.

A never waking.

Cole’s life didn’t flash by—it loomed and froze. A single image. A boy, dark-skinned and poor. White teeth, but no smile. Lisboa. Portugal. Bairro de lata. Slum. Home .

He saw fury creased across a young forehead, too young to crease like that. Black furrows full of the blackest rage. Fists clenched, arms thrown wide for balance. A boy at his feet, bent in half. The image was frozen, but the boy’s leg was blurred. The boy’s leg kicked, action without motion. A frozen blur, vivid and remembered. The last kick that did it, pushing a nose back into a brain. Silencing it.

Cole didn’t need to see it. Didn’t need to see the before—the years of life abused and wasted. Didn’t need to see the after—the hours of being beat on. So much pain on either side of that frozen slice of rage. Towering stacks of pain squeezing a sliver of time, that frozen horror of violence. Of killing .

Cole didn’t need to see it. He had another life worth flashing by. A life of redemption. Of learning to love. But he didn’t get that one. Just got the brutality and error—looming and frozen.

Something else. New. Guilt and pleasure intertwined and swirling through Cole’s mind, becoming one.

Arms waving, reaching, swimming out of the fog. Out of unconsciousness. The world, a world solidifying, congealing into the half-real, half-imagined.

A woman kissing him, her hands on his body, on his chest.

Lips touching, over and over.

Cole looked up—saw it wasn’t Molly.

Red hair. Bright. The color and flicker of fire, of precious warmth. It danced and waved all around him—it draped across his bare chest. He was naked, the girl hovering.

It felt like—

It felt like forever.

Like wholeness and emptiness, like something spilling out and refilling, like infinite desire and eternal sating, the two racing and endless, like lines stretched out through the unknown, meeting at forever.

Pleasure.

Lust laced with fear and shame.

It wasn’t Molly.

He tried to fight back, to push her off, but every movement—deflected. Every effort—turned against him. The fiery woman. Resistance became passion.

The gradual giving in. His body worn down. Exhausted. Dead. She was kissing him—he kissed back. Hands wrapped in the wild hair, pulling her down.

Skin sparked with electricity everywhere it touched, where it touched other skin. Something jolted him alive.

Alive.

Cole looked at his hands. Fiery hair slid between his fingers. Ten fingers. But he didn’t have two hands. Not anymore. A dream. It was a dream—the last firings of frozen neurons as he perished in a bank of snow.

He pushed the girl away—or tried to.

She was strong. And the more he fought, the more beautiful she became, smothering him with a longing.

Cole groaned. He wondered if this would be the last he ever felt. A parting gift for a life too soon ended.

He longed for Molly.

The lips, full and fiery, shut out his moaning, clamped down on his mouth. Biting. He felt his body betray him, betray his promises and do another’s bidding. Cole cried, tears streaming down his face. Tears that felt incredibly—powerfully— real .

Molly gripped the spigot with the palm of her hand to avoid using her damaged fingers. She gave the valve a turn, and water gurgled out of the hose, discolored at first, then running clear. She offered the stream to Cat, who knelt beside her.

Cat pushed the hose away. “You first.”

Molly held the stream against her lips and took in a mouthful of the cool water. She shook her head, swishing it around before spitting it out, trying to purge the taste of the rag. She ran more water over her lips and drank some down, enjoying the burn of the frigid fluid. She passed the hose back to Cat, who began splashing some on her face.

Molly collapsed against the dumpster behind her and looked up at the lone and naked bulb above, which cast a sad pool of light into the alley. On the other side of the restaurant, she could hear the blare of horns and the rattle of traffic. Occasional shouts from drunks and angry pedestrians reminded her that people were out there. Civilization, going about its nighttime business. Oblivious. Meanwhile, she cowered against a dumpster in some dark alley, a seeming world away. Her body was literally drained, and she felt lucky to be alive.

“We need to get you to a hospital,” Molly said. She turned to the side and watched Walter pace up and down in the darkness, hissing to himself. “And then I need to alert the authorities, tell them what’s going on in that place.”

Cat swished some water in her mouth, then spit it out in a pale, blue stream. She wiped her chin with one of the few clean patches of her shirt. “Those probably were the authorities,” she said.

“They were going to kill me, weren’t they?” Molly inspected the mark in her arm, wondering how many times that needle had been used. Her vein seemed red and irritated, standing out against her pale skin. She worried she was imagining things. She looked up at Cat. “They’re rigging the elections, right? They were gonna take it all—every ounce I had, weren’t they?”

Cat nodded and splashed some water on her face. She looked up at Molly. “Was at least six dead in there.”

“But why?” Molly didn’t get it. Living people gave blood forever. It was as dumb as a parasite killing its host. Didn’t politicians need to keep their constituents alive, at the very least? She started to say something to Cat about it, then saw her face as the water washed away the blood. Molly leaned forward from the dumpster and gaped at the Callite’s lips, touching her own. “Your face—!”

“Still bad?” Cat asked, smiling a little.

“No, I—your lips , I could’ve sworn—”

“I’m fine.” Cat bent the hose to stop the flow and handed it out to Molly. “What about you? You need a doctor? They do anything ’sides bleed you?”

Molly drank some more water and shook her head. She ran the cool liquid over the pads of her fingers, numbing them a little. “No, I just… feel a little weak. I… I’d be dead if you hadn’t come along.”

“We!” Walter hissed from the darkness.

Cat and Molly smiled at each other, complete strangers sharing a post-adrenaline moment where bonds were immediate and humor oddly enticing. Again, she marveled at how untouched Cat appeared. What had seemed a missing tooth must’ve been darkened by blood. And perhaps some of the blood on her belonged to another Callite—from a donor bag, or something. She watched as Cat reached down to adjust one of the strips of fabric around her thigh, bringing it up to hide a tattoo of some sort, a purple line that encircled her brown, scaly leg.

“So, I’m Molly,” she said, holding out her hand. “Not quite how I’d hoped to meet you.”

Cat wiped her own hand on the back of her shorts and held it out.