The Reincarnation

Father Dante missed Tracy. It was so lonely in the room he had been drawn to. What was happening? he wondered. He was sick. He knew he was sick. Good God, it was like everyone there had some sort of disease. Everyone looked so anemic.

He looked at the bed. Except her, he thought. She doesn’t look that way. He turned on the light. A young woman, about eighteen, lay in bed. She was sleeping, but it was a restless sleep. Her arm stuck out from under the covers. It was covered in tattoos – spider webs, crosses, skulls.

Father Dante walked over to her. She’s beautiful, he thought. Like Tracy. He lay his head near hers. Where is Tracy? he wondered. He looked at the girl. He noticed her lips. They were pink with the blood that coursed through them. She was waking up. Maybe it was the light, Father Dante thought. He got up and turned it out.

That’s better, he thought, laying down beside her.

Tracy saw a young man on the bed in the room she had been drawn to. This isn’t right at all, she thought, this can’t be right. The man was waking up. He had short, spiked hair, and a red tattoo that said “Ozzy” on his arm.

“Baby,” he said, “I had no idea they were gonna do this. You wanna lay down?”

“No, there must be some mistake. I think I’m in the wrong room.” She ran to the door. It was locked.

“Mistake or not, I’ve been in the freezer for sixteen years and there’s one thing I miss more than anything.”

In a rush of excitement, he was out of bed and across the room before Tracy turned around.

He grabbed her just as her energy left her, leaving him holding her limp and vulnerable body.

Wow, she’s cute, Rob thought. She looked about his age, too. This was so cool. He walked over to her. Man, she’s cute, he told himself again. He bent down to kiss her.

He had her lower lip in his mouth and felt a strange compulsion. His mind echoed his sentiments – that’ll get rid of that empty feeling inside you, that’ll fill you back up. Rob couldn’t tell if this feeling came from within him or from some external force. Either way, he didn’t argue.

He pinched the girl’s nostrils closed, put his mouth over hers, and started sucking the life out of her.

Juliet Ward was already in bed with the patient she had come all this way to see.

She had found her appetite again.

Rudy Johnson felt like shit. What the hell’s wrong with me? he thought, I must have the dt’s somethin’ fierce.

Melvin Waters didn’t like the look of things. He had sent the boy in alone while he sized up the situation. Something was wrong here, he thought. Something was very wrong. He decided to get a closer look when he heard a noise behind him. It was a crazy sound, like an enormous dog was shambling up behind him.

What in Hell is going on here? Bishop thought as he walked swiftly toward the nurse’s station. He’d had enough. The hallways were crammed with sickly white children. A cacophonous symphony of screams sandpapered what was left of his nerves. Some of the rooms he had passed contained terrible sights. Patients were being outright killed by the Others. Where in Hell was Persey?

He finally reached the nurse’s station. The doors at the end of the hallway were wide open, jammed with pallid children. Behind them, he saw something that at first he thought was a trick of the light. Looking closer he saw that it was not. A creature stood outside the doors of the Lab that had seven heads and ten horns. One of its heads looked like it was wounded to death, but the wound was healed. A man stood beside it with the mark of the Beast stamped on his forehead.

Bishop turned around and ran.

David relinquished control over John and let his mind wander. He found himself back on the hillside in the graveyard. The hill was alive. People, mostly children, were swarming it. He found John, who looked happy to see him. John took his hand and led him to the top of the hill. The solitary tombstone on the very top grew as they approached it. It became a large, square structure resembling a mausoleum. John led David inside through the door that appeared as they approached it.

The mausoleum seemed larger on the inside than it had from the outside. The wall opposite the door was divided into dozens, then hundreds, of rectangular sections. There was writing on each panel, but David couldn’t understand it. John could read the writing, though, and after shaking David’s hand and then dropping it, he walked toward the wall. As he did, a section moved forward. As it slid toward him, David realized that it was a drawer. It stopped when it was six feet from the wall.

John lay down in the drawer. As soon as he did, the drawer began to close. David ran over to it, but he was too late to stop it: he didn’t know if he could – didn’t know if he should. It closed all the way, and John was gone from view.

The entire structure seemed to fold in on itself, transparent to the mind and eye, and David found himself staring at the solitary tombstone on the top of the hill again. He descended the hillside, sidestepping the throng of children gathered on it. He walked to the gates and turned around once he was outside of them. The gates swung closed.

The children on the hill started to run around on all fours, like sheep. As if to answer for this bizarre behavior, a shepherd appeared on the top of the hill where, just moments before, John had accepted his destiny. The shepherd was cloaked in a long white robe, the hood of which covered its face. It carried a long, wooden staff, curved at the top. While David studied this solitary figure, the children did, indeed, turn into sheep, as if David were dreaming within his dream. He looked back at the shepherd, and it, too, transformed. The white robe went black as the staff was turned upside down, becoming a metal scythe. The lamb-children ran to the top of the hill where the shepherd-reaper stood, and it methodically sliced them open with the scythe, their mangled, broken, all-too-human bodies littering the hillside, their blood turning the green grass crimson.

David found himself rising from the planet. From the air, he could tell that what he had seen on the hillside was only a fraction of what was going on in the cemetery. Children were everywhere, hundreds of them, covering the planet, all running toward the top of the hill, and their fate.

David saw the tombstones in their circular patterns moving and turning, going round and round, like great wheels.