The Hunter Page 0,48

was moving, breaking up. Becoming a dark cloud.

Heading toward her.

Jenny looked once more at Julian, and then bees began to fall on her like hail. They clung to her arms, her shoulders, her breasts. She had to hold her arms away from her body in order to keep from crushing the ones on her sides. She knew that if she did that they would sting.

Then it simply became a nightmare, unreal.

They were heavy, covering her like a blanket. Too heavy. Jenny staggered. She shut her eyes because they were crawling out of her hair onto her face. She was inundated with bees, layer upon layer of them. They were clinging to each other now, because there was almost no part of her body clear of them. Her fingertips, some parts of her face. She felt their feet on her cheeks and wanted to scream, but she couldn't, she couldn't scream because if she did-if she did-They'd get into her mouth. And then she'd lose her sanity. But she couldn't breathe well enough through her nose. Her chest was heaving and their weight was crushing her. She was going to have to open her mouth.

She was crying silently, trying not to move, to disturb them more than she could help. Julian's voice came to her.

"Just say the word, Jenny."

She could only shake her head slightly. The barest minimum of motion. But what she could manage, she did. She was still sobbing without a sound, terrified to move, but she would not-she would not-give in.

You can do whatever you like to me, she thought. In the dark beneath her bee-covered eyes she tried to hold on to consciousness, but it was like a thin thread slipping through her fingers. She grasped at it, felt it being snatched away from her.

She was fainting. Falling. But she wouldn't give in.

When I hit the ground and crush them, they'll go mad. They'll kill me, she thought.

But she never said the word to stop it.

She felt the darkness come as she began to fall.

Chapter 12

Floating in gray dimness, she heard a clock strike three.

Wake up, she thought, but she didn't want to. She floated for a while again.

No, wake up, she thought. That's the alarm. You have to go to school... or something. You have to go see Zach.

Zach.

She was awake.

She was lying on the cold floor of her cousin's garage, chilled and stiff but bee-less. She looked at her hands and bare ankles. Not a mark. Julian hadn't let it happen.

But now she was stuck in a garage without a door. The light trap had only a curtain. All the other doors-the large one for cars and the regular one to the house-were simply missing, their spaces filled in with blank walls.

She had no idea what she was supposed to do next, and it was after three in the morning and she was tired.

Jenny looked at the corner of the studio where Zach took pictures. Zach's camera stood on a tripod. The tungsten floodlamp was turned on. The backdrop was a sheet of seamless paper from a roll maybe six feet wide. Zach had done a lot of photos by painting paper like that black and throwing handfuls of white flour at it. The result had looked a little like the Milky Way-white splashes on infinite space. Very strange and futuristic; Zach loved that kind of stuff.

This backdrop, though, had a door painted on it, too.

A knob protruded from the paper.

The way out, Jenny thought as she went over to it, but something inside her wasn't so sure. For some reason this black-and-white door made her chilled flesh creep.

What choice have you got? her mind asked simply.

She turned the knob. The door swung out. She stepped inside.

It was like being suspended among the stars. The door closed behind her, but Jenny scarcely noticed. The sky seemed very low, more like a ceiling. It was black with glowing white splotches. The ground was a velvety black dropcloth that went on forever in all directions.

It was awful, this sense of infinity all around, pulling at her. It reminded her of a dream she'd once had, where the ground stretched on endlessly, but the sky was close and solid overhead. Did Zach have the

same kind of dreams? Was this Zach's real nightmare?

The only landmarks in the limitless, featureless darkness were lamps-tungsten floodlamps like the ones Zach used. They formed little islands of brightness here and there, some white, some colored, fading out into the distance.

Jenny pivoted, trying