Bodies Are Disgusting (7 page)

It's painfully obvious to anyone with eyes
that Simon is fighting back a stupid grin and losing ground fast.
"Luke, hey! This is my friend, Doug. Doug, this is
Luke!"

Lucien's expression doesn't change as he
glances in your direction. "Oh, we've met," he says at length. "I
plan to braid her entrails into a most delightful adornment once I
have fulfilled my duties to my master."

You stare at Lucien, dumbfounded.
"What?"

He cocks his head to one side, "I said that
we'd bumped into each other earlier. Don't you remember?" His voice
sounds almost innocent around the question. At your blank stare, he
continues, "I almost ran you over."

"Oh, right, yeah," you say, suddenly unsure.
"I wasn't paying attention, either, I guess."

He smirks. "Yes, well. Let me make it up to
you, Alice. Simon, would you mind bringing her a drink on
me?"

The use of your legal name makes your heart
lurch and the blood drain from your face. You share that particular
piece of information with very few people. How the
hell
had
Lucien known it? You reach into your back pocket to check your
wallet. The chances of him having stolen it during your little
confrontation were slim, but it was the only reasoning your brain
could produce that made any sort of sense.

Lucien raises a hand. "No, no, put your wallet
away. I'm being serious about the drink being on me." His smirk
grew until it was an impossibly wide grin. "It is the least I can
do, considering I plan to nail your hands to a wall above your head
and then use a delightfully sharp knife to slowly fillet the flesh
away from your bones. Starting with your face."

Before you can process his words and come up
with any sort of reaction, he lashes out with one hand and digs his
fingers into your throat. His fingernails worm their way into your
skin as if they have a life of their own. You try to yelp, cry out,
do
something
, but the only thing that comes out is a
strangled sort of gurgle. Your hands fly to his wrist, clawing
desperately at it, but his grin only grows. It's a separate entity
unto itself. It's an amused cancerous growth on his face, lined
with a billion needle teeth.

Your vision swims, and the next thing you
know, you're lying on the floor with Lucien's fingers buried in the
flesh of your neck and one of his knees on your chest. You flail at
him weakly, but your arms feel boneless. He merely chuckles. "Oh my
sweet darling, what I would give to wear your skin right now," he
says, and wiggles his fingers in your neck. The tips of them stroke
the back of your trachea before ever-so-gently pressing on it. You
try to scream, and this time he lets you.

* * *

You jolt awake, your hands going for your
throat to verify there aren't actually holes there. You're still in
the coffee shop, but it's nearly empty. Your laptop sits in front
of you, the screensaver cycling through different soothing fractal
images you downloaded one morning after work. Simon's walking
toward you. "Ready to go?"

Blinking at him owlishly, you nod. "Yeah. Uh,
just let me pack up. I kind of zoned out, I guess."

He scowls at you. "No shit, Sherlock. You
barely said two words to Luke after he sat down. What the hell were
you reading, anyway?"

Your mouth opens, but you realize with a
chilly sort of feeling that you don't even remember. With the flick
of a finger across your computer's track-pad, you dispel your
screen saver and glance at the last thing you left open.

It's the thread you were following before
Lucien arrived, but there have been several more posts after the
final one you read. "Just... some dumb internet bullshit," you
hedge. "Sorry."

Despite yourself, your eyes skim over some of
the new posts before you shut your browser down. One anonymous user
writes, "tracked ms's ip. dude's haus is on the other end of my
town. good samaritaned this bitch n called the cops. gonna see if
that shit makes news @ 11."

The most recent post is dated approximately
ten minutes ago. "THE GIRL IS DEAD, ALICE. AND IF YOU ARE
IMPRUDENT, YOU MAY SOON JOIN HER. <3"

On a lark one day in your youth, when you had
been feeling particularly frustrated with your legal name, you had
looked up how common it was. For over a century, it has been within
the top five hundred girls' names in the United States. It even
made a showing on the list of top thousand boys' names in the late
1800's. There are any number of people that the final anonymous
poster could be speaking to, or perhaps they simply picked a name
at random to try to unnerve anyone with that name.

Yet, as you shut your laptop down and slide it
back into its carrying bag, you can't shake the weirdly persistent
worry that it might have been aimed at you.

* * *

That night is blissfully devoid of dreams, as
is the night that follows. In the interim, you open your mailbox to
find your first bill from the hospital (it contains more digits
than you particularly care to think about), flush the stragglers of
your codeine-laced painkillers, and get a much-needed haircut while
Simon makes a show of reading overly trashy Hollywood gossip mags
in the waiting area. He makes a similar show of looking bored while
you shop for a replacement phone.

You bumble through your final appointment with
the neurologist for the next six months, surprising yourself by
remaining silent on the issue of your hallucinations; when you open
your mouth to try, the words stick in your throat and you simply
close your mouth again. The whole time, you toy with the silver
band on your finger. The neurologist scribes you a tentatively
clean bill of health, along with a note allowing you to operate a
motor vehicle at night and a forklift again. When you send JD a
text to let him know, his response is simply, "Good. Tomorrow,
6PM."

And with that, life starts to feel normal. You
feel a pang of sadness every time you glance outside and don't see
your old car parked in the driveway, but the bruises are all mostly
progressing to the gross blotchy green-yellow phase that heralds
their inevitable fading away. It's getting easier and easier to
write off the wreck and ensuing days as a nasty
nightmare.

Work is hard, and it makes you notice
contusions in places you hadn't realized you had them, but the
repetition of shifting papers adds just another soothing layer to
the patina of "ordinary" that's beginning to set in. JD teases you
mercilessly about getting into a wreck to beg off of work when the
warehouse is at its coldest and least comfortable. You take his
words for what they really mean: "I'm glad you aren't
dead."

By the time you've run the paper and bundled
the stacks set to mail and the stacks set to be placed in the
dispensers, you're bone-weary and aching. It takes every ounce of
self-discipline to drag your sorry carcass home instead of passing
out in your rental at three in the morning. It's a very near
thing.

Through the grace of God and caffeine (which
are one and the same in your mind now), you stumble into your home
and manage somehow not to bark your shins on anything in your rush
to get to the bathroom and out of your work clothes. You have ink
smears on your hands and arms, smudges on your face, and you
managed to pour soda down your front. The only thing that could
prevent you from soaking in the shower is a lack of hot water (a
problem you know for a fact you won't have to deal with, given the
size of the water tank in this house).

You don't bother with any lights; there's
enough glow from the street lamps outside filtering through the
bathroom window for you to stumble your way through disrobing and
crawling into the shower. The first blast of water that hits you is
frigid, but it warms quickly enough that you don't even have time
to jump back. The hot water pelts your skin, the warmth soothing
away some of the residual soreness after a while. You let your head
tilt backward and rest against the tiled wall at the back of the
tub.

* * *

The water has gone cold.

You don't remember shutting your eyes, but you
know you must have if the shower turned chilly.

The knobs of the tap squeak, and the water
slows to a trickle at your feet. In the gloom, you see a slender,
pale hand disappear on the other side of the shower curtain. You
want to push yourself up, jump away at the start of someone
intruding on your shower, but your limbs refuse to move. All you
can do is stare ahead, wide-eyed, your heart beating quick and loud
in your ears.

The curtain draws back, and you lay eyes on
the skinny form of Ori. This time, they are completely nude and
even in the dim light you can tell that they lack any sort of
sexual definition. Their skin is so pale that they practically glow
as they step gracefully into the tub with you. There are no
nipples, no navel, not even any signs of how their body expels
waste. You can count every rib, separated as they are by little
gashes that might have been gills if they'd been born in the water.
Through the shadows you can see their pointed teeth glint like
little ivory jewels.

"I can't leave you alone, can I, Douglas?"
They kneel between your legs and curl forward to rest their head on
your chest. "I turn a blind eye for three days and you somehow
manage to attract the attention of my nearest, dearest, and most
bitter rival. Whatever shall I do with you."

After expending a bit of effort, your tongue
decides to start working again. "Could always just give me up as a
lost cause."

Ori hisses against your chest. "That is not an
option, dearest Douglas. You are too valuable for me to simply let
you go." They bury their nose in the hollow space between your
breasts, clamping their arms around your ribcage to keep you from
squirming away. "No, I believe I shall just have to keep a closer
watch on my investment. It is simply unfortunate that you should
draw the attention of the Breaker. He is not known to be gentle
with those who catch His eye."

You swallow, your throat feeling suddenly dry.
"I don't know what you're talking about."

The strange creature wrapped around you heaves
a sigh. Their fingers trail up your sides, skate across your chest,
and brush lightly against where your trachea is closest to the
skin. The places Lucien dug in his fingers blaze like fire under
Ori's touch, causing your breath to hitch and your body to jerk
away. But Ori's arms are implacable. "Don't lie to me, Douglas. If
nothing else, your body knows well what your mind refuses to see."
With another sigh, Ori pulls themself up your body until their eyes
are even with yours.

Even in the dark, they're like shimmering
pools of nothing that devour even the most trace amounts of light.
They're almost unnaturally large for Ori's face, lending them an
eerie quality like an alien child. You can't help but imagine an
entire race of Ori-people: skin stretched over bones like knives
and black pits for eyes and huge shark grins.

Their fingers grip your jaw, wrenching you
back to reality. "Focus, dear one. I let you be fallow for three
days as promised. It's time now to collect."

"Collect?" you ask, feeling like you've
swallowed a lump of lead.

Suddenly, you find yourself hauled upright,
clutched to Ori's chest. It feels like your legs won't support you,
but Ori's grip is (as always) iron-like. "Come. I have such
wonderful things to show you." Once they have you on your knees,
they shift their grip and stand you on both feet like a
well-behaved doll.

The world lurches underneath you; you can see
the walls of your bathroom warp and bubble like skin dunked in
acid. The tiles on the floor bow up, crack, erupt in little bursts
of black slime that congeals mid-air. Above you, the ceiling splits
open to reveal not the cluttered attic you know should be there,
but instead a noxiously gray-green sky filled with roiling clouds.
Sheetrock melts, timbers behind them turn black and rot, and you're
suddenly standing in what might as well be the burnt-out ribcage of
your home. Howling winds that reek of bad eggs and spoiled meat
pick up globules of goo and send them rolling along the
debris-covered floor.

"I made this for you," Ori breathes. The words
somehow reach your ears, though the wind tries to whip them away.
"For us."

"There's no 'us,'" you reply, but the words
are dry and cracked in your throat.

"Of course there is," says Ori. "There always
has been, and there will be until the end. Either you will succeed,
and we will rule this place together; or you will fail, and I will
take great pleasure in feasting upon your flesh as my consolation
prize."

Your throat burns, and you can't tell if it's
just an echo of what Lucien did or the acrid air getting to you.
"You're high," you croak.

"No, we are in fact rather low. Would you
prefer we were higher?" Ori says, and you regret ever having
learned a language with which to utter those two words.

Everything tilts and the ground rushes away
from you faster than your eyes can really track. Suddenly you're
hundreds of feet above the bombed-out shell of your home, looking
at the street on which you live. All of the houses resemble yours:
gutted, rotting, twisted parodies of how you know them to be. The
street bubbles over with that black slime, which flows like a
bloated river toward the city. The sky is still bruise-colored, but
the skyline where you know the city's skyscrapers should be glows
an angry, infected red. Below you, you hear a single bird chirp.
Something long and dripping emerges from the muck of the street to
snatch it and drag it beneath the depths. Your stomach
churns.