Eat'em (20 page)

Chapter
46

“What did I think as the blade entered the heart of Dr. Reeder?” I repeat the question. Gomes nods for me to go on. “I thought it was over. I thought it would be the catalyst of an outbreak nobody would deny. I thought the police force would put an end to it. But I didn’t think this. I didn’t think I would be stuck in a never ending trial for the rest of my life. I didn’t think that.”

Never ending is more hopeful than anything else. The truth is, the trial is coming to a close. The audience has grown restless. The lawyers have run out of reasons to postpone the inevitable. I’m on the stand for presumably the last time. One last time to be made a mockery. One last time before judgment.

“I spent my life with the ability to see things others can’t,” I said. “It wasn’t some magical ability I could control, nor was it some superpower that arrived at puberty, I was simply born with miraculous vision. At times it’s been a curse. I’d be on a date and suddenly I can’t tell where my fork ends and my food begins. A distraction. Other times, it’s a blessing. I never lose my car keys, for instance.”

“Funny,” Gomes says. “Where are you going with this?”

“A few years ago,” I say, “I stumbled into a bathroom, and I saw something nobody else could see. A man, Louise Parsons, biting into the neck of a woman. Carrie Gerberich. When I tried to find out why I saw this, I was forced to end Louise’s life in order to save my own. How do I share the burden of something only I can see? Sure, Professor Kempter ran experiments. Nobody believes her either. That’s my only corroboration. My family. My friends. If they take this stand, they risk their lives. And for what? More stories nobody will believe. There’s got to be a bad guy, and that role has fallen on me. All I ever wanted to do was help. But as you said, I’m here for what I’ve done, not what I wanted to do.”

“That’s right,” Gomes says. “And what you’ve done is confessed to a series of murders. And you’re only real argument for doing so is that you can see things others can’t.”

“Can I show you a couple magic tricks?” I ask.

“I don’t know if I care to entertain this idea,” Judge Brentt says. He gives me a stern look. The kind that suggests he is a couple headaches away from beating me half to death with his gavel.

“It’s I who wish to entertain you, Your Honor,” I say. “It’s nothing quite so incredible as pulling a rabbit out of a hat, and I assure you, if I had a disappearing act, I would have done it long ago.”

“I’ve got a disappearing act,” Eat’em laughs.

“Make it quick,” Judge Brentt says. “And if I find this act of yours to be as irrelevant as I think it’s going to be, I swear I’m going to add contempt of court to your charges and start stacking your time in lockup.”

“Is that charge worse than murder?” I ask. The judge’s face drills a hole in my spirit and I drop the attitude. “Alright, it’s a two-parter. First, I need Lieutenant Bellecroix.”

The lieutenant’s face turns beet red. He sits at the back of the auditorium. He’s been trying to hide from me for a while.

“Lieutenant,” I say, “I need you to do two things. First, give Officer Cameron your handcuffs. Not your keys. The keys, I want you to lie down right in front of you, so everyone can see them. Officer Cameron, if you would, please come up here and put the cuffs on my wrists. Nobody freak out, okay. Neither of the kind policemen are infected.”

I hold my hands in front of me and wait for the sergeant to cuff me. I flash a quick smile to Big Mike, who’s mouthing something like “What are you freaking doing?”

As Cameron locks the cuffs to my wrists and tightens them a couple clicks too tight, I turn my attention back to Bellecroix. “Now, Lieutenant, as he’s doing this, I’d like you to find a dollar bill. It doesn’t matter if it’s yours or someone else’s. I just need you to hold one up nice and flat so everyone can see it. Any denomination is fine.”

He removes a money clip from his breast pocket and dramatically unfolds a dollar from it. He rubs it on the pew in front of him and holds it up.

“Alright, you ready for this,” I say. “The serial number is A86998541G. It’s dated 2006. On the back is a ‘Where’s George?’ stamp with the URL circled in red ink. In black ink, written under the stamp, it reads ‘Georges dead.’ There’s a missing apostrophe. Someone tried to erase it with a pink eraser from a number 2 pencil. If you hold it up to the light you’ll see the microscopic fragments stuck in the bill’s threads.”

Bellecroix flips the dollar and examines it. He grunts and puts it back into his money clip, sliding it into his pocket as he does so.

“How’d I do?” I ask.

“You weren’t even close.”

“Are you sure?” I ask. “I have a feeling nobody is going to believe you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’ll tell you if you unlock my cuffs,” I say.

“Not a chance,” Bellecroix says.

“Why not?” I ask. “Don’t you have the key?”

In front of the lieutenant is a set of handcuffs. It’s the same set that was on my wrists. Eat’em had replaced the lieutenant’s key with them as I described his dollar. The same key I held in my outstretched hand.

“Pretty cool trick,” I said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

Chapter 47

Val overreacted. I didn’t need to go to a hospital. As much as I refused, my dependence on my uncle’s Mustang prevented me from having my way.

I laid down in the back seat with my head on Dixie’s lap and a dirty rag pressed to my chest. Val grabbed it from the trunk. It smelled like oil and added a bitter taste to my coppery blood. Surely, it poisoned me, but as I pulled it away, Val reached back and smacked my hand.

“Keep it on the wound, Jake-ass,” he said. “If you get blood on my upholstery again I’m going to lose my mind.”

“It’s not even bleeding that bad,” my voice sounded faint.

“Yeah, well, it’s bad enough you’re going to need some stitches. And that’s only if you didn’t puncture a vein or an artery or something. Christ, Jacob, this is pretty messed up.”

“Ugh,” Eat’em said. He banged his head against the center console. Neither of us were hospital fans. He hated them ever since he discovered they weren’t giant warehouses for what he thought were special edition ice cream trucks marked ECNALUBMA. He groaned before saying, “Do we have to ride in another Ec-na-lub-ma? I can wait in the car, yes?”

“Yeah,” I said. It was more a response to Val than the demon, though I really didn’t care if he came in or not. He saved my life. That was enough to ask of him for one day.

“Why you so afraid of hospitals, anyway?” Isaac asked from the front passenger seat.

“I’m not afraid,” I said, “I just don’t like them.”

“Why’s that?”

“Who does?”

“You got a point,” he said, “but for a guy with the tendency to get bloodied up and get into knife fights, you sure hate them more than most.”

I dabbed a build up of bloody saliva from the inside of my mouth, regretting it immediately. Peeling the rag from my chest felt like ripping out a hot coal from an open sore and worse yet, the rag tasted like the inside of a Jiffy Lube.

“Well, Isaac,” I said, “I don’t exactly have a great experience with doctor visits.”

“Sensitive to needles?”

“Nope.”

“You weren’t…” he turned around and gasped dramatically, “touched… were you?”

“No, Isaac,” I said, “the last time I was in a hospital was the day my parents were murdered.”

Sick patients galore filled the waiting room. A child cuddled on her mother’s lap, a man with rash, another with a broken arm, chest pain, headaches, a woman with ankles so large and misshapen she was destined to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair.

The air smelled like sickness. Coughs and moans drowned out any potential of happy thoughts. The implementation of universal healthcare brought all walks of life for all illnesses severe and imagined to the Emergency Room. One guy looked nothing worse than hung over. One had a runny nose. One sat cross-legged on the floor, playing a shooting game on a handheld device. Which was great, because I had nothing more I wanted to do than spend the rest of my evening in a room with sick people and poor air circulation.

“Next,” a cinnamon-skinned clerk called me to the sign-in window. She kept her face buried in her computer and asked, “What are you here for, sweetie?”

“Busted lip,” I mused, peeling the rag from my shoulder. I wanted to throw up.

She looked up from the screen and said, “Oh, honey. That doesn’t look good. You shouldn’t play with knives.”

My heart skipped a beat.

A pulse ran from the bottom of her neck, up her cheek, and through her left eye, briefly dilating the pupil.

“Never mind,” I said, backing up. “I’m fine.”

“Nonsense,” she flashed a wicked grin. “Something like that needs to be seen right away, Jacob.”

My heart racing, I rushed across the room where Val and Dixie waited with Isaac. “I can’t be seen here. We need to go.”

“What are you going on about?” Val said. “Did we not just go through this?”

“We did. I can’t. Let’s just hit the pharmacy on the way back. I’ll grab a suture kit.”

“You can’t stitch your own shoulder,” Dixie said, her face contorted in confusion.

“I can,” a stinging pang of fear rolled up my chest. A peppery ball of panic, built up from my ribcage, formed into a tangible beast, spiked with fear, the color of dread. It clawed its way up my throat, pushing serrated talons into my flesh as it ascended. It lifted itself into my mouth and bored deeper into my skull until the acidic buildup behind my eyes grew uncontainable. Tears slid down my cheeks. I attempted to shake the feeling and said, “I can’t be here, Valentine. Dixie. I can’t. I have to go.”

Dixie softened and nodded understanding. “Okay, Jacob,” she said, “let’s go. We’ll drop by the pharmacy, get some gauze, antiseptic, whatever. I’m sure I can stitch you up. It’s alright.”

“You’re serious?” Isaac scoffed. “Look, I don’t want to belittle your traumatic experience, or whatever, but you sew that thing up wrong or don’t clean it right and you’re going to make it ten times worse.”

“Val,” I said, “I can’t see a doctor here.”

“Come on, Isaac,” Val said, “I’m sure Dixie can figure out a needle and thread.”

“Jacob!”

The three of us turned toward the entryway to the ER. The male nurse holding the door open looked like a young Keanu Reeves, his stubbled jowl drew back in a forced grin.

“You’re up, buddy,” he said.

I shook my head.

“Dude,” Isaac nudged me, “it’s not that big a deal. As much as I’d enjoy watching your girlfriend mangle you with a fishhook and a pair of pliers, don’t you think you’ll be much better off in the hands of a professional?”

“No.”

Val gestured for the nurse to wait a second longer and said, “Jakester, it’s alright. We’ll be right here.”

Chapter
48

I clinched the rag, wet with blood and oil, so tightly I felt warm liquid drip from my knuckles. I drudged down the hallway, following the Keanu-cool nurse at a distance. We passed medic after medic with the same dead-eyed stare. The same shark-toothed smile. The mind-rotting parasite.

Each hungered glare stalked my every movement. Like the lenses of an asylum they monitored me, tracked me, prevented my escape.

The nurse led me into a room in the center of a forked hallway. Emergency exits flickered at the end of three of the corridors. An Operating Room and group of elevators stood toward the back of a fourth hall behind a reception desk guarded by two more infected medical personnel. Finally there was the way I came in. All equal distances from the small room with a plastic cot adorned with paper sheets.

“Go ahead and have a seat, Jacob,” the nurse said, holding the door for me. “The doctor will be right with you.”

I halted outside the door, too stiff to move.

“It’s alright, buddy,” he said. “Ain’t gonna bite you.”

His smile bore an uncanny resemblance to an angler fish. The illumination of a deathtrap. Yet, I couldn’t run. Not with Dixie and Val and Isaac at risk in the waiting room. I could only hope this room wouldn’t be my final resting place.

And what would they do to my uncle and girlfriend and neighbor? Kill them too? Turn them into grotesques?

“We’re going to fix you right up, Jacob,” the nurse’s smile dropped. “Get in the fucking room!”

I did as told and the door shut behind me.

No time.

That’s what I had to deal with. Precisely no time. Now I was in the room, they no longer needed the charade. There was no more reason to play doctor, and I had exactly no time to think of a way out of a room with no windows, one door, omnipresent security guards, and the disadvantage of said room being dead center a labyrinth, which happened to be a hospital.

No time.

I pressed my back to the corner furthest from the door. More than anything I just needed my eyes to do their trick. “Come on,” I said aloud, “do it.”

On cue, the room unfolded in an incredible panorama. From my left: A poster of Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, signed; corkboard, notes, calendars, ten thumbtacks, a picture of a little girl, a wife, a family; a receptacle, empty but for one latex glove and a tube of ointment rolled to the nozzle; a red call button, speaker box; a comic strip above the light switch, Blondie, the punch line unfunny; stool; door; counter, sink, hand sanitizer, bar of soap, paper towels, bedpan; glass jar of individually wrapped sterilized needles, lid shut, twists off; cupboards, closed; television, flat screen; chair, green cushion on birch frame, unwieldy; IV drip, metal rod on steel platform. In the center of the room; the bed, pull out drawers, manual recline lever, on casters, wheel closest to me has foot-locked brake applied.

All my focus narrowed to the door as it opened.

“Jacob, Jacob, Jacob,” the doctor said as he entered the room. “Privacy at last, huh?”

His chin scruff looked more Grinch Stole Christmas than Wolverine. Same could be said of his eyebrows, which were so dark and drawn so close to his deep eye sockets, I wondered if he could see anything above the bridge of his nose. His head was otherwise bald as if a cruel god pulled what was once on his scalp through the pores on his face.

“I’m Dr…” he looked down at his nametag, “Sri-long-cole, is it? Sriloungkhol… that’s a helluva name ain’t it? What do you think that is? Puerto Rican?”

“Looks Asian.”

“Asian?” he said, looking at his arms. “Am I Asian? Weird. I get mixed up from time to time. Asian?”

“Yeah.”

“Asian one minute Puerto Rican the next,” he said. “Did you know, I know fifty-six different languages?”

“No.”

“That’s cool, right? There was a time I didn’t even know fifty-six languages existed. Yesterday, I learned Farsi. What an interesting language. I could write in it too, if I wanted.”

“You must impress yourself when you meet you at the bar.”

He laughed and spun toward the end of the bed, pushing himself away and toward the Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster. “See this? Mr. Sriloungkhol tells everyone that comes in here this is Audrey Hepburn’s genuine signature. It’s not though. This is a manufactured signature. Mr. Sriloungkhol bought this from a used video store for seven dollars and ninety-eight cents for his wife, Mrs. Sriloungkhol. They haven’t seen each other in a very long time. He wasn’t faithful…”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “He must have not been himself.”

“HA!” he said as he spun himself in a circle. “You’re right, Jacob. Mr. Sriloungkhol wasn’t himself. He realized he could be anyone he wanted to be.”

“I bet.”

“He realized he could do anything he wanted to do,” he continued. “He realized he could live a life fully without consequences or repercussions or better yet, the fear of death.”

“Everyone should fear death,” I said.

He stopped the stool and kicked his feet up on the foot of the bed. “Do you fear death, Jacob?”

“I do.”

“That’s why people come here,” he said, spinning in a circle with his arms out wide. “Fear. I am the destroyer of fear. Of death. Through me, they have everlasting life. I am their savior. Do you believe me yet?”

“Sure,” I said, “though I’d say pestilence was a better word for you.”

“Pestilence?” he smiled. “You know, I do enjoy our chats. You’re a smart kid. If only you weren’t also demented, because unfortunately, I just can’t have that.”

“Of course.”

“Did you know that I can cure all of them?” He gestured in the direction of the waiting room.

“To what extent?”

“Any extent, probably,” he said. “Cancer, heart disease, you name it.”

“You?”

“Me?”

“Yes,” I said. “Can you cure them of you?”

He drew near the foot of the bed and rested his chin on his elbows. Then he sighed heavily. “I’m not an illness,” he said. “I’m not a parasite. I’m a god.”

“No,” I said, “you’re an infection.”

“There’s no infection!” he said thunderously. A sliver crawled from his brow, across the top of his scalp, disappearing behind his head. “A parasite cannot have a conscience! I am a god, Jacob! I am God.”

“Is that why you were outsmarted by a demon?”

He paused. His Cro-Magnon eyebrows raised and with a snort he erupted into laughter. At first he let out a mild chortle, which quickly evolved into a nauseating guffaw. His raucous laughter rattled to the bone. After a moment he composed himself enough to say, “Outsmarted by a demon? You mean you?”

“No,” I said, “I mean the half-pint sugar-addicted crimson demon that gave me the knife I stuck in your chest.”

He laughed. “I like you, Jacob, I really do, but you see, you’re kind of a problem. I can’t let you go around killing me and I can’t bring you into my little family. So what do I do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes you do.”

He meant to kill me. I represented some sort of loose end… I was the threat.

“If you kill me,” I said, “you’re going to have one very upset demon on your hands.”

“Does this demon have a name?” he asked.

“Eat’em.”

He laughed again. “Eat’em. Eat’em. Eat’em. What a name! I remember you mentioning him before. Does he eat people? Does he eat their souls?”

“Candy.”

“Ha!” Dr. Sriloungkhol said, “Where is he?”

“He’s behind you.”

He twisted the stool around and I moved all at once.

I stomped the brake on the bed, yanking it toward the doctor’s back. The momentum threw him headlong into the trashcan and onto the floor.

The jar. I knocked the IV over as I sprung from one side of the rolling bed to the other, grabbed the jar and threw it across the room into Audrey Hepburn. A shower of glass and needles rained down on the doctor. He was on hands and knees.

Again with the bed, I rolled it into him, knocking him off balance.

No time.

He still blocked my passage to the door.

With haste I grabbed two packaged needles from the shattered remnants at my feet.

The doctor lifted himself to one knee and shoved the bed back in my direction. I jumped and rolled over it, banging my shoulder against the metal frame as I did. I ignored the sting and thrust both needles into the doctor’s face, without bothering to tear the plastic off first. One hit below his right eye, the other embedded into his cheek, piercing his gums. He roared and grabbed his face. He would heal.

Stumbling over him, I threw open the door, flinging myself into the hallway.

The receptionists were up before I was out.

One defied gravity, racing across the ceiling on all fours. Her hands and feet were both split down the center, gripping ceiling beams in much the same way a chameleon grabs onto a branch.
They were evolving
… The other ran with an inhuman intensity, covering distance at half my pace.

I took off the way I came, sprinting with all my might toward the waiting room. Doors flung open as I passed them as others joined the chase. I slammed into a door that opened to my left, I juked right, grabbed the handle of a second door and yanked it open as I ran past without missing a step.

Halfway there.

My legs pumped faster as the infected drew nearer. Fifteen yards left.

Their feet clomped right behind mine.

“Val!” I yelled. “Isaac!”

Ten yards left. Nine.

“Dixie!”

A hand grazed my wrist. I yanked forward and picked up the pace.

Five yards.

Four. Three. Two.

The beast on the ceiling dropped behind me, inches away.

I shoved through the door, running with all my might.

I screamed, “RUN!!!”