MalContents (13 page)

Sunny switched on the closest burner. Blue flames tipped in orange and yellow tongues sprang forth. Grinding her teeth, she aimed the gushing stump of her missing finger into the fire. Stopping her bleeding was her only goal. Right before the wall of pain crashed into her and she collapsed, Sunny caught the smell of roasting meat,
her
meat, and in a strange way, it didn’t smell half bad.

“ . . . tastes like chicken,” said a woman’s voice.

Sunny stirred. The voice wasn’t hers or I.B.’s. She explained it away as a hallucination and picked herself off the kitchen floor, careful of her right hand, which sang in exquisite agony. The wound hacked into the back of her leg was bitching now, too. Strangely, the one in her chest itched. She pegged that away as confused nerves. The tit-shanking had, until this morning, been her body’s only squeaky wheel, and she’d rightfully given it her full attention. Now that so many parts of her had been sliced and diced, it was impossible to listen to all of them equally.

The aroma of charred meat lingered. The reality of what had been done to her and in turn what she’d been forced to do to herself rolled over her, nauseating in its ugliness. A part of her body was gone forever, a piece of her that she had taken for granted for most of her life. A finger she used when she dressed and undressed, when she bathed and tidied up during other personal moments; a finger she’d used to bring pleasure to herself and to Joseph. More, one she called upon when she cooked in front of the camera. She could still fulfill her judging duties on
Slice and Dice
, but how would a missing finger impact
Sunny’s Side Up
?

Going on automatic, she staggered up the stairs to the bathroom and turned on the cold water. Without electricity to run the well pump, a weakening stream trickled out. Curiously, getting her hand under the water took more effort than thrusting it into the flames. For the first time, she saw the result of the crab’s handiwork, and hers.

A blackened stump, puckered around what she assumed to be bone, met her eyes. The water hit it like acid. But the bleeding had stopped. For a second, so did the pain. The itching at her chest sprang to the front of the unpleasant sensations line. Using her good hand, Sunny lifted her shirt. The tiniest of mushrooms had sprouted along her scar. She flicked them off and dug at the raised zipper of flesh with her nails until that, too, bled.

Somewhere in the cottage, a woman laughed. Sunny ceased scratching and shuddered.

“My Nona Bustamante was a hell of a cook. Better than you, you stupid twat,” said Rona Bustamante.

Sunny glanced toward the cellar door, where another
croak
sounded.

“She had recipes for wondrous things, and not only food. One time, she followed a recipe and the boy I liked who didn’t like me took a nasty spin on his motorcycle, right into a brick wall. It was beautiful to behold. So red, those bricks were, even days later, after the ants were done taking their fill . . .”

Sunny tracked the voice to the tote bag containing her laptop. She crept over and fumbled the case open. Rona Bustamante’s face dominated an open video file’s window. Her old apartment in Lovell Green was visible behind her. It all looked exactly as it had in the bitch’s audition tape, only this version apparently came interactive.

“Aah, there you are.”

Sunny set the laptop on the nearest counter.

“I thought I heard you tromping around up there, and screaming. Fucking racket, girlfriend. I assume you’ve met my little friends.”

Sunny shot a look out the closest window. Beyond the gritty residue on the outside of the pane, she saw half a dozen gray-shelled monstrosities clicking their jaundiced legs at the base of the deck stairs. The troops had massed, keeping her trapped inside, trapped until the thing in the cellar was ripe enough to detach from its stem and come thumping up the stairs to finish the job.

“So this nasty old bag, Nona Bustamante,” Sunny said, “she was some kind of witch?”

The cocky smirk fell from video-Rona’s face. “Don’t you dare insult my Nona! She was a fine, fine lady, and a hundred times the chef you are, whore.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, dear, I’m afraid you’re the one who is about to get fucked up. You think you’re so smart, you and your lousy sunny cooking. Stupid twat, you ain’t all that.”

“Maybe,” Sunny said in a voice so calm that it surprised even her. “But I didn’t steal your shitty recipe. I’m sorry . . . your slutbag
Nona’s
shitty recipe. She wasn’t the first to take a stab at crab-stuffed criminis.”

“What the hell is a ‘crimini’?”

“It’s a mushroom, you ignorant bitch,” Sunny said. “Baby portabellas, and if you understood half of what you think you do, you would have made it onto the show. But you’re too smart to even consider you might be wrong, is that it?”

“You evil
cunt
.”

“I’m the cunt?” Sunny parroted, and then she laughed. “Me? Oh, that’s right, I’m the one who had to have my grandmother the witch kill a man rather than deign to think he didn’t worship me. I’m the one who went after another chef with a knife over a shitty stuffed mushroom app recipe. You stupid bitch.”

And then her anger surged. She smacked the laptop off of the counter, using her right hand. The impact sent an explosion of hurt racing up her arm. Right before the pain hit fully, she saw the streak of crimson on the case of the flying laptop and realized she’d opened up the wound on her missing finger. The laptop struck the wall and fell.

“Sunny,” Rona sang. “I’m almost ready. Nona’s mushroom recipe . . . it’s so brilliant!”

Thick tears filled Sunny’s eyes, and breathing through the pain was almost impossible.

“Sunny, you thieving twat . . . I’m almost ready to finish what I started. I’m gonna come up those cellar stairs and hack you into bite-sized bits. And this time, I’m not stopping until you’re dead.”

The rolling boil took forever. Sunny grabbed the stewpot off the stove, holding its handles with the two oven mitts bearing her trademark lemon sun pattern, and carried it toward the open door. She walked across the deck and dumped the water down on the army of crab-things below. The boiling cascade struck three of the nightmares full-on and another two peripherally. The three she’d nailed skittered away, spilling over themselves in their death throes before coming apart in smears of putty. Animated ashes, thought Sunny. The ones she glanced staggered off, injured but not quite out of the fight. An equal number of uninjured soldiers took their places.

Given enough time and water, she might have gained the upper hand. As it was, she stuck the stewpot under the faucet and turned the handle, but a hollow gurgle issued forth in the absence of water. Without electricity to pump the well, the pipes had emptied.

There would be no escaping. She was trapped.

Sunny reached for the burner knob, intending to switch it off. At the last second, she left it on, not sure why. Her eyes fell into the pull of the blue-orange tongues, like the proverbial moth to the flame. In her mind’s eye, Sunny was back in Boston, in her trophy room with the exquisite view of the Charles River. Her eyes roamed the walls. James Beard. Emmy. The Silver Spoon Award. The framed newspaper clippings—
“Sunny Shines!”

Suddenly, she was with Joseph again, loving his swarthy pirate’s smile, his painfully handsome face, his sexy, masculine body. She loved his scent, his taste…she loved
him
. And she hadn’t needed to threaten him with some arcane witch’s spell in order to get him to care about her in return. For the first time in a long while, she genuinely missed being with him. She needed him but, more so, she also wanted him.

And then she was in the kitchen, the one at the network where Sunny sliced and prepared vibrant, delicious meals. Cooking was her life. The flame reminded her of that. She had learned from the best, Grammy Rae, and, sharing what she knew with the world, she had made the world that much better a place. The flame . . .

“Sunny,” Rona cooed. The cellar gave one final croaking groan. “
I’m coming for you
.”

Sunny blinked. The flame burned an afterimage into her vision.

She loved Joseph, loved cooking. Sunny loved her life and wasn’t about to give it up to a jealous, vindictive, and delusional bitch.

She reached toward the knife block, right as the first creaking footstep sounded on the staircase. The blade came free with a cutting, musical note. She passed the handle from her right hand to her left, then back to the right.

Creak . . .

“Boo!” Video-Rona said.

The door opened. The thing standing on the other side was an approximation of the human form, gray-skinned, naked, hairless. The lumpen collection of limbs bore fingers and toes. A gap in its flesh formed a mouth. It had black eyes, breasts, even a discoloration marked by bristling hairs, a mushroom’s mole. It was Rona Bustamante, reincarnated in fungus.

Sunny’s grip on the knife tightened.

“Time to die, bitch,” Video-Rona said.

The thing lunged. Sunny dodged, swung. She jabbed the knife’s blade into the mushroom’s side. The clean slice was like trying to stab at marshmallow and yielded no blood, not even any appearance of pain. In one fluid motion, the thing spun around, nailing her with a punch. The blow didn’t feel like being pummeled by fluff; it was like being clobbered by concrete.

She staggered back, still clutching the knife.

“Oh, you can’t stop me that easily,” the bitch on the laptop taunted. “This is one recipe where the food eats the chef.”

And then she started to cackle, and Sunny remembered the flame, and in the madness of everything happening around her, a glimmer of sanity crossed her mind. The recipe. The crabs . . . boiling water had destroyed them. What could destroy a mushroom?

The Rona-thing lunged, grabbed hold of Sunny by the collar of her shirt, and clouted her hard enough to send her flying across the kitchen. She lost the knife in the fracas, and then her balance when she tried to stand. The room spun. Only the certainty of what she needed to do in order to return to the life she loved kept her from surrendering to the brilliant eruption of pain.

410
. The numbers loomed in her thoughts stronger than her fear, stronger than the Rona-thing, which now blocked her path. “You,” she said, tasting fresh blood on her tongue.

The Rona-thing made another grab at her. Sunny almost avoided it cleanly, but was a second too slow. The Rona-thing hauled her into its clutches, squeezing an arm around her throat. Sunny kicked to no avail. She planted an elbow into the nightmare’s gut. When that failed, she bit and chewed, tearing meat off the Rona-thing’s arm. The taste of raw mushroom filled Sunny’s mouth, sickening in its pungency.

The creature let go. Sunny pulled free. Video-Rona chuckled.

“This is fun. A real kitchen competition. None of that
Slice and Dice
horseshit.”

Sunny reached the stove and dialed the oven’s heat controls up to 410 degrees. The rush of gas coming on sounded. Sunny yanked open the door and hauled out the middle rack. The Rona-thing lunged at her. Sunny turned and slammed the rack into its face with a flying swipe.

“You’re no match for me in the kitchen, bitch,” Sunny said.

“You think so?”

“I know it.”

She danced around the Rona-thing and grabbed anything off the counter worth swinging. A marble rolling pin sailed. Then she hit it with a metal meat tenderizer, again and again, bashing the soft gray flesh of its head. The Rona-thing flailed, attempting to regain the upper hand. Reaching behind her, Sunny yanked another knife out of the cutting block, a fish knife. She ran it into the mushroom’s right eye.

The Rona-thing reached up. The oven’s timer pinged. Screaming to the limit of her lungs, Sunny danced around, lined up the mushroom with the oven, and drove all of her weight into its chest. The Rona-thing toppled. Its head hit the oven’s down door. Sunny pushed with her shoulder, and its head went in.

A scream issued out of the laptop. Sunny shoved, forcing more of the lumpen mass into the oven. Its girth stopped it at the shoulders, and its bucking limbs eventually tossed her hard, into the lower cabinets. The smell of seared mushrooms filled the kitchen.

The Rona-thing started to pull away from the oven, only to stop, halfway out. The flesh of the nightmare’s shoulders had gone from gray to caramel-brown. The mushroom ceased moving. The smell intensified. When Sunny glanced behind her, she saw that the laptop’s screen was dark. Noxious smoke filled the kitchen, foul with the burned-sugar stink of scorched food left for too long under high heat. An incinerated, hollow shell poked out of the oven and across three or so feet of the kitchen floor. Holding onto the counter for support, Sunny walked over and shut off the controls. The outline of the Rona-thing collapsed into blackened ashes at her feet.

“That’s right, bitch,” Sunny said.

She opened the front door. Smoke billowed out of the house, but outside the choking gray haze had evaporated, and sunlight spilled down through the trees. Nothing clicked or clattered around the base of the stairs. The mushrooms growing everywhere not an hour earlier were dying everywhere. A gentle breeze stirred the lessening mist. It was over, and she had won.