“I don’t think so,” Kartya whispered, and flooded the gas. The things disappeared under the Jeep and Kartya flinched as she registered the sounds of splitting flesh and crunching bone. It sounded like someone had thrown a cantaloupe onto pavement from six stories up. Then, there was quiet.
Kartya sat in the driver’s seat, feeling her skin slide over the leather under its coating of gore. She had time for one profound exhalation before a figure blotted out the moonlight streaming through the passenger’s side window. As she regarded the reanimated corpse-woman with horror, the driver’s door opened and Kartya was pulled from the Jeep by a pair of rough hands inserted beneath her armpits.
At the last second, before her legs had passed the frame of the vehicle, she found purchase and launched herself backward. The thing hit the pavement again with a wet thump, and Kartya managed to disentangle herself from its clutches.
She ran for the garage, hoping to find a pair of gardening shears. Instead, her headlights illuminated a beautiful sight, the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen. She said a silent apology for ever nagging Kit about cleaning out the garage, packed full with junk from previous tenants, and sprinted for the chainsaw.
She flipped the switch and placed the saw on the dusty floor, gripping the handlebar with her left hand.
“Here goes everything,” she said, and pulled the recoil rope like she’d seen her father, Kit, and Ash all do on numerous occasions. The saw popped, but did not start.
“Dammit!” She watched the first of the possessed-things, which after its run-in with her Jeep had lost even a passing resemblance to a living human, approach the mouth of the garage. She jimmied a black lever on one side and tried the starter rope again. The saw came to life with a deafening rumble.
Kartya had been a vegetarian for eight years, so the extent of her experience with chopping flesh was limited. By the time she’d finished a violent vertical dismemberment of the stout man, she was so thoroughly covered in blood that she did not imagine the second creature’s vivisection could be any worse. It was coming for her, the female, and though Kartya almost slipped in the lake of blood that covered the two-car garage from wall-to-wall, she was ready for it.
“You’re taller than Chuckles over there, so this could take a while,” Kartya told the demon-thing.
Kartya missed the creature’s hellish reply under the unforgiving tremors of the chainsaw.
—
Headlights announced the approach of a vehicle. Drenched from head to foot with an unfathomable amount of blood, Kartya was not curious as to the identity of the driver until the car passed the entrance to No Bottom Pond Road and started down the driveway. Wiping a film of blood from around her eyes, she was surprised to see Kit’s Volkswagen nearing the carnage.
When the car turned and illuminated the blood-covered specter that was Kartya, Kit threw the car in park and was at her side in seconds.
“What the hell! Where—?” His hands grasped her shoulders and he surveyed her wildly, looking for a wound.
“It’s not my blood,” Kartya told him. She gestured behind her where four halves equaled two bodies.
Kit’s jaw dropped.
“I’ll explain, but we should call the police. They took some sort of recreational drug that turned out to be far from recreational. It infected them with something that turned them into zombies. Or... Deadites.” She said these last words as if, despite the very concrete evidence of chaos behind her, Kit would think she’d lost her mind at the mention of the purportedly fictional walking dead.
“I can’t believe this. I’m so glad you’re all right. I pulled into the lot at work and thought what the hell am I doing? The night after the holiday, the night our friends get robbed, I shouldn’t have left you. I should have been here for you. So I called in sick and came home. You should have called me, Kartya. No, you should have called the police right away!”
Moved past the point of revulsion at Kartya’s blood-saturated state, Kit pulled her into a savage embrace. She let him hug her, still a bit shell-shocked, then stepped back and took it all in.
The gore packed into her Jeep’s tire treads winked in the moonlight. The dismembered bodies glistened in wide pools of blood near the still-purring chainsaw. The pile of syringes and infected water sat in the foreground of the house’s smashed windows. The house itself, a looming skull with its two front teeth knocked out. Her eyes came back to settle on Kit, and she smiled.
“There was no time to call anyone. I didn’t have much in the way of options, didn’t have time to come up with a plan. I had to rely on myself, I guess. With a little inspiration from a certain groovy guy.” She paused, wiped a smear of blood from her cheek, and continued, “The important thing is that I did what needed to be done, and that I’m okay. And you’re home now... so come here, and gimme some sugar, baby.”
A FAIRY PLANT IN GRIEF
Her boots crunched on the gritty snow and the sound reminded her of the hard candies she and her sister used to devour at the back of her parents’ store. They would huddle together behind towering boxes of soft drinks (their favorites were the Clearly Canadians in the elegant glass bottles, as smooth and sensual as a lady’s silhouette) and suspend the candies under one another’s nose and guess which kind the other held.
There were few things in the grey-scale palette of the graveyard that recalled those colorful candies of her youth, but the longer she walked, the better her chances were of finding what she needed. It was a shame that the flowers she’d amassed could not retain their colors. In the ramshackle Victorian on Elm Street that had once been her parents’, but now belonged to her and her sister, dried bouquets of flowers covered every available surface of wall, upside down and desiccated like a silent colony of bats.
Mikhail would occasionally grip the dried-out petal of one of these inverted flowers—the coagulated-blood maroon of a hybrid tea rose, the thin, claw-like spear of a dahlia—and rub her fingers so that the petal disintegrated like overburdened tissue paper, or the wings of an insect left to wither on a windowsill. She’d regret this once the act was done, did not like to squander the fruits of many laborious hunts, but sometimes she was unable to help her anger at this degradation of beauty, at the flowers that had made promises of comfort and distraction, but faded and shrunk and aged like everything else that was, and everything that would be.
Mikhail walked a meandering path through the cemetery, looking for a break from stone and marble on the cold December day. She’d made it as far as the river when she stumbled onto a private moment between a couple—hand-in-hand, their cheeks moist with tears—and a ghost. She had to wait and whistle, appear otherwise engaged until these harbingers of color ceased their whispered prayers and retreated through the thick iron gates, back to the land of the living.
The flowers were exquisite in the glaring winter sun and it hurt Mikhail’s heart to look at them. She ran her fingers along liquid amber and chocolate cosmos, across the snow-white petals of sweet peas, and the waxy surfaces of dusty millers and viburnum blueberries. Then, after glancing around to ensure she was alone, save for the crows and the velvety-winged swallowtails, she snatched up the arrangement, folded it beneath her sweater, and started out toward home.
The house was sepulchral-quiet upon her return and she paused at the kitchen sink to spritz her prize with water. She kicked off the clunky boots before ascending the stairs, her socked feet noiseless on the polished wood. Light, the faintest of glowing embers, leaked into the hallway from under the bedroom door. She hesitated, pinching off the browned corner of a Sahara rose petal, and let it flutter to the floor. She pushed the door open and pasted a smile on her face, the action suffused with all the care of a florist preparing a bouquet.
“I’m back,” she said to the motionless body on the bed. “I brought you something.”
She plucked an arrangement of dying flowers from the nightstand and replaced it with the vibrant assemblage of peaches and corals, burgundies and scarlets. She took he
r sister’s cold hand and looked upon the eyelids, purplish and closed and like twin buds that had been snipped too soon, never to open again.
“Guess,” she said, holding the bouquet under her sister’s nose. “Guess what kind of flowers I have brought for you today?”
WOLVES AT THE DOOR AND BEARS IN THE FOREST
Cheek pressed against a peeling linoleum floor, one arm bent at a painful angle behind her back, Molly Monteith set her gaze on a small plastic baggie, cloudy with the remnants of whatever narcotic it had recently held, and watched as it trembled in the weak pulse of the grease-stained radiator. If she’d been closer, she could have fished the baggie from under that radiator and ran it over her gums, mining the plastic for whatever relief it held.
Before she could grit her teeth against the pain, Klay Shoemaker flipped her onto her back and sent her skull into the side of the coffee table. She closed her eyes against the trickling blood and willed her muscles to go limp so that the bear of a man, breathing hard and sheened with sweat, could drag her onto a rug discolored by a decade of overturned beers.
I’m not here, Molly thought. I’m floating far away from here... flying high above the pain.
Molly’s chewed-up fingernails clicked against the linoleum. Her landlord grinned wolfishly, squeezed her breasts, and backhanded her across the face. Molly winced and saw stars. She tasted blood, but she did not make a sound. She never let on to Klay that she was anything other than grateful for their arrangement. For the exchange of sex-for-rent that seemed to become more tyrannical and horrific the more Molly’s situation warranted it.
When she finally limped from Klay’s apartment, she had a receipt for the month of December. That had been her stipulation: he could do whatever he wanted to her as long as Molly was granted proof of payment.
Molly opened the door to the apartment below Klay’s, recoiling at its identical layout, at the knowledge that flashbacks of her torments would visit her at inopportune moments.
Nothing destroys the illusion of normalcy like passing your abusive landlord on the way out to the park. She pulled the door shut and crept to the apartment’s only bedroom, a room she’d painstakingly labored over until it was a chamber fit for a princess atop a tower.
Her stomach dropped at the sight of her daughter already awake, but her pulse steadied when she realized Audrey had yet to slip from between the covers. Audrey was captivated by the bedraggled Teddy Ruxpin reading her a story, unaware that her mother had only just returned.
As she watched her daughter grasp the bear’s shabby paw, Molly’s hand traveled up to the swollen ruin of her mouth. She let her mind wander to the contents of the cupboards and thought she’d suffer the same treatment from the grocer if it meant more food in Audrey’s stomach. Her probing fingers dug too hard at her lip and she gasped. Audrey looked up.
“Mommy!” Audrey held her arms in an entreaty to be lifted from the bed.
Molly stepped forward and grimaced. “Climb out of bed like a big girl,” she said, willing her pain to go unnoticed. “What would you like for breakfast?”
Audrey slid from the four-poster bed before dragging Teddy after her. “Pancakes!” she declared and skipped into the hallway, thumping the bear’s heavy body against her mother’s leg.
Molly stifled a cry. “Go find your juice cup,” she managed. “And set the table. Mama will make you some pancakes.” Audrey scampered away to comply.
“Audrey?” Molly called after her daughter.
“Yeah, Mommy?”
“I love you all the world.”
“I love you too, Mommy.”
“As much as anything in all the world?”
Audrey turned and smiled at her mother. “As much as all the world, Mommy.” The girl paused, noticing Molly’s injuries. “What’s that boo-boo on your face?”
“It’s nothing, sweetheart. Mommy walked right into the cabinet getting some water this morning. It’s like in One More Spot when Teddy paints the black dots on the ladybug’s shell, only I’ve got one on my face!”
Audrey’s mouth scrunched as she tried to work out something too complex for her three short years, but the comparison of the bruise to something from a storybook, coupled with the prospect of pancakes, was enough to set the girl back on her path to the kitchen.
By the time Molly had cleaned herself up, Audrey was seated at the table, humming the intro to the Teddy Ruxpin tapes as she attempted to fold a paper towel into a seashell, a smile on her heart-shaped face.
Audrey never asked for anything, but she had begged her mother for the revamped smart model of the talking teddy Molly herself had adored as a kid. At a hundred bucks a pop, Molly couldn’t afford a new bear, so she’d journeyed across town to her grandmother’s old colonial where she spent the afternoon in an airless attic, sidestepping dead mice and searching through talismans of memories best left undisturbed.
When she’d found her old companion stuffed inside a box with the complete collection of cassette tapes, she’d worried Audrey would prefer no bear at all to the poor excuse for the technologically advanced one the other kids boasted. But here Audrey sat in mute fascination as the plastic, cartoon mouth opened and closed in time to the words of the story.
The dented box of Bisquick was the only thing in the cupboard besides a jar of pickles and a can of tomato soup. Audrey hated all things tomato, but soup—specifically, tomato soup—was a staple at the local food pantries. Weeks would elapse where nothing but the thick paste of the condensed Campbell’s Classic passed Molly’s lips, so intent was she on saving the chicken noodle and occasional can of hearty chili for her daughter.
Molly went to work on the pancakes, and had served Audrey the first batch when the girl said, “Mommy, do we not have to go to the clinic today?”
Molly dropped the spatula and shot a look at the stovetop clock. It was blinking. She rushed to the couch and rifled through her purse, ignoring a photo of Audrey at the pumpkin patch the previous month to stare in rising panic at the time on her phone.
“Fuck!” she shouted and threw her purse over one shoulder. She flew to the table and gripped Audrey’s arm, lifting her from the chair and dragging her toward the door.
“But my pancakes! I didn’t eat my pancakes yet!”
“You can eat them when we get back! We have to go now!”
Molly held the keys to the twenty-year old Civic between shaking fingers and closed her eyes.
“Start, you bitch,” she whispered.
The engine sputtered, caught, and died.
“No!” The word burst from her mouth like geese exploding off the bank of a lake. Audrey whimpered from the backseat. Molly pulled the keys from the ignition and held them, poised for a miracle. “Please just fucking start,” she begged.
Molly let forth with an astonished laugh when the engine caught and held. She’d made the first few lights on a busier-than-usual Main Street and was beginning to relax when a line of brake lights roused her from her reverie. She slammed her foot in time to avoid rear-ending the Mercedes in front of her, and then sat in a horrified, incredulous silence for the twelve minutes it took for the crew to pull the fallen spruce from the road.
It was exactly eleven AM when Molly pulled into the lot for the Somersworth branch of the clinic, her stomach knotted with anxiety, her heart lodged high in her throat.
“Wait here,” she croaked, and shut the door before Audrey could protest. She sprinted up the cement walkway. The women passing her in the opposite direction gave her pitying looks.
The towering figure of Victoria Swanson stood at the intersection of lobby and hallway, blocking Molly’s view of the dosing windows and increasing the flow of adrenaline to Molly’s veins. The Program Director’s face was as calm and imperial as ever beneath a grey spiked bob.
“Dosing is closed,” Victoria said. Steve, the Clinical Director, stood beside her.
“Please,” Molly whispered, looking back and forth between them. “It’s eleven now.”
She spu
n to where the nurses still bustled behind their respective windows, cleaning the pumps, entering their notes. Molly caught Melissa’s eye. Melissa was around Molly’s age, with a daughter of her own. The nurse looked quickly away.
“I haven’t been on the clinic long,” she tried, frantic, ignoring the callousness in their eyes. “If I don’t get my dose, I’ll be sick. Please. I don’t want to be sick all night.”
“This is not a discussion, Ms. Monteith,” Victoria said, her words devoid of emotion. “New Hampshire state law prohibits the distribution of methadone from the computerized pumps after eleven AM.”
Victoria turned to Steve and asked him something Molly did not hear. He responded with the name of the counselor Molly saw for one-to-one sessions.
Victoria gestured toward the secretary at the front desk. “Would you like Cindy to see if Olive is available? Perhaps talking to your counselor would be beneficial.”
Molly wanted to scream that talking to her counselor wouldn’t do shit. She wanted to rail against the state laws that mandated the dosing hours of a privately owned clinic. But more than that, she wanted to inflict pain onto herself. She hated herself for losing track of time while she was fucking her landlord, hated herself for getting on methadone when she’d left detox. Most of all, she hated herself for being a heroin addict in the first place.
Molly felt Victoria and Steve looking at her, taking in her swollen lip and disheveled hair. She colored when she realized she had slippers on her feet.
“I can’t see my counselor right now,” Molly repeated. “I have Audrey in the car.”
Molly watched as Victoria’s expression morphed into one of actual emotion, then blanched as she realized that emotion was alarm.
“Ms. Monteith,” the Program Director began, “are you aware that the temperatures have been close to freezing for much of the past week?”
Molly did not answer. I’m floating, she thought. Floating above this nightmare.
Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked Page 14