The other flesh would reach the lake soon. Heart-Brecker would discover his gift to her, or she wouldn’t. Perhaps she would be afraid. It did not matter. Night would fall just the same. Tomorrow would come. Valentine’s Day. They would come here, rather than huddle in the dark forest. Their fear would rule these extraneous bodies, and Heart-Brecker would lead them straight to him. He would stake his soul on it.
There came a thunder of engines. Snow crunched under steel-belted tires, and a slate-gray SUV lumbered slowly around the bend, its headlights flickering among the trees. The Riley-body reached up, combed matted blonde hair over a vacant eye socket, and stepped out into the road, shading the good eye with an outflung hand. He could not see the driver, but the vehicle slowed, sliding a little on the snow as the brakes engaged. The SUV creaked to a halt, and he allowed the Riley body to collapse, bathed in the glory of the headlights.
The driver-side door swung open, and boots crunched on the snow, running toward him. The Riley-body lay motionless. He had learned patience these past two days. Flesh rebelled against that kind of patience, but he had learned to conquer the will of flesh, to bury it in himself, layer over layer. He thought of Heart-Brecker, leading bodies carrying a body through a world that did not know her. He would watch a while longer. Then he would join her. He would sew up the wound between them and wash his hands of the whole chore.
This all had stopped being fun for him a long time ago.
* * *
It seemed so long ago now—but he remembered, at first feeling merely frustrated with the whole affair. Heart-Brecker had thrown tantrums before, but they always fizzled out inside of an hour or at most a day or maybe two. Then she would return, ready to play the game again. But this had felt different. Like a window slammed shut on his fingers. His mind could not touch her, and she had run so far away this time, fled north to this bleak and hostile place. And she had brought the bodies with her. No… Heart-Brecker would say the bodies brought her, acting autonomously, as if detritus bumping across a windswept parking lot could act. Vehicles driving vehicles. Bodies driving bodies. He remembered thinking it was madness. She had never really understood, despite all his lessons. He loved her—but deep in his heart, he had to admit she could be a stupid bitch sometimes.
He knew he loved Kait Brecker. Could have loved her. If she had only let him try. He could have been any body she wanted him to be. Anything she desired: any shape, any flesh, any number of faces and voices and sensuous forms. Features in endless combinations. Infinite variety across infinite years, combining and re-combining, creating new flesh from old. That was the beauty of this empty world. What more was there? He would have given her the stars. But the flesh betrayed him. She abandoned his love for her friend. For another woman. Another body.
A body called Alice Gorchuck.
He remembered being heartbroken. He remembered being incandescent with rage, numb with confusion. He had never seen them in the same room before. Not truly together—only on that one Halloween night, and the Alice-body had been dressed in some absurd regalia, the end result of some vulgar spark of flesh-instinct. A costume born out of mutation. A mask wearing a mask. Thing Two, she called it. They had laughed at her that night. Then they coupled, and then they laughed some more. He had disregarded that body’s worth, discarded the memory of the peculiar expression on the girl-flesh’s face as he shut the door in it.
He had been a fool.
Because later, at the gas station… That should have been the end of it. It was the first time he had seen Heart-Brecker in over a month, and his heart had swelled with affection at the sight of her. They spoke, and she had felt it—the overwhelming pressure of his love. Their minds touched, it was like a symphony. Right then, they could have begun to heal. But the Alice-body, it intervened somehow. Against every conceivable possibility, he had actually been forced to speak with it, engage in conversation with the flesh. And he had played along, hadn’t he? Played make-believe in the puppet show, pretending he couldn’t see the strings, the hand in the sock. He had displayed the patience of stone—but when he tried to reach out to Heart-Brecker once more, the body attacked him. It attacked him. With strength enough to knock him down, to actually damage his own beautiful flesh-set and force him into retreat. Heart-Brecker scuttled under the shadow, and their minds did not touch again.
A nervous defense system. Something subdermal. A pre-rendered protocol, calculated to preserve the integrity of the flesh. Nothing more.
That’s all it could be, he reasoned after, nursing his wound, feeling warm ichor drip down his broken face. But still, he felt irrational hatred blaze up within him. He had wanted to destroy it right then, take the offending girl-body and fling it onto the highway where a vehicle would strike it. He wanted to feel it fly apart, feel his consciousness scatter as the flesh broke up like a continent. But he had controlled himself. The destruction of the Alice-body would not solve the larger conundrum. He remembered being the Jill-body, and this cooled his nerves. He would regroup. He would try again. He would find another way.
* * *
He was the driver-body, hunched over the steering wheel. His Riley-body crouched in the passenger seat, folded up for storage. Driving was easy—the flesh remembered the movements. Protocols stored in the muscle and nerves. He needed only to direct them where to go. He had done his homework, surveyed this part of the land, probing it for weaknesses. The boy-body at the gas station had a map in his car. This road wound up to the cabin, or it would take him down into the valley by a circuitous route. It would pass by the lake. There was a pier, and a dry dock. He could drive right up to the water.
* * *
It was only when he arrived at the cabin that he realized the depth of Heart-Brecker’s confusion. He had tried something he’d never accomplished before, a hitchhiking maneuver. He left a piece of himself inside the Alice-body, to observe without acting, something that could be activated remotely later, a seed that could grow under the right kind of light. He transferred the seed to the Riley-body, then the Ben-body, all without taking full control of the flesh. It was an unusual experience for him, acting as a passenger, relinquishing control like that. But this status afforded him certain insights as well. He could observe Heart-Brecker anonymously, see her just as the flesh saw her.
What he saw enraged him like nothing else ever had before.
Heart-Brecker and the Alice-body—they touched. They were sitting at the dinner table, very close together, eating something the Ben-body had prepared. This other flesh kept twining fingers through Heart-Brecker’s hair. She stroked it, idly scratching her scalp just like Heart-Brecker had done for him so many times before, and it was only then that he realized: this was no approximation, some mere effigy of affection, a copy of a copy. It was real. He could not touch her mind in this form, but he could tell just from the look on her stupid face that she liked this, this… this abominable mockery. The stomach of his flesh turned, thinking about it. For an instant he hoped against hope it was more play-acting, a joke for his benefit, another strange wrinkle in their two-hearted game. But it was not so. She did not know he was there. Heart-Brecker, his Heart-Brecker… She liked this flesh. It wasn’t a parody at all. It was love.
That was when his rage boiled over, exploding inward like a collapsing star. He took the Ben-body in his anger, filling it with himself—but when the flesh welcomed him, something inside woke up and began to talk to him. Began to whisper. Not an intelligence, no, but a cluster of higher processes, nerve-center instinct, almost like a personality. And something in this alien signal in the flesh whispered like hatred, sweet and intoxicating and strong. This was when he made his first mistake. He listened to the whispers—and it almost cost him everything.
He needed to plan, he knew. He needed a timetable. Heart-Brecker had fallen down the crevasse, and she would need to be fished out before their game could continue. But the doubled hatred moving and flexing inside the Ben-body overpowered him, if only momentarily. It made him lash
out: he laughed in her face, mocking the mockery, scorning the perverted dollhouse she had constructed around herself. He hurt the flesh’s feelings, if such a thing was possible. And later when his anger cooled and he realized what he had done, he tried to smooth the waves kicked up by his tantrum.
But again his emotion ruled him. He made another mistake.
He exposed himself to Heart-Brecker.
And then Heart-Brecker exposed him to the world.
* * *
He remembered being the Ben-body. Heart-Brecker had nearly bludgeoned him unconscious, once before he relinquished control of the flesh, and once more after.
He remembered being the Riley-body, smashing the flesh against the unforgiving edge of the wooden post. Living tissue pitted against dead tissue. Heart-Brecker had destroyed the body to prevent him from destroying the body. It defied logic. Perhaps he would never understand.
He tried to forget being the Alice-body. There was no telling what Heart-Brecker had inflicted upon that flesh while his back was turned, while his attentions were elsewhere. He would have to destroy that body himself, burn it down to ash, just to get the stink of that memory out of him. Would Heart-Brecker forgive that? Would she be able to forget her obsession and play the game as she had played it before? Yes—he believed she could. He held onto that faith, even after everything else. But the Alice-body was quite large. It would take a lot of burning.
He was the driver-body, and now the lake shimmered into view, brilliant in the late evening light. The water was frozen over, but the ice did not look thick. Sparkling liquid lay in puddles across the surface. The ice could be broken with a fist, he wagered, or by the weight of a body in a carpet. The SUV idled behind a thicket, crouched on the snowy road. He could see the pier and the dry dock—there were two tiny figures struggling across the road, carrying a long something between them. He adjusted the driver-body’s glasses.
The Ben-body. The Alice-body. Heart-Brecker was not among them.
He considered, for a brief instant, calling out to them. They would not see the Riley-body in the passenger’s seat from this distance, and they did not know this man-body’s voice. He considered activating the dormant mind-seed he’d left in the Cormac-body. That flesh was strong, stronger than any he’d taken before. It could escape the carpet, especially cut loose from the autonomic limits that prevented flesh from injuring itself. He wanted to see the girl-body—this Alice Gorchuck—flail in terror as a corpse lumbered toward her. But Heart-Brecker was not there. Her suffering would be meaningless.
Instead he pressed the gas pedal, and the SUV began to creep forward, snow groaning under the steel-belted tires. His hands gripped the wheel, the knuckles going white from the pressure, and the Riley-body slipped sideways, its head falling into his lap. He thought of the Jill-body, but the memory only left him cold, like a mouthful of ice. The vehicle gathered speed, and the two forms by the water’s edge did not look up.
* * *
Confusion would do him no good. Outrage would do him no good, nor wounded pride. This was not his fault. He could never have predicted that Heart-Brecker would do something so cruel, so foolish. He wanted to set the cabin on fire with all of them inside it. Let her burn with the bodies she loved so much. He wanted to disappear into the forest, drown himself in flesh, gorge on the emptiness of the world until he burst. Instead, he had dug in like a tick. He watched and he waited. But Heart-Brecker stacked injustice on top of injustice. She talked to the bodies, but she would not talk to him, even when she knew he was hidden among them. She plotted against him with the bodies. She announced that she would kill him, destroy his flesh-set with the hunting rifle on the hook—she told him this to his face, and he had been too stunned to respond. And every attempt at reunion he made, she thwarted with the precision and cunning of a suicide bomber. She harmed flesh to harm him. She harmed herself to harm him. She destroyed the Riley-body, and she wept over her sacrifice, over the devastation of beautiful flesh.
He wanted to weep too. He wanted to tear the whole stupid empty world into halves and watch the hollow bodies tumble out among the stars. He wanted to stop this feeling that followed him from flesh to flesh, body to body, form to form. He wanted to find another world to wander, one where the flesh did not have names. But he could not abandon Kait Brecker.
So he would have to show her. One last try. One last attempt at welcome. He would prove to her what his love actually meant, prove that she had only broken his heart and not his spirit. That he was still her mate, her man, that it was baked into his flesh-self, stamped onto his mind like a heart carved in the wood of a living tree. He would remind her why they loved each other. Why he was the only person on the entire planet she could ever truly love. Of course, he would have to clear the path. Hold the doors open for her at every juncture. He would do this for her. He would teach her one last time which direction the empty world really spun. He would take her by the hand and lead her where she did not wish to go.
But she would not take the lesson well. She had never taken his lessons well.
He would have to ram it down her throat this time.
Chapter 20
The More We Get Together
For one agonizing instant, Kait forgot how to scream.
The world went away—but then consciousness came surging back like a rush of cold water splashed in her face. Alice was shaking her awake, and as the eggshell of the dream cracked open, sudden fear gripped her in iron-toothed jaws and she lunged upward, seizing her friend’s shoulders with such force that the other girl cried out in pain. But Kait herself could make no sound. Her mouth hung open, but the only noise that escaped her lips was a thin whistle, like air escaping a poorly tied balloon. Images fled her mind—no true renderings, but bizarre wipes and swaths of liquid, oozing color. Crude renditions of unspeakable violence, constructed from the dark reds and pinks and browns of human tissue, while the horror of real life flooded in around every corner.
“It’s all right,” Alice was saying to her. “We’re here, Kaity. You’re all right, you were only dreaming…”
Kait blinked, peering blearily past Alice’s face: the straight trunks of trees thrust upward all around her, shooting off into the deep gray crush of the forest sky. She shifted her shoulders against the ground. Snow hissed and popped underneath her back, packed hard by her weight. The world looked like a painting of the world, rendered in broad, dark, impressionist strokes. She had slept. And night had fallen. The darkness was already here.
Something terrible was about to happen.
“How long…?” she managed to croak at last. “How long was I…?”
“Only a few minutes,” Alice began in a soothing voice, but Kait was already struggling to climb to her feet, wrestling out of Alice’s grip as she floundered on the ground, her hands searching the snow all around her like a blind man.
“You just… kind of… fell,” her friend continued, letting Kait flop down to her knees in the snow. “We figured it was fatigue, from, you know. Everything. We tried to wake you up earlier, but you just kept talking in your sleep. The same thing, over and over—”
“The gun,” Kait interrupted, panic springing into her voice. Her hands swatted the empty snow around her. “The gun, Alice. Where is it?”
“Right there, against the tree.” Alice gestured with one mittened hand. “We didn’t want you rolling over on… Kaity, what’s wrong? What is it?”
“I…” Feeling began to return. The air turned knife-steel cold in her lungs. She took several shallow, quaking breaths through her nose, trying to shake off the throbbing ache in her chest. “I… I had a…”
A premonition.
It still didn’t feel like a dream. She remembered when she and Lutz would sleep together, side-by-side on the lumpy double-bed mattress in his apartment, or collapsed against one another on the sofa in front of the flickering TV. She remembered falling unconscious with Jill Cicero’s warm body positioned between them, the sound of the other woman’s breathi
ng slowing from its fevered pitch to a soothing, rhythmic hum, lulling Kait into slumber. Those nights she would always dream. The experience became less alien as time went on, but she never truly got used to it—holding conversations with her boyfriend, hearing his voice in her head while they slept. Sometimes she would wake up in the dark and hear him murmuring in his sleep; sometimes it would only be his lips moving, with no sound coming out. She would hear his voice just the same. And he would hear hers.
This had felt just like that. Like hot breath against her ear.
Like a long finger tickling over the surface of her mind.
“I had a nightmare,” she said at last, thinking quickly. “I saw… Everything was all tangled up. Riley was…” She let emotion overwhelm her, and for a moment she could only rock back and forth on the cold ground. Her face screwed up, but no tears would fall, and her weeping made no sound. “I dreamed Riley was still alive,” she moaned softly. “And I had to… I had to…” She hated the lie. Hated herself for telling it. But there was no other explanation she could offer up. She had heard Lutz’s voice again. She could still hear it, murmuring within her as though he had slept by her side.
It would take a lot of burning.
“Where’s Ben?” she coughed, uselessly scrubbing her tired eyes with one gloved hand.
The Unwelcome Page 23