by Wol-vriey
Ignoring his pleas—and later, screams—Frank unbuttoned Smith’s shirt and began cutting.
PART 2: PORCELAIN
INTERLUDE: THE ODS
Since the day of President Lincoln Jefferson’s death, the world had become a much stranger place.
In retrospect, the popcorn rain over the last US president’s funeral had been a prophecy of the future.
***
The new changes to Boston reality were both drastic and subtle.
In addition to obvious oddities like it now raining cornflakes and popcorn, there was the constant suggestion that Boston—nay, the entire USA—was now overlaid by other dimensions, places no sane person would rightly wish to visit.
Places accessible via the Otherworld Doors,—ODs—the wormholes through space-time.
The ODs were upright shimmering ‘spaces’ that could occur anywhere—in the middle of the street, in the middle of the air, in the middle of a kitchen or living room or toilet. There was no rhythm or rhyme to their placement.
Some ODs only teleported the user across Boston. Some seemed to teleport the user across the universe. Yet others appeared to teleport those entering to realms that seemed versions of Heaven and Hell.
Many different versions of Heaven and Hell.
On the ODs initial appearance, many had attempted entering the worlds they were granted access to.
A few of these adventurers had returned with unbelievable stories to tell. A few had returned mauled/maimed by creatures they could find no words to describe.
Most hadn’t returned at all.
So now the ODs were left alone, with only the intrepid, the extremely/congenitally foolish, or the desperate venturing into them.
Thankfully—from a Bostonian point of view—there were few Otherworld Doors in and around the ‘livable’ parts of the city. The Grid itself, Chinatown, South Boston and the Charles River Basin out east were mostly free of the shimmering distortions that announced a passage to another realm.
The area north of the city—all through Cambridge and across the harbor to Logan International Airport in East Boston—was riddled with these wormholes through space-time.
Logan Airport was particularly plagued with ODs. It was as if someone had earmarked it as a transit portal.
If anyone other than the dragons and dinos had ventured out to Boston’s erstwhile international transit point, they’d have been amazed by the profusion of upright mirror-surfaces dotted all over the place. Some of the portals were tiny. Others were LARGE.
The dragons never went near the portals. The dinos, lacking in brains, frequently did, and generally never returned.
Most people believed the Forks were responsible for the ODs. Only the kitchen gods were powerful enough to open these portals to anywhere and hold them open.
The idea that the Forks had opened the ODs greatly worried everyone.
If it was true, the kitchen gods must have opened the wormholes for a reason—most likely to let something through them to Earth.
Why this possibility worried everyone was because some of the ODs were ridiculously huge. Big enough to pass an aircraft carrier or oil tanker through. Big enough for an Amphicoelias Fragillimus—the largest dinosaur that ever lived—to walk through with ease.
But Amphicoelieas Fragillimus was vegetarian.
Everyone prayed that whatever the Forks planned on bringing through the Otherworld Doors didn’t have sharp teeth.
CHAPTER 39
Malone: Three months later.
Malone sat in Ma’s house, facing Jade Cure and Yang Yang. Ma’s head still resided in the cabinet, next to the bottle of dragonreich that had ‘cured’ Posh.
Malone’s arm ached from where Jade had just bled him.
Jade chanted; the snake goddess came alive.
Yang Yang raised the bowl of Malone’s blood to her lips and took a long sip. Then she looked at Malone and spat the blood in his face.
She sat back on her white tail coils, scowling at him, her slanted eyes dark moods in her flawless white face.
Jade gaped at Malone’s bloody face, then at the animated statuette. She broke off her chanting: “I don’t understand. This has never happened before.”
She turned to the stone goddess and unleashed a long stream of angry Chinese. Yang Yang smirked. She jabbed a finger at Malone, then calmly replied Jade.
Jade looked at her, growing perplexed, she turned to Malone.
“She’s extremely angry with you.”
He nodded.
“She’s asking why you’re here bothering her again, when you don’t love her.”
He wiped blood out of his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said dryly, “I suspected it might be that. Tell her I’m sorry. And that I really need her help.”
Jade relayed his words to the snake goddess, who shook her head. “No help.”
Jade chanted some more, while Yang Yang alternately drank Malone’s blood and glared knives at him. Then she smiled a bloody smile and spoke to Jade.
“She’s wondering how your blood tastes so sweet, when you’re such a ugly, horrible person . . .”
Malone winced.
“. . . And that she’s drinking it because, well, one never wastes good blood no matter how nasty a person its provider is, even a heartless troll like you.”
Malone stared at the Snake Lady. She nodded back scowling, and said more:
“. . . A heartless person who toys with her fragile emotions, breaking her stone heart, while she pines for you in her frozen state . . .”
Malone was shocked now. Yang Yang was weeping, red tears which he suspected were his blood that she’d just drank.
“. . . And that she knows you’re only here now because of her rival, the dragon woman Posh, and no, she of course will not help you cure her rival. Why should she? What woman would be so stupid?”
Malone gaped at Yang Yang. She was weeping profusely now, blood tears running down her cheeks and dripping off her chin into the bowl of blood, amazingly to refill it. She drank deeply from the bowl:
“No, she won’t help you. She wants you to feel her pain each time the dragon woman eats some—”
Jade broke off, gaped at Malone. “She’s been eating people? How many?”
“Too many.”
Jade nodded, her eyes were cold. “You promised that you’d kill her. But no—”
The goddess was speaking again. Her pose was defiant and proud, her beautiful face a model of regal haughtiness. Her back was arched, pointing her flawless breasts at Malone. Drops of red polka dotted their upper halves. Her breasts heaved with the contempt of her words.
Jade lost her anger on hearing what the goddess said. It was all she could do not to laugh out loud.
The weeping goddess finished speaking. Next she drank up her bowl of Malone’s blood, promptly spewed it all in his face again, then froze into rigid immobility.
“Well you’ve really got her riled up,” Jade said.
“Don’t I fucking know it.” Malone wiped his face off again. He was a mess now, red-splattered everywhere.
Yang Yang wasn’t in much better condition. Jade wiped her besmirched front down with a rag.
“You know,” Jade said as she worked, “It’d be better if you just slept with her. That’ll put you permanently in her good books.”
Malone’s skin crawled with revulsion at her suggestion. The very thought felt like cockroaches trampling him. Only over his corpse was that happening.
“What was the last thing she said? That made you laugh?”
Jade laughed louder than before. Her slanted eyes thinned to slits in her mirth.
Jade calmed down and grinned.
“She said that she doesn’t understand why you’re so choosy—always rejecting her advances. She asked what the difference was between you fucking her—a snake woman—and fucking that ‘stupid dragon woman’ you have at home?”
Malone had no answer to that.
***
Malone pointed
to Ma’s head in the cabinet. Cobwebs linked her white hair to the dusty varnish.
Ma’s eyes were shut, her expression solemn, like she was in meditation. The Chinese script on the strip of paper ringing her neck flickered occasionally.
“What are you going to do about Ma?” Malone asked. “You can’t leave her up there forever.”
Jade shrugged. “She’s been on the shelf for longer periods. Nothing I can do, until the right body turns up.”
“What is the right body anyway?”
Jade grimaced. “There’s the rub. It can’t be an actual corpse. It has to be someone dying, but who won’t survive it. In the past three months I’ve been offered three kid bodies . . .”
“Ma’ll be mad if you use those.”
Jade nodded. “. . . Two young men’s bodies, and one old woman’s.”
“Why didn’t you use the old woman’s?”
“Ma would have hated it. The old girl had arthritis so bad, her fingers were permanently hooked into claws.” She smiled. “Though I did consider using one of the young men. It would have been priceless—seeing the expression on Ma’s face when she wakes up to find she has a penis.”
Malone smiled. He couldn’t imagine it either.
“Look,” Jade said. “Forget Ma—a nice female body will turn up soon enough.” She stared him dead in the eye. “What I want to know is: What do you intend to do about Miss Dragon, who—according to the goddess—you’re busy happily screwing?”
Malone stared glumly at the floor.
“Okay,” Jade said, “let’s start again. How many people has Posh eaten to date?”
“Six.”
She stared at him, slack-jawed. “Why the hell haven’t you offed her then? Is reptile pussy that great? And if it is, what’s your beef with screwing the Snake Lady?”
She groaned. “Shit, you men are really something, you know that?”
Malone shook his head.
“It’s not like that, and not that simple,” he explained wearily. “Posh is in human form most of the time. But she’s addicted to reich now—it’s a craving with her. She only becomes a dragon when she’s high on the drug. That’s when the murderous impulse comes. At those times she doesn’t even recognize me.” He winced. “Shit. You should see her afterwards, Jade. She’s the sweetest girl in the world. She really fights her craving . . .”
“But the drug is stronger than she is,” Jade finished unsympathetically. “That’s a con; all junkies say that to excuse the criminal shit they do for their next fix.”
Malone nodded. It was a fair—though unequal—comparison. “So what’s to do?”
Jade’s eyes were merciless. Her epicanthic folds looked like meat scimitars. “Kill Posh. Before she murders some other innocents.”
“I can’t. I love her.”
Jade shrugged. “Okay, I’ll concede that to you. Love’s a good reason not to kill a killer.” She pointed to Yang Yang. “Only other option is to fuck the goddess. Then, ask her to fix Posh for you, for good.”
“She’s likely to advise me on how to kill her instead.”
Jade shook her head. “You don’t understand women. The goddess has nothing against Posh. She’s however angry that you’re rejecting her when she clearly feels for you, and has openly expressed those feelings to you—it’s embarrassing to be publicly rejected. Yang Yang doesn’t want you to leave your girlfriend. She knows that won’t work—she’s divine and a statue after all. All she wants is for you to make her feel special, to let her know that she has a special place in your heart . . .”
Jade couldn’t help grin, “. . . by your filling up that special place in her tail.”
“You make it sound so simple. All I have to do is make love to her?”
And tell her how incredible she is compared to other women you’ve slept with. Flatter her vanity.”
Malone nodded. “Considering the alternative, I should be able to do that.”
He had another question, though. “One more thing. She needs blood to activate her during lovemaking, doesn’t she? Where does that come from?”
“That’s easy. I’ll make a cut in your shoulder that she can suck blood from while you get it on.”
The blasé way Jade said it chilled Malone.
She looked at the white statue, then back at him, her expression dark as storm clouds.
“I won’t lie to you—loving her is dangerous. If you don’t make her orgasm quick enough, she could bleed you to death.”
Malone nodded.
“I’ll do anything to cure Posh,” he said. “The deaths are weighing badly on my conscience. I’ve already moved us west towards the river, into an old funeral home, so I can use their incinerator.”
Jade whistled. “Wow, that’s what I call long-term commitment!” She stared at him in grudging admiration. “How long were you planning on cleaning up after her?”
Malone winced. “Not that long. But I got tired of coming home to find bones strewn everywhere. Sooner or later a client is bound to see them and think me a cannibal.”
Jade nodded.
“Okay,” Malone said, running a hand through his hair, “let’s do this.” He grimaced at the half-woman half-snake statue, the gorgeous white stone upper body over the repulsive reptile coils, at the flawless Chinese face, that face so incomparably beautiful, yet so forbidding ugly in its amorality.
“No,” Jade warned. “You two screw tomorrow, not today. If we unfreeze her again now, she’s very likely to turn you down out of sheer spite, just to make you suffer.” She smiled. “Come back tomorrow afternoon. I’ll calm her down before then.”
Malone nodded. He got up to leave.
“You’re forgetting something,” Jade said.
“Huh?”
She wagged the crystal summoning bowl at him. “I need to bleed you to wake her up to plead on your behalf.”
Malone groaned. “Aw, shucks! Can’t you just feed her chicken blood?”
Jade eyed him coolly. “Dude, how angry exactly do you want the goddess to be with you? She utterly ABHORS non-human blood. Feeding her chicken blood is the ultimate insult. Do that and you’ll be number one human asshole on her divine shit-list. That isn’t a preeminence you want—trust me. Currently, your only crime is that you won’t fuck her. Insult her divinity however . . .”
“I get the point,” Malone snapped. He bared his arm for Jade to jab the crystal lancet into.
He first watched the crimson spill filling the bowl, then looked over at Yang Yang with heavy misgivings. Shit, he thought, this snake chick is going to leech me dry tomorrow.
CHAPTER 40
Malone
All the way home from Ma Cure’s, Malone steeled his mind over what he had to do. The further away from Chinatown Park he got, the easier it seemed to him that making love with Yang Yang would be.
After a while he was smiling at the thought. I should be flattered, really. If nothing else, it’ll definitely be a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Grinning broadly at the image of Yang Yang’s serpentine coils wrapped around him, Malone turned onto Charles Street.
His thoughts immediately cut out in abrupt dismay. He pulled up sharply.
From the junction, Malone could see the funeral home he and Posh now lived in. An orange glow flickered in a first floor window.
Malone groaned. That meant dragon. Fuck! His grin reversed itself into a grimace of disgust.
Posh has gotten high again and gone hunting.
The fire meant she was cooking someone.
Malone’s grip on the steering wheel tightened like he’d break it.
Not now, not fucking today. Preferably not ever again. Can’t Posh stay off the damn reich for even a month? Love isn’t worth this shit.
He put the car in motion again.
Close to the house, he slowed the Mustang to a crawl, giving her no warning he was back. The orange flickering in their bedroom window brightened, in-creasing his apprehension.
A fire-breather’s tric
k—yellow fire shot from the window.
***
Inside the house, Malone flung his coat down, then padded softly upstairs. On the landing, he silently got out the fire extinguisher and gas mask.
The corridor’s darkness was temporarily defeated at the ajar bedroom door by the vertical slice of orange light escaping the crack. Malone held his breath, padded closer.
He smelt roast meat, heard the sickening whimpers that were really exhausted screams.
Malone had chosen this residence with great care: the crematorium was situated on a factory estate that abutted the Charles River. It being so far from The Grid meant he and Posh had no neighbors.
Whoever Posh had taken this time might have screamed for help for hours with no one hearing. And when no help came, they’d just scream, period. Till, like now, they were hollered out.
Malone reached the door-crack. He peered in and recoiled.
The victim lay on a charred patch of carpet. He was a young man in his twenties; what was left of his half-cooked face gave Malone that much information. That glance also told Malone he was too far gone for any help to do him any good.
Posh had roasted him good. Sputtering fat bubbled from his body onto the floor. The young man was so cooked it was unreal he was still alive.
“Please kill me,” he moaned. “Please.”
Posh’s reply was a leonine roar. She was animal now, her thoughts instinctive feed patterns.
She walked into view then—a white porcelain dragon with pink roses painted all over her body, huge white wings folded on her back.
Malone marveled like he did each time he saw her. Except that she was made of ceramic and walked upright, she fitted the classic dragon description—the woven-scaled skin, the extended snout with its long teeth and piggy nose, the fierce yellow eyes, the muscular arms and legs with their scary-sharp talons, the clanking T-Rex gait when not airborne.
And the long, crocodile tail. That tail which could decapitate a man with a single swipe.