Her jaw wrenched around at a ridiculous angle and bit into the leather muzzle of the mask from within, shredding a hole. A drop of Quinn’s sweat flew to mix with the blood staining her teeth and the vomit clogging her throat, and before Quinn could make sense out of what he thought he saw, Amelia bit his nose off.
In the brief second before the pain hit, Quinn thought of that crazy shit on the news. Cannibal attacks on the eastern seaboard. Some whackpot scientist had claimed that dead people were reviving and eating live people. It was all Big Apple ratshit. Yet it flashed through Quinn’s mind right now because Amelia had bitten his nose off and was chewing it up and swallowing the pieces.
His throat flooded with the foaming pink backwash of inhaled blood. He made a liquid gargling noise as he tried to recoil, to back out of her, to get the hell away from this fucking lunatic, but she had a deathgrip on him below-decks, as well.
Then Quinn was able to yell, and he did because he could feel the ring of vaginal muscle increasing pressure, locking up beyond the circumference of his cock. The more he tried to pull out, the harder he got. He’d heard of men getting stuck in wine bottles the same way. You can’t compress a liquid. Blood was a liquid. His panic erection was vised with no options. He shoved wildly against the bed, blood pumping from the cavern in his face. He began hitting her with both fists, but she was beyond feeling a thing.
When he felt the muscle sever his penis like a wire cutter, he began to scream hoarsely. None of his neighbors would pay any mind. Weird games, aberrations, were the standard menu at Quinn’s. Suddenly freed, he sprawled backward. Blood gushed, ruining the carpet and sputtering from his crotch. He watched the stump of his still-stiff manhood vanish into the slick red chasm between Amelia’s legs, overwhelmed by the sight of it being swallowed whole by the orifice that had bitten it off.
Quinn hit the floor and kept screaming until catatonia blanketed him.
It took Amelia about half an hour to gnaw through her bonds. She spent another hour and a half eating Quinn. During her meal the life left his body, and the queer radiations mentioned on the news did their alien work. By then there was not enough left of his corpse to rise, or walk, or eat anyone else. The pieces lolled around on the floor, feeling the first pangs of a new hunger, unearthly and unsatisfiable.
Her savaged dress dropped away. Swaying side-to-side she found her way into the room where they had dined when they were alive. Sparks of remembered behavior capered through her dead brain matter, evaporating for the last time. She began eating the flowers in their vases, in no hurry to begin her nightwalk. The flowers were alive, but dying every moment. Their life might become hers. When she stopped, all the bouquets had been stripped.
Eventually Amelia found her way to a door, and moved into the world to seek others of her newborn kind. Never again would she be as beautiful. It was her moment, just as Quinn had said. She blended with the shadows, a striking, cream-skinned nude with flower petals drifting down from her mouth, ocher, mauve, bright red.
THE THIRD DEAD BODY
by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Nina Kiriki Hoffman is the author of several novels, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning The Thread That Binds the Bones, A Fistful of Sky, A Stir of Bones, Spirits That Walk in Shadow, and Catalyst, which was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Weird Tales, Realms of Fantasy, and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and in numerous anthologies, such as Firebirds, The Coyote Road, and Redshift. Her work has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and the Nebula Award four times each.
In the nineties, Hoffman went through a summer where she read one serial killer biography after another. “I was in the grip of some monstrous curiosity about how far humans will go,” she says. “My favorite book that summer was about a case that wasn’t even solved at the time, The Search for the Green River Killer, by Carlton Smith and Thomas Guillen. Part of my thinking in ‘The Third Dead Body’ was to give the victim a voice. There were so many victims. In this case, where the serial killer was the celebrity—as so often happens—I wanted to focus elsewhere.”
I didn’t even know Richie. I surely didn’t want to love him. After he killed me, though, I found him irresistible.
I opened my eyes and dirt fell into them. Having things fall into my eyes was one of my secret terrors, but now I blinked and shook my head and most of the dirt fell away and I felt all right. So I knew something major had happened to me.
With my eyes closed, I shoved dirt away from my face. While I was doing this I realized that the inside of my mouth felt different. I probed with my tongue, my trained and talented tongue, and soon discovered that where smooth teeth had been before there were only broken stumps. What puzzled me about this and about the dirt in my eyes was that these things didn’t hurt. They bothered me, but not on a pain level.
I frowned and tried to figure out what I was feeling. Not a lot. Not scared or mad, not hot or cold. This was different too. I usually felt scared, standing on street corners waiting for strangers to pick me up, and cold, working evenings in skimpy clothes that showed off my best features. Right now, I felt nothing.
I sat up, dirt falling away from me, and bumped into branches that gridded my view of the sky. Some of them slid off me. The branches were loose and wilting, not attached to a bush or tree. I used my hands to push them out of the way and noticed that the backs of my fingers were blackened beyond my natural cocoa color. I looked at them, trying to remember what had happened before I fell asleep or whatever—had I dipped my fingers in ink? But no; the skin was scorched. My fingerprints were gone. They would have told police that my name was Tawanda Foote, which was my street name.
My teeth would have led police to call me Mary Jefferson, a name I hadn’t used since two years before, when I moved out of my parents’ house at fifteen.
In my own mind, I was Sheila, a power name I had given myself no one could have discovered from any evidence about me.
No teeth, no fingerprints; Richie really didn’t want anybody to know who I was, not that anybody ever had.
Richie.
With my scorched fingers I tried to take my pulse, though it was hard to find a vein among the rope burns at my wrists. With my eyes I watched my own naked chest. There were charred spots on my breasts where Richie had touched me with a burning cigarette. No pulse, but maybe that was because the nerves in my fingertips were dead. No breathing. No easy answer to that, so I chose the hard answer:
Dead.
I was dead.
After I pushed aside the branches so I could see trees and sky, I sat in my own grave dirt and thought about this.
My grannie would call this dirt goofer dust; any soil that’s been piled on a corpse, whether the body’s in a box or just loose like me, turns into goofer dust. Dirt next to dead folk gets a power in it, she used to say.
She used to tell me all kinds of things. She told me about the walking dead; but mostly she said they were just big scary dummies who obeyed orders. When I stayed up too late at night reading library books under my covers with a flashlight, she would say, “Maybe you know somebody who could give those nightwalkers orders. Maybe she can order ’em to come in here and turn off your light.”
She had started to train me in recognizing herbs and collecting conjo ingredients, but that was before I told the preacher what really happened when I sat in Grand-père’s lap, and Grand-père got in trouble with the church and then with other people in the Parish. I had a lot of cousins, and some of the others started talking up about Grand-père, but I was the first. After the police took Grand-père away, Grannie laid a curse on me: “May you love the thing that hurts you, even after it kills you.” She underlined it with virgin blood, the wax of black candles, and the three of spades.
I thought maybe if I left Louisiana I could get the curse off, but nobody I knew could uncross me and the curse followed me to Seattle.
In the midst of what was now goofer dust, I was sitting nex
t to something. I reached out and touched it. It was another dead body. “Wake up,” I said to the woman in the shallow grave beside me. But she refused to move.
So: no fingerprints, no teeth. I was dead, next to someone even deader, and off in some woods. I checked in with my body, an act I saved for special times when I could come out of the numb state I spent most of my life in, and found I wasn’t hungry or thirsty. All the parts of me that had been hurting just before Richie, my last trick, took a final twist around my neck with the nylon cord he was so fond of, all those parts were quiet, not bothering me at all; but there was a burning desire in my crotch, and a pinprick of fire behind my eyes that whispered to me, “Get up and move. We know where to go.”
I looked around. At my back the slope led upward toward a place where sun broke through trees. At my feet it led down into darker woods. To either side, more woods and bushes, plants Grannie had never named for me, foreign as another language.
I moved my legs, bringing them up out of the goofer dust. All of me was naked; dirt caught in my curly hair below. I pulled myself to my feet and something fell out of my money pit, as my pimp Blake liked to call my pussy. I looked down at what had fallen from me. It was a rock flaked and shaped into a blade about the size of a flat hand, and it glistened in the dulled sunlight, wet and dark with what had come from inside me, and maybe with some of his juices too.
The fire in my belly flared up, but it wasn’t a feeling like pain; it felt like desire.
I put my hands to my neck and felt the deep grooves the rope had left there. Heat blossomed in my head and in my heart. I wanted to find the hands that had tightened the rope around my neck, wrists, and ankles. I wanted to find the eyes that had watched my skin sizzle under the kiss of the burning cigarette. I wanted to find the mind that had decided to plunge a crude blade into me like that. The compulsion set in along my bones, jetted into my muscles like adrenaline. I straightened, looked around. I had to find Richie. I knew which direction to look: something in my head was teasing me, nudging me—a fire behind my eyes, urging me back to the city.
I fought the urge and lifted more branches off the place where I had lain. If I was going to get to Seattle from here, wherever here was, I needed some clothes. I couldn’t imagine anybody stopping to pick me up with me looking the way I did. I knew Richie had worked hard to get rid of all clues to who I was, but I thought maybe my companion in the grave might not be so naked of identity, so I brushed dirt off her, and found she was not alone. There were two bodies in the dirt, with no sign of afterlife in them except maggots, and no trace of clothes. One was darker than me, with fewer marks on her but the same rope burns around her neck. The other one was very light, maybe white. She was really falling apart. They looked like they must smell pretty bad, but I couldn’t smell them. I couldn’t smell anything. I could see and hear, and my muscles did what I told them, but I didn’t feel much except the gathering fire inside me that cried for Richie.
I brushed dirt back over the other women and moved the branches to cover their resting place again.
Downslope the trees waited, making their own low-level night. Upslope, open sun: a road, probably. I scrambled up toward the light.
The heat in my head and heart and belly burned hotter, and I churned up the hillside and stepped into the sun.
A two-lane highway lay before me, its yellow dotted center stripe bright in the sun. Its edges tailed into the gravel I stood on. Crushed snack bags and Coke and beer cans lay scattered in the bushes beside the road; cellophane glinted. I crossed the road and looked at the wooded hill on its far side, then down in the ditch. No clothes. Not even a plastic bag big enough to make into a bikini bottom.
The heat inside me was like some big fat drunk who will not shut up, yelling for a beer. I started walking, knowing which direction would take me toward town without knowing how I knew.
After a while a car came from behind me. Behind was probably my best side; my microbraids hung down to hide the marks on my neck, and Richie hadn’t done any cigarette graffiti on my back that I could remember. A lot of tricks had told me I had a nice ass and good legs; even my pimp had said it, and he never said anything nice unless he thought it was true or it would get him what he wanted. And he had everything he wanted from me.
I could hear the car slowing, but I was afraid to look back. I knew my mouth must look funny because of the missing teeth, and I wasn’t sure what the rest of my face looked like. Since I couldn’t feel pain, anything could have happened. I bent my head so the sun wasn’t shining in my face.
“Miss? Oh, miss?” Either a woman’s deep voice came from the car behind me, or a man’s high one; it sounded like an older person. The engine idled low as the car pulled up beside me. It was a red Volkswagen Rabbit.
I crossed my arms over my chest, hiding the burn marks and tucking my rope-mark bracelets into the crooks of my elbows.
“Miss?”
“Ya?” I said, trying to make my voice friendly, not sure I had a voice at all.
“Miss, are you in trouble?”
I nodded, my braids slapping my shoulders and veiling my face.
“May I help you, miss?”
I cleared my throat, drew in breath. “Ya-you goin’ do down?” I managed to say.
“What?”
“Down,” I said, pointing along the road. “Seaddle.”
“Oh. Yes. Would you like a ride?”
“Mm-hmm,” I said. “Cloze?” I glanced up this time, wondering if the car’s driver was man or woman. A man might shed his shirt for me, but a woman, unless she was carrying a suitcase or something, might not have anything to offer.
“Oh, you poor thing, what happened to you?” The car pulled up onto the shoulder ahead of me and the driver got out. It was a big beefy white woman in jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. She came toward me with a no-nonsense stride. She had short dark hair. She was wearing a man’s khaki cloth hat with fishing flies stuck in the band, all different feathery colors. “What ha—”
I put one hand over my face, covering my mouth with my palm.
“What happened—” she whispered, stopping while there was still a lot of space between us.
“My boyfriend dreeded me preddy bad,” I said behind my hand. My tongue kept trying to touch the backs of teeth no longer there. It frustrated me that my speech was so messy. I thought maybe I could talk more normally if I touched my tongue to the roof of my mouth. “My boyfriend,” I said again, then, “treated me pretty bad.”
“Poor thing, poor thing,” she whispered, then turned back to the car and rummaged in a back seat, came up with a short-waisted Levi’s jacket and held it out to me.
I ducked my head and took the jacket. She gasped when I dropped my arms from my chest. I wrapped up in the jacket, which was roomy, but not long enough to cover my crotch. Then again, from the outside, my crotch didn’t look so bad. I turned the collar up to cover my neck and the lower part of my face. “Thank you,” I said.
Her eyes were wide, her broad face pale under her tan. “You need help,” she said. “Hospital? Police?”
“Seattle,” I said.
“Medical attention!”
“Won’t help me now.” I shrugged.
“You could get infections, die from septicemia or something. I have a first aid kit in the car. At least let me—”
“What would help me,” I said, “is a mirror.”
She sighed, her shoulders lowering. She walked around the car and opened the passenger side door, and I followed her. I looked at the seat. It was so clean, and I was still goofer dusted. “Gonna get it dirty,” I said.
“Lord, that’s the last thing on my mind right now,” she said. “Get in. Mirror’s on the back of the visor.”
I slid in and folded down the visor, sighed with relief when I saw my face. Nothing really wrong with it, except my chin was nearer to my nose than it should be, and my lips looked too dark and puffy. My eyes weren’t blackened and my nose wasn’t broken. I could pass. I gappe
d the collar just a little and winced at the angry dark rope marks around my neck, then clutched the collar closed.
The woman climbed into the driver’s seat. “My name’s Marti,” she said, holding out a hand. Still keeping the coat closed with my left hand, I extended my right, and she shook it.
“Sheila,” I said. It was the first time I’d ever said it out loud. She. La. Two words for woman put together. I smiled, then glanced quickly at the mirror, and saw that a smile was as bad as I’d thought. My mouth was a graveyard of broken teeth, brown with old blood. I hid my mouth with my hand again.
“Christ!” said Marti. “What’s your boyfriend’s name?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
“If he did that to you, he could do it to others. My daughter lives in Renton. This has to be reported to the police. Who is he? Where does he live?”
“Near Sea-Tac. The airport.”
She took a deep breath, let it out. “You understand, don’t you, this is a matter for the authorities?”
I shook my head. The heat in my chest was scorching, urging me on. “I have to go to town now,” I said, gripping the door handle.
“Put your seat belt on,” she said, slammed her door, and started the car.
Once she got started, she was some ball-of-fire driver. Scared me—even though there wasn’t anything I could think of that could hurt me.
“Where were we, anyway?” I asked after I got used to her tire-squealing cornering on curves.
“Well, I was coming down from Kanaskat. I’m on my way in to Renton to see my daughter. She’s got a belly-dance recital tonight, and—” She stared at me, then shook her head and focused on the road.
The land was leveling a little. We hit a main road, Highway 169, and she turned north on it.
The burning in my chest raged up into my throat. “No,” I said, reaching for her hand on the steering wheel.
“What?”
“No. That way.” I pointed back to the other road we had been on. Actually the urge inside me was pulling from some direction between the two roads, but the smaller road aimed closer to where I had to go.
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