“No, but I’m…much better. Are they…really going…to build a fire?”
“They will…try. I have some…dry clothes…at the house that you…can wear.”
“Me,” Mal said. Margi realized that he was answering the question she’d posed a few moments before. She looked at Colette, and they both laughed.
“Sorry, Mal,” Margi said. “You are awfully strong, though.”
“I’d have thought…that water…would be…deeper,” Colette said. “It was only…six or seven feet…deep.”
“It was plenty deep. I’m only five feet one.”
“There’s…that,” Colette said. “Hey, we should…call your…Dad. Your cell phone…”
“Was in my jacket pocket.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
Margi could smell smoke, and she saw a great billowing puff rise up into the air ahead of them.
“Wow, he got a fire going.”
“Tak is…very…resourceful.”
“Thank…you,” Mal said.
Colette stayed with Margi as she warmed herself in front of the fire Tak had constructed in the remnants of a stone fire pit at the edge of the Haunted House’s yard. The others were gone when they arrived, and Mal wandered off, probably to return to his rock. They were alone.
The warmth from the fire seeped into Margi’s skin, replacing and erasing the cold of the lake. Soon she began to sweat.
“Can you feel that at all?” she said. “The warmth? I can’t tell you how good it feels right now.”
“A…little,” Colette said, the dancing flames reflected in her eyes.
When Margi was sufficiently thawed, they went inside to put on dry clothes. Colette exchanged her wet Rosedale’s shirt for one with the Skeleton Crew logo; to Margi she gave basic black.
“It’s a little tight,” Margi said. “And these jeans. Omz, I can’t even snap them.”
“You’ve got blankets.”
“My dad is going to kill me.”
“Maybe…you’ll…be lucky,” Colette said. “And come back…as a…zombie.”
Margi giggled, then laughed out loud, then grew serious.
“Colette, you saved my life,” she said.
Colette turned away to look out the window, perhaps at the flames that by now must be dwindling down.
“You really did, Colette,” Margi continued. “I couldn’t save you, but you saved me.”
Colette lifted her head, and Margi could see her reflection in the cracked window pane.
“That’s what…friends do…when they…can, Margi,” she said. “Save each…other’s…lives. That’s what friends do…every…single day.”
* * *
Her father didn’t kill her, not even when Margi finished her story and made her request. Margi watched a thousand thoughts and emotions swimming across his face as she was talking to him, but to his credit he managed to quell all the recriminations and admonishments that he surely wanted to say to her, and in a very loud voice. But when she was finished all he did was embrace her. Margi was aware of Colette watching from the rickety porch of the Haunted House as they spoke outside her father’s warm car. Finally released from her father’s embrace, Margi walked back to the porch.
“See you…tomorrow,” Colette said, the half smile back on her face.
“No,” Margi said, shaking her head, her expression grave.
“No?” She looked confused, which cheered Margi considerably. The more expressiveness that returned to her friend’s face, the better.
“No,” Margi said. “Go get your things. You’re coming to live with us.”
“Really?”
Margi nodded, watching as Colette’s half smile became complete.
“I’ll…I’ll go get my things.”
Margi watched her go back into the house, moving as hastily as a zombie could move.
“That’s what friends do,” Margi whispered as she waited for her friend to return. “Every single day.”
DOLL PARTS
SYLVIA LOOKED ACROSS the room at the long stainless steel table where her liver and another grayish, shriveled squiggle of an organ—her pancreas, maybe?—were floating in wide glass jars. The liver was in murky pinkish solution that two dangling pieces of plastic tubing brought in and out of the jar through a circuit powered by a whirring compressor on the floor beside the table. The jar with the squiggle also had lengths of tubing, and a wire that delivered an electric charge every thirty-seven seconds. Sylvia had counted, many times.
Sylvia felt fortunate that she had conscious control of her eyes. In the first few days since the scientists at the Hunter Foundation had begun what they referred to as her “augmentation,” she’d only been able to stare straight ahead. The scientists, perhaps as a final indignity and torture, had placed a television directly across from where her body—where she—lay strapped, propped at a hundred-degree angle on some sort of medical table. The television was tuned to CNN the entire week that she couldn’t move her eyes, and except for the couple of hours a day that the doctor worked their procedures on her, she received a steady diet of all the horrors of the world. Every day there were new stories about violence against her kind, but these stories appeared and burst like the clear bubbles rising from the fluid surrounding her pancreas, crowded out by more newsworthy topics like the world’s many wars, the terrible earthquakes in China, or the marital problems of a dozen or so famous actors and pop stars. In those first seven days she couldn’t even blink, and even if she could have, there was no way to shut off her ears.
Maybe that’s why I’m insane, she thought. Maybe it was the television and not the sight of me, scattered in pieces around the room.
But even as she thought it, her eyes flicking from some athlete denying he ever used performance-enhancing substances to the vat in the corner where she thought her digestive system was being stored, coiled like a long gray python, she knew it wasn’t the television that had made her insane. The constant flood of input and sound bytes and information was maddening to be sure, but it was nothing compared to the complete absence of data. There was a time between when she accompanied old Alish Hunter to the laboratory and when her eyes opened in front of the television that was just gone, a time when there was just…nothing. When she died, it hadn’t been like that. She’d been aware of herself, as a consciousness if not a body, during the hours she’d spent between her physical death and before her return as a zombie; but after Alish and one of the other doctors had helped her onto a gurney and then given her a shot of a neon blue substance, there was nothing. She’d overheard the doctors talking about the time she’d lost a few days ago. “Taking her offline” is how one doctor, the one she’d dubbed Dr. C, had put it.
Dr. C walked into the room as though her thoughts had summoned him. The “C” was for Cadaver, because that word described both his work and his appearance. He was balding, skeletally thin, with thick glasses and skin the color of wet parchment. Sylvia knew personally many zombies that looked far healthier than Dr. C.
He gave her a wide smile upon entering, his perfectly square white teeth a strange contrast to the rest of his appearance. He was one of the two doctors who visited her with the most frequency, the other being a heavyset man with a crew cut, whom she’d heard Dr. C call Beck. Beck liked to switch the channel of her television to ESPN and would check on all of her pieces and the levels of juice in which they floated with the programs playing at an elevated volume in the background. Beck never spoke to her the way Dr. C always did—he never even looked at her, actually. Not the real her; he’d scrutinize the aquarium tank with her lungs, or take a sample of the liquid circulating around her liver, but he’d never make eye contact with her. This allowed her to observe him closely as he made his rounds (unlike Dr. C, who, when he caught her peeking, would shield her from his tasks with his body, saying “You shouldn’t watch, my dear, as this might be very upsetting to you,” as though spending the day in clear view of her internal organs—and the televi
sion—wasn’t horror enough), although sometimes she did watch the athletes on the screen instead, their long, muscular bodies sailing through the air, through space, and through time.
“And how are you today, my dear?” Dr. C said. His grin conveyed just how happy he was to see her and to have another chance to muck about with her guts. He always called her “my dear” and never Sylvia. She doubted that he was an actual doctor, at least one that had any sort of medical degree.
He walked straight to her, invading her space until their noses were just a few inches apart, and he shined a penlight into her left eye, his free hand moving along her neck as though feeling for a pulse or for swollen glands. He was close enough that she’d be able to smell his breath, but that sense had not yet reliably returned to her. She’d get flashes of scents, but she thought they were probably memories and not actual smells. Yesterday she’d thought that she could smell an overabundance of peppermint, but there hadn’t been anyone in the lab then, and she didn’t think any of the vats and jars containing her parts were emanating such pleasing aromas. Moments later, the smell disappeared and did not return. She missed it.
His smile, impossibly, widened.
“You are doing fine, just fine,” he said. “Is there anything we can do to make you more comfortable? Anything at all? Anything to enhance the augmentation process?”
Yes, she thought, wondering why Dr. C always used “we” when speaking to her. You can make me thin. And pretty. And cure my asthma, and give me diamond eyes like Karen and make my hair blond not brown.
And wings, she thought. Give me wings.
Inside, she was smiling. Dr. C, in one of his many monologues directed in her general direction, had mentioned that her mouth was usually opening and closing as if she were trying to speak, or take in a gulp of air, but she knew these movements were involuntary. She remembered that Dr. C had frowned when he’d given her this information, which made her think such movement was not an expected or a good thing.
“No? Nothing?” he said.
Yes. Put me together, please. Please put me back together.
“Very well then, my dear. Let’s check on how the rest of you is doing, shall we?”
He made kind eyes at her, but she wasn’t fooled. He wasn’t at all kind, and she hated it when he pretended to be. She watched him move to the large vat—it looked like the tub of an ancient washing machine—where some or all of her digestive system was being stored. A clipboard hung from a nail in the wall beside the vat. Dr. C took the clipboard off the hook, feathered the pages, and made a notation on one of them with the black pen he always kept in the pocket of his lab coat. Then he moved over to the aquarium where her lungs were marinating in an electrified solution.
They left me my heart, she thought. At least they left me my heart.
Dr. C. made more notations and walked along the metal table where her organs were on display like items on a steaming buffet.
And I still have my brain, she thought. But I’m sure that they tried to take that.
Her heart and her brain—but she didn’t like to think about the latter, because there were a couple of times when she’d caught a glimpse of herself in the thick lenses of Dr. C’s glasses, and she’d thought that her hair looked very strange—multicolored, in reds and blues and greens. Then she realized that what she was looking at wasn’t her hair at all but a nest of wires, and that the wires were attached directly to various places in her brain. They had lifted the top of her head off like the lid of a cookie jar, and her brain, grayish and shrunken, seemed poor soil for the garden of wires to have sprouted from.
At first she’d thought that her brain was exposed to the air, but then she noticed that there was a big bubble of Plexiglas extending around her head from her temples. The wires were bundled at the back of her head in a thick cable that fell across her shoulder like a ponytail. Dr. C opened a panel at the front of the bubble once; she assumed it was so that he could check the wires and their connections.
If she could speak—which she couldn’t, not with her lungs removed—she would ask what the wires were doing to her mind.
She had ideas—and more than once she wondered if the very fact that she had ideas was a failing, and not a function of the wires—and none of them was pleasant.
She’d been thinking them on the day that awful boy entered her room, and they grew in scope and clarity after he did what he could to her. She knew as soon as she saw him that he was going to harm her, that he would do things. He was going to harm her, and there was nothing that she could do to prevent him, just watch and wait until it was over. Just watch as he added cleaning chemicals to the vats and jars containing her body. Just watch as he twisted dials and flipped switches on the machines that were monitoring and regulating her.
There were times when he moved out of her field of vision, and she went through a series of painful, sometimes ecstatic changes, the first of which was like a violet curtain dropping over her eyes, the next an intense taste of lemon. She imagined that he was plucking wires from her brain like they were stray hairs, or that he was alternating the amount of amperage that flowed through them. The violet and lemon went away, and she was struck with an acute memory of playing in a sandbox as a toddler, a memory that was so tactile and so rich with sensory detail that she could feel the sand, granular and cool, slipping through her tiny fingers, and she could feel her heart beating in her chest, and she was aware of her breath going in and out, and beside her in the sand a little blond boy in a red jacket sat, and he was offering her his yellow shovel and she was so, so happy. The emotion welled up inside her with a strength and purity that she hadn’t known since dying.
She reached for the shovel, and then the memory was gone, its departure as abrupt as its arrival.
She then felt a desire that she’d never felt before, in either life or death: the desire to kill. She wanted very much at that moment to kill her tormentor, and that was before her next vision.
This one was as powerful as the first vision, and like the first was so real, she felt like she was living through it rather than remembering it. She could feel the weight and texture of fabric on her skin. She could feel the air moving through her lungs. But this time she wasn’t a child but a young woman. She was a young woman, and she was walking from a classroom, and she was aware—pleasantly aware—that heads were turning to watch her leave. She walked out of the classroom, and the click of her heels on the polished tile was audible over the general clamor of her fellow students. She pushed open a heavy wooden door and stepped out into the sunshine of a warm spring day. She crossed a tree-lined quad of bright green grass and someone was waiting for her;she could see him standing in the shade of a cluster of birches. Although she couldn’t see his face, she could feel her heart leap a little in her chest as she quickened her pace to meet him. Then the boy—not the one waiting for her, but the one with her at that moment, in her room—twisted a dial or removed a wire, and the vision went away. She wanted more than anything to cry out, but couldn’t.
Unlike the vision of the sandbox, this wasn’t a memory. Nor was the next experience, which was a sanity-obliterating wave of pain that racked her all over, that racked parts of her even that were no longer attached to her body.
The next experience was from something outside of her as well, a clear vision of a beautiful girl that she almost didn’t recognize as being Karen from Undead Studies class—whom she didn’t in fact recognize until Karen winked one blue eye that became her more familiar diamond color when the lid was raised.
The girl disappeared, and Sylvia saw her mother on her deathbed—another memory—and when the image disappeared, the feeling of desolation remained.
The torture continued. Senses, memories, emotions, experiences—real and imagined—coursed through her at the torturer’s whim until, bored perhaps by her lack of a physical response to his depredations, he moved on, giving the washing tub vat a healthy dosage of glass cleaner before walking out the door.
H
e had tortured her, without even being aware of the horrors he was putting her through, but he’d taught her something as well. Something that she would not forgive him—any of them—for.
Dr. C was finishing his rounds. Of all the things that she wished, she wished that the memory of what happened next would be destroyed along with whatever other damages his messing about caused. And there certainly were damages—Drs. C and Beck had raced into her room soon after the boy had left, panic evident on their faces, lab coats swirling about them as they moved from vat to vat, assessing and sampling. The Hunters were summoned soon afterward, which worried Sylvia. She wondered if maybe he had done damage that could not be repaired. Angela held her hand as her colleagues worked, whispering words of compassion and apology. Sylvia was looking into Angela’s eyes when she heard the words that froze her soul.
“We have to take her offline,” Dr. C had said. Angela was still telling her how sorry she was when Sylvia went away. That was the only way that she could describe what happened. She went away.
Where did she go when she was “offline”? There were no other words for it. She was gone. Nonexistent. This was something she’d never experienced before; when she died, there had been a time when she felt she was present in her deceased body as a being of pure consciousness, unable to animate her dead flesh but still capable of thought and emotion. And when the doctors began her augmentation, she was fully conscious through all of it, all the surgeries and removals, and although they sometimes hid what they were doing to her with a curtain or a sheet, she had still been aware.
Not when she was offline. When she was offline, she was just gone. She’d already thought that they were evil for toying with her mind, for implanting impulses and memories and feelings that she’d never had, but this was far, far worse. This was just like erasing her, making her nothing at all.
Dr. C gave her liver a final inspection and then went to her, smiling. Always smiling.
“I’ve very good news, Sylvia,” he said. “You are ready for the final phase of your augmentation. Well, the final surgical part, anyhow. You are ready for reassembly.”
Generation Dead: Stitches Page 3