Second Skin

by Caitlin Kittredge

  Where were the other three bodies? Had they gotten out of the morgue and into the labs above? I thought of the technicians working second shift and my stomach fluttered.

  “Stay back!” I yelled at the firefighters, but even as I did, I heard the whine of another saw, one of the portable metal shredders that they use on car wrecks.

  “Meat . . . ,” Priscilla moaned again.

  “Bart,” I said, “we gotta get rid of her.”

  He nodded slightly, his eyes wide and all pupil behind his glasses. Bart may get scared, but he’d never go into shock over something as trivial as a dead body coming back to life and trying to gnaw the flesh off his bones. I liked that about him.

  “When I start moving,” I said, “open the big freezer. And be ready.”

  I dropped the saw and stepped toward Priscilla. She showed her fangs and I bared mine in return, moving in a crouch so that I looked like I was going to fight with her.

  She smelled chill, over the stink of the autopsy bay, like frozen iron and smoke on a cold morning. Also dead, with the necrotic stench of a corpse.

  “Come on,” I taunted her. “You afraid of me now? Don’t tell me that you’re gonna tap out after losing an arm. An arm’s nothing.” I circled her, forcing her out of her corner, away from the streaks of her black blood on the tile.

  “You couldn’t take me even with two good arms,” I snarled. “You’re a pathetic little bitch. You understand what ‘pathetic’ means, right, Ugly? It means weak. It means prey.”

  She hissed at me and I spread out my arms, letting my eyes go to gold. “Are you gonna stand there bleeding or are you going to make a move? Come on!” I screamed the last, a battle cry, and Priscilla sprang for me.

  Clumsy as she was from her wounds, she still hit me and dug her claws in before I could react. I felt the bite in both of my shoulder blades and smelled my own blood over her stink as we fell back and I hit the floor.

  I dug one leg into her gut, foot-first, and extended it straight, using her weight and momentum to push her over my head and crashing to the tiles behind me. Spinning, I got into a crouch.

  She was still faster. She swiped at me and her claws rent flesh along my shoulder and my forearm as I threw it up to block her. I felt her claws dance along my bones and the jet of hot blood that hit her face made her pupils dilate and strings of drool grow at the corners of her mouth.

  “Wolf . . . ,” she moaned, in a tone rife with desire of the most perverse order.

  “Bite me,” I said, and kicked her in the gut with all of my were strength. On a good day I can dent a brick wall and right then it was a bad day, and I was pissed off and cut up and tired of this shit.

  Priscilla went back, falling and rolling like she’d been hit by a truck, into the mouth of the freezer. I screamed, “Bart, now!” and he slammed the door shut after her. The automatic bolts clicked into place and a green light came on above the door.

  Bart slumped, breathing heavily. I tried to go over and make sure he was all right, but everything went soft at the edges and I sat down hard in a pool of blood. Mine or Priscilla’s, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Oh dear,” said Kronen. “You’re injured very badly.”

  “I’m . . . fine . . . ,” I gritted, but it sounded like crap even to me. The were could heal up from small things, but Priscilla had cut me to the bone, literally. I could hear her screaming from inside the freezer as my blood pumped and soaked my shirtfront and my jeans. Kronen grabbed my arm and made a tourniquet out of the sheets used to cover up the cadavers. He fussed and made me hold my arm above my head. Slowly, things started to heel back over toward consciousness.

  “She’s not . . . gonna get out, right?” I whispered to Bart.

  He shook his head. “I jammed the lock. You’re all right, Officer. Just keep still.”

  The door to the bays crashed open and a two-man fire team came through, almost falling over each other as they drew up short. “Hex me,” said the taller one. I recognized him as the voice from outside. “What happened here?”

  “One of the patients got lively,” I muttered. “Listen, we need to get out of here right now . . .”

  “Control,” said the firefighter, “I need paramedics and police down here right away . . .”

  He got cut off as I stood, walked over, and ripped his microphone cord out of the base of his mouthpiece.

  “You can’t do that!” he yelled.

  “Listen, tall, dark, and dumb,” I hissed. “There’s something down here that’s got a taste for humans, and if we don’t haul ass back to the surface right now—”

  A scream echoed down the hallway, and my head dropped to my chest. “No . . .”

  “Check it out,” TD&D ordered his partner.

  “Dude, you do not want to check that out, believe me!” I said. “One of that thing’s friends did all this to my arm!”

  He hesitated, but the first firefighter yelled at him. “Get moving, Orris! Somebody could be hurt!”

  “Please,” I said to Orris. “Just come with Dr. Kronen and me and let’s get the Hex out of here.”

  “Who’s out there?” Orris called nervously, casting glances back to his commander and me before he stepped out into the hall.

  I saw the shadows unfold behind his head, and then Orris was jerked backward off his feet, Aleksandr’s mouth opening wide enough to wrap around the back of the firefighter’s skull. The crunch and spatter were all that followed, and then Orris dropped, just a sack.

  Kronen turned away, putting a hand over his mouth. The firefighter ran forward before I could grab him with my good arm, screaming and brandishing his hand ax.

  Jin came from the other direction under the erratically flickering hallway lights and leapt on the man’s back, taking him to ground and digging in his claws, wrapping his jaws around the firefighter’s throat and biting down.

  Aleksandr, not satisfied with Orris, dropped from the ceiling, looked up at us, and snarled.

  “Observation room,” I said to Kronen, pulling us into the small space that had a window on the autopsy bay and locking the door. It was flimsy compared with the metal bulkhead that the firefighters had chopped through, but it was something. I braced myself against the wobbling barrier as Aleksandr howled on the other side. My blood had started to go cold against my skin in the proximity of the monsters. My heart felt like it would break my breastbone.

  We were so Hexed.

  Kronen tugged his key chain out of his pocket and unlocked a metal cabinet replete with hazard signs and stickers. He pulled a heavy jar off the top shelf and hefted it. “Open the door, Detective.”

  I jolted against Aleksandr’s assault. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea, Doc!”

  “If we stay here, we’ll die,” said Kronen. “Give me a moment to prepare, then open the door.” He slipped on a rubber apron and gloves, then picked up the jar again.

  Aleksandr’s malformed, taloned hand snaked through the crack in the door, and I felt a slow hot pain in my back where the doorknob cracked against it. “Go, Bart!” I said, and stopped trying to hold Aleksandr back.

  Bart brought the jar over his bald head and smashed it down on Aleksandr’s shoulders. Foul-smelling liquid gushed over his skull, the shards of glass embedded in his skin making blood spout. The stuff Bart had hit him with made Aleksandr’s skin peel back from his wounds, shrivel, and turn necrotic before my eyes.

  He collapsed to the ground, twitching and groaning. “Formaldehyde,” said Bart. “Best to move out of here before the fumes get too bad.”

  My eyes watered and my nose stung like I’d shoved a lit match into it, but I still managed to stumble over Aleksandr’s body. I stopped at the door to the autopsy bays, keeping Bart behind me. “Where’s the other one?”

  I couldn’t smell Jin over the chemicals, but I knew he was out there, waiting. “Listen,” I told Bart. “I want you to run. Get out and make sure no one else comes down here.”

  He nodded. “I won’t pretend I wish to
be noble, Officer. Do be careful.”

  “Don’t worry,” I muttered, stepping out into the hallway. “I’m always careful.”

  Kronen slipped away toward the emergency exit lights and I went the other way, being sure to make enough noise to draw Jin away from the doc.

  “Hey you!” I shouted, banging open each door. Gods, my arm hurt. It wasn’t healing at all, just quietly bleeding. “Jin Takehiko! I’m talking to you! Show your lumpy face!”

  The last door at the end of the hallway was the pathology lab. I’d been in there exactly once, during my first year in Homicide. My training officer, Detective Burke, and I were here regarding a dismembered woman dragged out of Siren Bay in the propellers of a garbage barge. I remember the smell, the mouth in her severed head frozen open in a scream. Her teeth were pulled, and the killer had chewed off the first digit of each finger to prevent identification.

  Detective Burke retired not long after that case. Myself, I developed a healthy dislike of the pathology lab. Seeing dead bodies whole is one thing, but seeing them in all their bits and parts, organs and slides, was too close to mortality for me.

  Still, I kicked open the door and bellowed “Jin!” to the blackness inside.

  He emerged from the shadows, the bones and stringy embalmed flesh of someone’s dead hand in his mouth.

  “You’re disgusting,” I sneered, making sure to keep a lab table between us. Mark enough time for Kronen to get clear, and then run like hell. Simple plan. Of course it wouldn’t work out that way, but plans give me a nice sense of security.

  Jin dropped the dismembered limb and stood up from his hunched position, the mist clinging to him like a coat of dewy fur. I picked up the nearest jar, which was labeled ALCOHOL, and unscrewed the lid. It wasn’t toxic, but under the circumstances I’d settle for stinging like hell.

  “Back off,” I warned Jin. He purred at me, and I swear he smiled around his awful teeth, a long blood-red tongue snaking out to wash his jaws and chin with spittle.

  “Fine,” I gritted. “Be that way.” I tossed the alcohol, splashing Jin square in the face, then I grabbed the Bunsen burner sitting on the lab table and spun the valve all the way open.

  A jet of flame leapt the space between Jin and me and set him ablaze, his skin puckering like a sausage under a broiler. He screamed and staggered backward into another table, sliding down to the floor as he bucked and convulsed underneath the sheet of fire.

  I just stood and watched, and as I did Jin began to ash, his limbs blackening and sloughing away. He made feeble sounds of pain.

  I just held my injured arm against my stomach and closed my nostrils against the scent of smoke and overcooked meat that filled the lab. Jin stopped moving, slowly but surely the ashy rot creeping up his body until he was nothing but a skeleton, and then not even that.

  It wasn’t until I got outside to Kronen and the fleet of police and fire vehicles that I realized Bertrand Lautrec had gotten away.

  CHAPTER 12

  Bryson shoved his way through a knot of emergency personnel and spread his hands in disbelief. “What the Hex happened?”

  “Hold still!” the EMT bandaging my arm ordered as I swung to face David.

  “We’ve got a major problem.”

  Bryson craned to look into the morgue. “Like what?”

  “Bertrand Lautrec,” I said. The EMT jabbed me with a hypo of painkillers and released me with a glare.

  “Christ, check out those two on the stretchers . . . they look chewed.” Bryson turned back to me as Orris and his commander were wheeled by. “Lautrec’s dead.”

  “Yeah . . . not so much,” I murmured. Bryson shut his eyes and pressed his hands over his face.

  “Tell me the painkillers are making you loopy, Wilder. Please.”

  “He got up, along with the three other vics, and they did all of this,” I said. “Except Lautrec. He took off.”

  “Assuming that a gunshot victim has any sort of brains left,” Bryson said, yanking on his tie in a defeated fashion, “where would he go?”

  I turned and walked away from the cordon, just to be going somewhere. Then an iron fist wrapped my gut, and I stopped. “Laurel.”

  Bryson paled. “Oh, Hex me.”

  I beat him to his Taurus, even with the sling and the painkillers slowing me down. Bryson slapped the flasher on his dashboard and violated a dozen traffic laws to make it to Laurel’s apartment.

  “What’s the move?” he asked as we crossed the lobby. “Shoot ’im in the head? Holy water?”

  “Guns don’t do crap from what I’ve seen,” I said. If a bone saw didn’t dent Priscilla, I didn’t think bullets would have any luck. “Fire’s the only way.”

  “Great. Let me pull out my handy napalm tank,” Bryson muttered. We rode the elevator, feeling the air vibrate around us. “What the hell is taking backup so long?” he said.

  “Most of them are still cleaning up after the quake,” I said. “Tac-3’s been on forty-eight straight hours of calls.” I was chattering to fill the silence, so my thoughts wouldn’t run to You Whre willingly going to confront a guy who already died once and was no prize in life.

  The elevator stopped, and I indicated that Bryson should get out first. I held my pistol one-handed and slid along the wall, covering him as we approached Laurel’s door. My heart began to thud as I caught that cold metal stench.

  “He’s here,” I hissed at Bryson. He didn’t respond, just swallowed and tightened his grip on his Sig Sauer. I could hear Bryson’s heartbeat, too fast, and smell his sweat—pure fear. I gotta say, he hid it like a trooper.

  “Laurel?” I called as Bryson kicked open her door. The latch was broken, and it creaked feebly as the door hit the wall.

  Something hissed from within the dark apartment. Bryson raised his sidearm, then yelped as Laurel’s cat shot past us and disappeared down the hall.

  “Jesus,” Bryson said, leaning against the wall. I tried the light, and a floor lamp responded, tilted on its side. It sent up a red glow from the blood pool it was lying in.

  Laurel Hicks was on her back, her eyes open and her face bloodless. She wasn’t marked except for a row of punctures across her cheeks, as if someone had held her head in place. Tried to make her look at them, understand what was happening. The blood from her body was across her sitting room, like someone had spilled it out of a jug. Her heart, I could only assume, was with Lautrec.

  “We’re too late,” I said softly. Bryson slumped, holstering his weapon.

  “No—” I started and then Lautrec sprang from out of the darkness. He hit Bryson in the chest and knocked him back, the stocky detective denting the thin wall of Laurel’s apartment.

  Lautrec landed on the linoleum and hissed at me, scraping his claws together in a hellish screech.

  I darted around him, slapping at the knobs on Laurel’s old stove. The hiss and stench were welcome, considering the night I was having.

  “Feed . . . me . . . ,” Lautrec groaned, scrabbling at his own stomach as he bared his fangs and snapped at me. I grabbed a box of kitchen matches and dropped under his swipe, sliding on my butt across the linoleum, as far from the stove as I could get.

  “Bryson, cover!” I yelled, and I struck a handful of matches.

  The explosion wasn’t big, as far as explosions go, but it took out all the windows in the apartment and fried Lautrec where he stood. He screamed and disintegrated, still trying to claw at me.

  Bryson helped me up, grunting when I bled on him from my freshly opened arm. “Crap. I hate this shit, Wilder. I loathe it.” His tie and cuffs were singed—and a little bit melted—but he looked none the worse for wear. Even his hair was still in place.

  While Bryson wielded a fire extinguisher over the blackened kitchen, I bent down and closed Laurel’s eyes with my good hand. Her skin was ice to my touch, like she’d been dead for days. “I hope it was fast,” I whispered.

  In the hallway, backup units had started to arrive and uniforms crowded in the doorway. I push
ed through them and kept walking until a wall cropped up, and then I leaned my forehead against it. The world spun slowly beneath my feet.

  A charm against evil. If what I’d seen tonight wasn’t evil, then my perception of the world was hopeless. And I’d stolen it, because I didn’t believe real evil could be fended off . . .

  “Hey, Wilder?” Bryson said as the elevator opened to reveal a CSU team.

  I swiped at my eyes with my thumb before I looked at him. “Yeah, David?”

  He was holding Laurel’s cat, and she growled at me. “Shh,” Bryson told her, and sneezed. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said before.”

  “Oh?” I muttered.

  “Yeah. You are far from the biggest freak in this city.”

  I looked back at the sad, dim little apartment that had contained Laurel’s life, and now her ghost. “This was my fault.”

  “What?” Bryson started shaking his head. “That’s crazy, Wilder. Your blood loss is talkin’ for you.”

  “I took her charm,” I said. “I took away what was keeping her safe. She knew, David. She knew something bad had happened to Lautrec and I got too wrapped up in figuring out how.”

  “Okay,” said Bryson. “Number one, I don’t believe in that hoodoo crap, and number two, I think you need to go to the hospital.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, shutting my eyes on the tableau of Laurel’s body. Bryson could say whatever he wanted—the dead woman in the apartment was my fault, my shame.

  “You’re pumping red stuff pretty good,” said Bryson, in a tone approaching gentle. I looked down and saw a scatter of droplets on the linoleum at my feet. My arm, I realized, felt like hell.

  “Go,” said Bryson. “I’ll mop up here and let you know what the move is.”

  “The move is we catch these sons of bitches,” I said. “Before they do this to anyone else.”

  Bryson sighed. “Yeah, Wilder. I’m working on it.”

  That night in the hospital, I slept better than I had in over a year. Before Alistair Duncan started killing girls in my precinct, before Joshua and Dmitri had both wandered into my life.