by Barr, Jeff
A paper, affixed to the wall, flapping in the wind. It featured a picture of blond girl with good cheekbones and big, mournful eyes. Underneath, a number to call if you saw the girl, and one word. MISSING. Christian had seen her. Two hours ago, at the bottom of a hole, splashed with grave-dirt, being buried an inch at a time. He imagined calling the number, and calmly, with no embellishment or artifice, explaining what had happened to Katrina. He would name Skin and Mik, and then disappear. He would run, as far and fast as he could, and try to forget.
But no, it would never work. He had signed papers, rental agreements for Mik. Skin's credit, of course, was nonexistent. Christian's name would be pulled down into the same dank gray hole that now hid the body of the girl.
"I told you this was a shit-hole," Skin said. He grinned and crunched a stale French fry from an old grease-spotted bag. He gunned the engine and threw it into gear. Christian watched the rear-view mirror, convinced the teenagers would turn around and give chase. Mik groaned piteously from the back seat. As they left the curb, Christian saw the shadows of the two teenagers change, melting into writhing shadows. He blinked, sure that the rain had tricked his eyes.
Like a miracle, through the rain, a flashing red cross. "There." Christian pointed. He felt something loosen in his chest. Things were going to be OK. They could drop Mik here, and leave for Wichita. Mik would have objected, but this was his insane plan to begin with, and he could deal with the aftermath. No longer my problem—the words washed over Christian like a balm.
Skin skidded to a halt in front of the building. Christian jumped out. The frigid rain sent freezing rivulets down the small of his back, and the wind threatened to knock him over as it gusted. He scrabbled at the rear door handle, and when he opened it, Mik almost slid out to the ground. The front of his jeans was a red mess, his face slack and empty.
"Help me, you asshole," Christian gritted at Skin, trying to lift Mik. The guy was even heavier than he looked, and heavier still for being unconscious.
"Not my problem," Skin said airily, lighting a cigarette. "Besides, can't you see it's raining out there?"
Christian cursed and began to drag Mik inside. The flashing red cross cast glaring light over Mik's ashen face, turning him into a victim in an Italian horror movie. He whimpered as Christian dragged him up the steps.
He was trying to wedge open the door with his leg when he was startled by a blast from the Mustang's horn. "Hurry up, we're low on gas!" Skin shouted before winding the window up again. His laughing face was lost in the dirty cascades of water sluicing down the windows.
Christian felt like his head would explode. "Fuck you, you goddamn fucking scum!" He shrieked at Skin, and with a grunt, yanked Mik's body up the last steps. He fancied he could hear Skin laughing from the car.
"Wake up. Wake up, asshole." He chanted to Mik, dragging him into the dripping silence of the entryway. He laid him on the carpet, nudging Mik's boots onto the runner so they wouldn't drip filthy water on the tiles. The boots were caked with the wet soil of Katrina's grave, and he tore his eyes away before those memories could surface and engulf him. "Hello? We need help!"
The place was dim and silent, like something underground. An unpainted steel desk sat between two swinging doors. A couch, upholstered in hideous floral fabric, slouched low against the wall next to an end-table covered in a scatter of black and white magazines. A circle of yellow light pooled under a decrepit floor lamp.
He turned back to Mik. "Goddamn it, wake up and move." Mik grunted and broke explosive wind. Christian reared back. "To hell with this. Find your own way back to Wichita."
He turned to call once more and almost screamed at the two figures standing behind him. A woman, dressed in an outdated nurse's uniform, and a cadaverous man in an old-fashioned wrap-around lab coat. They stood, unmoving, not three feet from Christian. The doctor's glasses, fashioned from inch-thick yellowed glass, reflected back the lugubrious, flickering lamplight. Christian half expected eerie violin music to squeal and groan in the air, but the only sound was the drip of rainwater and his own impatient panting.
"My friend is hurt. Can you help him?"
The two only stared at him, and for a moment Christian was horribly certain they would begin to cackle madly and advance upon him. Instead, they shared a long, unreadable look. The glance was so fraught Christian could almost hear it in the gloom. Then the Doctor barked at the nurse, and she hurried forward. Christian back off a few steps and let them work, listening to their murmured conversation. They were husband and wife, apparently, and judging by their bickering they had been married for years.
He helped them load Mik onto an antique steel gurney, and watched as the nurse wheeled him through a swinging door with a smudged kick-plate. The room beyond was brilliant white. He turned to the doctor, and got a nasty shock. The doctor was grinning at him, and from much closer than Christian remembered. His eyes, under his green surgeon's cap, were dark and deep. Suddenly Christian was very eager to be out of the building, out of the office, and out of the town.
"Ah—will he be OK here, then?" Christian asked. He edged toward the door. "Do you need me to sign some papers, or..." The doctor said nothing, only examined him, grinning obscurely. A whispery sound emerged from beyond the swinging door, and Christian's heart began to hammer. The smile plastered on his face cracked like a mask. Something nudged him from behind, and this time he did scream. He whipped around. He had backed into the doors. He turned and fled, all thought gone from his mind, except the need to escape.
Out into the driving rain, and for a moment, he though the car was gone. Skin, already on his way back to Wichita, chuckling over his cigarettes at the thought of Christian stranded in this sodden backwater. He felt his vision wobble with rage, already half-convinced he would find the street empty.
The Mustang was there, smoking away in the needling rain. He slammed into the passenger seat and barked at Skin to drive, drive. Skin drove. They were on their way, screaming down the only road out of town.
Christian leaned back into his seat, feeling the adrenaline drain out of him, leaving cold wet exhaustion. A sign flashed by on his right. "Where did Mik say he picked up Katrina?" Christian asked, head craned to see out the back window. "Do you remember?"
"Some town called Nasana." Skin squinted at the radio, and started clicking around. Nothing but static. He clicked it off with a disgusted scoff. "Sounded like a real shit-hole."
Christian swallowed and said nothing. The bullet-holed, rusted signpost receding in the mirror read: Thank You For Visiting Nasana. Go In Peace.
CHAPTER THREE
When Mik awoke, he was in the dark, lying on rough concrete. The stench of the place was thunderous, full with shit and rot. A sewer. From somewhere above, he heard the sound of traffic. What little light there was came from a garbage-clogged sewer grate.
Is this hell? Am I in hell? He lay on the cracked and oozing floor of the tunnel, trying in vain to move. It felt like whatever that crazy fucking nurse had given him hadn't yet worn off. Random pulses of white-hot pain sizzled through his nervous system, making his gasp each time.
screaming, cutting, the thirsty grin of cold steel
but his mind slipped over it, burying it. He knew he would have to face it someday, but now was not the time.
Lying here in pain while just above and out of reach, normal life goes on as though you never existed. This is hell.
He was about to call for help when something moved in the shadows. Mik caught his breath, listening. The only thing he heard was the thunder of blood in his ears. A hot, stinking wave of stench roiled out of the blackness and enveloped him. The stink of a zoo. No more than a dozen feet away, the liquid, somehow putrid sound of something large and moist scraping across the floor. It sounded large, heavy, and close. Worse was that, Mik's brain insisted that it sounded…hungry. Panic flooded his veins with icy fear.
He bucked frantically, trying to move. His limbs would not respond. He tried to scrabble at the floor
of the tunnel, but could feel nothing with his fingertips. He tried to push away from that sound, but could find no purchase on the cement. Finally, he looked down at himself, and screamed.
Four stumps. They had cut off his arms and legs and left four red-stained scraps of sheet, the ends tied off with heavy rubber tubing. He bit back a scream, and felt something move in his stomach. He thought back to the doctor, his sparkling eyes and glittering syringe.
Another liquid noise from the shadows. Atavistic fear swallowed Mik's thoughts, and he flailed his foreshortened limbs, consumed by the pre-human urge to flee the great and unknown beast. Finally, he managed to flip himself onto his belly. He heaved his torso up onto the stumps of his arms and legs. Vicious bolts of pain twanged through the stumps like electrical currents. He screamed each time be brought a stump down on the concrete and dragged himself another few inches. A stumped landed squarely on a jagged hook of broken glass and his vision strobed white with agony. Still he moved, fighting forward with the frenzied drive of the survival instinct. Ahead, he saw a tiny swatch of muted daylight. It could be a way out, or only his fevered brain trying to trick him into hope. He humped his body along like a mutant inchworm, sweat dripping down his round face as the unseen thing in the shadows grew louder. To Mik, raised in the city, it sounded like wet garbage bags rustling and snapping in the wind. Shivering bolts of fear shot through him, making him jerk and spasm as he crawled. He threw himself forward, and his chin hit the cement with a crack. He grunted and kept moving. There was more movement in his belly, and sudden, shooting pains. He began to cry, and felt tiny, squirming movements in his—
Something wrapped around the stump of his right leg. He froze, whimpering, his hair hanging in his eyes. The cords on his neck stuck out like guy wires. The grip tightened, both soft and implacable. With a scream, he lunged again. He left bandages like shed skin as he scrabbled over the shit-stained sewer floor. His stumps sang with pain. Soon they would scream. The barely scabbed flesh of his amputations tore open and left bloody prints. He felt the tips of his bones where they poked through the meat and grated against the cement. He had thought, growing up in the projects, fighting among the rats and garbage and gangs and drugs, that he knew pain. But now he realized that pain transmitted far more widely than a few narrow bands; the agony frequency covered every spectrum.
All thought was driven from his mind when something brushed against his ass. Something questing, slippery, and sharp. He cried out.
It entered him, spearing his guts and sending a surprised blurt of blood out of his mouth and nose. His eyes bulged in their sockets. He grunted an inchoate expression of pain as the thing rammed into him. It skewered internal organs, pushing them upward into his chest cavity. He felt every inch of the thing as it slid inside. Finally, it stopped, at the place his esophagus ended and his lungs began. Just enough room, between the thing, and a mouthful of blood, for Mik to take a strangled breath. Enough air to live on, for a while.
With a scream, he was pulled back into the shadows, leaving nothing but scraps of soiled bandages and a pool of blood.
Mik groaned. Everything from his sternum to his knees was a burning suit of pain—the slightest movement sent agony flashing through him. He whimpered like a kicked dog.
The room was lit only by a band of pale light that seeped in through the doors at the far end of the room. The smell of the place reminded him of grade school: dark, varnished wood, liniment, mildewed wood. A black patch of mold crept up the far wall. If he squinted, it almost looked like a face—Katrina's face.
Strange shapes lurked in the corners of the room, old-fashioned beds draped in sheets, archaic machines that defied identification. A clutch of wheeled carts sat in a conspiring group near the doors.
"Hello?" he called. His voice cracked like he hadn't spoken for a year, and he was dismayed at the shaking, old-man fear he heard there. There was no answer except for the dour sound of rain blatting against the windows. A door slammed somewhere in the building, startling another cry from him. "Hello! I'm awake!"
The impersonal squeak of rubber-soled shoes in the hallway, coming toward his room. They grew louder, until they stopped just outside the door. He could see nothing through the pebbled glass of the door, and he was filled with an unreasonable fear of what was on the other side. Did they know about the girl? Would they call the police? Had they already called them? His mind whirled with visions: stone-faced bumpkin deputies clumping toward him, sending him away to some backwoods county pen. There, he would die. Rotted away to a walking corpse by prison hooch or stabbed by some prisoner looking to make a reputation. He would be passed around like a bitch, he was too pretty to go to prison, he—
The door swung open, and a nurse entered. Her starched whites shone in the darkness like teeth under a black-light. The dimness of the
operating room
place obscured her features, except for a pair of disapproving dark eyes. She didn't smile while she took his temperature, peered into his eyes with a small penlight, listened to his chest. She regarded him with a twist of her lip, as if trying not to smile.
"How do you feel?" she said. Mik eyed her with an auctioneer's gaze. Kind of hot, in a hillbilly way—until she opened her mouth to expose a mouthful of sketchy-looking teeth. "You were given a shot. For pain," she continued. He reconsidered his assessment. Maybe she could play a dominatrix in a fetish scene or two.
Already Mik began feeling better. Sure, he was hurt now—but he would heal. The doctors in Wichita could fix anything these days. Hell, he could go to Topeka, see the best doctors. Even better—with the money from the film, he would fly to Cali, and get treated at one of the celebrity hospitals they had out there. "Thank you for your help." He resisted the urge to lift the blankets and inspect the damage. "Where are my friends?"
"They left." She picked up his chart and examined it, tapping her teeth with a pencil. On closer inspection, her teeth were worse than he had thought; rotten-looking and crooked as leaning tombstones. He blinked; her teeth appeared to have grown lines of dark green mold. "If they're good friends, they'll come back to look for you. But somehow, I doubt they will."
Look for you? She means 'check on you', doesn't she? "Ah. Well." He looked around. "Very quiet place you have. Do you have many other patients?"
Rather than respond, she offered a small strange smile, and set the chart down on a table. He tried to sit up in bed. His arms and legs would not respond. Panic surged through his veins. "Nurse? Nurse! Oh, God, my legs, my arms, they aren't working, I—"
At that moment, the doctor entered the room through the swinging door. His manner was brusque but quiet, like something spiky worn down by the years.
"How do you feel?" he asked. He didn't consult that chart, only regarded Mik with a flinty gaze. "Are you in much pain?"
"Your fucking nurse has given me something—done something—and I'm fucking paralyzed, is how I feel!" Mik struggled against invisible bonds. It was like being held down by bands of cold iron. "I want the fuck out of here, now!"
The doctor regarded him gravely, unblinking. "But how do you feel?" He reached into his gown and withdrew something: a long, glittering syringe. The barrel of the syringe swam with a thick, milky substance. Thin black shapes squirmed in the liquid.
Mik's gaze tracked the point of the needle. The bore looked as big around as a cigarette. The doctor examined the needle, letting the light play along its polished steel length. "The nurse has given you something to induce temporary paralysis." He dandled the needle in front of Mik's wide eyes. "This is a special preparation of mine." The doctor's eyes sparkled. "Part of it is a synaptic enhancer. I believe it was developed to encourage interrogation subjects to more strongly feel the pain of torture. And along with that; a gift from our little town to you. I don't think you will enjoy it much."
Mik flashed back to old horror movies, direct-to-video torture porn of inbred country people gone crazy. "Please, no, don't do this—I have money! I'll give you everything I have
, I—"
Two men, so large as to resemble bears more than humans, shambled into the room. Their faces were stubbly and chapped by wind and moonshine. They stunk of cheap hand-rolled tobacco and some other, baser stench, like wild boars. They shuffled forward to stand on either side of his bed.
The doctor, without ceremony, plunged the needle into Mik's arm. After a few moments, one of the men leaned over and gave Mik's earlobe a tweak.
The pain was excruciating, like the man had taken a blowtorch to the side of his face. Mik screamed until one of them stuffed a oily rag into his mouth. His mouth stretched so far he felt the flesh at the corners of his mouth split.
The men turned away, and Mik heard the clatter of steel on steel. When the doctor and the two men returned to the bed, each of them held something long and sharp. Serrated steel blades grinned hungrily at him.
The cutting seemed to take forever, but he was conscious and screaming for most of it.
CHAPTER FOUR
A shallow grave for a murdered girl. Shovel, dirt, stone, flesh; all of it cold, blue, gray and black. A color poem of burial. Christian sweated through his jacket, pulling rocks like rotten teeth from the barren ground. At any moment, he expected the icy clutch of Katrina's fingers to grab his wrist, the frantic shuttering movement of her reanimated corpse as it clawed out of the dirt. The fact of her death squirmed in Christian's gut like a worm.
Nightmares every night left him a shaking husk, dreaming awake through his days. Every step forward was also a step back toward the cold plot of soil where they had buried her. Every day was a ruin. His body a wasted shadow, his soul a stained-glass window, leached of its color from the sin hidden inside. He was coming apart.