However, its thing—providing a stable conduit from which the transdermal, primordial ooze could be given a combative form—found an unexpected wrinkle in Jean’s morphology.
If it could think, it would ponder, why bother steering about one clumsy bag of bones when it could birth thousands of boneless wonders?
But wait ... let’s back it up a bit.
Whilst Jean luxuriates in pain-free wonder and her body accepts the new evolution, let’s go way back ...
Before Light, there was Dark.
Sure, things always begin with the ubiquitous in the beginning, and then there’s light, and life, and so on and so forth. Hundreds upon thousands upon millions upon billions of philosophical constructs and physical models prove as much.
But they always focus on the emergence of illumination.
What about The Dark that was and still is?
Shadows remind us of what once was, but there is little talk of the Infinite Dark—of its purpose, of its design.
In nature, say, in the very quagmire of hardened black at the edge of a familiar little clearing, deep in a dark, dense wood, the Infinite Dark manifests and entrenches itself within life like a stubborn cancer. It collapses and corrupts and waits for the opportunity to spread and flourish.
An oblong piece of gray-yellow limestone rounded off Dan’s impressively large pentagram. He took a few steps back and regarded his work with pride. The clearing was comfortably shady, but lugging rocks and sticks had him perspiring. He stood still. A little breeze whispered through the trees and cooled the slick beads of sweat gathered under his arms, across his chest, and along the length of his shoulders. He rubbed his face, and then reached for the sky in a grunting stretch.
Jean was entertaining the beast. This is how it went with all of Dan’s victims. Shannon, Krista with a “K,” Christa with a “C,” Lupe, and Angela all marveled over the Maker, allowing Truth to fill them in.
They still screamed and they still fought for their lives, but Dan liked to think they understood what he was doing. They didn’t want to die for it, no matter the glories the beast showed them, no matter Dan’s purpose, but deep down they had to know their deaths were anything but meaningless. This mattered somehow, right?
Dan made his way over to the picnic spread. This being sacrifice number six, he’d gotten pretty good at bringing along the essentials. The first few times out? Forget it. He forgot this and he forgot that, and any little miniscule mistake on his part brought on a potential for failure.
Though in his heart of hearts, he knew the Dark Lord wouldn’t let him screw up. It needed the sustenance as much as he needed a rush of salty slut blood.
Rifling through the little cooler, he grabbed for the hefty steak knife. It was streaked with bits of hard cheese and French bread. Wiping it clean on his jeans, he stood and then approached his prey.
Technically, Jean wasn’t a slut. Neither were Krista with a “K” or Lupe. Like Jean, they were nice girls who got caught up in his nefarious game. Sometimes Dan wasn’t sure if the good girls he offered up counted. There wasn’t any sort of rulebook or guide to walk him along. He just figured that the Dark Lord would want sluts.
Regardless, the black intermingling with his blood got as amped up over good girls as it did bad. Murderous intent blossomed. The urge pulled just as hard. It kept him awake and frenzied until he did the deed, and then once he gave the beast what it wanted, he got a little reprieve until the hunger began to gnaw away at his guts and the sacrificial courtship began anew.
Dan tightened his grip on the knife and took long strides. He found the faster he got it done, the better. Real feelings had developed between him and each of his girls, and it was no different with Jean. In fact, it was way worse with Jean. She was fragile. She needed him as much as he needed her. The end result was much, much different, but the developing love that brought them here followed similar paths.
Biting his lower lip until coppery respite filled his mouth, Dan held his knife hand high. He spun Jean around on her (floating?) heels with his free hand and then stabbed the hell out of her with the thick blade.
The very moment steel touched flesh, a number of things happened. Jean hadn’t put two and two together just yet. She was still free-floating and marveling at the odd things happening inside her body. Dan got the same rush he got from stabbing the others. Like a potent drug, the blood savagery consumed him.
One hovered in oblivious bliss while the other labored with hot, animal force.
When a spray of blood followed Dan’s knifepoint from flesh to the thick, forest air, misting and then splashing and cooling his face, all seemed right with the world (to Dan anyway). He continued the slashing motions and pushed the steel home again and again. Once the frenzy had left him, once he was spent, drained of murderous hunger, he’d pull his lady love close and let her lifeblood drench them.
Then, after a bit—just how long was hard to define, as it was different with each sacrifice—he’d lower her body into the center of the pentagram and make his offering to the beast. Once the ritual was complete, he’d feed her to the rocks and that was that—he’d be off to the bars in search of another flame.
Jean didn’t even feel the knife plunge into her chest. The dark ooze coated her muscles and her inner tissues, and every time the blade tore her flesh and sheathed itself in muscle, nicking bone and savaging capillaries, the gunk amassed and filled in the empty spaces. It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth strike that something in her brain rose above the ooze and noticed that her beloved boyfriend was trying to kill her.
The moment she noticed, a zillion tons of pressure compressed her chest, and pain—big and sick and bloody—welled. She burned from the tips of her toes to the top of her skull. At first, she couldn’t tell if the murderous blade or the all-consuming gunk was to blame for the growing pain. It seemed to be a combination of the two. Whereas the blade hit hard and fast, ice cold to blistering heat, over and over again, the Dark crept slowly, but had completed its circuit, and that fluffy good feeling that had filled her now dissipated and gave way to a disintegrating burn.
Her resplendent face lost all color and dropped. As Dan ground his teeth and drove the knife home, it dawned on her. She was in some serious shit.
While our human players struggled with the demons that devoured them, the primordial goo enshrining Jean’s innards happened upon an unexpected wrinkle in its purpose and design. For millennia upon millennia, it sat where it sat and did what it did, inching its way through the crust, dead-dreaming about a new dawning and eventual eventualities. The sludge couldn’t think things through or understand them like our fast-firing human brains, but it could feel. Inclinations came and went and came and went.
When Dan’s brutalizing steel pierced Jean’s right breast implant, the sharp point ripped the thick sack. The viscous saline solution ran from its shapely pouch. The second the black goo came in contact with the salty solution, a chemical reaction kicked the ooze in its ancient ass and dropped the transmogrifying process into high gear.
Vision expanded.
The ooze no longer needed eons to achieve dominion.
It no longer needed the minions it managed to infect and send out into the world to bring back paltry morsels of human blood and gristle.
Again, the thing at the thing’s core could not conceptualize any of this, but it understood ... opportunity ... and it seized that motherfucker with everything it had.
Ropy strands of black absorbed the foreign fluids, and the massive amount of salt within the implant’s malleable compound went to work shaping and invigorating hungry, toothy off-shoots.
Tadpole-like blobs of black leapt from the gaping hole in Jean’s chest and wrapped themselves around Dan’s knife.
Dan swung the blade back for his seventy-second grisly attack. The tadpole-things slunk up the steel. The unmarred black of their bulbous heads came apart in a razor-sharp yawn.
For a second in time, the world froze.
Dan�
�s eyes, slits of bashing hate, narrowed further as he tightened his grip.
Jean’s eyes widened as realization and confusion spun her mind.
The dark-manifest opened its new mouths, new jaws on the verge of unhinging, and then it slammed them shut on a nice, warm hunk of Dan’s gore-soaked hand.
He dropped the knife, doubled over in pain, and screamed his throat bloody raw. Before his brain had the chance to switch from murderous to fearful, the dark mouths grew and grew and gnashed and gnashed and—just, like, that—as easily as Dan gave himself over to the idea of base, godly gratification; as easily as he craved carnal pleasures and masochistic release; his blood, bones, organs, and skin were pulped into mash, and then swallowed into nothingness.
Jean continued to levitate, rising a few more inches into the air, the overhanging sun casting her shadow over the inky mess that used to be her man.
The knife damage was of the mortal variety. Had things gone as planned, Jean’s consciousness would have dwindled and disappeared like listless ash in a steady wind—but this new hiccup shifted the Fates. Destiny needed her.
Jean choked on a clump of coagulated blood obstructing her throat. She tried to get her bearings, but the black had worked its way into the folds of her brain. The ooze dampened thought until it was too soggy to hold together.
The black infiltrated every fiber of the gasping woman’s being. It soothed this patch of brain matter here and pinched a particular cluster there until it got her to stop gagging, and then it went on filtering ooze through the implant’s well of saline, producing an army of creeping, crawling doom.
The serene woman floating above the amassing army hung her head low and rested her chin on her chest. Warring trains of thought struggled in the quagmire of cerebration at the base of her brain. Things like Me, and You, and Self Worth, and Belief, and The Unimportant Importance of Pert, Perfect Breasts surfaced from the gray, swampy sludge before drowning in ambivalence, ready to rise and wash away the sins and faiths of the world in a devastating wave of cleansing, black death.
LOCKS OF LOATHE
BY JEZZY WOLFE
Alesha Aldopita’s head resembled a butchered Barbie doll. Scant threads of dull brown gossamer barely covered her pasty scalp. Growing up, she envied men with comb-overs. Her peers in eighth grade nicknamed her “Alesha Alopecia” and it followed her through high school. The more her beautiful but vicious classmates ridiculed her, the more she grew angry and resentful. She’d missed out on sleepovers with the girls at school, staying up past midnight putting crooked braids in each other’s hair. Prom was out of the question, along with every other dance and party the typical teenager begged to attend.
After graduation, she moved across the country to attend college, and never left her dorm room without a hat or scarf covering her cranium. Needless to say, she stayed as lonely as she was bald. A lifetime of poorly disguising her condition had passed, and she was tired of hiding.
Hell yeah, she was bitter.
“Have you considered wearing a wig?” This was her first therapy session with Dr. Wiston, a woman possessing more hair than the entire high school varsity cheerleading squad combined.
Alesha glared, regretting her choice of doctor. Taking advice from her would be the equivalent of a morbidly obese person taking nutritional suggestions from an anorexic.
“Hair salons donate hair to an organization that makes wigs for cancer patients and people with other illnesses,” the doctor continued. “That would be an easy solution if you’re so insecure about your appearance. Would you like me to give you their number?”
Alesha knew about them as well, but wigs were uncomfortable. They made her scalp itchy and sweaty, and she feared they would fly off her head at the worst possible moments.
“Wigs give me rashes. Isn’t it bad enough that I have to wear sunscreen under my scarves? I’m tired of living like a freak!”
Dr. Wiston squirmed in her seat as she scrutinized Alesha’s chrome dome.
Great. She’s captivated by the drops of sweat covering it. They’re probably reflecting tiny rainbows all over the room. I’m a human disco ball, whee!
“At the risk of sounding simple, many women flaunt a shaved head. Perhaps, rather than cursing your condition, you can turn it into an asset?”
Alesha practically hissed. “Absolutely not!”
“Okay,” Dr. Wiston said calmly, “there are many advancements in hair replacement now. While the majority of patients looking for hair replacement are men, it is certainly not limited to them.”
“If you are talking about Rogaine, it didn’t help.”
“There’s also Propecia, Dithro-Scalp, cortisone injections, and hormonal modulators.”
“You don’t think I would’ve tried them already? I’ve seen four different specialists, and it’s cost me more than a few years’ salary. The only progress I’ve seen is the ability to have lots of sex now without getting pregnant, thanks to the contraceptives they told me would spur more hair growth.” Alesha struggled to keep her voice steady. “But, hey, the pill works. Since it didn’t make my hair grow, no man will touch me with a ten-foot penis.”
“You’re an attractive woman, Alesha.”
“Right.”
“Have you looked into hair plugs?”
“Have you looked at hair plugs? Don’t I look weird enough?”
Alesha regretted her misdirected hostility, but she felt powerless to control the emotions dominating her reactions. She couldn’t stop staring at Dr. Wiston’s thick mane of spun gold. She can’t take me seriously because she doesn’t understand how I feel.
“How are your finances now?”
She didn’t even listen to what I just said! “Uh, few years’ salary, remember? I’m broke.”
Dr. Wiston studied her again, eyes squinted and brow creased as she tapped her pen against her lower lip.
“I am not supposed to do this; it is a violation of policy. But if you promise to keep this disclosure completely confidential, I might be able to help you.”
Alesha smirked. “How will you do that? Hair extensions and super glue?”
Dr. Wiston went over to her desk and opened a drawer, pulling a flat black box from under a stack of papers and laying it on her desk blotter. Resettling in a chair by the desk, Alesha watched as the therapist slowly lifted the lid of the box.
In the box rested only one simple business card.
Dr. Wiston started to hand her the card, but pulled back when Alesha reached for it. “Dr. Pift was disbarred six years ago, but he still practices from a private location. Some believed his methods were unethical and grossly negligent, and had his license revoked.” She glared a warning at Alesha. “If I give you his number, you cannot tell anyone that you’re seeing him. Should complications arise from whatever procedure you agree to, you will not be able to seek medical help from a hospital or outside doctor.”
Alesha’s heart pounded erratically and sweat rivulets raced down her temples.
“Because he has a humanitarian streak, his fees are reasonable. He continues his work because he believes in helping people like you, those who have tried every avenue they could afford without success.”
Still not convinced, Alesha shrugged. “That’s great, but is he any good?”
Dr. Wiston rounded the desk and squatted in front of her, eyes glittering above her twisted smile. She shook her head and a bounty of golden silk tumbled over her shoulders.
“You tell me. What do you think?”
Dr. Pift waited quietly behind an oversized steel desk as Alesha studied the sheet he’d handed her. It read like a menu, but rather than food, a list of surgical procedures and brief descriptions were laid out next to dollar amounts.
Her stomach dropped. I can’t even afford an appetizer ...
“I appreciate you stopping in to see me. Dr. Wiston is a long-time friend. How is she looking these days?”
“Perfect,” Alesha mumbled.
“Indeed. You know, there was a time her
head was as bald as yours.” He paused as Alesha’s jaw dropped. “Unusually bad reaction to the chemo, I’m afraid. For many, the hair will return, but in her case ...”
“How did you fix her?” Alesha ran a hand across her scalp. When she looked at her palm, she saw four strands of baby-fine hair caught on her fingers.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of hair plugs.” As disappointment registered on her face, he chuckled. “I’m not suggesting a traditional process of hair plugs, of course. You have no hair to re-harvest. But, after experimenting with a combination of techniques, I’ve discovered that healthy hair can be achieved on even the most barren head. What I’m suggesting for you is a full-thickness skin graft. We replace your scalp with the scalp of a healthy head and that hair becomes yours.”
A vision of Frankenstein fluttered through Alesha’s mind, complete with oversized metal sutures and neck bolts. “I ... I don’t know, Dr. Pift. That sounds outrageous.”
“Why? Successful skin grafts are performed all the time on burn victims. Hair plugs themselves are just smaller patches of transplanted skin.”
“Yeah, but isn’t the skin their own?”
“Most of the time, yes. But skin is an organ, Miss Aldopita. And organ transplants are hugely successful with the medications now available. Skin can be transplanted from a donor and treated just as if the recipient received a kidney or a liver. Once the body has successfully merged the new scalp into your system, the healthy follicles will continue to regenerate new hair.”
“It sounds pretty fantastic, but I’m not sure I can afford this,” Alesha said, dollar signs swimming in her vision.
Dr. Pift watched as tears welled in Alesha’s eyes. Pity—or something close to it—poorly disguised his smile as he leaned across the desk and offered her a tissue.
“Usually, when patients come to see me, they’ve already exhausted their resources in an attempt to find a cure. I never refuse to treat a patient based on inability to pay.” His smile warmed. “I came from a very poor background myself, but now I live a comfortable life. I’m not greedy.”
Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad! Page 18