Ms. Fuchs was nowhere to be found. I was bone-tired and looking forward to a nap in my office. I folded out the cot I keep in my closet. I’d never been able to sleep comfortably on my couch. No doubt I associated it with the sacrifice of power it would’ve symbolized, although at the time I only thought it was too soft for my back. I sat at my desk to sort through the file the social worker had left for me, wanting to get some work done even as my eyelids began to droop. Before I realized this, I was asleep.
And when I awoke, I was wet.
Warmth and moisture covered me, my clothes clinging all over. Absurdly, I believed I’d spilled something on myself, or wet the cot.
I’d left my desk lamp on, but the room was now pitch black. I reached for the switch. Streams of liquid force coursed up my torso and enveloped my face. Involuntarily, my mouth opened and I gagged on hot, salty foam. The intruding fluid gushed at once up my sinuses, forced itself over my palate and down both my esophagus and trachea, bored into my ears.
I could hear only the pulse of the incoming tide, feel only a simultaneous probing at every orifice, taste only a briny tang like seawater. The pressure in my head was terrific, and mounting as the volume of fluid rose. I was unable to expel it by coughing or choking, and my hands passed through it without effect.
I found the switch. The blackness became uniform red. It felt as if the fluid had managed to penetrate as well as cover my eyes. Dimly, I felt alien warmth coursing up my rectum and the channel of my urethra. My bowels swelled to the limits of their flexibility, but the fluid continued to seek entry. My equilibrium failed as blood poured into my inner ears, and, flailing in my chair, I collapsed on the floor. Straggling droplets filtered through my pores and merged with the ocean within.
I was a red world. I was the mouth of the river of Life, and she flowed into me.
Plasma chimes sounded in my arterial heavens, resounding down through capillary alleys and cardiac abysses. Torrents of divine incarnadine mingled with my own insensate blood, singing a hormonal lullaby that stilled all circulation. My lungs subsided, turgid, dormant; red tides effortlessly conducted oxygen directly to my cells, braced their membranes against the hydrostatic surge of redoubled pressure. My brain lolled in a languid current that whispered and murmured in time to the alien tocsin that stirred my heart. Cell by cell, it engendered understanding.
It wanted its daughter back.
The blood had existed symbiotically with Roja Zachardo all her life without her knowledge. Norman Cykes discovered its secret and impregnated the host, forcing it to split itself into a daughter, then locked it away. He drained the blood from Roja’s body and for years experimented with it, sometimes injecting himself, though the transfusions all failed. The blood would only bond of its own free will. Bereft of its host, the mother craved reunion with its daughter body.
I located Jane Doe Cykes for her; rapture bereft me of any secrets. I could hold nothing back. In return, she shared herself with me.
I/We could feel nothing outside my/our own body, could see no sense in ever wanting to, ever again. Outside the sub-molecular intimacy of our embrace was only infinite, empty space, the lonely pain of which I could not imagine enduring again. We were closer than the most passionate sexual act could bring two separate beings. I/We encompassed each other totally, sharing body and thought.
I awoke in the dark, dry everywhere but between my legs. This time, I had indeed voided my bladder.
There were no stains on cot or carpet, no marks on my clothing. My watch had gone dead, but the wall clock read 7 PM. I’d been incapacitated for roughly an hour and fifteen minutes. My muscles were slow in responding, and my knees buckled the first few times when I tried standing. I crawled to the door, and hauled myself upright by the knob.
I knew I had to locate the blood before it could infiltrate the quarantine room or commune with anyone else. I assumed it was traveling through the ventilation shafts. I examined myself in the mirror; when the spasms in my hands and knees had subsided, I cleaned up and changed.
I made myself walk down to the nurse’s station. A candy striper sat at the desk, engrossed in a personal phone conversation. I signaled to her to hang up. “I need you to page Dr. Randels. Tell him to meet me at my office immediately.”
She nodded, her bright burgundy nails clicking on the numbers, though her eyes never left my face. After a moment, her voice rang out through the hospital. She hung up. “Is there anything—” I stepped into the elevator and pressed the basement button.
I leaned against the mirrored steel wall of the elevator car as it descended, my eyes turned inward. I felt hollow inside, and knew I’d always felt that way and never faced it. I considered the possibility that the blood might have found Randels before it got to me, and might use him to aid its escape. I could only hope I was the only one with whom it had shared itself.
As the doors opened, I began to run, which made me dizzy, but I couldn’t stop. I slid past Jane Doe Cykes’ cell and fell sprawling. My arms flailing, I hit the floor face first. My left eyebrow burst open upon impact; the blood that flowed over my eye was drab brown, tasted thin and cold, inanimate.
I struggled to get up as the phone rang by her door. It trilled unanswered, jarringly out of sync with my pulse. I grasped the knob and found it locked. I would have to call maintenance and order them to shut off all airflow to the basement. I answered the phone.
“Shields, is that you? What’s going on? I’m up here at your office, and the receptionist told me—”
“The girl has an inherited condition that makes her a potential carrier of viral infection. We’ve got to isolate her completely.” I jerked at the doorknob again without success. Blood was trickling down my face faster than I could blink it away. “Do you have the key to her cell?”
“I’ll be right back down, Shields. Don’t go anywhere this time.”
I hung up. My vertigo subsided. The hallway was empty of personnel and equipment, but I recalled seeing a fire axe in its case in the stairwell. Pressing my face against the glass, I tried to make out any movement in the dark cell. A sickly green line arced and dove in the blackness to display the girl’s pulse rate. All else was still.
I jogged down the length of the hall, hands out before me in the dark. As long as I kept up forward momentum, I could stay upright. I wrapped my coat around my fist and punched the glass. It shattered on the third or fourth try, and I cut myself on the loose shards as I pried them out, then took the axe.
The elevator opened as I was lurching back to her cell with the axe cocked over my head. Randels popped out, a nurse beside him. He cringed behind her as I came at them.
I barely kept my footing as I pivoted and hacked at the window. The second swing went wild and I slipped again. The axe launched from my hand and crashed through the safety-glass.
Randels came shouting out of the elevator with the nurse close behind. I got to my feet and threw one leg over the windowsill. The axe was lodged in the wall above Jane Doe Cykes’ head.
Randels punched me in the throat. I gasped and slipped from my straddling position into the cell, at the foot of her bed. Glass grated under my weight, biting into my skin, drawing more blood. Randels dug for his keys.
The air recirculator gurgled.
Randels opened the door and came in holding a flashlight out in front of him as if to ward wild animals away, the nurse creeping dutifully behind him. His brow knitted as he squinted around, then his features were eclipsed by a splatter of darkness and his arms flew to his face.
I know what the videotapes showed. The hospital claimed they never existed, but I saw them before they were destroyed. I could not be made, then, to explain what they showed. For a long time, they formed my only memory of what went on once I entered the girl’s cell.
On the tape, I stood beside Jane Doe Cykes’ bed and leaned over her, hands outstretched as if to drink in the moonstone glow of her skin. My mouth opened and closed spasmodically, my eyes rolled back in my head, and I vomited
blood all over her. From out of the gash in my brow and the lacerations in my palms came fans of crimson spray like the fountains of severed arteries.
Blood cascaded out of me in a serpentine arc, and into the girl in the bed. I swiped at it, but my hand passed through the stream and emerged as dry as desert sand.
Jane Doe Cykes opened her eyes. The blood pummeled her and formed lakes in her lap, between her arms and torso, in the ravine where her rib cage gave way to her concave abdomen. Her mouth gaped and crimson jewels came pouring into her, gathering like to like with the eerie prescience of living mercury. A fountain of blood swirled and drained into her lips, and I threw myself upon her, taking her in a deep kiss.
I choked and lost control of my body, but somehow managed to hold on to her. Some of the blood flowed into my lungs, but came right back up, gushing out my nostrils. It was like trying to stifle a hearty New Year’s Eve puke. I bit through my lips, trying to hold her back, licked and frantically bit her cold, waxen lips to steal her back. I might have eaten her, if Randels hadn’t clawed at my shoulders and dragged me back.
I was losing her. Blood spat from my mouth, bubbled out of my sinuses, wept from my pores and flew across the room to the bed. She had only used me as a vessel to reach her daughter. With all we shared, she could still hide inside me, use me, and slip away—
I was too weak to resist as Randels grappled me into the corner of the cell. His teeth chattered in my ears, but he could not even speak.
Jane Doe Cykes seemed to grow, to swell, to ripen, as she absorbed the red reservoir in the bed. The girl disappeared beneath its surface. A voluptuous black-red woman lay upon the spotless sheets now, the secret form of the goddess who had slept in the veins of the bruja, visited upon the daughter from my unwitting lips.
Randels relaxed his grip and I elbowed him in the face.
I knelt before her, my arms out in surrender. “Take me! What are you waiting for? I can help you escape, I’ll be your host, just don’t leave me! You need me!”
Jane Doe Cykes stretched to bursting with an ocean of singing blood. She was breathtaking as she drew herself up and flowed to the door, her face stolen from Jane Doe Cykes’ body and reproduced as a negative framed in locks of fluid hair undulating to the beat of her heart.
After all the inquests, the civil trial and the APA review, the incident was explained away as inexplicable. The lab technician found unconscious in my closet, the vessel by which she came to my office, could shed no light on the events. The security tapes were, of course, not entered into evidence. Jane Doe Cykes was never seen again.
Dr. Randels and I both took medical leaves after the last review, he to resume drinking, I to decode the Cykes journals. Others, FBI cryptographers and a retired Army Signal Corps officer among them, tried to break them, but their skill had no personal impetus behind it. I have succeeded, at least partially, where others failed because I desperately needed to. Where I have achieved little else, I have solved at least a fragment of the mystery.
“Host A is unaware of the symbiote in her bloodstream. Interactions between the two organisms seldom take place above a cellular level, and conventional tests cannot discern any abnormal presence, though Host A attests to feeling a ‘holy spirit’ inside her when she performs her ritual cures. I believe Host A’s perception of stimuli from the outside world acts as a buffer between the host and the symbiote, suppressing any macromolecular contact. It sustained her, worked miracles through her, loved her, though she never knew it.
“If this buffer could be removed by the screening out of all stimuli from birth, the host’s perceptive sphere would be turned entirely inward, a world unto itself. In perfect darkness, they might find each other, and develop mutual comprehension, symbiotic consciousness, even a means of life support that would render nutritive intake obsolete. Host B, my darling Ruby, nears the end of her gestation period, which should make such an experiment feasible at last. Such a life will truly be a gift, when one considers the alternative to which we are all condemned.”
So I’m waiting in the dark. I’ve made encouraging progress since I weaned myself off solid food and punctured my eardrums. I must lie still, so that my pulse becomes regular enough to hypnotize me. Soon, I will lose the use of my eyes, weakening them with mild acidic irritants until I see only black, then red. I must dive into myself and slow the dismal thunder of my heartbeat until I can hear her voice again in the place where she hid inside me before, until some remnant mote of her teaches my blood to sing. I must lie still and whisper into myself until I hear a response. Soon, I know, there will be two less lonely souls in the world.
I am an ugly man. Women seldom look at me, and never in the eyes, unless I’m giving them money. So I go to strip clubs.
Let me tell you about my favorite.
The Black Box used to be called Strip Search, and before that, Freaky Kiki’s Cockpit, but nothing else about it has changed, except the cover charge. It’s a topless dive next to the airport runways. The overpriced, watery drinks keep the sailors and bikers away, and the hardcore perverts go to the all-nude shows at Les Girls and Pacer’s. Only hardcore losers and conventioneers go there, before hitting their flight home; people who can’t or won’t tell what happened to them there. Most of the locals know about the Black Box. I heard the warnings; that’s why I went.
You think you know me. I’m the sad, sick, deluded loser in the darkest corner of the club, who believes if he just keeps tipping, one day, maybe he’ll pay enough to do more than look. I am all that, and less. I keep coming, I keep paying, and they can barely bring themselves to touch my hand long enough to take money from it.
They know my name. They all shout it out when I come in, pretending to fight over me, but I always get Brandi. We have something special, she and I. She understands what I want.
She is not the prettiest, or the nicest. Drugs have made her scrawny and mean, but they have opened her to me.
She doesn’t fuck around. “Let’s get you started,” she says, grazing my crotch with a champagne bottle. It’s always open when I get there, and I’ve never asked to open it, like the other customers often do. I don’t want to know what’s really in it.
The first time, I was scared, like anyone would be. Sydni was my dancer. She had a weave and atrocious fake tits and a dangling tampon string. I dropped fifty on her for a private show, and another fifty for champagne. The only thing I remember after that is that she didn’t drink any.
I came to on a bus bench across the street from the club a few hours before dawn. A plane roared overhead, touched down and sucked newspapers off my body. I was wearing somebody else’s clothes, beer-soaked rags from the lost and found box at the club. My gold chain was missing. My wallet was cleaned out, and four hundred dollars was gone from my account, the limit I could pull out of an ATM.
There was only a hole from the first drink to when I woke up, a total void. Anything could have happened, before they robbed and stripped me. With such a vacuum, anything was possible.
But Nature hates a vacuum.
I waited a week before I went back. I wore shabby clothes and carried only a two hundred dollar roll. I cancelled all my credit cards and moved all but one hundred dollars out of my checking account.
They gave me to Brandi. She took all my money.
I woke up walking in a glade in Balboa park as the sun bled over the horizon. They gave me another glorious hole, but this time, dreams came bubbling out. Visions. Memories.
Slivers of what they said, when they thought I couldn’t hear, and what they did to me. What they did to each other. Her bony ass crushing my tiny cock, her long yellow teeth and dry gray tongue, the mouth of the bottle; her zombie eyes, sucking mine into a perfect void that ate me up and spit me out into the empty morning.
I go back about once a week. The drugs they use on me each time have the permanent effect of a heavyweight prizefight. Whole parts of my brain are going to sleep and waking less each time I recover. They get more brazen, milking
me, steering me to the ATM until the bouncers cut me off and dump me on the street. I really believe they’re selling my blood.
The visions get richer, which is how I know my mind is not dying. They go on longer each time, you see, blending into waking life, so when I close my eyes, I can relive every moment in the hole, and more.
Because I could see things that I shouldn’t have seen, I started to wonder. I saw Brandi after they rushed me out, saw her shower and snort coke or go down on another stripper in the dressing rooms, and it made sense. I was seeing all of it through her eyes.
Her real name is Rhonda Elaine Scroggins. I see her go home to a trashed apartment and a boyfriend turning fat and bald, ripening into the spirit and image of the stepfather who taught her to do things to men for money. I see him hit her, make her suck off his friends at poker parties, see him feed her coke until her head is a buzzing hole of infinite possibility, and she will do anything. That’s when she is closest to me, closer than when I feed her bills at the club. I am the only thing she truly owns, the only one who’d miss her if she disappeared.
Like a moth with its antennae singed off, I blunder through the cavernous, lightless hole where the rest of my life used to be. I start to forget things—stupid shit, like my PIN number, my mother’s name, how I make a living. But for every light that goes out in my head, for every dollar I pay, a little gray light goes on inside Brandi’s, and we are closer together. I am closer than her hogbitch boyfriend, closer than any man who’s ever had her. I look out of her eyes for hours at a time, now. When she’s sky-high, I can make her hands do things, and my control is growing.
I am building up a tolerance. It takes more every time to black me out, more to get me inside her. I can control her body better than my own, but I worry that they will cut me off for good, or that my money will run out. But I keep going. What we have is something special. She is almost paid for.
Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars Page 5