Ink

by Jonathan Maberry

  Monk’s face was set into a frown of concern and he winced as if each splinter were being pulled out of his own skin. The iPad was still playing; neither of them had bothered to turn it off, though for some reason it wasn’t following the alphabet anymore. The Alan Parsons Project was singing a sad sweet song about being old and wise. For some reason the songs were on shuffle now. She wasn’t sure how that happened, and it bothered her, but not enough to say something.

  “This is going to be a patch job,” he said, “but you’re going to need an actual doctor. Couple of those are going to need stitches. I’ll take you over to the ER soon as I’m done.”

  “No,” she said. “Please, I don’t want to go there.”

  “Not a debate, Patty,” said Monk. He dried off her legs and feet with a towel, opened a package of Band-Aids, and began tearing them open.

  “I can do that,” she said, but he kept working.

  It took sixteen bandages total. Five big ones and eleven smaller ones. Then he rocked back on his heels, arms hanging over his knees, hands loose. He wore a pair of ancient blue jeans and a white Ramones T-shirt. Someone who didn’t know him would think he was, at best, a roadie for a band or at worst, a bouncer from a truck stop strip joint. He was neither, but his official job wasn’t much of a step up from the latter. He was a bounty hunter who specialized in bail skips, working that gig for a string of bondsmen in New York and Philadelphia.

  Patty believed she was the only living person who knew Monk’s story. Or most of it, at least. She knew about the tattoos and scars on his body, and a good piece about the scars on his soul. Just like he knew her. Not all of her, but enough.

  He stood up and fished a pair of sweats from a drawer and steadied her as she put them on. Then he stood there, looking at her with slightly raised eyebrows. Letting the bloody tweezers, the bandages, and the fractured morning ask the questions.

  “I got drunk,” she said after nearly half a minute.

  “Uh huh.”

  “You going to lecture me?”

  He tried on a smile. “Have I ever lectured you on the evils of either grape or grain?”

  “No…”

  “There you go,” said Monk.

  The song ended and the Monkees began singing “Last Train to Clarksville.” They both turned their heads to look at the iPad. It wasn’t the kind of song she’d ever have downloaded.

  “I have no idea,” she said, the faintness of a smile on her lips.

  “Weird,” he agreed.

  They listened to the song all the way through. It ended and then Primus began howling about Tommy the Cat.

  “I’m okay,” said Patty, turning back to Monk and trying to sound confident. “Thanks for … well, for everything. But I’m good now. I’ll just clean up a bit and then take a nap. Open the shop late.”

  Monk didn’t move.

  “Really,” she insisted. “I’m fine.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I just need some coffee and a muffin and I’m good.”

  Nothing. He just looked at her.

  “I have two customers who…” Her words trailed off. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Monk scratched his wrist and picked at a scab over a small knife cut. He cocked his head and peered up at her. “I’m kind of waiting for you to stop jerking me off here, Pats.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No? So, when were you planning to tell me about your hand?” He didn’t even glance at the pillow, where she’d hidden it again. “When were you going to tell me about what happened to Tuyet?”

  She said, “Happened to who?”

  The frown on Monk’s face deepened, the way a person’s does when he doesn’t get a joke or can’t follow an obscure conversational reference.

  “Tuyet?” he repeated, making it a question.

  Patty smiled. “Who?”

  They stared at each other and the moment felt like it was being stretched too taut. The pain in Patty’s foot and leg suddenly flared as if the pieces of beer bottle were only now cutting into her. The room seemed strange. Stuffy. Close. Like the stagnant air of a basement.

  “Tuyet,” Monk said again, leaning on the name. When Patty shook her head, a look of genuine concern wrinkled Monk’s face. “Did you hit your head when you fell? Fuck, let me check.” He started to rise, but Patty flinched back.

  “No,” she said quickly. “I didn’t hit my head. Who’s this Tuyet? What’s the deal?”

  Monk straightened slowly but did not approach her. He looked big and clumsy and confused. “On your hand,” he said. “Christ, Patty, she’s on your hand. She’s been on your hand for ten fucking years.”

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “Are you trying to make a joke or something? I don’t have anything on my hand.”

  He pointed to the pillow. “Then why are you hiding it?”

  She refused to look. “I’m not hiding anything.”

  Monk stared at her for a five count.

  “Patty, what’s going on here? You’re starting to scare the shit out of me.”

  “This is ridiculous,” she snapped and started to rise, but Monk shifted to block her. He did not touch her or physically restrain her. That wasn’t Monk at all. But he stood there. Looking at her. Looking past her face down to where her hand was still on the bed but no longer covered by the pillow. She did not want to look. Patty did not know why, but it was almost as if she could not look. As if the action of looking wasn’t …

  Wasn’t what?

  It isn’t allowed.

  She heard her thought as clearly as if a clone of her had leaned in to whisper in her ear.

  It isn’t allowed.

  “You hid your hand, Patty,” said Monk. “I saw you do it. I saw you checking to see if I saw it. There’s something wrong with the tattoo of Tuyet.”

  “Who is this fucking Tuyet you keep harping on about?” she snarled. Or tried to snarl. It came out weak and cracked and small.

  It took a lot for Patty to raise her hand. It took much more for her to look at it. She could feel the simple action depleting her, like a knife draining an artery. She looked down at the back of her hand. She could hear Monk’s labored breathing. He sounded scared.

  Patty knew she had a tattoo on the back of her hand. She remembered inking it there. Doing the work one-handed took time. Getting the details took time. It took patience. It required so much of her thought and feeling and art.

  It took … love.

  Love…?

  She frowned at that thought. The frown became a wince as she looked at the tattoo. It was the same as when she was in the bathroom. A face—some girl—done in photo-realism style, and a crude and primitive one done over it.

  “Patty,” said Monk gently, fearfully, “don’t you know who Tuyet is?”

  She shook her head.

  But her lips moved. Formed two words. They came out so small, so far away, as if the memory attached to that tattoo was moving away from her, fleeing down a long hall, running too fast to be caught.

  “My … daughter…?”

  That was all she got out before she screamed.

  39

  There are so many kinds of screams.

  A mother’s scream as her whole body tightens like a fist and pushes a baby into the world, wrapped in blood and mucus, but no less beautiful for all that.

  The child’s scream as it realizes it is alive, awake, and alone—no longer part of the mother. Fragile and aware of temperature, sounds, smells, and pain. With no other way to articulate its reaction to everything, the soul in the tiny envelope of flesh screams.

  The screams of erotic intensity that accompanied the copulation that created that child. The screams of lovers everywhere as all of their awareness is instantly distilled down to a moment of pleasure so exquisite that all other thoughts are shouted to silence.

  The scream of a woman taken with no thought to producing anything but humiliation.

  The scream of someone in such need that they m
asturbate over and over and over again and manage to conjure no lover, no tenderness, no touch other than their own.

  The screams that take an angry person higher, past fury and into the blind purity of rage.

  The screams of the dying who realize that they are so badly wounded that no amount of clinging to something physical—a hand, a rifle, a pillow, a Bible—will overpower the coldness that will drag them down.

  The screams of grief of those watching their loved ones die, and in that moment understanding the gap between their perceptions of their own power and their control over the world.

  The screams of children at play, that ultrasonic burst of pure joy.

  The screams of someone suddenly accomplishing a thing that they—and everyone—thought was beyond their power. Pulling someone from under a car, defeating an impossible opponent, clambering over the last crag of a mountain, crossing the finish line an inch before a better runner, smashing that last overhand with such force the racquet strings break but the ball lands an inch inside the line.

  The scream of sudden pain, sudden loss, sudden heartbreak, sudden joy, sudden despair.

  So many screams.

  And there are the screams that no ear can hear, from the sad and lonely and desperate who have lost their voices but scream all the same.

  As the big man with the faces tattooed on his skin gathered the small woman into his arms, another scream filled the air. Only the nightbirds outside the tattoo parlor heard it, though. Only they could.

  Them and a fat blowfly crawling along the inside of the store’s picture window.

  It was such a small voice, thin, fading. But the shriek rose into the air and sent the birds scattering.

  “Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”

  Over and over again.

  Only the nightbirds heard it. Only they saw the thin figure standing in the street, reaching with bloodied fingers toward the figures inside the tattoo parlor. A little girl, broken and discarded. They saw her hands clawing the air as if it were somehow possible to pull the small woman and big man to her. To force them to see her, to know she was there.

  “Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”

  Even after it turned a corner and was lost to sight.

  “Làm ơn đừng quên tôi.”

  Mommy … don’t forget me.…

  40

  Owen Minor was at work—at his day job—when he felt the tremor build inside of him. It always began as a flutter in his chest, as if his beloved flies were somehow able to crawl over his beating heart. But then the feeling spread outward. Down to his stomach and loins. Up through his throat to his mouth, which began to water, and his eyes, making them wet.

  He slipped into a bathroom and locked himself in a stall, then stood with his arms wide, palms braced against the cool metal walls, legs straddling the toilet. There, in safety and quiet, he let the visions come.

  The woman from the tattoo shop was feeling it.

  She was feeling it so goddamn much.

  He was panting now, gulping deep breaths as the memories of Tuyet filled his hungry mouth and wrapped around his tongue and dripped down his gullet to his stomach.

  “Tuyet…” he murmured. Drool hung from his rubbery lips and dripped onto his shirt.

  41

  Monk held Patty, rocked her, whispered nonsense words into her damp hair.

  Later, he began touching her head, probing it for more cuts or bruises, anything hidden by her thick black hair. He found a lump that made her hiss in pain and surprise.

  “You really cracked your head.”

  “I didn’t,” she insisted.

  “Yeah,” said Monk, “you sure as hell did. Can’t see it but it feels like a fucking grapefruit. Did you fall?”

  Patty didn’t remember doing that and touched the spot he’d found. It was so intensely sensitive that she yelped in pain.

  “You need to go to the hospital,” Monk said. “You need an X-Ray.”

  “I already told you—”

  “I know what you told me. I’m telling you that there’s something wrong,” he replied, keeping his voice down, keeping it all in neutral, the way you do around the sick. The way you do around people who are losing their shit.

  “I’m just hungover,” she insisted. “I drank myself into a blackout. Pardon the hell out of me for not having my shit together at the snap of a finger. Not everyone around here has superpowers. We can’t all be like you.”

  It was a good jab, but Monk didn’t flinch.

  “First off,” he said mildly, “cut the shit. Unless you’re inking me, you can’t get under my skin and you know it.”

  She mouthed kiss my ass. He ignored that, too.

  “So, sure,” he continued, “you got shitfaced and blacked out. So what? You’re an adult, which makes you allowed to act like a juvenile delinquent any time you want. I’ll even join you next time. But that’s not the point. How many times have you told me that nothing—not one thing—matters to you as much as Tuyet? How many times have you told me that seeing her face on your hand as you work is the only thing keeping you sane? Like a million times? Christ, Patty … I can’t believe you could get drunk enough to forget her name. To forget her. You need to go get a CT scan or MRI or something.”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “You want me to call nine-one-one, ’cause I will.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and held it out like a threat.

  She started to cry again. Then suddenly she burst from the chair and lunged for the holstered tattoo needle on the table. She jerked it free and raised it like a dagger as she slapped her left hand flat on the wood bench. Monk was ten feet away. He was not poised to move. He was big and she was small. She moved at the speed of heartbreak.

  He moved at the speed of love.

  INTERLUDE EIGHT

  THE LORD OF THE FLIES

  Owen Minor kept asking, “What’s happening to me?”

  He asked that of his reflection in the mirror.

  He asked it of God, though he was pretty sure he was shouting into an empty room.

  He asked it on social media through a dozen dummy accounts he created. Reddit and 4chan, and even some Facebook pages. He was good at creating false identities. Very good. He even found his way onto some sites on the Dark Web, but there were too many criminals and criminal wannabes.

  No one had an answer. Most of the people he met online thought he was a freak. Owen couldn’t fault that view, though he was not the kind of freak they took him for. He wasn’t a sex stalker. No, his hungers were so very different from that, but he did not know how to identify or explain them.

  On one late night, as Santa Ana winds blew through the trees outside, Owen wondered if he was a monster. An actual one. A supernatural thing.

  It was such a strange conversation to have with himself.

  What, after all, was supernatural? This was the real world. He still liked the idea that he was a mutant, the next stage in human evolution, but the more he fed on memories the less that felt likely. This was stranger than that. The hunger was so specific, and the need so urgent that it felt less genetically aberrant and more …

  More what?

  Unnatural felt wrong because it was clearly natural to him. There had been no accident. No one had injected him with an experimental drug, he hadn’t been bitten by radioactive spiders. Somehow he knew this ran deeper than DNA. It didn’t feel at all like an accident.

  No, it seemed to him as this was very much like a gift given, By whom, or why, was beyond him.

  “I’m a fucking monster,” he told the mirror one night, as tears ran like mercury down his face.

  “I’m a monster,” he said on another night, after feasting on fresh grief from a man who wore a tattoo with the faces and birth and death dates of his wife and two kids, whom he’d buried after they died in a car accident and he had lived. “I’m a monster.”

  That time he said it with a bottomless and pernicious joy.

  42

  Mike Sween
ey winced as he sipped the truly appalling coffee he’d gotten from the machine near the waiting room. It tasted, as Crow once phrased it, like a sick lizard had pissed in it.

  It was hot, though, and he was cold. He stood for a moment, feeling the warmth wriggle like a snake all the way down into his belly. He needed sleep, and a shower that was more cleansing than standing buck naked in a downpour. Luckily he kept deodorant and cologne in a gym bag in the trunk of his cruiser.

  “You still here?” asked the duty nurse, Trish, coming out of a patient’s room and nearly colliding with him. “I thought you were going off shift after you brought that couple in last night. The head injury and his wife.”

  Trish was a sturdily built woman in her late forties. The last of the summer freckles were fading from her cheeks and she smelled of hospital antiseptic and Walmart perfume.

  “Stuff came up,” he said, shrugging his big shoulders.

  “Bet you haven’t even been to bed yet.”

  “No, but it’s in my immediate future.”

  Trish nodded and patted his arm as she passed. She was one of the good ones. Reliable, not too nosy, but with a knowing wisdom in her green eyes. She’d been here for the Trouble.

  “Hey,” he said before she got very far, “what happened with that couple? Was the husband admitted or…?”