“There’s something wrong with that voice,” Bernie said. And there was; the inflection and cadence were bizarre, the speaker careening high before dropping to inaudible bass murmurs. The volume was similarly disjointed: loud to soft, soft to loud and back again, making it impossible to understand a single uttered word.
Bernie retreated toward Tanis and the wall. The two were slinking back to the bulkhead door when the voice rang out, much too loud for comfort.
“You. You two. Come. Here, in here. Help me,” the stranger said, in the mother tongue. Tanis eyed the road to freedom up the stairs, and then the closed door and its dim light.
“I don’t recognize them,” Bernie said.
Tanis didn’t either, and considering all the fucks had fled the fuck farm about anything other than getting home to Naree, saving a faceless nobody didn’t factor into her plans. Too much risk, too little reward.
Until.
“You have one way to save her, Tanis. One way. Through me. It will be hard, yes, but Naree can live. Come to me. Listen. Lissssten.”
Tanis stopped dead. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Volume,” Bernie cautioned.
Shut up, Bernie.
...although you’re not wrong.
Tanis winced and glanced upstairs right as another crash sounded against the floor. This time, there was no accompanying scream.
Maybe Ariadne’s dead, and maybe that’s a mercy.
“She is your future but not without—come to me. Come, come. Yesss. Free me. I will tell you any and all. But you must free me before the Gorgons do.”
Before the Gorgons do?
So not a Gorgon.
“I will tell you what your mother will not,” came the singsong reply before she—probably a she?—exploded into piercing, echoing giggles. It was loud enough Tanis took two steps closer to the bulkhead, eyeballing the stairs to the main house in case the clamor called attention, but no one came. Footsteps above, crossing, but they never neared the door
“Probably used to it,” Tanis murmured.
Bernie snorted. “Used to nutters nutting? Good times.”
Bernie waited on Tanis to make up her mind—to go or not to go. Tanis didn’t know. She hedged, her fingertips tapping against the cold, concrete wall. The woman behind the door kept crooning her name. Taunting her? Tempting her? It was hard to tell with the half-pleas, half-demands. “Come to me. Please. I need you, but you need me. Save me, save her. Come, come, come!”
“Fuck it.” Tanis reached into Bernie’s leggings for the Colt, soothed by its weight against her palm. It’d blow a crater-sized hole in anything, which wouldn’t stop either Gorgon sister, but would be a hell of a deterrent for pretty much anything else stupid enough to cross her. She eased over, her hand resting on the knob, the light under the door kissing the toes of her boots. Her pulse was up; temperature, too. She actually sweated, and that wasn’t usually a thing with her reptile genes, but she was afraid. She glanced back at Bernie, who lingered closer to the stairs leading out than the ones leading up.
Tanis motioned with the gun. “If it’s a trap, get Naree out of Florida. She’s got money.”
“Promise, doll.” Bernie smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes, and in the abysmal lighting of the basement, her teeth looked yellow against her equally sallow skin.
Tanis thrust open the door, pointing the gun in at... well? She wasn’t entirely sure, though an iron maiden came to mind, or maybe an old-fashioned dress mannequin. The light was dim inside, but it was enough to show off a metal torso and head piece held up by thick steel rods, the contraption a few inches shy of Tanis’s six feet. There were no arms or legs to the thing, only a chrome chest with various wires poking out from the sides like spider legs. One wire led to a saline drip, another to a blood bag, and yet another to a colostomy bag.
On the floor was a lake of stains, none of them all that pleasing to behold.
“Barlasssssss,” the thing hissed.
Tanis eyeballed the headpiece. It was a mask, a crude face sculpted in metal, everything uneven and battered like someone had hammered it out with little care for aesthetic. A pair of mismatched round holes revealed big brown eyes, the whites a sickly gold with starbursts of red veins along the edges, the skin surrounding them grayish and puckered like raisin flesh. There were two slits for nostrils mid-mask but no space for a nose. A rectangle, one inch tall by two inches wide and covered in a silvery mesh of wires, formed the mouth. Beneath, Tanis spied two rows of rotting teeth tucked between dry, cracked lips with weeping blisters at the corners.
What in the hell is going on?
“The door, the door, close the door and come to me. Pleeease.” Tanis cast a look across the room at Bernie, raising her hand to let her know she was fine, before shutting the door behind her. She was in a supply closet, the shelves crammed with enough dry goods and canned vegetables to survive an apocalypse. The second shelf had been cleared for the medical supplies required to keep the metal-clad Frankenstein going. There was a heart monitor and other monitors—things Tanis didn’t know how to read, but which had lots of red and green buttons and white lines on black screens. On the floor to the right was a mini-refrigerator with a first aid sticker. Besides that, a trash bin full of discarded latex gloves.
Tanis dropped the gun, feeling ridiculous pointing it at a suit of armor that, without legs, wasn’t coming to get her anytime soon. “What are you?”
“Someone like you, but I am dead but not dead. I am and was Cassandra, they say. Brought back. Here. Here.” She groaned and whimpered, smacking her lips behind the mask and slurping in breath with a wet rattle. “Brought here. To life. My heart. My heart, my heart. No, your heart.” She wheezed hard. “Nareeee.”
Tanis set her jaw.
Don’t say her name.
It’s profane coming from a thing like you.
“What about her?”
“She is your gift, has your gift. You must flee, but, but, but... you must... take me with you to succeed. To liiive.”
“How the hell... I can’t,” Tanis said. “I can’t get you out of here. You’d die on the way out of the swamp if you need all this shit.”
“Yesss, die. That. Take my heart, my heart. They will... eat it. As they eat my flesh to see. They want my vision. That is why they brought me here. Back. To see with my sight. Cassandra’s eyes see all. Eat the flesh, have the gift. Eating me. Eating me!” She ended on a plaintive wail. Tanis wanted to reach out and clap her hand over the mask’s mouth hole, but what good would it do? The voice would just echo out from its metal cage. Her eyes strayed ceiling-ward. Nothing yet, no sign of the priests, but how long would she stay lucky?
“I can’t help you if you get me killed. I... wait. Hold up. Cassandra? The prophetess? And what do you mean, ‘eating you’?”
And do I even want to know the answer to these fucking questions?
“The ill-fated prophet, brought back with the blood of a phoenix. To see for the priests. To be used by the priests. To find your queen for their gods and destroy her. They consume, piece by piece. My feet, then my legs. My hands and my arms. Not much left, but if they eat my heart, forever lost, the lamia. They will always see and always find. Potent meat. Most potent.” Cassandra burst into laughter that turned quickly to shrieking sobs, made all the worse by the strange, hollow quality granted her by the metal cage. One of her health monitors beeped, a high-pitched, incessant alarm that sent Tanis scrambling. This time, the footsteps above did stop. This time, there was the squeak of floorboards, heading to the door at the top of the stairs.
Tanis abandoned the closet and dove for the shadowed nook under the stairwell, crouching low behind a Rubbermaid trash barrel. She couldn’t see Bernie from where she hid, which was a good thing, because if she couldn’t see her, neither could anyone else.
Probably.
She hefted the Colt, ready. Ready.
The overhead light snapped on. Through the slats between the stairs, Tanis watched bare feet with
blackened heels descend. White robes heralded a priest, not a Gorgon, and a fattish white man with a glossy, bald head rounded the corner, a pair of black-rimmed glasses perched on a wide nose. He was nothing extraordinary or noteworthy, not to look at, and not in demeanor as he entered Cassandra’s closet. His hissed “Shut up, you’ll wake Stheno” was followed by a clang that sounded like he’d struck the armor holding Cassandra’s tortured body.
Cassandra’s screams abated to wheezy snivels as the man rummaged around, the hysterical beeping of the heart monitor calming along with the attached patient. The basement was silent, Bernie and Tanis solid ghosts among the dusty miscellanea. Cassandra started to sing as the man doctored her. It was off-key and horrible, with no real melody Tanis could make out. She clued in at the end of the ditty, though, in time to hear the prophetess’ garbled, “I see your death, with guts and gore. Your insides spilled across the floor. Goodbye, Karl. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye!”
Another hard clang sounded from the closet.
“Shut your mouth or we’ll take your tongue next.”
“It’s too late for that, Karl. Too late now. But know your death is a slow crawl awashed in blood. No one will care that you scream.”
Karl exited the closet, stripping off his blue latex gloves and tossing them into the trash barrel hiding Tanis from his view. He slammed the door behind him. “At least I won’t be eaten, you crazy bitch.”
He went back upstairs, oblivious to the lamia in his midst as he snapped off the overhead light and plunged the basement back into darkness. Tanis didn’t immediately move from her spot, too busy processing. She knew about gods and monsters and the magical worlds beyond her snake hole from other lamia. She knew about the Usurper, and about the fall from Heaven that made everything much more crowded down here on Earth, a few years before she was born. More recently, she’d heard of the god-killers, and about a new Chronicler. She knew Shit Was Going Down, and the gods were squabbling for power—a fight the Mother was keeping them all the hell out of.
She knew anyone could be more than what they seemed, and that it wasn’t power that was good or bad so much as the wielder. But seeing it at play with Cassandra—experiencing something beyond Lamia’s fucked-up repopulation tactics—was eye opening at the very least.
“One piece at a time, snakeling. Waste not, want not, so they leave the best for last. Take my heart before they do,” came the dulcet call from the closet. “I die so Naree lives.”
What am I even doing?
“Tanis.”
Bernie. Tanis jerked her gaze over. Her friend was on the other side of the basement, popping up from behind a line of boxes like a prairie dog on its mound. She motioned up toward the bulkhead stairs. “Shit or get off the pot, doll. We gotta go.”
They did have to go, and either Tanis went back inside to help that thing or she was running and trying to put the memory of the hobbled-together woman behind her, which wasn’t likely given the gravity and weird-shit-ness of the moment.
And the fact that she knows Naree.
“Jesus Christ.”
Before she could talk herself out of it, before she could regain her damned mind, Tanis pulled herself out from under the stairs and made for the closet.
CHAPTER NINE
“TELL ME A story, Tanis. Tell me a story,” Cassandra rasped. Tanis’s fingers worked at the sides of the metal casing holding the prophetess together. It was heavy, the cover threatening to snap off the steel support rods and fall to the floor. She didn’t like to think how loud that would be.
“Not really in the mood,” Tanis replied, placing one of her hands under the front of the case to support it.
“Tell me of Medusa and Perseusss.” Tanis sighed, her eyes narrowing as another metal hook got caught on... something. They’d kept the carcass locked up tighter than Alcatraz. She wanted to pry it open like a tuna can, but again, sound factor. She had to work silently or everything would go to Hell.
“Why? Everyone knows the story.”
“Tell me,” Cassandra crooned. “Tell me a story before I die. Once upon a tiiime...”
“Fine, Christ.” Tanis licked her lips, her lungs screaming for a cigarette. “Polydectes was romancing Perseus’s mother. Perseus didn’t like him, and Polydectes knew it, so to discredit Perseus in his mother’s eyes Polydectes held a banquet where all the guests were expected to bring horses as gifts.” Tanis shifted her grasp on the breastplate. One more latch and she felt it coming away. “Perseus didn’t have a horse, so he said he’d bring anything Polydectes wanted instead. Polydectes asked for Medusa’s head.”
“Aaand?” Cassandra giggled as Tanis pulled the first piece away... only to reveal a second, thinner metal casing with colored wires threaded through tiny, drilled holes. Tanis ground her teeth. She began poking at it but then paused, hearing movement in the basement behind her.
Bernie?
She dared to breathe through her nose for the first time since the swamp. Yes, Bernie was close. There were other people nearby, too, but far enough she didn’t have to worry about them yet. She relaxed a little, but the calm was short-lived when she realized the all-consuming lamia musk was too faint for a live breeder to be nearby. Traces lingered, of course, but it wasn’t cock-arrestingly potent.
That, more than anything, told her that Ariadne was dead—she could function without double boners.
The closet door opened and Bernie slipped in. She said nothing, resting a hand on Tanis’s shoulder while Tanis worked on Cassandra’s manmade carapace. Tanis handed her the first breastplate to get it out of the way. Bernie eyed it, confused, and Tanis raked her hand through her hair, gesturing at the second layer of armor.
“I’m opening her up. I’ll explain later.”
“Not sure I want you to,” Bernie replied, setting the chest piece carefully onto a shelf of canned peaches.
“Keep going, keep going.” Cassandra trilled in pleasure as Tanis plucked at the wires, trying to see how they clipped in. If she ripped them all out at once, the monitors would start bleating and she’d have a stampede of Karls to contend with. That’d happen anyway when she took the heart, but if happened any sooner she was humped. She had to go slow, like playing the world’s worst game of Operation, except instead of an irritating buzz, it’d be death by Gorgon.
“So Perseus prayed to Athena for help. Athena had a beef with Medusa because Medusa fucked Poseidon inside Athena’s temple one time. Turning Medusa and her sisters into snake monsters wasn’t good enough, I guess, so Athena decided to help Perseus kill her, too. She gave him a polished shield and sent him off to get other gear. Zeus gave him a sword to cut off her head. The Hesperides gave him a bag to hold Medusa’s severed head so he wouldn’t get poisoned. Hades gave him an invisibility hat to creep into her den, and Hermes gave him winged sandals so he could travel any terrain to get to her. He went to the cave...”
“No, no, no. That is only half the story. Silly snake. Silly Tanis.”
Tanis lifted her eyes to that horrific mask. “There was a journey, but...”
“Journey, yes, and along the journey, Perseus met your mother. Mamaaa.” Tanis had been running her hands along the sides of the second plate to see how it connected to the infrastructure, but Cassandra’s taunt stopped her. Her mother had never told her anything about meeting Perseus, nor had she gone into any particular history with the Gorgons beyond racial superiority and genocide of the weaker snakes and blah, blah, blah.
The blah, blah, blah never involved her directly.
“What’s that mean?”
“So ignorant, little snake. So stupid.” Cassandra coughed, a wet, hacking thing that ended with sputum propelling from her mouth and mucking up the mesh of wires in front of her face. Tanis winced and went back to work, trying to ignore the smell of sterilized decay perfuming the room. “Perseus was pretty, so pretty. Dark hair with eyes as deep as an ocean. Your mother was alone on her island, her human beauty behind her, human children long in her belly. Eaten, as I am e
aten, her first lamia daughters, too. All gone to her appetites. So many appetites, the lamia queen, the worst of her curse, perhaps.” Cassandra moaned as Tanis found the lever in the back of the casing that would release the second chest piece. Tanis unclasped it. Bernie’s hands came out to hold the sides for her, the older lamia cluing into Tanis’s plans without explicit directions.
“She liked human men, wanted them,” Cassandra continued. “Loved humans and thought her lamia self hideous.”
“Well, that’s changed. She hates humankind now.” Tanis gently maneuvered the second plate away from Cassandra’s body and immediately jerked away from the awfulness. Cassandra was skeletally thin, her skin brown and puckered with sores, her nipples black on shriveled piles of drooping meat. Two thick, metal bands attached her to the metal contraption, one at her shoulders, one at her pelvis. Between them, open wounds oozed, gooey swaths of her body stretching between her chest and the cover in Tanis’s hand, thick ropes of pus and other unpleasantness drooping low before splashing onto Tanis’s shoes. Wires poked into her chest, her belly, and down, lower, feeding fluids in, taking fluids out. Where her arms and legs had been were a network of sloppy sutures against puckered, dying skin, the wounds cauterized to keep her from bleeding out.
“Holy Jesus,” Bernie said.
“Jesus ain’t helping no one here.” Tanis shivered and looked up at the ceiling, at the naked light bulb, at a pyramid stack of canned carrots. At anything that wasn’t the tragic disaster before her. No one deserved that kind of torture. Not even her worst enemy, on his worst day.
Cassandra whimpered and groaned. “Listen. Listen to meee! Time depletes. Time dies.”
Tanis maneuvered the plate around, being careful not to pull any of the wires or monitors away from her midsection. “Go on, then.”
Snake Eyes Page 8
