Naked blood and muscles writhed in the open air. The ghost of pain was clawing at my brain. I closed my eyes and breathed. There was no relief.
Tarboy moved and stood beside me. He put a firm hand on my shoulder and my chest convulsed.
“This is the new world.”
I opened my eyes. The sky was warm and red. Black treetops ran all the way to the horizon. Unbroken wilderness. The sheer scale of the open sky made my heart beat hard and I felt a cold panic start to work its way into my chest.
I turned to the Tarboy and raised my eyebrows, gesturing to the open wound in my skull.
“You got your head beat in. Like we knew you would. And then you were stuffed full of reds.”
I cleared my throat and spat a white lump of dust and mucous in the dirt.
“The burners brought you out here, I pulled you off the truck, and here we are.”
He turned away from the road.
“Lucky you woke up when you did. I didn’t have much waiting left in me. And you’re almost useless as it is.”
My legs were aching with the effort of standing. I looked at the Tarboy and gestured from my skull to the wilderness around us, opening my eyes wide and uselessly mouthing the word:
“Why?”
He shrugged and took my elbow, spinning me away from the road. The suddenness of the action sent needles up my spine. He shoved me forward.
“I don’t know. Exile. Some sort of lesson. Maybe to give you some perspective. Which sounds like a good idea to me. You could use it, big fish.”
I stumbled in front of him - my knees had locked up and I struggled to keep myself upright.
“Faster. Come on.”
He grabbed my hand and jerked me forward. I fell onto all fours and my fingers scrambled through the dirt. I felt like an animal. I clenched my eyes but the tears wouldn’t come.
“You’d better get it together; and fast. You won’t survive an hour out here, smoothie.”
I pulled myself to my feet and clenched my teeth, focusing on the blood flooding my muscles.
Just a smoothie in the jungle.
The tar had boiled away, the trees had grown dense and the sky had disappeared behind a twisted roof of branches.
I was half conscious. I tried to put together what had happened, to construct some sort of story - but my mind dropped the pieces and I drifted between waking dream and harsh reality.
The trees were oily and black. The bark opened toward the hidden sky. The naked wood was blood-red and pocked with wide, yawning pores. There were no leaves - just a nest of twisting branches. The undersides of the branches were heavy with some sort of growth. They looked like a cancer - hundreds of swollen spheres, somewhere between red and brown - clinging to the bark as if hiding from the light. I reached out to touch one. The thick skin crumbled beneath my fingertip and dropped a cloud of dust that smelled like gasoline.
The Tarboy turned his head and barked:
“Don’t touch anything.”
I reached for the tyre iron but my belt was gone and my back was naked. A flap of skin hung over my hip. I shuddered and silently thanked my overdosing pain receptors.
Our bare feet made no sound in the dirt, the wind whistled through the branches. In the distance I could hear running water. The ground sounded like it was slowly churning below the surface.
I stopped at a low-hanging branch and tried to pry it off the tree. It flexed and twisted and refused to splinter. My shoulders ached.
The Tarboy stopped and turned around.
“What did I tell you?”
He grabbed me by the forearm and jerked me alongside him - walking faster now. I stumbled trying to keep upright.
“Don’t touch anything. Follow me. Keep up. It’s easy. Are you too far gone? Is your brain scrambled?”
My face was burning. I clenched my teeth, dropped my train of thought and focused on my feet. The Tarboy’s grip felt like it was tearing my skin. He was strong. If I went limp he would easily have dragged me along - dead puppet, still upright, pivoting between his unshakable grip and the dead skin of my forearm.
I’d lost it. At some point the brief fragments of thought dropped away entirely and I was left purely mechanical.
I focused entirely on the dry folding of joints - ankle to knee, knee to hip; spine struggling to hover over the right angle - to avoid pitching skull-first into the dirt.
The Tarboy pushed me through a dense wall of branches. They unwound themselves, splintered, raking my skin with razor fingers.
The air was thick and warm. The sound of the wild had dropped away and was replaced by the dry rattling of my breath. I tried to take stock of my surroundings.
The Tarboy had me by the elbow. I was in a room, of sorts.
The walls were made of finger-thin branches - woven organically together. The floor was carpeted with hair - glowing soft and blue. It shuddered and burnt away in the light that came through the jagged hole I had left in the wall. A low, flat stone table was in the center of the room. We weren’t alone. My eyelids fell and I shook my head to try to loosen my consciousness.
My legs crumpled. The Tarboy threw me to the side of the room. I rolled onto my stomach and pressed myself against the foot of the wall. The hair sucked at my skin and shuddered beneath the weight of my chest.
“What did you bring?”
It was a smooth voice, female - I felt like I was listening through every tiny, fractured bone in my skull. The syllables vibrated in the marrow.
I watched the blood swirl through my eyelids.
Metal clattered on stone.
“And is he the one?”
The Tarboy cleared his throat. He sounded tired. His energy must have finally abandoned him.
“No. But he killed the others. He’s a psychopath. Sadistic. Masochistic. An animal. Probably suicidal. He’s near dead right now.”
Some kind of monster.
The female voice again. Somehow soothing. The voices became distant, stifled by the blood pounding in my ears.
“So why did you bring him here?”
Her voice was spiked with a vague, emotionless irritation. The Tarboy sighed.
“He’s resilient. Stubborn. Impulsive and self-destructive. It’s no loss if he dies, and if he lives - I guarantee he will be useful for something.”
The blue devil.
Silence. The hair crawled over my face and spread thin tendrils into the naked wounds on my back. The Tarboy continued.
“Plus. He’s already got a hairball inside him. Look at his face. Look at his stomach.”
He rolled me onto my back. The hair pulled at my skin. I tried to roll back onto my stomach but my muscles had been disconnected. The nerves in my spine crackled with frustration. I was all residual electricity and neurons. A gradually fading spark.
A distant shuffling, the reverberation of footsteps through the hair. I felt hot breath on my face, fingers pushing into the deep holes in my stomach. The sound of paper skin tearing.
“How did he get the hairball?”
The woman’s voice was close. I wanted to breathe in her words but my lungs had stopped inflating.
“I had a trader give it to him. They’ve been throwing them around pretty liberally.”
The Tarboy yawned and the woman rolled me back onto my stomach. I was pitifully grateful. The hair licked my face again. The rough tendrils had dug deep into my back and I could feel them twisting between my organs and muscles. The pain was intense - and I was filled with warm, bloody pleasure.
“Okay. What’s happening in the city?”
The tone of the conversation dropped, their voices low. The hair hummed gently; a high-pitched, voiceless sound.
The Tarboy spoke and his voice carried from his jaw through his elbows, into the stone table and along the floor. His words were muddy and indistinct.
“Another boring city. Animals. Pure animals. Playing old-world. Making fake bars and fake doctors. Fake rules, fake economy, fake class system. It’s insanity.”
“Are they still eating?”
“Most of them do. Fish and human meat and paper and rotten wood and occasional handfuls of dry hair.”
“And what about this one?”
“I don’t think he eats. He eats old-world drugs and drinks old-world liquor near-constantly. I’m surprised the hairball didn’t shrivel up and die immediately. He’s almost poison.”
“Okay. You’ve watched him. What do we do with him?”
“He might be brain-dead. His skull is smashed up. You saw his stomach and his back. If he gets back on his feet - he will go back to the city. He’s got a pretty straightforward psychology. He’ll go back and kill things until he is content.”
“So I guess we see if we can bring him back to life. Or, something close to life. And then we see what he does when he becomes a host?”
“I guess. Just… He’s a dangerous thing. I can’t say that enough.”
The woman laughed. An empty sound full of air and thumping vibrations in the dirt.
“How dangerous can a city boy be?”
They fell into silence. The hair continued to sing. I let it part my lips and it moved slowly over my teeth and across my tongue. The fingers left my skin warm - punctured by tiny spines, liberating every last undernourished nerve ending.
I dropped out. I wouldn’t call it sleep. It could have been death. It didn’t matter. There was nothing I could do about it.
Consciousness hit like a wall. Cold and jagged and etched in painful contrast. No gradual swell of sound, no subtle taste of salt or blood or rotting bone. My eyes were already open. They must have been open the entire time. They were dry and crusted over. I blinked the rust away and it scraped the inside of my eyelids.
At some stage I'd been propped against the wall. The hair had retreated from my mouth and nose. Weak tendrils clung to my legs and hands but they lacked the quivering desperation they had shown when I was sprawled on the floor.
I couldn't rationalize what I was feeling. I was alive; that was certain. I could feel the rough branches of the wall digging into my spine, taste the sour swelling of my tongue. But I felt hollow - there was something missing. My nerves were shooting messages to my brain - they seemed accurate, but they lacked... warmth. They lacked... life.
I kept still. The Tarboy sat across from the Feral Doctor. They wordlessly traced something out on the slab.
I could see his breath splitting the air - twisting and expanding and fading away. The heat from his shoulders came off in waves. His heart beat slow and steady - the skin at his throat flexed softly with every pulse. The Feral Doctor's heart beat quickly and shallow, fluttering along her arms and in her wrists.
It was all too real. Too tangible. The thin sigh of the branches overhead - hair whispering and stroking their feet, banking up against the slab.
Painfully alive.
A soft skittering carried through the wall and into my ribs. Vague radiating warmth to my left; a soft wheeze of air over something dry - the smell of sweat and meat.
I didn't turn my head; slowly pulling my fingers from the hair on the floor and creeping my fingertips over my stomach. The holes were gone. No wounds, no blood, no pain. The skin was numb and hard - a wooden callous.
The Tarboy didn't move. The Doctor didn't move.
I let my hand settle across my lap and turned my head toward the heat - excruciatingly slowly, joints clicking, holding my breath, forcing my heartbeat down into my stomach.
The muscles in my neck shuddered - the cold pinch of electrical impulses bounced from brain to spine to neck.
Naked legs stretched out across the floor; swollen and pocked with purple. The veins were thicker than fingers.
Wet air pushed through my clenched teeth - sour and human.
A stomach - heavy with tumors and crawling with vines, split and humming with spores - crawling from wound to weeping wound.
The face was barely human. Blood-red flowers pulled the pores open and sprouted from ear to eye socket. The jaws were stretched wide and thick, scaly branches twisted out the corners of its mouth and around the skull. There was no hair on its head - just a network of sliced skin, dry blood and tiny seedlings.
It was crawling with life. Green, naked life.
One wet eye orbited in its socket and fixed me in a pinhole stare. My breath caught in my throat. Its pupil dilated and seemed to flood the eye with black. The mouth struggled to move around the wood and plant - a hot cloud of breath burnt my eyes. It tasted like pollen and blood.
It let out a low groan - the sound shuddered along the walls and the hair recoiled from its skin. I kept still. I could feel the Tarboy's eyes on us.
It lifted one arm - heavy with dull red tumors - two useless fingers inching toward my face from a hand split with creeping brown.
"Settle down, Seedbank!"
The Tarboy bent down and gave it a slap on its face. It could have been the neck. The biology was diffuse.
"And you..."
He wrapped his fingers around my face and turned it toward him. His skin was warm and the soft flow of blood through his hands tingled across my face.
"Get up."
He stepped backward and gestured impatiently.
I narrowed my eyes and felt logically angry - but my body didn't follow suit. No rush of blood to the head, no violent beating of my heart against my lungs, no burning adrenaline twisting my fingers.
"Go on. Get up."
I pushed my hands against the floor and stood.
The motion was too fast - too disorienting. My muscles felt hollow and light. There was no weight, no resistance. Just brain-to-muscle; as if the vague grey mass between the intention and the action had been burnt away.
I held my palm in front of my face and flexed my fingers. The same empty feeling, vaguely dry, vaguely electrical.
Pure impulse.
The Tarboy pushed my hand aside and laid a resolute hand across the side of my neck.
"What is your name?"
I cleared my throat and coughed. Sharp lumps of mucus loosened from my chest. My saliva tasted bitter and vaguely toxic. I turned and spat on the floor. The hair lit up blue and teemed over the spittle.
His hand flexed against my throat and he turned my face back to his.
"What is your name?"
I instinctively reached for the tyre iron. My fingers clutched at nothing. Cold skin, no belt. Trousers jagged with dry tar.
"The Blue Devil"
My voice was thin and alien. The words came out like sand. I swallowed and licked my lips.
"The Blue Devil"
He shook his head. The Doctor laughed softly.
"What's your real name? What did they call you when you were made? What did your family call you?"
I closed my eyes and tried to summon the memory. The curtain fell - I knew that. The gut-shot... I didn't remember it, but I remembered slowly growing into the carpet in my dark apartment, festering in synthetic shag and coagulated blood. And Jesus putting the tyre iron to my skull in the hallway of my burning apartment block.
Even then... I couldn't dredge up the sensations - the smells, the metal on my skin, the pain... they weren't coming back. Just a few words and key scenes - a handful of still-shots, pasted together like a ransom note.
"I don't know."
He sighed. His breath was sweet.
"Where are you from?"
"The City"
"What City?"
I clenched my teeth and felt the hemispheres of my brain pulsate in turn.
"The... City"
"And what is it called?"
"I don't know."
I didn't know. I really didn't.
I should have felt lost... anxious or alone. But I felt nothing. Just a twisted set of muscles idly waiting for a signal from the brain.
Should I have cried? Should I have looked meaningfully into the distance? Should my face have taken on an enigmatic expression that said more than words possibly could?
I didn’t know.
It all seemed thin and irrelevant.
The Tarboy shook his head. The Doctor tapped sharp fingertips against the slab.
"Goddamnit"
He looked into each of my eyes in turn, folding his brow.
“It’s not looking good”
I narrowed my eyes and bared my teeth. His expression didn’t change.
“You aren’t looking so hot yourself, boy.”
I took his wrist in my hand and peeled his grip from my neck.
"Put your hand on me again and you'll lose it."
The words were cold and direct. My voice didn't sound like my own. I was a stranger to myself.
I put my palm against his chest and moved him backward.
He turned to the Doctor. The muscles in his neck betrayed a smile.
"I told you."
She nodded.
"You certainly did."
I turned back to wall where I had awoken. The hair was softly glowing - crawling up the wall to pry the final flakes of blood and tar from the wood.
The thing they called Seedbank stared at me with one wet eye. Its arm hung limp against the floor. The plants that split its skin competed for air and flesh. There was more life on its gut than I had seen in years in the City.
Its lips still struggled against the vines pushing themselves from its throat. Its eye wept freely - tears slick across his cheek and neck. A white-tipped vine attacked the salt as it pooled at its collarbone.
I looked down at my stomach. The wounds had grown over with rough brown callousing - rimmed with dusty mold and pulled closed with thin blue fingers of hair. I searched the small of my back with my fingertips, trying to find the steely lump of the bullet from the gunshot that had started it all. The skin was cold. The muscles beneath it felt like stone. I couldn't find the bullet.
Seedbank blinked rhythmically. The pupil of its one wet eye stretched and contracted. What was left of its face twisted in frustration.
I had nothing for him.
We were all slaves to something.
She stretched up from the slab and worked two fingers between the ceiling branches. The capillaries across her stomach were near black. The Tarboy traced the damp silhouette on the stone.
Blue Meat Blues Page 17
