by Anna Roberts
“Set it down,” she said, and the rumble in Joe’s throat changed pitch. Everyone held their breath.
“I said set it down,” said Ruby, and Nox got a hold of the leash somehow. Joe sat down on his haunches, but she could tell he was half crazy with hunger in there, his body crying out for the protein he needed to change back. Too bad. He’d have to bag himself a deer or something; this was not a meal for outsiders.
She turned to the nearest swamper, a boy with a wicked looking bowie knife in one hand. “Gimme,” she said, and he did.
Joe growled as she knelt beside the body. The crowd’s fear sang through her like an electrical current, but they didn’t shoot. In fact most of the rifles were lowered now. They were still scared, but they were waiting to see how this would play out, waiting to see if she had the stones.
They always said the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach, but Ruby knew better. She rolled the king’s body over onto his back, found the bottom of the ribs and made the cut. She fumbled up through the squishy, spongy lungs until she found what she was looking for. It felt smaller than she’d expected, but there was nothing else it could be, and with one hard, adrenaline-fuelled yank she pulled the heart loose and held it up to the crowd.
For a split second she saw the old man laughing and she feared the sickness in his flesh, but she couldn’t afford to right now. Besides, it was brain that made you sick more than heart. Heart was just muscle.
It was an old heart, withered in places and bulgy in others, threaded through with thick yellow fat. Cholesterol. All those brains.
No, don’t think. Just do.
Ruby took a bite. It was tough and tested her teeth to their limits. She pulled at it like a dog worrying a rawhide chew, and then she felt Joe’s secondhand hunger and that seemed to do the trick. She had a mouthful of flesh and now all she had to do was swallow. She felt the blood wet on her chin, but it felt like a line drawn, like she was that wolf at the end of the world swallowing down the end of an age. The King is dead, long live the Queen.
She swallowed. Her voice was still raw from the strangling. “So,” she said. “Ya’ll wanna carry on killing one another, or shall we just put an end to this shit?”
“No,” said the boy, the one whose knife was still in her other hand. “I mean, no ma’am. This is good. This is...an end.”
Ruby nodded, swallowed down puke. Goddamn, why did it have to be raw? Just gross. “Good,” she said, and handed him the knife with one hand and the heart with the other. “Now go put that motherfucker on ice. 'Fore it gets all gamey."
10
The hardest part was guarding her thoughts. That part never let up for a second, leaving her constantly frayed and anxious that she’d let something slip. Some thing that would give him a new means of manipulating her.
So when she dreamed about the reef she was already screaming ‘go back’ in her head, because she knew what came with the coral and the clear waters. And he couldn’t be here, not even in her dreams.
She was sitting in a rowboat. Gabe was sitting stiff at the other end, his palms on his knees. The ocean was like resin or glass, the sky the flat blank blue of a cheap backdrop.
“Get out of here,” she said, but he shook his head and looked straight at her, bringing tears to her eyes. “Gabe, go. You can’t be here.”
He shook his head. “I’m looking for you. No matter what. I’ll always be looking for you.”
“He’ll use you against me,” she said, but the ocean was already sinking around them, leaking away like someone had pulled a plug. She thought of the bottom of the boat hitting the coral and remembered something he’d told her; forty years growth destroyed in an instant. She heard a loud, ugly scraping noise and it was only as she surfaced from sleep that she realized she hadn’t dreamed that part.
The construction crew was up.
Blue was almost grateful for the noise. Dreaming wasn’t safe anymore. Maybe it hadn’t been safe since she first moved into Gloria’s place, when Yael had snuck out at night and tiptoed through her sleeping mind. She tuned her ears to another frequency, the one thrumming away inside her body and brain, listening for any sign that Yael had overheard her dreams.
He was quiet. She didn’t dare risk optimism but she thought the silences between them were getting longer, like the more flesh he had to take care of the less time he had to threaten and cajole. It took some doing, growing a whole human being from scratch, and he was rushing it, as her hips and spine and stomach knew all too well. Her throat blazed with heartburn as she swung her feet onto the floor, but Yael didn’t stir. Good. Maybe he could no longer flit in and out of heads like a spirit, now that he was becoming human. Soon he’d be stuck in his own head, like everyone else.
Only it wasn’t his own head. It was her baby’s head. And he’d hijacked it, made it grow too fast, and maybe that was what would kill him in the end...
She cut off the thought before it got her into trouble. At first she had tried singing to keep him out, repetitive baby songs like Row, Row, Row Your Boat and Frere Jacques, but that hadn’t helped. If anything he seemed to enjoy it, as if it reminded him of Gloria and the tunes she’d used to hum almost constantly.
She recited multiplication tables instead. Started at the beginning. Once two is two, two twos are four, three twos are six...
The back of her throat burned as she swung her feet onto the floor. Four twos are eight. Another creak from the construction site. Good. Noises were distracting. Shut down, shut him out. Keep him from your thoughts.
Blue went out and filled the ice bucket. The craving had set in now, and she remembered reading somewhere that wanting to eat ice meant your iron levels were low. He was sucking the blood from her veins as surely as any vampire. She popped a chip into her mouth and turned back to go to her room.
There was a black cat just in front of the doorway. Just like the one he’d strangled. Her eyes overflowed at the sight of it; she was turning into a mess of hormones. As she approached it trotted towards her, tail in the air, already purring.
“Don’t,” she said, tears pouring out like a damburst. “Please don’t.”
But it did. It wound against her legs and she felt the soft fur as clearly as she’d felt that poor little neck under her hands. Such a friendly cat, like the ones she’d longed to take home as a child. She clutched the ice bucket tight, keeping her hands away from the cat. It would be just like Yael to let her pet it for a second and then lock her fingers around its throat.
“Bad kitty,” she said. “No. Bad.”
The cat stopped in mid figure eight. Its green eyes were wide as it peered past her into the motel room, then the tail went up like a bottle brush and it scurried away, hissing.
Blue turned and almost dropped the ice bucket. Standing there, stark naked and somehow blurred around the edges, was Ruby.
“Oh my God.” She stepped inside and closed the door. “What are you doing here.”
Ruby’s gaze was a little unfocused. “I’m not here,” she said, and Blue suddenly understood. It was like that time she’d flown to eavesdrop on Ruby and Charlie, only this time Ruby meant to be seen. Goddamn, no wonder the cat had yowled; the air in the room was all powered up, charged like a battery. When she breathed in Blue tasted a metallic tang that put her in mind of the fuzzy mess that iron filings made of magnets.
“Right,” she said. “Of course you’re not.”
Ruby looked down at Blue’s belly. “Oh my God.”
Blue almost laughed, so relieved to see a familiar face, even if it was Ruby. “No,” she said. “Not God. Just Yael. He’s done to me what he was trying to do to you.”
Ruby shook her head. Did the math. “How is that even...”
“I don’t know. Let’s just say he’s impatient. I think he’s been waiting a while to become human.”
Yael moved angling a foot up against her stomach, pushing the acid up into her throat once more. He was waking up. Oh shit.
“Blue, don’
t freak out,” said Ruby. “But I have to tell you something.”
“Tell me how to kill it,” Blue said, and the words just came out before she could stop them. There was no more time. She could feel fingers and toes stretching within her. “And don’t look at me like that. I haven’t got time for your baby-crazy bullshit.”
“There’s baby-crazy and there’s murder,” said Ruby. “He’s a child now.”
“He’s a monster,” Blue said, but this time when she spoke a kind of black fog came out of her mouth. Oh God, she was done. She was busted. One moment of desperation and he was going to catch her. “A monster squatting in the body of an innocent,” she said, the fog flowing thicker and blacker than ever. He was moving around in there now, and he was pissed. “Help me, Ruby, please. You have to help me.”
Only she couldn’t even see Ruby any more. The room was full of fog and she heard a scream, then a strange static crackle that she prayed was the sound of Ruby taking flight once more.
“Oh fuck,” she said. If he’d had claws he would have turned them on her insides. His rage was like molten tar, sticking to everything and burning.
Three’s a crowd, said Yael. Get in the car.
“I’m tired.” And she was. It was the only thing she had left, to appeal to his vulnerability, that her life and his were now inextricably intertwined.
Get in the fucking car, mother monster. I know what you were plotting.
“No,” said Blue. “I won’t. Go ahead and put me in that coma you were always promising. Go on. Do it. Put your money where your damn mouth is; anything is better than this.”
She breathed hard, waiting for the darkness to come and claim her, but all he did was kick. She could feel his frustration as he tried to reach into her brain and turn off the lights, but he couldn’t do it. It seemed the more he settled into his stolen flesh the more he struggled to do the things he did when he was pure spirit.
“I told you,” she said. “That’s what being human means, Yael. It means being powerless sometimes.”
There was a deep, tearing pain between her hips, so mean and sudden that she cried out.
But I’m growing. And one day I won’t need you any more. I’ll be a helpless little baby rescued from his crazy mother, just like you, Baby Blue.
She dropped awkwardly to her hands and knees. Her back felt like it was about to break in two. “Please,” she said. “Please just stop.”
Then get in the car. Drive. Let’s go home.
“Okay. Okay. Please. Just don’t hurt me any more.”
Her hips cracked audibly, like someone was wrenching them apart. The next thing she knew her cheek was against the floor and she was sobbing, helpless, sure he was going to tear her to pieces from the inside.
You’re right, said Yael. This flesh stuff sure does bruise easily.
*
The Ninth ward.
She hadn’t been back here since the storm. The blue paint on the siding was all but gone, and the house was covered with a thick, green growth like moss, like a vision of a future where human beings were extinct and irrelevant. Sooner rather than later, maybe.
Blue climbed gingerly up the busted porch steps, her belly weighing her down and her spine on fire; on the way to New Orleans he’d figured out a way of compressing the vertebrae that made her scream and do exactly as she was told. The front door was boarded up but even the graffiti was faded, as if only one person had ever dared come up and scrawl on the door, and something had happened to him as a warning to all the others. Her old home had turned into one of those ghost houses. It didn’t have the rusty gates and the brooding grandeur of some of those old French quarter places...
...but it was haunted to hell all the same.
“How?” she said. “You were in Florida all those years.”
I wasn’t talking about me, said Yael. I was talking about him. Evil has a way of leaving echoes. Open the door.
She pulled at the old fiber board. It was damp and came apart easily, and beyond in the darkness she could smell something bad and old and sour. “West was here?” she said, remembering the dream when she’d first seen his face in the mirror that hung on the living room wall. Not a dream. A memory.
He was here, I was here, she was here, you were here. We made such a happy family, on those rare occasions when she was on her meds and he wasn’t off dumping bodies in the swamp. Go on. Go on in.
Despite her reluctance, Blue walked forward into the house. The smell almost knocked her over; it was the same sad waterlogged smell that had stank up the city after the hurricane, a smell of hurt and neglect and everlasting shame that so many people should have been abandoned.
And yet somehow, despite the boarded windows and the vines working their way through the walls and ceiling, it was still her old house. There was the wallpaper peeled away where Reggie had planned her manic mural. Under the dirt of old floodwater Blue could make out the crossed trunks of two childish palm trees, painted on the wall, and somehow that made it worse, like something from a nightmare where all the familiar things you loved were smashed up and rotted away.
“Why are you doing this?” she said, starting to cry. “Why, Yael? What the hell did I ever do to you to deserve this?”
He was quiet then, as if he couldn’t figure it out, and that was when she realized she’d never appealed to his compassion before. She’d taken it for granted that he had none.
It’s not about what you deserve, he said, and she thought she heard something like regret in his voice. It’s about what you are.
“I don’t understand.”
Then listen. Watch.
*
One hundred and seventy pounds of rotting meat. That’s all we are in the end, only this one smells worse than usual; he crapped and piddled all over himself while crying for his life. So much for having good men on the job; this one wasn’t even good at being a bad guy, and that isn’t even a thing that takes much effort. All you have to do is stop giving a shit; it’s kind of liberating, when you look at it like that.
West heaves the corpse from the back of the pick-up, head down.
It makes a snorty, gurgling noise, like they do sometimes. Bodies aren’t nearly as quiet as you’d think they are. Sometimes they burp, sometimes they fart. Sometimes – and this nearly made him pass out cold when he first saw it – they sit right up and moan like zombies. Just air leaving the lungs. A lot of interesting shit happens to dead bodies.
But not this one. Nope. This poor boring prick is getting fed to the gators, just like all the other people dumb enough to piss off old Bertrand, who you would think would go in for something a little more flamboyant than simply dumping people in swamps. Something flashy, like a Colombian necktie. Or cram a butterfly in their mouths or something like that, just to fuck with the police. Make all them Jodie Foster wannabes sit up and take notice.
I can smell your cunt. Jesus, that was a laugh. He picks up the feet and starts to drag.
“I can smell your ass, buddy,” he says. “I don’t know about anything else.”
Flesh is so messy. There’s clean, quiet bone under there somewhere but you’d hardly know it. Right now they’re a clunky deadweight, but when you lift them loose they’re surprisingly light. A human skull weighs next to nothing.
He can’t help it. Just a little souvenir. He remembers the guy when he was alive, grinning as he raised a middle finger from the driver’s seat of Bertrand’s Bentley, back before him and the Big B were on the outs. Nobody dares say exactly what he did to deserve this, but everyone’s guess is that it had something to do with Madame Bertrand, a lithe Spanish broad with eyes like a cow and thick brown hair falling just short of her heart shaped ass.
West takes out his knife and snicks off the driver’s middle finger. In any other part of the world you’d be sawing off the whole hands to prevent fingerprint identification, but not down here in the bayous. Toss them in the swamp and let the water do the rest. After a couple of days in water the skin peels off like glove
s, taking the fingerprints with it.
“In you go, Joe.” He rolls the body over into the brackish water, straightens up slowly, cursing his back. That’s when he hears it.
A hiss. Not like a cat, not like a snake. No, this is a beastie older than bones, a big-ass bull alligator maybe fourteen, fifteen feet. It’s smelled flesh, and he’s standing right between it and dinner.
He steps back. The huge jaws follow him around as he scrambles for the flatbed of the truck. Maybe he’s looking for a fresher snack than stinky old poop pants over there; he likes it when his food is still moving. And screaming.
The gator lunges. Amazing how those dumb stumpy legs can carry it across ground so fast. West leaps up on the flatbed just in time and snags a rope. It’s hissing and baring about a million mean old teeth, but he’s had enough for today. He’s got shit and piss all over the back of his truck, a severed finger in his pocket and an itch still very much unscratched in spite of the dead body he just dumped in the bayou.
“Come on, you old fuckin’ dinosaur. Gimme your best shot.”
But it turns away; it doesn’t want to eat him. It just wanted him to fuck off.
Every Florida kid has heard of the best way to kill a gator. It’s not the soft underbelly you have to aim for, it’s the head. There’s a spot at the back of the massive skull, but it’s tiny, just like the brain. Mr. Gator’s not too smart, but he doesn’t need to be. He’s an armor plated eating machine with a headful of teeth and a belly full of acid.
West drops down from the pick-up, knife in one hand, rope in the other. The gator turns again, hissing, huge jaws held wide. The adrenaline fizzes like a beer bottle shaken in sun, and if Yael had fists right now he’d be pounding his chest and screaming.
