Black Melt_Mother Fountain

by Indy McDaniel

  “Wait!” Erin screamed. “Please!”

  Gavin drew the glass across Erin’s throat without hesitation, opening up a wide gash. The young woman’s mouth continued to open and close, but the only thing she could emit was wet sputters and hot blood. The pressure of Gavin’s weight on her back disappeared and a moment later, he flipped her over onto her back. She brought a hand up to her throat, feeling along the ragged split in her once flawless skin. She clutched the wound as tightly as she could, but she could already feel a fatal chill running through her. Erin stared up at the grotesque thing perched on top of her. Gavin grinned back at her, soupy black liquid trickling from between his clenched teeth.

  With his broken arm all but useless, Gavin had some trouble tearing through Erin’s shirt, but he managed. Erin closed her tear-filled eyes tightly, not wanting her last moments of life to be filled with Gavin’s molestation. When she heard the retching, she couldn’t help opening her eyes again. She saw his mouth drop open and spew forth a thicker black substance out onto her. As the sloppy gunk splattered over her bare chest and sizzled through her small breasts, Erin made another attempt to scream through her slashed throat, only managing a soggy bubbling and light whistle.

  Erin watched and – worse – felt as Gavin pushed his fingers through the softened skin of her breasts and wiggled them in the warm sack of fat underneath. His eyes rolled back in his head and she was terribly aware of his throbbing erection pressing against her stomach. He let another spray of black vomit splatter over her chest, creating a myriad of sickening colors. The black of his sick, the red of her blood, the pale pink of her skin, the yellow of her fat, and – as he literally wiped one of her tits away from her chest – the off-white of her ribs. Gavin curled his fingers into Erin’s ribs and she felt a painful crack of her softened bones as he popped them out.

  Barely clinging to life, Erin endured one final horror as Gavin lowered his mouth to the gory hole he’d made in her chest and spewed another dose of his digestive puke directly into her body. Erin shuddered on the floor of her shitty apartment, legs kicking out weakly and bloody lips sputtering as her internal organs dissolved away within her. Eyes rolling back to the top of her head, the darkness of death finally overwhelmed the young stripper. Gavin hardly noticed, cracking through more of her ribs so he could plunge the majority of his head into her chest cavity and motorboat her sizzling lungs.

  * * *

  “You seen this guy before?” Stark asked as he held up a photo of Gavin O’Malley for the strip club’s bartender.

  The thick bearded man with the arms full of ink only gave the photo half a glance before nodding. “Yea, he’s a regular.”

  “When was the last time he was in?”

  While Stark interrogated the bartender, Zoey seemed to be hypnotized by the bright flashing lights and sensuously disrobing female flesh on stage. He couldn’t tell whether she wanted to hop up on stage to make her own attempt at stripping or if she was calculating the level of bacteria on the stripper pole currently clenched between the thighs of one of the more busty dancers. He’d been around the doctor long enough that either response wouldn’t have surprised him much.

  “The other day,” the bartender replied. “Flashing some serious cash and trying to get the girls to do things that aren’t a part of their official job descriptions.”

  Stark lifted an eyebrow at the bartender. “You’re being surprisingly forthcoming with a law man. Boss not paying you enough to glue your lips shut?”

  The bartender shrugged. “Look, man, despite the shitty décor of the place, Fallen Angels is a legit business. The girls here are clean, but a lot of em haven’t always been that way. We’ve got recovering alcoholics and drug addicts. A few former call girls and hookers. Some barely legal kids just trying to keep their student loans paid off. Everybody here’s got scars, but they’re good people. The clientele, they’re a bit spottier. So I’ll cut you a deal, law man. Promise you won’t fuck with any of my people without a goddamn good reason, and I’ll tell you anything you like. Shit, I’ll even tell you the damn truth.”

  “Deal,” Stark said with a nod. “I’ll tell you I ain’t here to bust anyone for prostitution. It’s a bit below my pay scale. But I gotta know, all the same. Are any of the girls willing to go above and beyond their official job descriptions for enough cash?”

  The bartender narrowed his eyes at Stark. “If it’s below your pay scale, how come you need to know?” he asked.

  “Because your regular with the thick wallet might be sick,” Stark told him. “We need to find him before he spreads it around any.”

  The bartender let out a sigh. “Great, the last thing we need is an STD outbreak,” he muttered, cracking open a bottle of beer and taking a swig. “Look, this place is essentially a halfway house with a two drink minimum and fully nude dancers. Not everyone’s so good at walking the line. But this guy?” He nodded to the photo of O’Malley. “He’s only got a taste for one girl.”

  Stark waited for a name but the bartender didn’t seem eager to give it. “Look, if you’d rather, I could make this about prostitution. Drug abuse. Any one of a hundred other things that’ll shut down your charitable organization of flesh and booze.”

  “She’s a good kid,” the bartender told him. “You should know that first. A good kid who’s just a little too liberal with what she’s willing to do. And the only damn reason I’m gonna tell you at all is cuz if you are telling me the truth and that asshole is carrying something, she might be, too. So she might need help with it.”

  “Just give me a damn name already,” Stark grumbled.

  “Erin,” the bartender finally confided. “Erin Moone. She works days and goes to school at night. This guy O’Malley’s got a serious hard-on for her, and she’s not above getting physical with a customer for the right price.”

  “Is she here now?” Stark asked.

  “Should be,” the bartender nodded. “Not sure. She hasn’t come up to check in yet.” He waved down a blonde-haired stripper with breasts larger than Zoey’s head. “Busty, is Erin in the back?”

  The woman turned to the bartender and shook her head. “No, she ain’t gotten in yet.”

  Zoey’s wide eyes were fixed on the stripper’s breasts. She lifted a hand and reached out to poke one until Stark waved her off. The stripper noticed and grinned. “It’s alright, girly,” she told Zoey. “You can touch. Shit, the money I spent on em, I’m not gonna turn down a little appreciation.”

  Zoey nodded and extended a finger, gently prodding at each of Busty’s oversized tits. “Hardly appreciation,” she muttered as she stared at the naked flesh. “Butchery. Scarring minimal, but not unnoticeable. Nipple sensitivity reduced. All surveys point to more than a handful being a waste.”

  Busty’s look of smugness transformed to one of perplexed annoyance. She turned to Stark. “Is this bitch serious?”

  Stark laughed. “Don’t think she knows how to be anything else.”

  “Lies,” Zoey announced as she lowered her hand and turned back to Stark. “Slander, even. I have a firm grasp of the humorous. Have you heard the one about the road-trekking poultry?”

  “You can tell me about it in the car,” Stark shot back, returning his gaze to the bartender. “Would O’Malley have any way of knowing where his favorite dancer lives?”

  The bartender shook his head. “No way,” he said. “All the dancers have stage names. Their personal records are locked up in a filing cabinet in the office, which is also locked.”

  “I’m gonna need you to show me that it is,” Stark said. “I’m also going to need a current address for Miss Moone.”

  * * *

  Stark dragged Zoey along with him as he followed the bartender back to the office. He didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone with any of the strippers. If he had, he wouldn’t have been surprised to come back and find her beaten to a pulp or being forced to strip to Menudo. When they reached the office, Stark immediately spotted that the door was ajar. “Tho
ught you said you kept this locked?” he asked the bartender.

  “I do,” he replied with angered confusion in his voice.

  “Stand back,” Stark said, pushing ahead of the bartender and pulling his gun free of its holster. He stepped up to the door and lifted the gun up. He shoved the door open and stepped in, eyes and weapon searching for any hostile targets. He didn’t spot any, but he could see easily enough that O’Malley had been there. The office was a mess, tossed about in the heat of a hurried search. “That the filing cabinet where you keep your girls’ records?” he asked the bartender, motioning to the toppled over cabinet. The drawers had been yanked open and the paperwork within strewn about the room.

  “That’s the one,” he said, standing beside Stark and scanning the room with a stunned expression plastered over his hairy face. “Why the fuck would O’Malley bust into my place to hunt down one of my girls’ addresses?”

  “Well, his girlfriend’s guts are currently splattered across a hospital room,” Stark muttered. “Guess he’s got a strange way to mourn.” As he continued to scan the ransacked office, Stark spotted a number of signs of the dark substance that seemed to be following O’Malley like a snail trail. “Zoey,” he called back to the doctor. “Time to call in your nerd herd. There’s more of that mold shit in here.” He turned back to the bartender, slipping his gun away as he did. “Stay out of here and keep everyone else out, too. You’re not gonna be doing any business today until the quarantine team says otherwise. The pervs can find another way to work out their urges.”

  “What the fuck’s going on, law man?” the bartender growled. “Are we in any danger here?”

  “Definitely possible,” Zoey cut in as she finished making her call.

  Stark gave her a glare before returning his gaze to the bartender. “Everything’s going to be fine. Just do what the guys in the funny outfits tell you to. Now, I need you to give me the address of that dancer O’Malley has the hots for.”

  * * *

  Stark had thought the last apartment complex had been a shit hole. He’d been wrong. Arriving at the address the bartender had given them for Erin Moone, he only needed half a glance to determine it wasn’t much more than a flophouse on stilts. He looked over at Zoey. “Keep your eyes open,” he told her. “O’Malley might not be the only dangerous thing in that place.”

  They got out of the car and headed into the place, once again taking the elevator up to the floor they needed. They found the door to Erin’s apartment kicked open. “That doesn’t bode well,” Stark muttered as he got his gun out. He moved ahead of Zoey, slowly pushing the door open and raising his weapon. The sound of hysterical sobbing struck him first, followed by further signs of a forced intrusion. Stark moved deeper into the small apartment, towards the crying.

  Stepping into the living room, Stark was met with a scene he’d not expected. “Holy shit,” he muttered as his eyes moved over what lay before him on the floor. He could only assume the body lying on the floor was Moone, or at least what was left of her. From the waist up, she was nothing but a congealing puddle of black sludge. As horrific as the sight was, Stark kept his gun trained on the only other figure in the room. The one crouched over the remains of Erin Moone and sobbing like a baby. “Gavin O’Malley?” Stark asked. “Alright, you slippery son of a bitch. Back away from that mess you made and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  O’Malley’s crying ceased abruptly. His head lifted slowly, looking to Stark. The FBI agent muttered a curse as he saw the infected man’s face, covered in dark growths. He opened his mouth only to drool out what looked like a half-dissolved kidney. The bubbling organ plopped into the thick pool that had been Moone’s head. “Do you see?” O’Malley blubbered out. He motioned to what was left of the dead stripper. “Do you see what it makes us do? This terrible, beautiful life coursing within us.”

  “Alright, Mister Cheery,” Stark growled. “How about you just take a breath, let out all the crazy, and calm down. You’ve been infected with a bit of nastiness. We’re gonna fix you up all nice and shiny so you can spend a whole fistful of years in jail, thinking over where your life went wrong. Sound good?”

  “Look at us!” O’Malley screamed, surging to his feet. Stark kept his gun trained on the infected man. “Do you really think you can fix this?” He reached up and tore the front of his shirt away, revealing the gaunt, tainted form underneath. The darkness travelled along his veins and grew in flakey patches across his stomach and nipples. “Go on then,” he hissed, black bile sputtering from his lips. “Fix this beautiful blight. I fucking dare you.”

  “I’m not the fixing sort,” Stark replied. “I mostly do the other thing. Lucky for you, I’ve got someone with me who might be able to. But before that happens, I need you to turn around and put your hands behind your back. I’m gonna give you some fashionable bracelets to keep you and everyone else safe. Then we can move on to the fixing.”

  “And rest assured,” Zoey said, stepping up behind Stark. “I am quite adept at fixing things of this nature.”

  O’Malley’s eyes lit up with hungry glee as he spotted Zoey. “Tasty critter’s come to play,” he squealed. “Not a moment too soon. The other one was getting all soggy.” He launched himself forward, leaping over Erin’s remains and made a grab for Zoey. Stark fired before he got within reach, splattering O’Malley’s brains out the back of his skull. The infected man stumbled forward another couple steps before flopping face first to the floor. A few subtle death twitches went by before he lay still.

  “What the hell was that?” Stark asked Zoey as he lowered his weapon and turned to her. He’d managed to keep his cool during the tense situation, but now in its wake, he was letting the truly insane encounter wash over him and he didn’t like it one bit. “Is that typically what happens when someone has a fungal infection?”

  For once, it seemed Zoey was speechless. Her eyes remained fixed on O’Malley’s corpse as she slowly shook her head. She took a few slow breaths before finally being able to speak again. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said, the slowness of her words bordering on normal. “The scene in the hospital with Kurylenko was strange enough, but this takes things to an entirely new level.”

  “The stripper,” Stark said. “Was he… eating her?”

  “Certainly appears that way. But not proper eating. Mastication and the like.” Zoey’s words were picking up speed again as she stepped forward and kneeled down, careful to avoid stepping into the dark slop staining the floor. “Looks more like straight digestion process. Skipping the middle man, as it were. O’Malley’s last words even more alarming. Suggests an intelligence to the infection.”

  “Or maybe it just got into his brain and made him go utterly psycho-bonkers crazy,” Stark countered. “Makes a hell of a lot more sense than intelligent fungus.”

  Zoey nodded. “Agreed. Simpler explanation usually best. Although, nothing about this case seems simple. Why did fungal infection react so severely with Kurylenko? Why did it manifest differently in O’Malley? And why the apparent preference towards females for the sake of consumption?”

  “Maybe he was just a misogynistic prick.”

  “Possible, except his reaction to me at the end. Not hatred. Happiness. And hunger. Saw you, no hunger. Me, irresistible. Hunted down Moone to feed on her. Could be link there.”

  Stark put his gun back in its holster. “Yea, well, that sounds like more of an egghead concern to me. O’Malley’s dead, so as soon as you and your team get this mess sorted out, the trail of potential infection should end here, right?”

  “Presumably, yes,” Zoey said. “But investigation far from complete. We have the end. Need the beginning. Only way to determine if there are other threads of infection.”

  “And that sounds like more of a my problem sort of situation,” Stark said. “Don’t see much use in dragging you along for that.”

  Zoey looked up from the mess on the floor to Stark, her brow creased with curiosity. “Don’t you? I
could be quite useful. Data interpretation, lingo speaking, infection threat assessment. The works.”

  “Could be dangerous,” Stark warned her.

  Zoey smiled. “Fear not, Stark. I’ll protect you.”

  Chapter Four

  Field Trip

  Between Stark explaining to his superiors the reason why he’d had to kill O’Malley and Zoey overseeing the clean-up of two apartments and the strip club, it was well into the night before either of them had the time to regroup and figure out what their next course of action should be. Stark still wasn’t entirely sure he wanted Zoey tagging along on his investigation. While it seemed the biggest danger had been dealt with already, there was no telling where the search for answers might lead. Also, the chick was just plain weird. Cute, in a nerdy sort of way, but damn weird.

  Stark’s cell phone rang as he left the FBI field office. He didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway. “This is Stark,” he said into the phone.

  “This is Zoey,” the voice on the other end replied. “Dinner?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Traditional evening custom of consuming nutrition,” she explained. “In this particular case, while adjoining me in the same.”

  Stark shrugged. “Sure, I could eat.”

  “Wonderful,” Zoey said. He could hear the grin in her voice. “Meet me at Feathered Touch in twenty minutes.” She hung up before he could reply.

  Stark sighed and slipped the phone back into his pocket as he made his way to his car.

  * * *

  “Don’t you think this place might be a bit overly fancy?” Stark asked Zoey as they made their way into the Feathered Touch restaurant. It was about as upper class a restaurant as he’d ever seen and certainly made for a drastic change from the day full of seedy apartments and strip clubs that he’d had to jaunt through. Still, he could already hear his wallet groaning in dismay and he hadn’t even seen a menu yet. Looking around at the diners already seated and enjoying their meals, Stark felt woefully underdressed for the occasion in his plain black suit.