Vessel, Book I: The Advent

by Tominda Adkins

I'll go ahead and say for the record that the ride was the hardest. Worse things had happened, yes, and worse things were yet to come. Things that will bend your mind and twist your stomach, I'm sure. But all of that other business―the falling off the bridge, the shock to the arm, the horrors that were headed my way―they all came with a generous supply of adrenaline and some feeling of finality. When you're dropping hundreds of feet or hearing bullets whistle by, you tend to think, Oh, okay, this will be over soon. There's just the moment and no assumption that the next moment will come. And that's manageable.

  Sitting in absolute darkness, feeling dead hands and shoulders and knees brushing past, listening to the sounds of decaying bodies putting themselves back together (it sounds a lot like juicy chow mein getting twirled around a fork, to give you some idea), and not knowing when the ride will end―that isn't manageable. I don't care who you are.

  The Hollows, for the most part, left me alone, which was fine and dandy by me. The only thing they seemed the least bit interested in was my arm, something I was paying an awful lot of attention to myself. I couldn't see a thing, but in the bumpy darkness I imagined that everything between my shoulder and my elbow must have swelled to the size of my head and beyond. Every nerve in the area of the shock throbbed and hummed with a raw sting. I wanted to squeeze the living daylights out of it. I wanted to rip my arm off. But I could not bring myself to touch it, so I did a lot of ghastly clenching and puffy breathing instead, while bubbles of heat fizzed up in my brain and made my eyes water. I was grateful for the dark. I probably looked pretty stupid.

  Cold hands pinned me to the wall near the beginning of the ride. Someone prodded at the burn, smelled it, and dragged a dry finger―or maybe a tongue?―across the hole in my sleeve. Fully expecting the thing to start chewing, I stayed rigidly still and did my best not to piss him off or seem too delicious. When he began rolling up my sleeve, however, and I felt my own loosened flesh moving with it, I lost my damn mind. I shredded his soap-like skin with my nails. I screamed until I forgot how to breathe.

  The next thing I knew, I was sitting upright, wiping snot off my face. A length of electrical cord was wound around the uppermost part of my left arm, pulled tight and knotted off to form a tourniquet. My pulse throbbed against the pressure, but the swelling plateaued off, along with the dizziness. I wasn't in great shape by any means, but I was no longer bleeding to death. And for the hundredth time that day, my life continued when it should not have.

  Joy.

  I didn't understand such treatment at the moment, but I was being preserved. These Hollows didn't want me to die on their watch. They didn't want to kill me, and they didn't want to breathe into me or eat my guts. Those kinds of pleasures had already been reserved for someone else. Someone they knew better than to disappoint.

  And so I was mercifully ignored for the remaining duration of the trip, which was maybe an hour or more. During that time, I did all the things that any Bruce Willis movie had ever taught me to do: I counted stops the U-Haul made, and attempted―with pitiful success―to memorize the direction and order of the turns. I had no way of marking the time or determining how fast we were going, but I definitely noticed when we hit a gravel road near the last leg of the journey. A series of rolling hills followed, punctuated by sharp hairpin turns and staggering potholes.

  I was pulled to my feet after we lurched to a stop. The door rolled open with an ugly screech, and I blinked my dark-stunted eyes, confused because there was no light outside. It felt like I had been in that thing for a whole day, sure, but my body knew better. My body still expected morning.

  Only after I was dragged out of the truck did I understand. Twigs of distant daylight were coming through the wiggly edges between panels of corrugated steel. We were indoors, in some enormous, old, industrial space, like a factory or an aircraft hanger. Just one big open floor, soft with dust, and not a light on in sight.

  Once its hold was empty, the U-Haul sped away across that vast space. A door, small and impossibly far away, opened for it, and in the faint light that rushed inside I could see more doors along the closest wall. The Hollows hustled me toward one of them―a flimsy metal door, rusty and banged up, chained shut. A key hung in plain sight and the Hollow to my right grabbed it, fumbling a little with the lock. Most of his left hand, and part of the left side of his face, I noticed, was covered in limp little strings of pink flesh, as thin and dangly as jellyfish legs.

  Hollows don't always heal in perfect ways.

  I was totally mesmerized by those little strings. They seemed to be the most hideous thing I'd seen so far, and the thought of what they would feel like made me queasy. I became terrified by the idea of being touched by them, so when the door was pushed open, I moved through it without any encouragement.

  Nothing touched me. Nothing at all. I turned around and watched as the door closed with a rusty creak. Outside, the chain clinked while Spaghetti Hands replaced the lock, the key pinged against the wall, the footsteps shuffled off, and I was alone.

  I stared at that door for what felt like a very long time, simply because it was the only thing in the room that I'd seen so far, and I was afraid of what I might see if I looked elsewhere. When I could no longer bear to stand still, though, I turned around.

  This room wasn't as dark as the factory floor. It was large but not immense, about the size of a two-car garage. The floor was concrete and covered in grime, and from what I could tell, the walls were made mostly of cinderblock and sheet metal. The halogen lamps above were off, but they were so thick with gray dust that I doubted any light could escape from them at all. Muted daylight filtered through teal green panels of rigid plastic higher up on the walls, the kind you see patching up the tops of greenhouses.

  Large shop tables were parked in the center of the room, heaped with dirty tarps and cardboard boxes. Along three walls, metal shelves stood in disarray, holding more boxes, bulging trash bags, piles of clothing, and tools. The fourth wall stretched halfway across the room and then recessed to form a large, shadowy nook in the far corner.

  I stood there awhile, watching the breath condense in front of my face, clenching my fingers to keep the feeling in them. The fingers of my left hand were becoming slow and stubborn. Gradually, I worked up the will to take one step, and then another, and suddenly I was rushing to find a light switch. Whatever this place was, the Hollows were evidently paying their bills. I flipped the first switch I came to, and the bulbs above cast a filmy yellow light through their shells of dust.

  One step at a time, I moved toward the center of the room, lightly touching one of the heavy tables as I came to it. I pushed a corner of stained canvas aside to uncover a cluster of disassociated items. Dingy glass jars full of clear liquid. Tools, sharp and caked with a dried ruddy brown. A pair of reading glasses. A human tooth. Things that made me swallow and shudder.

  I pulled my hand back to myself, and my elbow bumped a box. A huge box, certainly big enough to hide in. Its contents were heavy. Tentatively, I took a step closer to the table and leaned forward, holding back one of the cardboard flaps to peer down inside.

  Shoes. Just totally full of shoes.

  Something behind me made a sound.

  Something behind me was moving. Groaning.

  I wasn't alone.

  I stared straight ahead, right over that big box of shoes. My nostrils flared and the rest of me tightened and turned to stone.

  It moved again. It moaned, thrashed, made a rustling sound. I turned my head first, taking days to swivel it around, not daring to breath. My eyes strained so far to look left that they ached. From the edge of my vision, I caught up with the sound.

  The ceiling lights barely permeated the shadowy nook in the corner, but from where I stood then, I could still see the network of pipes running across its far end. Hanging from those pipes were four large bags of rubberized canvas. The kind of thing you'd see in a garden store. Or a morgue. Zippers ran down their fronts, and plastic funnels had been stitched along th
eir bases. From these funnels, a coiling maze of rubber tubes tumbled down to the ground, all of them winding over to a flat, plastic tank.

  The tank was filled halfway with something scarlet and opaque.

  Blood.

  Hollow Cocktail.

  I was already upset. Very upset. And this development, understandably, upset me more. But what took my upset-ness to an unthinkable level, what really did it, was the bag to the far right. The one farthest into the corner. It moaned again. It shifted and twitched.

  I took a step toward it, which sounds like the last thing anyone would want to do, but remember: I still didn't have all the pieces of what had transpired on the river. Not the foggiest. In my mind, it could have been Jesse. It could have been any of them.

  I tried to say "hello." Hi. Hey there. You know, just a reassuring greeting. What anyone hanging inside a bag, letting blood, would like to hear. No sound made it past my frozen trachea, though, so I crept over silently, forcing each and every step. With some serious self-prompting, I managed to reach up and grab the zipper tab, flinching and jumping every time the bag moved. My breath moved in and out in dry gulps, like empty sobs.

  I pulled the zipper down a few inches. I saw bare feet. Farther down, the bunched hems of denim jeans. I began to unzip the bag a little more quickly, slammed by waves of conflicting emotions.

  I was horrified. This was a person.

  I was elated. This was a person.

  I was not alone. That's what mattered most.

  I uncovered knees, a waist, a navel. Arms lashed to sides with nylon cords. Open wounds, flaking and bled dry. I had to stop for a second there. But this person was still moving, still breathing. And so I had to keep going, keep pulling the zipper down. A bare chest, a panther tattoo, a stubbly neck. A face. A man's face, an older face.

  I pulled away and smashed my palm against my mouth.

  The man's eyes were black, as if he'd been filled with oil after being left upside down. His mouth was wide open, croaking and dribbling more oil. And lolling out of that mouth was not a tongue, but a ghoulish black tendril, waving and unravelling like a time lapse film of a growing plant.

  That's what you look like after they breathe into you, for awhile. Until that's all that you are.

  Flailing, I managed to zip the bag halfway back up before I lost control and fled, tripping over the tubes and throwing myself across the room. My body quaked, my knees knocked together, my breathing was that of a Lamaze instructor.

  I didn't bother with the door. It would make too much noise, and it would never open, and even if it did I would only see more things outside that I never wanted to see. I didn't bother with anything; I just hurtled to the other side of the room, crashed into some shelves, and puked until I couldn't puke anymore while the guy in that bag just moaned and moaned and moaned. And then I slid down to the floor and had myself the most hard-earned cry of my career.