Bats chirped, insects buzzed, wind soughed through the branches overhead. There was meaning in these sounds, she just knew it. Then a different noise caught her attention, heavy breathing next to her cheek and the smell of thick air, rotten breath. Her eyelids flickered open, and she gasped. Large, golden eyes stared into hers. The wolf panted then growled and took a step away. It sat in front of her, its tongue lolling, tail batting the ground, and threw its head back ululating into the dark, the sound echoing all around.
Camilla screamed and clapped her hands over her ears.
Five other wolves lunged from nowhere and nipped at her. She flinched and yipped like a pup every time they got close enough to bite, but they didn’t actually touch her. Then they stopped and sat, watching. She stared at them, panting, calming herself. They began a murmured growl. She scrunched her eyebrows, cocking her head, listening. There were words in those noises, telling her to get going.
“Okay,” she said and stood up. The large one snapped at her ankles, its teeth grazing her enough to hurt. “I’m going,” she said, no longer afraid and sounding more like a petulant teenager talking to her stern father. The wolves watched as she trudged back to the road. Once there, the pack faded into the shadows. The sky grew lighter in the east, and the night ended.
After less than a mile, she saw what they had said would be there. Just over the next rise, a city sprawled beneath her, only a few miles downhill. She ambled along, glancing over her shoulders every once in a while. She no longer tried to hide her breasts within the tattered remains of her shirt, intent on finding a hospital rather than concealing her nakedness.
Morning-gray lit the horizon from behind the city, marking the start of her third day on this journey. She smiled for the first time since its inception, as she trotted down the hill, a new bounce in her step. Soon, she would get the help she needed.
Questions flitted through her mind—why hadn’t she bled out yet; why wasn’t she dead?—but she pushed them away knowing it did no good to think on these things. Her pants squished as she shuffled toward civilization. The smell of cold hung in the air.
Streetlights cast orange pools on the sidewalk. She walked through the creamy circle of each glow as she followed the road signs directing her toward the hospital. The sleeping town nestled around her. It didn’t take her long to reach her destination. In front of it, she stopped and stared at the two-story building. She looked down at her bloodied jeans and curled her lip at the mess between her legs. She hugged her breasts again when she noticed people moving around inside.
“I made it,” she whispered, unaware that she had spoken. It didn’t hit her until now that she’d never believed she would make it to safety. The realization made her knees buckle. With a firm hand, she steadied herself against a car and took a couple of slow deep breaths. The air she sucked into her lungs couldn’t satisfy her, however, didn’t soothe the way it should’ve. She ran her dry tongue over her cracked lips, tried to swallow.
A man walked past her in the parking lot. There she stood, bleeding, clothes in tatters, and he didn’t even ask if she needed help, didn’t act alarmed, as if she didn’t exist. She glared at his back and sighed. Something was severely wrong with people in this area. Were they demented? No one seemed to care about a woman covered in blood standing mostly naked in the road. She walked across the parking lot without pause, head held high, shoulders back. This would not be the end of her, she decided. She had made it to town without anyone’s help. What was one more person passing by?
Despite her resolve to be strong, her bottom lip quivered. She wouldn’t cry. “You’re a big girl. You can do this.” Back straight, she marched to the glass doors. A yellow sticker cautioned her they were automatic. She walked into them, bumped her nose and breasts against the glass, then bounced back.
“What the fuck,” she said, rubbing her nose, which throbbed like a rotten tooth. A nurse came up behind her, walked right past her. Camilla raised her hand, a warning for the nurse on her lips when the double doors slid open and the nurse walked through. Camilla slid inside, shadowing the nurse, a quick glance over her shoulder at the closing doors. They were smeared with a bloody face and body print.
Suppressing a shudder, the confidence she’d felt moments before seeping from her gut like air from a balloon, she went to the nurse’s station. Avoiding eye contact with the patients waiting in the emergency room lobby wouldn’t be easy, but she thought she might be able to manage it if she kept her head down. Her nakedness screamed at her, begging Camilla to hide it, cover it up with her torn shirt. If there was a hole somewhere, she would’ve slid down it like a snake grateful for the dark confines.
At the front desk, she glanced at the closest nurse typing on her computer, leaned in so that she could whisper to the harried woman.
“Excuse me,” she squeaked. The nurse didn’t look up. She cleared her throat and tried again. “I need help,” she said, louder this time. The nurse still didn’t seem to notice. “Hello!” She snapped her fingers in the nurse’s face, the need for discretion morphing into a need to be noticed, no matter the scene she was about to cause. The nurse sighed and whipped around, scowling, lips tight.
“Mary, do you have the file on Brian Clark? He’s the one came in with the broken foot.”
“Hey, bitch! I need some help here.”
Still, no one acknowledged her.
“Mommy,” a little girl to Camilla’s right whined. “Mommy, what’s wrong with that lady?” The little girl, her eyes large and teary in her pudgy cheeks, her black hair hanging lank and tangled around her face, pointed a chubby finger at Camilla. “She’s bleeding, Mommy. What’s wrong with her? Look.”
“Don’t point, Britney. That’s rude.” The mother pushed her daughter’s hand down but Britney still stared at Camilla.
“Someone help me!” Camilla called out to anyone who would listen. As she swung around to face the waiting room, searching for the first person to acknowledge her, her shirt fell open again. She gathered the cloth around herself, picked at it with shaking hands.
“Help her!” Britney yelled, tears spilling down her cheeks as her chest hitched with sobs. Her mother held the little girl’s finger wrapped in gauze. “Mommy, she’s scared. Someone help her.” The little girl buried her face in her mother’s chest and curled her body in pushing against her breasts as if she were trying to force her way back inside, where she wouldn’t have to look at something like Camilla’s abused body anymore.
Nurses ran in to see why Britney was yelling. They tried to calm her down. She pointed in Camilla’s direction again and gibbered. The nurses turned and stared past Camilla at an old woman hunched in a chair with an oxygen mask over her face. They cooed to the little girl and told her that the old woman needed the mask to breathe.
“That’s not the lady I’m talking about,” she wailed. “She’s right behind you.” The mother licked her lips and darted wide-eyed glances around the room as she rocked the trembling ball that was her daughter. The nurses looked around the room, apparently not seeing the bloody woman frightening the little girl.
“I’m right here, you fucking idiots,” Camilla whispered, unable to put any force in her words. She sank to her knees. No one but the little girl looked at her. A nurse brought the child a mild sedative and she relaxed against her mother, the stained bandage on her finger now bright red. One of the nurses walked past Camilla and knocked her over, never turning to see who she’d bumped into.
Camilla allowed herself to fall back welcoming the cool tile against her cheek. She drifted. Her eyes fluttered shut and all went dark.
* * *
A nurse walked through the door and called a patient’s name. She looked into the lobby to see who would stand. Then she screamed. Her pale skin turned whiter as she swayed. She stared at the bloody woman sprawled on the lobby floor.
“What’s going on?” the head nurse bellowed. She rushed around the corner, saw the body and gasped. She stood for a moment with her hand cuppe
d over her mouth. “Someone call the doctor,” she yelled, then turned and ran through double doors. Moments later, she returned with a stretcher. Two orderlies helped lift the body. The doctor arrived out of breath and checked for a pulse. Other patients shrank away, hugging their arms, cupping their mouths, clutching each other. No one understood why they hadn’t seen the body there before. They stared at the discarded heap of flesh.
“She’s dead,” the doctor said, his face sagging as he glared at the head nurse. “How did this happen? Who is she?”
“I don’t know,” the nurse said. “No one saw her come in.”
They covered her with a white sheet and rolled her to the morgue. After writing what they knew about this mysterious woman, they strung a Jane Doe tag over her big toe and placed her in one of the coolers.
“What happened to her? I can’t believe those bruises. And those are bite marks on her shoulders and stomach,” the pathologist said to her assistant as they left.
Chapter Two
The counters around the room’s perimeter held iodine and other bottles exhibiting exotic, sterile sounding names, like bleach and formaldehyde. The tiled floor reflected the fluorescent lights. In the center of the room, the tiles were stained a darker brown and flaunted scratches filled with grimed-in matter. Above the discolored section of floor, a large, stainless-steel table loomed. A tray with various sharp and serrated instruments sat beside it. The stark illumination made even the smallest details visible.
A naked man rested on the metallic platform, his squishy flesh surpassing the width of the table, drooping over the sides. The skin on his face sagged toward his ears and his jaw hung open as he stared with sightless eyes at the ceiling. His toes pointed outward like a duck, his manhood all but lost in graying-pink folds.
Libitina Flesher stood next to the body wiggling her gloved fingers above his gut, looking like a wicked witch gloating over a great find. Her scraggly black hair was tied back in a ragged ponytail, a large zit was on the end of her nose, and thick, black rimmed glasses adorned her face. All combined to make what might have been an attractive woman appear homely, someone most people wouldn’t notice on the streets.
“And now to start.” She gripped the scalpel. With a sigh, she placed the blade next to his right clavicle and made a diagonal incision to his sternum, giggling as she did so. She repeated the process from the left clavicle, meeting her first line in a V. She dragged the razor-sharp edge through the flesh, down his belly to his groin turning the V into a Y.
She’d learned that skin made a mild tearing sound when cut, like tape pulled from leather. Because of the silence, the soft purring seemed as loud as an engine, making Libitina shiver with pleasure. Nothing came close to such a noise. Only a little blood oozed from the large incision etched over his chest and abdomen. She slipped a hand into the fresh opening and wiggled her fingers down past the fatty tissue. Then she made her hand flat over his muscles and moved it in small, circular motions under the skin.
“Oh my,” she said in a hysterical tone, “an alien is about to burst through.” She turned her hand palm up under his fat and poked her middle finger upwards, giving the appearance of something trying to beat its way through his skin. “Everyone, rrrrun for your lives,” she squealed, trilling her R’s. She giggled, cleared her throat and then became more serious as she continued to loosen the flesh. One must be serious and careful during such delicate procedures. If someone ever caught her playing around… well… she didn’t even want to think about the humiliation.
A small noise from outside tore her attention from the autopsy. She looked at the door, at the closed blinds over the window it held. She had to go faster. Doing so, she placed her hands back to back and put them once again inside the incision, pealing the flesh back, exposing his pink muscles and white rib bones. Very nice, she thought. Now to get him open.
After cutting his sternum, she grabbed the rib spreader and positioned it ever so carefully around his chest. When it cracked apart, she snickered again, glanced over her shoulder at the closed door, lips pressed tight. She didn’t hear any other commotion from behind the door. Back to work.
As she cut the membrane covering his organs, she whisper-hummed “The Star Spangled Banner”. The first organ she reached for was the corpse’s enormous stomach. A loud belch boomed from the dead man’s mouth when she grabbed it. Libitina jumped, clasping her hands over her mouth, stifling the scream threatening to escape.
Eyes wide, she stared at the vacant face. It only took a moment for her heart to slow. She sucked in a breath and laughed, clapping. Blood and fluids flew from her fingers. Red smears like feathered wings streaked her cheeks.
She hopped as she giggled like a child playing with her favorite toy. She then jabbed the dead man in the shoulder with a bloody finger, the red mark a harsh contrast to his bluish skin. “You got me, you little joker.”
She reached back into his abdomen, snipped the membrane holding the stomach in place, then set it in the scale. “Whoa, big boy,” she said, as if looking at his enormous body wasn’t proof enough to this fact. “So, what was your last meal?” She sliced the organ open and inhaled the fumes emanating from within. “Ahh, junk food junkie,” she said as she examined the orange goo inside. “Oh, and here’s a piece of pepperoni… Let’s look at your heart next. I bet I can guess your cause of death, Mr. Fatty.”
She removed the partially digested treasures.
Footsteps and jingling keys from the hallway beyond the closed door stopped her progress. “Shit,” she said as she wiped her hands over her stained lab coat and then grabbed her clipboard. “Shit.” A shadowed head bobbed in the window. She scuttled to the door, head down, clipboard tucked under her arm, bag slung over her shoulder. Just as she reached for the knob, it swung open.
A skyscraper of a man ducked under the lintel. Their inevitable collision reverberated through Libitina making her teeth click and her ears ring. She caught her balance by stepping back. He caught his by hanging onto the door jamb; his stethoscope clattered to the floor. Already tall at 5’10”, Libitina had to tilt her head back to look into his eyes. She grinned, recognizing him immediately.
“Not you again!” he yelled. When he noticed the blood on her face, his features twisted into a grimace, and he stepped back. “Security,” he hollered down the corridor. “She’s here again, come quick.” She tried to shove past him, but he grabbed her wrist. “Not this time, you sick fuck! You’re coming with me.” He glanced into the autopsy room at the opened corpse. “Fuck! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
Libitina giggled and brought her knee into the large doctor’s crotch. His eyes grew wide as his mouth dropped. He collapsed to his knees and grabbed his abused testicles. With his size, she half expected the ground to shake when he hit the floor.
“Sorry, gotta run,” she said as she shoved him onto his side. She sprinted in the opposite direction the doctor had looked when yelling for security and reached the elevators before the men in blue came around the corner. “Not fast enough,” she whispered as she slipped into the elevator. It closed before they saw her.
When the doors dinged open on the lobby floor, Libitina trotted toward the entrance.
“Hey,” someone yelled behind her. The voice carried a heavy tone of authority. She didn’t turn but fled instead through the exit, never looking back. She jumped into her black SUV, jammed the key into the ignition, started it, then backed out. As she sped out of the parking lot, she chanced a glance in the rearview mirror in time to see the same security guard from the morgue come skidding into view.
Too close. She laughed, a high-pitched, relieved sound, as she headed to the back roads that would lead her home. Mozart filled her car as she drove the forested road, thinking about the fat man she’d been autopsying. If only she could’ve looked at his heart.
After driving for over an hour through dense woods, she reached a long driveway that wound down and around, eventually revealing her old cabin. The white paint cracked and f
laked. Weeds choked her garden and front yard.
She went inside, a slight stomp and pout to her walk. Just past the door, a large armoire stood against the wall, the hand carved oak covered in numerous scratches and dings. She opened it. Mirrors hanging on the back of the doors reflected her greasy image. She grinned at her ugliness, then grasped her hair at the roots, on the widow’s peak, and pulled, ridding herself of the scraggly wig and revealing the natural red bun beneath.
She placed the fake hair on one of the mannequin heads, then peeled off the large pimple protruding from her nose, the adhesive looking like strands of a spider’s web before snapping. She placed it in a basket full of other scars. Her thick-rimmed glasses went into another receptacle, full of a myriad of spectacles. She took out the colored contact lenses and put them in a container.
She grabbed the face cleaner and wiped oil and the dead man’s fluids from her skin. Free of her disguise, her blue eyes looked watery. A slight shadow cast a muted light of sadness across her features. She closed the armoire and went to the kitchen. After making a sandwich, she plodded to her bedroom, head down.
A black Chihuahua bounced around her feet there.
“Good afternoon, Cerberus, my little baby,” she said to the wiggling dog. It yipped at her and bowed to nip at her toes. She giggled and swooped up the dog. “I think I know how that fat man died,” she whispered. “Yes, I do,” she said in baby talk, scratching Cerberus’s belly. The dog wriggled free and grabbed a toy from its basket. “Not now, baby. I’m thinking.”
She tapped her upper lip with her index finger, thoughts back in the examining room with the dead man. Her face lit up and she went to her bookshelves.
The medical section in her mini-library dominated the wall. She grabbed a tome with a cracked spine, the paper over the hardback peeling and fading in places. The advanced autopsy book, written for the medical student looking to determine cause of death, creaked as it opened.
Women Scorned Page 2
