13 Bites Volume II (13 Bites Anthology Series Book 2)

by Adam Bennett

  Finally it all boiled down to sitting by James’ side in the enormous library, bought back when she had thought that she wanted to spend her life reading books like a certain Disney princess, when really she had wanted to spend all her time with the beast who had given her the library of her dreams. Sometimes fulfilled dreams were as bittersweet as shattered ones.

  It was the waiting that finally got her. She could handle that James was in a coma after having had wildly experimental surgery despite the strong warnings from the surgeons performing the job. She could handle that he hadn’t decided to include her in his decision, even though it affected her most of all. She could even handle the library taunting her that this was the longest she had spent inside its walls since it had been built so many years ago, but the waiting gnawed at her. Kathryn had never been good at waiting. She had rushed into every major decision in her life. It certainly didn’t help that, for the most part, her jump-without-looking attitude seemed to end with her on her feet and in a better position than when she started. Her patience had never had a reason to grow.

  By all accounts, she did quite well. Seven months and four days had passed when Kathryn finally snapped, three months and eleven days since the last specialist had showed up from across the globe to say that nothing was to be done. She had sat beside his bed and sobbed on his chest for several hours every one of those days. When she thought back on it later, she was surprised she had lasted half that long.

  Two hundred and sixteen days after James went in for his sixteen-hour surgery to remove his cancer, Kathryn was weeping on his chest when suddenly she realised that she had shed her very last tear. Something inside her was finished, and she stood suddenly, knocking the chair over onto the thick Persian rug.

  Kathryn turned toward the trays of medical instruments, looking first at the switches and dials, and then at the readout. The months of proximity had taught her next to nothing about the various machines that sustained her husband’s life. The panels were a jumble of switches and knobs that she simply didn’t understand. Turning the wrong one could hurt him rather than ending his pain.

  Eventually she moved behind the array of machines and found the power outlet and switched off all of the sockets. Instantly the room began to scream with various alarm signals from the different machines as their batteries kicked in and they shouted warnings to absentee staff. It had been over a month since the full-time nurse had done anything other than poke her head in once a day to see whether James was alive. Kathryn had moved him periodically to prevent bedsores and washed his body. He had always taken pride in his clean appearance. She hadn’t let him down.

  But she had let him down now. The squealing was only getting louder and Kathryn began to panic. She looked around the room for something to help. Beside the screaming machines stood a stainless steel tray, surgical instruments ready to be quickly re-sterilised in the event of an emergency. The four drawers below held a multitude of bandages and IV bags and gauze and tape. One of the drawers held primed syringes and she snatched one up, hoping that her jump-don’t-look attitude would help her finish James off before the doctors turned up. They were supposed to be there within four to seven minutes, but Kathryn figured she had ten at least.

  The needle she had chosen was the right one — she knew it. She had always thought that poison was called arse-nick or something dirty like that, but that was probably just a nickname. She had the real stuff in her hand, she knew it. Adrenaline.

  And without much more to decide, Kathryn acted.

  She turned, ignoring the screaming machines, ignoring the cries of the three doctors who were still halfway across the enormous library, and with a single step towards the bed, Kathryn smiled at the love of her life and wished him happiness in heaven until she came to join him. Then she stabbed the full syringe into James’ chest and slammed down the plunger.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Katheryn thought that she had done it. The doctors froze as she wrenched the needle out in triumph. And then everything went wrong.

  James opened his eyes. The pupils were so dilated that none of the lovely blue iris showed and his mouth moved soundlessly, as if in some exquisite pleasure or agony, she couldn’t tell. He began to thrash against the restraints all the while opening and closing his mouth, his eyes locked open all the while.

  In her terror Kathryn hadn’t noticed that several of the machines had stopped beeping and others had changed pitch or urgency. The doctors seemed to snap out of their shock and quickly regained their composure. They jumped into action and began removing tubes and giving injections and bringing James back into the world of the living, however strange that might have seemed to them.

  After some time, they had calmed him down and all of the machines had been silenced, or at least returned to their normal comforting tones. James had stabilised and gone back to sleep, but the doctors assured her that that was all it was. His polyrhythms showed he was in a much higher state of subconscious than that of a coma patient. They didn’t understand how, but it looked like he might stay out of the coma.

  Then they started discussing all sorts of technical avenues they could take to fix the structural damage the surgery had caused and she went back to ignoring them and waiting for him to wake up. She had waited seven months and four days for this moment. How much longer could it take?

  It turned out that it would take quite some time. Several more surgeries were planned, with Kathryn being consulted as little as the first time. Now that James had awakened, she was happy to let him do whatever he needed to get well. He had beaten stage four stomach cancer and was going to live to tell the tale. She would wait much more patiently than the first time.

  Three months and twenty days after the big plunge, Kathryn was practising her knitting in the now-vacant library. She was terrible at knitting, but she enjoyed sitting in her library these days. It was where James had come back to her. It was where her life had started again. It had almost been a year since the surgery. A soft noise at the door made her glance up.

  There he was. Standing in the soft afternoon sunlight, unsupported, unaided and unconquered, James looked to her almost a god. The final surgery had been today, and his artificial stomach muscles had been fitted and given the okay for general use. No heavy lifting or exertion for six months, but he was ambulatory. The technology used in his artificial organs had been created by James himself and was revolutionising the medical industry all over again. James seemed to do that without even thinking.

  Kathryn was overwhelmed at the sight of him, and she leapt up, knocking her forgotten knitting aside as she ran to her husband and hugged him hard despite his protestations of pain. She had him back.

  The first few weeks took some adjusting. James didn’t eat or drink, his energy requirements coming from IV bags changed four times a day. He still sat down to dinner with Kathryn, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was a little unnerving to eat with someone who just sat and watched you eat, smiling all the while. Kathryn didn’t like the thoughts that began to come to her more and more often. Thoughts that James wasn’t the same anymore.

  There was something about him; James had been a loving man, but now there was something remote, almost artificial, about him. As the months went on, the spectacle died away, and their lives returned to a semblance of normalcy, Kathryn began to worry that there was something wrong with him. Maybe the surgeries hadn’t been completely successful. Maybe the coma had damaged him somehow. Maybe she had simply gone a little mad when she had decided to kill him and ended up bringing him back instead.

  Whatever it was, it haunted her. Kathryn didn’t know what to do. She had isolated herself from the few friends she had when James had been in his coma, and reestablishing relationships was hard under normal circumstances. How did you call a friend to chat when the topic was your stomachless husband giving you the creeps? Actually, that was probably one of the most common phone calls in the nation tonight, if in a less literal sense.

  It was the little thing
s that got to her. He rarely slept, never ate, blinked less than before the surgeries. That was one of the things that convinced her she was simply going mad. How could she know how often he had blinked in the past? Surely that was just her own declining mental state, tricking her into hating the husband whose return she had waited for so long. It must be her.

  Some part of her had thought that getting him back was the only thing that could sustain her life, but somewhere in the endless sitting alone by his bed all those months, she had become her own person. For so long she had lived every moment with him in mind, always with him or waiting for him to come home from a rare day at the office, and now the months with her own thoughts had replaced that old impulse with a new, more liberating sense of self. But surely the fact that she was no longer ‘in love’ with James had nothing to do with the growing darkness she could feel coming from her husband.

  He worked every day now, often for ten and twelve hours at a time, and when he was home it was as if a darkness descended on the house, like a shadow in the corner of the eye, lurking, waiting. There was never a frown or a shout; in fact, there was nothing but smiles and words of love from him, but something in his behavior had changed since his surgery and subsequent coma. She had been so happy when he woke up and had come back to her. Now she was afraid. Something in his eyes had changed.

  But nothing came of it. The menacing air continued and Kathryn sought out old friends with whom to spend her new freedom; the months passed, and the two-year anniversary of the unexpected surgery rolled around and passed without event. James was rarely home; his lack of food and sleep making him a tireless worker. The advances in medical technology that James had made in the year since he had gone back to work were taking the world by storm, and Kathryn was happy that at least he had found something on which to spend his passion.

  It was late in autumn and there was some sort of construction happening down the road from her small city apartment. The noise had made her angry and she felt the emotions tug at all of the other feelings bottled up inside, threatening to ruin her day. Suddenly she realised that she had to be happy with her new life rather than sad about the loss of the old.

  She climbed from the bed with renewed purpose and began to dress. She was searching for something light and summery to go with her newfound mood when there came a loud crash from the lounge room. Pulling her shirt on, Katheryn walked down the hall, wondering which of her picture frames had blown off the wall this time. The apartment was a wind tunnel when the windows were open.

  Walking into the living room, Kathryn saw the front door first; it was ajar, and looked like one of the hinges was broken. She stopped dead when she saw James. He was soaked from head to toe, even though it wasn’t raining outside, but even more disturbing, he was liberally coated with blood. She could tell immediately that it wasn’t his.

  She was speechless. A thousand different responses and reactions collided halfway between her brain and mouth and all that happened was her mouth opened a little and she grunted inaudibly. He saw her then and turned, revealing an enormous knife, thick with blood, clutched in his right hand. Little drops of congealing blood were falling on her Belgian carpet, staining the exquisite coffee and cream pattern.

  Then he spoke, “Braaaaaiiiiiinnnnnnnsssss…”

  Kathryn was jolted out of her shock by the comment. “Are you kidding me!? What the hell is wrong with you? You scared the hell out of me.” She took a step towards him, trying to reevaluate the blood. It looked real enough, and so did the knife, “Why are you all wet?”

  James lashed out with the knife, cutting Kathryn across the arm, a shallow wound that didn’t cause much damage but still hurt nonetheless. “What are you doing?” she screamed, stepping back in horror. She realised that this was no elaborate prank. James had snapped. Where had all the blood come from?

  He lunged at her, no emotion in his eyes, wordlessly coming after her. The apartment was small and cozy, with only four individual rooms. Kathryn ran back to the bedroom, slamming the door behind her as she went but it stopped against something, a discarded piece of clothing perhaps, and bounced open again. She turned to try to close the door, the indecision between going for the pistol her father had given her before he’d died and closing the door wasting precious time.

  Pulling a bra free of the bedroom door, she quickly slammed it and locked the handle. Falling back against the door, Kathryn breathed out for what felt like the first time in a week and tried to gather her thoughts. What was happening?

  Searing pain erupted in her shoulder, and she cried out, pulling away from the door and spinning to see three full inches of blood-slick blade sticking through the door. The knife wiggled once and then disappeared.

  Nothing happened.

  Then a huge resounding crash as James kicked against the door. It held, but the entire apartment seemed to shake under the blow. There was another, then another. The door wasn’t going to hold.

  Kathryn ran to the dresser, pulled a small metal lockbox from the drawer and spun the combination to 147. The fourteenth of July. Their wedding anniversary.

  Kathryn pulled the pistol from the box, slid the action, thumbed the safety and fired, putting all nine rounds through the bedroom door, just as another heavy thud rocked against it. She thought she heard a dull thump on the other side of the door as she slid another magazine into the pistol and racked the slide, but she couldn’t be sure. The room was starting to go black and spin faintly. She realised that she was losing consciousness but couldn’t do anything to stop it. She slumped to the floor and her eyes fluttered shut.

  When she woke she was in a hospital. The doctor explained that the knife had punctured her lung and she had been lucky to live. The police then came in and explained that James was dead, having been shot nine times in the chest and head. The young officer seemed amazed at the perfect shooting; frankly, so was Kathryn, but she tried to play it off as nothing. No point bragging about an accident.

  They asked her a few questions, mostly about James’ stress lately. He had attacked a young couple when he got off the elevator on Kathryn’s floor, and had hurt them badly, but it seemed they would make a full recovery thanks to the new nanograft technology that was taking the emergency wards by storm. Kathryn felt it best not to mention that it was one of James’ inventions. The police probably knew that anyway.

  They left her to her rest, along with a copy of the preliminary coroner’s report for James. She knew he must have broken several regulations just by leaving it. He must have really been impressed with her shooting.

  Kathryn was feeling tired now, and sad at the loss of James, but quite glad that it had come to an end. The report was quite detailed, explaining the likely cause of death, his body temperature over time, and many other facts that she didn’t really understand. There were photos which were less gruesome than the ones on primetime cop serials. There was a little paper target with a man on it with nine red ‘X’s marked in two groups, five in the centre of the chest and four on the bridge of the nose, almost as if it belonged to an expert marksman rather than Kathryn.

  She put the report on the bedside table and found the remote to lay the hospital bed flat. As she was drifting off to sleep, something kept tugging at her mind from the report. Something about the time of death. It didn’t make sense. It said that James had died at 4:17 am, but it had been well after 10 am when she had shot him. She shook her head. It was a preliminary report. No doubt the full report would correct such an obvious mistake.

  Sleep was close. The report was gone from her mind and she yawned, feeling herself slipping away. She thought she heard someone screaming down the hall. Why would someone scream in a hospital? That didn’t make any sense.

  She must already be dreaming, she realised, and promptly fell asleep.

  In the 7th grade, B. Johnson decided she would see what skipping school was all about. After getting caught by none other than the principal of the school himself, she decided that it wasn't all it was cracked up
to be. Her punishment was to write a two paragraph explanation of why she skipped; that turned into a five page short story about an alien abduction. The story was so good that she was fully exonerated of any wrongdoing. That was the day she discovered she had a gift.

  Years later, she is still busy writing. She has been sighted in the foothills of Mt. Rainier, where she resides with the youngest three of her five children and her dear mother. Thus far, the aliens have not returned — but the night is young.

  www.facebook.com/b.johnsonwriter.5

  CLOWNING AROUND

  B. Johnson

  “I don’t know what you mean...?” asked the officer who was sent with the task of filling the captain in on the latest in a slew of murders that had all but challenged his sanity. “They sweeped the place pretty good, sir.”

  “The word is swept, and I would like it swept again,” the captain spit out as he walked into his office. He was closely followed by the officer as well as his partner. The captain walked around his desk and sat, sighing because he had hoped he would be alone with his thoughts for a minute. “Yes, Simmons; what do you have for me now?”

  Officer Simmons handed him a file. He had been the bearer of bad news to the captain once before, and it was never a pretty picture. “This just came for you, sir.” He left the office in the same fashion in which he entered — quickly and without permission.

  Captain Andrews opened the file and frowned at the pictures inside. He took out the photos and placed the folder on the desk so that he could shuffle through them and try to note any differences between the victims. They were all the same; middle-aged men of a medium build, averaging six feet in height, all dressed in clown suits with their faces missing. It was as if the perp had merely sliced them off from eyebrows to chin, leaving the ears and forehead intact. There was little to no blood on any of the costumes he dressed them in, telling the detectives that he dressed them after they were dead. Each wore a large, rainbow-colored wig that covered the head entirely as well as a red foam nose, leaving only the remaining flesh and bone structure of the skull showing.