The Darkest Colors- Exsanguinations

by David M. Bachman

  Satisfied that she had adequately taken care of her basic appearance, she quickly went about dressing for the evening. Honestly, these were not her nicest clothes. No, Mister Giovanni had provided her with quite a few expensive and elaborate outfits and accessories that made these things look quite cheap and perhaps tacky by comparison. She was his favorite bit of arm candy, and he wanted her to look her best when she was out in public.

  However, these clothes were hers. She had selected and paid for these things herself, even before Mister Giovanni had become a part of her life. They probably didn’t look like much to anyone else, and that was fine with her, because she didn’t particularly want to stand out by dressing flamboyantly or by flaunting her pseudo-wealth. These were just things she had picked up at a couple of discount superstores, things that other dancers would have called “beginner’s rags” because they weren’t bearing certain brand names or logos – the kind of things that someone just starting out in the business might wear. A string bikini top and bottom under a mesh pullover shirt, a “pleather” mini-skirt, ordinary thigh-high fine-weave fishnet stockings, and some cheap patent-leather stiletto heels made up the outfit, all black in color – nothing particularly outstanding or potentially weird.

  The only accessories she chose to add on were a few simple bits she’d been saving for a special occasion, which included a lacy black choker with a little skull-and-crossbones pendant, some pewter silver skull-shaped earrings, and a full set of matching stainless steel curve piercings for her left eyebrow, navel, and nipples – nothing fancy, really, except that the ball ends were shaped like tiny little skulls. The morbid skull theme was something she had originally pieced together for Halloween, but it held a bit of symbolic meaning for this particular night: the death of this life and (hopefully) the beginning of a new one.

  She would have preferred something a bit more elegant, perhaps something less trampy or flirty, but again, she was shooting for raw sex appeal. And, anyway, this was far more comfortable than many of the other things she had. She hadn’t been allowed to dress the way that she wanted for quite some time, no thanks to Mister Giovanni. It was quite possible that the individuals she would be meeting that night would find this to be much more preferable than the pedophilic schoolgirl outfits or trashy porn-queen outfits that her master usually insisted she wear. She had only worn this outfit once before, and because Mister Giovanni objected to her looking like “a stereotypical vampire Goth slut,” she had been reluctant to wear it again for fear of triggering his wrath. She had leaned toward the Goth style in her clothing and interests for quite some time anyway, much to her family’s chagrin. But this outfit wasn’t reflective of the particular kind of Gothic style she favored. Alas, a corset and full-length dress wouldn’t exactly be practical when she expected to be up on the stage that same night.

  The house was utterly still and silent. Mister Giovanni had already left for the evening to attend to some unscheduled “business” that had him rushing out the door in a hurry. She was alone in the house, aside from the other girl. Mister Giovanni had left her a little “gift” to keep her occupied for the next few hours, and so she was busy in the master bedroom shooting up with it and would be no problem.

  She had a hard time feeling sorry for the blonde, simply because the stark difference between herself and the other girl was that she was not a junkie. She knew that her relationship with Mister Giovanni was wrong and unhealthy, that it would surely only end with her death, and she actively wanted something better out of life. The other girl, well … as long as someone else was footing the bill for her addiction, she was sadly more than willing to do anything he asked, just so she could get her next fix. She was doing everything she could to get out; the other girl was doing everything she could to stay in. What made it worse was that, from the conversations they’d had, she realized that the girl knew better, but she was making a conscious decision to devote herself to this lifestyle. They just had two very terribly different concepts of what constituted “the good life”: safety, security, and personal happiness … or fame, fortune, and a seemingly limitless supply of drugs.

  She was finishing up the application of her eye shadow when she became aware of a strange humming sound. After a couple of seconds, the humming stopped and then, a second or two later, it resumed. Hurriedly, she reached for her nearby purse, grabbed her cell phone, and opened it. The phone showed no sign of an incoming call. The humming sounded again, coming from somewhere to her left. She was about to dig out her other phone when she remembered that Mister Giovanni had disposed of it a few hours before. Amazingly, not only was it apparently still functional but also capable of receiving a call even as it was sitting inside of a wall.

  She hurried out of the bathroom and turned to her right, looking at the rectangular-shaped hole left in the wall. Mister Giovanni had already earlier instructed her to conceal the damage by taking a small framed picture from another room and nailing it up over the hole, hiding it neatly until a handyman could come by sometime later in the week to patch and paint over the spot. She hurriedly yanked the picture off the wall, immediately seeing a dim glow of blue light inside of the hole. There could only be one person calling that phone, and she absolutely had to catch the call before she missed it. She didn’t always get a call from the same number, and the number of every call she received from her was always listed as “Restricted.” If she missed this, she had no way of calling back.

  The hole was perhaps four inches by one inch in size, just big enough for her to slip most of her hand into the wall but not enough for her to actually grasp the phone and bring it back out. In an immediate panic, she looked about for something she could use to widen the hole. She thought about using the heel of one of her shoes, but figured that would only result in breaking the heel and getting nowhere. Still holding the framed picture, she elected to try opening up the hole by thrusting a corner of the frame at the wall. With the first blow, the thin wooden frame crunched, and with the second, the glass of the picture frame shattered loudly. She narrowly escaped injury from the jagged pieces of glass that fell to the floor at her feet as she immediately leapt back.

  Cursing under her breath as her pulse quickened to a flutter of near-panic, she tossed aside the ruined picture frame, glanced around a moment longer, and then faced the hole in the wall with a sigh of resignation. She knew it was only drywall, not even that thick, and she knew that it shouldn’t be that hard to get through, but she wasn’t keen about the next idea that popped into her mind. She didn’t have time to waste, and she could think of nothing else in immediate reach to try. Steeling herself for the potential for pain, she balled her right hand up into a fist, drew it back, and punched at the wall. The drywall caved in easily, though it painfully scratched the back of her hand and wrist as her fist penetrated into the wall completely.

  With her right hand stuck in the wall, she fumbled about blindly for the phone, but quickly realized that the very act of punching the wall had knocked the phone down a bit father, again just out of her reach. She could feel her fingertips brushing against it, but then heard it moving downward in the wall as it began to vibrate once again, gently sandwiched between the drywall and the pink fiberglass insulation – something that already was irritating her skin as she desperately tried to grab the phone.

  Cursing once again, quite loudly now in her sheer panic, she yanked her hand out of the wall and punched at it again, slightly below the four-inch circular hole she had made. The wall gave in, but it offered much more resistance this time, and the impact seemed to reverberate throughout her entire arm all the way up to her shoulder. The pain was immediate and so strong that it was almost numbing, and for an instant she feared that she may have broken something. She winced and withdrew her hand, flexing her fingers to make sure she was okay. Already, there was blood upon her knuckles. Nevertheless, she clenched that hand into a fist once more, drew it back, and punched through the wall once again. The surface caved in, but didn’t completely open up
, and as she drew back to hit the wall again, she saw the red smears that she was leaving with every blow.

  Really, she did know how to throw a punch. In fact, she had a fair bit of martial arts experience. But her training had almost exclusively pertained to the use of weapons, with a bit of empty-hand grappling experience thrown in. Her knowledge of striking was limited to what she had seen in movies and what her training partners had taught her. She had never broken a board in her life. She could handle a sword or staff nearly as adeptly as the samurai hero of any classic martial arts movie she’d seen. But sadly, it had been years since she’d even set foot in a dojo, and she still “punched like a girl.”

  She punched through the wall one more time and reached inside. This time, she heard the phone fall down quite a bit farther, nearly to the floor. Feeling hot tears of frustration welling up in her eyes and dimly becoming aware of the almost animalistic keening sound that was escaping her, she allowed desperation to overtake her. The hole was big enough now that she could insert the fingers of both hands into it and pull back upon the drywall. She had to lean against the lower wall with her knees and lean back with all of her body weight as she did so, but the wall began to surrender to her destructive efforts. With a crackling and ripping sound, she broke off a significant section of the sheet rock and peeled back some of its paper-like covering. The hole was now at least a foot and a half in size, but it only revealed a section of that itchy pink insulation material.

  The phone had stopped buzzing.

  “No! Aw, c’mon, no!” she gasped breathlessly. She drew her right arm against her body and rammed her shoulder against the wall with everything she had. Again, the drywall cracked and buckled. “Oh, God, please! Please!”

  Within a few seconds, she had managed to make that moderate hole into a gaping maw of devastation within the wall, having broken off and torn away large segments of the sheet rock. By the time she finally reached the phone, she had created a vertical opening at least four feet tall and a foot wide, exposing the wooden studs of the house frame. She snatched up the phone and grabbed it, letting out an almost insanely giddy sound of elation as her fingers finally closed around it and withdrew the phone from its confinement. The knuckles of her right hand were bleeding and throbbing with pain, so much that she could barely move her fingers properly to open the phone, and her black clothes were now smudged with a chalky white dust in places where the exposed sheet rock had brushed against her. She didn’t care. She had the phone now … for what little good it was to her.

  “Shit!” she cried as she immediately saw that the phone’s shiny outer plastic casing was cracked right across the external digital display.

  Having to use both hands to manipulate it, she opened up the flip phone and saw that the LCD screen was so badly damaged that the bottom half of it was completely unreadable as it lit up. She could barely make out the edge of a message that unsympathetically informed her that she had missed five calls. The icons at the top of the display indicated that she had both awaiting text and voice mail messages. She had been trying desperately to reach her.

  Realizing that she would have to navigate blindly through the menus to at least check her voice mail, she tried pressing the directional buttons of the phone to access her account. Her hands were trembling terribly now with the rush of adrenaline. She had to press the button several times very firmly to get it to respond at all, and when she tried to press the “Send” button to call her voice mail inbox, nothing happened. She pressed it again and again, frantically, but to no avail.

  The sudden buzzing of the phone with another incoming call caught her with such surprise that she yelped and dropped the phone. To her horror, the short fall from her hand to the hardwood floor was apparently the final coup de grace for the cell phone, as it seemed to practically explode upon impact into several pieces – the main body of the phone, the battery, the battery cover, and a few tiny random pieces of plastic. She stood in complete stillness for several long seconds, staring at the wreckage of that small bit of technology that had been her lifeline to the outside world, the thing that was essentially her boarding pass to the last Heaven-bound flight available out of Hell. She was too crushed to even cry. She was just stunned, shocked, and utterly lost.

  Wait … no, that wasn’t right. She realized that she was overreacting. It was just a phone. She had another. She still knew the basic game plan. She knew where they would be meeting, and they had already agreed upon this night and that particular location for their meeting. However, things had changed. For one, Mister Giovanni had left early, his whereabouts were now a mystery, and she had no idea when to expect his return. Secondly, the exact time of their meeting had become questionable, again due to unforeseen circumstances. And lastly … she still hadn’t managed to get a proper picture of herself out so that she could be positively identified. She had meant to take a picture of herself as soon as she was done getting ready, so they would know exactly who to look for. But … now this. Everything was changing. Everything was falling apart.

  Well … no, not entirely. No, she had to get control of herself. She had to keep her calm. She couldn’t afford to lose her cool now. She still had this thing under control. She could manage. She could improvise. She could adjust and adapt. She had to. If she didn’t, then she would have to…

  “What the fucking shit?”

  She turned toward the voice with a gasp and staggered away until she bumped painfully against the doorway of the bathroom with her right shoulder. Mister Giovanni’s favorite junkie stood before her in little more than a pink silk robe cinched tight about her tiny little waist. Her hair was a tousled and frizzy mess, and her eyes appeared so dark and sunken, her eyelids so heavy, that she looked zombie-like. The blonde was still high as a kite, and she had a relatively fresh needle track in her right arm with a small ooze of semi-dried blood from her latest fix. It had been a few hours since she’d watched her hook up and shoot up, but she had expected her to be lying about like a limp noodle for at least an hour or two longer. Either she hadn’t used as much this time, or she was simply building up a tolerance for it.

  She finally regained her composure enough to erase the look of panic from her face as she dismissively said, “Don’t worry about it. Go back to bed.”

  “Look … look what you fuckin’ did! He’s gonna be pissed as hell when he sees this!” she exclaimed, her words coming out slowly as she remained halfway trapped within her dream-like state.

  She shrugged as she glanced at the blonde, heading back into the bathroom. “Oh well.”

  “Oh well?” The blonde followed her inside as she began to hurriedly gather up her makeup items and stow them away. “Are you out of your fuckin’ mind? You just destroyed a fuckin’ wall!”

  “Don’t worry. It’s not your problem,” she told her.

  As ever, she was annoyed by the knowledge that when people were either high or drunk, they always seemed to think they were far more sober than they were in reality. As such, she knew that nothing she could possibly say would convince the girl to just mind her own business. That’s just how the girl was, high or not, because this sad blonde had a backwards opinion that she was going to protect her from Mister Giovanni, when in fact it was the blonde that so often had to be saved. Taking the blame for things she didn’t do, telling white lies now and then to cover for her, preventing her from choking to death upon her own vomit … that sort of thing.

  “What the fuck? Don’t you fuckin’ care?” she demanded slowly. Like so many others in the scene, and particularly of the younger generations, she had a particular affinity for the F-word, using it as a “filler” in nearly every sentence. “He’s gonna positively fuckin’ freak the fuck out when he sees this!”

  “Yeah, you’re right. He will,” she admitted with a nod as she zipped up her makeup bag and dropped it into her purse. She yanked a nearby hand towel from its holder on the wall and began to brush off the white dust from her clothes. “Don’t you have some smack to do, or s
omething?”

  The blonde squinted her eyes at her cluelessly. “What?”

  “You know … smack, dope, heroin, happy dust, whatever…?”

  “I already did, stupid. Didn’t you see me earlier?”

  She stared at the girl. “You did all of that?”

  “Shit yeah! What, like … did you think I was just going to just … fuckin’ … save it for a rainy day?” she asked with a dopey smile as she leaned against the doorframe lazily, bonking her head against it with a mild thud.

  “You’re going to kill yourself someday.”

  The blonde shrugged and chuckled lazily. “Nah. Bitch, I’m cool like that. I got my shit together tight, yo. I know what I’m doing.”

  “If you say so.”

  She finished brushing herself off and gave herself another examination in the mirror. Her hair was a bit mussed, having come loose from the neat ponytail into which she had tied it back. She took out the ruffled elastic band that held it back and began to smooth it down again to tie it back once more. In the mirror, she saw the blonde behind her turn and stare at the mess on the floor in the hallway as though she had only just then noticed it.

  “Holy fuckin’ shit,” the girl exclaimed slowly and lazily. “Man, he’s gonna lose his fuckin’ mind when he sees this.”