Bodies Are Disgusting (14 page)

The more attention you pay to the thing, the
less forward movement you possess, until you're left inching
forward through the rotting leaves (which have begun to have more
in common with other rotting things in your peripheral vision, like
a slurry of food and internal organs). The creature matches your
pace such that now it is less like a queerly lumbering thing and
more like a nimbus of black flame flickering from one tree to the
next when you blink. The bitter wind ensures that you blink
often.

The more you try to concentrate on what's
hiding in the trees, the more convinced your brain becomes that
there is more than decaying vegetable matter under the soles of
your shoes. It's less a suspicion and more an irrational
hybrid-knowledge-fear that causes you to seize up mid-stride. The
feeling that the next thing you'll set your foot down on will be
wet and warm and steaming and only recently deceased congeals into
an immutable fact.

In your pocket, your phone vibrates. The
ringtone sounds distant and vague with most of the nuance scoured
away by the wind, but it is still unmistakably the snippet of song
you had assigned to Amanda's number. With one foot lingering a few
inches off the ground, it's difficult to both maintain your balance
and pull your phone out of your pocket, but you succeed. The
creature in the distance still has the lion's share of your
attention, but you accept the call anyway.

"Hello?" you say, your voice quivering in the
cold.

"Hey, Doug," Amanda responds. Her tone seems
flat and mechanical, reminiscent of the synthesized voice reading
off numbers. "I just... fuck. I don't know. I thought I'd call and
say...
something
, I guess." The edges of the thing following
you coalesce, seemingly in response to her words, shifting from
indefinite and smoky to sharp and jagged. It no longer
flickers.

"Listen," you say, slowly lowering your foot
until it's resting on the slimy remains of what might not be
leaves, "now is not exactly a great time for me." You can see the
thing's eye-analogs glimmering as spines sprout along the edges of
its form. "I'll call you back." You end the call with your thumb
and shove your phone back in your pocket. Every muscle in your body
is trembling now; you've been staring straight at the thing since
Amanda started talking, and it's right in front of you. A jagged
tear in the creature's black "head" opens in an approximation of a
mouth, and it is lined with hundreds of glittering needles that
might be teeth.

A scream rises in your throat, but you've
already turned before so much as a gasp leaves your lips. Your
shriek is strangled and the wind snatches it as soon as it's out,
but it doesn't matter. You're already running, and the monster is
following. Your entire being narrows to the feel of your feet
pounding the ground as you throw yourself forward and the burning
of the icy air you gulp down. There are other stabbing pains, too,
but none of them come from your legs or your lungs, and thus they
are ancillary.

A gust of wind catches your back with enough
force to send you toppling forward into the gutter. You try to
catch yourself, keep your already damaged face from hitting the
ground, but your fingers sink ineffectually into the slimy detritus
before sliding out from under you. You yelp in both shock and pain,
and get a mouthful of dead plant matter for your troubles. Tears
prick at your eyes as you push yourself up and forward, find your
feet, spit the dirt out without aspirating it.

The monster is like a barbed and icy sheepdog
at your back. It keeps an uneven pace with you, nips at your heels,
lashes out at you if you aren't quick enough for its liking, feints
and lunges to drive you. The sounds it makes are only
distinguishable from the howling wind because of their
source.

You're beyond anything as dignified as
running, now. Your limbs are barely coordinated enough to maintain
a shambling gait, but you've passed the entrance to your
neighborhood. It's only matter of pushing just a little... a little
farther, a little faster, and then you'll be safe. You
know
it, deeply and intimately. The knowledge consumes you and gives you
the strength you need to make it the last grueling quarter mile to
your front step.

The door mat slides forward when you land on
it, sending you skidding face-first into the door with a dull thud.
There's not enough fight left in you to cry out at the pain or
wince when you feel blood trickling from your nose again. Your hand
flails weakly against the door until it lands on the knob.
Belatedly, you wonder if you'd remembered to lock it on your way
out, but the point is moot. The doorknob turns and the door swings
open under your weight, sending you toppling, again, to the
ground.

Without wasting any time scrambling to your
feet, you drag yourself away from the door and kick it
shut.

It takes a while before you can do more than
just lay quivering and panting on the floor. When your limbs start
responding to your commands, you pull yourself up to the bathroom
and into the tub. There's no point to looking in the mirror; you
know what you'll see. Instead, you pull off your shoes and throw
them onto the bathroom floor, followed by your hoodie, sweater,
shirt, pants, and binder (
god, no wonder it was so hard to
breath
). After a few abortive attempts to work the faucet, you
finally turn on the hot water and let it start filling up the
tub.

You lean over the side and fish around until
you can grab your jeans and drag them closer. Still shaking, your
fingers find your phone (miraculously intact) and pull it out of
your pocket. You pick Amanda's number out of your call history
almost automatically and bring the phone up to your ear. The water
level rises while you listen to the call connect, the temperature
growing warmer by the second. Steam wafts up from the surface and
clouds the mirror you'd so recently wiped clean.

The call rolls over to voicemail, so you hang
up.

You reach over and adjust the tap so a little
more cold water tempers the heat, then make another call. Gavin
picks up after the second ring. "Doug."

"I think I fucked up," you say
unsteadily.

An uneasy silence follows, then Gavin clears
his throat. "I think you might have, yeah," he responds. "What
happened?"

With halting words, you tell him what's
transpired since you spoke to him last. It's possible, by the time
you've caught him up on current events, that tears may be rolling
down your face, but it might also be sweat from sitting in the
slowly rising, steamy water. You turn off the flow without looking
at the faucet, instead keeping your eyes firmly fixed on the pile
of clothing on the floor.

"That's some serious shit," Gavin says at
length when more hiccups than words are coming out of your mouth.
"You have no idea what you did, do you? No, don't answer that, I
can't stand listening to grown people crying." He sighs heavily,
and you get the impression of someone pinching the bridge of their
nose to stave off a headache. Except you're fairly certain that the
headache is you're own stupidity at this point, and there is no
fighting it.

"Listen, Doug," he continues in a weary tone,
"what you did was monumentally stupid for a number of reasons, the
first of which being that Ori is fucking
batshit
and you
gave it leverage over you. The way you gave it leverage over you is
my second point, because that ring? It's like a–a get out of jail
free card. Or a protective charm. Something in between, maybe. It
makes you off-limits to the other players. Without it, anyone can
make your life miserable.

"You want my advice? Ask Ori for it back. If
you're lucky, Ori'll do it with no questions asked, and then it's
just a matter of waiting for all of this to blow over. If you're
unlucky, it's taken umbridge with the fact that you declined its
advances, and it's just going to withhold its protection until you
submit. Or die."

"Th-thanks," you mutter numbly. Gavin grunts
in a noncommittal fashion. "I'll–" What? You'll talk to him later?
You'll let him know how this works out? You let the fragment hang
there while you flounder, trying to find an accurate way to end the
sentence, before truncating it entirely. There's no point. "Thanks.
Bye."

"Be careful, kid."

You toss your phone onto the pile of clothes
before the line's even dead.

* * *

Ori is waiting for you when you finally haul
yourself out of the tepid water and venture into your bedroom for
un-bloodied clothing to wear. She perches on the edge of your bed
with her slender legs crossed at the ankles and her hands folded
politely in her lap. Her head is cocked down such that her white
hair falls in front of her face and makes seeing her eyes
impossible.

Everything aches, and you don't have the
energy to rise to whatever bait she is surely leaving for you, so
you nod vaguely in her direction as you shamble toward your
dresser. A part of you wishes for a towel to at least clutch to
your chest, but it's tiny and cold and lacks any real
substance.

She speaks first. "You're hurt."

And whose fault is that?
you want to
demand, but you don't. "I hate cars," you say instead. It's a safe
response, but not an informative one. You're certain she knows all
the things those three words don't cover anyway.

She extends a hand toward you and beckons you
closer with the crook of a finger. "Oh, my dearest Douglas," she
coos, "let me have a look at you."

Not seeing the point in fighting, you drift
toward her until she's close enough that she can catch your wrist
and pull you nearly into her lap. The hand not holding your arm
comes to rest on your shoulder and pushes you down into a kneeling
position in front of her. She lets your arm fall to your side and
rests her forehead against yours.

From this vantage point, her eyes are giant
and infinitely dark, and you can barely see yourself reflected in
them. Her fingers rest lightly on your cheek for a moment before
she swipes away some of the blood under your nose with the pad of
her thumb. Her skin is cool against yours in contrast to the soak
you've just had, and you feel the aches flow out of you in the wake
of her touch.

"It's all right," Ori whispers. "I could never
leave you in such a state, unless I were the one responsible for
putting you there." Her left hand finds your right; her fingers
tangle with yours. As you stare up into the darkness, you feel her
slip a ring on your right index finger. "I forgive you."

* * *

You jolt upright, grasping the lip of the
bathtub to keep yourself from slipping under the water. You feel
refreshed and warm, and as you look around you note no sign of your
previous distress. Your clothes are folded neatly on the toilet,
with your phone resting atop them, and a fresh set of underwear and
pajamas are laid over the sink. There's even a towel hanging on the
bar that's closest to the tub, within easy reach even sitting down
as you are.

Using your toes, you unstopper the drain and
stand, grabbing the clean towel and wrapping it around yourself.
You can feel the comforting weight of the metal band on your finger
and you know that you will not have to face the horrors from the
previous days again. Still, Ori's message in laying pajamas out for
you is clear: you will not be leaving the house again
today.

You dry yourself off and put on the PJs.
"Pizza it is," you mutter to yourself. You grab your phone and head
to Simon's room to get his input on the order.

Once the pizza arrives, you bring it back to
his room along with the DVDs for a stuffy British costume drama and
settle in to enjoy the rest of the day. Later, you sleep as soundly
as you've ever slept, and you do not have any nightmares that night
or the next.

* * *

Two days later, you wake up to the sound of
your phone ringing.

Everything has a queer, surreal quality to it,
as if you've been bundled in plastic wrap and can't quite breathe.
Sunlight streams through your window, but it seems wrong, somehow.
Shouldn't you have been awake? How were you dreaming? Next to your
head, your right hand is balled into a fist. Silver gleams around
your index finger.

The generic tone for a number not in your
contact list continues to nag your consciousness, and a bleary
inspection of the screen reveals that it's a local number. Likely
not a telemarketer, but also not anyone you know. Especially since
it's ten in the morning, according to the display. No one calls you
this early; everyone knows you work nights.

Unless it's an emergency.

Feeling like you've been drenched in
ice-water, you hit the answer button and bring the phone to your
ear. "'Lo?"

You don't recognize the voice, but the tone is
unmistakable. "Mister Fitzmoriah?"

The way the caller forms your name out of
sounds, detached and clinical... you know what's coming next.
"Yeah."

"I'm calling on behalf of Amanda Ebonlee.
There's been an accident. Could you possibly come down to Northside
Hospital?"

* * *

Simon's not moving from his bed; he doesn't
even respond to you when you try to tell him where you're going.
Not that you're surprised. Still, you squeeze his hand and leave a
glass of water at his bedside before bundling yourself up and
snatching his keys. He certainly won't mind that you're borrowing
his beloved Bug. At least not now.