It's Alive (4 page)

In fact he was a typical beefcake with no brains, but a barrel of brawn. Of course she figured she could do a brain transplant on him or something to make him at lease able to keep up with an intellectual conversation about something other than sports or video games. Maybe attach the head of a sex therapist who specialized in pussy-eating techniques. Or duplicate the brain of an erotic romance writer, like that S.L. Carpenter guy.

Suddenly she found herself standing in the darkness, a long serrated knife in hand. The need to create this perfect male was violently strong. It wasn’t like her to think like this—she had the looks to lure a man into her web but she was no black widow. Even though a lot of men deserved to have their heads eaten off because they were such assholes, it wasn’t her way.

Yet here she was, contemplating killing out of pure desperation.

She wanted a man with a good mind, who was intelligent enough to know when to be cute and flirty and when to shut the fuck up. Knowing when to take the time to listen and when to take the trash out. Someone who could watch Forensic Files and understand what they were talking about, instead of going on and on about missing the game and wanting to see reruns of Jersey Shore and Duck Dynasty.

She knew exactly where insert the knife to kill quickly and painlessly. The perfect body for the perfect mate lay before her. She would have to do something about that void between his ears where his brain should have been, but it would be worth it for that body.

And she realized he was getting an erection again. He was mumbling something about Captain Crunch cereal and rollerblades. Maybe just one more time… no, she couldn’t get distracted. No matter how good he was at fucking her, how good he was at making her come, how he taught her to tap-out when the pain got too much when he pinned her and had anal sex with her, she had to do it.

Or did she?

Glancing up she caught her reflection in the closet mirror. She noticed she had put on a few pounds around her hips. Oh good Lord, she was going to have a muffin-top if she wasn’t careful. She stared at herself and sucked in her stomach and turned to see if her ass was bigger as well. Jesus, look at that
booty
! No more twerking. Maybe next week she could cut back on the coffee and donuts.

She realized she was trying not to think about what she was contemplating.

She also realized that she couldn’t kill Mike. She was a scientist and was supposed to preserve life, not end it. Yes, she wanted the perfect man, but she simply couldn’t start making one with such a terrible act of violence.

So her experiment would have to wait. She would have to use parts from men killed in accidents, organ donors, or male gigolos with huge cocks.

Right about that time, she noticed that Mike had a full on erection going and was getting restless in his sleep. Her body sounded the mental bell for the start of Round Four. Thank God for high testosterone levels.

She’d been thinking about cocks, so she sure as hell wasn’t about to let a fine upstanding one like this go to waste.

The next day she wondered if that might have been a mistake.

After constantly adjusting her underwear, she still felt the ache from the all night sex-a-thon with Mike. He texted her that he’d failed his test, but thanked her for the anal, prostate massage, wrestling lessons and night of legal and illegal sexual bliss.

Which was nice, but she was still stuck with a feeling of failure because she wanted something to go right. She wanted her own creation, something she could control. A sexual toy that just did what she wanted, when she wanted, with no guilt, no strings and an insatiable appetite for her. It wasn’t anything more than a greedy lust, but she didn’t have the time or the energy for the drama and the potential mess of a relationship right now. If her experiment actually worked, she could patent it and make millions from the women that wanted to buy their own living sex toy.

She thought, worked, researched and made notes. Then did it all over again. Eventually she found herself at home, exhausted and completely worn out from trying to figure out a way to bring her creation back from the dead.

She had used up all her batteries again, thinking an orgasm would clear her mind. After three of them, she was still not thinking any more clearly but had a bad cramp in her calf from holding her leg up while using her toy, ice tongs, and the whisk from the kitchen.

She rested her head on the arm of the couch and absently turned on her television. She recognized a few scenes from
Back to the Future
and when the lightning bolt hit the wire, jolting the car back through time, Mary was suddenly awake, sitting bolt-upright, gaze glued to the screen while her brain whirled.

How fucking stupid am I?

I’ll use an electric jolt to kick-start his heart and body in a controlled area. Damn, the blonde hair dye must have crept into my brain.

For the next two weeks, Mary’s every spare moment was devoted to doing research inside her garage in a makeshift lab. She worked a deal with an animal shelter for their casualties, not wanting to attract attention by “borrowing” neighborhood pets.

She made an exception for the big dirty Rottweiler next door that growled and snarled and shit all over her roses. Prince scared her every time she walked outside and made her pee herself with his loud bark and bared teeth. He’d already mauled a couple of Chihuahuas and tried to take a chunk out of a two-year-old toddler.

The big ugly brute was accidentally run over as she backed out of her driveway…twice. So sad.

Finally, she had watched all the movies and read all the books about reanimating life. Her favorite movie was
Young Frankenstein
but that one was just for fun.

She saw flaws in most of the processes used, because wouldn’t shocking a guy with lightning fry him like an egg? She started wondering how to control the exposure to electric shock. The creature would have to be submerged in water, probably salt water, so the ionic fluid would surround him completely. A low voltage electric current would then be sent through the liquid as it flowed over and around him.

She had to calculate the equations exactly, since there was no room for error at this point. Too much electricity, he’d be boiled like a lobster. Not enough and he’d be like her vibrator—totally fried and out of juice.

Going back to her notes, and scribbling furiously, Mary began to work on what she hoped would be the final few calculations of the greatest experiment of her life.

Chapter Five

A few days later, the distinctive sound of multiple gurneys being pushed into the lab had Mary sitting upright in a hurry.

There were six of them and they were tagged with red labels, announcing priority rush autopsies because they were first responders. A fire truck had crashed into a gas tank and exploded, pretty much cooking the victims inside. The authorities needed to know if the driver was intoxicated before they could even think about how to clear the media frenzy.

For the ME’s office, and Mary, it was a beefcake-BBQ.

The powers-that-be needed the bodies identified as soon as possible and as usual, nobody could handle the task but Mary and Inga. Trying to find enough tissue for fingerprints or match what they could by dental records would be hard enough, but scraping the cooked flesh and the scarred tissue from the charred remains and bones to confirm cause of death was an unspeakably messy task.

It was a given that both women would be tireless and painstakingly detailed in their respect for the men killed in this terrible accident.

Of course, even that couldn’t stop Inga from commenting about how
hot
firemen were, and how they always looked
scorching
and their big
hoses
made her wet. But Mary let it go. She knew that everyone working in their field had their own ways of dealing with what they saw. Inga’s involved really terrible puns a lot of the time.

As usual, when around what most people wouldn’t be able to cope with, Mary took it in stride and went to her memories to block out the horrendous visions of charred flesh around her.

She picked through the pieces and found a tongue that had survived. It looked like it had been bitten off during the crash. Funny how something as simple as a human tongue could spark memories from the past.

Leaving Inga to do the basic lab work and fill out the first of many forms, Mary remembered back to when she met Franc. She had taken three years of Spanish only to find out that French would be better in her scientific field of study. She was a perfectionist by nature and pulling a B was not acceptable in her world.

She went to the college admissions office and scanned the wall of tutors to find someone both cheap and fluent in French. She picked Franc from his small ad. Having his photo helped ease her decision, and meeting him in the library later cemented her choice. He was tall, slender, very handsome and suave. He also had a swagger and confidence in person that she admired.

He was a tutor for her French class and taught her the magic ways of oral sex. He could eat her out and have her melt within seconds. She easily fell head over heels for him. Seriously. What was not to love?

He also embezzled quite a few bucks from her bank account. She wasn’t really worried about the money so much, because she only had a small portion of her grants and college funds in the account, but the fact that he did it really hurt her.

After they broke up she did manage to slip a rare virus into his drink—one that caused severe impotence. But his tongue…that had been a gift from the gods.

Processing the fire victims was a time-consuming job and took many hours of hard work on everyone’s part. Even Mary ended up cataloging the various injuries and that alone soaked up most of a night.

After finishing the tedious job, Mary sat at the cafeteria table next to Inga and shared a plate of barbequed ribs—the special of the day. It had been a very long night and they were starving. They had devoured most of the food quickly and messily, and now looked pretty much a couple of characters from a zombie movie.

Rob came into the cafeteria and saw them eating dinner. “Jesus.”

“What?” Inga sucked on a rib.

“I was just in the morgue. I’ve been looking at mutilated and cooked body parts. And now I see this…” He waved his hand at them and turned green, rushing out with his hand to his mouth.

When he returned, Inga couldn’t resist trolling around moaning, with her eyes rolled up toward her eyebrows. Mary couldn’t help laughing.

Rob was not amused. “Would you quit screwing around, Inga. This is serious.”

She stumbled in his direction, holding her barbeque-covered fingers out in front of her, and he kept backing up.

“Dammit Inga, knock it off.”

Inga grunted. “I want to eat your cock…,” and reached towards his crotch.

“But you’re a lesbian, for Chrissake. You wouldn’t know what to do with a dick.”

“Rumor says neither do you…” She started giggling and Mary couldn’t resist joining in.

Rob stormed out while the girls were still laughing.

“I think you pissed off the boss Inga.”

“He’ll get over it. Just speaking the truth. Heard the guy is a two-stroke joke. In, out, in, out, and he’s done.”

Inga cleaned up her area and was heading out. She had a hot date with a Filipino woman, a chef at a sushi restaurant. So she’d have something fishy to eat, one way or another.

Mary was finally heading home. There hadn’t been a lot of time to think about her building the perfect mate project, but in a way maybe it was just a passing fantasy. She admitted that even thinking about making a live man from dead ones was a little sick and odd. Sure, there were probably enough women who wished their husbands were dead, but to start out that way was a warped twist of fate.

Mary said goodnight to the few people left in the morgue and hopped into her car for the drive home. As with everything else, she liked nice things and had a fast and sporty car. It had heated leather seats and since she was exhausted, and now comfortably warm, dozing at the wheel became an almost inevitable danger.

She was extremely tired and found herself yawning again. She shook her head to keep awake, and in an instant she saw headlights approaching. Instinctively she swerved out of the way as the other car drifted into her lane. She slammed on her brakes and turned to look in her rearview mirror, watching the other car jump off the road and slam into the guardrail.

She tore herself out of her car calling nine-one-one as she ran to the accident to see if she could help.

“Is everyone alright? I’m a doctor…” she yelled at the wreck, but quickly realized she was too late. “Eeeuuuwww.”

By the look of things, this wasn’t going to end well. The guardrail had split the drivers’ side in half.

Cars were pulling up to the wreck and their headlights illuminated the crash. Walking around to the passenger side, she could see that the door was open and the guardrail had cut right through both men. Different internal organs dangled and were displayed on the metal like snacks on a buffet table.

She stared at the car and her first thought was
shish-ka-bob
. Both men had been pretty much skewered by that damn rail.

She heard the distant sounds of sirens and sighed. Help was on the way, but there was no helping these poor souls. Dead on arrival, and she would have to put all this on a couple of gurneys and make it presentable for their families to see them. Maybe Inga would take care of it without swapping their internal organs as a joke.

Sure it was funny and whimsical, but mostly it was a nuisance. She had a habit of mixing and matching. She put three livers into one guy because he died from alcohol poisoning. Another got an extra heart in his lower abdomen because she said he felt emotions with his dick.

Saddened, Mary lowered her head. She was surrounded by death. Everywhere she looked, people were either in pieces, ripped opened like some kind of potato, or lying peaceful and still, never to wake again. Her life, her job, everything was always death and gore. Perhaps that was why she was so fixated on making something alive from the dead. Preserving a life instead of simply cataloging its passing.