Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (3 page)

I stared at that goddamn syringe for three hours when I got home. Put it on my own desk in my study and watched it as if it was going to grow wings and fly away. If I’d been a drinking man, I would have gone through a bottle that night. As it was, I only had a bottle of water to help me ponder my options.

It looked like tar. I knew the side effects of the chems I used. I knew the risks. This stuff? Pure mystery. An enigma as deep as it was dark. One that had cost me five grand and my best friend.

Was it worth risking more? My health?

I weighed myself a dozen times that night, never expecting a change but still compelled to look for one. If a single pound had been added, I probably would have thrown the needle away.

Left deciding between life as I was and the chance of improving even more, there was no real choice to make.

I uncapped the needle and slipped it into the ball of muscle above my hip. A moment’s hesitation, and I depressed the plunger.

The cold slid through me, spreading in tendrils like an oil spill caught in a tide. My legs went numb first, then my stomach. It crept upward until it coated my skull, shards of pain splintering my mind. There was an instant where my panic washed away, replaced by a sense that I was no longer alone. No longer a mere mortal.

And then my mind succumbed to the darkness.

I woke on the floor, sore and stiff but otherwise unaffected by the injection. Sunlight blazed through the windows, casting the tan carpet in shades of gold.

Food.

It was my only thought—the only purpose I could concentrate on. I’d never before been so famished.

The raid on the refrigerator was legendary. My strict dietary plan was forgotten in that instant, and before I’d sated the hunger I’d cleared nearly two shelves. There was no counting calories, no monitoring protein levels. It was all fair game and I the hunter.

Once I filled my belly, I felt better than I had in years. I’ve never been lazy, but the energy was phenomenal. And for the first time in months, I felt confident that the plateau would be erased.

The trip to the gym was ecstasy, each lift a revelation. My body burned with pleasure, demanding more. I obliged, until finally the manager told me they were closing for the night. I drove home, shuddering. My body felt alive—each muscle and tendon singing in harmony.

I gave in to the urge as soon as I woke the next morning and climbed onto the scale. It announced two hundred forty-nine and I nearly screamed with joy. The ceiling was broken. The plateau nothing but a runway I’d used to sail off of, upward toward that mythical number. That magical goal.

The hunger was nowhere as profound as it had been, and I let myself go back to my diet plan. I knew it was pure muscle I’d added—there was no doubt that the calories from my buffet the day before had been burned away by my workout.

The next trip to the gym was no less a marvel, though this time the initial amazement had diminished. It gave my mind time to wander, to remember.

Two questions bored into my brain, blossoming wider the more I thought about them.

What had happened in that room?—
the
first and obvious one. A sacrifice? Whether financial or physical, spiritual or scientific, a trade had been made.

The second hinged on the question Mark had asked me during that initial phone call—
Do you have someone close to you? A brother?

Would people actually trade those they loved for some promise within a syringe?

If so, and if these were the rewards from a dog ... what would it be like if a human was offered up in that sacrificial room?

It took will power, but I left the gym early that evening and went home. I logged back into the classified web site and started searching other listings.

I found the one I’d responded to easily enough, with a dozen more.

Plastic surgery results without the surgery! Roll back the years!

Escape the clutches of cancer without medicine or surgery!

Rebuild your self-esteem in days!

Enlarge your penis—no pumps, pills, or exercises!

Lose weight without dieting or exercising! Real results, real fast!

And more, all of them followed by the same local number.

If that’s what you really, truly want.
Mark had said.
You’ll get what you want.

My mouth was dry, my brain reeling with excitement. He offered perfection in all its forms. A chance to become glory incarnate, beauty made flesh. For a price, but what didn’t have one attached to it these days?

I drove back to the mouth of the subdivision Mark lived in. I found a strip mall about a mile from the house and left my car there. I was still in gym clothes, so I wouldn’t look out of place as a jogger.

I can run a mile in just under six minutes, but I kept my pace slow and Mark’s house came into view as the sun began to fall. I ran past until night had taken hold of the world and then doubled back. The darkness enveloped me and I crept around the corner of his house, well in the shadows.

I waited until after midnight, when the lights inside the house had switched off, before I gave up.

The days went like that for a week. Each evening after my workout I’d make my way to the house and hide, waiting and hoping for some other soul in search of salvation.

On the ninth day, one came.

She was middle-aged, pretty but not beautiful. Her thick lips and upturned eyes proclaimed her affection for cosmetic surgery. Nothing to be ashamed of, in my opinion. If surgery can help you look and feel better, why not? But it wasn’t as kind to her as it could have been. It was obvious. A good surgeon will do work you’d never be able to pick out of a crowd. I know. I bought Rhonda a lot of work and she left looking far better than when we’d met.

The man that she brought into the house must have been close to ninety. Frail, hunched over from the weight of life itself, a walker leading him into the house. I wondered if he knew he was making his final march, if he’d volunteered his last days to help the woman or if he was ignorant of what lay inside for him. Her father? Grandfather? Some poor old bastard she’d wooed with her fake tits and plastic smile?

I listened as their movements thumped and creaked and groaned through the house. I circled to the rear and found the room I’d made the deal in. Mark apparently cared little for privacy. The windows weren’t curtained and I could see him at his desk, talking to the mismatched pair across from him.

The conversation was short. The woman slid a stack of bills across the table, no envelope. It looked much thinner than my own had been. But of course, she’d brought a bigger prize.

Mark stood and led the man back out of the room. The old man followed willingly.

I tried to follow them as well, tracking them back along the rear wall of the home. I found what I was looking for as I rounded the corner. A window, painted black except for a few flaking spots near its bottom. The paint had begun to chip away there and, while it was barely more than a pinhole, I could see the room inside when I pressed my eye tight against it.

A large room, probably a master bedroom at one time, lay within. It was sparsely decorated or furnished; a half dozen cages of various sizes sat against the far wall, while the center of the room held a large oval drawn on the bare wooden floor. Around the oval was a series of symbols and letters, each so peculiar I couldn’t even begin to fathom just what they meant or symbolized. To one side of the oval, a table held a thick tome and an electric device that looked like a mixing board in a recording studio. A table on the other side of the oval held a bastardized lab device. A glass funnel protruded out of the table and just over the edge of the oval, its furthest extremity supported by a steel rod set in the ground. The funnel narrowed quickly, its tip ending over a small rack on the table. The rack held syringes, their plungers removed. Ready to be filled.

Mark was positioning the old man in the center of the oval, whispering into his ear as he did so.

The frail old man teetered there, almost fell, and then righted himself as Mark went to the tome and switched on the machine. Immediately the man went rigid.

I felt it outside, too. The same sensation as before, only much more intense now that only a thin sheet of glass separated me from it. Mark was reading from the book, but I couldn’t hear him. The air warbled, like a thin sheet of metal caught in the wind. The rushing of air was starting to come as well, along with the metallic odor.

I had to fight the urge to remove my eye from the hole. The sensations were overwhelming, making me want to vomit.

But inside, the show was beginning.

The ceiling of the room changed, shifted, began to dance. It rolled like ocean waves, a square body of water barely held in check by the walls. It darkened in places, grew brighter in others. Colors pitched and swirled and oozed like a massive lava lamp designed to defy the laws of physics.

It was more than a color show, however. Behind the nebulas and vortexes there was something else. Something organic. Huge.

The sliding shapes made it impossible to see it all at once, and as each part appeared it seemed to recede, then return, closer then further away, here then gone, obscured then revealed.

It squirmed and writhed, a single body made up from many.

Snouts and fangs, claw and tentacle. Hair and scale, skin and slime.

Legion.

Glory.

Alpha and Omega.

The old man’s screams cut through the din and his body snapped backward, nearly folded in half. It rose up off the floor, suspended by some unseen force, and then began to spasm.

He fell to pieces. His skin and tissue came off in chunks, tendons popping and veins drooping like ropes of spaghetti. Organs shook free from their mortal imprisonment, a kidney here, a liver there. Bones splintered and shattered into powder and fragments. The blood rained a crimson monsoon, but not a drop of it reached the floor. Nothing did. Each atom of his being was sucked up into the nightmare kaleidoscope above. Each bit of flesh that found freedom from the old man’s body was absorbed into its new home in that fabulous beyond.

The sacrifice claimed, the infinite being became harder to spot. The nebulas spread, blotting out the view and turning the ceiling into a rippling, black pool.

From that impossible surface salvation began to flow. A stream of black liquid dribbled from the ceiling into the funnel and rolled down into the syringe waiting below.

The blackness shuddered, the liquid slowed to a drip, and then the world righted itself.

Mark turned off the machine, bowed his head in some kind of prayer, and then took the syringe, reinserting the plunger before he left the room.

My ears popped; the dizzy-sick feeling subsided. But my mind and body were coursing with adrenaline. With excitement.

I’d witnessed a miracle. In fact, I was a part of that miracle. It coursed in my veins. Beat inside my heart.

But I could have more.

Two hundred sixty-five? It was a fool’s dream when there was so much more potential to be tapped here.

The path to perfection lay before me.

I had only to follow it.

The woman left five minutes later, a smile stretched across her face and a syringe of perfection in her hand.

The lights inside went out fifteen minutes later.

I waited an hour to make sure he was asleep. It was hard to be patient, but necessary. He’d already said that he didn’t sleep much. Which meant he was probably in there somewhere, awake. Staring at the walls. Thinking of the miracle he had dominion over.

The door was the problem. He locked it. Windows, too. It’s a habit that everyone has, but the fact is that if someone wants inside your house, they’ll get in.

And I wanted in pale, sickly looking Mark’s house.

I opted for the window in his office. I knew I was strong enough to kick in the door no matter what type of lock was on it. But the noise would be tremendous. There would be no questioning what he’d heard. With the window, there would still be a lingering “what if” in his mind. A hesitation. A doubt.

And I needed him to have that tiny doubt.

I wrapped my hand in my shirt and punched through the glass, then undid the lock, climbed into the room, and hurried across to the door. It took no more than thirty seconds, but before I’d reached my post I heard soft footsteps and saw distant light spill beneath the door into the office.

The next minutes stretched into hours. I heard him in the hallway; saw his shadow dance in the glow on the floor. Heard the doorknob twist and watched as the door swung open. It stopped inches from me, concealing me behind it.

Through the crack in the door, I watched him enter the office slowly, the gun out in front of him as if he were clutching a cross before a vampire’s attack. I waited for him to switch on the light, to step into the room, to see the open window.

Then I was on him before he had time to react. My left arm wrapped around his head, enveloping him in the muscle. I squeezed tight, cutting off the air. My right arm grabbed his wrist and twisted. The bone snapped almost at once and the gun dropped to the carpet. I could feel him try to scream against my arm.