Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (7 page)

“And I won’t be any different, will I?” Cory shook his head; he suddenly felt a wave of hopelessness inside of him and if only for a moment he lost his cool. “Well, boy, if you untie me I’ll play with you for awhile but if I am going to become one of those corpses either way… quite frankly you can go fuck yourself in the ass.”

Sami looked up at him and though there was little expression to see on his covered face the creases in his forehead deepened. Cory flinched as the boy stood up and left the room.

“Hey… come back here, you little shithead…” Cory shouted. He started to struggle, trying to pull his hands out of the tight nylon rope. His hands were in front of him but they might’ve been in outer space, the kid was good with knots.

Sami came back but when Cory saw the large knife in his hand he started trying to push himself backwards with his bound feet. He shouted at Sami as the kid came closer and pulled his tied up hands to his face.

The apartment buildings echoed with his screams when he felt the boy grab his ear and start to saw, a moment later Cory’s right ear came off in the kid’s grasp. He felt the last strands of skin pull tight before snapping back; his ear now completely severed.

“What the fuck! What the fuck, kid!” Cory screamed. Sami stepped back with the ear in his hand and, as if to taunt him further, he held it up and wiggled it back and forth.

“What the fuck!” Cory was hysterical; his green eyes wide from shock. “You fucking psycho!”

“Are you going to play with me? And read to me? Or do I gotta cut something else off, asshole,” Sami snapped, his high tenor voice only adding to his overall psychotic demeanor. This kid was something else; he was a fucking lunatic.

And why was he covering his face?

“Fine! Fine for fuck sakes,” Cory said, his face tensing in pain. Blood was pouring out of the deep red gash on the side of his head. “I’ll read to you. What the fuck do you want me to read?”

Sami turned around and put the knife and his ear beside one of the ripe and moving corpses. He turned around and pointed to the small novel that had fallen off of Cory’s lap during his mutilation. The boy picked it up and re-adjusted it, curiously still the book was being held open by food saver clips
To make it so the book doesn’t close.
The realization made Cory’s chest tighten, this kid had been here for a long time and doing this for just as long it seemed.

The area where Cory’s ear had been throbbed with intense pain. With a groan he shifted his legs up so the small novel was on his knees.

He looked at the first few lines and raised an eyebrow. “This novel is about talking mice?”

Sami glared at him. “There are mice, squirrels, voles, and rabbits, and evil foxes, and the good guys live in Redwall Abby in a big forest and the bad guys are pirate rats and foxes. It’s the bestest book; don’t say anything bad about it.”

Cory looked down and closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Whatever, kid. So how far did the last guy get before you killed him?”

Sami kept his stare down, though it would be more intimidating if he didn’t have his sunglasses on and the kerchief, a dingy grey, covering his face. Cory decided not to push him and started reading him the mouse book. It would distract him from the intense pain where his ear used to be, the wound felt like it had its own pulse.

While Cory read the kid pulled up a blanket and quietly played with his action figures and other toys, occasionally laughing at funny parts or asking him what a word meant, though most of the time the greywaster didn’t know. He had read for about an hour before the kid’s head started to droop. Seeing that as a good sign he kept reading until the black-haired boy was still under his blanket, the Conan action figure loose in his small grubby hand.

He might be a fucked up little thing but he was just a kid. Though it doesn’t matter in the end; he was a little killer and if I don’t get out of here and finish him off, he’ll kill me too.
Cory pressed his back up against the wall and started to slowly inch himself up the wall to get to his feet; his eyes never leaving the sleeping boy.

Once Cory had stood himself up he turned around and realized he had been tied up to the window. It looked like the boy had made a hole underneath the windowsill and had tethered him around the frame.

Cory’s heart sank as he realized that just walking out would be impossible. He gave a small defeated sigh and looked around.

He spotted a knife – it was resting right beside the boy’s feet.

Could I reach it…
Cory got down on his knees and started inching himself forward. His arms outstretched to try and reach the knife. It was a long knife and it looked sharp; if he could just get it into his hands he could finish the kid off quickly. The kid had made sure he wasn’t in slashing distance but he could untie himself and then do it…

Just a bit… closer.

“I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

Cory jerked his arm and quickly jumped away as Sami threw off his blanket and kicked Cory right in the face. The greywaster swore and put his bound hands up to his nose as it started to drip blood.

“Joshua passed the trust test and he still tried to kill me!” Sami spat; his little fists balled in rage. “And you failed, now I’ll never trust you, ever. Stupid greywaster; you’re gonna fucking rot!”

“I was just reaching for some water… I… ah –” Cory gritted his teeth together, wracking his brains trying to come up with something better. “– I was tucking you in.”

The boy kicked him again. “I’m not stupid. I’m going to sleep, and I have my gun with me. I’ll show you all my guns tomorrow because I have ten of them and lots of ammo and if you try anything again I’ll shoot you. Okay, Cory the greywaster?”

“Sami… come on. Come back and I’ll read some more. We can be buds,” Cory called before clenching his teeth together. He swore and hit his shoulder against the wall in anger.

Sami turned around and though he had his sunglasses on Cory got the distinct impression the boy was glaring him into the hellfires below.

“You can call me Sanguine, thank you!” Sami spat before angrily stalking out of the bedroom.

“Sanguine… Sanguine?” Cory called before leaning his head against the wall with a sigh.

“What does… extravagant mean?”

“I… I don’t know… I–”

“I was talking to Diaz.”

Cory turned the page on the book as the boy, now wearing a green kerchief and a baseball cap that was stained with brown, looked over at a brown-haired corpse whose face was starting to slip off of his skull.

The rotting corpse, his eyes now stuffed with moving insects and larva, said nothing back but the boy Sami nodded anyways and continued to draw with some half-broken crayons.

“So what does it mean?” Cory put his damp finger on the book page and slid the paper away from the food saver clip revealing the start of a new chapter.

“It means… lots of vagants.”

Cory looked up at him. “And what’s a vagant?”

“Keep reading.”

“Give me a drink of water first and I will… my throat is parched and you owe me for telling you where to find that water spring.”

Sami, laying on his stomach with his feet kicking up and down, started drawing a circle. “I was doing just fine drinking blood and drinking from the river a mile from here. It was only bad in summer when the river bed dried up. I was doing just fine on my own, just like Nan said I would do fine.”

Nan? Cory watched as the kid got up and brought a bottle of muddy brown water up to his lips. He took a generous drink and kept drinking until Sami pulled the bottle away.

“Was Nan your Grandma?” Cory asked. The gash where his ear had been ached and the jerky the boy fed him made his stomach sour; it was almost rotten and the salt did little to kill the taste.

Sami shook his head and laid back down on his stomach in front of his crayons. “Nana was a nice lady who took care of me with a bunch of other kids. She made me leave because Gill was going to chop me up with an axe.”

“Chop you with an axe?” Cory repeated in a low tone. The more he spoke to this kid the more his behaviour made sense. “Why?”

Sami kept kicking his legs as he coloured and drew, the dead body of Taylor behind him shifting around under the impact of his boots. “No one liked me especially two boys named Gabe and Pauly. They pushed my face into a burning anthill so I tied them to their beds and lit them on fire.”

“Are you fucking serious?” Cory said lowly. He looked around the boy’s bedroom, past the semicircle of corpses, with a fresh new determination to get away from this kid. He had been a prisoner to Sami-Sanguine for three days now.

“Yes,” Sami said before sneezing onto his paper and crayons. Cory saw a bit of his kerchief rise up; his mouth looked normal enough.

“Why do you always keep your face covered like that?” he asked.

“I don’t want to scare you… everyone gets scared and yells and swears at me when they see my face.” Sami’s voice dropped to a sad level.

This planted another seed of alarm in Cory’s chest. “You sound and look normal enough, and from what I can see of your face you don’t look deformed. I have seen scarred up kids and even a dwarf once. I don’t think you need that face cover.”

Sami shook his head back and forth. “That’s what Joshua said too and he told me I was a demon.”

A demon? Cory tried to look through the sunglasses and through the corners of the kerchief but he had it covered and the sunglasses were pressed right up to his face. He just looked like a normal seven-year-old in need of a bath.

“Look kid… do you want to come with me to Chilko Lake? If you have all of those guns you can sell them in the shops and put in an application to get your own house. You would be safe in a city with water and food and you would have a lot of people to talk to,” Cory said, one again trying to reason with him.

“I went there last winter when I was freezing cold and my lighter ran out. I stayed and got a lighter and I wanted to stay longer but they saw me and chased me out with rocks,” Sami replied dully. There was a snap as he put too much pressure on one of the crayons, breaking it in half.

This confused Cory even more. What was this kid? Birth defects in the greywastes were nothing new and though you got a few assholes here and there everyone was rather tolerant of deformed people.

Maybe he hadn’t gone to the city and this was all in his head. Cory had seen the kid frequently talking to the rotting corpses so that wouldn’t be any stretch of the imagination.

“Well, we can always make up a lie, say you have a disease or something…” Cory looked down at the book, being held open by his bound hands. Though the kid had been feeding him the half-rancid jerky and the muddy water he could feel his energy leaving him. His limbs were cramped up and his nose had committed suicide days ago from the overpowering stench of the corpses.

“I don’t have a disease, I’m just a bad kid,” Sami explained. His tongue poked out of the side of his mouth as he got a red crayon and started colouring something in. “I’m evil, aren’t I? You think so too like Gill did, the townspeople did and all my other friends. I’m just a bad person.”

Before Cory could say anything back Sami jumped to his feet and lay his crayon drawing onto Cory’s lap. The greywaster looked down and wasn’t surprised to see a small boy in the center surrounded by what looked like a mom and a dad and… the teddy bear he liked to wind up before bed from the looks of it.

Even the boy was wearing sunglasses and a kerchief over his face.

“Is that you?” Cory motioned down.

Sami nodded. “My mom was named Lydia and she died. I didn’t know who my dad was. Barry was given to me by Nana and I drew what I bet my dad looked like.”

Another small pang of sympathy, but the pain in his limbs and, especially now, the scabbed over gash where his ear had been stifled it rather well. Though Cory wasn’t an idiot; he played along and tried another angle.

“I had a son who was five, he got eaten by ravers… why don’t we go to Chilko and I’ll say you’re my boy. I wouldn’t mind some company,” Cory said to him.

Cory’s heart jumped when the kid paused. “You would be my dad?”

I’ll be your worshipper just get me out of this disgusting room and give me a chance to escape you.
“Sure,” Cory said. “I was a father once and you seem like a nice kid. Smart too, only seven and you read better than I do. Not to mention you survived out here for a long time.”

The boy took a step back and looked behind him; still seeming unsure Cory inched his offer further. “Winter will be coming soon… wouldn’t it be nice to spend winter in a warm repaired house?”

“I don’t trust you,” Sami said cautiously. He took a step back. “I trusted Joshua and…”

“Not all greywasters are the same and I was a father that has to count for something. Have I tried to hurt you? I only tried to escape once and honestly you have four dead bodies circling me, you can’t hold that against me. You cut off my damn ear kid,” Cory said.

Sami shook his head and grabbed the bear he was always carting around. “No, I’m not… I’m not dumb. I’m going outside to play.”

“Wait, kid –
ah fuck
.” Cory clenched his teeth as the kid disappeared into the main area of the apartment. Just him surrounded by corpses now purple, green and red and leaking all things foul. He sighed and started trying to wiggle out of his binds again, his wrists now rubbed raw.