Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (72 page)

“As you know Baby Adler died in the plane crash, love,” Silas responded.

Nero nodded; he had been the one to put the six month old fetus’s corpse into a small bag. “But what you didn’t know is that… half of Sky’s brain matter was with me. I only have a finite number of tries until… until his brain matter his gone. I have enough for perhaps five more graphs. If I don’t figure out how to make a born immortal – my dreams of resurrecting Sky will die just like that infant.”

Nero let out a sympathetic breath and stood up. He sat down beside Silas, and even though Ceph’s scathing words echoed in his brain, he put his arm around him.

Sky had been a name he had been hearing since he was young. A born immortal like Silas but one who had figured out how to kill himself, apparently because he had fallen into madness and had become a terrible person.

Like Silas had said there was a limited amount of brain matter that remained of Sky. And unfortunately using Silas’s or Perish’s was out of the question. The born immortal’s brain wasn’t identical, even the twin’s. They realized that after creating the first generation of chimeras. All three born immortal’s brains worked differently and responded differently to manipulation. Tests to try and create a clone of Sky would have to be done with Sky’s own DNA.

“I’m sorry, Siley-pie,” Nero said. “That’s shit luck… we’ll bomb the fuck outta the rebels and get some good revenge on them. I’ll rape a couple just for you.”

Silas’s expression was dull and dead, but he managed to nod. “Yes… I want the Legion inside of them. I want to know just how they knew I would be in that plane. We have planes going in and out of the greywastes all the time – how did they know I was on that one? I need answers, Nero. I need to know if we have a turncoat in the Legion.”

“Okay,” Nero said, talking about the Legion and not his fiancé made him feel better. It made him feel more centered in this hour of chaos.

Nero felt himself able to push down the feelings regarding his fiancé, and instead stepped into his shoes as Imperial Commander. “I’ll talk to Zhou. You’ll send the family to find Sangy… I’ll organize an attack on Irontowers. I know you love him, unlike Elish. I’ll–” Nero smiled for Silas when the king glanced up at him. “I’ll put my puppy’s fate in your hands.”

“He’ll come home when he realizes I’m awake,” Silas responded. “We have a strong bond… I do love that man.”

Both of them looked up as they saw Loren coming into the living room, Jack behind him looking bewildered at both Silas being awake and Elish dead behind them.

Silas smiled at them, before leaning into Nero as the brute chimera squeezed him to his side. “Everything will be fine, and we’ll all be happy. I’ll be fine with the family I have and… when the technology is there – I will have my Sky. My beautiful… Sky.”

My lips were chapped, peeling… when I ran my tongue along them I felt rough mountains underneath that tasted like copper if I left my tongue on it for too long. When this happened I would break the scab and enjoy the taste inside of my mouth. I liked the taste of blood, that in itself would never change.

Surrounding me were stuffed animals, all of them in a row with the walls behind them full of newspaper clippings and the writing I wanted to have easier access to. It was like its own wallpaper now, writing stapled to the brittle drywall and bulletins patching up the holes made in the walls. I was surrounded by these things and surrounded by the smells I had been accustomed to in the basement.

I loved my stuffed animals. I had teddy bears, two cats, a penguin, a dog, a panda, and Patches my rabbit. They kept me company but sometimes they yelled and screamed at me.

My hands picked at another one of my scabs. I felt a dull pain that turned to a sting when my finger brushed open the bleeding wound. Thinking of the times the stuffed animals screamed made me nervous and guilty.

It made me guilty because they were trapped inside of themselves, condemned to being stuffed animals again. They wanted to be real like Barry had been before he died. They wanted to be real boys and real girls but I didn’t know how to free them.

Barry was still trapped inside of a bear – so dearly did I want to see that grinning face and those black slate eyes, black eyes like Jack had.

But I didn’t know how to free them, so they screamed and they screamed, a constant assault on my brain.

‘Help us, Sami. It’s dark and it’s cold; it smells like stale piss and blood. It smells like Jasper’s cum. We’re trapped inside of these bodies and all we want is to escape.’

‘You escaped but you left us behind, you left us to get fucked by Jasper.’

That wasn’t true; they had never been in the basement. But they yelled it anyways and all I could do was watch their expressionless faces staring at me and watching me sleep. Watching me like sentries, like my dead friends in the shanty town had watched me.

I liked it when they watched me.

‘Sami? Come on, look at me!’
Patches suddenly said angrily. I looked at her noticing her voice was different.
‘Sami?’

I stared before I realized it wasn’t her talking at all. So my eyes took me to the door and I saw Julia standing, the light of the hallway behind her making her brown hair glisten. Though not shining locks smelling like soap, her hair was shining from grease and I could see it on her face as well.

“What?” I mumbled. I was hunched over my notebook, writing. I was dressed in lots of clothes and they all smelled bad. My hair was messed up and my face was rough as my lips. I had picked and picked at my skin and my face and now I left spots of blood wherever I went. It was even on the walls, blood speckles on the walls where my writing was and my drawings and the newspapers I collected.

They were coming for me – they were all coming for me and I would have to leave soon. This was concluded through bouts of panic and anxiety, through spouts of yelling and ranting that usually ended with me tearing down the papers I had stapled to my walls.

Soon the walls would shake and the hands would slither down the windowsill like a snake. They would grab me and pull me through and throw me in the basement with Jasper. My stuffed animals would watch with their blank faces like Barry watched me. Barry would be by my head with
Daisy Daisy
playing, his music box drowning out Jasper’s moaning.

“We’re out of money – you need to get more, Pumpkin,” Julia said. When she was angry she called me Sami. I don't know when she learned my name but sometime during my time here she started injecting my birth name into her nagging. Women loved to nag.

“Get out of here,” I whirled around and snapped. “I’m not going out; there are crows all over the yard! I need protection. I can’t go anywhere until my friends get their bodies back!”

Julia made a noise. I saw her kneel down in front of me. “Pumpkin… you’re already dressed and ready. We need to go to the bank. We’re fucking out of food and you’re going to be out of meth tomorrow. We need to go, now.”

I looked past her at my friends lined up against the wall, watching everything that was going on.

If I only knew how they could rise up and eat Julia alive, eat Mouse alive too. Everything would be well if I only knew how. They would stop screaming at me then too.

My eyes fell to the notebook, pages and pages of my writing. As I looked I realized there was blood on the pages, my hands had been bleeding from writing so much. The entire side of my palm was raw, stinging, and painful.

“Sami!” Julia suddenly slapped my face.

“Don’t touch me!” I snarled as I glared her down.

Julia’s eyes widened. She got up quickly, her heartbeat revving like an engine, and quickly left the room, shutting the door behind her.

I stared at the door, a brown door not white like at Jasper’s, and heard her yelling at Mouse.

‘You need to leave soon,’
Barry said, his voice was small and weak. Barry needed strength; he was weak from being shot in the head. He had the strength to speak though, the others could only moan and scream.

Pleading, pleading, always pleading.

I frowned and shook my head. “They’ll see me… my contacts are gone and the caps in my teeth are gone too. The family will find me. I just know they have Jasper looking now too.” Then another prick in my heart, this one bleeding more doubt into my already anxious mind. “And you’re too weak, Barry. If I take you out in the cold you’ll die again. I can’t handle that.”

I ignored the crashing and the yelling outside my bedroom door. Julia and Mouse fought a lot, over me usually. Sometimes I heard my real name, Sanguine, but that didn’t alarm me. There were so many other things to worry about.

Julia and Mouse had stopped bringing me bulletins too. Not until I get them more money – it was all about money for them, they didn’t care that I had to hide from the family and Jasper. They didn’t care that I was stumped as to how I could bring my stuffed animal friends out of their bodies and make them real.

The thought of being surrounded by them made me smile. With Barry beside me, maybe he would be my age now, and Patches and the others. I would not only have protection… but I could go outside too.

I prepared another rock of meth and filled my room with the white smoke. I was halfway through my rock when Mouse rattled my door knob. He shouted some things at Julia while he had the knob turned, then finally pushed it open.

“Pumpkin…” Mouse said in a subdued voice, but it had a definite edge. His face was covered in sores like mine, except he didn’t shave, Julia shaved me. His stringy hair was all greasy like Julia’s too and his white shirt a dingy brown. “We’re taking you to the bank tomorrow morning, if you keep saying no… you need to leave.”

“The… the crows are watching me,” I said, “and Barry is too weak. I can’t carry my other friends either. I can’t go outside, you said yourself so many times it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous. You don’t even let me read bulletins anymore, I can’t go out!” As I said this my voice rose and as it did Mouse shrunk down.

He looked nervous but his voice was still hard. “We have you dressed in winter cloths and we have sunglasses. You either go with us or you get out. I’m sorry but we can’t afford to keep you and your money is gone.”

I stared at him. He’d been getting mean over the last couple weeks. The less money we had the more mean him and Julia got.

‘They aren’t your friends,’
Barry said in a grave voice. I looked at him and made his ears wiggle back and forth with my fingers.
‘They’re turning against you. What if they were lying the entire time and it’s safe to go out?’

I shook my head at him, but the seed of unease had been planted long ago, perhaps that was what Barry was nurturing. He knew I was starting to get nervous being here; he knew I had to leave soon too.

Mouse made an angry noise, then in a flash Barry disappeared from my grasp. I looked up and jumped to my feet, but I stumbled backwards and hit the board-covered window.

“When you fucking get money, you can get Barry back,” Mouse snapped. “We shouldn’t have let you have so much meth, you’re a fucking lunatic. Fucking stupid chimera. Just get off your ass and go to the fucking bank and get money. Then we can continue to rot here like the low lives we all are. It isn’t fucking complicated, Sanguine.”

I stared at him; his angry voice and biting words striking me dumb for a second. Julia just hit me and now Mouse was yelling at me?

Were they turning against me?

I looked behind my shoulder at my stuffed animal friends, standing with the backdrop of stapled pieces of paper that made up my wall. They looked like a shrine, an offering to a faceless god. All lined up in a row with the wallpaper of ramblings. Their black eyes reflecting the single light I had above me, hanging like a noose from a black cord.

Then Mouse hit me, then he hit me again. The last one knocked me off-balance and I landed on the mattress, the back of my head smacking against the frame of the window.

I squinted, stars and sunbursts exploding in front of my eyes, sparkling around Mouse as he stood in front of me, Julia behind him. Both of their buggy eyes were filled with anger, brown eyes matching the rough scabs on their gaunt faces.

“You’re going to agree now to go tomorrow, or we’re throwing you out,” Mouse said angrily. “We can’t fucking afford to feed you. We don’t have all of Skyfall’s money in our bank accounts. Got it, chimera?”

Mouse threw Barry back at me. I heard a clunk as the beads that made his eyes knocked against the wall. Automatically I picked him up and clutched him to my chest, momentarily mute over the chaos that had suddenly found its way to my quiet room.

“Fucking retard,” Mouse said furiously. “I’ve done so much for you – we both have. You have no fucking idea how much money we could get for you.”

“I told you we should’ve told the rebels we had a chimera,” Julia’s voice sounded as I checked to make sure Barry was okay. I kissed his nose and smelled him; he smelled like the basement. I liked that. He was my –
“SAMI!” Mouse screamed.

“OKAY!” I shouted back, holding Barry close to me. “Okay, I’ll go tomorrow. Okay, okay. I’ll go…” I swallowed, feeling like I was seven years old again. “I need bags to carry my friends. And also make sure the crows don’t see me… make sure the family doesn’t – doesn’t see me.”

“No one is looking for you, Sanguine,” Mouse snapped. “We’ve had the silver-haired fuck sniffing around two bars and he hasn’t been seen in weeks. No one is watching you, it’s the fucking meth. Now shut the fuck up and stay in your fucking room. I’m sick and tired of being the babysitter of a literal retard.”

Mouse dug into his pockets and threw a pill onto the mattress. “This is Intoxone for meth, take this and detox yourself. You’re too fucked up on meth and even when you do get money… we’re putting you back on opiates.”

I looked down at the pill, a small red pill with an M on it. I had heard of these pills before, but… “The meth opens my mind,” I said to him weakly. “It makes me smart; it makes me see what has really been–”

The door slammed and they were gone, not even listening to what I was saying. A moment later I heard Mouse through the closed door.

“If the rebels knew chimeras were this fucking weak and retarded they would’ve invaded Skyfall long ago.”

“Well, Sanguine agreed to get us the money. If you’re that frustrated we can take the money and try and get in contact…”

The voices faded into the white noise. I sat on my bed with my legs crossed, my chin resting on Barry’s head. I sniffed, not even the meth was making Mouse and Julia’s anger fade from my mind.

I picked up the almost empty baggy and looked at the two remaining rocks.

Then a spur of anger went through me. I tossed the baggy across the room and in defiance of my own mind telling me to heat up another rock; I popped the red pill into my mouth and chewed it. A bitter, acidic taste coated my mouth which made my face pucker but I swallowed the remnants down my throat.

My mind told me not to, it yelled and screamed at me that the insider information I had been infiltrating would be harder to crack once the meth was out of my system, but a stronger voice was telling me I had to take a break from the drugs. It was a darker voice, a soothing voice, it almost sounded like Crow but – he was gone.

I listened to him and ignored the pull to make myself throw up the pill and cook the meth, then I laid down on my bed and stared at my paper-covered walls.

‘Sami… Saaammi.’
Their voices were low, moaning susurrations that came from lips sewn shut. They were muffled and desperate, their hands outstretched and reaching for me. They were begging me to free them, begging me to rip their bodies apart to expose the person inside.

I had been hearing their voices since they had been brought to me, and I had to free them. I had to free them. I needed the help, and I needed the protection.

My eyes felt like two bags of wet sand but as soon as I opened the heavy lids I felt myself unable to close them. In a way it seemed like my eyes had never closed; they had been open the entire time staring at the numbers, the papers, the images in my mind.