The Skunge (22 page)

"Now hold on a minute, son. Slow down."

"Slow
down
? I'm telling you, this guy murdered a fifteen year-old kid. First degree. And there's more. I have another body. An infant."

"We knew about that. In fact, we hear you had a dust-up with the guy running that show. He passed along your description, and we figured it was you."

"You
knew
about it? I want that guy brought up on charges." Arneson hissed through his teeth. "Listen I don't know who you are, but you get your CO on the line. Now."

"No,
you
listen, son." Arneson didn't think it was possible for the voice to get any colder, but now it sounded like pure ice. "I
am
the CO here. Here, there, and everywhere you need to worry about. I am the COIC of the west coast SecOps team. You understand what that means?"

Arneson stiffened. "Yes," he said. After just enough time to make sure it sounded sarcastic, he added "Sir."

"This goddamn thing. This
Skrunge,
" Arneson bit back the urge to correct him, settling for scuffing at the gravel with the toe of his boot. "It's heading toward the tipping point."

"Yes sir, I know, but—"

"It's spreading faster, mutating right in front of our eyes. And we got nothing that can stop it."

"There has to be some way of containing it. This situation has been in the playbooks since nineteen seventy-eight, for Christ's sake." Arneson's free hand was shaking, and he stuffed it into his pocket.

"We are looking at a total burn-down of everything south of your location, all the way down to the Mexico border. Maybe further."

Arneson went cold. "You're fucking kidding me."

"You want to watch your language when you're addressing me, son." Staunton's voice twanged like am over-tuned guitar string. "I am not kidding, not even a little bit. We are pulling everyone out. Today. Without support, without money. Find a way."

"I need to bring someone."

"Is she infected?" Staunton said it softly, but with weight. "Are
you
?"

Arneson said nothing. The silence hung until Staunton broke it.

"Don't go all wiggy on me now, boy. This is your
country
we're talking about—the survival of the USA. You got to take care of your own problems—and if you can't…" Arneson didn't need Staunton to tell him what would happen then. He would be cut loose. And there was no retirement plan for guys in Arneson's line of work.

"But the person I need to take out—she's different. Not like any of the other Skungers. Maybe she'll be able to answer some questions about the origins. She was right there when it hit the States. If she didn't have personal contact with Patient Zero, she knows someone who does."

There was a brief pause. "I'm listening. Tell me what you know."

Arneson told Staunton everything. Sugar's encounter with the boy from Kansas, her and Jynx's subsequent infection, Palmetto, all of it. Arneson was a man used to his own counsel, but he had been feeling adrift, floating out here on his own. His chest loosened as he unburdened himself.

"OK. That's good son, that's real good. Hold on."

The muffled sound of Staunton holding the phone to his chest, and the bass rumble of his voice. When he came back on the line, his voice gave away little except enormous tension.

"Head north. There's a facility in Oregon. Junction City. You know the place, I believe?"

"I know it." Arneson had grown up only thirty minutes south of Junction City. Of course Staunton knew that. He knew everything: the label on Arneson's boxer briefs, the name of JFK's killer, the price of rice in China. Guys like him knew it all.

"In the northeast corner of the city, there's an office building. Juniper Ridge. One of our sites. I know a man there. He's a doctor. Not a medico, but a kind of...researcher, you might say. If anyone can figure out a way out from under this goddamn thing, it's him. He's a bit of a duck, but give him my name and tell him 'Frank sends his best.' Can you remember that, son?"

"Yes."

"That's all I got. You get yourself and your girl there, ASAP, and maybe he can help you. Maybe not. But that's all I got. God forgive me. Good luck, son."

The line went dead. Arneson lowered the phone, his nerves buzzing. He dropped the phone to the ground and crushed it into glittering plastic shards.

CHAPTER FORTY ONE

Maas eyed her like a savanna lion contemplates a limping gazelle. "Hi there, Sugar."

Sugar fidgeted, the thick carpet rough against her bare feet. "Hey." Sweat ran down her side, and she resisted the urge to brush it away.

"Having a good day?"

"Yes."

"The air agrees with you?"

She crossed her arms. "What do you want? I'm kind of busy right now. On a shoot." She pointed to a monitor that showed the pool deck. Vanessa was crumpled into a deck chair, sobbing. The director stood nearby, checking his phone. Every few seconds he would look up, bark silent orders, and go back to his phone. No one ventured near the crying girl.

"Yeah, I saw that. I saw what you did to that girl." He stood up and walked around the desk. "I have to say, it turned me on a little bit."

She swallowed and said nothing. He had the air-conditioning cranked up, and she willed herself not to shiver in the cold air.

Maas leaned on the edge of his desk. He popped the top button of his shorts.

"Get on your knees," he said.

"Listen, Dennis, I can't do this right now, I—"

His eyes narrowed. "I give a
fuck
what you think. Get on your knees."

The cold light in Maas' eyes pinned her there, like an insect on a board. His hand shot out and locked around her wrist, grinding painfully. He began to pull her forward, the corded muscle standing out on his arm. Maas noticed her trembling and smiled like a crocodile. "So much like your mother. She liked to fight sometimes, too—but she always ended up where she belonged."

He guided her hand until it brushed against the bulge in his shorts. With a growl, she grabbed tight, clutching his cock and balls in her fist. She twisted savagely, laughing at his howls of pain, at the spots of blood that soaked through his shorts. She—

She blinked away the fantasy and sank to her knees. She wondered if there was a psychologist somewhere that was working on an emotional dictionary. A lookup table to draw a line between a given mix of emotions and their physiological counterpart. Where would loathing—pure, unfettered disgust, the kind that causes your stomach to bubble with acid and your teeth to grind—where would that connect to lust?

A thought struck her. How many of those lines were artificial lines? Dotted lines created by habit and repetition rather than genuine, healthy interaction. She knew that this wasn't right. This was compulsion.

"Crawl to me."

She began to crawl jerkily, a puppet with half its strings broken. She turned it over in her mind. Those dotted lines between the body, the mind, and the heart.

"Just like your mother. Always my good girl." He unzipped his pants.

The tumbling, swirling feeling in her stomach, the one she had felt so many times before. She felt it only with Maas…why didn't she feel it with Arneson? The thought froze her mind. She thought she was a slave to her own sexual need, but was it possible she had just mistaken lust for some other feeling? Fear? Shame?

"No." She stopped.

"Yes. Come here." Maas freed his cock, and stroked himself. He smiled at the way her eyes followed it. "Just like your mother."

"No, I'm not like my mother at all." Once she spoke the words, the tumbler in her mind clicked over. The enormous truth of it slammed into her body. She wasn't like her mother, and she didn't want Maas. He had tricked and subverted her mind and her body. He had raped her. Since she'd known him, he had been shaping her, working her mind with his tricks and his words and his orders. And now look at her. Porn, webcamming, all of it; meaningless and perverse.

She stayed where she was, head down, hair hanging in her face, marveling over this new bit of information. It was only just occurring to her that she should get to her feet and leave, when Maas' foot slammed down on her hand.

He ground his bare foot down, twisting until the skin felt ready to tear loose. She cried out and bared her teeth at him. He bore down, smiling, and she felt the skin tear.

"I used to do this to your mother. She got off on it." He reached down and pulled her to her knees by her hair. "I bet you do, too."

He pulled her level to his crotch. She stared at his erection, hypnotized by its gentle sway. His fist tightened in her hair, and at the pain, her mouth dropped open.

"Yes," he hissed, pulling her forward. The tip of his cock touched her lip and caught, sticking to the dry skin. He pulled her forward, looking down, the tip of his tongue poking out from between his teeth, the color high on his cheeks.

She opened her mouth and let him in.

Palmetto, gently pulling aside her bloody bandages, encouraging her to squeeze his arm while he worked, even when she clawed bloody half-moons into the skin of his forearms.

Arneson, his mouth on her neck, his hands in her hair
.
Nothing between them, and everything between them.

Jynx, fluttering down to the pavement like something broken.

Her mother, laughing with her in the car, her eyes the same green as her dress and the rain-drenched trees.

Sugar bit down.

Blood squirted into her mouth, and her eyes squinted involuntarily at the hot spurt of the initial salty burst. Her teeth punched through the delicate skin on the top of his penis, then through the dorsal veins. She bore down, through the capillaries, through the spongy meat of the Corpus Cavernosum, stopping only met with the muscly resistance of his urethra.

He shrieked and cuffed her across the face, splitting the skin above her eye and sending her spinning to the floor. The remaining strands of flesh still holding his cock to his body stretched and snapped like a strand of
al dente
spaghetti. The top half of his cock flew out of her mouth and bounced across the carpet, dangling oozing purple veins and chewed scraps of flesh. The head of it came to rest against his foot. He screamed again and reared back, slamming into his desk and sending a huge monitor crashing to the floor. He clutched at his groin, bending at the waist like a child needing to pee.

"You crazy fucking bitch," Maas gasped. His face had gone gray with shock, save for two hectic patches of red high on his cheeks. He hopped across the carpet, blood falling from where his hands cupped his crotch. "Give me back my cock!"

She wondered how she must look, her grinning, bloody mouth and crazed eyes. She decided she didn't care how she looked, and spit blood at him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, leaving a bright red smear. "Go ahead, it's right there. I don't want it." A giggle rose unbidden to her mouth, along with the remnants of a school-yard taunt. "Besides, I choke on small bones."

Maas' eyes blazed at her. "I am going to cut your throat and skull-fuck the hole." Hectic patches of color crosshatched his cheeks and his chest rose and fell like a bellows. "You're going to die fucking
screaming
." His mouth trembled between a pained grimace and a sneer. "I'll have your boyfriend do it. Arneson."

She got to her feet. "If you think he's your running dog, you may be in for a surprise."

The sneer dropped from his lips as she approached. His hands remained clutched over his groin. Blood dripped down his balls, hanging in fat drops like overripe fruit.

She stepped to him, her face inches from his. "You think just because you pay him, you own him?"

"You think because you fuck him that
you
do?" He looked smaller now, gray, sunken, aged. "You don't control anything, you crazy bitch."

"Fuck you," she said. "My mother was crazy." She leaned over him, smiling at the way he cringed. She reached behind him, and picked up a shiny steel camera. She looked at it, looked at him, and brought it up in a wide, looping blow that slammed into his jaw and sent two of his teeth rolling across his desk like dice. He howled, blood spattering from his broken mouth. She dropped the camera. "But I'm not."

She slammed the door on her way out.

CHAPTER FORTY TWO

Sugar held the enormous Bowie knife over the candle flame, watching, fascinated, as tongues of fire forked over the steel. Soot formed on the chrome like the breath of a ghost. The drops of her sweat sizzled as they dripped on the blade.

The razors she had employed in LA were pale shadows of the large, chromed blade of the Bowie. It was majestic. It was made for tasting blood.

She brought the glowing tip to her arm and began to prick at her skin with the blade, watching fascinated as tiny red pearls of blood welled up. Under the naked light of the bathroom mirror it was almost purple. The smell of burning flesh wafted up to her, and she welcomed it.