The Skunge (3 page)

CHAPTER THREE

When Mik awoke, he was in the dark, lying on rough concrete. The stench of the place was thunderous, full with shit and rot. A sewer. From somewhere above, he heard the sound of traffic. What little light there was came from a garbage-clogged sewer grate.

Is this hell? Am I in hell?
He lay on the cracked and oozing floor of the tunnel, trying in vain to move. It felt like whatever that crazy fucking nurse had given him hadn't yet worn off. Random pulses of white-hot pain sizzled through his nervous system, making his gasp each time.

screaming, cutting, the thirsty grin of cold steel

but his mind slipped over it, burying it. He knew he would have to face it someday, but now was not the time.

Lying here in pain while just above and out of reach, normal life goes on as though you never existed. This
is
hell.

He was about to call for help when something moved in the shadows. Mik caught his breath, listening. The only thing he heard was the thunder of blood in his ears. A hot, stinking wave of stench roiled out of the blackness and enveloped him. The stink of a zoo. No more than a dozen feet away, the liquid, somehow putrid sound of something large and moist scraping across the floor. It sounded large, heavy, and close. Worse was that, Mik's brain insisted that it sounded…
hungry.
Panic flooded his veins with icy fear.

He bucked frantically, trying to move. His limbs would not respond. He tried to scrabble at the floor of the tunnel, but could feel nothing with his fingertips. He tried to push away from that sound, but could find no purchase on the cement. Finally, he looked down at himself, and screamed.

Four stumps. They had cut off his arms and legs and left four red-stained scraps of sheet, the ends tied off with heavy rubber tubing. He bit back a scream, and felt something move in his stomach. He thought back to the doctor, his sparkling eyes and glittering syringe.

Another liquid noise from the shadows. Atavistic fear swallowed Mik's thoughts, and he flailed his foreshortened limbs, consumed by the pre-human urge to flee the great and unknown beast. Finally, he managed to flip himself onto his belly. He heaved his torso up onto the stumps of his arms and legs. Vicious bolts of pain twanged through the stumps like electrical currents. He screamed each time be brought a stump down on the concrete and dragged himself another few inches. A stumped landed squarely on a jagged hook of broken glass and his vision strobed white with agony. Still he moved, fighting forward with the frenzied drive of the survival instinct. Ahead, he saw a tiny swatch of muted daylight. It could be a way out, or only his fevered brain trying to trick him into hope. He humped his body along like a mutant inchworm, sweat dripping down his round face as the unseen thing in the shadows grew louder. To Mik, raised in the city, it sounded like wet garbage bags rustling and snapping in the wind. Shivering bolts of fear shot through him, making him jerk and spasm as he crawled. He threw himself forward, and his chin hit the cement with a crack. He grunted and kept moving. There was more movement in his belly, and sudden, shooting pains. He began to cry, and felt tiny, squirming movements in his—

Something wrapped around the stump of his right leg. He froze, whimpering, his hair hanging in his eyes. The cords on his neck stuck out like guy wires. The grip tightened, both soft and implacable. With a scream, he lunged again. He left bandages like shed skin as he scrabbled over the shit-stained sewer floor. His stumps sang with pain. Soon they would scream. The barely scabbed flesh of his amputations tore open and left bloody prints. He felt the tips of his bones where they poked through the meat and grated against the cement. He had thought, growing up in the projects, fighting among the rats and garbage and gangs and drugs, that he knew pain. But now he realized that pain transmitted far more widely than a few narrow bands; the agony frequency covered every spectrum.

All thought was driven from his mind when something brushed against his ass. Something questing, slippery, and sharp. He cried out.

It entered him, spearing his guts and sending a surprised blurt of blood out of his mouth and nose. His eyes bulged in their sockets. He grunted an inchoate expression of pain as the thing rammed into him. It skewered internal organs, pushing them upward into his chest cavity. He felt every inch of the thing as it slid inside. Finally, it stopped, at the place his esophagus ended and his lungs began. Just enough room, between the thing, and a mouthful of blood, for Mik to take a strangled breath. Enough air to live on, for a while.

With a scream, he was pulled back into the shadows, leaving nothing but scraps of soiled bandages and a pool of blood.

Mik groaned. Everything from his sternum to his knees was a burning suit of pain—the slightest movement sent agony flashing through him. He whimpered like a kicked dog.

The room was lit only by a band of pale light that seeped in through the doors at the far end of the room. The smell of the place reminded him of grade school: dark, varnished wood, liniment, mildewed wood. A black patch of mold crept up the far wall. If he squinted, it almost looked like a face—Katrina's face.

Strange shapes lurked in the corners of the room, old-fashioned beds draped in sheets, archaic machines that defied identification. A clutch of wheeled carts sat in a conspiring group near the doors.

"Hello?" he called. His voice cracked like he hadn't spoken for a year, and he was dismayed at the shaking, old-man fear he heard there. There was no answer except for the dour sound of rain blatting against the windows. A door slammed somewhere in the building, startling another cry from him. "
Hello
! I'm awake!"

The impersonal squeak of rubber-soled shoes in the hallway, coming toward his room. They grew louder, until they stopped just outside the door. He could see nothing through the pebbled glass of the door, and he was filled with an unreasonable fear of what was on the other side. Did they know about the girl? Would they call the police? Had they
already
called them? His mind whirled with visions: stone-faced bumpkin deputies clumping toward him, sending him away to some backwoods county pen. There, he would die. Rotted away to a walking corpse by prison hooch or stabbed by some prisoner looking to make a reputation. He would be passed around like a bitch, he was too pretty to go to prison, he—

The door swung open, and a nurse entered. Her starched whites shone in the darkness like teeth under a black-light. The dimness of the

operating room

place obscured her features, except for a pair of disapproving dark eyes. She didn't smile while she took his temperature, peered into his eyes with a small penlight, listened to his chest. She regarded him with a twist of her lip, as if trying not to smile.

"How do you feel?" she said. Mik eyed her with an auctioneer's gaze. Kind of hot, in a hillbilly way—until she opened her mouth to expose a mouthful of sketchy-looking teeth. "You were given a shot. For pain," she continued. He reconsidered his assessment. Maybe she could play a dominatrix in a fetish scene or two.

Already Mik began feeling better. Sure, he was hurt now—but he would heal. The doctors in Wichita could fix anything these days. Hell, he could go to Topeka, see the best doctors. Even better—with the money from the film, he would fly to Cali, and get treated at one of the celebrity hospitals they had out there. "Thank you for your help." He resisted the urge to lift the blankets and inspect the damage. "Where are my friends?"

"They left." She picked up his chart and examined it, tapping her teeth with a pencil. On closer inspection, her teeth were worse than he had thought; rotten-looking and crooked as leaning tombstones. He blinked; her teeth appeared to have grown lines of dark green mold. "If they're good friends, they'll come back to look for you. But somehow, I doubt they will."

Look for you? She means 'check on you', doesn't she?
"Ah. Well." He looked around. "Very quiet place you have. Do you have many other patients?"

Rather than respond, she offered a small strange smile, and set the chart down on a table. He tried to sit up in bed. His arms and legs would not respond. Panic surged through his veins. "Nurse?
Nurse
! Oh, God, my legs, my arms, they aren't working, I—"

At that moment, the doctor entered the room through the swinging door. His manner was brusque but quiet, like something spiky worn down by the years.

"How do you feel?" he asked. He didn't consult that chart, only regarded Mik with a flinty gaze. "Are you in much pain?"

"Your fucking nurse has given me something—done something—and I'm fucking paralyzed, is how I feel!" Mik struggled against invisible bonds. It was like being held down by bands of cold iron. "I want the fuck out of here, now!"

The doctor regarded him gravely, unblinking. "But how do you
feel
?" He reached into his gown and withdrew something: a long, glittering syringe. The barrel of the syringe swam with a thick, milky substance. Thin black shapes squirmed in the liquid.

Mik's gaze tracked the point of the needle. The bore looked as big around as a cigarette. The doctor examined the needle, letting the light play along its polished steel length. "The nurse has given you something to induce temporary paralysis." He dandled the needle in front of Mik's wide eyes. "This is a special preparation of mine." The doctor's eyes sparkled. "Part of it is a synaptic enhancer. I believe it was developed to encourage interrogation subjects to more strongly feel the pain of torture. And along with that; a gift from our little town to you. I don't think you will enjoy it much."

Mik flashed back to old horror movies, direct-to-video torture porn of inbred country people gone crazy. "Please, no, don't do this—I have money! I'll give you everything I have, I—"

Two men, so large as to resemble bears more than humans, shambled into the room. Their faces were stubbly and chapped by wind and moonshine. They stunk of cheap hand-rolled tobacco and some other, baser stench, like wild boars. They shuffled forward to stand on either side of his bed.

The doctor, without ceremony, plunged the needle into Mik's arm. After a few moments, one of the men leaned over and gave Mik's earlobe a tweak.

The pain was excruciating, like the man had taken a blowtorch to the side of his face. Mik screamed until one of them stuffed a oily rag into his mouth. His mouth stretched so far he felt the flesh at the corners of his mouth split.

The men turned away, and Mik heard the clatter of steel on steel. When the doctor and the two men returned to the bed, each of them held something long and sharp. Serrated steel blades grinned hungrily at him.

The cutting seemed to take forever, but he was conscious and screaming for most of it.

CHAPTER FOUR

A shallow grave for a murdered girl. Shovel, dirt, stone, flesh; all of it cold, blue, gray and black. A color poem of burial. Christian sweated through his jacket, pulling rocks like rotten teeth from the barren ground. At any moment, he expected the icy clutch of Katrina's fingers to grab his wrist, the frantic shuttering movement of her reanimated corpse as it clawed out of the dirt. The fact of her death squirmed in Christian's gut like a worm.

Nightmares every night left him a shaking husk, dreaming awake through his days. Every step forward was also a step back toward the cold plot of soil where they had buried her. Every day was a ruin. His body a wasted shadow, his soul a stained-glass window, leached of its color from the sin hidden inside. He was coming apart.

Ten nights after the return from
Nasana
, he stood in front of the mirror, staring. He had lost too much weight; he had never been bulky, but now each bone and muscle stood out in stark relief. Veins coiled and bunched along his arms and the lines of his torso. He ran his hands over his stomach, tracing the edges of his abdominal muscles with his fingers, hardly feeling the ragged nails, bitten to the quick. He rarely ate, yet was never hungry.

His boyfriend Nick would have loved Christian like this—he had always had a thing for the thin young twinks, the younger and skinnier the better.

He prodded at his belly, wincing at a spot of pain. He traced his fingers over a lump just under his sternum. It felt spongy, then hard, then spongy again. He prodded, feeling it give an inch before springing back. Something pushed out from under the skin of his back, and he whirled to stare over his shoulder at the mirror. Another bump, pointed like an accusing finger, arose and subsided. He turned back to face the mirror, eyes wide with shock, brow sheened with sweat. Another long, protruding bump, like a leech, extended outward from the flesh of his belly. Then, when the movement dipped lower, panic bubbled up his throat. He dropped his towel. One of his testicles lumped and bulged with movement, like a sac filled with worms. As he watched, it grew to three times its size, pulsing and throbbing. He whimpered. Terror sweat ran down his neck. He reached down with trembling fingers, and just before he touched himself, a bolt of screaming pain ripped through his stomach.

Something was inside his stomach. He felt it moving, shifting, and growing. He shook his head at his reflection, at the strange bulges and agonizing coiling. His stomach tore open with a sound like thick wet cloth. Long, weeping gashes opened like red mouths, and in the churned red meat of his gut, pale shapes wriggled like enormous worms. No, not worms: fingers. Fingers green with rot and tipped with long, cracked nails painted orange and black. He drew in breath to scream, and could pull no air into his lungs. Which was odd; he could
see
his lungs past the fingers, and they looked as pink and firm as a pair of good lamb chops. Katrina's hands tore free with a final, horrible squelch. They began tearing gobbets of bloody meat from his chest. Blood spattered the mirror in idiot scrawls. Her face pushed close to the surface, and she bared her broken teeth at him through his own rent flesh. Green and yellow fluids spattered her face, painting her blackened teeth with glaring color. The bathroom echoed with the squish of meat and the splatter of blood. She began to emerge from him, like a blood-engorged moth from a cocoon of flesh. He threw his head from side-to-side, the tendons standing out like steel cables in his neck, his fingernails peeling back against the porcelain of the sink. His body jerked and spasmed, thrown from side to side by her struggles as she clawed her way out of his body. He screamed soundlessly as she heaved her way out of him, twisting in his gut like a worm in an apple. She turned, and reached for his face with grave-raddled fingers.