Thirteen Specimens (6 page)

     I stood over her, just looking down at her for a while, and one big fat tear plopped right on her foot with its
frosted pink toe nails which still had a strong chemical smell.

     After going to the living room, watching a few more minutes of the movie while I toweled off my hands, I shut the thing off, stopped it in the middle of a very romantic scene, froze it right in that perfect moment of love and ecstasy. I returned to the bathroom. The blood was spreading from beneath her like big butterfly wings so I shut myself in with her as if the door would contain it. I bent down over her, close to Parina. I kissed her full, open lips. I sucked her entire lower lip in my mouth and it tasted of salty buttery popcorn and there was still a faint smell of beer on her breath. I bit her lip. I tried to bite it off, it was so full and succulent, I wanted it in me, I wanted her in me so we would be joined forever but it wouldn’t bite off, so I worked the knife out of her brown neck, wiped it a little so it was less slippery, and stuck it through her lip in the middle, sort of sawing off to one side so that it hung half off her chin. Now I could bite the rest of it off...more like tearing it off to one side.

     I chewed it. It was soft but rubbery. I choked because I had to swallow it whole like a raw oyster, ultimately. I gasped for breath afterward. I still had tears on my cheeks though partly from the choking.

     Like a cat, I hunkered even closer to the floor. I licked some of the blood from the pool, but it wasn’t intimate enough. Instead, I switched to licking the blood still flowing out of the slit that had opened wide like another mouth in her neck. I pushed my tongue into it as if it were her honeyed garden and her blood flowed in rhythmic heavy wave after wave over my tongue and down my throat. It was a beautiful bonding. It was poetic. Her blood sustained me, gave me a sustenance I had known so little of.

     I wanted more, however. I wanted her so inside me that we would be as one.

     In the kitchen I found another knife but this one’s long blade was thin and serrated. With this, I sawed off a toe. The smallest toe on her left foot, so I could swallow it more easily with a swig of my third Corona, with no lime or salt to compete with the taste of my Parina and there was salt enough in her beautiful rose red blood.

     I didn’t want to consume her eyes because I wanted them on me in their snapshot beauty but her lids were closed now so I had to slice them off, which left her with a ragged and ugly effect but at least we could see each other now.

     After I ate the lids, so she would no longer be blinded by her father to her kinship with me, our sisterly love for each other, I stretched out beside her on the tiles and rested my head on her chest while her warm life fluid soaked into my clothing and dyed my skin. Her chest was still warm too, her shapely breasts bigger than mine, soft as pillows, I could smell the soft musk of her skin through her t-shirt, and then I sat up to quickly cut the t-shirt away so I could taste the life-giving nipples of those breasts...take them in so they would nourish me forever. With her generous neck and now her breasts, she was an even more abundant provider than Cchinnamasta. America is the land of plenty, Parina.

*     *     *

      I am surprised that Dad has come to see me here, three times already. Not with his wife, though. How could such a homely woman have given birth to so lovely a daughter? It almost makes me imagine my Wasp Mom managed to give birth to Parina after all.

     I don’t know if Dad comes because he pities me. Or if because with Parina gone, I’m the only daughter he has left. Or maybe, maybe he sees her inside me. Her eyes glowing from mine. I don’t know which of these I hope to be true, if any.

     But sometimes I think he comes to torment me. Pretending to pity me, but wanting to pierce me with his big Indian eyes with their ivory whites and their heavy lids. He’s trying to remind me, like my mole, of who I am. His daughter. His flesh and blood. I am inescapably Indian. Well, if that is his intent, he’s too late. With Parina a part of me, I know I am Indian and I am proud of it. Proud. You can’t give it to me, Dad, because I already have it...and you can’t dangle it before me to taunt me with it because you can’t take it away, either.

     Sometimes I think he torments me as if to say, teasingly, you really wanted me. I’m the one you wanted, not Parina. And you know, I would have accepted him instead. That would do. And maybe some day, if he gets too near, if the watchers turn their heads, maybe I will have him too, after all. Then with him and Parina combined, I will be even more Indian than the both of them.

     And, within my skin, we three will be a family.

Six Hundred and Sixty-Six Women

1. EVE is a mystery to all who know her name.

2. Since she rose from ‘neath the roses FLORA’s never been the same.

3. HELENA wears her corset so tight her eyes turn black.

4. A kiss from little JILL is a blood-splashing attack.

5. – 63. Heaps of nameless women were all buried in one mass grave.

64., 65., 66. JAN, RENE, and ANN share one man as their slave.

67.
LIZ’s squirming babe was fathered by the great Old Ones.

68. When she grew up, CHRISTINE was awfully fond of stabbing nuns.

69. RHONDA likes to flay living sheep with just her teeth.

70. Peeling off her own skin, JODY shows what writhes beneath.

71. – 88. Prettily-painted hookers were trapped when their brothel burned.

72., 73. SHANNON and her half-formed twin won’t say how their pay’s earned.

74. MARIA reads obituaries to lull her kids to sleep.

75. Born without her eyes, CAROL wishes just to weep.

76. JENNY lives inside the corpse of a beached sperm whale.

77. Extracting her own bones, SHERRI built herself a jail.

78. - 203. Most the village wives sneaked off and vanished in one night.

204., 205. Over a sale item, two
BETHs killed each other in a fight.

206. Poor befuddled CHRIS has still not figured out that she’s not real.

207. Pounding herself with stones or bricks is JOAN’s attempt to feel.

208.
PATRICIA’s never caught a glimpse of the man she married.

209. Gnawing her toes to stubs is what TRISH does when she’s harried.

210. – 223. Witches in a coven plot to overthrow the modern gods.

224., 225., 226. PAM, CELINE and TARA survived the plague against the odds.

227. ERICA suffocated when she woke up on the moon.

228. Even dissected on the slab NAN keeps humming that old tune.

229. – 665. Vikings raiding the suburbs didn’t leave a single mom.

666. At the antiques shop JOY set off an old atomic bomb.

Monsters

    
There was a man, human, with a gash to the bone across his right cheek, his ear messily bisected as well. His collar was stiff with drying gore but the bleeding had been stopped with a spray, probably at the factory where he had received the injury, though the fissure still needed to be mended and the man was at the triage counter demanding painkillers. Another Earth colonist, his hand wrapped in gauze wet with fresher blood, was also becoming agitated with another triage worker. “I have M-670, you know,” he said threateningly. “You want me to open this?” He plucked at the end of the spooled gauze. “You want me to fling a little of this on you? Yeah?”

     Fleck watched a security man wade through the milling people – all of them seeming stunned, even those who weren’t damaged or ill – heading toward the counter with his hand poised over his shock wand, but the shriek of an infant called away Fleck’s attention. He craned his neck, yet couldn’t see where the cry had come from in the thick of the waiting room, where on a large VT screen near the ceiling a commercial aimed at the KeeZee race showed pigs’ disembodied heads with wings sprouting from their
temples flying around in a circle singing in a chorus of children’s voices, “Meat-meat, meat-meat...” while a KeeZee boy with a head like a monkey-wrench dipped in skin gaped up at the vision, masticating air in anticipation.

     Then, there was another sound that made Fleck forget the cry of the child and the chorus of pigs’ heads. This sound was like both of those in combination: a chorus of piercing screams. There seemed to be three or four voices overlapping, each like the screech of a hawk, but sustained and ululating.

     “Here she comes,” said Dr. Midas, standing beside him. They had been expecting this one, having been called down specifically – Midas to head the emergency procedures while Fleck observed, because he had no familiarity with this race. Later, Fleck would perform the reconstructive work himself. He was highly regarded in his field. Midas joked that it was Fleck with his golden touch who should own the older surgeon’s name.

     “Oh,” was all Fleck could say, dazed by the sight of the thing as the paramedics half led, half dragged (and was someone even pushing it, hidden behind its bulk?) the being into the ER. They barely squeezed its mass through the double doors. The sound from it increased terribly and Fleck had never seen the cries of one victim draw the attention of all the other patients who waited – often for hours – to be ministered to, distracting them from their own anxieties.

     “Beautiful, isn’t she?” Midas said, smiling.

     Fleck looked over at him to see if he were being sarcastic, then looked back at the wounded entity, which despite all the alien races and mutations he had seen in this city since his arrival, eight months earlier, had to be the most hideous sentient life form he had ever set eyes upon.

     The monster was somewhat caterpillar-like, an indeterminate number of legs obscured by the bloated segments that pulsed with its labored progress. The brown flesh was dark up front, where the forelimbs and what passed for a head were located, though the long body became more translucent further back, showing layers of fibrous lace beneath the glossy outer skin. Dangling strands and bundled clots of this net-like lace hung out of the gaping wounds inflicted on the creature. A silken embroidered cloth, strapped like a saddle to its back in one place, apparently covered a row of bulbous protuberances. Symbols had been branded into two segments of the grub body, and at the very end of it, a series of apertures were encircled by tattoos.

     Midas explained to his colleague, “The tapestry covers some nodules they grow by symbolically implanting a seed they know will inflame the surrounding tissue. Like a pearl growing around a grain of sand. But they have to hide these orbs from the eyes of anyone but their mates. The brands – that one right there is the parents’ family crest, and that one belongs to her impatient fiancé. And the tattoos – heh – they’re a potent curse to anyone who might think about poking around the back door...”

     As the paramedics and now some of the ER staff fought to get the creature around the corner of the triage counter and into an off-shooting corridor, the assembly of querulous patients moving very willingly out of its way, Midas pointed toward the vast body and said, “We could theoretically cut her off from that point on – it’s all useless tissue, nothing vital in there that can’t be rerouted – they gorge them for some aesthetic reason, maybe to make them too cumbersome to run away from the males – heh – but then she’d be more disfigured than she already is...”

     Fleck saw that the man with the stained, gauze-bound
hand stared in horror at the snail trail of blood the entity was leaving across the polished floor. Already, two blankly-determined robots were whisking into the reception area to clean up and disinfect. The blood was pouring down the thing’s flanks from great crusted scabs that the paramedics had no doubt spray-sealed, to little effect. The most serious injuries seemed to be to the head, though without knowing what the head should look like, Fleck couldn’t be sure. It had no face – just a crater, drooling threads of ichor. As alien as the alien was, its life fluid was a disturbingly human red in color.

     He had no idea from which places along the body came the hawk-like chorus (oddly, it didn’t seem to emanate from the face crater), though these cries were becoming ragged and tapering away, to be replaced with a wheeze that was just as horrible, if less painful to the ears.

     The being was almost into the corridor, and Midas touched Fleck’s elbow to indicate it was time to follow. As they started forward, a stabbing scream caused Fleck to look back toward the front of the sizable waiting area. That unseen infant again, shrieking like an inconsolable ghost child. How could it be that he, a veteran healer – and particularly in a place as full of crying children as the city called Punktown – had not become immune to such a sound?

     As he was looking back, Fleck saw that the swimming pigs’ heads had floated off the VT
’s screen and were circling the waiting area near the ceiling, even though the commercial had ended and a game show had come back on. They no longer sang, but smiled anthropomorphically. One of the heads drifted down toward a jittery man too nervous to be seated; Fleck guessed that he was overdosed on buttons or even purple vortex. The man’s eyes went wide and he scrambled backwards, bumping into people, turned to flee from the grinning head as it continued to follow him, swooping down very close. A gang kid clutching a scorched ray wound to his shoulder pushed at the addict angrily for bumping into him, and the man fell to the floor, yelping and babbling, “Meat! Meat! Meat!” as the disembodied head bobbed only inches from him. A nurse elbowed through the throng, and used a spray can to mist the man’s body. The spell was broken and the head rose like a released balloon. Another staff member pointed the VT’s remote and touched an ad-banishing button. All of the porcine holographic heads vanished.

     “Fleck?” said Midas, waiting in the corridor’s threshold. He nodded at the river of blood. “Watch your step.”

*     *     *

     “The Kalians and the Stems do stuff like this to their females, too,” said Dr. Midas, as he worked over the great drugged form that nearly filled Operating Room 17. It lay on a tarp on the floor. Steam rose from one of the wounds he had cleared the thick scabs from. “Deep,” he muttered, “deep.” He resumed what he’d been saying. “A Kalian woman might have acid thrown in her face...if she isn’t stoned to death first...”

     “What did she do, doctor?” one of the nurses spoke up.

     “Premarital sex, Wanda,” he said. Then he wagged a bloody probe at the nurse. “Let that be a lesson to you.”

     “How did they make these wounds on her?” Fleck asked, staring into the well-like injury Midas hovered over. “Some sort of weapon?”

     “With their mouths, my boy. Their mouths – like lampreys, with retractable teeth.”

     “But who did it to her?” Wanda asked. “Clerics?”

     “Her family, Wanda. It was their responsibility to punish her, so as to save face.”

     “My God. But how did they feel about having to do that?”

     “They must not have felt too badly,” Fleck murmured grimly. “They did it, didn’t they?”

     “Were they trying to kill her, ultimately?” Wanda persisted.

     “Nope,” Midas said. “Mutilate her, but leave her alive as a warning to all.”

     “And her fiancé, who seduced her?” asked Fleck.

     “Banished from the community. Disgraced, but intact. He’ll teleport back home, and have to find another community to take him in.”

     A deep, rumbling gurgle resonated through the slumbering thing’s body. The vibration actually went through Fleck’s soles, startling him. Disturbingly, it had almost sounded to him like a string of bass tone words. “Is she sufficiently under anesthesia?”

     “Don’t worry – just talking in her sleep,” Midas replied. A sizzling sound as he worked, both his hands sunk to their wrists in the wound. “Well, trying to talk. The females’ vocal cords are severed as children.”

     “It’s appalling,” Fleck said as if to himself, looking over toward the head area, currently hidden under a cloth. “Unthinkable...”

     Midas raised his head, helmeted like the others’. “Still not used to this, are you?”

     Fleck felt somewhat embarrassed, kept his eyes from his friend’s as he grumbled, “I don’t ever want to be used to this.”

     “Well, I didn’t say you should ever become unconcerned, my boy. But you have to get used to it, if you’re going to stay in Punktown.”

     At twenty-eight, Fleck had up until now lived in a smallish Earth colony on a moon of the Tikkihottos’ home world. He had been to their planet for a year as an intern, and while there had seen some ugly sights in emergency wards, but nothing on the scale of Punktown, here on planet Oasis. He had thought the Tikkihottos’ world had been hellish, compared to the sedate colony he called home...but Punktown made that seem like a utopia.

     Up until Punktown, his skills as a reconstructive surgeon had been mostly honed by repairing hovercar and industrial injuries, congenital deformities, mutations. By reconfiguring the countenances and bodies of the vain. He had secretly, self-consciously thought of himself as an artist...and he did, in fact, like to paint, though he had seldom showed friends or family his work and displayed none of it openly, even in his own apartment. But here, in Punktown, there was little time for delicacy or finesse. He had had to step up his preferred pace...so as to move one patient out and bring in the next. Assembly line work...

     “I hate this,” he said. “All of this. The gang killings. The serial killings. The killings without even a reason of insanity to explain them...”

     “Your talents are best served here, Fleck,” Midas said. “This is where you’re needed...exactly because it’s so ugly.”

     “How can you stand it, sometimes? Sometimes it must...it has to...horrify you.”

     “Well...I worked for a time as an intern in a burn unit for children. We called them – away from the parents, of course – toasty tots.”

    
“What?”

     “We had to, my boy.” Midas lowered his gaze to his patient. “We had to make jokes. We had to go in there every day, have a coffee, and get to work. We had to get past the burnt flesh of children...”

     “But you can’t get past it. You can’t. It’s the very thing you’re working on...”

     “Well, I guess you can’t get past the burnt flesh,” Midas amended. “It was that they were children, we had to get past.”

*     *     *

     The next time they shared an operating room, it was Midas who observed while Fleck worked – rather self-consciously, as if he were at his easel. But Midas assured him, “You’re doing great, on her. Just great. I knew you’d be fine with it...”

     The saddle-like tapestry was unbuckled, set aside. While he infused one of the patched-up but still shocking wounds with a solution to engender localized cloning, Fleck raised his eyes to the half-dozen shiny brown nodes along the back and said, “Too sexy, huh?”

     “Ohhh, yeah. Please cover them up again, before I dampen my
undies.”

     “I’d like to see their mouths, that can inflict injuries like these,” Fleck groused, waving a gloved hand over the circular pit.