A voice—
her
voice?—dripped into his head.
Give me your tired, your homeless, and your poor…
“The fuck?”
Come to me all ye who travail and are heavy laden…and I will refresh thee…
T.J. could only lurch when her teeth clipped off his right testis; he couldn’t scream. He didn’t seem to be able to hear either, as if the ruined church sucked up all sound. But somehow, in fragments of jerking ill-lit horror…he could see.
He could see her chewing it, crunching down as if on a persimmon.
Good, so good. Sustenance! But…you must be hungry too, and you all shall eat…
Her throat gulped; she swallowed and smiled. Then her head lowered to the opened scrotum, sucked out the remaining testicle.
Strong meat belongeth to them that are poor.
The face rose again, then lowered to T.J.’s lips, as if to give him a kiss. His mouth opened against his will, and then the raw testicle was slipped through her lips and into T.J.’s.
The ball felt hot on his tongue. His eyes wouldn’t close, and it was no wonder. For it was not the carnal red-haired woman who knelt naked before him now.
“Tommy!”
It was the gas-bloated corpse of his mother.
“Be a good boy and eat all your food. There are people starving in the world, you know.”
T.J. did as his mother requested. He began to eat—
««—»»
—was the first to react, he whipped out his butterfly-knife, his herpetic genitals still dangling, and lunged at this crazy bitch who’d just bitten off T.J.’s nuts. Marlon moved quickly enough that she’d have no way to avoid the thrust.
This bitch is gonna die right here, right now.
Only—
She was gone, she was gone and someone else was in the nave. He blinked and tried to reconcile what he saw. Standing in front of him was Captain Choi, that same skinny smile and slit eyes, the shiny angled face. Marlon lay not in the church now but tied down naked to a table in the open quad of Camp 6-H, about 20 clicks west of Hue. Yeah, yeah, now he remembered. Bravo 2/37 had been ambushed; half the 2nd Platoon got chopped, and the other half…brought here.
Choi’s North Vietnam Regular uniform looked crisp-starched, fine red piping lining the collar.
“I’ll tell ya anything ya wanna know, I swear to God,” Marlon sang like a canary.
Choi did not respond. He up-ended a box over Marlon’s chest, and then he could feel them.
Hundreds of them.
He didn’t know what they were just then, but he’d find out a little later when the 3rd ACR and 1st Air Cav busted this shit house open on an extraction raid.
They were blood chiggers from the Red River. Charlie liked to use them a lot; they dug deep and laid eggs, like shitloads of eggs for each bug. They’d heard all about these things.
“JESUS CHRIST, WIPE ’EM OFF!” Marlon pleaded. “I TOLD YA, I’LL TELL YA ANYTHING!”
But Captain Choi only tilted his head, and spoke in his refined accent, “There is nothing I want you to tell me, Private.”
Then he up-ended another box over Marlon’s groin.
At once, they began to burrow. They began to
dig
—deep into the soil of Marlon’s flesh. Screaming, he felt them crawling around beneath his skin, deeper, deeper, ever searching for a suitable nesting place. They dug for hours as Marlon lay clenching in this scintillating agony until—
Choi freed Marlon’s hands from their constraints and lay a riffling knife on his sheened chest.
Marlon knew what he had to do…
Yeah!
He grabbed that knife and began to dig them out—
««—»»
—woman had disappeared, and so had the church. Craze blinked, confused. No, he wasn’t in the church—he knew where he was. Back
there.
The Clifton Perkins Pavilion at the Crownsville State Hospital. And the same two techs who always fucked with him—Matthews and Johnson—were snapping on the canvas bednet just like they had when he was a kid—
“My! You’re a
big
boy now!”
Craze puked himself when he looked up and saw Nurse Havleck, those devil eyes in the freckled face, her cap, dress, and stockings so white they glowed.
“Never got to juice you right…but now I can.”
Matthew’s hand crammed the rubber block in his mouth; Johnson chuckled as he smeared the redux paste on his temples. Then Nurse Havleck’s elegant finger snapped on the WARM UP switch on the Somatics, Inc. Thymatron Series electro-convulsant therapy unit. The machine made a sound like a Polaroid recharging, a nearly subaural whine. A silver knob read STIMULUS DURATION; Nurse Havleck turned it to MAX. Johnson placed the headset over Craze’s temples, plugged the line cord into the jack.
“Let’s cook his brain for awhile,” the nurse suggested. “Then we’ll use this uretal-probe I swiped from upstairs and do his cock.”
The rubber plug blocked Craze’s screams, but he could still see, his eyes shock wide as they watched the nurse’s pretty finger touch the TREAT button and—
CLICK—
—“Aunt” Velma in the foster home. No, she wasn’t really his aunt, that’s just what she called herself. She loomed before Willy, a large woman in a floral-print dress, a huge hand the size of a small ham grabbed him by the jaw forcing his mouth open. In horror he saw the other hand contained a small jar of
Jean-Paul’s Extra Hot Louisiana Red Sauce
. The smell of unwashed underarms and cheap perfume almost gagged him as she brought the jar of hot sauce to his mouth.
“Boy you’ve been sinnin’ agin, an’ we gots to burn that devil right outta you; drink this up an burn out that devil!” she thundered as she poured the concoction down his throat and released him to fall on the floor gasping and spitting. Blinded, Willy couldn’t even offer any resistance as he felt his pants being tugged down to his ankles, he knew what was coming next, and now there wouldn’t be anyone around to stop her and take him to the hospital.
“Now we’ll burn out that devil for sure,” he heard her say, as the hot iron pressed into the small of his back, “this time we’ll do the job right and burn ’im out for sure; we gots all night,” she crooned as the iron burned into his buttocks for the first of many times. Even over the stink of scorched flesh he could smell her cheap perfume.
But much worse was the
sizzle…
(v)
They died quickly, two of them I didn’t even have to touch, their fears took them, what they thought was real. The other two I tore to pieces; I’m such a bitch, I was hungry and excited, I just couldn’t help myself. They were sinners, they just wanted to cause pain; but then am I really that different from them? I could have terrified them and left them huddled in the darkness with their fear; I could’ve, but I didn’t, I ripped and tore and covered myself with their blood, I rolled in their offal as I ate their hearts and livers, then I touched myself until I came… I wasn’t always like this, I remember when I met him, back in Eire a long, long time ago. He said that he would show me what was real, what was true, that he’d make me an angel and that I’d live forever; just like him.
He didn’t tell me the whole truth. I think I will live forever, but I don’t think I’m an angel. He said I was Sciftan, that we owned the world and could take what we wanted. I asked him about love and he told me I must prove my love for him by my obedience, that only by total obedience could I show him that my love was true.
I wonder about the man, though, the poet. I took him home, made him forget. I didn’t want him to wake up to the leavings of what I’d done. He seems very much like me. A poet, yes. He can feel things as deeply as I can.
I think he wants to love like I do.
Yes, I think that he might be like me, and that’s what I’m afraid of.
That means he’s part of it too.
THIRTEEN
Effusion
(i)
“You’re shitting me, Jill!”
Brock looked at Cordesman as though he’d walked in with his pants down. “Come on, Captain. Can’t you read?”
Cordesman pushed his hair out of his eyes, an instinct by now. Jill Brock pointed to the well-placed signs. NO SMOKING IN MORGUE SUITE. COMBUSTIBLE COMPOUNDS.
Cordesman nearly mourned when he crushed the fresh Camel out under his shoe sole. Beyond Brock’s anteroom, he noticed sights so familiar he scarcely reacted. There were no neat metal drawers in this morgue—he’d never seen drawers in
any
morgue—but instead metal “deposition” platforms, i.e. tables. On each table was a Parke-Davis cadaver bag. He’d seen this, literally, a thousand times. The only vision that gave a hitch to his gut was one bag in particular.
It was tiny: a baby.
“Fusiformal match?” he dared question her expertise.
“That’s correct, Captain. I didn’t make it up for fun.”
“Sixteen all in 64s with case numbers that began
a week
ago?”
“Yes. You guys want a Coke or something?”
“None for me, thanks,” Kerr said.
“Well I could sure use some caffeine,” Cordesman admitted.
Brock flicked a pasty hand. “The fridge.”
Cordesman passed the main lab counter, a periodic chart and an anatomical chart. And a coy bumper sticker stuck to the wall: DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES, BUT THEY CAN STILL GIVE YOU AIDS. WASH YOUR HANDS AFTER ALL CONTACT WITH THE DEAD!
Piss on the dead,
Cordesman thought.
I need a drink…but I’ll settle for a Coke.
He yanked open the Kenmore refrigerator, reached in—
“Fuck!”
—and quailed.
Brock and Kerr burst into a round of laughter like that of psychotic trolls.
“Gotcha, Captain,” Brock celebrated.
No Cokes occupied the refrigerator, only clear, plastic evidence bags containing human body parts. One part was a nose. Another bag contained two feet. And another—the kicker—contained the severed head of a little blonde-haired girl.
Nine, maybe ten years old.
Brock and Kerr
jammed
; they were hooting it up.
“Always wanted to get Stone Face,” Brock laughed.
Kerr: “Hey, Captain? How’s the Coke?”
Cordesman slammed the fridge door shut, mortified. “The Coke’s great, Kerr. Almost as good as the first one you buy on Pike Street after your transfer to the Meter Unit. You people are perverse.”
“No we’re not, Captain,” Brock clarified. “We’re cops.”
Cordesman lit another Camel. “Don’t like it? Sue me. Report me to the Public Safety Director. And what’s this shit about the red hairs?”
Brock was a walking broomstick in her autopsy greens. Cordesman had to admit: skinny and close to breastless, electrocution hair, glasses thick as coasters—hell, he didn’t care, he could go for her.
She’s probably a fireball in bed,
he thought. The nasally, sinitic voice he could overlook.
“So the fun’s over?” Brock quelled her smile. “Okay, sir. If you ever took the time to learn how to turn your computer on, you would’ve seen the cross-reff two days ago.”
“Does this have anything to do with the 64 we had this morning? Lehrling, the Wallingford novelist?”