The Nameless II
‘NAMELESS' (continued)
To wake from a sleep brought by a bitter crying jag is to taste dry salt on the lips, to feel eyelids swollen, as hard to pull apart as if they had been sewn. And for a moment, Leah also felt a blessed, amnesiac oblivion. Then the night dreams completely fled in the light of waking and the memories came crashing down upon her like an avalanche.
The Junkie Stone heavy in her hands, her chest, her gut - elongated arms, clawing grabbing at her - a syringe in the neck - Siekan's kisses, poison-sweet - the wrenching, tearing unbearable pain, at the moment of giving birth...whether to monster or baby.
She shuddered. Never ever to feel that pain again, for the rest of her life, that was what she wanted. A small resolve, but it was something to cling to, like a lifeline. Hand over hand, she pulled herself actually and emotionally to a standing position, ready for action. Any muscle with the remotest connection to her stitched belly turned torturer here, but she gritted her teeth, got herself finally upright, feet on the cold, dusty concrete floor. She spat into her hands, ungummed her eyes. Light came from a trapdoor at one end of the cellar, beneath it a twisted flight of stairs. She climbed up, into the familiar urban wasteland, the half demolished warehouse, shadowed by a freeway overpass, even at this early morning hour thundering with commuter traffic. Naked as she was, she squatted and pissed a yellow river. Car horns sounded from the overpass, and she lifted one hand without looking up, gave the commuter pervs the finger: May-you-crash-in-flames!
From the sound of it, they did.
She grinned, something she had not done for a very long while. Then using any muscle except those in her belly, she stood again, walked stiff but proud back to her lair. In the cellar again, she hooked the filthy blanket up with her toes, pulled it around her, and stood for a moment regarding her reflection in the shard of mirror that hung dagger-like over her cot. Well, she'd looked worse. The reflection was death pale, except for the hair, even the dyed red ends darkened by dirt, and the river-trails of kohl down her face. But her eyes were angry, their grey tempered into the hardest of steel.
"Mother," she whispered into the mirror.
A flash of light, a figure appearing over her shoulder. Karolin/Caroline, the Trashwife.
"Watch my back, Mother, with the sharpest, deadliest, dirtiest of your blades. Because I'm going after them. To get them, give them a taste of their own medicine. The drugs they sell, they'll feel in their arms, their gut, their brain. Never enough, a continual withdrawal, worse than any birth pangs because they last forever, and ever and ever. Amen."
The figure over her shoulder mouthed a word at her, then vanished.
"Unsex? Myself? Why gladly, Mother."
(Lucy Sussex)
There was a tear in her womb where the Junkie Stone had once sat, cold and hard and leaking junk juice like defrosting meat leaked blood.
She felt exhilarated and it took her back to the good times, those rare times when the place was safe and maybe there was someone who cared, so you could take the joy with no deep hard gnaw of worry.
That was not what she would take to the Night Brethren. She would take the bad times. The times she woke up with long, deep cuts in her arms which took forever to heal. The times too many when she started the day with a sore cunt and no idea, no fucking idea, who'd been up her. The loss of family and future, the filth she'd poured out; all of that she'd give them.
She needed help. Six helpers. Not one functioning addict. Not a businessman, not a mother of three with a talent for makeup. What she wanted were the ones who'd lost so much they had regained innocence.
She found:
A man so close to death he had rats gnawing at his naked, grey toes.
A woman skin and bones, all her flesh sucked out by the junk.
A girl full of spunk, full of spunk 22 times a day, all of it for the junk.
An old man. Five kids, the grandkids, every last one of them, curse his name like he was a disease.
A boy, all pretty with his pale skin, his pink lips, this boy lost all soul and brain cells. Toothless, gummy, like a baby pretty baby.
And the last one; she went home for that one. Her sister, a ten-year shut-in with the shit delivered and sometimes food, the stench of the baby who burned to death like a flesh bonfire settled in the house.
That was seven, and they walked on, forward, to fuck over the Night Brethren.
(Kaaron Warren)
The street was grey, the buildings made of fog. It was neither night, nor day, and Leah had the distinct feeling that this was the end of things, that the world was disintegrating around her. Mist gathered at her feet. The sound of the posse's footsteps, hard and clattering against cement, now became squelching whispers. Then the buildings weren't buildings anymore, they were great billowing shapes around her. She became aware that she didn't know where she was going, where these Night Brethren even were; but somehow if she just put one foot in front of the other...
Drifting in and out...
A swamp, clouds of gas, the cold scent of mist... four figures, black and hard against the swelling grey shapes.
Her six companions ran, like dogs to their master. She kept moving, forward, forward, drifting... falling apart...
Snarling, growling, shrieking. All a long way away. A splash of crimson blood threaded through the grey.
Then a hard, black hand around her wrist. "How much do you want to live?"
"Not at all," Leah smiled. She looked in her hand for the stone, but her hand had disappeared. "I was never alive in the first place."
(Kim Wilkins)
‘O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?'
Edgar Allan Poe ‘A Dream Within a Dream'.
Lucy woke with a start at the blast of a single shotgun. Its deep, throaty boom was muffled by distance and the thick walls surrounding her, but she had heard it fire many times before and knew it well. Even as the rags of the dream slowly untangled and fell away, she wondered why. Why just one?
She pressed her right hand to the wound in her chest, sensing a powerful pain there, waiting. She didn't try to sit up. The real world held cracked ribs, failing hearts, and cold necessity. She longed to linger in the halfway state between asleep and fully awake as long as she possibly could.
Needles and childbirth. An urge to weep filled her. The surgeon had told her she wouldn't dream under the anaesthetic. Maybe the gas had gone off. Less a dream than she would have liked, with shadowy, threatening figures reaching for her in a world remade from unfamiliar shapes. Some she recognised; some she did not. The sleazy prick who'd asked for sex in exchange for a lift had been in there, for sure. In real life, he'd called her a cunt and left her behind. Three days later, she'd seen the wreck of him and his bike, picked clean, from the safety of the semitrailer she'd stowed away inside.
The pain of losing her baby was worse than anything she faced now.
Another gunshot, then two more in quick succession. The same shotgun. No voices. That was a bad sign. If the surgeon didn't check on her soon, she would try to sit up, staples be damned. She was lucky to be alive at all, her heart the way it was.
The way it had been. Their crazy plan appeared to have worked, despite all its practical impossibilities. Perhaps she had been wrong to tell them to give up on her, although anyone else would have.
"What do you think we are?" the surgeon's wife had said. "Stone-hearted?"
"But a donor-"
"The dead are innocent," the surgeon had firmly said, and that had quelled all argument. Even as he had prepped her for the table, he had refused to tell Lucy who the donor had been. "Let her remain nameless," he had said. "I'd worry more about compatibility and rejection, if I were you."
The feeling of a stone under her breast came back to her from the dream, and the old man's words came with it. "How it weighs you down..."
The shotgun blasted again, and now she could hear heavy footsteps moving through the hospital. She tried to count them. At least two sets, maybe more. Maybe many more.
Tears pricked her eyes. She clenched her fists at her sides. It wasn't fair. The fence was supposed to keep anything out, at least until they could get moving again. That's what they'd promised her. "When you're eating and walking," the surgeon had told her, "we'll consider leaving. Not before."
She wished now that she had never come to them, that she had taken the vile ride offered by the biker and been killed with him instead. Her dicky heart had cost enough life already--the baby, for one, and very nearly her own. That's where the count should have ended. Now there was just one gun, which meant just one person left to fight, and she had dreamed right through it. She should have killed herself and spared them all.
It wasn't over yet. With a shuddering groan, she forced herself upright. The pain was unbelievable, but this was how she would meet her fate. With her eyes open, knowing what she had done.
One final blast, and then a door crashed open nearby, deafeningly loud. A thunder-roll of feet poured into the room next to hers. The handle to Lucy's door rattled.
Her heart--her new heart--convulsed in her chest.
When the first of the outsiders burst in, Lucy recognised her immediately. It was Leah, the girl who had helped get Lucy out of Sydney--but at the same time Leah from the dream and more recent times, pale-skinned and sick-eyed, with wet blood on her chin and a terrible hole where her chest should be.
Behind Leah, the ghastly tide wavered.
"That's right," Lucy told the outsiders, only half-lying. "I'm one of you."
Leah stared as though in recognition but said nothing. Despite the wound, she was still standing--and eating and walking, like everyone outside the fence. Like Lucy would have been, once her new heart became truly part of her--either way--thanks to Siekan & Sorien Pharmaceuticals, and the virus, and the accident.
Leah and the rest of her kind considered their options. Then slowly they began to retreat, shuffling and rocking from side to side. They would wander off in search of other prospects elsewhere, Lucy knew, now the compound was empty of fresh human hosts. But that was a small consolation.
Leah was the last to leave. Did she really recognise Lucy, or did the connection run far deeper than that? The hole in her chest was cleaner than anything a shotgun could make, and there was a wounded innocence in those eyes.
Lucy fell like a dead thing back onto the bed.
The surgeon had been right. It would've been far better never to know.
(Sean Williams)
...to be concluded...
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