Decay Inevitable

“We both need you.” She came to him and unbuttoned his shirt, looking up coyly through her fringe as she had when he came to rescue her from the travellers. He saw now how that had been a test. A trap, even. He had unwittingly created a bond in that moment that had doomed him as surely as the fly accepting the courtesy of the spider in his parlour.

Will looked down as Sadie gently peeled the shirt back from his shoulders. The rot that was displayed made Will gag. The muscle had stripped back almost to the bone, the edges of the wound were furred and discoloured, slowly spreading outwards to the uninfected areas of his body like a recalcitrant flame on damp paper.

“I’m dying,” Will said simply.

“Yes,” Sadie confirmed. “You’re being consumed.” Though she said the words gravely, she was racked with giggles. She covered her mouth with her hand and stepped back from him, her eyes becoming wet. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to make fun of the dead. Or rather, the dead to be. But it was a good joke.”

“I’m cracking a rib here,” Will said, flatly. “What have you done to me?”

“I’ve touched you deeply,” Sadie said, and she was off again, chuckling into her palms.

“You’ve poisoned me.”

“No,” she said, hastily. “I’ve not poisoned you. I’ve taken from you, because my child... our child... needs nourishment from her father. That’s the way it is here. A true two-parent upbringing.”

Will licked his lips. “That,” he said, pointing at the sac, “is not my child.”

“In the church,” Sadie said softly. “Do you remember how I fucked you? How my legs spread wide on top of you? How I sucked in every inch of you? Do you remember how hard you came? Do you remember the shadow, the shade? The black shape that moved in the corner of the church? You know what that was. You know full well. You thought you had a headache, you weren’t entirely sure that any of it had happened.” She smiled and leaned over to kiss him. Will recoiled but one of the bouncers stepped up behind him, making a wall with his chest that Will could not knock down. Sadie’s lips were cold against his. Her tongue wormed between them. She tasted of damp woodlands. He closed his eyes when the sac slapped against his thigh and he felt the spindly limbs of what spun inside it grope for his hands.

“It happened, Will. You poured yourself into me. We made heat. We made a baby. And you have to provide for the child. You have to. You belong to us now.”

Where she had kissed him felt strange. There was a tingle there, like the phantom sensation on the mouth that heralds a cold sore.

“Don’t touch me any more,” he said. “Please.”

Sadie said, “Can’t make promises like that, Will.”

He raised a finger and probed his lips. They felt mushy and hot. They felt as though there was nothing as firm as teeth behind them. Fluid seeped onto his fingertip; it appeared black in the poor light. He hoped to God it wasn’t.

“I do like a sacrifice,” Sadie said, suddenly excited. “Don’t you? Doesn’t it just fill you with importance? A death, for your sake. This will be for you too. For our new family, for as long as you last.”

She caught hold of the sac by its umbilicus and swung it up so that she was eye to eye with its occupant. “And baba makes three! Yes he does!”

Joanna was stirring on her macabre throne. Sadie gripped Drinkwater’s arm and dragged him towards their prisoner, asking him if he had a knife or a gun or a grenade they could use. Attention diverted from him, Will moved towards the stage. He drew himself up onto it and carefully navigated his way around the weakened boards, the holes, and the splinters to the pike.

He reached out a hand slowly, reluctant to touch the failing flesh of her face but desperate to make one last contact. In the end, it wasn’t so bad, not really. It felt a little like the skin on his grandmother’s face when he had visited her in hospital, towards the end. She had been sleeping; he touched her cheek and it had been cool, dry and soft, slightly powdery. She had woken with a start and he had tried to smile at her tired, bewildered eyes, but it hurt too much to do so. “I love you,” he had told her, around the lump in his throat. The first and the last time. I should think so, she had replied, in a voice full of mock-chastisement.

“I love you,” he said now, through the mess of his mouth. “I’m sorry.”

As gently as he could, he wrenched her head from the spiked end of the weapon, feeling to the core of his bones his revulsion as it came suckingly free.

He turned to Sadie, who was pushing sticks of dynamite into Joanna’s pockets, into her mouth, under her seat. She was laughing with Drinkwater, who handed her the TNT as if it were treats from his pocket.

Will leapt from the stage and launched himself at them. Somebody was screaming, and it was only when he was within slaughtering range of the others that he realised the screams were coming from his own mouth.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: SOFTSUCK