Decay Inevitable

She was getting the moves down pat, now. Gleave had shown her where she was going wrong. He had taught her what pain was. Not what she thought it was. She had thought pain was being born into a world without asking for it. She had thought pain was sifting alien molecules – a wall, a door, a pane of glass – through her own. It wasn’t. That was nothing next to the agonies Gleave visited upon her. She had told him she loved him when he started. By the end, she wanted him dead, his family dead. She wanted to find the bones of his ancestors, dig them up, and stomp them to splinters. But she was focused. She knew what was expected of her, and any interest she had shown in tampons, hairstyles, or whether to wear a liquid-filled or an underwired bra, was forgotten.

Gleave, standing over her, his arm in her throat up to his elbow. Gleave, ripping out her heart and showing her how black it was, how malformed. “Your heart in my hand, girl, and you stare up at me as if I was holding a sick puppy. You should be dead. If you were like us, you would be.”

And then:

You aren’t human, you will never be human... learn it... believe it...

“Afternoon,” Derek said, as he caught up with Harry and Joanna. He held the lift doors open for them. “Which floor you after?”

“Three, please,” Harry said.

“Nice one,” Derek replied. “Me too.”

WILL’S NOSE STREAMED with blood but it had nothing to do with any injury Sadie inflicted upon him. Out of the blue came a torrent of red. It was a fashionable colour. Sadie was on all fours, gasping as the sac tore open. Gore was flushing across the black floorboards, giving them a gloss that no varnish could deliver. The child wriggled on its back, trying to chew through the cord that connected him to his mother with teeth that looked like broken bits from a straight razor. Even as he did this, he was scrabbling with his hands, trying to gain purchase on the slippery boards, trying to crawl over to where Will was crouched.

There was no exit behind him. High above, thirty feet or more, the ruptured stage let through shafts of granular light, thick with dust. The only exit was beyond Sadie and her grim spawn.

Staunching the flow of blood with the back of his hand, Will stood up. Sadie swung her head to look at him. Her face was covered in sweat and darkened by blood, building up in her temples. Her teeth were bared and a rope of saliva shivered from the corner of her mouth.

“Say hello. To Daddy,” she managed, the words coming out packaged in little coughs of pain. “Give. Daddy a big. Kiss.”

“Fuck that,” Will said, and took off.

He hurdled Sadie, but she managed to lift her forearm, which she smashed across Will’s shin. He toppled forwards and landed heavily against a rack of microphone stands. There was something wrong with the way he tried to stand up, and he saw that he couldn’t get any leverage from his hand because now it was lying, palm upwards like a weird ashtray, six feet away from his body. The thumb and forefinger made an OK sign. He closed his mind to what was happening. He stood up, shakily, and tottered over to the hand, which he picked up with the other

Nice to meet you, I’m fine, how are you?

before vomiting thinly and lurching away from Sadie, who had rolled onto her back, scrabbling in the wet for her crop. He stuffed the hand into his pocket and backed off, his head ranging to and fro, trying to spot the child in the gloom. Presumably Sadie was shielding it from harm. Perhaps it was too raw to harm him just yet. He eyed the microphone stands, their heat-warped, splintered bows of metal, but what use was a weapon here? He could slash, spear, or cudgel Sadie, but to what effect? She was this place and it was her.

“I saved your life, you fucking bitch,” Will said, needing to say something, anything that might get through to her and stop her from causing his decomposure. She sagged back into her own juices and stared at him, her mouth parted, hissing through her clenched teeth a sound that might or might not have been laughter.