Friday Flash Fic: Blood

Last week, I did a "Follow Friday" for my friend Jean Bauhaus, and many of you good readers responded positively to her short story Snack Machine. Some of you (God bless) even bought some of her books!.

Since the response was so positive, and because I spent my afternoon driving my father around on errands, and because she posted this on her own blog today, I figured I'd give the talented Ms. Bauhaus another boost of recognition.

Just a reminder:  throughout all of October, all of Jean Bauhaus' e-books are on sale for 99 cents, and her paperbacks are also marked down. You can get her books here:

  Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Createspace

BLOOD

I was a boy when the monster killed my parents. Of course nobody believed me. It was put down to a bear attack. But I know what I saw. I watched from under the bed as it fed on them. And when it was done, it sniffed me out, lifted the bed off me like it was made of cardboard. It bent down and put its big ugly face in mine, its breath fetid with the stink of their blood, and stared at me with nightmare eyes that I still see every time I sleep.

Then it left.

I don’t know why it spared me. I don’t care. It orphaned me. I’m going to make it wish it had killed me.

My entire life prepared me for this. Learning about it, studying the lore. I found others who had seen it, who had been victimized by it. I found those who knew how to track it, and how to kill it. They taught me, and when I was ready, I hunted it.

I found others of its kind, and killed them. It took a silver-tipped sword, forged by monks and tempered with holy water. Beheading worked. So did stabbing through the heart, but the heart was hard to locate, so I generally stuck with beheading. I’ve taken out five of them since I started hunting. But none were the one I wanted.

That one is here before me now. I tracked it to a back alley in Tulsa of all places. I know it by its eyes. It’s looking at me, and I see recognition. And regret.

Good.

I draw my sword. It swipes at me. I dodge, but not fast enough. Its claw grazes my arm. Not deep, but it tears through my coat and makes me bleed.

We dance like that for several minutes. Time slows, and it feels like hours. Then my sword finds its home, slices clean. The head falls, and just like that, my life’s work is done. My parents are avenged.

I hear a wild howl, and I turn. My monster had a mate, and she charges me. I raise my sword. She runs onto it. Miraculously, it finds the heart. She falls.

I pull out my blade and wipe it on her fur. I hear another wail, this one small and pitiful. It’s coming from a Dumpster.

Inside I find another one. Just a pup. An orphan now, like me. If I spare it, it’ll only grow up to be a killer. And it’ll want vengeance. Also like me.

I won’t make that mistake.

I raise my sword, but as I look in its eyes, I see only myself.

It trembles as I wrap it in my coat and tuck it under my arm. As I carry it to my car, I wonder first how it will ever forgive me. Then I wonder how on earth I’ll feed it.

We’ll figure it out, together. We’re family now, bound by our parents’ blood.

Follow Friday: Jean Marie Bauhaus

As I may have mentioned before, Jean is a dear friend to me, and unlike me she's actually managed to write (and publish!) not one but FOUR books.  (I haz a envee.) 

Throughout all of October, all of her e-books are on sale for 99 cents, and her paperbacks are also marked down.



Please give her a chance! She's a great writer and an even better friend, and I want her to succeed.

You can get her books here: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Createspace

Want to try before you buy?  Read this short story of hers, reprinted here with her permission; it originally appeared on her blog on Sept. 22.

Snack Machine

You think strange thoughts sometimes when you work the night shift. Coming home in the dark late at night, it’s easy to imagine that something in the darkness is out to get you.

If your imagination is like Tina’s, you might think how creepy it would be if the thin, dark gap between the wall and the vending machine at the end of the hall was really a doorway to some otherworldly dimension.

And then you might laugh the thought away as you grab your chips and resist the urge to run back to your apartment.

She was tired when the thought occurred to her, after a long night on her feet at the diner, and it was a nice distraction from worrying about getting mugged on the way home. Or worse.

Tina liked having the machine there. It was her one consolation when her budget had forced her to settle on the tiny basement efficiency. She almost hadn’t been able to afford even that, what with the landlady wanting two month’s rent up front. Thankfully, she’d relented. “Had a lot of trouble with drifters sneaking out without paying their rent,” she’d said, “but I guess you don’t strike me as a drifter.”

Anyway, takeout places were usually closed when her shift ended, and a bag of chips was better than nothing when she felt too tired to cook. She kicked off her shoes and turned on The Late Late Show and munched on her bag of Sun Chips. At least she could pretend those were kind of healthy. When they were all gone, she brushed off the crumbs, crumpled up the bag and headed to bed.

***

She needed to go grocery shopping. She debated going out for breakfast, but she didn’t feel like getting dressed yet, and decided to get something from the machine. In the hallway, dollar in hand, she stood debating between a Snickers bar or Fig Newtons when she noticed that the dark space at the back seemed a little bit wider. For a fleeting second, she thought about investigating, but shrugged it off. It wasn’t like she’d been paying close attention to the size of the gap. Anyway, so what if it was wider? The vendor had probably stocked it that morning, jostling it in the process.

It was a stupid thing to notice, let alone worry about. She told herself that as she backed toward her apartment, dollar still in hand. She felt like going out for breakfast after all.

***

Tina jolted awake, her heart pounding. She thought she heard a loud crash. She was just starting to think she’d dreamed it when she heard it again, out in the hall.

She turned on her bedside lamp, then thought better of it and turned it off before fumbling for the can of pepper spray she kept in the drawer. She got out of bed and shuffled quietly toward the door. There it was again. Startled, she froze in place. It was a familiar sound, and as she took deep breaths to slow the pounding in her chest, she tried to place it.

Then it came to her. The high school lunch room. It was the sound that the vending machines used to make when the football players would tip them forward and then let them fall back in place. They’d do that whenever their chips got stuck. Sometimes they’d do it just to see if they could get a free bag.

That’s all the sound was.

Except, nobody who lived in her building was big enough or strong enough to tip that machine. Her neighbors were mostly elderly. Some were women around her age. Maybe it was a visitor. Somebody’s boyfriend, maybe. Or Mrs. Woo, upstairs. She had a son in the Marines. Maybe he was home from Afghanistan. If he was still on Middle Eastern time, that would explain the three a. m. chip craving.

Tina crept softly to the door and peered through the peep hole. She saw a flicker of shadows, and held still, watching. For ten minutes, she watched. But nobody passed her door. They’d have to, to get from the machine to the stairwell.

She checked the chain to make sure it was secure. She double checked the locks. On the way back to bed, she paused, then grabbed a kitchen chair and dragged it over to the door, jamming it under the doorknob.

***

She saw Mrs. Woo in the laundry room the next day. “How is your son?” she asked.

A haunted look filled the older woman’s eyes. “He’s injured. I only found out this morning. I don’t know details yet. But they say he can come home in three weeks.” A faint smile touched her lips. “He’ll get a purple heart, I suppose.”

Tina stared in shock. “I’m so sorry,” she said when she found her voice. “I hope he pulls through and you find out something soon.”

The older woman nodded. “Thank you.” She went back to folding her clothes. Tina threw the rest of hers in the basket and hurried out of the laundry room. She paused upon seeing the machine at the opposite end of the hall. The gap behind it had definitely widened. She averted her gaze from it and forced herself to walk normally to her door. Her hand trembled and she fumbled her keys. Cursing, she picked them up and got the door unlocked.

As she closed the door behind her, she could have sworn she heard the sound of heavy metal scraping on linoleum.

***

She was getting home later than usual. Her replacement at the diner was late, so she’d had to stay to cover. Once she finally clocked out, she decided to stay and grab something to eat. It was almost one-thirty by the time she finally got out of there. She had debated volunteering to work a double shift, just so she could stay till morning and avoid having to walk home this late. But she was so tired, and ready to get home and off her feet.

The streets weren’t exactly deserted, but there were few enough people for her to be suspicious of all of them. Being out so late made her extra paranoid. She gripped her can of pepper spray, keeping it ready, and kept glancing over her shoulder. Twice she crossed the street because she didn’t like who she saw behind her. Once, he seemed to follow, and she picked up her pace. It was only a four-block walk, but tonight it felt more like four miles.

When she reached her building, she didn’t waste any time letting herself inside. She shut the door behind her and heard the automatic lock click into place, then leaned her back against the door, panting and laughing a little at herself. All she’d done was get home safe another night, and here she was acting like she’d just outrun a serial killer.

Even so, she gave the door a tug to make sure the lock held, and got her apartment key ready before crossing over to the stairwell that led down to the basement. She hummed to herself as she skipped down the steps, feeling wired up and happy to be alive. At the bottom of the stairs, she froze.

The vending machine at the end of the hall was sitting sideways, facing the wall opposite her apartment door. Like something had swung it open from the end wall like a door. And on the end wall, the vending machine’s shadow was still there, a big, black rectangle of darkness that had been branded onto the wall. It seemed to go beyond the wall, somehow, like if she walked over there she could stick her arm through it.

Behind her, at the top of the stairs, she thought she heard movement. She glanced over her shoulder just long enough to see a flicker of shadow, and then bolted toward her door. As she tried to steady her shaking hands enough to insert the key into the lock, another flicker came from the end of the hall, and the darkness seemed to somehow be reaching for her.

Tina started to chant a one-word prayer: Please. “Please, please, please, please,” she muttered in a thin, high voice, over and over until the key finally slid into the lock. She turned it and pushed the door open, slamming it and locking it behind her.

This time when she leaned her back against the door, her sense of triumph and relief felt more justifiable, albeit short-lived.

Something rammed her door. The thud reverberated through her body, and she screamed and backed away. It rammed it again. It felt like the whole building must have shook. It must be waking her neighbors. It rammed the door again. “Stop it!” she screamed, and waited, tense, her pepper spray feeling useless in her hand.

Whatever it was stopped. Tina debated whether to call the police or reinforce the door with a kitchen chair, then decided to do them both in reverse order. As she took a step toward the chair, she heard the squeak of her mail slot being opened. A dollar slid through it, and fluttered to the floor. When it landed, the deadbolt on her door turned, followed by the doorknob. The door slammed open.

Tina didn’t have time to scream.

***

Lorena Patton stood by, keys in hand, and waited as the police knocked patiently on the door. She knew how this went. They’d give the tenant a few opportunities to answer the door, then they’d have her open it up and let them in, because the tenant wouldn’t be there. Sure enough, that’s how it went.

Inside, they found all the girl’s things, but no sign of the girl, and no sign of forced entry.

“I don’t understand it,” said the weepy girl in the waitress uniform, the one who’d called the police. “She’s not the type to just not show up to work. And why would she leave without her stuff?”

Because, Lorena thought as the police questioned the girl, it’s a lot harder to sneak out without paying your rent when you’ve got to load all your furniture into a U-Haul. She kept the thought to herself, though. She was disappointed. Not just in the loss of income, but in her own poor judgment. Here she’d thought she’d finally gotten a decent tenant for that damned basement, even waived her two month’s rent rule. Last time she’d ever do that. Girl turned out to be a drifter and a thief, just like all the others.

She was running out of room to keep putting these people’s things in storage. The girl’s stuff wasn’t too bad. Maybe Lorena would just keep it in the apartment and rent it out as furnished. That’d let her charge more. ‘Course, that’d make it easier for people to keep cutting and running in the middle of the night. Maybe she should stop renting the dang place out altogether and just use the apartment for extra storage.

The police finished up, and she locked up behind them, then went to inspect the vending machine at the end of the hall, trying to remember the last time she’d had it stocked. Hardly anyone but the basement tenants ever used it, so it didn’t need to be serviced very often. It seemed like it never ran out of snacks. Hell, she should probably just get rid of the thing. Everything in it was probably past it’s best-by date. Still, Lorena fished a dollar out of her pocket. After the morning she’d had, she deserved a dadgum candy bar.

Friday Fiction

This is dedicated to Miakoda, who was nice enough to give me encouragement to keep writing Curse/Or. Don't worry, there will be more -- this just got the ball rolling.

Also, the current story so far has been turned into a downloadable PDF.  Firefox 4 users may be unable to open it within their browsers (I'm one of them) but if you right-click the link and save it to your computer, it will open just fine from there.

And now...




She was flat on her back, staring at the ceiling. She didn't remember falling. She didn't remember much of anything prior to coming out of the toilet. It was as if the movie of her life was a reel of celluloid and, having jammed in the projector, simply melted where it had stopped.

Remove reel.
Excise burnt section like a cancer.
Splice together healthy frames.
Life continues.

Teresa, she realized as her thoughts rearranged themselves into cohesion. My name is Teresa. I'm on the floor of a hotel room. I used to be in prison.

She took a long, shuddering breath as the memories came crashing back. The screaming had been rusty nails clawing at the inside of her mind. The suckling that ate at her soul. The constant, maddening demands. And then it had started talking, less than a year old and it was talking and pawing at her and killing other children whenever she left it alone.

It. The demon seed. The one good thing in her life, and it had become corrupt and possessed. Teresa had ruined everything she touched, just as her mother said she would.

I was in prison because I set my baby boy on fire.

 

Curse/Or: Chapter 5, Scene 3 (second part)

(continued from part 1)

"Shitshitshit!" shouted the doctor, as if the obscenity were a mystical ward against danger, spitting the burning pen out of his mouth and jumping backwards in that odd little bunny-hop people do to avoid having something hot fall on them.

Teresa just watched the pen, fascinated. It wasn't melting or smoldering like she would have expected. It was actually on fire, burning just as merrily-as-you-please, like it was a candle or a match.

Or a cigarette, she thought. She hadn't deliberately ignited the doctor's pen. In fact, she wouldn't have even thought to do so, let alone consider it a possibility. Then she began to remember what she had done in the restaurant earlier, how she had reached out with her magic to dissipate the effects of the stun grenade on everyone else around her. How Tommy had somehow brought her back from the brink of death.
 
Like calls to like. Cancer wants to spread. Path of least resistance.

"So doc," she mused as he yanked the fire extinguisher from the wall and doused the flaming pen with CO2, "I'm guessing you used to smoke?"

He looked up at her, blinking in confusion. "Y-yes. Started in med school. Only stopped about a year ago." He set the extinguisher down, nudging the pen with his toe. Now it just looked like a charred piece of plastic, covered in a layer of dry ice. "Why are we talking about this?"

She laughed. "Netty never told you what I do, huh? 'Course not. Bitch. Anyway, the Amazing Broken Nose out there calls me cancer's Typhoid Mary. Only I do it with magic."

"Carcinosurgist," he offered.

"You just sneeze?" Teresa asked.

Dr. Rauche shook his head. "No. I said carcinosurgist. It means one who uses cancer in Latin." He turned to her with a quirky grin. "Sorry. I analyze and catalog things when I'm nervous. It's why I went into medicine in the first place."

Teresa simply shrugged. "I just smoke."

He nodded. "Yes, and I can see why. This certainly explains a lot." He picked her chart up from the floor and studied it again.

"Okay, honesty time," he said after a few moments of uncomfortable silence. "I need to look at your hand, but before I can do that I need to know what's going on with this magic of yours." He held up a finger to forestall an already-forming objection on her lips. "I'm not going to lecture you on lifestyle. We both know it's unhealthy and probably killing you. That's your business. What I want to ensure is that it doesn't end up killing me."

He sat down on the stool again and looked her in the eyes. "Irritability. Aggressive behavior. Destructive impulses. Ms. Reyes, you are a raging nicotine addict and, according to Netty, it makes you unbearable to be around. Add to that your propensity for setting things like computer monitors and pens on fire, and you present a very real threat to me. Now, I could just anesthetize you until you aren't dangerous anymore, but I'd rather avoid that. Instead, what I would like to do, with your permission, is placate your craving without letting you smoke anywhere near me."

She gave him a wicked, tobacco-stained grin. "How're you gonna do that?"

He smiled and pulled a foil-backed sheet out of his coat pocket. "Nicotine gum. Chew on this until the cravings go away," he instructed as he handed the package.

"What if the cravings don't go away?"

"Chew another piece."

"Isn't that dangerous?"

"For other people? Yes. For you? To paraphrase a movie, you've spent the last twenty years building up an immunity to nicotine. I suspect you could chew the entire box and it would only give you a slight buzz."

"Gimme," she cackled, almost witch-like, as she tore into the foil, tossing two pieces into her mouth and chewing voraciously. The thick squares had a minty flavor at first, but as she chewed a hot, peppery sensation developed on her tongue. It burned pleasantly, like an ointment on sore muscles.

"Thish ish soo good," she mumbled around the thick wads, like a child with a jawbreaker.

For the first time in what felt like ages, she began to un-tense her muscles.

"Excellent," said Dr. Rauche. "I'll go take care of your friend's nose while you bliss out. Then we can treat your hand, and I'll show you how to administer nicotine patches."

"Take… your time…" she said to the closing door as she lay back on the exam table. Deep inside her, Tommy nursed contentedly.

Curse/Or: Chapter 5, Scene 1

Teresa had expected a cramped, dismal waiting room in some desperate no-name clinic, filled with cheap plastic seats and screaming children and reeking with the delicate bouquet of "eau de ammonia and ass." Instead, it reminded her of the first-class section in an airplane: the seats were wide and comfortable, the décor was tastefully understated, and it smelled of lightly-perfumed professionalism. Even the receptionist slightly resembled a stewardess, with her long perfect hair and brilliant blue eyes, though her figure made her look more like a high-class call girl who had been poured into an office-casual dress.

Of course, considering that they weren't at an ER at all, but a plastic surgeon's office on the outskirts of Las Vegas, the receptionist (whose name was Candi or Barbie or something else equally saccharine – Teresa hadn't bothered to pay attention) probably served double duty as a billboard for the doctor's skills with cosmetic enhancement. Given the young woman's obvious 'qualifications,' there was no doubt in Teresa's mind that the surgeon was very, very good at his trade.

"So Esther," Teresa said, tossing the corpse of another broken-and-consumed paperback onto the coffee table, "why exactly do you call her 'Mister Netty'? Seems pretty damn feminine to me, with the lipstick and painted nails and all."

Yarrow, who had been fidgeting his coins with boredom, spoke first. "Netty isn't a he or a she. The conscious mind of the Internet doesn't need gender. Any avatar it adopts is deliberately androgynous, allowing the mind of the viewer to fill in the details. You see feminine features, so to you Netty is female. Fulcrum here perceives Netty in a more masculine way, and therefore to her it is male." He smiled at this, pleased to be able to answer a question within his sphere of authority.

Teresa shot him a sidelong glare. "And I bet that whatever it looks like, you jerk off to it."

Yarrow just stared at her, open-mouthed, his expression a mixture of shame and bewilderment. Teresa could practically hear the gears turning inside his head as he desperately sought for the proper comeback. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said in a sing-song voice, "has your buddy the Internet not shown you what masturbation is?"

Esther's eyes snapped upwards with a quick hissing inhalation of breath, the needle of her stitchery poised between her fingers like a miniature poisoned dagger. "You leave him alone," she said, in that intense mom-voice which promised ultimate suffering while remaining perfectly composed. "We have done nothing but help you since we found you, Reecy: saved your life, got you fed, got you cleaned up, gave you hope, and all you've managed to do is hurt everyone you meet. God love you, girl, is there anything that don't make you angry?"

"Cigarettes," Teresa answered. "Which I ain't had any of since you and boy wonder there kidnapped me. And I saved your lives, not the other way 'round, 'cause if I hadn't smoked the Pink Peril there – and don't think you don't still owe me an explanation for what that shit was – she'd have popped you both."

"And what about you?" she continued, somewhat less quietly. "You're all God-this and God-that, got all the answers to everything and knows what's best for everybody. Well, let me tell you, concha, you ain't my mother and you ain't his, and you're letting a face on a fucking screen jerk you around and tell you what to do! Why the fuck are you even here, anyway? You're, like, a bake sale away from being a one-woman church social, why are you hanging out with a baby-killer like me and a know-it-all atheist like him?" Without waiting for an answer, Teresa stood up and stormed towards the receptionist. "The doctor had better be goddamn ready to see me now, because if I have to spend one more minute with these people there's gonna be blood across your carpet."

Candi-Bambi just nodded, her eyes wide in shock, and ushered Teresa towards the nearest examination room before buzzing for the doctor.

"Your… mother?" Yarrow ventured towards Teresa's receding form, like a child using a new vocabulary word for the very first time.

"That's right, baby," Esther said, reaching out to pat him on the knee. "You tell her."

Curse/Or, Chapter 4.5: Patch Notes (Complete)

Teresa walked into the bookstore like she owned it, a slow but deliberate saunter which stated she was a predator and that this was her hunting ground, Yarrow obediently following in her wake. "Books," she said to the young man who asked if there was anything he could do to help. "Books on computers. Books on computer networks. Books on programming and artificial intelligence. Even books on people who spend too much time on computers," she said, flashing a vicious smile in Yarrow's direction, "and top it off with the best science-fiction stories of the past twenty years, preferably anthologies."

"That's… quite a lot of books," the salesman explained, holding his palms up in supplication. "I'm not sure if –"

"I have enough money to buy every goddamn book in this store," Teresa said, turning that joyless smile on the salesman, "and I have nothing but time. Now get to it." She dismissed the boy with a wave of her bandaged hand, and he promptly scurried off.

A few minutes later, Teresa was slowly following the harried clerk as he made his way through the stacks, pulling books from shelves and tossing them into a pushcart which Teresa had commandeered from a nearby big-box store. She seemed disinterested in the growing collection, which was already a foot high and rising, paying more attention to the paperback currently in her hand than what the clerk put in the cart.

"I don't understand this dead-tree fetish you have," Yarrow groused as he followed along behind her. "My phone can display any book ever written, at a fraction of the volume displaced here. This is inefficient on a scale beyond comprehension."

Teresa turned and glared at Yarrow over the top of her book. "Three reasons," she said coldly. "One, that phone of yours is practically surgically attached to you, and I don't want to keep wrestling you for it every time I want to read something. Two, the screen is too goddamn small. Three," and with a vicious grin she folded the already-read pages of the paperback book backwards, its spine crackling like boiling fat until the covers were flush and its back broken, "I can mangle 'dead trees' to suit me."

Yarrow shuddered at the casual desecration of information. "Vandal," he accused.

"Damn right," she agreed, "and we sacked Rome itself."

*** *** ***

She left Yarrow in the checkout line to pay for her purchases, claiming she had some "lady business" that needed attending. His naiveté regarding women made him easy to manipulate, and he had taken her nonspecific claim at face value. "Jeez," she thought as she left the air-conditioned relief of the bookstore for the hot Nevada afternoon outside. "I bet if I told him I crapped cigarettes, he'd believe me. Speaking of…"

It had been several hours since the incident at the Denny's, and while she was still riding a nicotine high she could feel it beginning to fade and knew with a junkie's clarity that she would need to score more tobacco soon.

She looked around the parking lot and considered her options. Ahead of her was the gas station where Esther was filling up her station wagon. They sold cigarettes there, but she had no money; the old woman had taken her last pack after their fight in the car and was about as likely to buy her a new pack as she was to return the old one. Yarrow could buy them for her, and she could probably manipulate him into doing so, but Netty would know the instant the transaction went through and one way or another, Esther would find out.

"I'm their bitch," she muttered to herself, a bad habit she'd picked up from her years in jail. "I'm bitch to an old woman and the goddamn Internet. It's time that changed."

She began to pace, the conversation with herself picking up speed. "Crafty," she mused, flexing her fingers, the muscle memory which associated smoking with thinking unconsciously steering her body. "Gotta think crafty. The cigs are out there, after all. They wanna be smoked. Like calls to like…"

She walked towards the newspaper vending machine she'd spotted on her way into the bookstore. Digging in her pockets for loose change, she found none. A burst of anger flared within her stomach, a rising urge to kick at the machine's door until it gave way with a satisfying crunch, but a glimpse of what might have been a police car in the parking lot forced a reconsideration.

She poked around the machine until she found an old, discarded sheet of yesterday's newsprint wedged underneath its stubby legs. "Gotcha, fucker," she grinned, seizing the paper with her nicotine-stained fingers, quickly tearing a page out of the Classified section before rolling it into a long, thin tube.

Her hands seemed to know what to do even before her brain did. An illicit thrill coursed through her body and she felt like a teenager again, sneaking a smoke behind the school gym at lunchtime. If Yarrow or Esther caught her, she would catch such hell. But if this worked…

Just as she had done in front of the church earlier that morning, she concentrated on the end of her improvised cigarette and watched it smoke, then smolder, then burn. She put it to her lips and gave a single, strong pull.

The smoke clawed its way down her throat, sharp and stinging, the burning of rough paper nothing like the smoke of prepared, filtered tobacco. She coughed, the gag reflex making her nearly vomit, but she held the makeshift smoke between clenched teeth. A thick haze formed around her as she deliberately hyperventilated, trying to smoke as much of the burning newspaper as possible.

And then she was doubled over, her hands against the brick bookstore façade to steady herself, as a spasm of violent coughing ripped through her. Bloody phlegm splattered wetly against the wall, each convulsion as agonizing as giving birth to a child made of sandpaper and barbed wire.

She felt Yarrow's hand on her shoulder, and she couldn't hear what he was saying to her over the noise of her tubercular retching. But as the spasms subsided, even through a haze of pain and dizziness, she was able find the answer she had sought.

Running down the wall, painted in her own blood and mucous, was the name and address of a local Indian Casino. She could get money there, and buy cigarettes. It was where the cancer wanted her to go, where it wanted to spread, and it would reward her.

Tobacco from Indians. Her cancer, her Tommy, obviously had a firm sense of irony. She coughed one final time, smiling as the scattershot gobbets of phlegm obliterated her oracle.

*** *** ***

Esther gave a long, low whistle when Teresa's book-laden cart rattled up to the park bench where she was sitting. "Now that is a passel of books," she declared, putting a cross-stitch of an elephant in a green suit into her knitting bag. "How'd you pay for all that, Reecy?"

"Did you know that credit cards these days are verified over the Internet?" Teresa answered with feral glee. "I only found that out myself just a little bit ago." Behind her, Yarrow struggled with maneuvering the cart towards the station wagon's trunk.

Esther sighed exasperatedly "You stole them, then." The lines around her mouth and eyes were quite pronounced as she fixed Teresa with a look of severe disapproval.

"Noooo," protested Teresa, drawing out the word as if she were a small child who had been caught in the act of being naughty. "Yarrow just used the credit card Netty gave him and this ridiculously expensive shopping spree was magically approved. It's a miracle, I tell you, like manna from Internet heaven."

Esther simply crossed her arms and glared.

"Oh goddammit," Teresa swore, "I did not steal these. Our employer paid for them, just like she's paid for our meals and our gas and probably even the doctor you're gonna take me to after this. I don't know if Netty has bank funds stashed somewhere or if she pulls money out of thin air like the Fed, and frankly I don't give a shit because it's not my problem and it's not yours either. So now that you've got gas and I've got something to read in the emergency room, can we please get a move on before my fucking hand falls off?" She climbed into the car, slamming the passenger door behind her for emphasis.

Esther looked at Yarrow, who only shrugged helplessly before closing the trunk of the station wagon. "All right," she said, getting into the car. "But let's get two things straight, Reecy. One, I don't want to hear you taking the Lord's name in vain again. And two, MISTER Netty is a MAN."

*** *** ***

Curse/Or, Chapter 4.5: Patch Notes pt.1

(Author's note: I call this section 4.5 because I'm still not entirely sure if it should be the beginning of a new chapter or appended to the previous one. Until I decide for certain, it exists between the two, and therefore the name of Patch Notes is entire apropos.)
 
Teresa walked into the bookstore like she owned it, a slow but deliberate saunter that suggested she was a predator and this was her hunting ground. "Books," she said to the young man who asked if there was anything he could do to help. "Books on computers. Books on computer networks. Books on programming and artificial intelligence. Even sociological studies on people who spend too much time on computers," she said, flashing a vicious smile in Yarrow's direction, "and top it off with the best science-fiction stories of the past twenty years, preferably anthologies."

"That's… quite a lot of books," the salesman explained, holding his palms up in supplication. "I'm not sure if –"

"I have enough money to buy every goddamn book in this store," Teresa said, turning that joyless smile on the salesman, "and I have nothing but time. Now get to it." She dismissed the boy with a wave of her bandaged hand, and he promptly scurried off.

A few minutes later, Teresa was slowly following the harried clerk as he made his way through the stacks, pulling books from shelves and tossing them into a pushcart which Teresa had commandeered from a nearby big-box store. She followed him with benign disinterest, paying more attention to the paperback currently in her hand than what he put in the cart. The collection was already a foot high and rising.

"I don't understand this dead-tree fetish you have," Yarrow groused as he followed along behind her. "My phone can display any book ever written, at a fraction of the volume displaced here. This is inefficient on a scale beyond comprehension."

Teresa turned and glared at Yarrow over the top of her book. "Three reasons," she said coldly. "One, that phone of yours is practically surgically attached to you, and I don't want to keep wrestling you for it every time I want to read something. Two, the screen is too goddamn small. Three -- " and with a vicious grin she folded the already-read pages of the paperback book backwards, its spine crackling like boiling fat until the covers were flush and its back broken.

Yarrow shuddered at the casual destruction. "Vandal," he accused.

"Damn right," she agreed, "and we sacked Rome itself."

Follow Friday: This Old Haunt

Ack, I have been slacking lately, gotta get back into the groove of posting!

Tomorrow is All Hallow's Eve, and I an certain that my readers -- who are all quite literate and well-educated and walk in a lightly-scented cloud of gorgeousness that isn't far short of being simply terrific -- will be looking to whet their appetite for spookiness by reading ghost stories.

In which case, might I suggest This Old Haunt, the debut novella of Jean Bauhaus? It's a blast to read, the story trots along at a pleasant clip, and best of all the author is a good friend of mine who has helped me out of a creative jam more than once. (It's fair to say that I can't write Curse/Or without her help.)

So yes. Go thither and read, because I would like to avoid having to say "I wanna pimp my girl Jeannie out for y'all." That just sounds wrong.

Curse/Or, Chapter 3 end: On a Lonely, Lonesome Highway

It wasn't so much a waking up as it was a slow unfolding of senses back into reality.

First there was motion.
(The gentle vibration of a moving car.)

Then there was sound.
(The hum of tires over asphalt.)

Much later, there was vision.
(A long, lonely stretch of desert highway.)

And finally, after a few million subjective years, the helpless thing cowering behind unresponsive eyes uncurled from its fetal position and became a person again. Teresa blinked, coughed, and gagged a bit, the taste of bile strong in her mouth. "Jesus," she murmured.

"Here," she heard Esther say as something warm and fibrous was pressed into her left hand. "Drink this. You'll feel better." Numbly, she raised the object to her lips, was surprised to discover it was a paper cup from a coffee chain, then was surprised at her surprise. The cup was so exceptionally normal that when compared to everything which had happened in recent memory, it was the strange thing.

She sipped the dark liquid carefully, half expecting it to scream all the way down her throat. She supposed that it wouldn't particularly surprise her if it did. The coffee was warm and bitter.

It matched how she felt in her heart.

"Someone mind telling me what the hell just happened?" she asked, as much to the cup as to the woman beside her in the back seat. "Second time today I've woken up in this goddamn car with no idea what hit me."

"You had a bit of a fit, dear." Esther brushed the bangs from the younger woman's face reassuringly, her touch that of a grandmother soothing a colicky child. "But you're better now."

"Bullshit." Teresa spat, and found the round vulgarity oddly comforting. The old, familiar anger was returning too, a fire in her chest that rose to fill her face. "I don't have 'fits'. Never fainted in my life, neither. Now you tell me what really happened."

"Psychogenic fugue state," pronounced Yarrow from the driver's seat. His voice was more nasal than before, due to the rolls of bloody cotton which had been shoved up each nostril and taped into place. "Characterized by reversible amnesia, wandering, and loss of original personality. It is etiologically related to…"

"Someone," Teresa hissed, "needs to tell me, using very small words, what the hell happened back there, with the exploding cat and the weird shouting girl and the cheeseburgers and OH FUCK WHAT HAPPENED TO MY HAND?" She jerked her right arm into view; it was swathed in a mitten of bandages which extended up to mid-forearm. "I CAN'T MOVE MY FINGERS!" she screamed, whirling to confront the others.

"Teresa!" shouted Esther. "Reecy! Stop!" She caught Teresa's flailing wrist, locking it in place with her velvet granny-grip while smoothly relieving her of the cup of scalding liquid. She placed it on the floor between her feet but never released her grip or broke eye contact with Teresa. "Reecy, you just sit there and relax for a while as I explain things best I can. Will you do that for me, please?"

Teresa nodded. Then, "Reecy?"

The older woman shrugged. "Teresa, Tereecy, Reecy. Just thought it suited you better." She smiled, and for the first time Teresa noticed how straight and white her teeth were, brilliant against her dark skin. "Calmer now? Good. Now, you can't remember what happened," she explained, "because you weren't you at the time. You went… away in a moment of stress and became somebody else. But now the stress is gone, and you've calmed down and become you again." Her smile broadened, and the corners of her eyes crinkled. "And we're glad you're back now."

"What. Happened," Teresa breathed, through teeth clenched with fear and frustration, "To. My. Hand." The anger was still building inside her chest despite Esther's "let's all get off this ledge and go talk about it, okay?" tone, but she lacked any true desire to fight.

"Now," Esther said cheerily, "the important thing to keep in mind is that there was no permanent damage done. No, no, just relax," she said as Teresa tensed. "The reason you can't feel your hand is because we immobilized it and gave you something to help with the pain."

She took Teresa's left hand in her own, and held it gently. "You have a bit of a nasty burn. Back there, when things became… difficult… you did something very brave. It saved us all, and I want you to know just how much we appreciate that. Don't we, Yevgeny?" She looked pointedly at the driver's eyes through the rear-view mirror. Muttered nasal sounds of thanks lacking any real conviction emanated from Yarrow's direction.

Esther turned back to Teresa, her face wrinkled in sympathy. "But Reecy, when you did this very brave thing, you hurt yourself something fierce." Esther's face wrinkled in sympathy but her eyes never left Teresa's. "Your lighter got so hot that it melted some, and burned your hand. We didn't want to remove it for fear of hurting you worse, so we just bandaged you up. We were going to take you to the emergency room, but…" Her voice trailed off.

"We thought it would be too dangerous," offered Yarrow.

"Yes," Esther agreed, nodding quickly, as if she were reassuring herself as much as Teresa. "Too dangerous. But I want to tell you, Reecy, that we are gonna take care of it soon as we can. Soon as it's safe."

Teresa laughed then, a sharp coughing laugh that threatened to bring up blood, or possibly venom. "Safe. I haven't been safe since I met you fuckers. I was safer back in Frontera where 200 pound dykes were trying to shiv me for cigs on a weekly basis." She shook her head slowly and relaxed back into the bench seat of the station wagon. "Sure, safe. A thirteen year-old girl in cat ears tried to shoot us at a Denny's while we ate breakfast. That is so goddamn surreal it redefines everything. What's next? I get maced by a nun?"

"Surreal," said a tinny voice from the front seat. "Excellent word choice. I'd have chosen 'anomalous', but a good word nonetheless." The voice was soft and British, with an accent that suggested sophistication without arrogance. "But if you want to talk surreal, might I recommend you look at the front of your shirt?" Teresa looked down, starting when she saw the bloody mess that covered her chest. "You were shot in the heart, and yet here you are with only a freshly-healed scar and not a gaping mortal wound. So, my dear, you are just as surreal as everything else that has happened today."

"Who's talking?" Teresa demanded, struggling to look into the front seat. Esther released her hand. "Who are you?"

Yarrow picked his iPhone off the dashboard and handed it back to her. "Hello," it said, an androgynous face appearing on the display screen. "I'm the Internet." A hand extended towards the screen, and then the phone vibrated, as if in handshake.

"Call me Netty, for short," it said, and gave her a cheeky wink.

To be continued in Curse/Or Chapter 4: Infodump

Curse/Or: Chapter 3 Revised

As I mentioned earlier, I discovered an issue with the pacing of the big fight scene in chapter 3. This issue was so large it demanded a fairly extensive re-write to make it work effectively.

In order to provide context, I am posting the entirety of Chapter 3 now. I apologize to everyone who is now grumbling about "having to re-read stuff". These things happen when one is essentially liveblogging the novel-writing process. Still there is new stuff here, so I encourage you all to read it again.

Chapter 3: LULZ is the law, LULZ under LOL

It wasn't until much later that Teresa learned the exploding cat had actually been a plush toy with a stun grenade stuffed inside. Surprised and off-balance, the force of the flash-bang beneath her knocked her up and over, the right side of her torso striking the edge of the table with enough force to make her wince.

As she fell, the serrated pain of a cracked rib tearing inward from bone to lung to tumor, she knew -- with an animal certainty which bypassed all thought -- that everyone in the dining room had seen the flash and heard the bang. They had shared the experience. They were all interconnected with her.

They had all been breathing her air, just like the inmates at Frontera.

The magic flared within her at the speed of instinct, burning from her tumor outward through the searing pain in her side, spreading her blindness and deafness and disorientation across a network of arcane second-hand smoke and into the two dozen customers and waitstaff.

As one, the entire population of the restaurant coughed wetly. Their lifetime chances of contracting cancer increased by a statistically significant percentage.

And then Teresa could act again, shoulder-rolling as she hit the floor, coming up into a kind of half-crouch. She could see the girl crouched beneath the table, wiping her mouth with the left sleeve of a bright pink cardigan, right hand buried inside a matching vinyl purse-slash-tote bag. Their eyes met.

The girl looked to be about 12 years old, but the eyes that looked back at Teresa weren't those of a child. They were hard and deep and dark, as black as her glossy Asian hair, a gaze made of obsidian knives. They were the sockets that remained after her innocence had been scooped out with a melon baller.

They were the same eyes Teresa had seen in the mirror every day for the past twenty years.

"OH HAI THAR," the girl exclaimed, and pulled a pistol from her bag. It was the exact same shade of obnoxious pink as her purse, except in anodized aluminum, and the kitty face painted along its extended barrel matched the picture on the girl's dress. She cocked her head to the side and smiled brightly, waving cheerfully with her left hand as the laser spot under the gun barrel traced a hot pink line to Teresa's heart.

"U DIEZ NAO KTHXBAI."

The gun made a soft mewing sound as it fired. Pain blossomed inside Teresa's chest, twice, and then she was falling face-first onto the carpet, oblivion thundering upon her like an oncoming train.

"LOL," announced the girl. "ENDCAT HAZ ENDED JOO." She pivoted smoothly to her left, humming tunelessly as she took careful aim at the still-stunned Esther's head.

Yarrow gasped. "You… !" He was on the floor next to Esther, his hands clawing at the clutter of the broken dishes around him in a feeble attempt to end his disorientation. The girl brightened visibly at this, squatting by his head to regard him curiously, pervious target forgotten. Her grin was feral, her slender body quivering with predatory glee.

"YA ME RLY." She wasn't shouting, but every word that came from her mouth seemed to be at full volume. She poked him in the cheek with the muzzle of her pink kitty pistol. The action was careless, whimsical, like a child poking a strange object with a stick. "WAT U WANT? U CAN HAZ LAST WISH."

Yarrow blinked, trying to resolve the rosy haze above him into some kind of recognizable form. Teresa had taken the brunt of the blast, stretched over the table to throttle him, but even so his proximity to an exploding stun grenade had sent him reeling. And yet despite the roaring in his ears, he was still able to hear the pink catgirl assassin with perfect clarity.

"I… can haz?" he stammered. The young fool seeks me, he remembered. Youthful Folly has success. He thought for a moment, then swallowed hard. "Can I wish that you don't kill me?"

The girl smiled fiercely, and with a casual swipe of her hand broke Yarrow's nose with the butt of her gun. His scream of pain only seemed to excite her, her butt wriggling back and forth as if she possessed an invisible tail and was twitching it from side to side. "SILLEH BUNNEH," she cooed. "IF I NO KILL U THEN IZ NOT LAST WISH. AMIRITE?"

"Just stop hitting me!" he screamed. Her smile widened and she aimed the gun at his head. "Oh crap," he squeaked, mouth suddenly very dry as the blurred form of the barrel slid into his field of view.

(On the other side of the restaurant, a short-order cook who had been smoking all his adult life coughed twice, clutched his chest, and died as the burgeoning tumor within his lungs increased a thousandfold in volume before metastasizing and devouring his heart. He was thirty-two.)

Youthful Folly has success. At the first oracle I inform. "Cheeseburger!" shouted Yarrow.

The girl's body went rigid. "WAT U SAY?" she demanded through clenched teeth. The muzzle of her gun visibly wavered in front of Yarrow's face, her muscles nearly vibrating with barely-controlled tension. The feral Cheshire grin was gone, replaced by a far more human expression of indecision.

"Cheeseburger," he said with increasing confidence. "This is a restaurant. They make cheeseburgers. They're over there." He pointed in the general direction of the kitchen. "You Can Haz," he directed, with as much conviction as he could muster.

At the first oracle I inform.

Behind them, Teresa's body spasmed, as if CPR were being administered through repeated vicious kicks to her chest. Nicotine roared through her bloodstream, jump-starting her body with the fierceness of a habit that would not, could not, be denied. Roaring darkness receded from the edge of her vision, the cancer magic sparing her in exchange for claiming the life of the cook.

"Fine," spat the child. The hollow boom in her voice was gone, replaced by the normal soprano pitch of a preteen girl. She squared her shoulders and drew another pistol from her bag. Even with the second gun, she seemed diminished in some way. "I don't need the LOLcat to finish this." Next to them, Esther moaned.

Teresa felt like she had just walked up thirty flights of stairs. There was a concrete block inside her chest, and each breath was agony. Her arms were wooden, her fingers lifeless cigarettes. Her mouth tasted of ash and the stink of burnt filters filled her nostrils. Her eyes ached with the yellow-brown stain of nicotine. She thought she might vomit.

The girl's back was to Teresa, rising from beside Yarrow's head to a firing position. Her twin pistols were tracing dual pink lines towards the center of Esther's chest. "The Godcaller dies first," the child said to Yarrow. "Then you. And then I Can Haz Cheezburger."

Tommy would be about Yarrow's age, Teresa realized. Another dumb kid, another mother's precious son, another stupid, senseless death…

The rage returned. In that moment the tired, half-dead Teresa was gone, consumed by all the anger and the guilt and the rage of the past two decades. Her nausea was forgotten, burnt away by the rush of emotion. What remained was something pure, primal in its direction and purpose. "Bitch," spat the Camel, pulling the lighter from her pocket to hold before her face. A flame the color of hemorrhagic blood licked into life.

"I will fucking smoke your ass."

She exhaled sharply, and the air before the cancer mage wrinkled as serpentine tendrils of heat writhed towards the catgirl. The child shimmered slightly, the haze wreathing her in an infernal halo, and then she was shrieking as every hair smoldered, every piece of plastic melted and every scrap of clothing on her body threatened to combust.

The girl crumpled into a fetal, screeching ball, the smell of scorched flesh crawling up Camel's nose. For an instant it all seemed intensely familiar, sickening and yet somehow terribly delicious.

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