Cheat the Grave

30

Every person asks themselves how they’re going to die. Most people wish for something gentle and in the night, a scant few petition the skies for adventure, to go hard and young, guns blazing-sometimes literally, sometimes not. Over the past year I’d faced the question a number of times, not because I wanted to, but because it presented itself to me like an unwanted hooker in a lineup. I mean, once the choices were narrowed down, you had to pick something, right?

So this was how it would happen: Mackie would lunge, carve into my mortal flesh with that blade, and what remained of my soul would join his, trapped inside that fisted iron, while my body finally fell to dusty silence.

Well, it wasn’t exactly how it would happen, I thought, easing my hand around to the gun at my back.

But then, like a crosscurrent, she landed. Positioning herself at the point where the aisle met the pier, one foot on each side, she halved the distance between Mackie and me. Pointing her nose straight into the air, Skamar sniffed, then angled her head my way. “Smell that, Jo?”

I didn’t move, fearing whatever I did would be wrong, she’d leave, and I’d be headed for the glue factory again. Yet I was screaming inside. Scoop me up! Take me away! Deliver me from this particular evil, and I’ll never take your name in vain again!

But Skamar was preoccupied with something other than escape. “It’s not your fury, nope. Not like the last time we met. That smelled like the aftermath of a traffic accident. It’s got quite a nice hook to it, actually.”

“Skamar…?” I ventured, seeing Mackie list her way, and thinking it was an odd moment for philosophical musings.

“Nope, not even the despair I sensed when this walking miasma killed your cat.” She ignored the grating metallic whine rising from Mackie again, but I couldn’t. It was a noise associated with homicide.

“Skamar.” Maybe intoning her name would snap her out of it.

Inexplicably, she closed her eyes and tilted her sharp, slim jaw up to the sky. “No, this is fresh and floral, like spring’s blossoms and green wood. This,” she said, turning her back on Sleepy Mac, “is life. ”

“What are you doing?” I said, panicked as Mackie’s head lowered, blade lifting.

She continued to foolishly ignore him, opening eyes both determined and sad. “I’ve decided you’re right. It is time for something to touch me. To prove I’m more than animated flesh. Not like this half-life behind me.” The sadness left her eyes. “It’s time, in other words, to pick some bones.”

Mackie clearly had other ideas. He grinned so widely his black stub of a tongue showed between his teeth. His laughter was ground iron. Skamar’s smile didn’t meet her eyes, sincere, severe, and still fastened on mine. “But you might want to look away. ’Cuz when I pick ’em? I pick ’em clean.”

She pivoted as Mackie lunged, and for a second’s frac tion pulled back, as if bracing herself. Then she dove forward so quickly it was like she expected to move clean through him. She didn’t, of course. Sleepy Mac didn’t give ground, had never needed to before…though seconds later I bet he wished he had.

His scream rose like a tornado siren, jagged and uncertain, but too late. I cupped my hands over my ears- countless people behind the dueling creatures did the same-but stayed focused on the whipping dervish just as Skamar bit down and ripped the nose from Mackie’s face. She didn’t spit it out, didn’t even chew. Just swallowed it full and swung back down for another bite. First one bony cheek disappeared, then the other. She had his wrists pinned, and though he didn’t let go of his blade-he’d never do that-he flailed in panic, jerking his head from side to side as he tried to avoid the tulpa’s barbed teeth. He was struggling too hard for her to get a good bite, so I shook myself to my senses and shot him twice. That enabled her to find his throat, and his grunts and screams gurgled into silence.

That’s when his arm started swinging.

Skamar lifted her head, blood blanketing her chin as she stared right at me. “Shoot me!”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard right, and kept my aim on his body. “What?”

“Shoot me,” she repeated, head lowering. “Quick!”

As she began shredding fingers from his free hand, I remembered what happened when you shot a tulpa…and lunged for the bazooka. Narrowing my gaze, I pointed the giant barrel at her middle and fired. She grew a foot with the first rocket, and another six inches with each additional shot. It didn’t sound like a lot, but it was six inches in circumference, and after the first two strikes, Mackie sure as hell knew the difference. He turned his head on what remained of that sinewy neck long enough to growl at me, hate naked in his black-socketed stare, the skeletal face now missing so many of its features.

The warning movement cost him. I shot again and Skamar engulfed him with her jaw, crunching down on his skull like a nutcracker. His expression literally shattered before me. His black tongue lolled from his mouth, then fell, severed by his own teeth.

But his flailing blade finally found a home in Skamar’s side. I shot him again, but it was too late. She twisted, her face scrawled in agony, but dove in once more. I turned the weapon back on her, causing her to jerk but also causing her to grow.

Her jaw was the size of my head now, and she easily engulfed the whole of Mackie’s crushed skull, right down to the base of his neck. And she bit. After snapping it, after his muffled cries fell silent in her mouth, she jerked back, ripping it from his body. Mackie’s shoulders slumped, his posture both defeated and confused, and from there it was an easy thing for Skamar to dismantle the rest of his body.

“Motherfucker,” I whispered, lowering my weapon. She ate every bit of him, every bone, dried jerky muscle and gristle, and she licked her fingers when she was done.

“Old habits die hard,” she finally said, offering me a bloody, lopsided smile. It was how we’d met. She had been a doppelgänger- my doppelgänger-and so hungry for life she was willing to eat me.

Then Skamar convulsed and let out an agonizing scream. Jerking back and forth, she forced herself to stop with visible effort. A moment of stillness.

Then, like a shark’s fin breaking the surface, the knife burst through her belly.

“Spit it out!” I screamed, wanting to go to her, but knowing well enough to stay away. The man was in pieces inside of her, but he was somehow still alive.

Skamar winced, clearly wanting to, but slowly shook her head. “I can’t.”

And screamed again.

Because Mackie’s soul was in the blade, I realized. She had to swallow him whole, masticating his body, blending it with hers until she totally blotted out his existence…which meant the blade too.

And that, I suddenly realized, meant Skamar would end up like Luna-a fully conscious being trapped in a body of flattened nerves and destroyed tissue. Sentient, but with no way of communicating with the outside world. A bright mind in a decaying body. It’s why she’d hesitated, and I couldn’t blame her…yet it was also why she’d returned. No one else could stop Mackie, and he would never stop.

“When he’s done,” she said, seeing my understanding, “suck the last breath from me. That’s where the soul resides. Th-That should do it.”

I swallowed hard. “But I’m mortal.”

She winced. “You’re alive. You…count. Please.”

I nodded at first, unable to get any words past my thickened throat, but I owed it to her not to leave her to a fate of conscious death, just as she hadn’t left Luna. “I promise.”

Skamar’s eyes were wistful and she was breathing hard. “Tell Zoe…I love-”

The blade reared up inside her throat then, severing vocal cords to poke through the white flesh, the shark’s fin trailing blood behind it. The last bit of Mackie’s soul fought for escape, but she punched her middle, breaking her own ribs as she pummeled him into submission. She gurgled loudly, defiantly, and finally, pitifully.

Simply watching was the bravest thing I could do. But I cried as I did so, choking down vomit numerous times, and at some point my knees numbly gave in. Mackie’s frenetic thrashing gradually ceased, and after a while the deft flicks forcing Skamar to jolt and twitch turned into lethargic slices that only caused more blood to trail from her body. In desperation, or maybe his last hoorah, he gave a final energetic swipe at her heart, and the still-beating thing popped from her chest, pulsed over the top of splintered ribs, pounded a handful of times, then slowed.

The breath stilled with the blade. When neither Skamar nor Mackie moved, I climbed shakily to my feet and crossed to the pulpy mess. Hesitating, I licked my lips before leaning close. Skamar was flattened, destroyed. But her eyes, tucked deep but still whole, swung my way.

“Oh, God…oh, God…”

I fell forward, ignoring the squishing slide of destroyed flesh beneath my knees, and found the carved ruin of her lips. Mackie’s blade had cut through the flesh of her lower jaw, but most of her skull was intact, which was probably why she was still able to exert her will over him. Knowing she was still there, thinking and feeling and simply being alive, actually made it harder to kill her, but it was also the only way to destroy him. Besides, she’d already forgiven me for the death. She wouldn’t forgive me for letting her live.

So bending down, I placed my lips against hers, already cold, and I sucked. The dry coil of breath worked its way into my mouth like rising steam, surprising me and reverberating strangely in my throat, like it was someone else’s voice…and it was. Skamar’s dulcet pitch smeared my esophagus on its way into my lungs.

Mackie’s black fanged timbre clawed at it.

I pulled away, coughing, the throbbing in my chest threatening to make me ill. Out went Skamar’s soul, a taste of creamed blood, and out went Mackie’s soured one. Skamar’s consciousness thanked me as it sailed free, but when the last of Mackie’s deadened soul was hacked from my body? It screamed.

A gelatinous shudder rolled along the entire pulpy mass beneath me then, followed by a long, gentle sigh. The whispered exhalation probably wasn’t a whole lot different than the way Skamar first entered the world. Just the flip side of a lone, fateful breath taken by a woman begun as a vision. One given life by a powerful woman’s mind.

My mother.

Zoe.

I sat back on my heels, wiped my bloodied mouth with the back of my hand, and closed my eyes.

Suzanne.