4. Bleeding For A Taste
Bleeding For A Taste
If it wasn’t for the stinking pit in the center of Marlowe’s hand, she might have imagined all of it.
She’d been smart. Got antibiotics right after—under the table to avoid any invasive questions—kept it clean, considered checking in for a mandatory hold. Left it open overnight in the sticky heat of her apartment to dry out. She woke up to her hand crusted into a fist.
By the third day, Marlowe’s hand oozed sickly green and her skin peeled away in diseased, flaky layers. Dark tendrils snaked up her arm and twined around her elbow, sluggishly burning through her veins.
The one person who could tell her she wasn’t losing her mind, who had witnessed the beginning with her, Marlowe was going to kill. Desperation hadn’t let her rest, and it rotted Marlowe’s revenge into something crude and reckless.
Acid spilled into her tub, gallon after gallon eating away at the soap-scum sides until a mossy sheen coated the surface under the faucet.
Marlowe peeled off her thick rubber gloves. Another layer of skin sloughed off her palm and slopped wetly on the bathroom floor. She gritted her teeth against the foggy urge to lay her nails into the sore and scratch it to bone, and instead leaned across the tub to crack open the small window.
A strand of her hair hissed and bubbled where it fell. Marlowe’s head cleared in a gust of fresh night air and she lowered herself onto the dingy bathroom tile.
Two years ago, a new maintenance man at the hospital took a different route transporting the chemicals after the weekly delivery.
A wobbly cart, slippery floors, and drinking on the job were a near-lethal combination.
By the time Marlowe and the other night shifters heard the screams, the puddle of spilled acid had dissolved the carpet and the soles of his boots.
His heel bones scraped on the tile when he limped toward them.
After the incident the chemicals had been stuffed in a back room, disturbed only by staff locking themselves away for a cry or a smoke.
Marlowe ground her knuckles into her gritty eyes. She couldn’t have slept more than a handful of hours each night since she left Pike’s Lake. Exhaustion gnawed at her, making her see things, think things.
The morning after the lake she’d locked herself in that stale little back room, hazily sucking down cigarette after cigarette. She’d stubbed out the ends on grimy tiles next to faded red symbols stamped on cardboard, and one open-box epiphany later, she finally knew how to get rid of Heather.
Chain-smoking and hacking up phlegm afterwards had done nothing to loosen the decay lodged in her throat.
Marlowe could taste the lake even now, silt-heavy, drilled into her teeth, clogging her throat and choking away the pine-vanilla stench.
Her eyes burned from the chemicals and her palm pulsed in heavy throbs.
She squeezed her legs together and sucked in air through her teeth, willing the ugly ache in her cunt to subside.
Marlowe’s left hand fisted at the waistband of her shorts and the flushed skin of her stomach blazed against her knuckles.
Heather hadn’t been a bad fuck.
The thought burrowed into Marlowe’s mind, truth-barbed and hated as she dug her left hand into her shorts under scratchy lace. Shitty motels in neighboring towns had been their sin of choice, but sometimes they fogged car windows, leaving sweaty handprints on cracked leather seats, and once—
Marlowe’s lips parted in a strained pant as the pads of her fingers ground clumsily against slick, touch-starved flesh, and she curled her fingers into herself, head hanging, eyes screwed shut.
Once they’d met at a bar and she’d hardly recognized Heather under the layers of eyeshadow and black leather.
Piss and water soaked the hem of her skintight dress when Heather had pinned her up against the sink, like her leather jacket was stitched together from flayed convictions and sewn together with the same two fingers buried in Marlowe’s cunt.
Marlowe had hated her more for it. Knowing this is what she could be—what they could be.
Her stomach twisted and tightened, hair feverishly plastered across her face and cheeks, but the angle was all wrong and her shorts suffocated her hand and acid burned her nose.
Marlowe’s solution to Heather’s corpse glistened in the bathtub, air exposure darkening it from oily yellow to a dark, sickly green.
Her death wouldn’t be quick. Wouldn’t be clean, like the knife at Pike’s Lake was supposed to be.
She’d have to be tactful in luring Heather to her apartment, and packed to leave town once it was over. It would all be over.
Heather would cease to exist, and would take with her that aching bitterness writhing inside of Marlowe like a parasite she couldn’t dig out of her skin.
Wedging her fingers deeper, Marlowe tried to force a release, hips jerkily rocking against her fingers to clear her mind from the throbbing pain of her right hand.
She clenched her hand at her side, then pressed it into the biting cold tile.
There were only a few seconds of relief before the blistering pain returned and she snatched it away.
Leaving a festering brown smear on the floor, the smell of lake rotted the air.
Marlowe stilled.
Her mouth went dry, bleeding for a taste.
She needed to taste the rot, feel it string on her tongue and clog her throat. She needed it once more, and then she could focus on killing Heather. She needed to taste Pike.
Fingers trembling, Marlowe brought her hand to her mouth, tongue flicking across the fluid leaking from circular teeth marks. Molded fruit, carried on the leathery slip of an earthworm’s belly. Bloated slick of a fish tossed ashore. Decay webbing the inside of her mouth.
Marlowe swallowed a moan and worked her other hand viciously, wetness soaking through to the floor. She bit and sucked at her palm, fragile skin greasy under her tongue, her lips. Rot dripped and flesh wedged in her teeth.
Acid fumes burned at her nose and lungs and each breath came in short, labored gasps. Marlowe mouthed words against her palm, begging, the muscles in her left hand spasming as the tendons in her right flexed under her teeth.
Pressure built in the pit of her stomach, fueled by fragmented memories of Pike, her hands on Marlowe, her tongue down her throat—
Marlowe shuddered, knees falling apart, cresting.
Acid sizzled on the tile.
Then again, and pinpricks of pain stabbed through her socked feet.
Marlowe’s eyes snapped open.
Webbed hands gripped the tub’s edge. Pike, golden eyes blazing and cutting through Marlowe’s black-spotted vision, slopped acid on the floor as they crawled toward her.
She tipped back from the brink. Her cunt throbbed, empty, as Marlowe scrabbled back. Drawer handles cut into her back.
Vision faded, spots overlapping. Her sight blared back to full color.
Pike dragged a line of festering, sick-green acid behind her. Waterlilies clogged the drain, roots cracking at the foundation and reaching for Marlowe, curling around her ankles like the panic binding her chest.
A rasping sound thrummed in the air between them. Marlowe’s breathing. Desperate, wanting.
Pike drew close enough Marlowe could see her fevered reflection in those round, unblinking eyes. Swollen, red veins lined her own chest above her low-cut tank top.
A webbed hand rimmed with acid and slime trailed up her leg and a whine left Marlowe’s throat. Her knees, drawn to her chest, drifted apart.
A plea snagged on Marlowe’s rot-slicked tongue. She wanted. She needed.
Marlowe’s hips rutted against nothing, aching, begging. Her hand dripped onto the floor, and she wanted to taste Pike again, needed to be consumed by the lake.
She blinked, and Pike was gone.
The acid bloomed oily yellow. The tile, bare, except for smears of filmy brown. Marlowe fogged the cracked finish as she lowered herself to the floor and licked up the last taste of Pike, flesh and worms and decay.
Her body ached, empty.
Marlowe pressed her face against the cool tile, easing the blurred pressure in her head.
In the cratered center of her hand, algae wept in green, stringy ropes.
Marlowe bared her teeth and staggered to her feet, catching the sink, the walls, steadying herself from the terrible pounding in her head, in her cunt.
The porcelain sink cracked and strained as Marlowe leaned on it and dug her fingernails into the red veins webbing across her chest. Words jumbled together in her mind.
Heather. Cabin 13. Pike.
She couldn’t lure Heather here in her condition.
The phone seemed so far away, the cord writhing up the wall.
She was running out of time before Heather called Mercy Hospital, before Heather realized what had almost happened that night, before Heather didn’t need her anymore. Before Heather didn’t want her anymore.
Marlowe had to go back to Pike’s Lake.
She was out of time.