When she was on her feet, she regarded Debra’s corpse. Working together, she and Katie had torn off Debra’s left arm and cast it aside. It now lay several feet from the body, fingers half curled, thumb slightly extended, almost as if Debra was signaling approval of their work from the great beyond. They’d removed most of the muscle in her left shoulder and had discarded it, too. Katie had taken a couple bites of it, but she found the meat too tough and chewy, and she was now hunkered over Debra’s remains, gnawing on a length of intestine. While this admittedly drastic therapy was quite messy, Melinda thought it fast and effective. Debra’s shoulder pain had been thoroughly and completely resolved.
As she stood watching Katie work on her grisly meal – it was lunchtime, after all – she pondered what to do next. She’d killed Dennis – torn the business manager’s throat out with her teeth – before coming out to the reception area to help Katie deal with Debra, and there was no one else currently in the clinic. The other PTs were at lunch, and no clients had been scheduled for this time. People would soon be coming, though. Her employees would return from lunch, and the afternoon clients would begin to arrive. She supposed she and Katie could attack them as they entered, and while that would be fun, she couldn’t escape a nagging feeling that there was something else she should do. Something important.
It had been a strange day so far. She and Katie were always the first to arrive, and while Melinda usually beat her to the office, today had been one of those rare occasions when Katie got there before her. She had been seated at the reception counter when Melinda entered the clinic. Melinda wasn’t much for empty pleasantries at the best of times, and today she especially wasn’t interested in chatting with Katie. She and Carlo had had a fight last night, a real knock-down-drag-out that had come close to ending their relationship. Things had been better between them this morning, if still strained, and while she was hopeful they would return to normal soon, she was worried the fight had been a symptom of deeper relationship issues that needed to be addressed.
The fight had started because Carlo had said he was too tired when she’d wanted to make love last night. He’d been putting her off sexually for a while now, but when she’d confronted him about it, he’d said she was making something out of nothing. He still loved her, still wanted her. He was simply tired. He ran his own construction company, and he put in long hours, often doing physically demanding work alongside his employees. Of course he’d be too tired for sex sometimes. Melinda knew that. But every time she wanted to fuck? She was starting to worry that he was having an affair.
So when Katie greeted her as she entered the clinic, she hadn’t bothered smiling, only nodded and hoped Katie would get the message and leave her alone. But Katie hadn’t taken the hint.
“I’ve got something cool to show you,” she’d said. “Really cool.”
Melinda had intended to ignore Katie and keep on walking until she reached her office, which was located across the hall from Dennis’s. She’d enter, close the door behind her, and try to get it together before her first client of the day arrived. But she didn’t do that. Instead, she walked over to the reception counter to see what Katie wanted to show her. Why she’d done this, she wasn’t certain. Maybe, despite her determination not to interact with anyone this morning, she needed some positive human contact. Or maybe she’d decided that just because she felt shitty was no reason to treat Katie poorly. Whatever the reason, she was at the counter, and she waited for Katie to reveal whatever it was she wanted to show her. It damn well better be cool, she’d thought.
Katie had something inside a plastic shopping bag sitting on her desk area behind the counter. She stuck her right hand inside the bag, but instead of pulling out whatever object it contained, she quickly withdrew her hand, reached out, and rubbed her fingers rapidly back and forth over Melinda’s lips.
“What the fuck?” She stepped back in alarm, raised a hand to her lips, touched them, looked at her fingers, saw they were smeared with thick, sticky red.
“It’s cat blood,” Katie said. “Awesome, right?”
Melinda was beyond horrified. She had two cats herself – Puddin’ and Lightfoot – and the idea that Katie would smear ketchup on her and claim it was cat blood for some sick fucking joke was….
She heard the plastic bag rustle, then watched as Katie lifted a dead cat – half a dead cat – up for her to see.
It’s out of the bag, Melinda had thought. The cat. Is out. Of the bag.
The blood (definitely not ketchup) felt warm and tingly on her lips, and she had the sensation that her skin was absorbing it somehow, pulling it into her. Or maybe the blood was forcing its way in, invading her. Either way, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that it felt good. Felt fucking great, in fact.
She’d started laughing then, and Katie joined in. They both looked at the cat’s head – open staring eyes, small blood-flecked tongue sticking out of its mouth – as if they expected it to say something. It remained silent, of course, but the look on its dead face was so ridiculous that the women’s laughter intensified, becoming shrieks of hilarity.
That had been hours ago, and while Melinda still felt fantastic, as if she was flying high on the greatest drug ever created, she felt unsettled as well. Restless. There was something she needed to do, she and Katie both, but she couldn’t—
And then the dark infection that had entered her body via tainted cat blood began whispering to her. She listened intently for several seconds, and when the voice fell silent, she smiled. She knew what they had to do.
“Lunch is over, Katie. Time for you and I to get back to work.”
Katie spat out the length of intestine she’d been chewing on and stood, giving Debra’s ravaged body a last regretful look, as if she felt guilty about wasting so much food. Then she turned to face Melinda, her stomach bloated, full to bursting with cat and human meat. Melinda noticed the woman’s face had changed. Her eyes were now amber and larger than before, and tufts of downy hair covered her cheeks. No, not hair. Fur.
They say you are what you eat, Melinda thought. In Katie’s case, it seemed to be you become what you eat.
“You want me to take the rest of her out back to the dumpster?” Katie asked. There was a soft, fluttering hum to her voice, almost a purr.
“I don’t think so. Her corpse livens up the place – so to speak. No, you and I are going to take a little trip to pick up a new friend.”
She felt her braid quiver against her back. It was excited, ready and raring to go. She reached around to the back of her head and stroked the base of the braid.
In a moment, she thought. Be patient.
“Okay,” Katie said. “But can we maybe stop and get some snacks along the way? I’m starving.”
Melinda smiled. “I think that can be arranged.”
* * *
It was beginning to rain by the time Lori pulled into Woodlawn Cemetery. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was steady, and Lori activated her windshield wipers. What a cliché, she thought. Rain in a cemetery. She might’ve thought the Cabal had arranged the rain in order to provide a suitably gloomy atmosphere for her, but from what she’d experienced so far, the Cabal wasn’t this unoriginal.
If I have to be stalked and harassed by fiendish otherworldly mystics, at least they’re creative ones, she thought.
She hadn’t been here in almost fifteen years, but she remembered the way so well, she thought she could drive it with her eyes closed. Woodlawn was one of only a handful of cemeteries in town, and it was smaller than the others. It was enclosed by orange brick walls all the way around, and its only entry and exit point was through a pair of black wrought-iron gates, which were left unlocked and open every day from nine a.m. to nine p.m. The ground here rose and fell in modest hills and dips, and there were few trees. Those that were present were young, with thin trunks and even thinner branches, leaves still mostly green, but some edging toward fall colors. She remembered more trees, much older and larger than these, and she wondered if they’d been cut down and replaced by younger ones since the last time she’d been here. Probably. Cemeteries were depressing enough as it was. Who wanted to be greeted by a bunch of dead and dying trees?
A narrow access road wound through the cemetery grounds, the asphalt old and cracked. They’d replaced the trees but couldn’t be bothered to repair the road? Cheap-ass bastards. The road was only wide enough for one car to drive on, but there was no one else in the cemetery – at least, she couldn’t see any other vehicles – so she didn’t have to worry about having to pull off to the side so another car could pass. More importantly, she wouldn’t have to worry about anyone seeing her here. No one would know who she was or why she’d come, but she still didn’t want any eyes on her. This was going to be hard enough as it was. She didn’t need a goddamned audience.
The headstones were of different sizes and fashioned from different colors of stone. Most were in the typical rectangular shape, but some were shaped like larger obelisks or spires, and others were more stylized in design, carved to resemble a heart or – in one extremely depressing case – a cradle. The headstone she was looking for was a modest one. No pictures of angels carved onto its face, no sentiments like Always in our hearts or Gone to be with the Lord. Just gray rock with simple letters and numbers etched in its surface.
And there it was.
Up to this point, Lori hadn’t felt much of anything. She’d been numb, operating on autopilot, desperately trying not to think about Katie holding the mutilated body of the dead cat out to her.
Want some?
But now that the grave – Aashrita’s grave – was in sight, she felt a lance of pain behind her right eye. The first sign of a stress-induced migraine, she thought. The rain wasn’t helping either. It always played hell with her sinuses.
She parked her car and got out, leaving her purse on the passenger seat. She had a small umbrella in the glove box, but she left it where it was. The rain wasn’t coming down that hard, and it was cool but not cold out. She had a red windbreaker in the back seat, but she didn’t want to have anything to do with that color right now, so she left it, too. As rain hit her – especially her uncovered head and bare arms – she hoped the sensation would provide a kind of buffer that would insulate her from her emotions. So many awful things had happened to her since Goat-Eyes had first approached her in the grocery store, but none of them was worse than this was going to be.
She stepped onto the grass, careful to avoid walking across people’s graves as she made her way to Aashrita’s headstone. She did this out of a quasi-superstitious politeness more than from any actual belief she would be disrespecting the spirits of the dead by tramping on their graves. But given everything she’d experienced since last night, she figured better safe than sorry.
Her bad knee always ached when it rained, and it throbbed now, buckling a little with every step. She was grateful for this pain, too. It was an old friend, and as such was – in a weird way – a comfort to her now. The pain wouldn’t serve as a distraction from her thoughts about Aashrita, though. How could it, considering Aashrita had been there when she’d sustained the injury responsible for that pain?
She was surprised to see one of the new, skinny trees had been planted close to Aashrita’s grave. Too close, she thought. The base of the trunk was less than a yard from the headstone. As the tree grew, would its roots grow around Aashrita’s burial vault, or would they worm their way through tiny cracks in the concrete, widening them until they’d breached the vault and could slither toward the casket – and its occupant? When Lori reached Aashrita’s grave, she stepped off to the side to avoid standing on her friend’s resting place, body angled so she could face the headstone. Fifteen years of exposure to the elements had worn the edges of the letters and numbers somewhat, but they were still easily legible. AASHRITA DHAWAN. That was all, aside from her birth and death dates. There was no sign anyone had visited the grave recently. There were no flowers, and the grass could use some trimming. Lori wondered if the sound of a lawnmower would disturb the dead’s sleep, or if they would welcome sounds of life, however impersonal those sounds might be. She felt an urge then to say hello to Aashrita, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.
