With a magician’s flourish, she pulled the blanket off her legs and tossed it aside.
“So what do you think? Pleased with your handiwork?”
Aashrita flinched as if Lori had slapped her.
Lori continued speaking, her voice becoming louder and angrier as she went on.
“I’m never going to be able to play sports again – not unless I want to risk fucking up my new knee. Hell, right now it’s all I can do to walk up and down the street a couple times. It still hurts like a bitch, too – especially if I use it too much. My physical therapist says it won’t hurt forever, but I think he’s full of shit. I think it’s always going to hurt. Maybe not as much as now, but I think the pain is never going to not be there. I’ll have it – and the scar – to remind me of you for the rest of my life. Better than signing my senior yearbook, right?”
Lori knew she was being cruel, but she couldn’t stop herself. And part of her didn’t want to stop, wanted to keep on hurting Aashrita.
“Don’t know what I’m going to do about college now that a soccer scholarship is out of the question. Maybe I’ll get a job at a fast-food place after graduation instead. ‘Would you like fries with that?’ How’d I do? Think I got what it takes?”
She thought Aashrita might get angry and lash out at her. Lori wanted her to, wanted to get into a shouting match with her, wanted to yell and scream and cuss her out. But Aashrita said nothing. Her eyes shimmered with tears, but they did not fall, not yet.
“I’m sorry, Lori. It was an accident. I didn’t mean it. I’d do anything to take it back.”
“Well…. There is one way you could make it up to me.”
Aashrita wiped the nascent tears from her eyes and gave Lori an uncertain half-smile.
“What is it?”
Lori’s words came out of her mouth like daggers of ice. “Go kill yourself, you brown bitch.”
She shocked herself, perhaps more for the racist barb she’d hurled than for telling Aashrita to commit suicide. She was deeply ashamed, but at the same time she felt dark satisfaction at knowing how much her words had hurt her friend. Her former friend.
Aashrita’s eyes went wide and the tears came now, flowing fast and free. She looked at Lori for several seconds, mouth open as if she might say something. But then she whirled around and ran down the walkway. She kept running when she reached the sidewalk and didn’t look back.
Lori almost called out for her to stop, almost shouted that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant it. But she remained silent and watched Aashrita go, not knowing it was the last time she’d see her friend alive.
* * *
Lori fell out of the memory and found herself looking into Aashrita’s face – the version of the woman whose exposed intestines had a life of their own. They were still almost nose to nose, and the loops of organ still wrapped tight around Lori and held her above the ground. The loop coiled around her throat had loosened a little, just enough so she could breathe, but only shallowly. A cloud of flies still buzzed around them.
“You didn’t know depression ran in my family, did you?” Aashrita said. Her voice started out weak but grew stronger and more forceful as she went on. “My family was in denial of it. They self-medicated – Dad with booze, Mom with drugs. My brothers and sisters used both in various amounts and combinations. And when my parents saw I was quiet, moody, and withdrawn, they assumed it was nothing but normal teenage angst. Nothing to be concerned about.” She released a bitter laugh. “No therapy or antidepressants necessary. ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ they told each other. ‘It’s just a phase.’ They knew better when they found me in the bathtub later that night. The water was long cold by the time they entered the bathroom, but it was still red. I’d used a pair of garment scissors to slice deep vertical gashes in my forearms, just like I’d read on the Internet you were supposed to if you wanted to do it right. The scissors lay on the bathmat, blood on them still wet.
“You know what the funny thing is? The racism didn’t bother me all that much. You kind of get used to it after a while. It hurt because it came from you. You called me a brown bitch not because you were racist, but because you knew how much it would hurt me to hear those words come out of your mouth.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Lori said. “No, that’s a lie. I did want to hurt you. I blamed you for my knee getting fucked up, and I wanted to get back at you in some small way. I was a stupid, self-absorbed teenager wallowing in pointless anger.”
While she would’ve hopefully found her way out of that emotional state on her own eventually, Aashrita’s death – and the guilt and shame she felt over the way she’d treated her friend the afternoon before she killed herself – had shocked her out of it. She’d stopped focusing on herself after that, dedicated herself to helping others. As a PT student in college and as a professional working at Get Moving!, she’d come to have a much better understanding of how people could react emotionally to receiving a chronic injury. Her own experience with such feelings gave her far more empathy for her clients than a lot of other PTs had. But while her guilt had motivated her to make positive changes in her life, it had also caused her to bury the memory of Aashrita’s suicide, and sometimes she didn’t remember Aashrita at all. She remembered now, though, and she wouldn’t allow herself to forget again.
“You say you wanted to get back at me in a small way?” Aashrita’s voice burned with barely restrained anger now. “Well, small actions can have pretty goddamn big consequences!”
Lori said nothing for a moment. She looked into Aashrita’s eyes as the woman’s words sank in.
“You’re what I need to confess to and atone for,” she said. “I mean, what I did to you. You were teetering on the edge, and I thoughtlessly pushed you over. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You can’t confess to me. I already know what you did. But congratulations on your little epiphany anyway. There’s more you need to know, though. A lot more. Think you’re ready?”
Lori answered truthfully. “I’m not sure.”
Aashrita’s smile was cold. “Too bad. You don’t have a choice.”
Aashrita’s brow furrowed in concentration, and her facial muscles tensed. Lori heard a wet tearing sound, and Aashrita let out a cry of pain. The lower end of her intestine came slithering out from her body cavity, disturbing the flies gathered there. The intestine swayed like a viperous snake, and Lori realized she was looking at Aashrita’s colon. She’d caused it to tear free from her anus, and now it was rising further upward, snaking between their two bodies.
“We’ve covered the past,” Aashrita said. “Now I need to show you the present and the future. I wouldn’t be much use as an augur if I confined myself solely to what was, would I?”
Lori tried to protest, but the colon shot toward her mouth, slid past her teeth, and wiggled its way down her throat. And then it began pumping something thick and sludgy into her. She tried to scream, but all that came out was a muffled moan.
Images began to flash across her consciousness. She saw Shadowkin moving through the streets of Oakmont, destroying anything in their path, including people. There were so many, far more than had broken into her apartment last night, and more than she’d seen at the cemetery. Three times that number, maybe more. They moved so swiftly, killed so many…. They were far stronger now than they’d been when they’d broken into her apartment. They’d fed on her then, taken some of her strength. And had they retreated afterward so that they could digest what they’d taken? She thought so.
The images changed then, and she saw Melinda, Katie, and Justin riding together in Melinda’s white SUV. Melinda drove, her gray braid swishing back and forth behind her head while Katie – who now had tufts of fur on her face, along with cat teeth and cat eyes – scanned the sidewalk for something. Or someone. Justin sat in the back, face expressionless, his shirt open to reveal a chest covered with a mass of misshapen, discolored growths. What the hell had happened to them, and how had they ended up together? But she knew the answer to that, didn’t she?
The Cabal.
The images in her mind changed yet again, and now she saw the inside of Horizon’s Edge Mall, saw people running, mothers with children mostly, saw bodies and blood…. Reeny was on her knees, tears streaming from her eyes, mouth open in a silent scream as she cradled the limp body of Brian. Lori’s nephew had blood on him, a lot of it. Near Reeny and Brian lay the body of a uniformed police officer, gun in hand, the top of her head blown off. There was lots of blood on her, too, but her features were clear enough, and Lori saw she was one of the two officers that had come to her apartment last night to investigate the Shadowkin’s break-in. Officer…McGuire. She’d never learned the woman’s first name, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was poor Brian and her devastated sister. Lori focused on them, tried to reach out mentally to Reeny, to let her know she was not alone in her grief.
Then Brian opened his eyes.
Lori felt almost giddy with relief. He wasn’t dead! He was only wounded, and despite all the blood, evidently not too seriously, for he sat up easily, displaying no sign of distress. He started speaking, and although these visions came with no sound, she could tell by the increasingly angry expression on Reeny’s face that whatever her son was saying, it was making her furious. What the hell—
The vision faded, was replaced by yet another.
This time she saw a scene of Oakmont viewed from above, as if she were flying over the town. There wasn’t much left, just some scattered buildings here and there. Most of the structures had been destroyed, reduced to broken brick and concrete, splintered lengths of wood, shards of shattered glass, bent and twisted metal. The ground was torn up too, as if dozens of tanks had rolled through, treads churning the soil. It looked as if a mass of tornadoes had swept through Oakmont, their merciless winds pulverizing everything in their path. There were bodies, too, so many of them, some more or less intact, some only partials, others smears of bloody meat and crushed bone. There were no signs of life, not even animals – no dogs or cats, no birds.
She tried to scream, needed to release the horror she felt, but the sludge from Aashrita’s colon was still being extruded into her, and it clogged her throat, and she could make no sound. And then the coils of intestine grew slack and she slipped through them. As she fell to the ground, the end that had been forced into her mouth came free, and she was able to breathe again. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees, her body shaking so violently that it was all she could do to keep from collapsing back onto the ground. She opened her mouth to scream at last, but instead a torrent of thick black liquid shot forth. The muck that came out of her smelled foul – and tasted worse – and the sensation caused her to vomit even harder. She continued vomiting, abdominal muscles contracting painfully, spine arched and rigid, for what seemed like hours. But eventually the flood of sludge became a trickle, and then she was dry heaving. She felt the blanket being draped over her body, and she might’ve flinched at the unexpected contact if she hadn’t been so physically spent.
