DOA III Read online

  It was as if along with her face the boiling oil had relieved Catherine of the person she had been beneath it. Where once she was meek, now she was in control. Where was once she was passive, now she was insatiable; once sad, now gleeful. As her new face had torn free in a violent eruption of steam and blister flowers, so had the person she was meant to be.

  And when it got really lonely, when she couldn’t get anyone else to tend to her, Mom could always tiptoe down the hall to Gregory’s room. He was fifteen by then, after all.

  “Such a big boy,” Vicki would hear her mother coo from inside her brother’s room at night. “Mommy’s big, sexy boy.”

  “No,” he said. “Don’t. I don’t like it!”

  “But look here.” Mom would giggle. “That means you do, baby.

  Looks to me like you like it a lot.”

  He eventually learned not to struggle.

  It was Vicki who found her mother dead in the bathtub.

  She was naked. Really naked. She hardly ever wore much, but she was not wearing a mask or wig either. Her wrists were severed. She’d been serious, too, cutting up and down, not across. Determined to die. Every mirror in the house was broken, smashed to bits, and she’d used one of the biggest pieces to gouge the deep, moist slits into her skinny forearms. Vicki had heard the glass breaking the night before, lying absolutely still in bed. She had been terrified, but she knew by then to stay out of Mom’s way. When Mom was in a mood, it was best to lay low.

  Catherine had tried to fuck herself back to life. It didn’t make sense to Vicki then, but later on she began to understand. Her mother’s plan had worked, for a little while. She’d filled herself with a Naval fleet’s worth of cock, and enough jizz to float their ships on, but it hadn’t been enough. She could never feel desired enough, be wanted enough, to look at herself for very long. For just a little while though, she had been happy. But Catherine couldn’t embrace the change. She got caught up in the surface. All style, no substance. The change is what’s really important, and that happens below. It happens within.

  Gregory was eighteen and out of the picture by then. So Vicki was alone when she called the police. She was alone as she watched TV and waited. She was alone when they finally arrived to take her mother away forever.

  Years passed.

  Vicki didn’t often think about her mother. Though, in another way, she never really stopped thinking about her. It wasn’t so much a case of thinking or not thinking about her, really. The memory of her mother coated every feeling she had, every action and thought, like a layer of dust that she couldn’t wipe away.

  Tonight, once more, she had her hands full of hair. Beautiful strawberry blond hair, beneath which her roommate Andrea spat and sobbed into the toilet. Devastated by another man, the comely petite girl from Minneapolis had again tried to assuage her feelings with vodka—a lot of vodka—and now she suffered on her knees before the pitiless porcelain goddess.

  Sitting on the side of the tub, leaned forward with elbows on her thighs, Vicki gathered up the sad girl’s hair into one fist and slid her other hand to her roommate’s heaving back. She rubbed small, comforting circles.

  “It’s OK,” Vicki said again. “It’s all going to be fine,” for the hundredth time. Then she said, “You’re better off.” Vicki searched for what usually came next in the speech. She came up blank though and went back to rubbing and shushing instead.

  Tomorrow would come the hangover, brutal and debilitating but a necessary period in the depressing run on sentence that was Andrea’s love life. Then the slow recovery, until her next paramour and the accompanying, almost assured, infidelity, dishonesty and mistreatment.

  Andrea was a beautiful girl. The broken ones almost always are. But it did not make her happy. Vicki felt bad for her. She felt a lot of things for her. She’d watched Andrea for the three years they’d lived together, watched her very closely. She’d seen her desperately squeezing herself into the role dictated by the world, killing herself at fitness classes and starving herself to slip into seductive clothes. Still not happy. Andrea wanted to be the girl she thought she should be so badly. So many long, painful hours, so much time standing before mirrors analyzing and adjusting. So many trinkets, tricks, powders, gels and sprays. And she was still not happy.

  Vicki had watched Andrea alter herself for every man who came along. Hair, interests, mannerisms, they’d all been changed easier than underwear if the next willing cock in her life had seen fit to encourage, or forbid, something. They were never real changes, though. Just a surface disguise. A mask to hide behind.

  “Shh,” Vicki said in her friend’s ear. It was stretched and punctured by many heavy, twinkly, eye-catching baubles. “It’ll be OK. I promise. I love you.”

  “Thanks,” Andrea said, staring down into the toilet, head on her forearm. “I love you too, Vick.”

  Andrea didn’t really mean it. Not like Vicki did. It was just one of those things heartbroken girlfriends say to each other. Fueled by sorrow and Smirnoff, it was an easy thing to say. But Vicki could pretend, just for a moment at least, that her friend’s words meant more than that. In the darker private places of her mind she always did. But all she said was, “I’ll always take care of you.”

  Moans and whimpers are the crickets of the nighttime burn ward. Occasionally, a lone shriek would pierce the relative quiet the way a wolf’s howl might ring out over an otherwise hushful landscape. Vicki moved like a silent specter in her white scrubs among the still aberrations displayed in uniform rows, their mutations thinly veiled beneath hospital blankets and stark patches of alabaster gauze.

  Vicki often worked shifts for other nurses. She liked to be at work—especially late at night when there were less people around—and she was qualified to work in many departments. Her primary duties were in the burn ward, though. It was a specialty she had chosen without much conscious thought. It just felt right.

  Regardless, it was an excellent fit for her, and a position that not many others could handle. The doctors were all impressed with her unflinching coolness in the face of the horrors effected on humans by heat and her attentive hands-on approach to each newly warped victim. Vicki had advanced quickly, and she enjoyed her position at the hospital. It was where she had first met Andrea.

  She paused at the foot of the bed of a man who had earned his new countenance in a car accident. Third degree burns are more serious, more often fatal. But second degree burns are more painful because the nerves survive. This man was covered in the latter variety, and he cried in his semiconscious, drug-induced haze. As she slipped the thin sheet down to reveal his wrecked body, Vicki absently wondered if he even knew he was crying.

  Dangling tubes descended from high on metal arms to penetrate his tumescent skin and deliver medications and liquid food. The man had become swollen, saturated with the dripping sustenance like waterlogged driftwood. His insides strained against the confinement of his own skin, like something left in the microwave too long. Rips had begun to show, and crimson fat split through the growing fissures.

  Vicki ran a finger along those lines and remembered her mother’s husky pleas—the soundtrack to her own budding sexuality. The man’s scrotum had ballooned up to cartoonish proportions, and Vicki lightly prodded him there too. He made a pathetic little mewling sound—I don’t like that! I don’t like it!—and she imagined the strong calloused hands of working men caressing perfumed scabs. The man’s eyelids were bulgy, like rotten fruit. Vicki poked them gently, imagining they might pop.

  Tomorrow, she knew, they would cut him. As the pressure choked off blood vessels, the man’s skin would suffocate and die. He would rot from the outside in. So the surgeons would cut him free by slicing vents in his constrictive skin casing.

  She’d seen it done many times, including the long gashes sliced into her mother’s neck and shoulders. Like tiger stripes, she’d thought at the time. Or gills, like the kind a mermaid might have.

  Vicki rested a hand on his plump tummy, guts tigh
tly corseted in overcooked leather wrapping. His entire body lay engorged beneath her touch, pulsing and warm. Like he might burst at any second.

  She reached into her pocket, took out a tiny digital camera and began to photograph the extraordinary specimen before her, all fevered tension and mounting pressure. The man made a babyish keening noise. It leaked out from between his bloated lips like air escaping from a balloon.

  Vicki crouched lower for a close-up. She wondered what the man had been like before his accident, and what he was becoming beneath his hardened cocoon.

  Days later, Vicki returned home from a double shift at the hospital to the sound of Stevie Nicks. Today, she’d been subbing in pediatrics. It had been tedious and boring. She had no interest in children and it was Andrea’s day off, so Vicki could not even look forward to catching a glimpse of her roommate while making the rounds or sharing a meal break.

  Inside the apartment, she found Andrea bopping near the stereo, drink in hand, wearing tiny gray shorts and an old Metallica t-shirt that was too big for her, a comfy relic of a long-gone boyfriend. She was devastatingly sexy. From the doorway, Vicki watched her dance for a moment that seemed to last forever.

  “Vick!” Andrea cried, turning to face the entrance as Stevie Nicks sang. “Vick, Vick-ay! How was your day, slut?”

  Vicki groaned, playing her established part in their domestic act. She dropped her bag near the couch and kicked off her white sneakers.

  “Yeah.” Andrea made a pouty duck face, nodded sharply and turned back to the stereo. “Fuck work. Slip out of them scrubs. There’s margaritas in the kitchen and pizza on the way. Fingers crossed we get the blond delivery guy with the neck tattoo.”

  “You seem to be feeling better.” Vicki headed to the kitchen, dragging her eyes away from Andrea’s legs and reaching for a glass. “I’m fucking great,” Andrea said, sauntering in behind her for a refill. “Come on, shed the work clothes and get with the party. You’re off tomorrow and I know you got nothing planned.”

  It didn’t matter if she did or didn’t have plans. Vicki knew she could never disappoint Andrea. She never would. She poured herself a glass of the frozen booze concoction, topped off Andrea’s and headed off down the hall toward her bedroom.

  Alone, Vicki stripped and tossed her clothes into the hamper by the closet. She saw herself in the mirror above her dresser. She eyed herself dispassionately with a professional, clinical gaze, then opened the bottom left drawer and took out a mismatched pair of fluffy socks. One was bedecked in dolphins, the other a pattern of cherries. She rubbed them between her fingers and ran them up and down her bare legs. Goosebumps broke out over her entire body. They were Andrea’s socks. She had taken them from the laundry, one at a time, over the course of the winter. Slob that she was, Andrea hadn’t even noticed. Vicki held them both to her face, inhaled deeply.

  She set the socks on her bed and, from the same drawer, took out some red lace boy shorts, also pilfered from the laundry. She ran them likewise over her legs, then caressed her stomach, gliding them up to her breasts, tickling herself. She held them close to her face and licked them daintily.

  From the living room, Andrea called, “Pizza’s here.” There was a lot of giggling; she must have gotten the blond guy after all. Stevie Nicks played on.

  Vicki pulled the underwear away from her mouth. “Coming.”

  She stepped into her roommate’s panties, grabbed some sweats off the back of her door and dressed. Stevie Nicks now sang “Talk To Me.”

  You can set your secrets free, baby

  Andrea caterwauled along with Stevie. With her blond hair, and having retrieved a black wide-brimmed hat and scarf from her room a few drinks ago, she looked the part more and more. An obsession with the gypsy rocker was one of the things that Vicki loved about Andrea. It was an unapologetically corny thing they shared. Vicki sipped from her glass. It was only water now and had been for a while. She let Andrea drag her off the couch, gave in and danced along. She couldn’t let Andrea down, even if she wanted to. And she never did.

  Dusty words, lying under carpets

  Seldom heard, well, must you keep your secrets

  Locked inside, hidden safe from view?

  Vicki felt, as she always felt when she heard this song, like Stevie was talking to her, like the lyrics were written for her. She watched Andrea sway and stumble near the record player, sloshing more margarita than she was drinking, with a smoldering American Spirit stuck between her flawless lips and her hat tilted way back. Buzzed enough to be brave, Vicki came up close behind Andrea and danced a little slower.

  Well is it all that hard?

  Is it all that tough?

  I’ve shown you all my cards, now isn’t that enough?

  Andrea suddenly fell away from Vicki’s grasp and caught herself against the entertainment center, the record skipping and scratching over Stevie’s haunting voice.

  “You okay?”

  “Sorry,” Andrea slurred. She shuffled over to the couch on unstable legs. Vicki followed and kept her hands on Andrea’s toned obliques, helping to guide her.

  “It’s OK.”

  “Just need a rest.” Andrea sunk into the couch, her limp arm hanging over the edge, smoldering filter inches above the carpet. She was instantly asleep.

  Andrea could be happy. She just needed some help. She needed freeing from her cycle of disappointment.

  Vicki thought about this while sitting at her computer an hour or so after Andrea passed out. She was angry, frustrated and disappointed. She was also excited.

  She scrolled through the photos in a desktop folder labeled “Research.” Some she’d taken herself at the hospital, others she’d been sent in trade. Most came from a man who claimed to be a paramedic in Nevada, including the ones in front of her now. Her favorites.

  The blackened, twisted form of a woman in a number of lewd poses bared itself for her. A life-sized sex doll the man said he’d found in the remains of an adult shop that burned down. He liked to send Vicki pictures of the things he did to her. The poses he put her in, the clothes he made her wear. She sent him back suggestions.

  The aberration is the attraction.

  That’s what he’d written. She’d never put it into words before, the slippery thing that coiled deep inside her, but it was true. Pouty lips blistered just right. A coquettish smile stretched and smeared into a novel, unreproducible expression. The world’s full of pretty girls. But real carnage? That’s rare. Before the fire, this doll had been like any other. Just one more on the shelf. Ignored. Not special. Licked by flame, assaulted by the inferno, though, she was divine. Special. She was saved.

  She and Andrea could both be happy. They deserved to be happy. It had almost worked for her mother. It would have worked, if she hadn’t been so alone. Vicki was older now. She finally understood. She would be there for Andrea, and she would make sure it worked.

  She would comfort and care for Andrea. She would sate her. She wouldn’t leave like Dad had. Like Gregory.

  Vicki crushed sleeping pills into a glass of water and managed to wake Andrea long enough to gulp it down. “You’ll feel better tomorrow if you drink this now,” she said.

  “Thanks, slut,” Andrea mumbled. Then she was out again, slumped on the couch and sleeping more soundly than ever.

  Vicki gathered her tools, then waited.

  An hour passed. The harsh blinking digits on the microwave clock told her it was almost three in the morning. She splashed the face of her comatose love, her very own sad sleeping beauty, with the last of the tequila and tucked the soaked scarf securely around Andrea’s face. Vicki lit a cigarette from Andrea’s nearby pack and pressed it to the sodden silk.

  Watch her pretty skin. See it change from pink to crimson, then darken still further. See it crack and rupture. Fatty bubbles begin to appear. Small dots. Then they grow. They swell and bloom like the bulbs of a fleshy flower, a bloody bouquet.

  Vicki gazed down with wide, unblinking eyes as it happened, a great
secret show, just for her. She knew that Andrea’s once smooth skin would melt and pool, and reassemble itself. A beautiful new flesh would eventually burst free, split through the old. She would be changed, permanently this time, and for the better.

  Andrea woke, a guttural scream swallowed by the fire. She pawed at the molten cloth sticking to her face. She tried to roll off the couch, but Vicki was there. She wore thick rubber gloves pulled up to her elbows and grabbed hold of Andrea’s flailing wrists and held them tight in her determined, sober grip. She pounced on Andrea’s stomach, pinning her to the couch, and held her hands far away from her burning face.

  Vicki watched, tears running over her smiling face as she listened to the wails, as Andrea’s lips pulled back so far the budding blisters tore open. Her skin ripped and curled, peeling back like worn paint, and she bucked wildly between Vicki’s legs like a live wire.

  Finally, Vicki let go and leapt onto the floor. She grabbed the fire extinguisher—the one she would tell the police she ran to get from the kitchen—and let loose the cool white foam.

  Later, from the chair beside her love’s hospital bed, Vicki stared longingly at the bandaged figure lying silently before her. She stroked Andrea’s arm above one of her gauze mittens. The doctors were confident they could save her hands. They had not been so badly burned as her face. Her eyes too, they thought, would probably be all right. Though the scarring would be severe.

  Thank God, they’d said, that Andrea had the good fortune to have another nurse for a roommate—a burn specialist, no less—who was on hand when she passed out drunk with her lit cigarette. She must have spilled tequila on herself after Vicki went to bed. It happens. It happens every day. This could have been worse, they all agreed. She could have died.

  Vicki nodded, but of course she had known that wouldn’t happen. She would never allow her friend to die. Andrea would probably not remember Vicki’s part in her accident. She had been very drunk, and mixing alcohol with sleeping pills… The trauma of seeing her new face would be devastating to her memory too.