Bad People (49 page)
Authors: Evan Cobb,Michael Canfield
Flesh, stripped from his buttocks and the back of his thighs, had been grafted over plastic implants meant to somehow recreate the general shapes of the muscle and cartilage that had been torn away, carried off, and most-likely devoured by the bobcats. The overall effect however, came to nothing like a true human face.
A face of
some
kind however.
Some organism that breathed, and salivated, and swallowed, and probably ate.
The creature in the defendant’s chair also probably slept, scratched itself and shat, but it was not human.
A monster’s face. Luke now looked exactly like what he really was.
When the verdict was read, Connie was not present it the courtroom. She did not watch the moment, nor the sentencing a few weeks later on television.
Someone told her that Luke had shown no emotion at either event. Whether his true face was even capable of it, she did not know. Nor did it concern her.
For all intents, Connie thought, it had ended.
But it hadn’t. Not quite.
A year later, a writer started calling her with interview requests. Of course, there had been a whole onslaught of those requests when the case was fresh, but Connie had assumed that was all behind her now.
Newer tragedies filled the cable news channels: one month a new missing blonde girl in Jamaica, the following month a celebrity marriage on the rocks, or a politician facing sexual disgrace.
Now this writer was doing a book. She elected not to participate. Though she did not attempt to influence Stephen-David one way or the other, he did not speak to the writer either.
In the end, the book was rushed out, with most of its material sources from existing sources: police reports and court documents, and news account.
However, a not-insignificant amount of the book was based on interviews with two people.
The first, and lesser of these, was Erika, Connie’s sometime associate, and one-time friend. This did not so much anger or shock Connie, as sadden her. She did not dwell on it overlong though. She had other concerns, a new business for one. And she had other friends; ones chosen more carefully than those she had chosen once upon a time.
In business and in her personal life, which, by the way, were never to be the same thing again, but two separate modes in which she chose to express herself, she now only surrounded herself with good people. Not so hard to find, if you really looked.
The other interview subject of the book was Luke himself.
***
Luke barely slept the night before his first visit from Thomas Cake.
He had had interviews before, but interest had died off after a time. This was different however. Much different. Cake was doing a book.
A whole book.
That morning Luke was up early, his bunk made and his hair combed. He sat on his mattress, hands folded together.
He directed his single eye at the corridor outside his cell, waiting for the guards to come. He had a single cell, and he was in a special wing of the prison. But today the guards would have to take him to a private visiting room, and to do that, he would pass by at least some segment of the general population.
The guards came; Llewellyn and Ting, both of whom he got on well with. Ting, in fact, commented as they shackled Luke’s wrists and ankles. “Big day, eh Luke?”
It certainly was. Luke had ordered his notes.
Notes he kept in his head. The full explication of the Mind.
He would start with the obvious, and point to the empty socket where once had been a useless second eye.
He had worn a glass eye at the insistence of his lawyer at trial, but the glass eye was not allowed inside. A patch was, but he had rejected that.
The hole where the false eye had been, the hole exposed beneath the flaps of skin and scar tissue, was the way the Mind came and went now.
The other eye, the organic one, saw only the tired and tedious physical world surrounding it.
In truth, the organic eye was blind to the real world. The Mind allowed this inferior organ to remain in Luke’s face for now, for practical reasons: to observe objects and human animals, and confront or steer around them as circumstances dictated. That was all.
The guards led Luke from the cell.
The chains rang out as he moved, tiny hobbled steps in quick succession to hurry toward his interview.
Everywhere they passed, whatsoever creatures gathered, whether guard or prisoner, fell silent in awe.
Some gaped at his face, his magnificent holy, tooth and claw -blessed face. Stunned.
Speechless.
Others looked away, too humble, too weak to look directly at him, any more than they would dare stare into the face of the sun for fear their eyes would burn out of their heads, and they be struck dumb before the brilliance.
When the entered the interview room, the author Thomas Cake was fussing at his various implements, restraightened his piled of canary tablets, his pens, and his tiny recording device.
At the sound of the door, he looked up with a phony smile plastered on his face.
In an instant the face expression vanished.
Stunned, the author, stood up. He gaped at Luke.
When the guards unchained his hands, Luke extended one for the author to shake.
The author’s hand trembled and Luke held it gently, feeling that.
The hand was damp, suddenly damp, as damp as the rest of the man. Out of shape. Soft puffy sacks under little eyes. A soft damp man.
Luke smelled the author’s fear, and his desperate desire to please.
Luke sat down in the metal chair that had been placed opposite the author at the table.
From the side of his mouth that drooped lowest, saliva tended to collect. When something enticed him, as it did now, the saliva would run down to his chin. He wiped it with the back of his hand. He dried his hand on the thigh of his jumpsuit, and then folded his hands in his lap.
He waited. The author stammered and fumbled through his first attempt at a question. Luke told him to calm himself, and to slow down if he wished to make himself understood.
Though no one could see it, Luke smiled. He smiled because he knew.
This would be fun.
*****
Evan Cobb
, author of
Perfect Likeness
,
Friday Nights At The Caravan Motel
, and the forthcoming novel
Exhibit A
, is the alter-ego of
Michael Canfield
. Under his own name he has published,
Red Jacket: A Novel with a Superhero
,
as well as nearly two dozen mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, horror, stories on fiction sites including
StrangeHorizons
,
Spinetingler, EscapePod
,
Daily Science Fiction
, in dead-tree magazines including
Realms of Fantasy
,
Talebones,
and
Black Gate
, and other places. His novelette“
Super-Villains
” was reprinted in the prestigious
Fantasy: The Year's Best
series, edited by Rich Horton. He divides his time between Seattle and Los Angeles, with frequent side-trips to Vegas.
Connect Online:
www.amazon.com/Michael-Canfield/