In This Skin (42 page)

    ”It's part of the process,” Nathaniel said. ”Your body needs water.”

    ”It's growing,” she whispered. A statement of fact, incontrovertible fact. ”I feel it. It's stretching, enlarging.”She rubbed her stomach, trying to ease the tight muscles as the fetus developed with supernatural speed. ”Junior's going to need plenty of fluid. All that extra body mass… ever see speeded-up film of plants growing?” She realized her speech was slipping free of logic now. The faces of Ellery, Benedict and Nathaniel proved that. They worried about her.

    At that moment a gunshot cracked, making her jump.

    ”Don't worry,”Noel called from the hallway. ”I'm letting those guys know that they can't just stroll in here.”

    Robyn sat at the table with her fist clenched on the checker-pattern cloth. She focused on that for a moment, willing herself to stop gulping down glass after glass of water.

    Failed…

    ”Another glass, Ellery. Thanks. Will you fill me a pitcher, too?” Draining the glass in one thirsty swallow, she relished the liquid's cool flow down through the core of her body, a body that burned as arid as any desert. ”Pitcher's in the wall cupboard.” She spoke breathlessly. ”Another glass please, Benedict. I'm sorry.”

    As Ellery found the pitcher Benedict refilled the glass at the sink.

    ”Don't apologize, Robyn. We're here for you. Anything you want, we get, okay? Do you want to eat?”

    ”No. Drink's fine… just keep it coming.”

    That was the moment she stepped over the threshold into her own personal hell. Outside the midday sun shone. Downtown Chicago sparkled on the horizon. More crows glided in from faraway fields to settle on the roof of the Luxor. Inside the dance hall she could hear creatures tearing down the door. Inside her she knew another life was growing… and growing at a hell of a rate, too. And all she could do (even though she longed to scream and tear out her hair)… all she could do was sit here drinking glass after glass of water. What's more, she had an audience of three. One: Benedict, an amateur detective who'd learned that his long lost girlfriend had been transformed into something hideous. Two: Ellery, a guy whose cruel stammer had forged the expression of a martyred saint. Three: Nathaniel, a giant with blue-white skin that resembled cemetery marble, whose legs terminated in large splayed hands.

    More water. She could, as the saying went, drink a river dry. The water didn't fill her stomach. Instead, it was channeled directly to the thing growing inside of her. Thing? Could she be nurturing a monster in her womb? She glanced at Nathaniel and shuddered.

    

    

    Logan sat and listened to the crazy music of fists ceaselessly pounding wood, with a chorus of breaking glass and splintering panels. Shit, what was going on over there? He nursed the submachine gun on his lap.

    Tempting to check the loony-tunes out, he told himself. But he'd lose the element of surprise.

    But what surprise? Ellery hadn't shown his stuttermonkey face. And here Logan waited for what seemed like ever and a day. His butt was numb as corpse meat because he'd sat on this stage for so long. Christ on a motorcycle. If Ellery and his clan didn't give their ugly faces an airing soon he'd have to do something that would make them come out.

    Logan reached out in the darkness to what he knew hung there. His fingers brushed the fabric of the back stage drape that covered an entire wall. He smelled dust and dryness. Logan began to consider possibilities.

    

    

    ”What's happening?”

    Robyn glanced up at Noel in the doorway Thirsty. She drained another glass. ”What's happening out there?”

    ”They're still trying to get in through the doorway, but there's so much furniture and junk behind it they can't open it more than a couple of inches.”

    Nathaniel said, ”I'll pile more furniture into the stairwell.”

    ”Thanks.”

    Over the rim of the glass as she drank, she could see Noel's puzzled expression. ”Robyn? Should you be drinking so much water?”

    Seeing that she was reluctant to halt her liquid intake, Benedict answered on her behalf. ”The child inside of her requires fluid to grow… it'll need protein, vitamins and minerals, too. But I guess its drawing those from Robyn's body ”I wish you hadn't said that.”Robyn panted with the effort of drinking so fast. ”Makes Junior sound like a cannibal.”

    ”You should lie down,”Noel told her.

    ”I'm staying here near the water.”Okay, so the statement wore an edge of craziness. But that's exactly what I do need, she thought. I need to keep drinking. I know I'll die if I don't keep the water going down inside of me.

    The fetus demanded more water than she could supply through drinking alone. Her eyes had become dry. The moment she took the glass from her mouth, her tongue became as arid as a rock in a desert. Her fingers looked smaller. Even her skin became tightly dry so that she felt it pull as she moved her limbs.

    The thing inside is sucking all the juice out of me. Forget cannibal.

    Read vampire.

    The notion shook her. Fear sent shivers through her bones. Crows cawed.

    Echoes of her death cry to come? She closed her eyes, struggling to break the morbid cycle of thought. But even as she diverted thought away from whatever grew inside of her, her imagination fired images into her brain of those creatures breaking into the apartment. What then? She pictured them holding her down on the table and ripping open her stomach to insanely drag the unborn child from her womb…

    Drink. The command came again from within. Drink.

    Drink. Ellery filled the glass. Trembling, she raised it to her lips to pour more water down her throat to nourish the creature inside her.

    

    

    After three hours of drinking glass after glass of water (how many, she didn't know), her stomach had become swollen. To her fingertips it was hard, as if a boulder lay behind the skin. This wasn't water filling her belly, it was solid tissue. Her unborn baby had grown to the point when she could have passed for six months pregnant. Stomach muscles stretched. The internal pressure became enormous. Almost explosive. Her body must be close to bursting wide open… at least, that's how it felt. Discomfort evolved into full-blooded pain. Every so often the stretching sensation drove her to walk around the kitchen, only now her legs had weakened. The baby robbed her own body of nourishment. The extra weight, too, weighed her down. After a circuit of the kitchen (which gave her a view of the sinister crows sitting in the trees) she had to sit down again before she fell down.

    By now Ellery and Benedict didn't speak. Their eyes said it all, anyway.

    Nevertheless, they continued to refill the pitcher and glasses without being asked. Out in the hallway Noel and the giant guarded the stairs.

    Robyn pressed her lips together to prevent herself from groaning out loud. The baby kicked hard inside her. It moved constantly, stretching, turning, flexing newly formed limbs. She clutched her belly as pain stabbed into her. What would the baby look like? What would it resemble?

    The face… what about the face?

    Would it even have a face?

    A human face, that is. Nathaniel told her it would be a healer of his people, even those breaking down the door. But right now she felt as if the unborn baby would be the death of her.

    

    

    An hour later the pressure inside her body made Robyn want to scream.

    ”You should lie down,”Benedict told her gently. ”It's making demands on your body that must be hard to bear.”

    ”I'm staying here.”But, God, oh God, was he right about the unborn infant's demands. It sucked the moisture from her flesh, even from her blood. Now it squelched through her veins with the thickening consistency of mud. Her eyes were gritty. Arms and legs had gotten stick thin. Her body was shrinking in on itself in its effort to feed the baby. Only her stomach had grown. Now it had become gross, engorged by the baby (the creature?) it contained. Her T-shirt and sweatpants had stretched with her belly. Everything seemed at bursting point. Stinging pains darted across overstretched skin.

    Go on: SPLIT! I dare you! SPLIT!

    She stared at her belly expecting at any second to see the skin part with a ripping sound. Then two hands would appear, two bloody hands that would push aside her gory entrails as the monster escaped from her womb Vertigo spun her senses. Images of the monster baby breaking out of its dungeon of flesh boiled inside her mind. Even her brain must be shrunken with dehydration now. Thought became harder. Only the irrational mind movies became more frequent and increasingly vivid. She barely moved now. All she did was drink, rock slightly on the chair, stare at her stomach. Flesh quivered, stretched, pulsed as some entity swam through its prenatal ocean. The view of her own body mingled fascination with absolute horror. Meanwhile, a voice in the back of her head said: Not long now.

    

    

    This was hell. Logan was numb in the rear end. His back ached. He was sick of waiting here in the dark, listening to the lunatics beat on wood beyond the doors. Logan couldn't wait any longer. They'd already killed his buddy. What did he want to wait for? To invite the jerks out for dinner? With the surge of impatience that ran in scalding rivers through his body came the recollection: He needed the element of surprise.

    More of them than me, he reasoned. Of course, he could give them a hell of a surprise. He thought about that four hundred square feet of stage curtain. Then he visualized the cigarette lighter in his pocket.

    

    

    At six in the evening it came, a savage pain that plunged all the way from Robyn's heart right down to the bottom of her stomach. Lightning bolts of pain forked; one ran down her left leg, the other seared her right thigh. A squeal burst from her lips.

    Anxious, Ellery offered her another glass of water.

    Robyn shook her head. ”No. I don't need any more… I don't need-ah!”She bit her lip as muscle spasms detonated nerve endings. ”It's starting… the baby's coming…”

    Her eyes blurred with those cruel surges of pain; she could barely see.

    She heard Benedict, though. With a tautness in his voice that did nothing to put her at ease he told Ellery to bring Noel to the kitchen, adding, ”You'd better warn Noel. He's going to see things that are going to be difficult to handle.”

    Christ. Spasms tore at her. Grunting, she clenched her fists and ground her teeth.

    ”Time to lie down, Robyn.”

    ”No. I don't want to lie down.”

    ”Robyn-”

    ”No! Lying down will make me feel vulnerable. I don't want to feel vulnerable. This is my child. This is me giving birth. I'm going to be in control!”She stood up, grunting with pain at the downward pressure exerted between her legs. Shit… felt as if she was going to extrude a two ton granite boulder from that little private place Grimacing, she made it to a bare expanse of kitchen wall, then stood leaning back on it, so it took her weight. She shuffled her feet apart.

    Meanwhile her heart thundered in her chest; her respiration came in rapid tugs. And just when she thought there was no moisture left in her body to perspire, all of a sudden the sweat did come, pricking through the glands in her skin to raise beads of moisture on her face. She cried out. ”Oh! It's going to come fast.”A scream sounded in her ears. For a second she didn't even realize that yell blasted from her own lips.

    ”Robyn…”

    She glanced up through blurring eyes to see Noel hurry toward her, his arms outstretched, ready to hold her until it was over. ”Noel… you're not seeing this.”

    ”Robyn, I'm going to stay with you.”

    ”No, you're not.”She panted. ”I love you. I want us to be together for years and years and… uh. ”That pain kicked in hard. ”I don't want you remembering this every time you look at me.”Groggy, she looked to her right. ”Benedict. Ellery Will you help me?”

    Through her own grunts of pain she heard them promise they would. She nodded. ”Noel, leave the kitchen.”

    ”Robyn, I love you. I want to-”

    ”Nathaniel. Drag him out if you have to. OK?” Through smeared vision, she managed to make out Nathaniel's nod.

    Noel didn't have to be forced, however; reluctantly, he returned to the hallway. She prayed he understood. Nathaniel placed his hand on Noel's shoulder, a gesture of both affection and compassion. The door closed.

    ”Right,”she panted. ”First things first. Help me out of these clothes.”

    

    

    No food, no water, no light, no cigarettes. Nothing soft for an aching butt. Blood sugar levels falling. Irritation climbing. Anger taking flight to screaming red skies. Shit, Logan had had more than he could stomach of this. When his body had squeezed what fuel it could from his muscle tissue, it extracted residues of all the narcotics he'd devoured over the last couple of weeks. From his liver, kidneys, spleen, even from the body fluids held in reserve in his scrotum, the chemicals all but flew through his arteries to his brain. When those babies hit, all trace of logic and rational thought withered, to be replaced by a cranky, bad-tempered mindset to get this job finished.

    Wired, Logan moved fast. Jerking the lighter from his pocket, he rotated the milled wheel. With a pop, the blue flame appeared to dance on the wick. Oh, man… he could even smell the funky lighter fuel smell. A sexy liquor perfume that warmed his blood.