Suko’s eyes fluttered open.
Justin had an explosive orgasm in his pants.
Something heavy thudded against the bathroom door.
Suko saw the blond man’s face upside down, the lilac eyes like little slices of moon, the mouth a reverse smile or grimace. A whining buzz filled his skull, seemed to jar the very plates of his skull, as if hornets had built a nest inside his brain. A dull ache spread spiderlike over the top of his head.
He smelled roses, though he had seen none in the room. He smelled wood shavings, the sharp stink of shit, the perfume of ripe oranges. Each of these scents was gone as quickly as it had come. Lingering was a burnt metallic flavour, a little like the taste that had lingered in his mouth the time he’d had a tooth filled in Bangkok.
Shavings. Roses. Cut grass. Sour milk. And underneath it all, the smell of rotting flesh.
Suko’s field of vision went solid screaming chartreuse, then danger red. Now Justin was back, a negative of himself, hair green, face inky purple, eyes white circles with pinholes at their centres like tiny imploding suns. And suddenly something else was in the frame as well. Something all black, with holes where no holes should be. A face swollen and torn, a face that could not be alive, but whose jaw was moving.
A hand missing most of its fingers closed on the back of Justin’s hair and yanked. A drooling purple mouth closed on Justin’s pale throat and tore away a chunk.
Suko managed to sit up. His vision spun and yawed. The reek of rot was dizzying, and overlaying it was a new stinging smell, a chemical smell he could not identify. Something salty ran into his eyes. He touched his face, and his fingers came away slicked with a thin clear substance.
The thing wrapped skeletal arms around Justin and pulled him off the bed. They rolled on the floor together, Justin’s blood fountaining out of his throat, the thing grunting and lapping at it. Ragged flesh trailed from its mouth.
Justin wasn’t screaming, Suko realized.
He was smiling.
It was the boy from the bathtub. Justin couldn’t see his face, but he could smell the Clorox, raw and fresh. He had carved a great deal of flesh off of this one, as well as removing the viscera. But he had not yet cut off the head. Now it was snuggled under his chin, tongue burrowing like a worm into his wounded throat. He felt the teeth tearing at him, chunks of his skin and muscle disappearing down the boy’s gullet. He felt one of the bones in his neck crack and splinter.
The pain was as shocking as an orgasm, but cleaner. The joy was like nothing he had known before, not when he watched his mother die, not when he tasted the flesh of another person for the first time. It had worked. Not only was the Asian boy still alive, but the others had come back as well. They had never left Justin at all. They had only been waiting.
He got his arms around the hollow body, pulled it closer. He cupped the cold rubbery buttocks, entwined his legs with the thrusting bones of its thighs. When its jaws released his throat, he pressed his face against the voracious swollen one, pushed his tongue between the blackened lips and felt the teeth rip it out. His mouth filled with blood and rot. He swallowed, gagged, swallowed again.
A head rolled out from under the bed, pushing itself by frantic motions of jaw and tongue. The severed ends of the neck muscles twitched, trying to help it along. Its nose and left eyebrow were pierced with silver rings, its empty eyesockets crusted with blood and greasy black make-up. It reached Justin and bit deep into one of his thighs. He kicked once, in surprise, then bent his leg so that the teeth could more easily get at the soft muscle of his groin. He felt his flesh peeling away.
The upper half of a body was pulling itself out of the closet. Its black-lacquered nails dug into the carpet. Ropes of intestine trailed behind it, coming apart, leaving a trail of shit and ichor on the rug. This one had been, possibly, a Mexican boy. Now its skin was the colour of decaying eggplant, and very few teeth were left in its gaping mouth. Dimly Justin remembered extracting them with a pair of pliers after the rigor mortis had slackened.
It tore Justin’s belly open with its hands and sank its face into his guts. He arched his back, felt its fingers plunging I deep, its mouth lapping at the very core of him.
The small pleasures of his life — reading, listening to the music of another time, choking the life out of boys and playing with their abandoned shells — were nothing compared to this. He wanted it to go on for ever.
But, eventually, he died.
The corpse from the bathtub chewed at Justin’s throat and chest. Half-chewed pieces of Justin slid down its gullet, into the great scooped-out hollow of its abdomen, out on to the floor. The corpse from the closet sucked up the liquor and partly digested meat it found in Justin’s stomach.
The head bit into Justin’s scrotum and gulped the savoury mass of the testicles like a pair of tender oysters.
They seemed to know when to stop feeding, to refrain from pulling him completely apart, to leave enough of him. When he came back, Justin knew exactly what to do.
After all, he had been doing it long before most of the others.
Suko stumbled out of the bedroom and slammed the door behind him. Something was rolling around and around in the refrigerator, banging against the inside of the door. He almost went over to open it, only caught himself at the last second. He wasn’t thinking very clearly. His head felt wrong somehow, his brain caught in a downward spiral. He did not understand what he had just seen. But he knew he had to get out of the apartment.
No problem, a voice yammered in his head. Stay cool. Chill out. Don’t have a cow, man. He barely knew the meaning of the words. The American voice seemed to be receding down a long black tunnel; already it was so tiny and faint he could hardly hear it. He realized he was thinking in Thai for the first time in years. Even his native language was strange, a flurry of quick sharp syllables like little whirling razorblades slicing into the meat of his brain.
He fumbled with the complicated series of locks, yanked the door open and nearly fell into the hall. How had he entered the building?. Up a metal staircase, through a door at the end of the long dark hall. He reached it and let himself out. The hot October night seared his lungs. He could smell every poisonous particle of exhaust blanketing the city, every atom of shit and filth and blood baked on to the streets. Not like the ripe wet kiss of Bangkok, but so arid, so mercilessly dry. He felt his way down the fire escape and around the corner of the building.
The empty street seemed a mile wide. There was no sidewalk, only a steep curb and a long grey boulevard stretching away towards some other part of the city. There were no cars; he could hear no traffic anywhere. Even with his head feeling so strange, Suko knew something was wrong. LA streets were often empty of people, but always there were cars.
Far away at the next intersection, he made out a small group of figures straggling in his direction, bathed in a traffic light’s red glow. For a long moment he watched them come, trying to be sure they were really there, wondering what he should do. Then he started towards them. The blond man had done something awful to his head; he needed help. Maybe the figures would be able to help him.
But when he got closer, he saw that they were like the things he had seen in the bedroom. One had a long fatty slash wound across its bare torso. One had been gouged in the face with something jagged; its nose was cleaved in half and an eyeball hung out of the socket, leaking yolky fluid. One had no wounds, but looked as if it had starved to death; its nude body was all bone-ends and wasted hollows, its genitals shrivelled into the pelvic cavity, its blue-white skin covered with huge black and purple lesions.