[ Drafted 22 Aug | 0 likes | 0 boosts | edit ]

So, I tried. I think we all know that I tried really hard. Right? I got away from that toxic place and all the toxic people I grew up with. I discovered myself for real and built up a new house and person and life. But I guess other people still didn’t like the person I discovered myself to, uh, be. I was still wrong. No matter where I go, it’s more of the same.

Mellie, you were the only one -- no, I don’t mean that like you need to be here.—

It’s not like I’m the same person as I was five years ago. I can tell I changed. But it’s never going to be enough. Maybe this world just isn’t for me. Or I’m not for the world. I’m sorry for not being what you wanted. I mean needed. I tried.

Mel. I mean it. Maybe in the next life – I’m not trying to be manipulative, but if only you–

—

Had it gotten cooler? Not according to the forecast. The sky, however, was a crisp blue. The pollution had let up, at least around their meeting spot - and Sao’s blood had been chilled by the information Rai passed to him on the drive over.

“Their bodies disappeared?” he whispered, even though there was nobody close enough to listen. They had pulled up in front of a ramshackle two-floor motel covered in chipped pink paint and wilting greenery. There was a chained-off pool that contained nothing but dry sand, teal tiles desperately clinging to their last vestiges of color. The place was an afterthought set on the interstate, around which there wasn’t much to see but the distant mountains, a lot of flat dirt and drips of traffic. And today, the sky.

Rai slammed the car door. They were one of only four cars in an overly generous parking lot. “Cadmus was pissed, especially since he was the one who called Jasmine’s family about scheduling the autopsy today. He’s doing a full inventory of the morgue right now.”

“So they just walked out, wearing stolen clothes.” There was something morbidly magical about the story. Sao pictured dancing skeletons and slouching corpses emerging to play, pushing out of their drawers at nightfall and sliding back in at daybreak; spell broken.

If death in reality could always be so fanciful.

“I suppose that solves the case of the hospital’s recent thefts,” Sao said.

“Not exactly. The night of the locker room break-in, two people were caught on tape. This was before Jasmine did her hanging, and after Sapphire had been taken for cremation - so Hazel would have been in the morgue at that time. But who was her helper?” Rai adjusted his hooded jacket. He had foregone his heavy leather one today, though he’d retained the gloves, perhaps because Maya had found them so amusing over the phone. “As for Jasmine, we have no idea when she might have left.” Rai noticed Sao’s vacant smile. “You thought of something?’

He had skeletons twirling through his mind again. “It feels so odd to say a corpse got up and walked out of its own free will. Not bad, but odd.”

“It’s pretty sweet compared to the alternative reasons for being gone. Cad told me that in the past, corpses were stolen all the time for illicit sale - for organ transplants, or to research companies. And the research might involve studying bones, or it might be seeing how a human ribcage holds up in a speeding vehicle, or real skin’s resistance to bioweapons. Or they were taken by perverts.”

Sao’s enchantments were dispelled instantly.

“The latter is rare,” Rai said, as if that improved the picture at all. “But you can see why Cad’s turning the place upside down, in case anyone else is missing. He’ll double-check the security cameras too, but there are small blind spots. The inside of the mortuary, that one’s for legal reasons. The fire exit in the basement was more of an oversight. Until today, everyone assumed the thieves came from there.”

A container truck blew by, gracing them with a wind that smelled of boiled rubber.

“Assuming Hazel and Jasmine have become free-roaming zombies, Orchid’s still kind of an anomaly,” Rai said.

Waving the odor away from his face, Sao gave a cough.

“The other two were confirmed deceased. Cold, no breath, no heartbeat. Orchid never got mistaken for dead. Cole’s probably talking to her now. Better if they chat as much as possible. Maybe she’ll give something away by accident.”

“You believe she’s withholding information?”

“I’d say for a fact that she is.” Rai scanned the door-window sets that marked out the dozen or so guest rooms that overlooked the parking lot. “I wonder if Maya expected suicide to land her in the morgue too.”

On the tail of the passing exhaust fumes came a murky beige fog. Enough with the welcoming ceremony. Sao drew out his burner phone. “No matter where they are now, we need to remember how it started. These girls had suicidal tendencies. We’ve got to be gentle.”

“How could I forget?”

—

With a series of muted clicks and creaks, Maya admitted them into Room 212 and locked the door behind them. She peeked out between the wooden slats covering the window, surveying the empty hallway and lot, before facing them.

It was a very plain setup, lacking the kitschy patterns and suspicious stains Sao had come to expect at roadside stops. The only standout was a hot pink suitcase stuffed in the corner.

While rather pinched in expression, with her wringing hands and anxious glances,  Maya had the air of a small, gentle forest animal. A ruffled blouse and skirt added to that charm, as did the soft buttery yellow hair that floated in the lamplight. She seemed a bit unwoven when compared to her Neocam persona, but then, circumstances were very different.

“I’m happy to see you,” she said. Mostly to Rai. “I’m sorry for the trouble. I should have believed when I heard you would be alright.”

“Who told you that?” Rai asked.

She waved her hand rapidly; fanning the question away. “Not right now.”

“I thought you were going to explain this whole zombie suicide ritual to us.”

“I will. But some people… I’m not sure I’m allowed. Or, I can’t properly explain in the right way…”

“Alright. Let’s talk about how you’re doing first,” Rai said. He took a seat in an armchair that looked like it was made of planks. Maya seated herself on the bed. “Your neighbors told us that you left to go visit your family about a week ago.”

“That was a lie. I’m sorry. I was afraid, and I had to leave for a while, but I didn’t go there.”

“Yeah, that didn’t seem like something you’d do.” Rai nodded at this, as if there’d never been any doubt. “So, your folks. You moved away and cut contact years ago, right? What did they do?”

To Sao’s surprise, Maya brightened; she straightened her back, and her hands had stopped trembling. “It was terrible that it took me so long to recognize their bigoted ways. I didn’t want to believe it, for so long. The northern mountainside was a lovely place, otherwise… all big green fields in flower, and dark blue peaks with glaciers catching the light that came between the slopes… spring that was my favorite season, but in the winter, oh, it was indescribable. Like a classical painting. I see them now and think, ‘I used to live there.’” She giggled. “I guess it’s even more appealing to think about mountain air when the weather’s like this.”

“No kidding. But sometimes it’s not the landscape that creates problems…”

“Yes. It was a beautiful place, but the people…” She gnawed her bottom lip. “The village started as the sect of an old church that splintered because they were too much, even for the old orthodoxy. Of course they were going to be that way, and were never going to change. Oh, child brides and wife-beating was all fine and honorable. But they couldn’t accept that I liked girls.”

Rai had brought out his terrible smile and Maya was facing it sunnily. “Did they think it was devils or did they have breeding on the brain?” he asked.

“The two are rooted in the same thing, I think.”

“I guess so. How did you come to know you were into ladies?”

Maya beamed.

“How could I not? Well, I learned the proper terms online. The older folks probably believed speaking the word ‘lesbian’ even in deterrent would make them burst into flames. Although the whole town caught onto any new tech super late, we did get an internet connection set up. Old radio and television services were falling by the wayside, but the men had to have their shows. Modern phones were a natural extension to that. And so I got talking to Mellie. Not on Neocam, but on a kids’ site. A goofy game where you collected clothing for a dress-up doll. It started there, but we moved to private messages. She was so good to me, and really had more patience than she should have. I always knew I didn’t like the boys much, but I hadn’t thought an alternative was possible.”

“There are even people up-to-date with the terminology who have a hard time picturing alternatives,” Rai said, expressionless.

Maya nodded vigorously. “I learned as much when I tried to explain it to my family. I softened it by saying maybe I was bisexual, so maybe I’d have a man in the end anyway. I only wanted to share and teach them, I thought they’d be excited by the knowledge like I was. But… I can say this, they weren’t violent about it. They just denied everything in these nice quiet voices but you could hear the gears grinding in their heads. They didn’t know what to do with me.”

“Sounds shitty.”

“In the end, they decided I should be put in front of the congregation every meeting, until I recanted. Even when I did, it wasn’t enough. It was only talk and weird looks, but it was, I don’t know… defiling.” She began picking at the ends of her hair. “Mellie had a lot of smart friends who also talked to me. At first, they gave me techniques to use to try to defend myself. Humor, education, and finally gray rocking. That’s when the church sessions turned to yelling. Eventually, Mellie told me enough times, broke down all the ways I was being controlled and how things were likely to escalate to physical abuse and maybe even murder, that I finally understood. And then she and her friends helped me move to the city, helped raise funds and use the train-ticket website. And I got to move in with Mel.”

“She was okay with that?” Rai asked.

“Yes, she was. She offered. Do you not believe love can come about online? Really, we talked every day, messaged each other at all hours. The words just kept on coming. Investigator… no matter how things turned out, I’ll always believe that the very deepest relationships can develop without physical touch.”

“Of course,” was all Rai had to say.

“So… I got to meet Mellie in person, as well as her clever friends. These were people who’d known what they were, and made it open knowledge, since they were very young. They kept saying I was a hero, and… who doesn’t want to hear that? They started me on Neocam.”

Her expression became hazy.

“They wanted me to really show my parents that I was doing better without them. That I should really rub the lesbian lifestyle in their faces and make the world know how awful they were. It started with explaining my story, and posting as many pictures of me and Mellie, daily. We were constantly looking for new and interesting places to stage makeouts. The story of my ‘escape’, they called it, got featured on a news site and went viral, and then the sponsors came in. Those friends of hers wanted me to send a thousand pride flags back to the village. One of them wanted to wrap each one around a sex toy, but we didn’t use that idea.” She smiled, shaking her head. “It was a fight, it was a business. I really wasn’t the person for it.”

“Was that how the trouble began?”

She sighed and grappled a pillow, pulling it to her lap. “Of course, I have to talk about the breakup, don’t I? It actually had nothing to do with Neocam or Mellie’s friends or my family, or any of that, except as a kind of tangent. I was just… depressed.”

“How so?”

“Clinically. I suppose I had depression all along, but had to be told. More things to learn. I’d been feeling homesick, and just tired and down generally, and when I do, I stop eating… so my - I mean, Mellie’s friends recommended a psychiatrist. They were so proud of me for going, at first.” She squashed the pillow into a square. “But, I don’t know. I didn’t feel much better.”

“Orchid said something similar about her experiences.”

“Maybe I was just… making it worse than it was. Because it seemed like just saying I was going to therapy impressed them.” Maya seemed to ignore him. “I mean, I shouldn’t even have been depressed. I’d lived so much worse. Hazel said as much. It seemed so silly, she said, for someone with friends and dates and sex always at the ready to say they have debilitating depression.”

“Sounds like Hazel thought she was an expert,” Rai said.

“Um, just try saying that to her face.” Maya laughed again, not quite as freely as the last time. “In any case, due to my histrionics, or the medication side effects, or just wear and tear… my relationship fell apart. We didn’t talk when I was down because she said I scared her. Whenever there was a disagreement, she’d tell me to crawl back in my hole and not come out until I was ready to be respectful. There was something Mellie yelled, when we had a fight so bad we had to cancel a trip to the South. I don’t remember how it started just how it ended, with her going, ‘even a god couldn’t fix the way you are.’ I stopped going to any sort of counseling after that. But stopping didn’t help, of course. Not me, and not our relationship…”

“We heard about a fish incident from the neighbors.”

“That was so embarrassing. She was picking them out of the water and throwing them out the window, saying I’d better stop talking so loud and scaring her but how could I? My poor betta… Mel had her hand in the arowana tank saying he was next, and I hit her.” Maya buried her face into the pillow for a moment. Sao wondered if she’d scream, but she resurfaced calmly. “She walked out after that. I would never have had the strength to kick her out. I barely have the strength to just live without her, even now-” She stopped. “I suppose this is the part you’re interested in.”

“Tell us about your little group.” Rai grinned. “Your friends.”

“Yes, them.” Maya tossed the pillow aside. “You see, it was Mellie’s friends who got me into Neocam and more or less planned my content. They sided with her in the end. They chased me until I deleted something like two hundred photos of us together, or any mention of them at all. They went from saying I needed therapy to saying I was just broken beyond repair. Therapy’s just paying for the privilege of someone else to claim they saved you - the advocates, the ‘scrubs’ were upset that you paid your money and they didn’t get their reward. That was an Orchid-ism about the whole situation, I think.”

“It does sound like her,” Rai said.

“You met Orchid before the breakup,” Sao commented.

She regarded him quizzically, after not having glanced at him for the entire conversation. “I met my Neocam friends in November. And the breakup was in the winter, so yes, you’re right.”

“You went without Mel and her people,” Rai added, as if he and Maya were the ones grilling Sao.

“Yes, it was something I attended on a whim. I’d become mutuals - er, in that we followed each other and boosted each others’ posts and streams - with a small group of Neocams. At one point, we did a set of joint posts about the importance of self-care. Selling some sort of soap and bath salt package. And when that was done, Sapphire arranged a meetup at a minigolf restaurant place. They all seemed so put-together, it was a little intimidating. Although, maybe not as much as Mellie’s friends. We talked into the night about our troubles. It was… pretty awful.” And yet, she smiled.

“How so?” Rai asked.

“It was nothing but woes. Weighted very much toward one person. Hazel was aggressive. She really picked apart the story of my escape, seemed to think that a lack of physical beatings made my problems lesser. She also, as I said, threw in the factor of me having had a girlfriend as a sign my life had no cause for complaint. Ignoring that my relationship was in pieces. Um, I don’t mean to dismiss the abuse she suffered at her home. Truly horrific; she was harsh but she wasn’t lying. She showed scars she’d made herself, but clammed up about others. A cluster of dots on her back, some red welts covered by hair or makeup; those were the ones we know she got from someone else...”

“Did you never see a reason to report her injuries?” Sao asked, feeling he was blending into the wallpaper.

“I couldn’t just do that. Not my place. There wasn’t anything she hadn’t tried on her own, and if there was, Jasmine helped her. The two of them were so close, considering Jasmine was so sweet and Hazel might have been the bitterest person I ever met. Still, I have a lot to thank her for.”

Somewhere in the motel hallway, a door opened and shut. It sounded close and Sao was faintly offended. Considering the lack of custom, could management not have allocated their guests a little distance between rooms?

Maya waited for the sound to fade. “We had a second gathering, at the same place. This was shortly after my breakup, and they turned out to be a refuge. Hazel changed her tune then; I guess losing my ‘on tap’ dates and sex tipped the scales in her eyes. I was more deserving of my depression. Like, what the hell? A life going poorly deserves sadness on top of sadness? When I brought up trying to find another partner what she said was, ‘don’t stand up again unless you’re ready for another hard fall.’”

“Thought you had something to thank her for,” Rai said.

“I do. What she said got me back into therapy again. I felt like, I don’t know, I had to prove her wrong.”

“Admirable,” Sao said with a smile. “The opposite of Mellie’s friends, then.”

“But it didn’t work out too well. Every time I talked about Mellie with the therapist - because what else was there for me to talk about? - all the pain and memories came rushing back. I walked out feeling crushed every session. I had to get it all out, but it never stopped, it was like a waterfall. I had some really dark times, days alone without eating or talking. I thought about ending it all, or telling someone that I felt that way. But Hazel and Orchid had some terrible stories about being detained when they were having breakdowns or harming themselves and let people find out. Orchid was held for three days, she just couldn’t answer the psychologists correctly. She called it purgatory and the ‘shrink’ was the sphinx. She downplayed it like she does everything, but you could tell she’d put some thought into it, she was warning us off. Except Hazel, who had her own experience…”

For all the distaste she had for Hazel, Maya seemed to smile at every time she had to mention the woman.

“It was a lousy time, she matched Orchid on that. Strapped to a bed, taken to a small blank room, left for hours for ‘monitoring’ and questioned by some tired minimum-wage doctor. But it was better than home, she said. She challenged them to keep her as long as possible, and they threw her out quicker and quicker each time. ‘Just say out loud and proud that this is better than being with family and they’ll shove you in a taxi back home in no time,’ she told me in her leery way. I suppose that was another inadvertent shot of reverse psychology, for me.”

“So you hung on,” Rai said.

“Yeah. Until… I mean, maybe I would have been fine, but…” A deep, sharp breath. “Then Sapphire jumped off that building. She always seemed like the most poised, the most stable, and nobody saw it coming. I could tell Hazel was slipping after that. She really looked up to Sapphire - even copied some of her content, the journal thing and makeup tutorials, but Sapphire was too dignified to take offense. I mean, it’s not like she killed herself because she was mad at Hazel or anything. She didn’t get mad at anything. We just never really knew her, I guess.” Maya let out a trembling sigh.

“And then Hazel committed suicide as well.”

“Yes. It was, um… we should have done more.”

A rather lackluster show of mourning, Sao thought.

“And then Jasmine. And Orchid. All in a row.” Maya sighed again.

“And you. Were you expected to follow?” Rai asked.

“I - ah - how much do you know?”

“I need you to answer our questions,” Rai said. And he added, “Sorry.”

“I know, I promised I’d do that,” Maya said. “And I still don’t know why they left me to explain it, out of everyone. I don’t even know how some of this was supposed to work. I guess I can tell you this: Hazel arranged the project. And… yes, I was supposed to die. I promised her I’d kill myself.”

“What was the project for?”

“In honor of a friend.”

“In honor of Sapphire?”

“No, no. Sapphire didn’t know, she had nothing to do with all this. It started after she was gone. Please, you should ask Hazel.”

“Hazel is dead.”

Maya squeezed her eyes shut a moment, then leveled her wet doe eyes at Rai. “No, she isn’t. She took the same drug as Orchid and she did it first. I saw her after her suicide - all of the group did - I know she’s alive. Although, I think she was really planning to kill herself, unlike…”

“Jasmine?”

“Jasmine, I guess I don’t know what she was thinking. She did the...” A gulp, as if the noose were in the room with them. “The hanging. That was so bad, it nearly scared us out of it. And then Orchid… I don’t know what went wrong there. It was even worse. Maybe she asked for it.”

Rai’s eyebrows shot up. “She did what?”

“Oh god, that sounded awful. I meant that, um, she asked for help. She was supposed to have… someone over to help. After Jasmine, we all got scared of accidentally having long, drawn out deaths, so the idea was someone would be called in to help us… do the killing.”

“It’s not killing, though. If you took the drug, you planned to live.”

“That’s the idea, but it’s just an idea!” Maya threw her hands up and fell back on the bed in a tornado of ruffles and blonde hair. “When I was really faced with it, I chickened out. I couldn’t think of a way to go about it, I was terrified that the - um - suicide expert would turn up and I hadn’t made up my mind. And what if I failed? That was what scared me out of trying anything, even before I knew about the drug. Before, it was ‘what if I fail and end up in a coma or paralyzed’? And for the project, the fear became, ‘what if I fail and don’t die, end up screaming in pain like Orchid or twitching for ages like Jasmine’? And… what if the drug fails, and I don’t come back…?” She hit the comforter with her arms and back, sending air jetting out under her. “Then there was the goodbye…”

“The goodbye?”

“The suicide note. I’m not good at adlibs. I always did a lot of scripting for videos, had proofreaders for my posts. So I was brainstorming about what I’d say on the stream where I… did it. I’d be the last one too, I had to make it perfect. And all I could think of was Mellie. For some reason. Every time I talked, it ended up being addressed to her.”

“This was a problem?” Rai asked.

“It wouldn’t have been fair. Because it’s not her fault.” Maya pressed her hanging legs against the side of the bed, one over the other, then the opposite. “I couldn’t do the show, any of it. So I ran away before the person who was going to help could come. I never saw them. I drove all the way to the end of the Interstate, and turned around just before hitting C-South. I didn’t answer my phone until… until you called.”

“We didn’t call you,” Sao reminded her. “There was a go-between.”

As she had been when they started, Maya was uninterested in elaborating on the male caller.

“Someone joined your group after Sapphire died,” Rai said. “Was it this woman?” He flashed the picture of Arilla, E34-ridden and unconscious.

Maya studied the picture closely. “I don’t recognize her. But… this is like what happened to Orchid, the black marks. Did she try to kill herself too?”

“So she isn’t involved in your ‘project’? She had the contact information for Hazel, Jasmine, Orchid and yourself, sent from an unknown number. She also had involvement in a court case involving the drug, about ten years ago. And, bear with me, before that she was a military covert agent who specialized in staging suicides.”

“When you list all of that out, I guess she was involved. I’ve never seen her, though.” A light flickered in Maya’s eyes. “Oh, maybe she was the person who was supposed to help us. Help kill us kill ourselves-”

“How about we call this person the ‘guide’,” Sao offered.

“The guide. Okay.” She regarded him kindly for the first time since they’d met. “I was put in contact with this person to say hi and tell them what we had in mind. They did know my address. How interesting that the guide would be a lady.”

There was some more rustling from a nearby room. A wordless scuffle, all air and fabric.

“What would you like to do now, Maya?” Rai asked.

“I’ll stay here for a while, probably. Traveling on my own has been a new experience. Besides that one journey I took off the mountain. I kinda think of these trips as a cleansing.” She lowered her eyes. “I don’t want to die anymore. If that’s what you’re wondering. Maybe I never did. I was always following people, for so long, that I just fell into it. My lack of faith knocked me out of it again. That was always my problem and my saving grace. No faith in the church, then no faith in the therapists. No faith in the zombie pill and no faith in myself to make choices...”

“Did you ever think for a moment about going back to your family on the mountain?” Sao asked.

She stared at him as if he were a talking dog, and began to smile. It was a smile that stretched her whole face, seemed to fill the room with pity, or pride. “What? Never. Not at any point, even when life here was at its worst. I’d take a thousand failed relationships over going back there. Even if her friends are awful, if my friends are suicidal, it would mean at least a thousand kisses and words and pretty girls in my life, in a big sea where things might go right if I’m lucky. As opposed to no options at all. God. If I went back, as I am now, I think I really would kill myself.”

Sao directed a smile at Rai. “See?”

“She put it more eloquently, but yeah, I see.”

“You two are so strange. I guess you need to report all my silly thoughts to the police? It’s okay… I’ll stand by what I said.” Maya pulled her hair back. “Still, I’m afraid. I’ve let Hazel down, and bet I’ll get an earful. But… I kind of got the impression there was some greater issue with the project. When I got the call from the guy…”

“The guide?”

“No, the guy who, um…”

They sat in silence for a while. Somewhere, a faucet came on, the sound of water streaming behind the walls.

“Maya,” Rai said. “How were you instructed to take the zombification drug?”

“I got a sheet of 12, I was supposed to take them all at once. Hazel told me this. I’m not sure how she found out. But it worked for Jasmine, so… what I don’t know is how long they take to wear off.”

“The most we know about that is that the military offered some kind of ‘remedial treatment’ to the original test subjects. The pills - do you still have them?”

“Er, about that–”

There was a loud thud that shook the room. The lampshade rattled, sending triangles of light swooping wildly across the walls like panicked birds. Maya sprang to her feet and ran for the back of the room. At first, Sao thought she’d arm herself or hide, but she reached the back wall, under a hanging rack, and turned, facing the room, the beds and window in paralyzing terror.

Rai pushed up the blinds revealing two large figures, one obscured by hood and high collar, and other with what looked like a sack over its head, locked in combat just outside the window. They froze upon being seen. Looking at the window, Sao thought of a paused television. Run your errands, come back when you’re ready.

Rai was ready before he was. He flung open the door. “Hey!”

The figures bolted.

Sao mouthed ‘lock the door’ at Maya, who looked at him (he hoped) with nervous comprehension. Then he ran out of the room. Rai was several strides ahead of him, following the sack-covered watcher, who was headed down the stairs. The hooded figure was running up.

“I’ll go up,” Sao said.

He’d made the right call for himself, because the sack-covered figure, upon reaching the first floor, gave up on the stairs and flung themselves over the railing, hitting the bare concrete with a thud - but rolling and rising into a sprint almost immediately, albeit with a bit of a limp.

Rai looked over the edge with a lurch that made Sao feel a bit sick, but quickly opted to use the stairs instead. He raced after the sack-headed person onto the road into the muggy fog.

Sao took the stairs up as quickly as he could. When he reached the roof, he spotted a swish of blue fabric taking cover behind one of the large air conditioning units. There was only one set of stairs. Hugging the wall with his head stuck out just enough to watch the units, he began dialing for help.

Units were already on the way, he was told.

Already?

—

Rai swore inwardly each time his shoes smacked the steaming pavement. He liked to think he was in moderately decent shape, but the pothole-laden road, and the killer sun (and his idiotic choice of clothing) made him feel like he’d already been running for miles.

Luckily for him, these same conditions were taking their toll on the man he was chasing, who was running with an uneven gait, evidently having dislocated something when he hopped off the first floor balcony. The idiot had a bag over his head, too.

Bumbling forward, limbs askew, the guy looked like a scarecrow come to life. Or one of those decently fast zombies from the newer films. Rai liked those, they looked more determined than their directionless, limping brethren. With persistence and the ability to make a running start, the action set pieces were cooler. When they bunched up, they made tidal waves of their bodies. It was fascinating and pretty disgusting; beautiful from a distance but when you looked very close you could sometimes see the same zombie copy-pasted to fill space. He planned to show Sao one of those movies when the case was all over.

On a baseless hunch he thought Maya probably liked that sort of movie too.

Rai was trying to think of a zombie movie that didn’t involve biting or facial trauma (did headshots count?) when he and his target reached an overpass. The road they’d come from didn’t see much use, but there was a busy eight-lane crossing below.

“Alright,” Rai said, “Why did you run?”

He sounded like a malfunctioning showerhead, mouth gummed with saliva and sweat. But it was enough of a distraction. The figure turned and Rai hurtled at him.

The figure caught his wrist, latched onto his gloves. Rai smelled stale breath.

His glove came loose. The second distraction was the light of his hands. With a flick of tension in his wrists, they flashed, and his opponent let go. The glove flopped over the edge and onto the road below. There was a screech; he could only hope it hadn’t been mistaken for an animal and caused an accident. Rai made a grab for the mask.

He only managed to wedge it halfway up.

The lower half of the face was covered in bruises, caked with some kind of liquid or powder. Some kind of cosmetic concealer. Since meeting Sao, who never went anywhere without his facial scars covered, Rai had gotten a lot better at recognizing makeup on all manner of faces.

“You’re Aquila’s friend?” Rai wheezed.

Somewhere in the distance, he heard a siren. Had Sao called backup? If so, Interstate police was more efficient than he’d expected.

“I know you’re worried. But you can see her. She’s not dead,” Rai pushed, but the guy had him in a nasty armlock. For a moment, Rai thought he was going to be tossed off the overpass.

What happened was the reverse. They teetered to the side, and after watching Rai struggle in his grasp, the other man swung himself up using Rai’s weight - he was surprisingly light - and flung himself over the edge, letting go just in time.

There was a 20-foot fall to the road below, and the man made it about halfway before being smacked off at an angle by a passing van. He careened off a concrete support pillar and hit the ground. Rai grit his teeth, feeling the impact in his own bones. Then he pulled out his phone to call an ambulance.

But the stranger wasn’t done. Having rolled to a halt, he unfolded his limbs slowly, one by one, and adjusted his mask, glancing up at Rai as he did so. Then he tightened some unseen belt, and took off down the highway.

Unless Rai made the daring jump, he couldn’t follow, not on his own. Devoid of options, he snapped a rather unhelpful photo of the back of the man, and headed back to the motel.

When the earthworm-colored building came into sight, he was hit by the scream. He ran up the stairs three at a time.

Sao was waiting for him by the door of Room 212, his white shirt flecked with oil. But it couldn’t be oil - from that smell, that metallic yet organic smell, it had to be blood. Blood mixed with something else. “Are they here yet?” Sao asked in that overly-calm voice he always managed to maintain, even when he was upset.

Rai was making some feral choking noises in lieu of actual words - as he wound up doing when he was upset. “W-What happened? Are you okay?”

“Hands!” Sao said.

Rai looked at his own, one left exposed by the missing glove, and took a step back. “Sorry, sorry.”

“No – her hands!” Sao turned back to the room. “Maya was attacked.”

Rai gingerly poked his head in through the door. The bed was in chaos, the lamp was overturned, and Maya was standing by the desk, nursing two wrists that ended in stumps. There was astoundingly little blood - her arms had already begun to seal over with black ooze. On the floor were two pale hands - also clotted with E34’s slime. Maya was nudging the disembodied hands together with the tip of her slipper, eyes unfocused.

“He didn’t record anything. I didn’t have time to set up. I thought he’d at least take pictures,” she murmured. Her eyelids fluttered when Rai grabbed her shoulder. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it myself. Where’s my phone? Ugh. Mellie–” She attempted to press a hand to her forehead but ended up smudging her face with dark blood from the stump. “A guide? Guide what? Just can’t trust men.”

“You’re in shock.” Rai pushed a chair up for her. It was the one he’d been sitting in, probably the worst seat in the house, but it was the only one light enough to move. When she flopped into it, he saw a shallower black cut had been made and already sealed; a vertical line, from her throat down to her collarbone. “Did he hurt you anywhere else?”

“No. It didn’t even really hurt… it was so fast.”

“His face. Did you get a look?

“It was the hooded one,” Sao said. “His face was hidden the whole time. Rai, I’m sorry… he climbed off the roof down onto this floor, I didn’t even notice until I heard her. Maya– I’m really–”

“Wasn’t expecting this,” she said, slurring a bit. “But I knew something would happen. Can’t trust men,” she warbled again. Despite the ugly outcome, and how quickly she was bound to relapse once reality caught up, Rai was glad to see her in high spirits.

“I can’t believe it,” Sao was saying.

“I didn’t catch the other guy either. I saw his face, half of it - heavy bruising, though I think he’s hiding it with makeup. He took a dive off the overpass and kept running.” Rai turned on his phone and tried to string together some way to report what he’d seen. “Maya, is there anything we can get you?”

“Phone. It’s in the purse.”

Rai wondered if it was his throbbing head distorting sounds, but her voice was level, perfectly lucid.

“I’ve done my part now,” Maya was saying. “Hazel can’t be mad at me anymore. But I have to tell her the guide didn’t record it. But how am I supposed to even use a phone like this?” She inspected her hands, which lay motionless on the carpet, like strange five-legged bugs. “Actually, nobody’s going to believe I cut my own wrists. Stupid, how do you cut the left hand when the right’s already…?”

Rai fell into the crusty mini-couch and looked at Sao, who smiled a little but didn’t say anything. It was shocking, how chill he looked in that spattered suit. The guy wore sweat and scars and zombie bloodstains like fashion statements. Rai was pretty sure if he looked at himself in a mirror that moment, he’d want to chase himself off the second floor rail.

No. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking like that, even as a joke. Not until this was over.

Emergency vehicles began to fill the empty lot. Then the police officers came upstairs looking for a pale man in a blue hooded jacket and took Rai away in handcuffs.