Too Loose For Terror Ch 05

Clocks squealed the third hour, paling by comparison to his shrieks as they hoisted him up on the table. Bent in half, his restrained legs bracketed his head, giving Sunnyville's zombies access to every bit of vital fluid that he could produce. Nurse Eleanor Trabes crouched beside him, withdrawing several long needles from her worn dress pockets.

Gazing at the limp rag of her tongue, Tom sobbed apologies.

She smiled and murmured softly, "No maa'er ear," as the first needle slid deep into his vein. Fire hissed through his blood, and as he opened his mouth to scream, she shoved her scaly desiccated tongue in. Like a reproducing earthworm, its split length wriggled, one eyeless half stretching toward his throat, while the other scooped saliva from him like a shovel.

It was like kissing a black hole, a dark star that sucked and strangled each emotion one by one. He sunk, buried by the sensation of whatever the nurse injected or pulled from him. As his memories flew like debris into that abyss, he willed himself to remember his first kiss with the girl still prone on the floor. Behind the gym of the old high school, she held his hand. Summer light played in her dyed hair, but that was all that Tom could recall.

He knew that she was Charlotte, and he should love her, but he could not dispel his wish to trade fates. The restraints rattled and creaked as he struggled to make good on that idea, to escape the needles drawing out his precious fluid, his very life. They weren't machines anymore. They were zombies, and they wanted his blood! "Vampire zombies!" his mind yowled in horror.

Trish sauntered over, followed by the big man in the cage. Her clawed hand wrapped around his balls and squeezed, forcing them upward until precum leaked from his dick, and he squirmed in a violent effort to escape her. She gave a nod to the big man in the wire contraption, and he leant close. The sticky ooze evaporated, or seemed to, and the larger apparition's bronzy skin glowed a dull blue.

"We don't really want your blood," the guide laughed maliciously. "Any fluid will do. It get sooooo dry being dead," her yearning voice scratched like a smooth piece of paper. "We need sweet, wet life. You're just the lucky one."

Eleanor emptied the syringe into her mouth, proving the point as her own being took on a dim silvery blue sheen.

"As for me," she murmured, "I want your eyes."

He closed them tightly, but paltry skin was a paper covering against otherworldly suction. His left socket failed, followed by his right, each optical vein snapping in his skull like paper mache twigs. As Trish's blue fire tongue lapped away the last traces of his vision, he screamed in agony, shuddering and twisting his head left and right on the table like a dying animal. The memory of the deer flashed through his mind again; doe eyes turned toward him begging release.

He vomited, choked the bitter substance down his throat, and vomited again. Hot spray landed on his cheeks and curtained the table, burning the exposed flesh around his empty eye sockets.

-From below, constant thumping against the steps.

"Go get Lowel. His chair is stuck again," she hissed, nails tracing through the spray on his cheek.

Under his mind-numbing loss of vision, he imagined that the ogre of a prisoner gave a grunt of recognition behind the electroshock cage. He heard the stomps of heavy feet down the rickety stairs before a worming tongue stabbed his ear, thrusting relentlessly until the drums popped.

Trish licked away the bitter stomach juices on his cheek through howls of pain that thudded dully on only one side. She heaved an agitated hiss then murmured, "You know if you possessed the ability to follow instruction, none of THIS would have happened. Instead, we're going to let all the souls you sullied suck your sorry ass dry."

A vacuum-like sensation wrenched at his skin, and he shrieked again in pain. The invasion spread to his open mouth, wicking its way down his suddenly dry throat like a sponge of razorblades. He tasted his own blood only briefly before it evaporated into nothingness.

Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes until there were no more to cry. His brain flickered on and off like a defunct light, aware of the pain then unaware, as the lump-covered inmate devoured his fluttering organs. The stench of something rotten and depraved tickled his withering nostrils as his skin collapsed. He knew that it was his own scent, the smell of muddy decay, of twisted secrets hidden among worms and maggots under a sickle moon. He was where he wanted to be for so long, among the dead, their sordid lover.

That morning, authorities searching for Charlotte found the girl, alone, amidst the lifeless mannequins and destroyed relic of an asylum, rambling about zombie life stealers. They searched the grounds for a serial killer, a rapist, anything, but their efforts yielded only several unfinished mannequins tucked behind a crumbling hole in the wall. The mannequins looked familiar of course, ordinary somehow, and native to Iowa, though they paid them very little mind.

They searched for Tom also, but as real detectives know, the best clues are those hidden in plain view; like the pile of bleached bones wrapped in tatters of withered skin on the medical table or the spindly hairs that desperately clung to a perfectly smooth skull in its head vise. Within, the narrowed eye sockets blared an alert, empty warning, gazing into the depths of the lab with an expression of constant, bloody thirst.