“Aurora borealis,” Lystra said. “The northern lights.” She nodded. “We get them in the south sometimes, too. You’ll see.”
Bug Man watched for a while, acutely aware of her nearness. Crazy, yes. Too old for him, yes. Still …
She must have sensed it because she laughed, an almost girlish sound, and pushed him back to his seat.
But then she stood up, turned her back to him, and said, “Help me with the zipper.”
Bug Man swallowed hard. Okay, yes, he’d thought about it. But seriously? With a woman who had his sanity and life in her hands? He’d watched the TV as instructed, and he had seen the Nobel madness. He had even seen a fleeting shot of Lystra dancing and twirling away from the carnage.
God only knew what the woman would do to him if he disappointed her.
He drew the zipper down. It snagged halfway and he had to tug at it for a bit, all the while with his nose just inches from her back.
Most of what he could see was tattooed. Blues and reds and greens. He couldn’t make out the patterns, except that most of it seemed to be faces. He saw eyes staring, mouths twisted in screams.
“Damn,” he whispered, and winced, hoping she hadn’t heard.
“You like my ink?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said too quickly.
“Want to see more? Want to see my latest one?”
He froze. Just absolutely froze. She let her dress fall to the floor.
“Oh … shit,” he said. There were faces on her back, on her behind, on her flanks. Not every inch was covered—maybe half of the available flesh.
More than enough. It was a horror show.
Faces. Men, women, one that might even be a child. All in agony or rage or some combination of the two.
He couldn’t breathe. He did not want to see more. He did not want her to turn around.
But she did.
Slowly, slowly; savoring his fear, the fear she could hear in his raspy breathing, in the way it caught in his throat.
Her front was even more horrific. Faces from hell were staring out at him. Two were new, still healing.
She pointed to the freshest-looking one with a coyly bent finger. She was being cute. She was playing with him. But oh, God, there was no way to fake this, no way for him to force his features into anything like a pleasing expression.
“That’s a man named Janklow. He didn’t want to sell me his medical testing company. Because of him, yeah, the whole game was delayed.”
Her breasts were just inches from him. Her eyes were the eyes of a rabid dog, focused on him with an intensity that made him tremble.
“Don’t you want to know who they all are?” she asked, and the hard, sadistic voice he’d heard before had replaced the cute come-hither tone.
He managed to shake his head. No. He didn’t have a single question. No, he didn’t want to know. He wanted to be back in England. He wanted to be back at Tesco, shopping for his mother’s onions. His fists were clenched so tight they ached.
“Sure, you want to know,” she said. “These are all the ones whose lives I have taken from them.”
“That actress? Do you remember, yeah? You must have read about it, seen it on TV? She dug her own eyes out with a knife. It was intense, Bug Man, very intense.” She tapped the other still-healing tat, on her sculpted hip bone. America’s Sweetheart in blue ink, bleeding red blood from her gouged eyes.
“What did she—”
“What did she do? Oh, she wouldn’t even remember, didn’t recognize me at all, why would she? I was in a hospital for a while for … stress?” She threw her head back and laughed. “Stress? I was crazy as a loon.”
Was? Past tense? Bug Man wanted to ask. But not as much as he wanted to go on living.
“My pap and mam, that’s what they had me call them. My guardians.” She spit the word. “The losers my daddy dumped me on. They started talking to me after I killed them.” She covered each breast with a hand, lifted them slightly so he could see the faces tattooed there. They appeared to have been crushed. Their eyes were …
“They would talk to me. ‘Be a good girl, Lyssie. Pray to the Lord for strength, Lyssie.’ Sometimes though, they would give me useful business advice.” She frowned at the memory, then thankfully she turned away, walked to a narrow closet, and pulled out jeans and a sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was green with a big letter C over an outline of Antarctica.
Bug Man breathed a shaky sigh of relief. Ugly sweatshirt, but so much better than looking at that torture chamber on her body.
“I went crazy, yeah. Into the nuthouse with me. I was rich by then, had my businesses going pretty good, but yeah, off the deep end, yeah. Meds did nothing; they still talked to me.”
Your conscience, you sick bitch, Bug Man thought.
“Not my conscience,” she said, for all the world as if he’d said it out loud. He had to resist the urge to cover his mouth with his hand lest he say something to get himself killed.
“Psychotic break. Not functional. Everything falling apart … and he came back. Daddy. He said he would if it came to it, if, you know … if. I guess he thought I might eventually get weirded out over his killing my mother. Drink?”
She poured them each several fingers of bourbon. Bug Man gulped his down. He needed to pee desperately, but this was so not the time to ask to be excused.
“Nuts, yeah. So back he came, my daddy. And he said, ‘I know about this man, this scientist. He’s doing some weird stuff with nanotechnology. Maybe he can help. Only he refused, you see, and Daddy couldn’t kill him and neither could I, because, well, he was protected.”