Red - Jack Ketchum [16]
The man touches her face, lifts her chin. Drops it. She lets it drop, slack, to her chest. He lifts her chin again and then with the fingers of his other hand pries open an eyelid. The eye does not so much as twitch. He is not aware of this but she sees the man quite clearly. His face is soft. Shaven. His hair is thin and slick to his scalp. His eyes squint with…what? concern? Does he fear he’s hurt her too badly?
He hasn’t.
~ * ~
Cleek is looking for dilation of the pupils. A sign of brain trauma. He doesn’t see it. She’s just out, that‘s all. He continues his inspection.
There’s a new purple bruise along her cheekbone. He didn’t put it there. He’d hit her on the forehead.
The woman is fascinating.
Her upper lip is scarred like most of the rest of her. The lower lip has fallen open.
He wonders about the teeth. Her breath is foul.
He lifts the left side of her upper lip as though checking out a dog’s mouth or a cat’s. The teeth range in color from brownish yellow to a kind of mossy green — they clearly haven’t been brushed in years, if ever — and the wisdom tooth on this side has gone to black. The canine almost looks to have been filed sharp. Certainly it’s jagged. The gums, though, are a healthy pink.
On the right side the wisdom tooth is completely missing. And now he can see definite signs of rough filing, not only on the canine but on the incisor too. It dawns on him exactly what this indicates, exactly what he’s seeing.
It dawns on him too late.
The woman’s head whips suddenly to the right. The jaws snap down.
The tip of his middle finger! Jesus christ it’s missing! It’s gone!
The finger gouts blood all across her chin, her neck and breasts. He waves the hand as though he’d hit himself with a hammer, hit his thumb hammering in a nail, shakes it to negate this pain which burns and throbs and runs right up his arm, shakes it to make it go away. This impossible sudden thing. His blood sprays him too. His face, his shirt.
“Ahhhhh! Fucking bitch!” he screams.
He takes a shaky step backward and almost stumbles. Rights himself.
“Bitch!” he screams again. His voice sounds wrong to him. A huge hoarse bellow. The kind of sound his goddamn father might have made.
His eyes lock with hers. A hint of a smile in her eyes. She’s smiling. The cunt is smiling! He watches her — hears her chew. Teeth against bone. His bone. Once. Teeth grinding. Twice. Three times.
She swallows.
~ * ~
The Woman has tasted him. His flesh is hers. His blood is thick and as sweet on her lips as honey. So that it does not matter what comes after, doesn’t matter when he comes at her with his fist flailing, when her lips split and the pain rages through her head again far worse than when she woke. It doesn’t matter because she has warned this man and he has taken note and she has taken his measure.
She has tasted him.
~ * ~
Cleek hits her again and again. He’s savage. He’s every bit his father now. She’s bleeding from the mouth and one eye is shot with blood but she won’t shut her eyes and that smile won’t go away and he realizes he’s screaming, spitting like a snake and blood is flying from her mouth, both of them painting the cellar floor a spackled red until finally at the brink of his own exhaustion the damned eyes close and she hangs limp in front of him.
He backs away, dazed by what he’s done and what’s been done to him.
And what he says next will make no sense at all to him an hour later.
And an hour after that, it will.
“That’s just not civilized behavior!” he shouts.
It is exactly then that the pain truly washes over him. Not only from his bloody hand clutched tight in the other but, he thinks, from every bone and muscle in his body. His lungs are burning.