Thicker Than Water

Not, it said.

I tried to back away, but my body didn’t really exist here and it didn’t even try to respond to the nerveless impulse. I was just a double handful of stiff, arthritic fingers groping along the cold metal of an object whose purpose I was starting to forget: a halting bellows blowing air over a spark I couldn’t see.

leave

I took the tune out into a wild cadenza - or at least I tried to, but I’d lost the feeling for it now. Playing on autopilot is a lost cause, ultimately. And it looked like I was one, too.

The unseen thing crouched to spring. How did I know, when I couldn’t fucking see it? Because I was tracking its voice through the muffled air - a diachronic line graph expressing an equation whose solution was my spilt intestines.

this

I blew a fingernails-on-blackboard discord - the last shot in my armoury. Sometimes it stops zombies and loup-garous undead in their tracks. Sometimes.

place!

Its hot, fetid breath was in my face, and there was a hideously suggestive sound - a sound like knives being stropped on a thick leather belt.

So I did something else. Since my hands were the only part of me that could still move, I punched straight forward with both of them, the whistle still gripped between them, and they made contact with something that was moving fast towards me. In fact, they did more than make contact: they sank, forearm-deep, into a rushing, blood-warm mass. A jolt of pure agony shot through me: a pain that was to the twinges of last night’s beating what crack cocaine is to Coca-Cola.

The thing’s own speed and strength carried me backwards. The darkness broke into bright staccato fragments of light and sound. There was a moment when I was weightless in a booming void, my thoughts spilling out of my head like blood as I turned towards a distant pinprick of light - attuned to its feeble radiance like a sunflower on Pluto.

Then I was falling out of the chair onto the ward’s tiled floor, with as much momentum as if I’d been pitched out of a moving car.

‘Castor!’

It was Nurse Ryall’s voice, and Nurse Ryall’s hands on my forehead, stopping me from smashing my brains out as I spasmed. Every muscle in my body was convulsing at once, and I could taste my own blood in my mouth. I was fighting for breath but the band of pain across my chest made breathing almost impossible. I was lapping air with my tongue, drinking it in agonising sips.