Fully awake now, she began to take in more details of her surroundings. She saw a ceiling fan above her. Tufts of dust along the edges of the unmoving blades. A bookcase filled with haphazardly stacked old paperbacks. An old television with a rabbit ears antenna atop an old dresser. Piles of dirty laundry on the floor. Chintzy cheap curtains drawn across the room’s two windows. A creased and much-folded poster of Robert Smith on the closed bedroom door. And a faint piss smell she associated with cats. Then she felt the sticky wetness beneath her and realized she’d pissed the bed while she was unconscious.
Gross.
“Where am I?”
Alicia’s hand slipped out of Dream’s vagina. The dead woman smiled and licked moisture off her bloated fingers. “Mmm… you’re not in Kansas anymore, baby.”
Dream’s mouth curled in disgust. “You’re not Alicia.”
The dead woman rolled her milky eyes. “How tiresome. We’ve been over this. I-”
“I know you’re real,” Dream cut her off. There was fire in her voice now. “But you’re not my dead friend. She’d never do anything so vile to me.”
“You didn’t think it was so vile a minute ago.”
Dream’s face reddened. “A minute ago I thought you were-” She faltered, her mouth hanging open a moment before she lamely finished, “-someone else.”
“Oh, I know what you thought, baby.” The dead woman shifted position on the bed, stretching a leg across Dream’s midsection. Then she sat up, straddling her. She was still wearing the slinky little black dress; it rode up high on her thighs now, exposing mottled flesh that had once been smooth and toned. “You figured I was some dude you picked up at a bar, but what you were really thinking about was-”
“Shut up!” Dream vainly tugged at her bindings again. “And get off me, you fucking disgusting…thing.”
“I will not.” She cupped Dream’s breasts in her swollen hands and tweaked the nipples with her thumbs. Her nails were abnormally long and yellowed; seeing them graze her flesh made Dream’s stomach twist. “You’re in no position to demand anything. And let me be clear about this one more time. I am Alicia Katherine Jackson. And though you didn’t mean to, you brought me back, restored me to this undead state of existence. And let me tell you, I’m not feeling all that charitable toward my old best gal pal these days. It’s not a lot of fun being a half-decayed walking corpse.”
Dream still couldn’t accept it. Buying into what the grotesque apparition was trying to sell her would mean she was some kind of monster. “No. You’re not her. You’re lying. You’re some thing masquerading as her to cause me misery.”
“Nonsense. You think I’m some random ghoul playing head games with you? What kind of sense does that make? No, I’m what I say I am and you’re just going to have to deal with that.” Alicia picked at a weeping razor wound with a yellowed nail. “These hurt, by the way. Thanks so much for making me corporeal, Dream. Thanks for making me feel things. Everything hurts, Dream. Everything feels like it wants to come apart, but the magic you filled me up with won’t let that happen. So, from the bottom of my dead-but-beating heart, thank you so very fucking much. Cunt.”
Dream’s vision blurred. She sniffled and b linked back the tears. “I’m sorry.” Her voice was small, soft, the sound of a beaten, broken thing. “I never meant to hur t you.”
Alicia’s smile faded. “I wonder how many times you’ve said that in your life. You know, I never thought I’d say it, but I’m beginning to think Chad-boy was right about you all those years ago. You love drama. You wallow in self-pity. And at the end of the day, all you’ve ever really done is hurt people.”
“Stop it.” Dream’s eyes misted over again. “Please…”
There was a sudden sound of voices from the other side of the closed door. Alicia sighed and climbed off the bed, moving to a spot near the bookcase. “The fuckers who nabbed you earlier are back. Guess I’ll just sit back and watch the show. Hopefully they’ll at least leave me some sloppy seconds.”
The door flew open and several young people swarmed into the room. Dream counted seven altogether, including the girl she’d assaulted in the bathroom of the Villager Pub. There were two other girls and four boys. They all appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties. One boy was carrying a huge Igloo cooler. He flipped the top open and pulled out a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A few of the others grabbed beers, too. A girl wearing a black gypsy dress had hair bleached a platinum shade of blonde with inch-long black roots. Black fishnets with several rips exposing pale flesh encased her slender legs. She fired up a clove cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Hello, sleeping beauty.”
Dream didn’t say anything. Though the girl was smiling, the expression didn’t reach her eyes, which were hard and flat. A barely contained rage pulsed just beneath that smiling surface. Dream’s eyes again filled with tears. She would probably die in this room. And despite the hell her life had become, she didn’t want that to happen.
The girl blew rancid clove smoke in Dream’s face. “I hear you beat up my sister tonight.” She indicated the girl Dream remembered from the Villager Pub with a nod. “She says you beat the living shit out of her for no good reason at all. Now, you’re not getting out of here no matter what. I guess you know that, so you might as well be straight with me. Is my sister telling the truth?”
Dream met the girl’s merciless gaze and swallowed hard. Though she was still terrified of what was about to happen, a part of her was already resigned to it. So the girl was right, there was no point in telling anything but the truth.
“Yeah. I did it.”
The girl nodded. “Good.” She blew more foul smoke at Dream’s face. “It’s good that you admitted it, I mean. It’ll make this easier for both of us. We’ll know what we’re doing is justified. And you’ll know you’re getting what you deserve.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to kill you.”
The bluntness of the statement elicited a helpless, sudden sob from Dream. For a long moment the only sound in the room was her rising anguish. Then the girl put her cigarette out on Dream’s thigh, making her scream and jerk away from the source of the pain.
The girl waited until Dream’s screams died away to a low, blubbering moan. “We’re going to kill you,” she said again, “and we’re going to take our time doing it. You may wonder why we didn’t gag you. We’re kind of out in the country here, which means you can scream your fucking lungs out and no one will ever hear you.”
One of the boys, a lanky, long-haired kid with acne, had been slouching in a corner, his arms wrapped over his knees, a can of Pabst dangling from one hand. He abruptly came out of the crouch and moved into the center of the room, beer sloshing out of the beer can. “Am I the only one who thinks this is kind of fucked?” There was agitation in his voice, real anger and incredulity, but the words were slightly slurred. A little much liquid courage, Dream figured.
He turned in a slow circle, eyeing each of his friends in turn.“Come on, you assholes. You know this is wrong. You can’t kill a person over something like this.”
No one said anything for a while. Several of the kids shifted uneasily. They studied the floor or briefly glanced at each other before turning their gazes to the ceiling or an inexplicably interesting patch of blank wall.
Then the girl sitting next to Dream said, “Am I going to have to worry about you, Michael?”
Michael was staring at another boy in the room, one to whom he bore a strong resemblance. They were siblings or very close cousins. Michael’s brother or cousin stared hard at the floor. His hands were shaking. Dream did a quick scan of the faces arrayed around her and saw evidence of fear in all of them, including the girl she’d so stupidly vented some of her free-floating rage on in the pub bathroom. The one exception was that girl’s sister, who was eerily calm.