Saving Face

Chapter Fourteen: Demon

Within minutes Tawnya awoke, blissfully unaware. She chatted excitedly with Almeda about how wonderful it was to be back in her own body despite her injuries, and discussed the upcoming physical therapy.

Tomas arrived a moment later and helped Tawnya into a wheelchair. He didn’t even glance in Sarah’s direction before wheeling Tawnya from the room. A second staff member came for the old renter body and wheeled it away.

Sarah waited impatiently for Almeda to leave so Tomas could come retrieve her, but the woman only moved to the work bench directly below Sarah’s hiding place, out of her range of vision.

A moment later the door opened again and a pretty young woman in a baggy orange correctional facility jumpsuit entered the room, followed by a uniformed officer.

Almeda pointed at the empty gurney. The convict sat on the edge of the bed and glanced around the room nervously.

“Whatcha gonna do to me?”

“Lie down. This won’t hurt.”

The convict complied, but repeated her question.

“Don’t worry,” Almeda said, “you’ve volunteered to be part of an exciting new technology.”

“I aint signed up for nothing.” The convict tried to sit up, but the officer held her down and growled something threatening.

Almeda produced a needle and swiftly injected the pre-op tranquilizer.

“Ow.” the convict yelped. “Hey, I got rights. I …” Her voice trailed off as the fast-acting tranquilizer pushed her into oblivion.

“Thank you,” Almeda told the officer, who retreated from the room.

As soon as he left, Almeda positioned herself over the convict’s head. Sarah tried to frown as Almeda grasped the sleeping woman’s face and dug her fingers under the lower edges of her jaw.

Almeda’s eyes began to glow just as Dr. Maerwynn’s had. Purple fire spread from her fingers, and they sank into the skin along the convict’s jaw.

Sarah watched in confusion and growing concern as the purple fire rippled up along the woman’s jawline. If Almeda was preparing for a transfer, why hadn’t she attached the life support unit? Where was the SOTRUN unit? What was that crazy purple fire?

Then the face began to peel away from the skull with a wet, sucking sound like a boot being pulled out of thick mud. A gap appeared between the woman’s face and the skull near the jaw, and widened up toward her forehead until half her face was leveraged up. Then with a loud pop, the face came free, complete with her nose, and with eyeballs trailing ragged nerve clusters.

Sarah bit back an anguished cry as she watched with stunned disbelief. Lacking the concealing protection of the machinery, she witnessed in full, horrifying detail as trailers of flesh dropped away and the face thinned, the eyes compressing into half-spheres. By the time Almeda raised the face to shoulder height, it looked like a translucent, shimmering full-face mask trailing tendrils of rainbow smoke.

As Almeda threw her head back in silent ecstasy, mirroring Dr. Maerwynn’s reaction when she operated on Tawnya, Sarah fought to keep from screaming. The truth struck her so hard that had she had command of her stomach, she would have puked all over the room.

Tomas was right, although he hadn’t prepared her for the awful reality of it. She didn’t know the convict, but couldn’t bear to see such torture being inflicted on the unsuspecting woman.

How many times had they ripped pieces of Sarah out of whatever body she possessed and she’d lain innocent under their hands? She wanted to scream at Almeda to stop, wanted to claw at the creature’s eyes, but she couldn’t do anything while stuck in the doll body, and was forced to silently witness the horrible procedure. On the gurney, the skin where the convict’s face had been removed settled into a smooth, blank mask, flowing together like water in a pond.