M.I.A.

Chapter 24

Chapter Twenty-Four:

Corey

When I get back, Mia is still asleep. I don't think she's asleep at all. I think she has moved to a place of unconsciousness where Cutter's pain-making can't get her anymore.

I'm almost mad at him for being so sloppy with this job. He could have made her last longer if he took care of her. And then I would have more time to plan.

I have to act. I have to do whatever I'm going to do tonight. Because once he sees that he can't make pain for her, once he sees that her precious skin has gone paper thin, once he knows that she's no longer a viable body on which to ply his art, he'll kill her before the dehydration does.

I go out to the garden and pace back and forth between my neatly planted beds. What to do? What to do?

If I can't hurt him and the others will not help me, then I need to find someone who will.

But how? How am I going to recruit someone to help? Another ghost might...I could go trolling around the church graveyards or one of the older buildings in town. But who knows what kinds of rules bind other ghosts? I already know that I'm different than the ones here on the farm.

I might be the only ghost in town who can move from my place of death—able to garden, able to go sit in classrooms when I'm bored, or read books over the shoulders of library patrons, or sneak into movie theaters when new Marvel movies come out. I'm not caught in the circle. I'm still sort of alive, in my own way.

Could I get a human to help?

That would be best. However, it would be very dangerous to involve the living. Tangling anything alive up with Cutter probably isn't a good idea. And how would I get a human to follow me anyway?

***

I'm still confused and puzzling over what to do when Cutter arrives home early. I run out of the garden and peg myself against him as he wearily takes his lunch cooler and some kind of bag I've never seen before from the truck.

He looks like ass. Not that Cutter was ever a looker to begin with. He's got bags under his eyes and he shuffles along like a man half asleep. Anxious, I follow him as he drags himself inside, sets everything down, and goes up to Mia.

Squatting beside her, he shakes her. When she doesn't stir, he begins taking her pulse and pulling up pinches of her skin. They stick up in slow-drooping peaks.

I hold my breath, expecting him to freak out again, but he doesn't.

Cutter takes out the key, unlocks Mia, and—astonishingly—picks her up and takes her to the bathroom. Using the same care as before, he strips her and lays her back in the bathtub. Then he turns on the spray and leaves her there.

I watch, mute and confused, as he changes the sheets and blankets. The mattress below is stained with feces, urine, and blood. A sick testament to his past transgressions. He covers them with fresh linens from the hallway closet. A pure, white mask over Death's fugly mug. He's not fooling anyone with that shit.

Cutter goes back into the bathroom and sets about cleaning Mia up. Except this time, I don't try to stop him because I'm confused. He never did this for me. And I doubt he did it for anyone. Is he trying to help her?

He doesn't whack off to her this time. Thank God. Even Cutter apparently has limits. I guess in his messed up little fantasy world, unconscious girls are okay, but half-dead ones are not. Seems weird that a sloppy murderer would have a taboo against necrophilia.

He cleans her up, dries her off, dresses her wounds—including smearing weird smelling stuff all over her bruised ribs and face, and slips her into a new ugly nightgown. Then, he carries her back to the bed and cuffs her back in.

He disappears from the room. I stay where I'm standing. Is he trying to cover up what he has done? Make it go away so he doesn't have to see? Is guilt at being a monster that easily covered up?

He comes back in, to my surprise, with an IV pole. A desperate scoff garbles up in my throat. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I watch with wide-eyed amazement as Cutter expertly slips a needle into Mia's collapsed and dehydrated skin and hooks her up to an IV. He's giving her a chance. Rehydration.

Where did he even get that? Has it always been here? I don't know. I don't think I ever bothered checking the closets for that sort of thing. It hadn't occurred to me to check for hospital surplus, but now that I think about it, he always had bandages. He knows how to cut just right and keep someone alive...unless he's having a bad couple of days like he's been having with Mia. And Little Evie Lee—the favored sister—is a scalpel.

Is he some kind of modern day Jack the Ripper? Someone who actually knows medicine and instead of practicing it, turned it into something strange and deadly? A med school drop out turned tortured artist?

Is this Jekyll and Hyde?

Why do I care?

Cutter steps back, surveying his work, both good and bad, and leaves the room.

***

I stay with Mia for the whole night.

I'm both delighted and terrified that Cutter has done this for her. It means she'll live longer but it also mean's he'll torture her more.

She wakes up a little bit before dawn and blinks at me. "Corey?"

I wince at the sound of her voice, but try to hide it with a confident smile. "Hi."

Her gaze flies around the room.

"How are you feeling?"

Her eyes find mine again and trap them. I need to save this girl. "A little better."

"Good." Bad. Bad, bad, bad. "Go back to sleep." Go back under! Don't let him see you awake and alive! He'll only hurt you more. This is a sick game of cat and mouse—healing her only to hurt her. I hide all this morbid certainty under a smile for Mia.

Despite her split lips, she smiles back at me. I feel my heart melt down the inside of my ribcage and puddle at the bottom. Hollow boy with a heart of melted gold.

"Another...story? To sleep?" Her eyes are innocent and child-like in the grey light. I push her hair back behind her ear. I don't know where she's finding all this hope, all this faith. I never had any of that. But I do as she asks, because I understand her wanting to walk out of reality and find herself in someone else's life or fantasy.

I tell her about going abroad. Of trips that I went on with Mom and Dad. Dad was always away from home on business, but he did make good on taking off long stints so that we could have family time. Mom counted down the days on a calendar. Every two months, for one week, I had a father and she had her lover.

It was a time of magic and intrigue because my father never accepted the mundane or the boring. We went to cafés in Istanbul and the Louvre in Paris. We visited the ruins in Greece and I met some of my distant cousins in Naples. We climbed Arthur's Seat in Britain and dove in the reefs off of Hawaii. I held the sturdy body of a koala in Australia and swam with dolphins in the Keys. I learned how to waltz at a stuffy banquet in Moscow and went on safari in South Africa and visited an archaeological dig in Croatia.

Mia finally falls asleep, her head resting against my arm and her breath against my neck. I slide out from under her and kiss her forehead. And then I stand guard, waiting for the demon to awaken.

When Cutter comes in the morning, he barely even looks at Mia. He changes out the squeezed-flat Lactated Ringers Solution bag and exchanges it for a fat, lolling new one then goes to work.

Satisfied that Mia is safe for at least another few hours, I go to work.