Hunger Pangs

Part 8

"Narcisse? Hello? Are you there?" I whisper into the dark apartment space, hoping that he really isn't. Maybe he decided to run to the next state. Maybe he died! Ha. Life's not that charmed. Clutching my bag full of sabotaged entrails, I try to not to let my knees knock together. "I'm back..." I can smell his blood, lots of it. That's promising?

A dry, dusty whisper tinged with hope answers me. "My little cuckoo?"

Flipping on the light as I enter the room, I flinch as the odor of decomposition burns my nostrils again. Narcisse is lying on his ratty twin bed, curled up in brown-black stained cartoon character sheets. He flutters his eyelids and moans in pain.

"He hurt me. Little Mirri. I hurt." His voice trembles and he sobs gently, pitifully. I actually feel a little sorry for him, even though he is a vicious monster. Well, I suppose I'm not that much better.

"Can I see?" I keep my voice calm and quiet, like I'm talking to a wounded animal. "Shhh, let me look."

He whimpers and acquiesces to my request, lifting the sheets away from his torso. Forbo did some serious damage. Narcisse is split from his navel to his sternum, leaking blood and visceral fluids, his guts held inside by strips of clothing. Any human would be dead by now. I don't know how he's still conscious. "So hungry." He shivers in shock, but he'll heal from this if he eats. He's so vulnerable right now.

Shushing him softly, "Don't talk. I'll get you food." I dig in my bag for one of the drug-laced intestines, "I'll take care of you. We're family." I don't know why I said that. Scary. Praying that he won't notice the taste of the pills, I put the bloody organ against his lips.

He rolls his orange-ember eyes back in his head and opens his mouth so wide that his jaws must have unhinged like a snake's. He chokes back the meat without chewing it; the gobbet slides down his gullet. He gasps and feebly reaches for more. Happy to oblige, I give him the next section and soon he has nearly devoured my zipper bag of drugged guts. His wound is starting to seal now. Damn, that was fast.

"Oh little cuckoo. You are my little guardian angel. We shall be so happy together with our little family and we shall dominate the humans and make them our slaves to be nibbled and sampled at our pleasure and I feeeeeeeel funny..." He starts to sound like Zola at the end of a bar crawl. "I just want, I just want to tell you, something... Something..."

I lean over and stroke his forehead, like an indulgent nurse. "What? What do you want to tell me?"

"Smile for me. Smile Mirri, show me what it looks...what it looks like to be happy?" His eyes are not tracking well and cross randomly. I paste a big, fake happy grin on my face.

Casually he backhands me across the mouth, whip-crack loud and I fly against the wall. I can taste my own blood filling my mouth. Spitting on the floor, I try to clear my ringing head. He's going to kill me.

"I've aaaaaalways hated your human teeeeeth." Narcisse slurs. "Now, now you will have ghoul teeeeth. And if you don't--" He sits up and bobbles from side to side like a toddler's toy. "I shall hit you some more until you loook like meeee and then we shall take pictures and have our portrait painted and we will be so happy together that we willlllll--" He falls off the bed and lands in a face-first pile on the floor. I try to not choke to death on my own blood, my mouth full of broken teeth, stifling sobs of pain.

Grabbing Forbo's knife from my bag without hesitation, I stand up. I could use the gun, but I don't want anyone to hear it and frankly, I don't know, really, how to shoot one. I'm going to learn how to shoot a gun and use many, many kinds of weapons, if I survive this. How do you kill something that heals so fast? Well, he needs blood, so that's a good place to start. Eliminate the blood.