Received a couple e-mails over the weekend asking about Exquisite Corpse that made me feel like a tool for letting it gather dust a year(? two?) ago. Last night, I went over a copy (the most recent copy, I think. I have version control issues) and remembered why I put it down and backed away slowly from it then. What a fucking mess. It's really strange, reading something you co-wrote years ago, and now, feeling disconnected from it. Some of it made me wince. Many, many mixed feelings about this.
Chunk. Not a good word for anything except maybe for what you find in ice cream.
Exquisite Corpse
(Somewhere near the end of the sprawling and messy chapter four.)
Spin the vamp. Stake. Six months and it had already become ingrained reflex. Hunter of his own kind. Perverse. As perverse as loving the Slayer.
Spike stared at the settling dust, the stake in his hands. Logic. Broken. It had gone wrong. All horribly wrong.
"Thanks," the girl stammered, clutching her neck. "That guy. He was a freak."
Looking up, he found himself fixed on the twin punctures in her neck. Deep, but not enough to pierce the jugular or carotid. Right here, right now, easy, insidious whispers. And he kept staring. At the bite. Her neck. Vision swerving in and out as blood and spittle trickled down her neck. He felt the muscles in his face begin to slowly shift.
"Are you okay?" she asked, first, concerned, then fearfully as his eyes slowly turned yellow.
It would be so easy.
After all, he was evil, right? This was expected. What he was. Could never change, could never amount to anything. She'd said so. The Slayer. So many times. And she wanted it that way. She wanted unremitting misery, so she'd get it, oh yes, she'd get it in spades.
He smiled. "I am now."
Moved, fast and brutal. Turning her head sharply in the other direction, he sank his fangs into the other side of her neck.
He flinched, reflexively, anticipating the shock, but there was no pain. The beta blockers chugging happily through his system were working like a dream. And it was a dream, beautiful, glorious freedom from the shackles in his head. Years of advanced research and development, Initiative technology and Operant conditioning, meticulously plotted out, flawlessly executed, only to be undone through the liberal application of pharmaceuticals. God bless the colonies, with their sex, drugs and delivery right to your doorstep.
In his hands she screamed. Gurgled. Flailed. He cruelly twisted her shoulder tighter against him.
No room for gentleness. Gentleness was for humans with their stupid bleats and cries of mercy. No. No mercy. No gentleness. No had ever been gentle with him. Life was rough, hard and cold. Being undead wasn't much different; dreams of immortality, filled with blood and misery. That, he'd accepted.
(In her arms, in her mouth, in her. He'd give anything to be there again.)
But it fell to the inevitable. He'd kill her. Or she'd kill him. Either way didn't really matter. Somewhere along, he stopped caring. Love was for suckers, especially three-time losers like him.
Roughly digging his hand into her hair, he jerked her head further to the side, exposing more neck to his feast. It felt nice, long, silken chestnut, twined in his fingers.
Her hair.
She had hair like Dawn's.
Like the Bit's. Her hair like--
The blood in his mouth turned, like soured milk, churning in the back his throat. Nausea ripped through his system, and tore himself away from the girl.
Hair like...
Staggering, he took three steps backwards, turned and puked noisily into the grass.
All the warm blood he'd swallowed came back up, splattering his boots, and the greasy pulp of a half-dozen thoroughly masticated jalapeno poppers followed soon after. He kept vomiting, chest heaving with involuntary contractions, as his stomach set about rapidly emptying itself.
Get it out--had to get the blood out.
The Ziploc bag fell from his pocket, its open seal upending all the pills inside. Footsteps. The girl. Stumbling. Running. And a chuckle crawled up his throat, leaking thinly through his shrinking fangs.
Yes. Run away, love. Run as fast as you can. Never know what sorts of nasty creatures you might encounter at night.
The chuckle slid into a mad laugh, broken and bitter. And he kept laughing at his pitiful state, bent double, cheek, sticky and warm in the regurgitated blood and dirt. Oh God, if they could only see him now, fallen low, so low he was nothing.
(Scraping the alley floor along with the rest of the garbage and wrinkled bills blowing around in the street.)
How it stung, the irony and how it had been so much easier then. Mourning her was when she was gone. One hundred forty-seven perfect dreams of saving her. It had been easier to imagine her then, flawless and unbroken, instead of desperate and dead-eyed. And even when she'd looked at him with nothing but loathing, she'd been alive. Still, he'd played the stupid, sad sod, how damned pathetic he was, crying over a girl who hadn't come all the way back from the hereafter. But he was, wasn't he? Pathetic. Crawling, digging through the dirt, through the trash. Anything to hold the smallest piece of her.
His laughter rose higher, shrill self-mockery, his fingers clawing in the mud, hiccuping, stuttering, finally descending into choking sobs, as he wept for his own futility.
And, because this has been sitting on my hard drive for months a year.
Exiles
(Some of chapter six. Cringe at Anderson's brogue)
He didn't notice the car following him. Didn't notice until a pair of high beams blasted on, rendering him blind for the few necessary seconds that provided enough time for it to accelerate direcly behind and slam into him, bouncing him from hood, to window, to roof, and finally off the trunk.
Bones snapped in his ribs and back as his body vaulted ass over head. His left maxilla, shin and collar bone broke as he bounced off a telephone pole and hit the ground, in a messy tangle of limbs.
The car screeched to a halt, red lights blinked on, and plowed into reverse.
His skull cracked sharply against the road, stickiness dripping steadily out his left ear as plates of his cranium loosened. Alexander Anderson found himself staring at the piece of bubblegum stuck to the bottom of his shoe.
Sprawled bonelessly somewhere between sunny side-up and soft-scramble, unable feel much except for the blossoming wetness spreading under his cheek, the headlights appeared again over the edge of his gum-stuck sole, speeding towards him like a freight train, the kind one saw when looking for the light at the end of a tunnel. It stopped just short of turning him into road decoration, screeching to a halt and kicking rubber and dust into his eyes, the tread of the tire leaving a light imprint on the side of his head. The door opened, and the driver who'd been playing kickball with Alexander Anderson's tailbone stepped out onto the gravel. The sole of a shiny, black loafer settled on his chin.
"They shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her," it was a strange, hypnotic drawl, his voice, "because she hath wrought folly to play the whore in her father's house. And what of you? A man of God...protecting these filthy little cunts." He closed his eyes, nostrils flaring as he breathed in deeply, sucking in the stench like a fine bouquet. And then he smiled. "But you're not a real man of the cloth, are you Father? Suicides are barred from the Kingdom of the Lord, preacher man. Is that what happened to you? Did God throw you out of heaven?"
"Filthae, fake blasphemer," Anderson spat, or rather, tried to. The only thing that came up from the mass of tattered velcro in his lungs was a frothy red spit bubble. Still, he gurgled on. "Satan's spawn kin burn in h--" The foot under his jaw jerked sharply, and his neck snapped, the alley echoing with the sound of the crack.
Crouching beside the body, the priest grinned. "No matter how many monsters you destroy, Father. No matter how many heretics you kill and sinners you save, you will never be able to enter the promised land."
Anderson saw feet again as the fake priest stood. The slamming of a trunk, followed seconds later by the body of the girl dropping next to his, her neck twisted at an odd angle. He stared into her dead, cloudy eyes and right over her jugular, the circle and small cross burned freshly into her mottled flesh.
A foot kicked his head, snapping it back into position and he stared up into the face of the First Evil.
"When all have died and passed in misery and shame, and only you and I walk the scorched earth together, I will devour you." Teeth glimmered as the he faded back into shadow. "Goodnight...fallen father."