Chapter 3
RIVET AND I had been friends since the third grade. He'd been sitting in the back of Mrs. Johnson's class, already something of an outcast in his shabby hand-me-downs, when I walked in two weeks after the school season started. I'd spent my whole life up to that point in Hong Kong before heading back to the states, and I guess I was as backward as could be in that sleepy Missouri suburb community just outside of Jericho.
Grade school is tougher than most adults remember. I was only a few weeks late for the ride, but friendships that would last the whole year had already been sealed in cement, so it was just social chance that Rivet and I had gravitated toward one another, both outcasts in our own right.
Back then, Rivet was known as Ritchie Whales, which was either a cruel joke or his God-given name. At about thirteen, we started calling him Rivet because he'd gone and gotten his ear pierced – not ears in the plural, just the one ear, the left one – and only a week later he lost the little stud earing he'd bought at the parlor and took to sticking an aluminum welding rivet in the hole so it wouldn't seal up on him. It was sort of a joke at first, a temporary gag by a teenager who barely even knew what being a teenager was yet. But over time, in that gradual, molasses-slow way things have of gelling into place, it became his thing, a piece of Rivet that was always there, just like his eyes and ears and nose.
Now, ten years older and a hell of a lot less than that wiser, Rivet's rivet glinted a ricocheted ray from the bright light beyond my living room window as he heaved another painful breath into his lungs.
I stepped over an old pizza box on the floor and came up beside the couch. Jennie looked up at me mutely, a lost animal in pain. She'd apparently been shocked into silence, which was a rare thing, but I doubted anything like this had ever happened before. The blood had already congealed a bit on her cheek, although it was still streaming bright red from the fleshy lump that had once been an ear. Her auburn hair lay matted against it, glued to her temples and dark with the wetness.
"Come on, Jen," I said. "Can you stand?"
A sound gurgled out of her throat, and I was again reminded of a wounded animal. There was pain in her eyes, which I expected, but also a hurt expression of betrayal, which I hadn't expected. Did she care that much for Rivet?
"It's okay, don't try to talk. Just try and stand up. Let's get to the bathroom."
I didn't hear Rivet get off the ground, but I saw a shadow flash across Jennie's eyes just before they went wide with terror. I spun, throwing an arm up to guard my face out of reflex, and Rivet's teeth tore into the meaty flesh of my forearm. Pain lanced up my shoulder, all the way into my gut, and I cried out and got a mouthful of Rivet's fingers. His hands clawed and slashed at my face, ripping for my eyes. I shut them tightly and we went down in a heap over the glass coffee table, shattering it into a thousand winking suns. Ribbons of glass flew around us, slipping across my hands and arms and chest with teeth.
The force of the fall wrenched Rivet's teeth loose from my arm and I planted my hand on his face, flattening his nostrils with my palm and digging my nails into his forehead just under the hairline. I locked my elbow. Even at arm's length, his nails still scraped across my own face, tearing stripes into my cheeks. His teeth gnashed below my palm, bloody and putrid. My cheek was pressing into something sharp in the carpet—glass, I suppose—but I couldn't break free, so we struggled like that, side-by-side on the floor.
His legs came up and wrapped around my torso. It was getting harder to keep my arm straight. I tried to grab at him with my other hand, but he squirmed out of my grasp like an eel.
"Rivet!" I shouted. "It's me!"
No use. He wrenched sideways and my hand slipped off his face. He lunged into the gap and brought his teeth within inches of my neck before I could clamp both hands around his head. I felt his hot breath under my chin, smelled the reek of fresh blood, felt wet spittle spray across my Adam's apple.
He jerked closer with raw, dumb, animal strength. More strength than I had. His chattering teeth were practically scraping the nape of my neck.
I'd have to break his neck to survive. Just a twist; my hands were already in position. Amazing how survival instinct makes it so easy to kill your best friend.
I tensed my biceps and dug a fistful of hair into each hand, ready to twist his head and snap his spine, when all of a sudden he went limp. Just like that, the fire left Rivet's body and he slumped in my arms.
I shoved him off me and clambered to my feet. The thin clear body of a hypodermic syringe stood erect on the back of his shirt, right at the base of his neck above the shoulder blades. The plunger was pressed in all the way. Behind him, Jennie, shivering and hugging her shoulders. She was dressed only in a pair of blue panties and covered in blood all down her left shoulder. In the struggle, I hadn't seen her leave the couch and sprint to the kitchen.
I bent over with my hands on my knees to catch my breath and looked up at her.
"How much was that?"
"I don't know." She was shaking. "Maybe like, half the bag? I just sort of dumped it out. Barely cooked it."
"Jesus..." I muttered, looking down at Rivet's inert form. He was sprawled across the carpet like a murder victim. Which he very well might be now, I reckoned. The bag in question had been a fresh gram baggie, minus the pinch we'd used last night, so dear old flesh-eating Rivet now had something close to 500 milligrams of Mexican black-tar heroin coursing through his veins. Unless it hadn't cooked. Was he breathing? I couldn't tell.
I sat heavily on the couch, unable to tear my eyes from Rivet's body, then remembered myself and stood back up.
"Come on, Jen. Before we do anything else about..." I nodded in Rivet's direction. I couldn't form the words. "...let's get a bandage on your head."
I put an arm around her shoulder and together we shambled into the half bathroom just down the hallway from the living room. I flicked the overhead on and took one look at her in the harsh white light and vomited in the toilet. I'd never seen so much blood outside a movie. When I tried to pull Jennie's hair away from the pulped gash on the side of her head, it stuck fast. I told her we'd have to cut it off, and she shook her head violently, still shaking, still rubbing her hands against her bare shoulders.
"Stay here," I said, and ran back to the living room for a blanket before she could reply. Rivet's body was motionless and a thin trail of foam had begun trickling from the corner of his slack lips, a grotesque reminder of the frailty of our lifestyle. I fought the urge to blow chunks again.
When I walked back into the bathroom, quilt in hand, Jennie was at the mirror with a pair of scissors in her left hand. Two rough snicks later and a matted clump of brown hair—usually so neatly brushed and straightened—was clinging to the side of her head like a tenacious rodent. She looked up at me in the mirror as I entered. I tried to offer an encouraging smile, but it came out closer to a grimace.
"It has to be done," she said briefly, splashing water onto a washrag before dabbing it onto the clotted mess of hair. I draped the quilt over her shoulders. She shrugged into it like a lover.
"Let me," I said, gently tugging the washrag from her quivering hand and going to work on her ear. The water loosened the matted blood and released ratty clumps of hair onto the white rag, turning it rosy, then crimson. I rinsed it periodically in the sink and kept going until the wound gleamed naked and pink.
Rivet hadn't taken the whole ear – just the top half and a few pieces of the lobe. It had ripped away in a lagged crescent around the hole of her ear canal. She'd never regain her full hearing on that side, but at least she wouldn't be completely deaf. I moistened the tip of a clean rag and dug a slug of blood from inside the canal. I looked up to see Jennie watching me in the mirror.
"What was that?" she asked, voice barely a whisper. "Ray, what happened back there? Rivet...I mean..."
I shook my head. "Don't. Not yet. One thing at a time." I wasn't ready to think about it, much less talk about it. Even less, talk about it with the girlfriend of the gu
y who'd gone psycho. There are only so many things a body can process at one time.
There was a roll of surgical gauze in an ancient first-aid kit at the back of the hallway closet. It took some digging, but finally I spied the dull red box behind a pile of moth-eaten beach towels. As gently as I could, I daubed a thick layer of antibacterial cream over Jennie's shredded ear, then pressed a cotton pad over it and gave her a lopsided headband with the gauze.
Dusting off my hands theatrically, I stepped back to look at my handiwork. Despite myself, I laughed. It came out dry, cheerless. Jennie wrinkled her nose.
"What?" she said.
"It looks fake," I said. "Like a costume in a play, an old war thing or something."
Jennie looked at me funny for a second, then laughed too.
"It does, doesn't it," she said, angling her head in the mirror like a model showing off the season's hottest fashion trends. "Trench chic."
For a moment I'd forgotten my dead best friend, but just a moment. When it came back, it was sobering.
"We should get..." I started to say, but never got the chance to finish. Suddenly, lightning agony raced through my brain with a physical force. I grabbed my forehead and bent over the sink, retching from the pain of it. It felt like a whole colony of ants had taken up residence inside my skull and started carving out little pieces, shredding the gray matter and nerve endings. I think Jennie was saying something – I felt her hands on my shoulders – but her words were muted and dull. Some sense of reality shifted, faded the world on a dimmer switch. The bathroom got hazy, dreamlike, as if that was just a fragment of imagination while the real world grew inside my skull.
I scrunched my eyes shut against the vertigo of the feeling and the darkness behind my eyelids opened up like an endless vista. Shapeless forms danced and crawled through the blackness, faces appeared for an instant only to shrink back into the shadows. Whispers came at me from every direction. I was in a cloud of them, a swarm, hissing voices that buzzed behind and above me. Saying...saying...
I must have stumbled because when I opened my eyes I was hanging from the bathroom sink. My legs felt like jelly; my fingers were locked into white-knuckled claws against the smooth inner bowl. Shreds of Jennie's lopped-off hair clung to my wrists and forearms. Jennie was shaking me, and when I looked up there was terror in her eyes.
For a gutwrenching moment, the bathroom and the bottomless chasm in my head grappled with each other, trying to claim me, and then the bathroom won and my senses flooded back over me. The stringent scent of antiseptic spray. The cold, smooth porcelain sink. The hard tile under my knees. Jennie's hands, still gripping my shoulders, but hesitantly, as if she were afraid I might roll my eyes back in my head and take a bite out of her like Rivet had.
"Ray, please don't do this. Please..."
She was pleading with me. She didn't want to be left alone. I groaned and struggled to my feet.
"You're sick," she said. "Your arm. Where Rivet..."
I looked down at the gash in my forearm where Rivet had locked his jaws onto me. It had been getting steadily more painful, but I'd all but forgotten it trying to get Jennie fixed up. It had stopped bleeding, but there was a perfectly clean chunk torn away from the meat just below my elbow. Tooth grooves sloped down from the surface like a dental record.
Jennie had already taken a washcloth and was wiping the blood away, just as I'd done to her.
"What was that?" she asked. "What happened to you?"
"Just a little queasy, I guess," I replied, avoiding her eye. Before Rivet had gone crazy, he'd been raving about darkness and voices. I knew now what he meant. But what good would it do to scare Jennie any more than she already was? We had no idea what was happening, and panic would only stop us from figuring it out. Movie scenes flashed through my head, and I agreed with them. There was something painfully familiar about all of this, but to give voice to the thoughts would just grant them strength. There was no way it was actually happening. It didn't; not in real life. When there's no more room in hell, I thought, then grit my teeth against the sting as Jennie splashed iodine over my arm.
"You guys need some of this. Now."
Jennie shrieked and clamped a viselike hand directly over the bite on my arm. I didn't even notice the pain. All I saw was Rivet leaning heavily against the bathroom doorway, a syringe in his hand.