She turned on the tap again and was about to cup her other hand underneath to get enough water so she wouldn’t have to dry swallow them, then stopped. She sighed and placed one back in the bottle. She held the other between her thumb and forefinger, hovering it over the bottle as if threatening to throw it back with the others.
Turning back to the door again, she sniffed back hard.
“Fuck it,” she said, then pushed the pill between her pursed lips. She bent down and stuck her mouth into the stream of milky liquid coming out of the faucet, sucking back more than enough to make the pill go down easily. Her hair got wet as she did this.
She turned off the tap and placed the cap back on the bottle, then gave herself one last look in the mirror. She adjusted her bra strap so it wasn’t quite so visible, then nodded approvingly and stepped toward the door.
When her hand touched the knob, her vision became hazy again. She paused, bit her lip, and forced herself not to start crying again.
To her surprise, it worked this time. She glanced at her reflection in the cruddy mirror one last time, forced a smile onto her face, then walked out of the bathroom and back out into the Factory.
She and Xander had decided to join Mike and Cathy that evening. They had agreed beforehand to walk home together, and nobody had blamed them. On their way there they had seen people affixing new locks to their windows, shops closing down early... and people only seemed to get more and more paranoid as they got closer to the club. Many older people gave them hard stares, following them with their eyes as they walked by.
Xander and Mike were caught deep in battle on an arcade game, which Mike appeared to be winning judging by the curses spewing from Xander’s lips and the way he was rattling his joystick.
Cathy sat in the driving simulator, not actually playing it. She pried her eyes from Mike long enough to acknowledge Sara’s return, but did not question her absence.
“What do you think of Grendel?” Sara asked, looking over at the buff hockey player.
“Ugh. I’m afraid to say. Mike’s all upset over me and Gren. He won’t accept that we’re just friends,” she tisked, pulling her hair back into a ponytail and tying an elastic in it.
“I meant for me.”
Cathy rolled her eyes. “Don’t you think it’s a little soon? Kinda pushing it.”
“Oh, yeah. The mourning has begun,” she laughed. The smile she had practiced in the mirror was more natural now, and she herself did not know whether she was faking it or not.
Cathy laughed too, but only to be polite. She didn’t see anything funny about it at all.
“Kick ‘em! No! How’d you... argh!” Xander finally admitted defeat and stepped back from the joystick. “Dammit! How’d you do that last bit?”
“Well, it’s all about a delicate balance of concentration, discipline, and not being a spaz. You wouldn’t understand,” Mike grinned as he straightened his collar.
“You’re not a very good winner. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“Hmm,” Mike responded, pretending to look thoughtful. “I don’t know. You’d think I would be a better winner, what with all the practice I have.”
Xander sighed, fumbling around his pockets for a quarter. Finding one, he held it up toward Mike at eye level, an evil grin spreading across his face. “Play again?”
“No way man. I gotta save some money to buy Cathy dinner.”
Xander made a little sound like a whip under his breath.
“What was that?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
Mike eyed his friend for a moment. “One more game.”
Detective Carl Dent had seen his fair share of weird stuff. Sick stuff. The stuff that they leave out of even the worst horror flick, he lived every day of his life. Things that wake you up at night in cold sweats. Children massacred in hoards and piled up in men’s sheds. People half eaten by some postal worker turned cannibal. Even a guy skewered on a lamppost. But when his commissioner passed him that folder, his gut turned over inside him. All he could think of was the sick, revolting, abhorrent nature of man.
He brushed a hand through his fast fading hair, briefly disrupting his comb-over before subconsciously putting it back into place. Flipping through the files on Jamie Dawkins, he felt himself unable to take his eyes away from the photographs or miss a single syllable written on the pages. He placed a hand over his mouth as he got to the part with close up photos of his organs, or where they should have been.
They had been extracted meticulously, with the preciseness and care of a practiced surgeon. The organs would be usable afterward if stored properly, if that was, in fact, the killer’s intent. But the area around where the organs had been lifted was the exact opposite, slashed and mutilated and mauled. Like once the operation had been completed the person had purposely caused as much damage as possible to whatever remained, for no other reason than the pure, undiminished joy of it.
Worst of all, autopsy tests revealed that the victim may have been alive when the operation was happening. Or at least when it had begun.
Detective Tim White walked by Dent’s desk, taking a peek over his shoulder at his friend as he did so. He frowned, his exaggerated lips and dark African-American complexion only bringing out the emotion more. “Jeez, Carl. What’re you doing?”
Dent did nothing for a moment, so engrossed was he in the information in front of him. He seemed to be fixated on one photo, taken of the boy’s lungs in the state they were in at the crime scene. Suddenly, his head snapped up to look
