Good Fences (R)

[Mona Oliveira]

(Moved from that other RDI site. Violence and gore ahoy!)

Seaside, 2015

She feels nothing but the ever consuming greed of thirst and she will do anything to ease it; to satiate the constant throbbing in her head. Goodish Mona would step back and remind herself that such a hunger knows no peace, knows no end, but this Mona, if she can still be granted the courtesy of a name, knows only gimmegimmegimme by any means necessary.

Mona escapes through a window in the hallway after smashing the glass with a solid pounding from her skull. Even the scent of her own blood is a torture. The pain of that act, the ensuing slide over broken glass and each slice into her cold flesh serve no purpose other than to rattle the cage of her want.

She is still graceful, but graceful in a way that no human being should ever be. Bleeding and sinking deeper, Mona zigzags through chairs, leaps over bushes and, eventually, the neighbor's fence, as if such obstacles are nothing. A scent is tangled in the air, a scent that drowns out the salt and the crabby odor of sand.

Inside of the beach house next to her own, Tommy Farley cuts himself shaving. He lives alone, has always lived alone, and that's alright by him. His life is a series of dull routines except for when his neighbors see fit to disrupt that structure, but they're not so bad..not really. The girl seems chillier than the guy, but even she has never went beyond the odd prank or two.

He doesn't know that one of those disruptions, the prettier one, is currently snaking her way up one of the wooden supports of his patio; has no way of knowing that the stick he keeps wedged in his sliding glass door is broken and useless, or that his death is now waltzing about his kitchen on the heels of her hands and the toes of her feet, soiling his newly mopped floor with blood and dirt and sand.

Crouching beneath the kitchen table, Mona hears a sound- the faint clatter of a toothbrush being dropped into a sink's cup- and her overheated lizard brain drops a delicious clue to her nose; the blood is nearby.

Never mind that someone else is still using it.

[Mona Oliveira]

Moving her body low to the ground, her arms bent at the elbows, Mona shoots out from her hiding spot so quickly that she is nothing more than a blur of bloodied flesh and long dark hair. She is so fast that Tommy doesn't even notice her until he turns to find her hunkered down just beyond the bathroom door, her filthy hands dangling limply in front of her.

A startled cry sticks in his throat and he steps back, clutching his straight razor in front of him as if he knows how to use it. Truth be told, he does. There's more to the man than anyone will ever know, but slitting the throat of a card hustler strikes him as easier than taking the blade to a wounded girl.

And she is wounded, but warning bells in Tommy's brain begin to ring the more that he looks at her, and they drown out any shred of worry he has to spare for Mona. She's watching him with eyes filled with nothing but darkness, her mouth hanging slack like a dog panting in the heat of a scorching summer, and his panicked brain tells him what his human ears were never prepared to believe.

She isn't human and, whatever she is, she's hungry. He knows that look, has seen it on the faces of starving, desperate bears from the safety of his television screen. Teeth like that, they're made for tearing into meat.

He swallows hard but tries to keep his fear from showing too much, but it's useless. Animals can smell it. He's heard that from too many high and mighty science guys, so he knows it's fact. But still, as doomed and as desperate as it may be, Tommy tries.

"Hey hey hey, now! Hey..calm down, okay? Just..." He licks his lips, tastes the blood from the cut just there on his chin, and watches with horror as Mona's nostrils flare. "Just..listen, okay? Okay!? Just..just listen..I..I can help you. I can go get my phone and call that Fitzroy boy..and...and I can help you."

Mona's head tilts sharply to one side and she snaps her mouth shut. For a moment, Tommy feels an overwhelming rush of a hope; of gratitude to whatever god may be looking down upon him tonight.

But hope is the folly of man, a lesson often learned far too late, and when a growl- part human and part animal- rises from her throat and leaps into the air, Tommy grits his teeth and clenches his eyes shut like a child trying to will away some imaginary bogeyman. He doesn't want his time to be up. He'll be a better person. He'll give to charity or go to church....anything, so long as he doesn't die like this; die like some kind of freak in his bathroom wearing nothing but his skeevies.

His promises fall upon Mona's deaf ears, no more affective than the strangled cry of a captured rabbit, and when his thumb accidentally catches the blade of the razor, the skin laid open, Tommy Farley's last action before leaving this world, before dying in his skeevies on his bathroom floor, is to wet himself.

[Mona Oliveira]

The world bleeds back into focus for Mona slowly but surely, the florescent lights hanging above her too bright and too blinding, and the pounding in her head so loud and so constant that it almost seems...

..rooted in reality.

She sits up carefully and with all of the awareness of a drunk emerging from a blackout. There's blood everywhere; blood on her clothes, on her skin, in her hair. Blood painting the room's robin's egg blue walls in horrific, vivid patterns. Someone is screaming at her from the other side of the door, panicked screams too high pitched to fit the familiarity of the voice birthing them.

Bart.

She opens her mouth, but there's something on her tongue. Something fat and cold like a dead slug. Spitting it out into her palm, her brown eyes widen with disgust and dread and worse..curiosity.

A tongue. A chewed up human tongue.

Frantic, still foggy, Mona sticks her fingers into her mouth, only to sigh in macabre relief when she finds her own still attached. Then, just as the pounding of Bart's fist convinces the door to give up the ghost, something pulls Mona's gaze to one side.

She isn't alone in the room. The one eye still left in Tommy's skull is staring blindly at her. Behind her, Bart stops dead in his tracks, a scream transforming into a strange, gargling noise, and Mona knows that he is looking at the body too.

The corpse is nothing more than a collection of wounds, a horrific souvenir of some mad animal attack. The best mortician in the world, given fifty years, would never be able to piece Tommy Farley back together.

Humpty dumpty sat on a wall...

Slowly she turns her head to look up at Bart, patches of pale skin still showing through the layers of gore, and she is not surprised to see him so still, so quite. So pale.

It isn't what it looks like, it's worse, and Mona knows that.

[Mona Oliveira]

Bart doesn't have to carry her out because Mona is on her feet once the shock of her actions fades, and she bumps shoulders with the Mage on her vacant eyed way out of the door. This is good. Bart's legs feel like jello and he's not entirely sure that he wants to touch her; not yet, not when what's left of Ol' Tommy is staring at him.

While across the privacy fence Mona goes through the motions of bathing, Bart shimmies and shakes and readies himself for what he has to do next. Tommy has far more power tools reserved for cutting and sawing than Casa de Oliveira-Fitzroy does, and the gearhead nearly loses his lunch navigating the dusty surfaces of Tommy's storage building.

He stares at the hacksaw in his hand for a long time, thinks of how many times he'd seen Tommy sawing up driftwood with it; the very same tool that, thirty minutes from now, will chew through Tommy's bones.

He finds painter's plastic and garbage bags and rope as easily as if the universe had saw this this coming and wanted him to be properly prepared.

While Mona is plucking bits of Tommy from between her teeth, Bart is rending him limb from limb until there's sweat mingling with the gore covering his skin. His stomach forces him to take breaks, because he believes with all of his misguided heart that Tommy should not suffer being covered in his vomit.

When he's finished, the bags bound neatly and piled into an ancient wheel barrel, Bart's brain has switched to auto-pilot. He guides Tommy's makeshift hearse through the gate and around to the freezer that rests in Mona's basement room.

She sits on the bed and watches him, the scents of her soap and shampoo mixing with the reek of raw meat, but Bart doesn't look at her. He can't, and it seems that Mona understands that.

So he nestles Tommy's remains beneath the Hot Pockets and the pounds of frostbitten hamburger, and when he's finished, he ghosts back outside. Seagulls call to one another, the waves crash and the sun is shining.

Bart breathes in a deep gulp of salty air and creeps back through the gate. He makes a pit stop in Tommy's kitchen, gathers up all of the cleaning supplies- An accident. This was an accident. It's Mona we're talking about. - and carries them with a robot's stiff legs back to the bathroom.

He scrubs and he scrubs and he scrubs. She's not a monster. She's not a monster. It was an accident. Accidents happen.

Even after the bathroom glistens, Bart can still see the blood and the muck, can still smells the sour scent of death.