Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,10

entered the bedroom, and stopped.

Ray lay on the bed. I’d seen dead people before, and I knew Ray was dead the moment I saw him. He was waxy and puffy, his body already past rigor and slack now, bloating in the October heat. In death, people rarely look the way we knew them in life; in Ray’s case, this was even truer than usual.

“Shit,” I whispered. I dropped down onto the sill of the French window that led out to the balcony. I balled up my hands and covered my eyes.

“Mr. Martel,” LeBlanc said, his voice distant, as though he’d already moved back to the door.

“Can you give me a fucking minute, please?”

LeBlanc didn’t answer.

I tried taking deep breaths, but that didn’t help; I could taste the corruption, the shit, the putrefaction, and I wanted to be sick. I dropped my head between my knees. Episodes like these were cluster bombs: an explosion of sensory input that I couldn’t control. The smell of fried catfish. The run of greasy skin against my face. Someone shouting. A hand around my neck, choking me. The unrelenting invasion of my body. Flashbacks, episodes, whatever you wanted to call them—when they happened, it was all happening now. It wasn’t the past. It was this moment, right now, and it was going to last forever.

A hand around my neck, choking me.

“Mr. Martel?”

A hand on my arm, grabbing me, twisting my wrist, pulling, pinning.

“Get the fuck off me,” I shouted, stumbling up from the window seat, trying to pull free from LeBlanc. Only it wasn’t LeBlanc who gripped my wrist.

It was Ray. He had dragged himself across the bed and now lay at an angle, his legs still tangled in the bedding. His eyes were open; blue fire danced in the milky depths. Where he clutched my arm, his bloated fingers had split, oozing black liquid down my arm.

Ray yanked, dragging me towards him; his mouth opened. No, not opened. His jaw dropped, unhinged, like he was going to try to swallow me whole. I stumbled back, screaming, trying to rip free. Ray held on. His grip was iron. My tennis shoes slid along the polished floor, and I couldn’t get my footing. He dragged me toward him again, his puffy flesh slipping through the twisted sheets. I was still screaming. The blue in his eyes was brighter: huge, dancing walls of fire that fell in sheets across my vision.

Then two strong hands had my shoulders, and my feet left the ground as I was hauled backwards. My weight must have overbalanced LeBlanc, because both of us tumbled to the ground. I twisted and scratched and clawed, not even sure what I was doing, just trying to get free. LeBlanc had rolled away, got onto his knees, and had out his service weapon.

Ray lay in bed, just the way I’d found him. No blue fire. No twisted, crawling abomination. His eyes were half open and filmed with death. I crabbed back a few more feet until I hit the wall, and then I scrubbed at my arm. No black juice from putrefaction. I could hear my breathing, shrill and hysterical, but I couldn’t seem to get it under control. LeBlanc held the gun fixed on Ray, but his hands were shaking.

And then, something blue drifted out of Ray’s mouth. A firefly, my mind supplied, although I’d never seen a blue firefly before. It circled lazily once, and then it slid through the French window and drifted away, vanishing against the intense blue of the sky.

DAG (6)

I’d heard about hallucinations people experienced after combat. Psychotic symptoms manifested occasionally in people suffering from PTSD.

I had seen a dead man grappling with Martel, trying to drag the kid forward, trying to . . . to bite him.

No, I had seen a dead man lying in bed. Dead. Motionless, the way dead people are supposed to be.

I had seen something blue.

No, I had seen a sunspot.

The panicked breathing behind me dragged me back, inch by inch, from my own terror. Holstering my Sig, I turned and saw Martel against the wall, knees drawn to his chest, running a hand over his arm.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

He kept turning his arm over, studying it, his breathing shallow and rapid.

“Mr. Martel, are you ok?”

He raked his nails down his arms, leaving faint white tracks. Then he did it again, harder.

Squatting next to him, I said, “Hey, you’re ok.”

He was really digging in now, his nails furrowing the skin; in a few places,