Title: Blood Wine
Series: Of Blood
Author: Harper Kingsley
Genre: urban fantasy, horror
Novel word count: 117,000
Summary: A doctor receives a visit. A Gift is unleashed.
This is an excerpt from somewhere in the middle of my novel. I had forgotten any of this even took place (I'm terrible!) It's like my brain has a "Hit it and quit it" philosophy toward writing. I get some and get gone.
EXCERPT --
"There's gotta be something," Dr. Timothy Vengelter whispered, knowing there was nothing.
The little girl on the table, her pelvis and legs crushed by falling bricks, didn't have long. Maybe if she had been rushed immediately to a state-of-the-art medical facility she would have a chance, but as it was, there was no hope for her here in the makeshift hospital. She was going to die, and he was going to have to watch it happen.
Tim shook his head slowly and looked at Cathy. "Tell her parents that there's nothing we can do. They can say their last good-byes, but... she's not going to make it much longer."
Tears glimmered in Cathy's eyes, but she nodded before leaving. Her shoulders were rounded humps beneath her shirt and she looked somehow broken, or at least very bruised. There had been so much pain and death today that they were all feeling beaten down by it all. If they hadn't had a job to do... it was hard to imagine how they would have held up under the horror.
Timothy looked down at the little girl lying on the bed. She was just one more in a long line of dead people. He wondered if something was dying inside him with each small broken body he had to face. So many dead children and there was nothing he could do for them.
It's not supposed to be like this, he thought. I run a small family practice so that I don't have to face the dead and dying. How could something like this have happened? How and why?
There were no answers, just more bodies. After awhile he began to see the wounded as nothing more than meat on the table. Blood and screams began to blend into blackened stumps and staring eyes. So much death, and he was useless to stop it.
He saved many lives, but he lost innumerable more. By the time the night was through and he was able to collapse, exhausted, on a mattress in the workers' tent, he didn't even feel human anymore. So many had died that he felt he should have been able to help that he didn't know what dreams he was going to have, except they would be bad.
When he could finally close his eyes, he dreamed not of endless bodies passing through his fingers, but of only one little girl, the one with the crushed pelvis and legs, dead before she was really born.
He was standing in a place of deep darkness, the only things visible the hospital bed and the girl on it.
"Why did you let me die?" she asked in her Shirley Temple voice. "You could have helped me--should have helped me."
"I'm sorry," Tim said, "I'm so sorry. There was nothing I could do for you. You were hurt too bad." Tears filled his voice and trickled down his cheeks.
A tiny frown downturned the girl's sugar bow lips. "You did try your best, but I'm still dead now." As he watched in horror, her flesh began to rot and flake off. Her lips pulled away from blackened teeth. "You didn't save me. Why didn't you save me?"
When she sat, then stood up, her pulverized flesh and bone knitting together, Timothy began to scream and tried to run, but his feet were locked to the ground where he stood. He was trapped.
He heard a whimpering sound somewhere and glanced down frantically. He had to chew the tips of his fingers to keep from screaming and screaming until he burst apart.
His bare feet were tied to the ground with a bloody length of wormlike intestines. His flesh crawled with millions of black flies, biting and chewing at him. His toes were purple with lack of blood. The pain was eating away at his nerves, throbbing and burning, jagged spikes passing through his bloodstream to dig straight into his brain.
"Oh God," he whispered. "Oh God, this isn't happening. This can't be happening."
"Oh, but it is," the girl cooed, shambling toward him. Her bones scraped together as she walked, sounding moist and dry at the same time. It was a rotting dead sound that filled him with dread as she came closer and closer.
Timothy trembled and wondered if she was going to kill him. If she did, he knew it was going to hurt, and hurt a lot.
He flinched when she wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in his stomach. She just hugged him tightly for a moment, and when he thought he might make it out of this alive, she pulled herself a little away and tilted her head back to stare up at him. Her face had reformed--gently rounded cheeks, pug nose, adorable little girl beauty. She looked like she should have been going to her first days of school, dreaming of a perfect fairy tale life that was going to be ground down by experience into an endless monotony until she was too old to care, her dreams crushed by the reality of living. Right now she was at the cusp of everything she might someday be, the possibilities of her future an open door she had but to step through.
Her eyes were huge--so green and innocent that he wanted to cry, because he knew she was never going to grow up, her hopes and wishes would forever go unfulfilled. Then she opened her mouth and grinned.
Her mouth was filled with metallic-looking razor-sharp teeth. There had to be a hundred of them, a thousand. Saliva glimmered gemlike and her tongue flicked out to caress her lips, long and black.
He screamed and tried to pull away, but she tightened her arms painfully around his waist. He gasped and moaned in pain; he could hear and feel the bones popping in his back.
"You didn't save me," she said, her voice a sibilant hiss. She shoved her face into his stomach and he screamed when he felt her teeth gnawing through his flesh, eating him alive.
"No!" he screamed, throwing back his head. His hands pushed against her shoulders, trying to shove her away, but she was too strong. Her arms were iron bands around him, crushing him slowly. The pain was an aching, burning thing, all dull edges and blunt madness. It was the kind of agony that didn't cut off with merciful abruptness, but would go on forever until he died.
"No," a gentle voice agreed and suddenly the girl was gone, as was the pain.
He found himself standing in the middle of a large white room. There were no windows and no doors, and at least no cannibal children hunting for his blood.
"Don't be afraid."
Tim spun around, his eyes wide in his pale face. "Where did you come from?" he demanded.
A young man stood in the shadows against the wall. When he shifted his weight, the shadows moved with him, framing him in a mote of darkness. He waved his hands negligently and the shadows shifted and ran, forming together into one amorphous shape that he absorbed into the palms of his hands. He was revealed in the fullness of the light.
No one--man or woman--should have been that beautiful. There was something almost inhuman about such a complete perfection. Large dark eyes had been enhanced by thick lines of black kohl, the eyelids gently brushed with gold. Full lips had been painted with sparkling gold, which helped to emphasize the dusky, golden-brown color of his skin. His hair had been done up in hundreds of narrow plaits and hung around his shoulders, gleaming blackly under the lights. Around his forehead rested a gold band with a large white diamond set right between his brows. He looked foreign, yet at the same time, like a chameleon, he was an amalgam of all of the peoples that populated whatever area he visited. He could have belonged anywhere he decided to stand, ruled any kingdom unopposed.
The guy smiled and crossed the room in a swirl of white robes. "I came because of you," he said. "My name is Justyn."
Tim just looked at him, wondering who he thought he was and why he had bothered coming.
A faint smile quirked Justyn's lips. "I told you that I came because of you, and it was true. For years I have been pushing my people to the point of exhaustion to complete our preparations for what has happened and what we have to do about it."
He walked closer until there was only about a foot separating them. Tim caught an elusive hint of spice in the air around Justyn. "Now that the moment so many years of preparation has led up to has come, we are looking for those that can help us minimize the damage that has been done. That is why I'm here with you now."
"What does that have to do with me?" Timothy asked. "Why have you brought me here?"
Justyn smiled. "I didn't have to bring you here; you brought yourself. This," he waved his hand around, "is your dream. You created it to help you deal with the horrors you have seen today. The girl--the monster that wanted to consume your flesh--is a manifestation of your guilt; you are punishing yourself for your inability to help everyone. It's actually rather charming, in a self-destructive kind of way."
"But why are you here?" Tim demanded impatiently.
"You are the descendent of a Witch and carry her blood in your veins like a rich fire. Because of that blood, I have come to speak with you." Justyn ran combing fingers through his hair, the braids slipping over his hands with a slithering, shifting sound. "Though you and all of the latent magic users don't have a lot of power to offer, you can be helpful in the coming troubles."
Just staring at the guy, wondering what he was really about, Tim felt something strange ripple through him; something shifted and rearranged itself. His whole body shook and trembled with the force of it. Something inside of him had been changed somehow, opened and shut at the same time. "What was that?"
"I have taken the liberty of activating your latent gifts. They will make you more useful to our cause. You may experience some discomfort in the coming days, but it's well-worth it if you help turn the tide in the war we'll be waging."
Everything started to fade around the edges and Tim knew the dream was about to end. "Wait!" he cried. "What war? With who?"
As the dream began to disappear, Tim heard a soft-voiced reply: "The war that began when the aliens attacked our planet without just cause. We may not have looked for this fight, but we will win it."
Tim's eyes popped open and he sat up with a gasping breath, his heart shuddering in his ears. Sweat streamed down his forehead and his clothes stuck to him uncomfortably. He scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands, trying to figure out what was going on. "Oh Jesus protect me," he whispered, "from dreams like that."
The sheet acting as a privacy shield between him and the rest of the room was violently shoved aside. "Doctor, we need you," Cathy cried, already turning to leave.
He leapt off the mattress and chased after her, shoving his feet into his shoes. "What's happened?" he asked.
"Rescue workers just dug out a pregnant woman buried under a fallen tenement building. She has a broken neck, but the baby is still alive and has to be removed now."
"Shit! How far along is she?"
"Eight and a half months."
He hurriedly scrubbed up and went into the operating tent.
The woman lay with her stomach outthrust toward the sky. Her neck was braced, her eyes closed. The monitors attached to her head said there was no brain activity, but the quickly weakening heartbeat displayed on the fetal monitor told him what needed to be done.
Working with two nurses, he performed a quick and rough caesarian section, slicing through the woman's flesh as though she was an animal for butcher. She was already dead, and only the baby had any kind of a chance. Her surviving family might have objections to how he treated her body, but he was in a state where none of that mattered.
He felt as though he was in some other place, as though he had stepped out of himself and into the mind of a robot. His emotions were shut off and everything was far away. There was no time to feel bad about what had happened to the woman, there was just the even flow of his thoughts, cold and dispassionately directing his body.
The C-section went smoothly, but the falling debris had done damage. The baby came out and cried weakly once before its lungs collapsed. Tim used the most heroic methods available in the makeshift hospital, but it was no use. The baby died.
It would have been better if he had stayed in that emotionless void. Being an unfeeling machine would have been nicer than what he felt when he looked down at that cold dead baby lying in front of him.
An image of the dead girl flashed in his mind. She was looking at him accusingly, demanding to know why he hadn't saved the poor innocent baby. Tim wanted to die.
I'm not strong enough, he thought. I can't do it. Tears burned in his eyes and sobs tried to claw their way out of his throat. It was all too much. The hours of stress were catching up to him with a vengeance and he couldn't stop it anymore, exhaustion had weakened him to his feelings.
He looked at that baby lying on the table, gently turning blue, its body so tiny and helpless, still speckled with amniotic fluid. She should have had years of life. She should have had the chance to grow up.
"I'm sorry," he whispered brokenly. "I'm so sorry."
It felt as though a ball of emotion caught in his chest. It was hard to draw breath and waves of pain and horror and sorrow went through him. His emotions rose up around him like waves from the ocean. He swayed on his feet, blinking, trying to clear suddenly blurry vision.
I wish you could live, he thought at the baby. Then he felt something, a burning in his hands. His palms itched and ached and his fingers felt as though a thousand bugs were crawling under the surface of his skin.
Caught in a wave of sickness, he felt himself stumble forward, his hands extended. His eyes ached and he was blind to see what happened.
His hands lowered by themselves to rest on the delicate chest of the dead baby. Through the pain he could feel tiny little ribs beneath the papery skin. He could feel the coldness of that flesh.
The heat in his hands suddenly flared white-hot, and he heard himself cry out and Cathy yelling something, but everything was far away. His hands burst into flame, or at least that was what they felt like.
A power centered itself in the palms of his hands and pulsed outward. The pain went with it, as well as all of his strength. He collapsed.
As the darkness covered him over, dimly he heard the startled, gasping cry of a newborn.
/ EXCERPT
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