Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2021-10-30 20:25:00 |
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Tuesday night was crisp and cloudless and everything Rosario’s clamouring mind wasn’t. Her eyes fell on the telescope, carefully packed away in its carry case in the corner of her bedroom, and in a moment of decisiveness she pushed her chair away from her desk and stood. Fuck it. Lyra didn’t hold exclusive ownership over the roof, it was a communal area. If she had a problem with Rosario being there, she could shove it. She set her jaw and she slung the case over her shoulder and she strode toward the elevator, feet thumping down the corridor loud enough to reverberate through the thin walls. Maybe (though it was exceedingly unlikely) even loud enough for Lyra to hear it, two floors down. Well, you know what? Rosario hoped she did hear it, and that she felt fucking shit about it. “No wonder you’re this close to flunking!” In fact, no! She hoped Lyra was up there on the roof right now. She wouldn’t even say a thing, she decided as she stepped into the elevator. She wouldn’t even look Lyra’s way. She’d push her shoulders back and she’d march straight on past to her regular spot, and if Lyra wanted to try and apologise? “Some shitty fucking scientist you are.” Well, Lyra could fucking shove that, too. Yeah. That’s exactly what she’d do. The elevator dinged. The doors slid open. Rosario’s feet didn’t move. She stood there, stubbornness written in the line of her jaw, an unnamable fear in the jitter of her heart, till the doors closed again. She went back to her apartment. “Some best friend you are.” On Wednesday night, it was all Rosario could do to keep her head down and her eyes studiously trained on her dinner plate as Chicky rabbited on obliviously about Halloween costumes. Lyra lived for Halloween. The dressing up, the parties, the spooks, the free candy— it was entirely her jam and she refused to waste a second of it. When they were kids, she’d drag Rosario out onto the streets, homing in on pumpkin-bedecked houses in rich neighbourhoods like a candy-seeking missile. She’d plan out ever more ambitious costumes, and plot illicit excursions into graveyards and abandoned buildings, and transform the roof of their apartment into an elaborate haunted house. Lyra was supposed to be hanging with Rosario and Chicky this Halloween; that was what they’d planned. Chicky had been working on the costumes obsessively all month. She’d talked them both into dressing up as rebel princesses from some show she liked: girls with magical swords and mermaid tails and prehensile hair, that kinda thing. “You wanna talk about me having my head in the sand when you’re the one talking about fucking fairies?!” Rosario stared at her plate and she said not a single word. “Jocelyn says Lyra’s in a mood.” Amparo Moreno Martinez was a diminutive woman, five foot one with thinning hair and built of sharp bony angles, but when she stood in a doorway, she could fill up the entire space. Rosario, cross-legged on her bed with her anatomy notes spread out around her, made an indistinct noise. “I say to her, that’s a coincidence, my Charo’s in a mood as well. Now Jocelyn asks me, this mood, is it started since Saturday? And I say—” Rosario’s head was sinking slowly into her shoulders. “’Buela.” Amparo came to perch on the edge of the bed, pushing aside an array of meticulously organised pages. “¡Ay! I thought you girls were past these dramas.” Rosario didn’t answer, and after a moment her grandmother sighed. “Go talk to her, nena. Don’t be so stubborn ‘bout it. No le busques cinco patas al gato.” Rosario hugged her knees. I’m not the one looking for five paws on a cat, though! I’m here just tryna point out cats only got four paws as a biological fact and she’s— Trapped in a fantasy world. Making up stories for attention. Rosario had said that. She’d been wounded, bleeding and lashing out in kind, but— she’d still said it. It had been a low blow, and cruel, and wrong, and the awfulness of it tore at her, twisted her in knots. Lyra hadn’t been gunning for attention, she’d been crying out for help. But help, by Lyra’s definition, meant jumping with her down the rabbit hole, when all Rosario wanted to do was give her a hand up and out of it. How we gonna talk it out, ’Buela? How we gonna talk at all when we’re speaking two totally different languages? On Thursday night, Rosario picked up her phone. She’d cancelled on Archer again that afternoon. He’d wanted to meet up on Monday after classes to run over the lab session he’d missed, but when the time had rolled around she’d lied and told him she had to work last minute. No problem, he’d said, how about Thursday? Today’s excuse had been even flimsier, something about having to take Abuela to the doctor. She knew she couldn’t keep blowing him off forever. She just couldn’t stand to look him in the eye with Lyra’s voice still ringing fresh in her ears. “Your brother can heal people. Rosario. It’s your life and it’s weirder than you wanna believe.” Rosario stared at the screen, chewing on her lip from a long moment. “Dad? Hey— I know it’s super late notice, and if you need it or whatever, that’s— yeah. Um. Can I borrow your car this weekend?” It wasn’t the perfect Saturday for stargazing. The moon was a fat crescent, a couple days past its third quarter and still luminous in the sky. Light, the number one enemy of astronomy nerds. Would’ve been more sensible to wait another week for the new moon; after all, if you’re gonna make a trip into the mountains, you oughta try and wring every bit of value out of that gas money. Usually Rosario would’ve cared about those things. This week, she just needed out: out of the apartment, out of town, out of her whole stupid life, out far enough to leave this choking cloud of guilt and hurt and fear and worry in the dust behind her. She needed to lose it all in the middle of nowhere, so, ideal conditions be damned, that’s exactly what she did. Well. Tried to do. She managed it, in snatches. Rosario never got tired of seeing the Milky Way in its full glory, the light and the shadow of it, the stars clustered together in such multitudes they may as well be endless. You never got that kinda view from Brooklyn, where the constellations of city lights forced back the night and drowned out the sky. In the mountains, the sky reigned over everything. But Brooklyn kept pulling on her thoughts in the quiet moments (and it was all quiet moments, when it was just you alone with the stars), not content to leave her alone. She got Jupiter in her sights, a crisp, clean view, the four Galilean moons stretched out in a line to either side of the great giant. Rosario didn’t have any fancy camera equipment, not the kind you needed to get properly impressive astronomy photos, but she did have her phone, and she managed to snap a pretty decent shot down the viewfinder of the telescope. She grinned, and her thumb moved automatically, and it was only when she found herself staring dumbly at the array of forwarding options on the screen that she realised she’d been about to send it to Lyra. Vega, hanging low on the horizon, glared at her like a single accusing eye. Narrow-minded, it scowled, and I don’t know how to fucking deal with you, and no wonder you’re this close to flunking! By the time 2am rolled near, Rosario’s concentration was shot. Her telescope was trained on a nebula three thousand light years away, but the same endlessly looping thoughts kept dragging her back to Earth. I am listening to you, she imagined herself saying, hands wide and imploring. I promise you I’m listening, but I need you to listen to me as well, cuz sis, I’m worried about you. Just look at it from my perspective— No. So what, I’m narrow-minded cuz I’m not gonna throw away the fundamental laws of physics for fairies? Sure, fuck Newton, I guess! Einstein didn’t know shit, it’s Lyra comin’ in hot with all the answers— Jesus, fuck, no. I love you, I’m sorry, I know you’re scared, I’m scared too, I just wanna help, please let me help— She played it out in her head every night, rehashing the fight, imagining all the things she could’ve said and all the stuff she wasn’t quick enough to think of in the moment, but it didn’t matter. She could get as smart as she wished she’d been or as heartfelt as she wanted to be, but in the end, the only words Lyra wanted to hear were I believe you. And Rosario refused to lie to her best friend. Not ready to sleep and not able to focus, Rosario left her telescope aside and lay back on her picnic rug. There was a kind of instinctual comfort to be found in the familiar shapes of the constellations. As a kid, enthralled by the puzzle of connecting the dots in the sky, Rosario had imagined them as living things, real creatures of sparkling stars hidden in plain sight. On those stifling nights when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak up to the roof, stretch out on her back and greet them all like old friends. In her imagination, the sky had become a vast cosmic playground where star-speckled bears and eagles and dragons set off on fantastical adventures. Lying under the Milky Way now, Rosario felt her chest tighten, gripped by an earnest longing to recapture that feeling. To go back to a time when everything was simple and she only had the one father and her best friend wasn’t having a breakdown and maybe, just maybe, fairies could exist out there in the stars. It was dumb and sentimental, she knew. Childish. She tried it anyway. Pushed the breath out of her lungs and relaxed her gaze till her vision blurred and the stars wavered and slid together, and she tried to call them back to her. The dogs, she remembered the dogs: Canis Major and Minor. She’d imagined them as puppies, cheeky, making trouble and getting underfoot as they chased each other across the sky. Ursa Major, that was the bear, but not a scary one; she was gentle and brave and strong, and she was best friends with the hunter. (Rosario remembered how incensed she’d been at ten years old to find out that Orion was supposed to be a man. She’d always thought of it as a girl, clever and fearless, with glittering silver hair as thick and curly as her own.) The stars were all there, exactly where they ought to be, but the magic was gone. When Rosario tried to call to her mind’s eye that kindly bear, all she could picture was a lumbering beast, agitated, pawing at the earth and growling low in its throat. The dogs weren’t playing at all, they were circling, restless, about the hunter’s feet. The hunter, she was standing straight as always, with her bow drawn back, ready to fire— —and as Rosario’s eyelids drooped, Orion let her silver arrow fly, and the dogs raced, barking, after it, a streak of light from east to west— A streak of light— Rosario blinked rapidly, jerked out of her reverie. The light had vanished as fast as it had appeared, but the after-image was seared onto her retinas, a ghostly blue-green arc plunging toward the treeline. Her mind took a moment to catch up to it. An Orionid. Oh shit, that had been an Orionid just now! Radiant around Betelgeuse, fast, with a long train – Orionid meteors were known for their speed, and… yeah, end of October, they’d still be active. The shower was way past its peak, it was why she hadn’t even thought to look for meteors, but— Damn. There it was, one minuscule piece of Halley’s comet burning up in the atmosphere. And of course, she hadn’t even been paying attention. Ugh. Head in the sand, Lyra would probably say. The benefit of choosing a secluded campsite was that you got less artificial light, a big plus for stargazing. A couple of flashlights or a campfire might not be that bright in the scheme of things, but they could still screw with your night vision. The downside was that secluded meant far from the toilet block, which meant a long walk in the dark if you needed to pee. There was, of course, one practical solution to this, but though Rosario was practically minded, she still wasn’t gonna piss in a bush unless she had absolutely no other option, so once she had her gear packed away and securely stashed for the night, she dug her phone from her pocket, flicked on the flashlight and started off down the dirt path. At least it was an okay night for a walk. Cold, of course, enough to sting at her exposed cheeks and turn her breath to icy puffs, but there was no wind to give it bite. Hardly any sound at all aside from the crunch of her boots on the ground and the odd rustle and creak of the trees. Rosario looked to the sky as she walked, hoping to glimpse another meteor cutting a silver line across the darkness. It wasn’t especially likely, but hey, she’d been lucky once. When the flash of silver did come, it wasn’t from the sky at all. It was a pinpoint glimmer, like a star nestled low amongst the trees. Rosario swung her flashlight around. The path came close to the forest here, branching off up ahead, the left arm continuing on through the clearing to the facilities, the right leading deeper into the trees. That was where the light seemed to be coming from, but what it was, she couldn’t make out. She moved the flashlight in a slow arc, illuminating a tangle of bushes, skeletal branches, bristling green pine needles— There! The pinprick gleamed, pearlescent white, reflecting the flashlight back at her. She started walking again, but her eyes were on the trees now instead of the stars. The light tugged at her vision, flickering like a tiny beacon as it passed in and out of view. No, seriously, what was that? Something metal? Glass? Some kind of electronic? Had to be reflective… seemed reasonably close, too. (An image passed through Rosario’s mind, fleeting, preposterous: a silver arrow streaking across the sky and plunging into the treeline.) It was only when she found herself stopped at the branching paths that she realised she was seriously considering following it. It was stupid and irrational, two things Rosario prided herself on not being. Sure, just go wandering off into the forest at night. Alone, and without telling anybody, and with only a phone flashlight to light the way. No way was that asking for trouble. If Lyra was here, though— If Lyra was here, standing at the fork with her... oh, Rosario could picture perfectly how that would play out. They’d argue about it first. Rosario would point out the dangers of hiking in the dark, and that she didn’t plan on spending her night lost in the forest freezing her ass off, and Lyra would say, we’re not gonna get lost, we’ll stick to the path. Rosario would say that whatever it was would still be there in the morning, and Lyra would counter with yeah, but we’re not gonna be able to see it in the morning, are we? Then Rosario would grumble that it was probably nothing anyway, and Lyra would say but what if it’s not? and don’t you wanna find out for sure? because she knew, of course, that Rosario did. And then Lyra would grab her by the hand and drag her down the forest track— It wasn’t because of Lyra that she moved. Definitely not. Stupid. Stupid, stupid. The admonition kept thudding in her mind in time with her footsteps as Rosario walked. She berated herself, but she kept walking into the trees. The thing bobbed ahead of her like a ghost light. From the edge of the forest, it had seemed close, but following the gently winding path, Rosario soon realised it was further out when she’d thought. Which she should’ve figured to begin with. Distances were harder to gauge in the dark. Stupid. After long, plodding minutes, the path veered sharply right again. The light shimmered pale white through the densely packed trunks ahead. Stupid, she told herself again. Stupid, irrational, go back. (But don’t you wanna find out for sure?) She didn’t know what she was doing. All she knew was that she’d come too far to turn around. Rosario left the path. It was slower going, now. Rosario trained her phone’s light on the ground, picking cautious steps through thick undergrowth that hid uneven ground, pausing to push aside the branches that criss-crossed her path. Things rustled in the bushes. Foxes? Bobcats? Probably better she didn’t think about it too much. She could see it now, though: a little irregular diamond of light, nestled among the branches of a big oak up ahead. Fuck it, nothing else in her life made any sense right now, she was at least gonna get a tidy answer for this— Rosario pushed through a wall of leaves and branches, and the smell slammed into her like a physical force. It was an evil smell, the stench of shit and bad meat and rotting food, so pungent she could taste the foulness on her tongue, feel it tightening her throat and stinging her eyes. She clapped a hand to her nose and mouth, gagging. Oh god. Oh god, there was a dead animal. Of course there was. She was an idiot. This was what happened when you wandered off the trail, this was why the trail existed. There were no fairy glades hidden in the forest, just tripping hazards and poison ivy and animal corpses left to rot. She skimmed the ground with her flashlight, all at once seized by a paranoia of setting her boot down in something slimy and decaying. At the foot of the oak, she found it, her light falling on a pale, swollen belly, greasy entrails spilling out into the dirt. A pig, she thought at first, disconnectedly, reminded of the grisly photos in one of her textbooks, successive shots of a dead piglet illustrating each stage of decay. Here was the same oddly marbled flesh, green and grey and brown like a fading bruise, tight and bloated and blistered. Here— Rosario saw it in the instant before she flinched away, and her own stomach seized up painfully tight, her lizard brain understanding instinctually what her logical brain took a full horrified moment to string together. Here was a shredded mess of grey fabric, stiff with blood. Here was a jacket, khaki, stained, spread beneath the corpse. No. No, not beneath. (Oh god.) Here was an arm. An arm inside a khaki sleeve, palm resting up, fingers pallid and swollen. Fingers. A hand. Rosario tasted bile. No. No, it was a pig, or— it was an animal, some kind of animal, this wasn’t— The flashlight followed the arm to a shoulder, to a pale exposed throat, to a— Rosario staggered backwards, crashed into a wall of pine needles, turned to one side, and was violently sick. A face. It was a face, or rather, it was something that had been a face. There could be no mistaking it for a living person now, not with that mottled dead skin, not with the tongue bulging grey and bloated from the mouth, not with the writhing mass of maggots burrowing into the empty eye sockets— Rosario caught a tree trunk for balance, sucked in a breath, and immediately doubled over again as the heavy stink of death hit the back of her throat. She heaved up bile till tears stung her eyes and spilled down her face. Christ. Oh, Jesus. It was a woman. A dead woman. Christ, fuck. She struggled to unlock her phone, fingers clumsy with panic. 911 was easy to dial, at least. Easy to dial, but no use at all if you didn’t have a signal, shit shit shit— A shadow stirred at the edge of her vision, and Rosario gave an audible squeak, before clamping her jaws shut. Fuck! Don’t lose your head, Charo. Not yet. Think it through. Just think it through. Ranger’s office, in the campground. They’d need to know where the body was, to come find it. No signal, couldn’t drop a pin on the map… shit! Would she remember it, the spot where she’d left the track? Could she mark it with… god, she didn’t have anything with her… rocks, sticks?? And then there came a horrible rattling sound from somewhere near the body. And as she spun back around with her flashlight, Rosario half-imagined a voice whispering to her, a voice that sounded a little like Lyra’s and a little like her Abuela’s, saying, Charo, you in danger, girl. This was the opening scene to the kind of horror movie she liked to watch, the kind with ridiculous plots and terrible acting and jump scares that would still make her shriek and cling to Lyra. This was the opening, and she was the girl who got killed as a prelude, cuz she was out somewhere stupid at night and she was alone and she walked toward the red flags instead of running away, walked into the locked-up gift shop after the goblin man with the grey skin and the strange hands— An animal, Rosario thought. Maybe a scavenger, a raccoon, a coyote. Not a person. Definitely not a person; the sound was like nothing that had ever come from a human, wet and rasping and straining. The flashlight skimmed along the trees, throwing up new shadows and revealing nothing at all, nothing, there was nothing here except— Finally, reluctantly, the light came to land on the face again, the face with the writhing maggot-infested eye sockets and the swollen dead-slug tongue, except now the eyelids were screwed tightly shut as though in pain, larvae spilling free along twin streams of some greyish fluid, and the tongue was— (no) —deflating, shrinking, moving uncertainly as colour returned, the tip flicking across dry dead lips— (no no no no no) —and the dead woman coughed— (not possible not possible it’s not) —a cough that seized the entire body, made it jerk like a marionette. Rosario flinched from it, and the flashlight jumped, fell onto the shredded belly with its pooling entrails. There’d been maggots feasting there, too, and black beetles. Now they were in distress, fighting a losing battle against a river of blood, spilling dark and fresh from the wound, and the mottled stain was fading from the skin, the bloat diminishing, the blisters vanishing, and within the ragged open wound Rosario saw— (stop stop stop it’s not possible) —saw, oh god, saw ropey pink intestines reforming themselves out of a bloodied broken mess— Rosario stood frozen, mouth clamped shut and mind screaming, as the dead woman coughed again. She coughed, and she kept coughing, till her whole body (corpse!!) was racked with it, and at the last she rolled shaky as a newborn foal onto her hands and knees, and she vomited at Rosario’s feet. The contents of the dead woman’s stomach were black and tarry, and the smell— sweet Jesus, the smell. Same as before, and yet infinitely worse, as though concentrated, distilled. It was rotting meat and bad eggs and shit and piss, the foulest public restroom combined with the skeeviest abattoir combined with the most toxic garbage dump. It was the smell of death, of decay. She heaved and she heaved, and Rosario saw masses of wriggling things, insects, squirming in the foul puddle. Rosario needed to scream. She needed to hurl. She needed to turn and run and keep on running, but all she seemed able to do was to stand and to stare and to deny the evidence of her own eyes. This wasn’t happening. Finally, the woman spat, and wiped her face on a filthy sleeve, and looked up at Rosario. Her eyes were a light blue, luminous among the shadows. There were still maggots in her hair. “You got some water?” It could only have been fate or ill fortune that had brought her to that particular bar in that particular town on that particular night. Galway, New York was a blip on the highway, barely even a village, just a single main street in the foothills of the Adirondacks: a church and a hardware store and not much else. Under the heavy shroud of night, she could’ve sped right on through without so much as registering it. Probably had done exactly that a dozen times or more. Probably most people did, which might explain the brand new sign by the side of the road, all lit up in white and green, a little beacon in the dark designed to draw the eye. Shamrocks Bar N Grill – Try Our Famous Hot Wings!! (Galway. Shamrocks. Yeah, now she got the message. Fate was a bitch.) She felt it, second she stepped into the bar, that low warning thrum, like the reverberation of war drums or the hiss of a sword being pulled free of its scabbard. Felt the other goddess as, in the very same moment, a woman by the pool table, bent low to line up a shot, peered up through a tangle of crimson curls, her eyes dagger-sharp. Fuck. The woman drew herself up slowly, deliberately, her lip curling, and she bellowed across the room, “Artemis, you feckin' shitehawk!” The last time Artemis had seen Macha, she had put an arrow clean through the goddess’s skull. The time before that, Macha had blown Artemis’ brains out and had her mortal goons drop the body down an abandoned mine shaft. Way Artemis saw it, that made them even: you killed me, I killed you, let’s both of us agree we’re not gonna fuck with each other’s shit and we’ll be good from here on out. Only thing was, she didn’t know if Macha saw it that way. The other woman unfolded herself slowly. There was a beer bottle balanced on the lip of the pool table; she’d go for that first, Artemis figured. It’s be that or the pool cue. She’d snap it over her knee, in that case, come at Artemis with the two splintered halves. Macha didn’t do staves; she liked to fight up close and personal, and if you were stupid or unlucky enough to let her that near, then you were already in too deep. Fucking battlefield gods had no chill at all; the longer the fight went on, the more it got ‘em going. Only way to beat ‘em was to end things fast. Artemis planted her feet in the doorway. A second to unsheathe the knife strapped to her forearm, she figured. Another to make the throw – straight for the eye, no fucking around, because if she missed she might not get the chance to make a second — and then get the hell out of Dodge. All this flashed through Artemis’ mind in the space of two heartbeats, and then Macha gave a harsh, deep-throated laugh like a crow’s caw and thumped the pool table with the flat of her hand. “Get over here and buy us a drink, ya Greek hoor!” Well, okay, then. She’d take that over throwing knives and screaming locals. It wasn’t such a bad night after that. Artemis ordered a plate of wings along with the beers, and Macha dug into it without waiting for invitation, picking the bones clean like the carrion goddess she was. They ate and they drank and they shot the shit. And when the wings were demolished and the bottles were empty, Macha aimed a sly look Artemis’ way and jerked her head toward the pool table. “How’s about a quick game, then? Loser buys the next round?” One quick game was where it started, but if there was one thing that both Artemis and Macha shared in common, it was a competitive streak, and it didn’t take long for the match to turn from a contest of who could sink the most balls to one of who could land the most convoluted trick shots. One thing led to another, and pretty soon they were three rounds deep, and Artemis’ brows were pressed together in furious concentration as she proceeded to set up a shot that somehow involved several balls balanced on top of beer bottles, all the while Macha draped herself over Artemis’ shoulder and whispered crude insinuations about Artemis’ mother in an escalating ploy to throw her off. When Artemis’ cue finally slipped and sent all three bottles (and their contents) spilling over the table, Macha gave another rasping crow-laugh, her face flush with victory, and at that point there was really nothing Artemis could do but grab her by the collar and shut her stupid jeering mouth up with a kiss. Shortly after that, the proprietor worked up the courage to clear his throat and inform them both (while going to great pains never to look at either) that the bar was closed, and Artemis (making no effort to acknowledge the man’s presence in her turn) turned a laconic grin on Macha. “Give you a ride, stranger?” Macha had her own transport. But she was very interested in a ride in Artemis’ truck. They were both off on their separate ways well before sunrise, Artemis headed for the mountains, Macha for gods-know-where. She didn’t give it another thought till three days later when, while lining up a shot on a fat hare in the forest a ways north of Pharaoh Lake, she heard the crunch of a footstep behind her, and spun around. Turned out Macha hadn’t exactly forgiven her. It was a reckless proposition to come for Artemis in the wilds. Very few people could survive it, let alone succeed. But Macha was a warrior who thrived on recklessness, and the bitch had a semi-automatic. Rosario stood frozen solid, mind rebelling at what she’d just seen. The woman had been dead, she’d been decomposing, there’d been maggots burrowing into her eyes, but none of those things could be true, because she was right there, sitting on her heels, staring up at Rosario with wide, alert, non-bug-infested eyes— but the smell, the blood, the horrifying black mass, god, the smell— “Kid? You hear me?” The woman’s voice was low and rasping, as though she’d just horked up a couple pounds of insects. (There were things writhing in the tarry mess on the ground. Rosario had seen it come out of her, which was impossible, which meant Rosario had seen wrong, which meant what the hell was happening??) “Uhh.” Rosario’s thoughts were racing in circles, panic rising with each loop. The dead woman was talking to her. The dead woman, who was alive, so she couldn’t have been dead to begin with, don’t think of the maggots don’t think of the smell fuck fuck fuck— “Y— uh, yeah,” she managed. “I, I— not here, at my tent, but—” and before she could struggle her way to the end of the sentence, the woman was hauling herself up with a grunt, grabbing onto a sapling for balance, and Rosario’s immediate spike of alarm was enough to cut through the storm of denial. “Whoa-whoa-whoa, are you sure you can walk?!” The woman wobbled a little on her feet and her hand tightened around the sapling’s trunk. She was tall and lean, and her midsection was dark with blood both old and fresh, her jacket stained, her shirt a mess of what looked alarmingly like bullet holes. And for all this, she squinted at Rosario in what seemed like real bemusement. “Yeah, I can walk.” “I mean cuz you were just…” Dead, dead, dead, she thought, but couldn’t bring herself to say out loud. She made a flapping gesture at the blood, instead. “…hurt. I-it, it could be dangerous to move, you could exacerbate your injuries, or—” The woman swatted a fly from her face. A pale maggot dropped from her hair onto her shoulder. “I’m good. Which way? I could eat, too, if you got food.” “Whoa, no, I saw you bleeding!” Rosario protested, because she’d definitely seen that, that part wasn’t crazy. The blood was right there in front of her face, glistening wet under the light from her phone. “This?” The woman looked down at her wounded belly, as though seeing it for the first time. Then, to Rosario’s utter horror, she pulled away her shirt, and— —no no no that wasn’t possible Rosario had seen the wound seen the gushing blood seen the pink, throbbing intestines— —revealed the pale skin beneath, filthy but whole, no wound, not even a scratch, not even a scar. “Look, I’ve had kind of a day. Fell into some shit. I just need a drink and a shower. Can we…?” And Rosario… Rosario had absolutely no idea what to say to that. She nodded, dumbfounded. Turned, moved to pull back the curtain of branches. “Ah, shit. Hold up.” The woman took a couple of shaky steps back toward the oak, to the spot where she’d been (dead) lying and, bracing herself against the trunk, bent down to retrieve something. A stick? Like… a walking stick, maybe? But instead of leaning on it, the woman simply slung it carelessly over her back and gave a short nod. “A’ight. Let’s go.” It was only after they’d both pushed through the tangle of trees and brush, after they’d emerged back onto the walking trail, that Rosario realised that the thing the woman was carrying on her back was a bow. Like… a hunting bow. Orion’s bow, she thought numbly, stupidly. She said nothing. They walked in silence. The woman seemed disinclined to conversation, and Rosario, who had only questions, couldn’t seem to build up the nerve to ask. The only sounds in the forest were their footfalls – the woman’s heavy and shambling, Rosario’s lighter and more diffident – and the ragged puffing of the woman’s breath. Once Rosario tried to offer an arm for support, but the woman only shrugged her off impatiently. “I’m fine.” You don’t look fine, Rosario thought, watching the woman drag her fingers through her thick curls, casually picking out maggots and flicking them aside. Rosario thought it, and she opened her mouth to say it, but the words seemed to stick in her throat, and all that came out was a tiny, indistinct whine. What did it take, she’d wondered up on the roof, as the horrifying, disorganised fantasy had come tumbling from her best friend’s mouth. What level of trauma did it take to send a somebody like Lyra, who was strong and street-smart and always sprung back up, running in the opposite direction of reality? How unbearable must it have been that the only way Lyra was able to deal with it was by rewriting it with fairies and trolls and spells that made the world forget about you? Was that the level she’d just hit? Was this her break from reality? Because it felt like reality, that was the terrifying thing. Rosario had been there, she’d seen it, for god’s sake, she was still smelling it, and if she’d been circling sleep when she’d started down the path from her tent, well, she was wide the hell awake now. Lyra had said the same thing about Archer, at the party. About the frat boy she’d seen fall off the balcony, and what she thought she’d seen after, the bone sticking out of his arm till Archer came and pushed it back into place like it’d never been anywhere else. Sobered her right the hell up, she’d said. Sent her skin crawling, like she knew she was watching something that shouldn’t be possible. It wasn’t possible. That wasn’t close-mindedness, that was a simple acknowledgement of the laws of reality, so if Rosario had seen it, there had to be something wrong with her, there’d never really been a corpse, there was no blood and no maggots and no smell of death. All of those things were in her head, it was the only answer. There was one way to find out for sure. Rosario looked at the woman, somehow keeping perfect pace alongside despite her dragging feet and laboured breath. You were dead, she imagined herself saying. Too much. Too crazy. I thought you were dead, she could say that. There were maggots in your face, something was rotting. And there was blood, it’s still on your shirt, it hasn’t even dried— She could say it, and when the woman answered, she’d know. Whether it was real, and therefore had a rational explanation she’d been too freaked to recognise (she’d seen the guts knitting back together!) or whether she was projecting it all onto some regular stranger who’d got turned around in the forest and she was the one who needed to get to an emergency room. Rosario summoned her frayed courage. “H-hey, uh—” Her voice emerged cracked, her throat gone dry, and she had to swallow a couple of times to clear it. The woman turned to look at her, eyes blue and clear and not a bit dead. Rosario’s nerve fled from her. “I, uh, I realised I didn’t introduce— my— my name’s Rosario.” The woman answered with a mild nod of the head. “Hey.” “Ugh. I smell like shit.” The woman — Rosario still didn’t know her name — had dropped to the grass by the tent. It’d taken Rosario maybe thirty seconds to flick on the camp light and rummage with shaking hands through her bag for a water bottle and granola bar. The woman had chugged down the entire bottle in five seconds flat, and now she was frowning to herself, nose wrinkling. She looked even worse in the stronger light, coated in filth and blood from head to foot. You smell like death, Rosario thought. Putrescine, cadaverine, skatole, indole, hydrogen sulphide, methane… Gases excreted by the gut bacteria when they start to break down the tissue. That’s what makes the body bloat in the putrefaction stage, it’s where the dead-body stink comes from, a living person shouldn’t smell like that— But what she said was, “There’s a shower block nearby. I could lend you some clothes if you wanna, you know…” The woman blinked at Rosario and tore at the granola bar with her teeth. It was weird, crazy weird, how such an innocuous, everyday action could be so unsettling. The woman chewed, and swiped crumbs from her chin, and Rosario tried very hard not to think of a dead grey tongue, bloated with gases, tried to stop herself from noticing the blackish stains around the woman’s mouth and nostrils, as though something vital had leaked from them, something that was very much supposed to stay inside the body. Rosario forced herself to push on. “There’s a ranger’s office, too. I mean, if you need to… call someone, or… maybe you wanna see a doctor...?” Around a mouthful, the woman said, “Nah, it’s all good. I can clean up at my camp.” She swallowed, then glanced down at herself. Pinched her shirt away from her belly and frowned at the bullet holes (they were bullet holes, they were definitely bullet holes) and the blood and the filth. If anything, she looked annoyed, as though the whole situation was just a big pain in the ass. “…I’ll take the clothes, though.” “Uh.” That hadn’t been exactly what Rosario had been thinking when she’d said lend, but… shit. The woman looked messed up, and it clearly wasn’t just her imagining it. Rosario couldn’t stop her from walking back into the forest, but if she let her go like that, the woman was gonna freeze for sure. (A slightly hysterical thought tittered at the edge of Rosario’s mind: Whatsamatter? She’s already been dead once.) She knew what Abuela would do. Abuela would give somebody the clothes off her back to stop ‘em from freezing, it was half the reason they were behind on bills so often. Lyra would do the same. So it was back to the tent, and back to rummaging through her pack. A pair of old track pants, a sweater, a faded Columbia hoodie— fuck, probably need socks and underwear, too. And a pack of antibacterial wipes, definitely those. Kinda like bringing a water pistol to a house fire, but it was all she had. Rosario bundled them all up and carried them out to the woman, who thanked her and stood and without a smidge of bashfulness proceeded to strip down, right out in the open. For several seconds, Rosario found herself staring in fascinated horror as the layers of clothing disappeared, revealing new strata of grime beneath. The blood was tacky in places, crusted-on in others. Blood, and some other maybe-fluids, less identifiable and infinitely more disturbing— but no open wounds. What the hell what the hell what the hell. The woman caught her eye, seemingly unperturbed, and a belated embarrassment stole up on Rosario. She hurriedly turned her back. She turned her back, and her thoughts jumped again to her textbooks, with their clinical summaries of the stages of death. Pallor mortis came first, within minutes. Number two was algor mortis, over about twenty-four hours, concurrent with three and four: rigor (peaks at twelve hours, dissipates after forty-eight) and livor (visible at two, max lividity at eight to twelve). Finally, five: putrefaction – full-blown decomposition – taking place over about ten days. “How, um… how long you been out there?” Rosario tried to pitch the question innocently – it was a fair enough one to ask – but her voice came out high and falsely bright, enough to make her wince at herself. At least it was no excuse me, weren’t you dead? She could hear movement behind her. The rustle of plastic and the swip of a damp wipe being pulled from its packet. “What day’s it today?” Rosario blinked rapidly. “Uh, Saturday? Wait, no, it’s after midnight, so Sunday. The thirty-first?” Her eyes were on the tree line ahead of her. She couldn’t see the woman’s reaction at all, but when the reply came it was a mutter, hard and spiky as gravel and seemingly not directed to her at all. “That bitch.” And that was the only answer she got. “You can turn around now.” There was a curious curl of amusement in the voice. Rosario did turn. The woman had discarded her ruined clothes in a pile on the ground, a scrunched bundle of used wipes forming a smaller pile on top. The smell was still overpowering, but she at least looked a little closer to human now. The sleeves and track pants pinched at her wrists and ankles, a little too short for her long-limbed frame. She eyed Rosario with a thoughtful expression. “Hey. I don’t know you from somewhere, do I?” That was not a question Rosario had been expecting. “I, uh. Think I’d remember if we’d met before,” she managed. The woman canted her head. Shrugged. “Well, thanks, anyway.” She shouldered her bow again and started for the path. Rosario stared after her, comprehension slow in coming, then she made a grab for her flashlight (the proper built-for-purpose one this time, she wasn’t making the mistake of leaving it behind again) and scrambled after the woman. “Whoa, whoa, wait, where you goin’ now?!” The woman didn’t stop, just shot another bemused look over her shoulder. “My camp?” “But—” Rosario was struggling here. It was like— bizarrely, uncomfortably, it was like last weekend, on the roof with Lyra. Or the cafe with Avery. She was talking sense, she knew she was talking sense, and everybody else was acting crazy and talking about aliens and telling her to open her mind to fairies and walking around when they should be dead, and somehow she was the one getting the weird looks. She pushed on. “Look, if you don’t wanna talk to the cops, it’s fine, but you can’t— it’s dark and it’s not safe, you don’t even have a flashlight! At least wait till morning, you shouldn’t go walking into the forest alone at night—” The woman made a huffing noise that might’ve been a laugh. “That right? So what were you doing?” Rosario stumbled, flailed mentally, but persisted. “Well, I, I— I was dumb. It’s dangerous. You could freeze, or get lost, y-you could—” They had reached the forking path, the one branch continuing onward to the facilities and the ranger’s cabin, the other veering into the forest. The woman stopped then, turned, and through the shadows Rosario could see the slightest of grins curving her lips and warming her clear blue eyes. She reached out – the motion brought another sickening waft of that death-smell – and set a hand on Rosario’s shoulder. “You’re a good kid. Thanks for the clothes and stuff.” It was, Rosario realised abstractedly, the second time the woman had called her a kid, even though— with the grime wiped clean (well, cleaner), it kinda seemed to her that they were about the same age. The woman was already turning, already striding away, moving purposefully despite the slump of her shoulders and the weary thud of her feet. “Wait, listen!” Afterwards, Rosario would never be able to figure out how it had happened. The woman was only a couple paces ahead, and she was obviously in a bad way— she was in some kinda way, at least! Not in any condition to move that swiftly or that silently, because nobody could move that silently, not on a forest track thick with leaves and fallen twigs and overhanging branches! But she did, she must’ve, because the fact of it was that one moment Rosario was hurrying into the woods after the woman, and the next – it really did seem that fast – Rosario was alone among the trees. What did she do? Holy shit, what the hell did she do? Go to the ranger, like she’d been gonna? Tell ‘em… what? That there was a woman out there in the forest, maybe injured, maybe in distress? (Except that, underneath the stench and the blood, the woman had seemed to be neither of those things—) That she’d blundered by total coincidence into a stranger lying in a puddle of decay, and no, she didn’t know where this stranger had gone, and yes, that was a pile of blood-stained clothes on the grass by her tent and of course she’d be willing to accompany the cops into custody and fuck fuck fuck FUCK. She’d sound crazy. It was crazy, and maybe she was crazy too, but anyone saw those clothes and she was gonna look criminally crazy and that was multitudes worse than the regular clinical kind. Criminally crazy meant cops swarming round with suspicions and assumptions and questions she didn’t know how to answer, and even if she left out the— the bits that couldn’t’ve happened, she was still gonna look suss as all hell. Rosario was moving even before she was conscious of having made the decision. No. She couldn’t tell. But she couldn’t turn her back, either. She had to see it again, she had to know. You’re a scientist. Go back to the evidence. Turned out she needn’t have worried at all about marking the place. The way was burned into her memory. It was worse than she remembered, though, everything her struggling phone light had left to the imagination emerging in full, horrifying detail before her high-powered flashlight. She crouched over the pool of black sludge the woman had expelled and immediately had to clamp a hand over her nose and mouth, fighting her rising gorge as the sick, dead stink invaded her nostrils again. Oh Jesus, she’d been right; there were insects in there, huge clumps of them, and most of them were still moving, converging greedily on what— what Rosario knew couldn’t be bits of decaying human tissue. A couple feet further in, at the foot of the oak, was the spot where Rosario had first seen the body. (No, not the body, the woman, who had definitely never been dead!) The smell here was unbearable too, the earth stained dark and thick with bugs. Decomposition, logic said. Waste and liquefied tissue leaking from the body into the soil, but there was no body because the person who’d been there wasn’t dead. A puddle of grey entrails said different. Rosario thought of a bloody, torn-open gut and pulsing organs remaking themselves. There was fresh blood here, dark and wet against the carpet of dead leaves; it caught the glow of the flashlight and reflected it back with a dull glisten. There was something else as well, a metallic flash half-buried in the filth. Rosario snapped a stick off a nearby branch and (grimacing) she leaned down to dislodge it. A numbing horror seeped, prickling, through her chest and up into her throat as the thing came free. It was a spent bullet. She was dead. Somebody died here. She was dead, and now she’s not. The thought was too big, too crazy, too impossible to handle. Rosario hugged stomach in the darkness. Evidence, she told herself. Get the evidence. If it wasn’t making sense, it was only because she wasn’t looking at it right. She got out her phone and began snapping pictures, and tried not to think of the story they were telling. It was only some minutes later as she straightened from her crouch beside the (now exhaustively, revoltingly catalogued) black puddle that she saw it again: a silver-white glimmer, like a star nestled low in the oak tree. A little point of reflected light, the one that had snared her eye way back on the path from her tent, the one she’d followed to this spot before shit had gotten— the opposite of real, or perhaps far too real. Rosario had forgotten all about it. Now, she raised her flashlight, and the cold, prickling sensation spread down her arms, sending pins-and-needles sparks into her fingertips. It was lodged in the trunk, in an awkward-to-reach spot. She had to scramble onto a raised root to get to it, gingerly picking a path around the bugs and the blood and the stinking earth, grabbing onto branches for balance, and once she got up there, she found she still wasn’t quite high enough, and she needed to stretch out precariously on tip-toes to get hold of it. On the first try, she missed it entirely. On the second, her fingers closed around it, but the thing was embedded deeper than she’d thought. She lost her grip, and her balance, and her foot slipped backwards and into something that squelched upsettingly. Rosario made a small keening noise in her throat, imagining rotting innards bursting underfoot. (Maggots, calm down, it was probably just maggots. Oh god, she was standing in maggots!) On the third try, she grabbed onto it and didn’t let go. It didn’t budge immediately, but by carefully working it from side to side, she was able to pull it free. The pearlescent white fletching of the arrow gleamed at her like a winking star. What— What the fuck. The bloodied clothes were still waiting for her by her tent. In the end, the only thing Rosario could think to do (after photographing each item in turn, using a stick to move them about and squeaking when a knot of fat black larvae tumbled from a sleeve) was bundle them all into a garbage bag and take them back to where she’d found them. And so she stole back into the forest a third time, feeling like a criminal and waiting for the shout behind her that would seal her guilt. By the time she actually, finally made it all the way down the path to the facilities, the sky had begun to lighten. She showered three times, scrubbed the dirt from her hands and the clammy sweat from her skin and the waft of rot from her hair, but the dead-body smell clung stubbornly to the back of her throat. (She couldn’t have imagined that part. It was too vivid, too visceral. She’d never in her life experienced a smell that like that, and she never wanted to again.) The flies were buzzing around her tent when she returned. She ducked inside only to begin the process of rolling up her sleeping bag and clearing away her stuff. There was no point even pretending she was gonna get any sleep tonight. She had the car packed and ready to go well before first light. She sat in the driver’s seat and she stared at the silver arrow, remembering a streak of light that had arced from Orion’s bow to land among the trees, and she didn’t know what to think at all. She had to drive a couple of miles to get a cell signal, and the moment her phone showed that single, precious bar, she slowed and pulled to the side of the road. With a tremble in her throat, she opened her messages. There was only one person she wanted to talk to, only one to whom she possibly could, and at this moment Rosario wasn’t sure whether that person even wanted to know her.
Can we talk
Please
Some real fuckshit just happened, I swear I’m not playing
Like the thing with Archer maybe, idk or maybe I’m losing it, please you’re the only person I can tell
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