Blood Price - part 1 (free version) (Patreon)

Read part 2 here.

I sit up against the headboard and I know before I look down. The weight tells me. It moves when I move and then it keeps moving after I've stopped.

The bulb in the lamp on the nightstand is half dead and throws a stutter of light across the thin polyester sheet pooled at my waist. Six weeks I've been doing this. Waking up, taking the count, finding the line had moved another half inch in the night, telling myself the number that was left. There's no number left. Under the sheet there's weight on both sides of my sternum, tenting the fabric, and it isn't the shape of something still happening.

I don't move. I breathe and watch it rise and fall.

Last night comes back in pieces. The dock, Groz's men, the pipe across my ribs, again, and again, and the wet snap of something deep letting go. Crawling out under the trailers on my elbows. Four miles in the truck with one eye swelling shut and my palm flat against my side holding it together, and the mesh going the whole way, that crawling heat under the skin that I stopped being able to tell apart from pain sometime around June. I parked in front of the door because the door was the only thing I could still see. Got it open. Past that it's nothing.

They put us both down in the same parking lot in April, Dawn and me, inside the same ten minutes. Eleven years married in March and they did it in front of a nail salon at nine at night. The ambulance that took me went to a facility with a research contract and the one that took her went to the county hospital, and that is the whole difference between us. They opened me up and laid the mesh in and told me it would keep me alive. Nobody used the word how. She's been on the fourth floor ever since.

I lift my hands out of the sheet and stare at them.

They're small. My hands have been tools since I was nineteen, palms carpeted thick enough to drag across a file and not flinch. The callus has been going for weeks, thinning under the shower, coming off in the sink. What's on the ends of my wrists now has narrow fingers and unbroken skin and neat pale half-moons at the nail beds, and I've never seen it before.

I grab the sheet with both fists and pull it down.

My heart starts going hard. I can feel it in my throat now, higher than it should be, and the pulse in my wrists is thin and fast.

I press my palms flat against my chest, and the breath punches out of me.

Soft, and then deeper than soft, and it pushes back. When I press harder there's a bruised ache that goes all the way to my ribs, the ache of something that got built in a hurry.

I squeeze. The flesh dimples around my fingers and springs back. My fingers. Slender fingers with smooth, hairless forearms below them, and I follow those forearms up to narrow wrists, up to shoulders that feel (I roll one, testing) rounded, slim, the deltoids gone, the heavy trapezius shelf I carried for fifteen years just gone, swallowed. I try to flex and something happens, but it's a ghost of a flex, the muscle firing weak under a layer of softness that blurs every definition I ever earned.

"No," I say out loud, and the voice that comes out stops me colder than anything else so far.

It's high, soft, breathy, a register I've never heard come out of my own mouth. The word hangs in the stale air of Room 114, bleach and old tobacco baked into the carpet, and it sounded like a woman said it.

The lights stutter and in the gaps I get all of it at once. My throat is long and smooth and there's nothing in it. Below that the collarbones, fine, holding up something I've got no claim on.

Tits. That's the word that comes, and it comes in my own voice, the old one, flat, the word I'd have used about another man's wife. Full and heavy and moving with my breathing. I can't make them stop and I can't make them somebody else's.

Last night's blood is still on me, dried brown in a smear from the ribs down, cracked and flaking where I've moved. Under it there isn't a mark anywhere. The shotgun scar is gone. The hair is gone. Whatever it was that made my body look like it had been places, all of it, gone.

The mesh is under all of it. It just sits where they laid it. I put two fingers on my ribs and trace a line of it. Warm. Warmer than the skin on either side.

It kept my heart going while I bled onto the dock. Sealed whatever the pipe tore. And it paid for that off the same account it's been drawing down since April, the mass, the strength, whatever it is that was holding the shape together, and last night it took the rest in one withdrawal.

I look down the length of myself and my stomach is a flat, soft slope narrowing to a waist I could probably circle with my own, with these new hands. Below the waist, my hips flare out wide against the mattress, wider than my shoulders, the proportions all wrong, all inverted, the geometry of a body I've spent my life learning to fight from, gone. My thighs press together, full and smooth, and they're warm where they touch, warmer than the rest of me, the last of the heat running itself out somewhere down there.

My hand moves before I decide to move it.

I'm not aroused. My hand goes down over the soft slope of my stomach, past a waist that flexes under my palm in a way no part of me has ever flexed, and lower, over skin where there used to be coarse dark hair and hasn't been any since August, and my fingers find nothing.

Nothing there. No weight, no heft, nothing between my thighs but the press of them together.

It's been smaller for a while. But there's a difference between less and none, and my fingers go lower and find a shape I've known my whole adult life from the other side of it, warm, present, mine. One second, two, because I have to be sure. It answers through nerves that run nearer the surface than anything I used to have, and I take my hand back.

The sheet is bunched at my knees. I'm shaking. The whole bed trembles faintly with it.

I sit against the stained headboard in the dead light of Room 114, a woman from the collarbones down and the throat up and everywhere, breathing in a voice that isn't mine, in a body carved out of my flesh, and somewhere across the city Dawn lies in a bed too, breathing through a machine, and the men who put her there are still breathing free.

The heat goes out of my ribs, slow.

I pull the sheet back up over myself, and even that's a lesson in what I've lost.

The act of tucking fabric used to be nothing. Now the sheet drags across skin that feels everything, the polyester catching faintly on nipples that are absurdly, uselessly sensitive, the fabric settling over thighs that shift and press against each other in ways my old legs never did. I sit there with the sheet at my waist and my small hands fisted in it, and I let the grief come, because I can't fight it and take stock of my body at the same time.

Fifteen years. Fifteen years of building that frame: the deadlifts in the garage while Dawn drank her coffee on the steps and told me I was going to throw my back out before forty. The calluses from the wrench work, from the rebar, from the range. The animal confidence of walking into any room knowing that most men in it couldn't move me if they tried. All of it metabolized overnight, stripped for parts by a machine in my own flesh, and what's left is this soft, wide-hipped, narrow-shouldered chassis that the world reads as prey before it reads anything else.

I think about Groz's men putting Dawn down. I think about the sound her head made. And I think, with a clarity that surprises me: I'd do it again.

The grief keeps slamming into it and can't break. If the mesh had put it to me in words that first night, all of it, everything I've watched go since April, for one more hour of breathing, I'd have signed. I'd have signed for less. The men who put Dawn in that bed are still out there breathing free and dead men don't finish lists.

But God, what it took. Everything I knew about defending myself without a weapon, gone with the body that knew it.

I swing my legs off the mattress, and the first thing that happens is my hips move differently. My thighs lead. There's a width to the swing, a soft collision of flesh, and my feet, small feet, I realize, staring down at them, land on the stained carpet with almost no weight behind them. I push up off the bed.

The room dips. My center of gravity has moved, lower and further back, settled into the flare of my pelvis. My old body carried its weight high and forward, in the chest and shoulders, ready to fall into a man like a dropped engine block. This body carries itself low and balanced, and my first instinct, plant, brace, square up, finds nothing to plant with. I reach for muscles that won't answer me. The stance collapses inward, knees knocking, shoulders pulling closed instead of wide.

I try a single push-up on the carpet, palms down, and my arms shake before I've lowered myself three inches. The tremor runs up these slim forearms and into those narrow shoulders and I fold, chest-first, the soft weight of my breasts pressing into the coarse carpet with a sensation that makes me gasp and roll sideways. I lie there on the floor, breathing hard in a voice that isn't mine, staring at the ceiling water stains.

Brute force is gone. Cold and final. Any of Groz's enforcers, any one of them, could pin these arms behind this back one-handed. The fighting I know, the fighting that's muscle memory layered fifteen deep, was built for a body that no longer exists. Every technique I own assumed mass and a jaw that could take a punch. I touch my face. Smooth, and the brow over it is fine and light, and the whole thing is a target.

So don't fight their fight. Fight yours.

Dawn used to say that to me, laughing, when I tried to beat her at chess by attacking straight up the middle. Don't fight their fight, Liam. The memory lands in my chest like a bruise and I let it sit there, because it's the only thing in this room that feels like it belongs to me.

I get up off the floor, and everything about getting up is different, I have to roll to my hip and push, and the hip flares wide beneath my hand, and I steady myself against the desk chair. Walking is a negotiation. First step, my weight overcorrects forward and my arms windmill; second step, I find the new balance, the slight sway, the hips doing the work my core used to. By the time I've crossed the length of the room I've got a gait, but it's a stranger's gait, light and rolling, and I hate the sound my own feet make on the carpet. Quiet. I sound quiet now, and quiet could be useful.

I stop at the desk. My bloodied shirt from the dock is draped over the chair back, huge now, a tent. My boots sit under it, and my feet would swim in them. My whole kit, sized for a man who doesn't exist anymore, and the rest of it out in the truck is sized for him too. I'll deal with that later. There's one thing that doesn't care what size my hands are.

The nightstand. I pull open the drawer and there it is: my semi-automatic, matte black, full magazine, one in the chamber. I pick it up, and my heart drops a little even as my grip closes on it, and the grip feels enormous now. My old hand swallowed it; this hand has to stretch, and the trigger sits further into the first joint of my finger than I'm used to. I adjust, find the pad of the finger, cycle my grip three, four times. The weight of it pulls at my wrist now.

But the trigger doesn't care what pulled it. A nine-millimeter round exits the barrel at three hundred sixty meters per second whether it's launched by a two-hundred-twenty-pound man or a hundred-and-something-pound woman. Physics doesn't mourn. It's the only thing that hasn't changed on me tonight.

I check the chamber, thumb the safety off and back on, and hold the gun low against my thigh, and for the first time since I woke, I feel something adjacent to steadiness. This is my equalizer. The great flattener. Groz's men will look at this body and see an easy mark, and that will be the last mistake they make.

Last night is still all over me. Two hours of sitting in it, dried to a crust and pulling at the skin every time I shift, and it smells like a penny held too long in the mouth. I go into the bathroom and put the shower on hot and stand there with my hand in the water waiting for it to turn. The pipes knock. It comes out of the wall cold enough to hurt and stays cold, the way it does in places like this, and I stand there holding the gun in my other hand like an idiot, waiting on a motel to produce hot water at three in the morning.

I take stock while the water comes up. Twenty-six hundred in cash in the truck. A gun with a full magazine and no spare. No phone that isn't in a river. A list of five names, two of which I only half have. And a body I've got maybe forty percent of the use of, which is being generous about the forty.

The water goes from cold to lukewarm and I put my hand back under it and wait for hot.

Footsteps.

Outside. The exterior corridor, the one that runs past the door with its peeling paint and its dead ice machine. Heavy footsteps, deliberate, unhurried, the tread of a big man who isn't hiding, or of a man who thinks he doesn't need to. The Starlight at three in the morning is silence and dripping compressors and nothing else, and these footsteps come out of all that quiet at full volume.

I go still, and the gun is already up, my back flattening against the wall beside the desk, out of the line of the door. My breathing goes shallow and high. Cold goes through my stomach and my arms won't hold still and I have to breathe it down. Steam begins rising from the shower, thin, climbing the mirror in a film.

The footsteps stop.

Right outside Room 114.

There's a dresser under the window, four drawers, veneer over particleboard, the kind two men carry up a staircase with one hand each.

I get both hands on the end of it and pull. In January I took a transmission out of a truck bed by myself on a wager and walked it eight feet to the tailgate.

The dresser comes maybe two inches and then the carpet catches under it. I set my feet wider, and that's already wrong, because wider on these hips puts my knees somewhere they have never been in my life, inward, and the pull comes up out of my pelvis instead of my back with nothing at the top of it to receive the load. I go down over the drawer front and haul.

They swing. Forward and down and then back against my forearms, heavy, still sore from whatever the mesh did to make them, and the second haul takes the breath out of me for reasons that have nothing to do with the dresser. I get a hand under them without deciding to and then put it back on the drawer, because there's nowhere else for it to go and because I don't have time to have feelings about my own arms.

It doesn't move. Something in my shoulder gives out before the dresser does.

I stand there in the dark with my hands shaking. I can't block the door, I can't hold the door, and if he comes through it I can't fight him for one second.

Under the door, in the thin bar of sodium light from the corridor, I see the shadow of two boots. A pause, long, wrong, the pause of a man checking a room number against something.

The keycard reader chirps green.

The lock disengages with a soft electric thunk, and the door handle begins to turn.