Weekly Drabble #286: Self Inflicted (Patreon)

This week's prompts are 'suicide by self-dismemberment' (I forgot the 'meticulous' part) from McBees and 'the horror is on our side' from Burning Desire. With that, we're back in Chi-Town with Detective Mcleary, his partner Hatsuki and the most notable visitor the city has ever met. Enjoy!

~

Self-Inflicted

“Have I told you today,” Joanne said, twirling her unlit cigarette around her fingers in a manic display of dexterity that would have impressed sleight-of-hand conmen, “how much I fucking hate this city right now?”

Geoff nodded. “Not in the last two hours,” he granted.

“Well, I hate this fucking city right now.”

The detective could only nod in genuine agreement. He’d been called to another crime scene. Joanne, now his official instead of de facto, partner had gone with him. Part of him had been hoping that the third fleshmonger had been found, but he wasn’t so lucky. The military was scouring the city to find it, but for a conglomeration of dozens of bodies, it was hard to find. He just hoped they got to it before it ruptured as Melinoë had predicted. The first two had been bad enough, but if dozens of those things got out...

...well, the National Guard and SWAT were on it. He could only hope they found it before it was too late. This morning, though... this morning had a fresh horror to show him.

Outside the scene, a weeping young woman was laid out a stretcher; she’d been so upset that the paramedics had had to sedate her. Inside this unassuming building in the heart of the meat-packing district were seven corpses, almost eight. Each of them had had their arms and legs cut off, their torsos heaped in an orderly pile.

And they did it to themselves, Geoff thought as he knelt at the edge of the pool of blood. On every man and woman here there was an expression halfway between agony and beatific joy. These people had used the machines here to sever their limbs, one by one. The next person in the chain cut off their last arm and then started to self-mutilate in their turn. The girl wasn’t a sacrifice or a prisoner or a hostage; she’d been one of them. The only reason she was still intact was because the machines got gummed up and wouldn’t work. She was so upset that she had to be dosed because she couldn’t cut off her own arms and legs and bleed out like the rest of the people here.

Shit like that made a man think. Maybe God really has abandoned us. All those street corner preachers were right all along. Or maybe He’s holed up in heaven because something else is here and Chi-Town belongs to them now. Maybe all of Earth.

When he’d told Joanne what he suspected about the killings, she’d just stared at him, before bending over and putting her hands on her knees. “I’m trying really hard not to puke right now,” she’d told him. Fortunately for the forensic techs, Hatsuki didn’t contaminate their scene.

After she got her bearings back, she’d just looked at Geoff. “How the fuck did you see that?” All she saw on the floor was bodies and bits of bodies. It looked like some Hollywood asshole’s concept of a slasher movie. She half-expected some psycho in a mask to burst out of one of the closets with a chainsaw in hand.

“How else would they get their last limbs taken off if someone wasn’t doing it for them? There’s only eight sets of footprints in the blood, so either our killer can hover...” he pointed to a couple of the bodies. “You see? The cuts on the right shoulder are different than the rest. The others get more ragged and messy because the person doing it is going through shock and blood loss. Then someone fresh takes over.”

The woman blinked. “Right. Fuck. I should have seen that.”

Geoff shrugged. That last part... normally, he’d have had to get the coroner’s report to tell the difference, but he’d gotten better at reading these kinds of situations. He didn’t consider that a good thing. In other circumstances, he’d have called this a gang killing. Someone rounding up a bunch of problems and hacking their limbs off to send a message. That wasn’t the story here; these were just normal citizens and no gang other than those MS-13 fuckwads dared poked their heads up. Geoff had talked Melinoë down from her rampage, but that was no guarantee she wouldn’t tie up loose ends – literally, considering what happened to some of those poor fuckers – if they showed up on her radar.

The girl would be a lucky survivor. That would have been the story outside of Chicago’s new reality (or lack of the same). In context, that wasn’t what had happened. Geoff had seen it when he’d spoken to her. Her eyes, glassy from the sedative, had still shone in the wrong way as she’d cried. “Not me,” she’d repeated over and over. “Not me.”

That wasn’t relief in her voice. It was despair. He was going to say more to Joanne, that she was a good cop but she wasn’t sleeping well and this scene was fucked-up enough that even the best in blue might not be able to process all of it right away. He was going to say all that, but he didn’t have the chance. Just as he opened his mouth, he started to die.

He’d said before that just standing next to Melinoë was like being in the death zone of a mountain, where every second that ticked by your body failed a little more. Two days. That was how long you could survive once you hit a certain point on Everest, he’d heard. Two days to get to the summit and out of the dead zone. If you fucked around, you joined the rest of the bodies that littered the trail up there.

It felt like he couldn’t even last two minutes around Chicago’s visitor. It was as if the air in his lungs was just gone. Not a vacuum, but like it had gone inert and it was just gas moving in and out with no oxygen and he was slowly suffocating. His blood felt like it was thinning into nothing, his heart pounding to push that same nothing through empty veins, his organs withering and curdling like meat left out in the sun too long.

All around Melinoë, life just... stopped. There even seemed to be less light when she was here, like it was swallowed by the endless void that was her home – her real home. She was a thing of darkness and death, an eldritch thing that Lovecraft himself couldn’t have imagined. The death of civilizations, an eater of stars and worlds. Utterly, unfathomably alien in mind and body... and she was standing next to him in a sun dress, dressed like she was going to the beach.

Joanne had turned grey. Whether that was from Melinoë’s presence or the death zone around her, Geoff couldn’t say but this time she did start puking, gasping between each burst of vomit like she was desperate for air. One of the forensic techs fled. The other was frozen in terror, trying not to look at her.

Blood squelched under Melinoë’s steps as she circled the science, but when she lifted her feet, there was no disruption in the fluid. “This,” Geoff told her in a tone that few people on this planet would dare use with the star-born horror, “is a crime scene.”

“What crime?” she asked, taking as much notice of the others present as she would have of the fixtures.

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Little minds,” Melinoë sighed. It sounded like pity, frustration and contempt all at once, “break so easily.”

“Everything breaks if you put enough weight on it,” he pointed out, moving to help Hatsuki up. He gave her some tissue to wipe her mouth. “Especially if they’re not expecting that weight.”

Melinoë tipped her head incrementally. The void withdrew. The air felt like air again. “You need to work on that,” McLeary told her. “Like you said, we’re little. And fragile and you-”

“-are too fucking big,” Joanne rasped. She looked up at Melinoë, her dark eyes glinting. “I can feel you. I can hear your voice in the dark. The shadows whisper your name. The... the fucking stars aren’t glinting, they’re trembling!”

Melinoë ignored Hatsuki, continuing her examination of the slaughter. When she looked up, it was only to McLeary. “Pilot fish,” she told him.

He put a hand on Joanne’s shoulder, simultaneously steadying her and keeping her from approaching the thing in the shape of a young woman. “Yeah,” he agreed. “I was afraid of that.” This didn’t feel like one of Melinoë’s cults. Though the methods of worshipping ‘the Lady’ (insert adjective as you like) varied between sects in the city, let alone all of those that had sprung up worldwide, there were still some commonalities. Self-mutilation was usually limited to scarification. Some might cut out their eyes or tongues, but the lunatics that worshipped her weren’t suicidal. They were waiting for herto devour the world and believed through their supplication, whatever manner it took from spreading word of her to vivisecting gang-bangers, they would be embraced when she manifested her true form and swallowed the Earth.

No, anyone who was crazy enough to worship Melinoë wouldn’t do this to themselves. There weren’t even any telltale indicators that he was familiar with. That was another marker: he didn’t know how to explain it, but those touched by Chicago’s most prominent guest also showed similar... manifestations, he supposed the word was. A common language and use of glyphs was one. Their lairs would be dedicated to her, scripture written across the walls in letters that it hurt to read and that seemed to move whenever you weren’t looking at them. There was none of that here. Just mass suicide through self-inflicted dismemberment.

Fuck.

He didn’t know what had drawn her here, just as he didn’t know how she’d heard that term. He’d first thought it on that night on the roof, when the shadows had tried to come for him, but a flick of the shark’s tail had sent them scattering. He used it back at the department, but he’d never said it front of Melinoë. Maybe someone had, or maybe she’d plucked it from his head. Though vulgar, garish and chattering, human minds were pop-up books to her.

And they tear just as easily, don’t they?

“Another pilot fish, eh?” he commented. “More of them are coming through. Maybe the shark they’re following...” he took a breath. It might be his last. That it was full of rank, old meat, fresh blood and wrong seemed like he’d been cheated. “Maybe she could go somewhere else.”

Melinoë looked at him. Geoff didn’t know much about the nature of the universe and reality, but if such a thing as a multiverse did exist, then a thousand new timelines had just been created from all the ways she’d killed him. Fortunately, in this timeline, she didn’t. “No,” was all she said.

“Please,” Joanne begged. “Please. You’re so loud. You’re so big. You don’t even want to hurt us, and you are. Please. Please just go.”

Geoff had never seen Hatsuki like this. Whatever was happening with her, it was worse than she’d been letting on. “She’s right,” he told Melinoë. “You should go. You’ve said how much you hate this place and how... filthy it is with our emotions. You need to leave and take all your pilot fish with you.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” Melinoë replied. “They are already here and others follow them.  Leaving...” The void around her withdrew even further and she looked down at her hands, her human hands. “I can’t.”

Those two words carried more sorrow, self-loathing and pain than Geoff could imagine, so much that he had to think a human would have shattered like crystal if they’d felt even a fraction of it. “Why not?”

“Sickness.” Melinoë looked up to the ceiling, staring through it and the bright light of day to the darkness beyond. “The stars aren’t right. Not yet.”

That could have been a silly, cliche saying from any dime-store Lovecraft knockoff but from her, it made Geoff’s blood freeze. “Right for what?”

The thing in the shape of a woman was done humouring the ant. The void started to leak back out as her humanity slipped away once again. She pointed to the spread of limbs, torsos and blood on the floor. “It should be careful,” she told McLeary. “This fish is only an animal, but it is always hungry. It breaks little minds to prepare their own meat for it. It will come for the meal they made and,” she tilted her head in the direction of the doors and the emergency crews outside, “the leftovers.”

“Thanks,” Geoff said, half-sincere and half-sarcastic. Without Melinoë, they wouldn’t have these problems to begin with... but she didn’t have to help, no more than someone had to put sugar water out for an exhausted bee on their balcony.

Her face twisted in a way human features shouldn’t, and she left without another word. The air became breathable again. The forensic tech had to sit down, bracing himself against a wall and covering his face, trying to slow his breathing. Joanne was trembling like she’d been caught in a snowstorm in nothing but a tank top. “It’s okay,” Geoff said to her and the tech. “It’s okay. She’s gone now.” Human emotions were a disease to Melinoë, and they’d infected her. Not enough to be truly empathetic towards the ants around her, but enough to know that something was wrong with her. Enough to hate that she had them at all. Without her ‘Beloved Concubine’, Melinoë had no anchor to this world and the longer she stayed here and used that form, the more she was contaminated with humanity.

It was going to reach a tipping point. Geoff could only hope that whatever connection he shared with the eldricth nightmare as her favourite ant might do some good when that time came, but he had no idea how to accomplish that. She’d saved his life and repaired his body, but he was still tiny and insignificant. Just as a human could crush an ant with their thumb, it would be no more difficult for Melinoë to do the same to him.

As Joanne recovered her breath, McLeary tried to do something. “Hey,” he said. “We have a lead. That’s something. And at least she’s on our side.”

His partner looked at him with haunted, terrified eyes. “Is she?”

“No,” Geoff had to admit, glancing at the doorway Melinoë had exited through. “Not really.”