My Life is Horrific Chapter 22 — Wednesday (Patreon)

Ughh.

That was the extent of my contribution to the English language as consciousness dragged me kicking and screaming back into the land of the living.

As I arrived the pain was the first thing I noticed, a full-body symphony of fuck yous that started at the top of my skull and played all the way down to my toes. But even as I lay there cataloguing exactly how many places I hurt, I could feel it fading, the healing doing its thing, stitching and mending and generally performing the biological equivalent of slapping duct tape on a collapsing building.

I tried to open my eyes.

Nothing.

I tried to move my hands and they hit resistance immediately and when I opened my mouth to shout I got a mouthful of something instead.

Dirt.

The realization arrived about half a second before the panic did. It was the full caveman response, every cell in my body going apeshit at the same time. Being buried alive occupies a very special place in the human fear hierarchy somewhere between on fire and trapped in space. 

I clawed upward with both hands, tearing through loose earth in desperate scooping motions while my lungs burned and my legs kicked against the bottom of whatever hole I was in, it seems like the only reason I didn't suffocate was because the soil was freshly turned and loose enough to shift, which meant whoever had put me here had done a shit job of packing it down.

My right hand broke the surface first and I shoved both arms up through the last few inches of dirt and into daylight and—

CLANG.

A shovel hit me directly on top of the head. 

"OW! WHAT THE FUCK!"

I grabbed the first thing my blind, dirt-caked fingers found, which turned out to be an ankle, and I yanked on it with every ounce of strength my recovering body could produce. Any normal person would have gone down like a sack of bricks. 

This person did not. 

Instead I felt the leg go with my pull, bending rather than breaking, and then the entire body above me redirected the momentum into a clean back handspring that used my yank as a launching pad, landing several feet away. 

I hauled myself the rest of the way out of my own grave, spitting dirt and coughing and scrubbing at my eyes with both forearms until enough of the grit cleared for me to see who the hell had just played whack-a-mole with my skull.

Wednesday Addams stood about four feet from the edge of the shallow rectangular hole in the forest floor, holding the shovel across her body in a relaxed two-handed grip the way a normal teenager might hold a lacrosse stick. 

Her dark braids hung perfectly straight.

Her black dress was immaculate

. Her face displayed exactly as much emotion as a department store mannequin. 

Of course it was her. The one person at Derry High School who I had been deliberately. Everything I knew about the Addams family told me that getting involved with any of them was a one-way ticket to a type of adventure place that made Pennywise look like a party clown.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I sputtered while clawing another handful of dirt out of my ear. "Why were you burying me alive!!?"

Wednesday regarded me with the same blank expression as she had for everyone. "When I discovered your body in the clearing, I performed a thorough examination after which I concluded that you were deceased and proceeded with what I felt was an appropriate response. A shallow, unmarked grave in an isolated location."

"Fitting? You thought the fitting thing to do was bury me in the woods like a dead cat?"

"I considered a deeper grave, but the soil here is quite rocky below eighteen inches and I didn't bring my pickaxe."

"Well I am alive," I said, putting my fists down and spreading my arms wide to demonstrate the very obvious fact that I was standing upright. 

Wednesday's eyes narrowed by a fraction of a degree. "That is the part I find troubling, your wounds were most definitely lethal I would know. Which raises the question of whether what I am looking at right now is actually alive in any meaningful biological sense, or simply animated."

"I'm alive, Wednesday now leave me alone so I can go shower."

"That remains to be determined."

She swung the shovel at my head again.

I ducked sideways and the blade sliced through the air where my skull had just been, close enough that I felt the wind of it ruffle my hair, and I backpedaled fast with my hands up. "Hey! HEY! What did I just say?!"

Wednesday advanced without changing speed or expression, reversing the shovel into a horizontal sweep aimed at my midsection that I barely got out of the way of, the handle whistling past my stomach as I sucked in my gut and stumbled backward over a root. 

She followed the swing through and planted her lead foot and then her back foot left the ground entirely as she launched into a spinning kick that connected squarely with the center of my chest and sent me backward into a pine trunk hard enough to knock a shower of needles down on both of us.

"What the FUCK are you doing?!" I wheezed from my new position slumped against the tree.

"Mitigating risk," she replied, already closing the distance with the shovel raised. "An untethered zombie in a populated area is an unacceptable public safety hazard. Experience has taught me that the most effective response to an ambulatory corpse is immediate neutralization followed by dismemberment and incineration. I will handle all three stages. If it helps, I've been told that decapitation is relatively painless when performed with sufficient speed."

"I'm NOT a ZOMBIE! I have a healing ability, my body heals from injuries, that's why I'm alive, I heal, like Wolverine, like the X-Men, have you read the X-Men, do you know what X-Men are—"

"I am familiar with the X-Men. I found their comics mediocre at best."

"The POINT is I'm not undead, I just heal, and if you would stop trying to cut my head off for five goddamn seconds I could prove it to you—"

She was not listening.

So I fought back.

It was, to put it mildly, not easy. Wednesday moved like she had been training since she could walk, which she probably had given that her family considered knife-throwing a parlor game and her parents had probabky already killed dozens of people. 

She was also fast, absurdly fast for her size, and she used the forest like a playground, bouncing off tree trunks to change angles, ducking under branches that caught me across the forehead, cartwheeling sideways when I lunged for her, always staying just outside my reach.

Despite the fact I knew I could beat her at CQC, Wednesday seemed to be phenomenal at making sure I never got close enough. Every time I tried to close in she would redirect, spinning the shovel into a jab or a sweep that forced me to reset, and the few punches I threw that actually reached her she slipped. 

She caught me across the ribs with the head of the shovel. She then swept my legs and I went down to one knee. 

I got back up and she drove the butt of the handle toward my solar plexus, and I only avoided it by twisting sideways and eating a branch to the face instead.

But I was bigger, I was stronger, I healed from everything she hit me with, and I was getting better at reading her patterns. She committed to a big overhead chop, raising the shovel high for maximum force, and I stepped inside the arc before it could descend, got both hands around her wrists, and locked them together in a grip that she could not break no matter how much she squirmed.

The electric jolt slammed through us both the instant skin met skin.

[Psychometry]

The psychometry ripped open like a floodgate and suddenly I was drowning in Wednesday Addams, a torrent of images and sensations that poured through the contact point in both directions. 

I saw the Addams mansion sitting on the edge of town. 

I saw Gomez doing sword practice in the grand hall with a manic grin. 

I saw Morticia pruning dead roses in the garden. 

I saw Pugsley cheerfully wiring himself to a car battery in the basement.

But what I hadn't known, what the films hadn't told me, was that the Addams family lived here In Derry. Their mansion was in this town, sitting somewhere on the outskirts like it had always been there, which meant the entire insane clan was within driving distance of my house.

I probably should've assumed that since she went to my damn school. 

I don't know how but I could tell Wednesday was getting my memories too. I could feel her in there, moving through my life cataloguing the powers and the monsters and Pennywise and all of it. 

The connection broke.

Wednesday stopped struggling and stood motionless in my grip, her eyes locked on mine, and for the first time since I had met her something shifted behind that impenetrable mask. 

She stabbed the shovel into the dirt beside her letting it stand upright on its own.

"Your cellular regeneration is interesting," she said flatly. "Your body rebuilt itself from injuries that would have been immediately fatal multiple times.

"I've been saying that for the last five minutes, but sure, nice of you to catch up." I released her wrists and stepped back, rubbing the spot on my ribs where the shovel had connected. "So, are you going to apologise?"

Wednesday looked at me.

"For what?"

I let out a sigh. "Forget it. Why are you even out here? It's a school day shouldn't you be in class or some shit?"

"The curriculum ceased to hold my attention shortly after second period," she replied, straightening her cuffs. "I elected to dedicate the remainder of my day to a more productive endeavor, specifically the continued tracking and analysis of the creature that has established a territory in this section of forest. I have been cataloguing its kill patterns, mapping its movements, and preparing for a hunt."

"Right," I said.

"Your body was, incidentally, the freshest of its kills that I have discovered. The previous ones were considerably less intact."

"That's comforting. Anyway, good luck with the whole monster hunting thing, I'm sure you and Scooby will crack the case wide open." I turned away from her and started walking in what I hoped was the direction of the school parking lot, muttering as I went. "I'm going to go home and take a shower and maybe drink an entire bottle of whiskey and pretend this entire day didn't happen. First I get counseled by a woman whose daughter is smarter than me, then I get attacked by a forest monster, then I get buried alive by a goth girl with a shovel, and it's not even three o'clock yet, this is genuinely the worst—"

Wednesday's hand closed around mine from behind.

I stopped and turned back to her with whatever patience I had left. "What do you want now?"

But she was not looking at me, her eyes were fixed on something past my shoulder, deeper in the forest. 

I followed her gaze.

The creature that attacked me was perched on a thick oak branch about sixty yards away, folded into that gargoyle crouch with its long limbs tucked beneath its body and its pale eyes fixed on us. 

"Ahh, fuckberries," I said.

Then we both legged it.

The forest blurred around us as we sprinted out through the undergrowth, ducking branches and hurdling roots and crashing through ferns while behind us a heavy thud of the creature dropping from its perch shook the ground. 

"What the hell is that thing?!" I shouted as we ran.

"A Hyde," Wednesday answered. "A parasitic transformation organism, human in its base state, capable of shifting into an apex predatory form when activated by its master. Enhanced strength by a factor of approximately eight to ten. Enhanced speed. Enhanced durability. Natural weaponry in the form of retractable claws capable of shearing through steel-reinforced bone. It does not tire and it does not lose interest once it has locked onto prey."

"Great! Anything else?!"

"Once it catches us it will likely disembowel us both, starting with the abdominal cavity and working outward. It has a preference for consuming the liver first, followed by the kidneys, and it typically leaves the skull intact, though whether this is intentional or simply a matter of anatomical convenience is still debated in the academic circles. There is also a documented tendency to arrange the remaining viscera in geometric patterns around the body, which some researchers interpret as territorial marking and others view as a primitive form of artistic self-expression."

"WHY WOULD YOU TELL ME THAT?!"

"You asked."

"OH SHIT, OH SHIT, OH SHIT—"

I pumped my legs harder, my sneakers tearing up pine needles, but despite that I could hear it getting closer, the galloping stride growing louder and faster behind us. 

It caught Wednesday first.

One long arm swung out from behind and caught her across the back with a raking swipe that launched her off her feet and sent her spinning through the air like a rag doll. Mid-flight her right hand shot out and caught a branch, but instead of slamming into the trunk she converted all of her forward momentum into a gymnastic swing that carried her up and over the branch landing in a crouch on a higher branch about fifteen feet up with her braids swinging and four shallow claw marks scoring the back of her dress.

The Hyde skidded to a stop beneath her, those pale flat eyes tracking upward, and then it reached for the trunk and started climbing. Its claws bit deep into the bark, hauling its massive body upward hand over hand with a speed that no tree was going to save her from for more than a few seconds.

I had made it maybe twenty more yards before I realized the footsteps behind me had stopped, and I looked back and saw Wednesday trapped in the tree with the thing climbing toward her, ten feet below her now, eight, six—

"You stupid son of a bitch," I said to myself. "You stupid, stupid, hero-complex-having son of a bitch."

I slapped both palms against the nearest tree and pulled. The oak flowed up my arms coating my skin in dense hardwood that hardened into armour as it spread, plating my fists and forearms and chest and legs in polished grain. I lowered my shoulder and broke into a dead sprint back toward the Hyde, covering the distance and i jumped and hit it like a freight train just as its claws were reaching for Wednesday's branch.

The impact ripped it off the tree and sent both of us crashing to the forest floor. We hit hard enough to leave a crater. The Hyde came up fast slashing down across my chest with both clawed hands in a double swipe that gouged deep furrows in the wood armour and sent splinters flying but didn't reach skin. I hammered a right cross into the side of its jaw and felt the impact travel up my arm as its head snapped sideways. 

It didn't slow down, not even a little, just grabbed me by the throat with one massive hand and hurled me sideways into a tree trunk that I hit back-first hard enough to crack the armour along my spine and drop me to my hands and knees in the dirt.

It pounced on me before I could get up, driving me flat with its weight, and those claws started working, raking across my back and shoulders in brutal strokes that chipped and cracked the wood with every hit. I rolled sideways and caught one of its arms as it came down, wrapping both hands around the wrist and twisting hard, using the leverage to shove it off balance and create just enough space to get back to my feet.

A rock hit the Hyde in the side of the head.

Hard enough to crack against its skull and snap its attention sideways. Wednesday stood on the ground now, braids slightly askew for the first time since I had met her, a second rock already in her hand with her arm cocked back. She threw it with the accuracy of a major league pitcher and it caught the Hyde right between the eyes, making it flinch and snarl.

It wasn't much. The rocks didn't hurt it any more than a mosquito bite would hurt a bull. But it gave me a few seconds and I focused on the new Osmosian ability, the weapon shaping, and willed the wood armour on both my fists to change.  The wood flowed and extended outward, stretching past my knuckles and hardening into a dense hammerhead on each hand, two massive wooden mauls the size of cinder blocks.

The Hyde turned back to me just in time to eat the first hammer strike full in the chest, a two-handed overhead slam that I put everything into, and the impact connected with a boom that caved in something behind its ribs and sent it staggering backward for the first time in the entire fight. I followed it, swinging the hammers in alternating arcs, left right left right, each one connecting with its body or arms or head while it tried to defend. 

Wednesday darted in from the side and slashed across the back of the Hyde's knee with a sharp rock she was using like a blade, opening a line that made the leg buckle for just a second. The Hyde swung at her and she flipped backward out of range, but the distraction let me close in and drive one of the hammer fists directly into its face with a rising uppercut that cracked against its jaw and sent it reeling.

I shifted one hammer, willing the wood to reshape again, and this time it tapered and hardened into a long, sharp wooden spike that jutted eighteen inches from my knuckle like a spear tip. The Hyde lunged at me one more time, claws reaching for my throat, and I met it head-on and drove the spike into its shoulder.

The point punched through its grey-blue hide and sank deep into the muscle beneath, and the sound the creature made was unlike anything I had heard from it before, a high, shrieking wail of genuine pain that echoed through the forest like a siren. 

It wrenched itself backward off the spike in a spray of blood, clutching the wound with one clawed hand while the other hung limp at its side, and for a long moment it stood there in the clearing staring at me with those pale eyes. 

Then it turned and ran.

The Hyde dropped to all fours and loped away through the trees at full speed, crashing through the undergrowth in a straight line until the sounds of its retreat faded into the distance and the forest went quiet again.

I stood there for a long moment with my chest heaving and sweat pouring down my face and blood dripping off the wooden spike that extended from my right fist, and then I let my legs give out and sat down hard against the base of the nearest tree while the armour began to fade. 

"That," I panted, leaning my head back against the trunk, "was fucking awful."

Wednesday dropped from the branch she had returned to during the final exchange, landing on the forest floor with a crunch that didn't even bend her knees, and stood there looking down at me with her hands clasped behind her back and her head tilted. "I have never encountered a sentient tree before," she said. "Your species is more resilient than the botanical literature would suggest."

"I'm not a tree,"  I snapped. "One of my abilities lets me absorb different materials into my body and use them as armour. Wood, stone, metal, whatever I'm touching. I can also shape them into weapons now, which, as you just saw, was pretty fucking useful five seconds ago when I was saving your life."

"Interesting," Wednesday said. "You are a more complex organism than I initially assessed."

She studied me for another moment, her eyes moving across my battered body. Then she asked a question that I did not expect. "Why did you stay behind to help me? You could have continued running. The Hyde had redirected its attention to me, which would have given you more than enough time to reach the road."

I looked up at her. "Because I'm not an asshole."

Wednesday considered this for a few seconds. "Mmm," she hummed, then she turned on her heel and walked away into the trees without another word.

I sat there against the tree, bleeding from a dozen places that were already sealing shut, and watched Wednesday Addams disappear into the Maine forest.

"You're welcome!" I shouted after her.

No response. 

Not even a backward glance.

"A thank you would've been nice! Maybe a little wave! A thumbs up! Anything!"

Nothing. 

She was gone.

"Un-fucking-believable," I muttered while I hauled myself to my feet and started limping back toward the school. 

I batted a branch out of my way. "Whatever. I'm glad she's gone. The further I stay from Wednesday Addams and her nightmare family, the better. I saw those films. Her parents are certifiably insane. Her brother electrocutes himself for fun. Their butler is literally a walking hand. I do not need any of that energy in my life right now, I have enough problems without adding the Addams family to the list."

I emerged from the tree line, climbed back over the chain-link fence, and crossed the parking lot to the Mustang. One look in the driver's side mirror told me everything I needed to know. My shirt was in ribbons, there was dirt in my hair and dried blood across most of my visible skin, my jeans had a tear down one leg that showed the pink line of a freshly healed wound, and I looked like I had lost a fight with a wood chipper.

I popped the trunk and thanked past James for the foresight of keeping a spare set of clothes in there for exactly this kind of situation. I stripped off the ruined shirt and the torn jeans right there in the parking lot, cleaned myself up as best I could with a rag and a bottle of water, and pulled on a clean t-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans before checking myself in the mirror again. 

Still a little rough around the edges, but passable. Human, at least.

I checked the time on the dashboard clock and swore. School was letting out in about ten minutes and I needed to pick up Beverly.

I drove the Mustang around to the front of the building and parked in the pickup zone just as the final bell rang, and within a minute the doors opened and students started pouring out in the usual flood. I spotted Beverly almost immediately, her red hair catching the light as she limped carefully down the front steps with the brace visible under her jeans, and clustered around her like a small protective army were the Losers. 

Bill and Ben flanked her on either side, ready to catch her if she stumbled, while Mike walked a step behind and Richie and Eddie brought up the rear arguing about something at full volume with Stan trying to referee.

Beverly's face lit up when she saw the Mustang, and she waved and started heading over with the boys in tow. I got out of the car and leaned against the driver's side door, crossing my arms and waiting for the inevitable interrogation.

Bill reached me first. "H-hey, James. Beverly told us about, about staying at your place. Is, is everything okay? Is she in trouble? Is her d-dad, is he—"

"Beverly's staying with me for a while," I said, cutting through it cleanly before the questions could multiply. "She's safe, she's got her own room, she's got food, and she's fine. She can tell you the rest herself, that's her story and it's up to her how much she shares. But the short version is that her home situation wasn't good and now she's somewhere better."

Ben looked at me with an expression that contained about six different emotions all competing for space, gratitude and concern and protectiveness and something else. "Is she, I mean, is there anything we can do? Is there anything she needs?"

"She needs friends," I said. "Which she already has. You guys are welcome to come by the house anytime, just call first. And Beverly can come and go as she pleases, she's not my prisoner, she's my guest. She wants to hang out with you guys after school, great. She wants to go to the movies, great. She wants to ride bikes around town, great. Just keep her away from open sewer drains."

Richie's mouth opened, presumably to make a joke, and Eddie elbowed him in the ribs before a single syllable could escape, which I appreciated.

Mike stepped forward and offered his hand, which I shook. "Thank you for looking out for her, man. That's really solid of you. Not a lot of people would do that."

"Don't worry about it."

Stan, who had been standing slightly apart with his arms crossed and his careful eyes studying me, spoke up for the first time. "You look like you've been in a fight. Your knuckles are all scraped up and there's dirt in your ear."

I looked at Stan. Stan looked at me. I pulled the piece of dirt out of my ear and flicked it away.

"I tripped," I said.

Beverly reached the car and I opened the passenger door for her, helping her step down off the curb and settle into the seat with her injured leg extended. She looked up at me through the open door with a smile that carried the weight of genuine relief, the expression of someone who had been waiting all day for the moment she could stop pretending everything was fine and go somewhere she actually felt safe.

"Ready?" I asked.

"Ready," she said.

I shut her door, gave the Losers a nod, and walked around to the driver's side. The engine rumbled to life and I pulled out of the pickup zone, watching in the rearview as six kids on the school steps grew smaller and smaller, a tight little cluster of misfits waving goodbye to the girl they were all, in their own way, trying to protect.

I pointed the Mustang toward home and stepped on the gas.

(AN: So James survived the Hyde, got made an uneasy acquaintance with the most emotionally unavailable girl in fiction, and somehow still made it to school pickup on time. The Hyde is still out there, Wednesday is still hunting it, and the question of who's controlling it remains wide open. Hope you enjoyed.)