Read Online Aberrations by ed. Jeremy C. Shipp - Free Book Online Page B

openings he saw the woman in the red dress, the vivid splash of color he had seen earlier muted now with a fine powdering of dust.  She was sitting on the floor, her legs spread out in front of her like a little child, her hands on the floor between them.  Her hands were wet with blood.
    He stepped inside the lobby and the crumbled plaster and broken glass on the floor crunched beneath his boots.
    The woman in red spun around and screamed.  Her sudden movements scattered photographs across the floor.  Canavan watched the pictures skid toward his boots, then turned his attention on the woman.  Her chest was heaving, her eyes wild.  She held her injured hands out in front of her, as though to push him away, the gore dripping from them a stark contrast to the bloodless pallor of her face.
    “Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered.  “Please.”
    She thinks I’m one of them, he realized.  Without his gear, and with the blood leaking from his nose and mouth and the punch drunk stagger in his walk, he must have looked just like a zombie.
    “I won’t hurt you,” he said.
    A long pause.
    She lowered her hands and made a low huffing noise that came from the somewhere deep in her throat.
    Canavan reached down and picked up one of the photographs.  It showed the woman in front of him, younger, smiling, nestled in the arms of an overweight, dark haired man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses.  They were on a small boat, a heavily wooded shoreline in the distance behind them.
    He held the photograph out to her.  “Your husband?”
    “My brother, Paul.”
    He nodded.  When she didn’t take the photograph from him he dropped it in front of her.  “What’s your name?”
    “Jessica Shepard.”
    “I’m James Canavan.”
    There was a beat.  The muscles at the corners of her mouth twitched, as though she might smile.  “Are you a James or a Jim?” she said.
    “Either.  Jim to my friends.”
    “Well, Jim, pull up a chair.  The place is kind of dead tonight.”
    He couldn’t really laugh, but he liked the easy way she used his name, the gallows humor, the way it gave him a glimpse of her personality.
    She was staring up at him, her eyes yellow and bloodshot and almost lifeless, rimmed with red.  Her face was lost in shadow and her hair clung to her damp forehead and cheeks like wet thread.  When she breathed she made a labored, painful sound, as though she had fluid pooling in her lungs.
    “Can you get me out of here, Jim?”
    He shook his head.  “You’ve been infected.”
    She closed her eyes and let her chin sink to her chest.  She was silent for so long he thought she hadn’t intended to answer.  But when she lifted her head again there were tears cutting rivulets down the dust on her cheeks and a knot was working itself up and down furiously at the base of her throat.
    The look in her eyes made him turn away.
    “I’m sorry,” he said.
    “You’re sorry?  You fucking bastard.  You God damned fucking pig-headed bastard.”  She wiped a forearm across her eyes, her bloody fingers trembling.  “I’m dying,” she said.  “I don’t want to die.  I don’t want to be one of those things.”
    The air seemed to go out of her lungs.
    Then, so faintly he barely heard her, she said, “I’ve been one of them for too long as it is.”
    Canavan had no idea what to say, and it shamed him.  She was pleading for some sign of human compassion, and it was just her lousy luck to meet with a man who could no more give it to her than he could cure the riot raging in her bloodstream.
    “Will you do it?” she asked.
    “Will I...?”
    “Please.  I don’t want to be one of those things.”
    He followed her gaze to his right hand and was dumbfounded to see his pistol still there, the slide locked back in the empty position.
    “I don’t,” he said, and trailed off.  “It’s empty.  I’m sorry.”
    “Stop saying that.”  Her voice was muted in resignation.  “Stop saying you’re sorry.  It only