Read Online New Title 1 by Patrick Lestewka - Free Book Online

a jug of Schlitz.
    Phil says, “So what’s this wiseass gonna look like when we get back?”
    I sip my beer, considering. “Well, once I put a hotdog into one of those turbo-model tanning beds. One hour cooked it. Two hours and it looked like beefy jerky. Three, shoe leather. After four it was pretty much ashes.”
    “Je- sus ,” Phil says. “Kid gonna be able to spill?”
    “He’ll talk.”
    By the time we finish our drinks and walk back to Sunchasers, nearly two hours have passed. Joe waves his hand in front of his face as we enter.
    “Roasting a pig back there, Answer?”
    “Something like that.”
    The odor intensifies as we get closer: a sickly-sweet mingling of cooked meat, blood, coconut. Phil covers his nose and mouth with an embroidered handkerchief.
    “Smells like a fucking glue factory.”
    Blood seeps between the seams of the tanning bed, thin runners that look a little like warm tar. Feeble scratching noises coming from inside.
    I unlock the lid and open it. The kid is in rough shape.
    His body is stoplight red, except for the odd patch charred black. Joey is… steaming . It rises off him in savory plumes, as from the surface of a hot bath.
    In his agony he opened his eyes. The ultraviolet light has blinded him: his eyes are completely bloodshot, the eyes of an albino. He thrashes mindlessly as I unplug the unit. His flesh is loose, more of a sheath than a part of him. It jiggles like the membrane that forms on unstirred soup.
    “Christ,” Phil says, staring at the writhing thing. “They sell these things? People lie in them… willingly ?”
    The kid holds his hand out to me like a frightened boy who’s lost his mother. He is trying to say something but his lips are melted black, tongue a swollen bulb in his mouth. I take his hand and there is a moist tearing sound as the flesh of his fingers and wrist comes off, all in one piece, like a wash-glove. Underneath are long ropes of muscle and knobs of whiteness where his knuckles are exposed, the yellow half-moons of his fingernails. The shed skin is warm in my hand, slack and slippery.
    “Oh, this is too much.” Phil unbuttons his Soprani blazer and reaches for his piece, thinking about a mercy-killing. “This cannot be .”
    “No,” I say quietly. “In a minute.”
    I kneel beside the kid. His face, what remains of it, is bloated and pocked with suppurating boils leaking pus of a shade I’d previously regarded as impossible for a human body to produce. I ask the same question I asked two hours ago, when there was still a chance the kid might’ve walked away breathing.
    “Where is the truck.?”
    “Ungh…ungh…uhhh…”
    “Just tell me, kid. I’ll make the whole world go away.”
    “U…u…u…sto…Storage…”
    I turn to Phil. “U-Storage?”
    “Yeah.” Phil’s skin is the color of unripe bananas. “Long-term storage joint down on the Hudson.”
    “We need anything else?”
    “No. Christ, no.”
    With a strength I didn’t think he possessed, the kid heaves himself up. A noise like wet leather tearing as the skin of his back and arms, which has melted to the glass, disconnects from his body. He makes a mewling noise, a strangled kitten, and I’m now staring at the flayed panorama of his back, these long red highways of sinew, glistening pockets of fat, a steaming landscape of tendon-knitted muscle that looks a little like rolled roast beef with the stark-white constellation of his vertebrae poking through at even intervals. He squawks and topples out of the unit. The flesh of his chest and legs and feet and head stays in the bed and now I’m staring at this mass of bloody meat squirming on the clear plastic tarp, this thrashing creature that was recently an arrogant boy. The veins of his throat resemble bluish tubes and strands of hair are plastered to the gummy redness of his face but there is only blackness, pitch blackness, at his pupils and mouth.
    Phil moans and staggers back until his ass hits the doorknob. This he