Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad Read Online Free Page A

room, to see the open window.
    Then I was on him before he had time to react. My left arm wrapped around his head, enveloping him in the muscle. I squeezed tight, cutting off the air. My right arm grabbed his wrist and twisted. The bone snapped almost at once and the gun dropped to the carpet. I could feel him try to scream against my arm.
    I waited for him to stop his feeble struggle. It was a short wait. When his body went limp I moved my arm and gave him back his breath.
    Everyone wakes up from being knocked unconscious differently. Scrawny Mark didn’t do it peacefully. His legs twitched and he sat up with a scream, looked around with wide eyes to try to figure out where he was and what happened. As his synapses started firing off and it came rushing back to him, his pale face flushed.
    We were in the sacrifice room. I’d put him into one of the larger cages on the wall and secured the closure with a lock that had been dangling from one of the others.
    “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He spat out the words.
    “I’m impressed. I expected you to shit your pants as soon as you woke up. You sound pissed. Maybe you’re more of a man than I thought.” I gestured to the room, to the strange oval. “Not enough of a man to deserve this, but still ...”
    “You’re a goddamn idiot. You have no idea what this is.”
    “I know enough. I may be big, but I’m not stupid. I know you’re wasting this chance for a few dollars.”
    “I’m not wasting anything.”
    “Look at you. You sell the chance to be perfect to anyone willing to pay. And you haven’t bothered to even try to improve yourself. You’re weak, emaciated, pale. Ugly. You could be a god. But you’re too pathetic to even see it.”
    “This is beyond that.”
    “What is it?”
    He said nothing.
    “How did you find it?”
    “I looked.”
    “These cages ... for the animals people bring?”
    He shrugged.
    “What is it?” I asked again.
    He shook his head, smiled smugly.
    “Doesn’t matter.” I grabbed the cage and dragged it across the floor. Once I left it in the center of the oval, his resolve shattered.
    “Please, no. No. I’ll tell you what I can. This won’t work!” he was crying already, blubbering and pleading and wailing. “It won’t work. Strangers barely give you anything. The person has to know them. Love them.”
    “But I do love you, Mark. You gave me the greatest gift in the world.” I switched on the machine. It emitted a low, pulsating warble. I didn’t bother with the knobs or dials.
    “Please!” He cried out.
    The book was in another language, one I’d never seen. I sounded out the words phonetically in my mind before I started speaking them.
    “Chryu alanion Dis! Ralo U Sym Dantalion! Pepe! Pepe! Carthun Chryu alanion nu! Kesto, Kesto Dantalion! Pepe!”
    It happened. The sounds and the scents and the change in the air all came at once. I sucked deep breaths to fill my lungs, trying to focus on what was happening. The room itself blurred, bent as the ceiling transformed.
    Mark’s screams reached a crescendo. He rattled and thrashed in the cage, trying to escape. He lay on his back and kicked at the door. The thin metal wires bent, but it was no use. Already the thing of a million faces was drifting through the display overhead.
    Mark rose off the ground, touched the top of the cage, and carried it up with him. They hovered in the air for a moment, and then his screams of terror took a different timbre. They were wails of agony. The shrieks of the damned.
    He flailed once, twice, and then his body went rigid. Then the convulsions took him. He came apart much like the old man had, though the cage made it worse. His body shredded itself, but the chunks were too large to escape the cage bars. He was sucked upward, his body splitting and squeezing and pressing through the bars in thin sheets. The blood had all left for the beyond while half his body remained in its confines. It twisted and crunched, a pink and