Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

she saw that the space wasn’t empty. The office chair was pushed up to the desk, and the woman – Katherine? Kathy? – was crouched on the floor, hunched over something. Her head was pointed away from Debra, so she couldn’t see what the woman had, but she was making wet chewing noises. Debra’s subconscious sent up another warning, this one louder than the last.

Get the fuck out!

Debra heard this warning, but she hesitated. No more than a second, two tops. But it was enough for – Kate? – to realize she was there. The woman sat up on her knees and turned to look at Debra. Her nose, mouth, and chin were slick with blood, as were her hands. She held a bloody thing that was mostly a skeleton with a few scraps of fur and flesh clinging to it. The woman – Katie! Her name was Katie! – drew the mutilated remains to her chest and glared at Debra with wide, wild eyes.

“You can’t have any, bitch. It’s all mine!”

Her voice was a high-pitched shriek and bloody spittle flew from her lips as she yelled. There were bloodstains and tufts of skin and fur on the carpet in front of the woman, and Debra knew she’d been working on the animal – a cat? – for a while.

Debra no longer gave a shit about her glasses.

She held her hands palm out in a warding gesture, and she began to back up slowly. She wanted to turn and run, but she knew better than to take her eyes off Katie, and she also knew that if she started running, she might trigger a predatory response in the woman, prompting her to attack. No, she had to go slow, regardless of how fast her heart was beating (very) or how much adrenaline was coursing through her veins (a lot).

The woman continued glaring at her, but she made no move to rise to her feet. A soft sound was coming from her throat, and while Debra wasn’t certain, she thought the woman was actually growling at her.

She’d taken three steps backward when she bumped into something. An involuntary squeal of fright escaped her lips, and she whirled around to see the clinic’s director standing there. She couldn’t remember this woman’s name, but she recognized her. She was always here, and today she’d observed Debra’s entire session with Lori for some reason. Probably some kind of performance review thing, she’d decided. Lori wasn’t bad, but she could use some improvement, that was for sure.

Debra’s first response was to enlist the director’s aid, and she hooked a thumb over her shoulder in Katie’s direction.

“Do you see what she—”

She broke off when the details of the director’s appearance registered on her awareness. The woman was covered in blood from head to toe. She looked like she’d been bathing in the stuff, swimming in a goddamned pool of it. Not a lake, an ocean….

The director smiled and held up a pair of glasses, lenses speckled with blood.

“Are these yours?” she said.

The woman’s long braid swayed behind her under its own power, as if she had a large gray snake growing out of the back of her head. The sight of the thing moving independently made Debra feel queasy. It was unnatural. Wrong. It couldn’t be and yet it was, and that idea – that something that should be impossible might be real – was more terrifying than these two women combined.

The braid whipped out from behind Melinda’s back and lashed Debra across the face. The impact stung like hell, and she stepped back, shaken. She brought her hand to her cheek as if by touching it she could somehow lessen the pain.

Katie’s growling became a snarl then, and Debra felt the woman slam into her from behind. Her shoulder screamed in agony, and a burst of white light filled her vision as Katie’s weight bore her to the floor. She hit hard, and she felt something snap in her chest. A rib? She couldn’t catch her breath, and her mouth gaped open and closed like a fish on land as she tried to draw in air. She thrashed back and forth in an attempt to dislodge Katie, but the woman grasped her shoulders tight and held on.

The director knelt in front of her face and smiled, lips sliding away from blood-slick teeth.

“I imagine your shoulder must be hurting a great deal right now. Don’t worry. We can fix it. There might be a little discomfort at first, but it’ll be over in a few minutes. You’ll feel much better afterward.” Her smile widened. “In fact, you won’t feel anything at all.”

The director dropped Debra’s glasses to the carpet and then both she and Katie went to work. As it turned out, the director had lied to Debra. She felt more than a little discomfort, quite a fucking lot, in fact.

* * *

Melinda did her best to wipe her hands clean on the carpet before she stood, but there was only so much she could do to get the blood off – there was so much of it. And really, why bother? She was covered in it, her clothes dark, sodden, and heavy. Besides, she rather liked the feeling of blood on her skin, and while she hadn’t had a chance to view herself in a mirror yet, she suspected ‘blood-drenched maniac’ was a good look for her.

When she was on her feet, she regarded Debra’s corpse. Working together, she and Katie had torn off Debra’s left arm and cast it aside. It now lay several feet from the body, fingers half curled, thumb slightly extended, almost as if Debra was signaling approval of their work from the great beyond. They’d removed most of the muscle in her left shoulder and had discarded it, too. Katie had taken a couple bites of it, but she found the meat too tough and chewy, and she was now hunkered over Debra’s remains, gnawing on a length of intestine.