Please Don't Go (42 page)

“
Jackie, you need to listen to me,” Zephyr demanded, pushing her back away from him, the look of rejection stretching across her face. Jackie undoubtedly thought that her ordeal had ended in her release from Lilith’s grasp, but Zephyr’s eyes told her otherwise, that her turmoil was only just beginning. Time was of the essence. “She’s going to take you back any minute now, so listen to me. You have to find a way out of there, wherever
there
is. I’m not sure what she’s doing to you, or how she’s keeping you inside there, but you need to keep your head on straight and think logically. You need to look for an opening. A leak. She’s not quite as crafty as she pretends to be. She’s got you trapped right where she wants you, and if her history is any indication, she’s gonna milk this for all it’s worth.”

“
I’m scared,” she stated with blunt, trembling lips. Zephyr was afraid she wasn’t listening to him, was not absorbing his information, only recoiling with her own chaotic emotions. “I’m scared for both of us.”

“
Don’t worry about
me
, please.”

“
I’m not talking about you.”

They looked at each other and their eyelids moved not an inch.

It came crashing down upon Zephyr again, that inkling of suggestion that Lilith had made right before Jackie’s Pod had arrived at his front door. That she was
eating for two
, implying to him that there was a baby inside of Jackie. If it was true, Zephyr could only assume that the baby was his, and he now felt confirmed in that thought as he looked into Jackie’s eyes, a trickle of joy trying to escape from behind the walls of worry.

“
You’re pregnant.” His face was blank for a moment and Jackie tried to coax a smile out of him with one of her own. Even in the most trying circumstances, Jackie had always been one to see the silver lining of every brown turd. It was part of the reason that Zephyr loved her so very much, and without question or hesitance.

“
A baby,” Jackie said with a slight peep of her voice, a dreamy sense of something surreal in that terrifying, yet invigorating, prospect.

Zephyr’s face cracked into a smile and he hugged Jackie tight. They shared a deep sigh and somehow knew that everything would work out, for there was no other option. Bad things happened to good people, but not like this. Never like this. They were stronger than Lilith. She had beaten the fight out of Zephyr, but he had plenty of that acidic spew left inside of him, especially with Jackie so near.

“
You take care of our baby in there. When you see a chance to get out, take it. For both your sakes. She can’t hold you. Not if you won’t let her,” he advised, thinking to himself that he had not yet figured out a way around that unearthly stubbornness himself.

“
She’s been talking to me,” Jackie moaned in delight.

Her face was flush with an unsettling notion.

“
She’s incessant. Get used to it. She’ll talk until she’s blue in the face, usually with a whole lot of ulterior motives.”

“
No, not
her
. Our baby. It’s a girl. She says that we have nothing to fear. And I believe her,” Jackie said in a low whisper, a glow overcoming her facial features. Zephyr had not seen her since she had become pregnant, and there was something to be said for the unmistakable glimmer that came strapped into a pregnant woman’s eye, that which would soon be gone when Lilith took the steering wheel once again.

Zephyr’s heart sunk. He looked at Jackie’s stomach, then back to her face. She couldn’t have been more than three months pregnant by this point, and most likely far less than that. The child growing inside of her didn’t possess anything more than a heart and brain at the moment. “Don’t believe it, Jackie. Lilith has her ways, she manipulates you into a false sense of security and then pulls out the rug from under you. I can vouch for that, personally. Don’t believe everything you see in there, wherever she’s keeping you... it’s not as safe as the first glance.” He looked upon his one true lover with dead-set eyes, attempting to convey the gravity of Lilith’s mind games, that she was not the kind of demon-spirit who simply pawed at humans, that she preferred to drag them over hot coals with every open opportunity.

“
I see,” Jackie replied, but Zephyr wasn’t buying her acceptance. She changed the subject, not wanting to believe that the thing that had been talking inside of her body (inside of her soul?) was not her gestating child. “That’s her name? Lilith?”

“
Yes... And no. I’m not sure, but I found a book that Rattup left behind. Although, I can’t even be sure that the book isn’t part of her game. It says she’s either Lilith or something created in the image of Lilith. I can’t really know, and we may never know either way. It’s all horseshit if you look at it from the right angle.”

“
And what’s this image of Lilith all about? What do you mean?” Jackie interrupted him, but he shook his head. There was no time to reiterate the mythology that surrounded the demon.

“
You need to listen to me.
Just be careful
. And keep your guard up. I love you.”

“
I love you too!” Lilith shouted as Jackie’s eyes reverted back to ivory globes of nothing. “Oh, aren’t you just the sweetest tart I’ve ever had the pleasure of bedding? I knew you’d come to your senses,” she cackled, rubbing at his chest, sending shivers dumping down his spine. The serpent that had inhabited his beloved Jackie made his skin crawl, like a bucket of worms had been dumped upon him in his sleep.

“
You’re insufferable,” Zephyr said.

“
Your words!” she sneered. Lilith clubbed him in the face with her bitter fist, yelping and screaming and shaking Jackie’s smooth pretty hair from side to side, like an overhead scrub brush at a car wash. She thrashed him as an angry girlfriend would upon discovering that her boy-toy had been cheating on her with her best friend. Her kinetic anger ended with her shoving Zephyr away from her, sending him tumbling against the kitchen cupboards.

“
You may or may not want to watch this, lover. I’ll understand if you’re not enough of a man to observe my pleasures,” Lilith announced, leaning down low on all fours, sniffing her nose around Lana like a wolf. She tossed her hair to the side, to better encapsulate the carrion in her smelling zone. The demon bit into Zephyr’s mother as a rabid, abused animal would, tearing back on flesh and gurgling between bloody bites and bubbly slurps. She paused early on in her consumption to lock eyes with Zephyr and warn him of her primal inclinations, the unspoken words hidden beneath her gaze, that said:
You’ll never control a beast. A beast is a beast and it cannot be caged.

Zephyr averted his gaze, running from the kitchen as terrible sounds filled his ears.

Lilith worked away at his mother until dawn, while Zephyr lay in the next room, curled in the fetal position upon his bed, covering his ears from the hideous sounds of his mother’s unwilling mastication. Zephyr wished that he was dead. If he was dead, he would be spared from the perpetual evil and nastiness that swirled about him. The thought of suicide didn’t seem as cowardly as it once had.

But then he forced himself to think of Jackie.

And of his baby.

2.

When Zephyr stumbled from his bedroom in the morning that followed, the first thing he noticed was the smell of sizzling bacon. It repulsed him to no end, for it had been more than a year since he had last eaten the stuff. He felt that it was a bad omen for him, an albatross tossed upon his doorstep by the raging bitch who had forced herself into an unflinching possession of his love... by way of stealing the physical vessel that he loved more than anything else in the world.

“
Is my lover awake?” Lilith asked via Jackie’s battered vocal cords, torn and displaced by a heavy night of flesh consumption. She stood at the stove, flipping bacon and sausage on the griddle, her empty eyeballs staring at the back of the stove top like a blind chef. “Grab a seat, eat some meat,” she rhymed, amusing herself as evidenced by the sick low guffaw that came from her raspy chest.

Zephyr could not bring himself to sit at the kitchen island, in that place where Rattup had first instructed him to leave the grocery unpacking to him. Those days seemed so far away, like a distant scream from a parallel dimension where worries were de-amplified by the simplicity of youth and innocence. If only he had turned his tail from the beginning, and stayed clear of Rattup.
Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

“
The swine is divine,” Lilith murmured in a new rhyme, plodding a pile of greasy bacon on to a dirty plate, touching at the sizzling bits of meat with Jackie’s finger. “And this body is divine, as well. Sensations, sensations, all around me.”

It was then that Zephyr’s mind started to buzz, plummeted into the terrible realization that had escaped him in the grip of sobbing himself to sleep. The wakeful morning brought about the harsh realities of a man’s existence while eating his breakfast, and Zephyr found that he was no exception to this rule of recompiling one’s livelihood with each new day, a computer that re-instantiates itself with the coming of the morning sun. A reboot, so to speak.

Upon the kitchen island sat two skulls. Both had been picked clean of their troublesome flesh, only shards and scraps of pinkish detestable material remained, gripping at the emptied craniums like mountain climbers on a desperate ledge. One of the skulls, the bigger of the two, was labeled with a black marker, across the whiteish canvas of the place where the forehead had once existed. The skull was notated as “MOMMY.” And next to it, the second skull of the pair, was deemed “RED,” an obvious ode to Karen’s fiery hairdo. They had been eviscerated into nothing but bone by the teeth of Lilith (or more accurately, the teeth of Jackie—would he ever be able to kiss her again when this was over?), ripped and licked and swabbed clean by the demon’s gangrenous jaws.

He could not imagine the reality of what the body of his lover, and the soul of his tormentor, had done to these two women of his life—the first being the most treasured woman in the longevity of his life and the second the stale sow who had meant nothing but a sour taste in his mouth. Still, he pitied them both in equal measures, regardless of their history. But something in that felt horribly wrong to him. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, everybody ended up in their current state, and all that had ever happened in between those two goal posts was lost in the annals of time.

“
Sit down.”

“
I can’t.”

“
Yes, you can. Sit with your mother. And what was the other one’s name? Red?”

“
Karen.”

“
Yes. Little red riding hood. She was a feast in and of herself, and with that wild, wild hair.”

Zephyr felt desensitized. A day earlier he would have vomited at the sight of his mother’s skull, staring him down with its empty ocular cavities, asking him
why, oh why
,
have you failed me in so many ways? Do you not care for your poor mother? Didn’t I give you every opportunity and nothing but love, all the way through
?
You couldn’t become a man quick enough to defend that very life that gave you your own?

Now, all that garbage meant nothing to him. His mother was gone, as was Karen, as was the entrapped soul of Jackie if he didn’t take appropriate measures towards swindling or properly satiating Lilith. “You won’t break me,” he stammered, sitting down at the kitchen stool, directly across from the bit of bone that had once contained the pulsing electric brain matter of the woman who had birthed him two decades previous. He stared Lilith down, accepting of the war at hand, and that casualties were to be expected of such a bitter conflict. On the inside, he would trample and hide his emotions, for that was the pleasure that Lilith sought in her actions, especially given that she could read his thoughts to some extent. If the skulls displayed before him would not break him, then perhaps nothing would.

The ghoul inside of Jackie slid the bacon across the table at Zephyr, who looked down upon it, no longer thinking of the offering as meat versus vegetable, but as the mere concepts of life versus death. He shoved the bacon into his mouth, accompanied by a greedy chomp, staring into Jackie’s vacant eyes as he violated his moral checklist.

“
On the contrary, I think I’ve broken you already,” Lilith replied, covering the mouth of Jackie with her hand as she observed Zephyr, unraveling at the seams, cramming the thing he had once denied into his gullet.

Zephyr’s stomach moaned from the invasive meat products, but his cerebellum sung a beautiful aria, that which only he and Lilith could hear. The sausage was atrocious... but the bacon wasn’t so bad, after all. He ate the entire plate with a voracious hunger.

At one point, Lilith reached over and clacked MOMMY’s and RED’s skulls together like cymbals, in celebration of their forward progress. Jackie’s usurped body had served its purpose already.

***

When she took him to their bedroom, Lilith had been unable to control the rapture in her grimy, bleeding breast. The skulls of his former female counterparts had been a master stroke on her part, sending him inside of a defeated shell that she could hence drag him from, like a burning victim from a massive structure fire, smoldering but happy enough just to be alive for even a moment longer.