HMS Valediction

Chapter 13.2

When we arrive at the bowels of the ship, I motion for John to stay put. With hands flat and pumping the ground, I have him shrink into a smaller shape and wait. His lights quit blinking on the way over and he's gone back to being dark and menacing. 

The Crust are raucous with their noises. Laughter bounces from the room like light off mirrors. Martin is gone, and six of the original ten are strapped to the wall where their arms flail above their heads in chaotic dancing. I hone in on my target and swiftly appear at his side.

He startles when I speak, rattling the bars with his fists.

"O'Deea. Good to see you."

"Princess," he eyes me with bright orange orbs, lips and jaw a crackled gold over his pale, dirty skin. Purple veins protrude from under the film. This is the first time I've been so close to the face of one of the junkies—it's the first time I've come to see what the stuff has done to them physically. I've been so concerned with all other repercussions, I didn't notice how they morphed into monsters.

Their eyes are blood orange—and not just the irises. Everything. Pupils, whites, waters substance around the lashes—everything is the same shade of citrus. O'Deea's skin has gone pale. Very pale. Cadaverous pale, with purple veins worming through his cheeks, mapping riverbeds across his face. His once-brown stubble has turned to damp yellow. His skin appears waterlogged and soggy. His lips, or what used to be his lips, have become thin and discolored from the dry, cracked, flakes of the Rind.

"Let me see your face," I stop short of my belly touching the bars. McCroy, standing guard, eyes me warily. From my peripherals, I notice him inch closer, his hand resting on the baton at his hip.

"You finally wised up and come to your real daddy." He licks the flakes of his lips and humps the bars.

McCroy is at my side in a second. "Say the word, Commander." The menacing threat in his voice dripped over the baton that was suddenly in a tight fist.

"No need, McCroy," I say like honey. "He doesn't even really know I'm here. Look at him."

We both stare at the man whose eyes are spinning in different directions. Murry O'Deea doesn't hear us. I doubt he even knows we are on the same plane of existence. I'm face-to-face with his neck. He presses his cheeks against the bar and opens his mouth, flicking his tongue out like he's lapping at something delicious in the air. I have to fight my vomit away.

Putting my fingertips at the tip of one unhinged piece of crust, I pull the yellow film back from under his nose. It easily peels away as a lip-shaped strip. Glad that I was able to get one piece big enough for testing, I look back and gasp in disgust as the space where his lip used to be fills with orange slime and floods his open mouth, dribbling off his tongue that darts out at me. Creamy orange pus streaks his chin.

McCroy and I back away as he slips down the bars, his teeth cracking as they hit each new row of black iron. He falls on his back.

A wicked grin breaks his face where the liquid puddles in his mouth and down his cheeks. It drips back into his eyes and fills the crevices.

"Flip him. I don't want him drowning in the stuff."

McCroy pokes the large man with his baton and shoves him to his front.

"I'll be back. I think we're onto something." I put a hand on the younger man's shoulder and squeeze it hard. "Keep an eye on him. Alert me if he starts doing something out of the ordinary."

O'Deea gargles on the goo.

"You know what I mean."

"Aye-aye, Commander."

I find John in the exact same place I left him. When he sees the flake from O'Deea, he releases a burst of steam from the hinges of his front claws.

"Does this piss you off?" I drop my hand so the piece is out of his view. "For once, I think we're on the same page."