Free Shallow Veins (The Obscured Book 1) by Brian Martinez Page B

face scrunches, squishes, reforms into an approximation of anger, and the eyeballs swell and shake in the skull like they're boiling on a skillet turned up too hot. They burst from the sockets, spraying thick jelly as bone and muscle protrusions push through from behind, articulated fingers like the ones that wrapped Kevin except they have sharp needles at the ends and suction cups along their entire length; modified octopus arms. They move around either side of Banks and rush forward, stabbing him through both shoulders. The needles pierce through, split and expand to lodge into place, like grappling hooks of shattered bone.
    More push through from the child's ears and the soft, underdeveloped top of its skull. The child-thing opens its mouth and a dozen more needle-fingers surge from inside. Each one finds its real estate on Officer Banks' head, neck and body, pierce him again and again, attach to him like truck chains ready to free a stuck car from the mud.
    With one simultaneous motion, they pull.
     
     
    **
     
     
    Mary doesn't know why she keeps watching. Officer Banks' murder has been a drawn-out car accident up close, a slow-motion, screaming dissection, and yet she's barely missed a second. She wonders if she's sick, mentally ill for watching this ordeal with eyes open. Fascination is one thing, after all, human curiosity, but this is something different.
    The man ripping apart above her came here to return their dog. Despite his bad attitude, his eagerness to fight, he only wanted to bring Felix back to them after the dog ran away, and this is the reward he's found: agony. Gnashing of teeth.
    As the blood rains down on Mary’s face, her thoughts turn to her mother.
     
     
    **
     
     
    Officer Banks dies. Yet he doesn’t.
    As his body is split into so many pieces, so too is his mind. The various aspects of his psyche are torn and absorbed and at once he feels a transfer, a simultaneous upload and download between him and the creature, The Self, as it calls itself. His transition to death becomes something more, a new consciousness, a kaleidoscope of blood and sight and sound, of touch and taste and anger and hunger, like a mirror, a painting, shattering into a thousand million hundred shards. It's the single most terrifying sensation he's ever felt but it only lasts a second, less than a second, a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, and when that microscopic moment has passed it's as if he's stepped beyond time, beyond atoms, beyond any level of understanding achieved by any human being, dead or alive, alone or combined. It's a moment of truth purer than a baby's first breath. Purer than a handshake with the creator.
    Officer Banks the person, the individual, slips away. Like a diver stepping off the Mariana Trench he fades away into a crushing, unending blackness, a place from which there's no return.
    There's only The Self now.
     
     
    **
     
     
    Mary wipes the blood from her eyes and finds herself face-to-face with Officer Banks' smiling head. She cringes and jumps.
    "Itt doesnn't hurt anyyymore, Maryyy."
    She lets out a yelp in a voice she barely recognizes, an impulse of the vocal chords. "Good," she says, "he suffered enough."
    "We honorr himm."
    "You murdered him."
    The dead Officer's face, hanging from the ceiling by a tangle of muscle and roots, drops into her lap. She cries out and pushes it away. "Yourr ideaa of deatthh is limmitedd," it says, lazily swinging back and forth. "Humann death is an endd. With The Selff there is nno death, no ennd, onnly The Joining."
    Voices from all around repeat the phrase, whisper it in a worshipful voice. "The Joining," say the beetle-claws. "The Joining," say the skinless mice.
    "It looks like death to me." Kevin's voice sounds from behind. The officer's head spins to address him, standing at the mouth of the hallway with the woman-head-spider wrapped around his arm, tasting his skin.
    "Drew Banks is still here, but he is betterr. He is Self nnow. He will never be