Halfway Inhuman DELETED CHAPTER 34

 

In final editing, the last two chapters, 33 and 34 were deleted from Halfway Inhuman. To celebrate it's sequel "Halfway To Hell" I'm releasing them here... SQUEEEE! I hope you enjoyed this little behind-the-curtain peek. 

Be sure to read the Natalie and Xavier short story "When Demons Dream" before you pre-order Halfway to Hell on Amazon! 

 

Chapter 34

 

 

It was Saturday, first weekend in August, and I was in my hammock, a closed book on my chest. I was staring at the sky and not really thinking about anything. 

Wiki popped up at my arm from out of nowhere.

“Boo!” she yelled.

I startled so hard I fell off the hammock.

“That was awesome,” she said. She was literally rolling on the ground laughing her little butt off. “You were off-the-charts freaked out.”

“Not funny,” I said throwing my book at her.

She giggled again.

“Carly’s at work, and dad and I are about to run into town for some pumpkin seeds,” she said. 

Wiki had decided that organic veggies were the way to go.

We were all blown-away when she planted some tomatoes and they promptly died. That only intensified Wiki’s desire to conquer vegetable gardening.

I had no doubt we’d be able to end world hunger by the time she’d achieved vengeance against food-plants that dared to die under her tender care.

The kitchen window sill was covered in rooting potatoes, the table was covered in cauliflower and broccoli flats, and she was determined we’d single-handedly provide a pumpkin to every home in Lake Francine by Halloween.

“Martin is here,” she said.

I shrugged.

“OK?”

Wiki reached over and hugged me.

“I love you, Nat,” she said, simply. “I’ll be here for you when you get back.”

Then she was gone.

Wiki was testing her powers, and super-speed morphing was really working for her.

Plus, she just loved showing off.

I had not worked on my powers at all. Days like this, when nothing but a slight breeze disturbed me, I almost forgot that I had powers. That there was a war. That my mom and gramps were dead. The dark thoughts crowded into my head and I exhaled, stretched and headed to the house, letting the thoughts, and any emotion associated with them, float away like a fall leaf.

Martin was standing on the front porch, back turned to me. I copped a look at his butt for old-time’s sake.

“Nice can,” I said.

He grinned, but didn’t turn.

“From my kiddo’s cryptic remark, we’re going somewhere?” I asked. “Can I drive?”

“If you want, to Natalie,” Martin said.

Hm. Strange.

Phelps bought a couple of new cars after the funerals, including a replacement Jaguar, which he said was mine. I got behind the wheel, Martin got in the passenger side.

“Tell me where we’re going,” I said.

He gave me an address, which I plugged in to the GPS Phelps installed.

“You’re really not OK, are you Natalie?” Martin asked as I started the engine.

“Why would you say that?”

“It’s like this, you always have something to say, you always want to know everything, and there’s no way you’d ever just get in a car, plug in an address in your GPS, and not ask a single question,” Martin said. “Especially not after the last two times you got in a car with me. That alone should have f-bombs dripping from your lips.”

I put on a pair of sunglasses, checked the directions and turned up the radio as we headed off Phelps’s property and onto the main road. 

Martin turned it down.

“Talk to me, Natalie,” he said.

“I don’t have anything to say, Martin,” I replied.

“Bullshit, you always have something to say. Call me Jim,” he said. “Your family said you just curled up and died in June, you just forgot to stay dead.”

I swallowed hard and merged onto the highway.

“My family is dead, Jim, because of me my mother and grandfather are dead, and my father dropped me like a hot potato for something that isn’t my fault,” I said. “How am I supposed to act?”

I turned the radio back up and we drifted on the highway in silence for a while.

“I kept waiting for you to get over your hang-ups and ask me out,” Martin said during a commercial.

I took a few deep breaths, my knuckles white on the steering wheel.

“Seriously? Why would you even tell me that? Of all the horrible things people have said and done, I think that may be the worst,” I said.

My GPS told me to take the next exit.

“I didn’t know what a cold-hearted, sadistic fuck you really are, Martin,” I said.

“There we go, finally the f-word!” he said. “I said it because you needed to hear it.”

I stopped at a red light, turned and hollered at him.

“I needed to hear that? You fucking want the fucking f-word? I daydreamed about you for six fucking months, and you treated me like I was just a fucking means to an end,” I yelled. He pointed at the light, which had changed.  I faced forward and yelled, though less loudly.

It’s hard for me to yell really well at someone unless I’m facing in that person’s direction.

“Drink my damn coffee and filch my damn DNA results!”

The GPS told me my destination was ahead of me. I pulled into the parking lot of an abandoned hospital.

“Then you offered to kill me, then you arrested me and used me as bait! I think I kinda fucking hate you Jim, why the fuck are we here?”

Martin got out of the car, and headed to the building. He picked up a rock from the parking lot, broke a window, reached his arm through to unlock it, and then climbed through.

A moment later, the double-doors in the front of the hospital slid open with a stale whoosh.

“Come on, demon-girl, whatcha waiting for?” Martin hollered, rocking back on his heels.

I stormed through the doors ready to punch the ass-head in the face for messing with my emotions.

Emotions I’d been trying to kill for months.

I hollered at him, but he just slipped through a stairwell and headed down a few flights.

“OK, you found your favorite word, you can stop,” he yelled from a flight below me.

“Fuck you!” I yelled back.

I jumped down the last flight of stairs and landed by Martin. He was standing next to an orange door. It was creepy-quiet, and trepidation crawled on my scalp.

“Wiki and Phelps helped me put the case to bed. All of the missing persons cases related to the search for a hybrid, I solved them all and brought closure to a lot of families,” he said.

Martin took my shoulders and made me look him in the eye.

“Natalie, it’s time for you to get closure,” he said.

“How does being here bring me closure?”

“The night Wiki almost killed herself, she found this place,” he said.

There were more words, but they just buzzed out of his mouth like an alien language. My knees were weak.

“This was… this was where they did it?” I asked.

“This place was the cause of your loss,” he said.

“Why did you bring me here?” I whispered.

He opened the orange door and went in. I thought about the sound of nothing and found my calm, then I stood up and followed him in.

The smell hit my human nose like a sledgehammer. Rot. Death. I could smell the death, really smell it.

I remember when I was little, maybe seven or eight, my grandparents had a rat in the garage. It chewed up the wiring to the ceiling lights, and just about burned the entire place to the ground.

Gramps put out some rat poison, and called it a day. Grammy Rose was sick at that time, so the next few weeks were a flurry of doctors’ appointments for them.

One Saturday, when the cartoons were over for the day, Grammy asked if Gramps could hang a painting for her. He accidentally knocked the head right off the nail he was hammering. Gramps told me to run into the garage and grab him a pair of needle-nosed pliers, so he could get a nail out of the wall.

The entire garage reeked. I covered my little nose with my shirt and inched over to the toolbox.

On the side of Gramps workbench, the rat was bloated to four times its normal side, its little rat arms were stretched over its head, and its mouth was open. A few flies lazily buzzed around it.

I screamed bloody murder and hauled back to Gramps and Grammy. I took the longest bath in the history of the world, because the stink was on everything, in everything. I could taste the dead rat, smell it in my hair, see it when I closed my eyes.

The room was like that, but with a few hundred rats.

I swallowed hard a couple of times as stale, putrid air, thick with the reek of decayed roadkill wafted out the orange door.

Only, it wasn’t decayed roadkill I smelled, it was people.

Four steel autopsy tables, the ones with drains at the bottom, were lined up in a state-of-the-art lab. There was a hose connected to the wall, and a grate on the floor under the tables.

Electronic x-ray readers lined an entire wall. I heard a gas-powered generator kick in, and Martin flipped on a set of lights.  I flinched as row after row of fluorescent lights flickered to life, illuminating places I never wanted to imagine.

There were two holding cells, set up like old-fashioned jails, much like my holding cell prior to the battle.

Computers, and refrigeration units lined the last wall.

I traced my finger through the dust on the stainless steel of one of the refrigerators.

“Why am I here?” I asked.

“Because it was all contaminated, and most of it destroyed, according to the reports,” Martin said from across the room. “Hazardous for humans, and no genetic information could be extrapolated after the decay. The entire place is slated to be bulldozed, and then quarantined for 50 years. We don’t know what is rotting in the vials in those refrigerators, and it’s better that we don’t keep that particular science alive.”

 I traced a heart in the dust, and tried to keep calm. My voice betrayed me “So, my little brothers and sisters are rotting in this fridge?” 

My throat shut, and I couldn’t breathe. I ran out of the room before he could stop me, bursting through the front doors, taking in air in giant gulps.

I leaned over in the bushes and barfed harder than I’d barfed since my college days, when I’d shown up at my first, and only, kegger on Greek row.

When I stopped heaving, Martin handed me a bottle of water. I rinsed my mouth out, spit, and took a long drink.

I wandered into the parking lot and sat on a curb.

“Your mom was post menopausal, Nat,” Martin said sitting next to me. “She was only there for her DNA, and it didn’t work because her demon gene was recessive.”

“I think you’re a sick fuck,” I said.

He stretched and leaned back.

“Actually, I learned a lot from talking to our guys in the white coats,” Martin said. “Vampirism and shapeshifting are more like viruses, they ride on top of the hosts DNA and change it. Shapeshifters can be born, though, and their DNA already has the rider. I’m probably going to explain this wrong, but, they’d take a fertile woman and make a test-tube baby with her eggs and Ward’s sperm, in the lab. They’d attach Grennon’s undead rider. They hoped to use Michelle like that, but they couldn’t. Instead, they used her stem cells.”

“I really don’t want to know about my mom’s torture,” I said.

“They took her bone marrow, out of her backbone,” Martin said. “It’s pretty painful from what I heard, but nothing like the host mothers went through, Natalie.”

I exhaled hard.

“From what the geneticists were telling me, Michelle was practically human, and you are a full half demon. If you had a sibling, it could have been a full human, no demon at all.”

“Stop. Right there. That makes no sense,” I said. “Like, my dad is one-sixteenth Cherokee, right? His great-great-grandmother was full Cherokee. It was just enough to get him a scholarship in college. However, as the next generation, I’m only one-thirty-second Cherokee. Just a drop. Too little to qualify. For stuff like that I know it halves each generation. So I’m thinking you’re either really explaining this wrong or really full of shit.”

He looked around and found a stick on the ground.

“What you’re talking about are bloodlines. I’m talking genetic features, like blue eyes, or freckles,” he said. “I’m not full of shit, and I am explaining this poorly.”

He drew four Hs in the sand and four Ds in the sand.

“The Hs are human, your grandfather, the Ds are demon, your grandmother,” he said.

He drew a box with two upper-case Hs, and two lower-case Ds; HHdd

“Michelle’s demon gene was recessive. There is nothing that could have done to made it come to life, she was human in every way but her heritage,” Martin said. “Your dad was HHHH. If you make that box like you make in science class in grade school, there were several ways your mom and dad could have produced children”

He drew a circle around the first two Hs in each of my parents lines, and then started made the combinations in the boxes HHHH, HHHH, DDHH, DDHH.

“I think it’s more complicated than that, but basically you had a 50-percent chance of being a full human. My gene guy said you inherited both of your mom’s demon genes. From what he can tell, one flipped over to be dominant, and one stayed recessive. The gene your mom’s body tried to hide is dominant in you. You’re fully half. If you married a human guy …”

He drew a box in the sand and put Ds and Hs in the box.

“It’s not like your dad’s Cherokee blood, genes don’t reduce each generation. They’re either there, or not. If they’re there, their either recessive, or dominant,” he said. “You could have fully human children. Or, full half-demons with dominant demon genes, like you or your buddy Xavier.”

“He’s not my buddy, Martin,” I snapped.

“Jim,” he said.

“So, what the hell does that have to do with me being here?”

“Right, sorry, hanging around science geeks is really contagious,” he said. “So, the vampires tried using some of her bone-marrow cells to power-up the babies, make them stronger. See if they could make her genes ride the other two. They used a sort of cleaned out elven ova and put your mom’s DNA in it, but your mom’s stuff kept eating everything else.”

He stood up and dusted off his pants.

“Our guys can’t make heads or tails of demon DNA, Nat. There are helixes, and… spikes, and things that look like tree branches that move around as our guys are looking at them,” Martin said. “It’s like your basic genetic structure is independently alive.”

He shuddered, and kept talking. “We don’t think the vampires could have decoded it so quickly, it’s so damn weird, but even if the vamps were that much better, there’s no way they could manipulate Michelle’s DNA enough to insert it into fertilized egg. Instead they shot her stem cells into the fertilized egg and hoped magic would happen. It didn’t.”

He stopped talking, and stood there.

I sat there and sipped water.

I had no idea what the point was.

“You brought me here to give me a genetic lesson?” I said. “Thanks. I found it both helpful and informative.”

Martin rocked back on his heels.

“Ah, I love the smell of sarcasm in the morning, especially from you, Nat!”

I twisted the cap on the water bottle, set it on the ground and stood up.

“I just don’t understand, OK? I don’t know why, after all this time, you brought me here, to teach me some science?”

He walked back into the building and left me there staring after him.

I so didn’t need this crap. I needed my hammock, a blue sky to stare out. I needed to get the hell away from here and hide in my little piece of heaven. To hell with Martin, sorry, Jim, he could walk back.

I dug in my purse for my keys, and couldn’t find them.

“Sonovabitch!” I muttered.

Martin probably swiped them when we were sitting on the ground.

Screw him. I’d wait. I was not going back in there.

I sat back down.

Then I got up and paced, muttering obscenities under my breath.

ADD and waiting during moments of anxiety? Yeah, they don’t go well together.

It felt like seven hours, but had probably been seven minutes since Martin walked back into the pit of doom. I followed, screeching his name.

“Give me my keys, ass-bag!”

He wasn’t in the hallway, so I stormed down the steps. When I pushed open the door to the putrid lab, I went flying. Martin had grabbed my arm and thrown me across the room as soon as I was in.

“Sorry for this. Try not to kill me. Why are you down here, Natalie?” he yelled.

“To get my fucking keys,” I yelled back, using one of the computer stands to get back up. “That hurt.”

The generator in the corner kicked in again, and the lights flickered. I felt something in my soul die as I took another good look at the stains in the cages, the stains on the floor.

I saw a flash of my mom crumpled in that cage, shitting herself, in pain, afraid, humiliated.

Tears welled up, and then Martin crossed the room in three steps and punched me in the face. I went down with a cry.

I think the side of my cheek had split over, and my vision was hazy. 

“You’ve been down here for almost four months,” Martin snarled. “This is where you want to be.”

He took a step back, and I could sort of see out of the corner of my eye that he was ready to kick me dead in the head. Fucker was going to kill me.

“Why don’t you just stay here? he said.

It wasn’t on purpose, but Martin’s foot didn’t make it to my face. He screamed when I caught it in my hands, which were fully demoned out, and squeezed. I heard something crack in his foot, and my lipless mouth turned into a wicked grin.

I dropped him on the floor and stood over him, inhaling through my mouth so my extra senses could take in the rot and filth of the lab.

“What do you feel right now,” he panted, clutching his foot.

“Rage,” I said.

My voice sounded like Lilitu’s, but colder.

“And what else?” he yelled.

“Hate. Fear,” I said. The green tinge faded a little from my vision. “Guilt.”

My voice cracked, “Shame.”

He was scooting away, towards the exit. A part of me was ready to pounce on him and rip his spleen out.

“Feel it, then,” he said. “Let yourself fucking feel it Nat. Take a good look at what you’re hiding, and let it go.”

My demon vision was fading quickly. The spines on my back retracted. Martin took off the shoe from his good foot and threw it at me.

“No! You let it go, now, or just stay down here and rot,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re half demon, so what?”

He was at the stairwell, hefting himself to a standing position. He was reaching for the fire extinguisher, probably to chuck at me, and hollering at the top of his lungs.

It was all clear in both visions, human and demon.

However, I was pissed at him for punching me in the face.

Uncool, boo-boo.

But I got it.

“Get out,” I said. “Fast.”

I’ve never seen a human, with a broken foot no less, move that fast.

I took a deep breath and fell to my knees screaming. The tiles on the ceiling fell from the force of it. I was in my other form, and the sound was unholy. And then I let out the rage. I pulled the refrigerators out and threw them through the cells. I punched holes through the walls with the morgue tables. The generator tipped over at some point, and gas spilled on the socket.

I came to my senses, bleeding, disoriented,  in a room that looked like it’d been through a couple of earthquakes and then a tornado, to thick clouds of black smoke from the outlet where the generator was plugged in.

My chest heaved as a few sparks caught in the gas puddle and ignited. As I watched, the flames licked up the walls and into the ceiling tiles.

Tears ran down my face as it all went up in flames. This was the entire reason my life was destroyed. Right here.

One of my dearest friends had to literally punch me in the fucking face to make me realize the place itself was nothing. It meant nothing. I had buried myself in this hollowed out hell hole.

Now it was going to burn to the ground.

I liked that. I laughed, and panting, pulled at what I thought was the last bit of demon-energy in me, and put my sparking green hands into the puddle of gas.

It wasn’t a kickass green ball of energy like Xavier’s, or an orange fireball like Carly’s, but it did the job. A little fuel on a fire goes a long way.

Flames licked my skin, and I didn’t feel it. I inhaled the filthy black smoke oozing through the plastic computer casings as the walls caught on fire, and I felt purified.

Martin was in my car, foot on the dashboard, moaning.

“Jim, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t think you actually broke it, Nat, but it hurts like hell,” he replied. “Anyhow, I deserved it. Any jerk who’d punch a woman in the face should have his foot ripped off and shoved up his own ass.”

No denying that.

I got around the car and got into the driver’s seat. Flames were licking through the windows of the hospital, and I heard sirens in the distance.

“I could arrange that, you know,” I said starting the car.

We headed back to Lake Francine, planning to sidetrack it to the walk-in clinic rather than the emergency room.

“Nat, seriously, I’m sorry,” Martin said.

“So why’d you do it?” I asked.

He paused for a long time.

“Oh balls, man, you fucking profiled me?” I asked.

“I mean, that’s my job,” he said.

“That is some shit. That is some seriously bent shit.” I said.

“Wiki said the place might not get to you,” he said. “She said someone was going to have to get rough with you if you didn’t break down immediately. Carly and Knob offered.”

I snorted. “I bet they did,” I said.

“But we took a vote and decided I’d be the best bet,” he said. “Wiki estimated the chances of you actually killing me at about 12 percent.”

I almost drove off the road.

“You voted? You all plotted this together and you voted?” I shrieked.

“Keep your eyes on the road, Natalie!”

“They sent you, and Wiki factored in if I’d kill you? What kind of perverted fucks do that to another person?”

“The kind who love you,” he said.

My mouth snapped shut, and I took the interstate turnoff to Lake Francine.

“You need to come to terms with yourself, Nat. Nobody wants to lose you like that. Just laying in a hammock, not speaking, not reading or working. Just… just laying your life away wishing you were dead,” he said.

“I wasn’t…”

“You were,” he said.

My throat got tight, and we made it to the walk in clinic in silence.

Martin’s foot was broken in four places.

I didn’t even squeeze that hard.

Damn.

He might have been an ass-bag for punching me in the face, but I hurt one of my best friends. We left the clinic, and swung by Phelps’s house.

I ran in the house and hollered for Wiki.

Wiki, the genius little piss-head, had planned out the post-hospital carpooling, because she calculated a 97-percent chance that I’d hurt Martin if he hit me.

 

She was going to swing by the pharmacy, and then drive Martin’s car to his house, while I drove him home in my Jag. We’d drive back together.

I was raging so hard when she calmly told me that, that I almost took her on.

I got all in her face, cussed her out, threatened to ground her, and then threatened to cut all Internet lines in our house.

I felt growly and my eyes started greening out, and that’s when her eyes pooled black and her feet started to disappear into an oily slick.

I backed off like a little bitch,

Wiki was my kiddo, but she was scary. 

I was still fuming when I got back in the car.

“I could have killed you, Martin,” I yelled. “No matter your motives, I’m not human, and I’m not sure you could have fended me off.”

We stopped at a red light, and I turned my head to look at him.

“You risked death, just to get me to snap out of my pity-whore funk,” I said.

He grinned and shrugged.

“It’s what friends do,” he said.

He leaned over and pecked me on the cheek.

“You’re a good person, Nat,” he said. “Forgive yourself already and just be that person.”

I got Martin into his house, and situated him in a chair, just as Wiki pulled up. She dropped of his prescription and we got in my car to head home.

“You OK?” she asked.

“You’re a fucking nut-bag,” I said calmly.

Wiki laughed, “Hell yeah, you’re OK!”