Homecoming

You are completely useless I am done with you and the whore Deal with maker-man now =D

Jeremiah held the cell phone at arm's length as if it were going to grow wings and teeth and fly screeching at his face.

How could this be? How could Mathias be so severely displeased with him? Hadn't he done everything he could? If that stupid bitch hadn't stabbed him in the back like she did—hadn't almost ruined the entire thing, it would have been perfect. It should have been perfect.

The waiting room was the usual drab collection of simple blue chairs, a loveseat, coffee table with battered magazines occupying most of the space, and a few art deco paintings too vague or pretentious to appreciate.
His stomach lurched suddenly. His throat was given the message to puke but his brain fought it off with the knowledge that if he did he would be throwing up stomach acid and not much else. He hadn't been able to touch a bite of food since earlier in the week, when both he and Clarissa were still deliriously excited about the arrival. Then her disposition had changed. No, she had changed. She'd gotten cold feet.

At first it was just little things

Frankly, for one, she had begun to smell bad. Clarissa had always been an extremely hygienic individual. She took a shower in the morning and a bath at night, generally. But the last week he began to notice her body odor becoming more and more apparent. At first he thought with the baby so close and everything that she had just gotten lazy and decided not to clean as often. But it wasn't all the time that he could smell it. And it wasn't like the normal musk of old sweat, either. It was different. He noticed too that he could really only smell it when she sweated profusely, which she tended to do. Hot flashes play hell on the internal temperature gauge.

Jeremiah's father, Henry, used to work at an old charnal pit in Middleton. The smell coming off her sweat reminded him of that. Sulfurous, almost.

But the worst change by far had been her temper. It wasn't terrible at first. Just a few snide comments here and there, but early last week she had begun to yell more, screaming at the top of her lungs over nonsensical shit.
He remembered he had left the milk jug sitting on the counter while he took the trash out the night before last, completely intending to use it again once he came back in.
When he came back in he hadn't gotten more than a few steps into the kitchen before he had to duck.

Clarissa had chucked the goddamned milk jug at him as hard as she could.
It struck the pantry door and promptly exploded. Most of the liquid missed him, the prime target, and sloshed against the pantry door. After a lengthy exchange of hysterics, she had stormed off, one arm cradling her belly as she went.

It had gotten much worse since then. The sudden outrageous tantrums. The violent anger. He had tried to avoid her as much as possible but that just made things worse. He had tried to ask her many times if she thought it could be the baby, just messing around with her head like they have a tendency to do.
It had been a nightmare. He would be relief to just have it out already.

Then just a few hours ago he'd come home from work a little early and found her in the bathtub.
At first he had been angry. Furious even. But only for a moment. Then his heart was sick at the sight. This was the woman he had fallen in love with and decided to marry. The sweet girl he met one day standing in line for an Alice in Chains concert had been laying quietly in the tub for what the paramedics had said couldn’t have been less than an hour and a half with a vertical cut in her wrist about three inches in diameter.

They had said it was a miracle she was alive. And even more of a miracle the baby was still breathing.

One of the paramedics, a black middle-aged man with a shitload of freckles across the bridge of his nose had made the sign of the trinity as he left Jeremiah in the emergency room hallway, stunned.
It wasn't a damn miracle though. That baby knew it had to come into the world and not a damn thing was going to stop it. Not even a straight razor and a bottle of Vermouth.

His finger was about to hit send on a text to Mathias, explaining the situation was under control. Things were going as planned. That they had just hit a snag, but then he felt something shift in his chest.

The pain didn't hit him at first, mostly pressure and the sudden sensation of something sliding inside of him. He looked down and saw something silver that glinted in the soft, subdued light of the waiting room.

A steel fin had grown out of his chest.

Then the pain hit as the finely grained, precisely sharped blade of the scythe was drawn out of him. He felt it slide through him against his own freshly cleaved bone, muscle, and tendon.
Jeremiah dropped to his knees. He held his hands in front of him, staring as a fine red mist began to accumulate on them. He blinked once, twice. His vision was hazy and from somewhere far away, perhaps years away, he heard someone screaming. Maybe his wife. Maybe him.
Then all sound fell away except one low pulse that got lower, and lower, and lower.

thump-thump...thump-thump...thump-thump...
The room suddenly flipped around, and turned and turned, tilted up—down.

One last seesaw tilt and Jeremiah screamed but no sound escaped his lips. From across the room he watched as his headless body fell neck first into the glass coffee table.

******

The maker-man stepped out into the hospital corridor. A candystriper rushed towards him, her eyes wide.

She wouldn't run, even though receiving 613B needed help. Needed it bad. She wouldn't run not because it was a safety hazard, though it was. She wouldn't run because it made patients nervous to see a nurse running through the hallways at two o’clock in the morning.

The maker-man knew this and he knew much more about the candystriper she she approached him but did not see him. He knew she was nineteen years old, that her name was Xana Marquez. He knew she was from a small town in Venezuela called Bella Hermosa. Not raised, only born there. He knew she was not full Hispanic, although she claimed to be. He knew when she was eight years old fer father, Alec Marquez had taken her out boating and made her do bad things to herself. He knew her father had gone to prison for what he had done, and he knew that he had died in prison after serving only forty-three days at the hands of an inmate who had a renowned issue with 'child molesting pervos'.
He knew these things like they were his own.

The candystriper ran past the maker-man, mere inches away in fact but did not even blink in eye in his direction. Her eyes were focused ahead, locked on the door to 613B.
The maker-man extended a slim, white finger; the tip of which grazed a lock of Xana's chestnut hair.
Xana stopped hurrying.

She stood in the hallway, thirty feet from 613B. The receiving bag and towels she carried fell at her feet as her fingertips relaxed, becoming beautifully numb. They were someone else s fingers. Someone else's hands. And that was just fine.

Someone else's hand lifted into the air then came slamming down across Xana's cheek. A tear welled in her left eye then tripped over her eyelid. It fell, resting on her trembling lower lip.
The maker-man watched as she opened the door to a supply closet and went inside. He smiled, setting a portion of his consciousness to the task.

Inside the supply closet, Xana's fingers worked fretfully. Leaning against the door, she rested her head against a package of hand-towels hanging on a rack. She concentrated on a cluttered shelf lined carelessly with cleaning supplies as she recited, “I'm daddy's little girl.” over and over again to a National Geographic calendar tacked onto the wall.

An orderly named Caleb Newall would find her almost two hours later, her eyes then rolled up to whites, her voice little more than a soft, terrible squeak.

******

The maker-man's fingers closed around the door handle of room 613B. The door opened silently onto a scene of panic, frustration, and fear. Clarissa's legs had been strapped tightly to the swing-out stirrup leg holders of the hospital bed. Her face was a horrific mask of fear and rage, eyes as wide as saucers, her teeth bared. There was a purple lump raised about a half an inch on her right temple; a gift from the stainless steel bedpan she'd tried smashing her skull in with a little less than five minutes ago.
An orderly by the name of Cedric held her shoulders down as best he could while beads of sweat threatened to thicken and drop down onto Clarissa's knotted brow.

Her blonde hair was damp and it clung like dew-wet spiderwebs on the sheets and pillows, on her cheeks and forehead. She spat and hissed, cussed and gurgled. Her throat was a filthy cave and dark words flew out like bats.
.
No one noticed the entry of a robed figure wielding scythe and Femur bone. A figure that strode up to Clarissa’s bedside and placed a cool, parchment white hand on her chest.
Moments later the orderly's job got much easier. The straps were no longer taut. They were now slack against the wet, tussled sheets.
Clarissa's jaw relaxed, frozen in a strange semi-smile.
Doctor Lem Castroba looked up from between her legs. The monitor read a single, unbroken yellow line against the black screen. The numbers all read 0-.
“Crash car--” Dr. Castroba tried to say before his face was slashed with a black line. His mouth pursed instantly, instinctively against the sudden jettison. The attending nurse, Bernice Cechin's mouth unhinged. It hung there like a screen door from a broken jam.

Then there was a sound like fabric ripping.

Dr. Castroba's eyes went slack, the pupil's becoming orbs, then space stations.
A low whine began to escape his lips. It was the most his throat would offer. He felt a scream well up but there was no power to push it forward.

The maker-man took a spot right behind and a little to the right of the doctor. They could not see him but he was sure they felt him. His presence was unmistakable.
He smiled as the child began to cry from within its fleshy manacle. The maker-man felt a sudden rush of very human emotion overcome him. He felt he had to reach into the dead woman, excavating the blissful little infant into his arms before the One above could smite the both of them.
But he knew such things were foolish. This was his time. His moment.

His son.