War Machine - 01 by Andy Remic

Author:Andy Remic [Remic, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Solaris Books
Published: 2011-10-05T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

The City of Bone

Keenan was a little boy again. He lived in a small house on a small street in a small town. The house had two bedrooms, no garden, and a sloping stone-paved back yard. His mother grew roses in pots, huge towering bushes with severe thorns and bright heavy-scented blooms of red and pink. In the summer bees came and buzzed around the flowers, and once Keenan—only eight-years-old—had been stung by a big fat bee. With tears leaving trails down his face he had run across the flags, sandals flapping, up the steep stone steps and into the kitchen. He skidded left, nostrils twitching on a strange, strange smell and then... stopped dead. His mother lay, at the bottom of the stairs, head to the ground and twisted to one side, legs still trailing up onto the lower stairs. One arm was caught beneath her, one arm tossed carelessly above her head. Her eyes were open and staring as Keenan moved close. “Mom,” he said, his bee-sting forgotten, “Mom!” and the smell came to him from that black bottomless open stinking maw, the smell that always lingered on her breath and meant she would be bad to him because of the bad things he did, and more and more often the bad things had got worse, and her punishments were more violent as bruises blossomed like black and purple flowers up and down his legs, across his back and shoulders and backside. He crouched by her and looked into dead eyes. Something went click inside his soul as understanding flooded him, and he reached out and slowly prodded the corpse. Only then did he see the blood. A pool slowly expanded beneath her head on the wooden floor from a ten-inch crack in her skull. The blood was a deep rich crimson; a little like the full-scented blooms that grew in the back yard. Keenan dipped his finger into her blood and sniffed at it, then wiped it on his shorts.

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