Milk-Blood Read online

  MILK-BLOOD

  By

  Mark Matthews

  Wicked Run Press

  MILK-BLOOD is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design by Elderlemon Design

  Edited by Richard Thomas

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © Mark Matthews and Wicked Run Press, 2014

  ISBN-13 978-0692207956

  ISBN-10 0692207953

  PRAISE FOR MILK-BLOOD

  “The originality and tension of the urban horror story, Milk-Blood is evident on every page. Matthews takes you to some very dark places, twists and turns, with the rabbit hole going deeper and deeper, until there is no way out. Not for the faint of heart, this story of love, loss, family and acceptance is a rollercoaster ride from start to finish.” — Richard Thomas, author of Staring Into the Abyss

  “What a dark, twisted and bizarre book this was. One of the most striking urban horror stories I have read in a long time.” —Author Adam Light

  “An incredibly powerful story and one of the most original horror novels I have read in years. Guaranteed to have you on the edge of your seat!”—The Horror Bookshelf

  "This is a helluva story. A discomforting tale of true inner city horrors, told by characters so real they pop off the page. Add the supernatural mix to the story and it really grabs you by the throat. Very much recommended!"

  — John F.D. Taff, author of Little Deaths

  ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

  ON THE LIPS OF CHILDREN

  “One of the scariest novels I’ve read all year.” ~The Horror News Network

  STRAY

  “Wildly empathic. Stray sings!” ~Sacha Z. Scoblic, author of Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety

  THE DAMAGE DONE

  “Weaves the truth of addiction into frightening fiction.” ~Peter Rosch, author of My Dead Friend Sarah

  “Ultimately all of us are alone in the universe — the only person we ever really know deeply is ourselves. Obviously, I’ve never been a dwarf or a princess, so when I’m writing these characters I have to try and get inside their skin and see what the world would be like from their position. It’s not always easy.” -George RR Martin

  MILK-BLOOD: The act of extracting heroin-laden blood for reinjection at a later time. It usually is one's own blood, but could also be the blood of someone who has just overdosed. It is done as "insurance" in case one's heroin supply runs out. The term is used in Neil Young's 'The Needle and the Damage Done': "milk-blood to keep from running out."

  Milk-Blood

  By Mark Matthews

  * IMPORTANT NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  The story you are about to read is entirely true. I know there was a disclaimer that called this a piece of fiction and that any resemblance to an actual person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. It has to say that. So now if you are damaged while reading the story, I am no longer liable.

  I am the author of three novels as well as a social worker and a therapist. Exposure to such a myriad of human experience provides fodder for writing material, but my ideas for novels come at me from all angles. The ones that seem to stick are those summoned not just from individuals I meet, but from settings. Setting radiates energy into the air. Every place has its own music if you listen, and I try to hear it and capture it. That’s how my first three novels came forth.

  This story you are reading relied on a place I was able to easily summon into my brain. I invited the characters who lived there into my heart so I could write from theirs.

  Where is this?

  Detroit. On a specific urban street called Brentwood where magnificent, ancient houses that once gleamed with pride have begun to crumble. A neighborhood where if you have fresh tags on your license plates you have to bring them inside or else they may be stolen. Where if you bring a new TV into your house it will get ripped off soon enough, for watchful eyes are everywhere. Where families fear letting their kids on the street not just for the street thugs, but for the stray dogs.

  I have visited families on downtrodden streets of Detroit as a social worker more than once. One family is easily summoned from my memory, partly due to the burned down house next door to them. The burns were fresh, it seemed, since you could see where the flames had been flickering out the windows and charbroiled burnt marks remained. It was one of many abandoned houses that would at best be boarded up, but never demolished.

  My client was a mother who lived with her teenage son and the rotting remains of the house next door were just part of their problems. My job as a therapist was to stop the family decay and help the family stay intact. Many words were said during our in-home therapy session, but the ones that stick with me were said by the mother. “I wish he would be more grateful, I should have had an abortion.”

  These words were terrible for the son to hear, but I did my best to open my soul to all her life experiences that lead up to this statement. “Advanced accurate empathy” is the clinical term for the ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of another, and to put oneself in their internal world and perceptions.

  At that moment, I felt an onslaught of heat, like the flames from next door were still flickering and came into me. The feelings from these flames guide me as I write each and every word that follows from here.

  Chapter One: Zachary - 10 am, Day after Christmas

  Puddles of mud.

  After she confessed her eyes became puddles of mud, like tears had fallen upon dirty eye sockets and left a muddy mess.

  “Okay, yes, it was Puckett. We had sex,” she squeaked. “Three times only. I didn’t mean to. Will you still take care of us?”

  Latrice only confessed because she was caught. The paternity test showed a 99 percent chance that Zach wasn’t the father. She held the child of Puckett in her womb.

  “Will you take care of us?” she asked again. It wasn’t a question. She was giving him a challenge. He took care of what he loved. His mother had been his to tend to for years, and they both got by with the help of some pills. He would take care of her until one of them died, because that’s what he did. But Latrice with another man’s child inside of her?

  “I will take care of things,” he answered, but he didn’t say the rest that he wanted to, which was, “Because the day I fucked you I caught an infection and now I have it for life.”

  “What about Puckett? Will you do him like you usually do?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  He had to. Because now Puckett has the infection too, and he was sure to come around running his mouth about being the father of Latrice’s child.

  Puckett spent three more days alive before Zach found him. Suffocation by choking had always been his choice when he wanted others to think for a moment about whose hands were killing them. His hands came alive with power when wrapped around someone’s throat. Like squeezing a loaf of soft bread he could squeeze necks, but when his hands were around Puckett’s bulging windpipe, he eased up. He wanted to hear him talk. He wanted a confession. When one didn’t come and Puckett played stupid, he squeezed until he saw a shade of blue in Puckett’s face and his body danced on the edge of death. Then he relaxed his fingers and let him gasp for air and come back to life. Dipping him in, and pulling him out. He could have done it all day, and nearly did, until the shade of blue seemed to burst and no more air was needed.

  Later, Puckett would swim deep. The Detroit River doesn’t give up its dead easy, and it was a better option than his burn and bury method. Last time he burned something was when he fire-bombed the house across the street with a Molotov cocktail made of vodk
a (100 proof). The whole block around Brentwood was rained on with ashes and soot of the boy who died that night. Latrice loved it when she could get into his head and make him kill, except for this time when a boy had died. But now she was giving birth to a new child, a baby girl, to replace him on this street. Spirit in, spirit out.

  Labor pains doubled her over in pain a month before her due date, and Zach drove her to the hospital at 4:30 am on a Tuesday. The delivery room was lit like a spaceship and reminded Zach of his trip to Vegas. No windows, no escape, and you won’t leave without being changed. He couldn’t tell if it was day or night as the hours passed. He slipped out more than once to chew on his own supply of Percocets or Vicodins or Xanax, and came back feeling cleansed each time.

  What he saw was a foreign liquid flowing from between Latrice’s propped up legs. It smelled of something spoiled being cooked, something ominous—bigger than her, bigger than this hospital could handle. Latrice went inward into silent agony at times, at other times yelled not with words but noises. She dripped sweat, spasmed, and when the head crowned, Zach felt both nauseous bile and warm shivers of hope.

  There was a one percent chance that the baby girl would have his ebony flesh. The miracle waited in his chest, thumping, wanting to explode. But on first sight the thump died. She did not. In fact, the baby’s flesh was a veiny blue color and so pale it was nearly see-through.

  A heart condition kept the child in intensive care for days, in an incubator, looking like a blue frog ready to be dissected. Zach peeked in at her and tried to make eye contact, did make eye contact. This infant seemed to be his very own heart beating in front of him, shriveled and alien, with doctors prodding it to keep it alive.

  “She’s going to die,” Latrice repeated again and again. “I can’t take this, I can’t see her. You do it, you stay here.”

  He did, and he slept in the hospital on plastic pillows while Latrice went home to watch over his mother who lived with them on 618 Brentwood Drive.

  His lone finger in the sterile glove touched the infant girl’s forehead.

  Where’s my mother? She asked him with tiny motions of her incubated arms.

  Soon. Soon you will see her. I am here. This is how it is.

  Days later, talking hospital heads gave him instructions and medicine and appointment reminders, and he brought the child home to Latrice. Life had grown stronger in the nameless infant, but she was still barely bigger than the palm of his hand. At home the child shrieked and wailed as if it hurt just to be alive.

  “This is not how it’s supposed to be,” Latrice said, watching Zach holding the wailing child at 3:36 am in the rocker on a Tuesday.

  “This is how it’s going to be.”

  He slept with the 10 day old baby flesh on his own. The skin was so thin you could see her insides, like it wasn’t fully done growing and she was thrown into the world before her time. Their bodies warmed each other and he rocked her on his chest until 4:25 am. She fell asleep against the beat of his heart.

  On her mother’s chest, she refused to take the breast and would not sup at the nipple introduced to her mouth. Latrice seemed as scared of the child as the child was of it.

  Medications the baby did take. Zach injected them into an IV port in her neck. Warnings from doctors rang in his ears. Too large of an injection could lead to asphyxiation. Failure to administer would do the same. She was already like so many who lived on this street and needed a daily drug to face each day.

  Latrice curled up into a ball much of the time. Her hair, unwashed for days, became stringy as a broom. Pill bottles with the prescription labels rubbed off sat on the counter. Oxys or Xanax or both.

  The infant tears came at night—sometimes for hours, non-stop. When they got too much and it seemed the child herself might shatter, the parents would wrap themselves in jackets against the cold and take dark trips to the hospital, only to be sent back home again. Sleeplessness weighed them down like soaking wet clothes.

  “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be,” she said.

  “This is how it is,” he answered.

  “No. No. You can take care of this. Take care of her like you do. Make it like it was before. She’s not meant to be alive.” Her eyes filled with tears once again. They pleaded to him. The infection bubbled in his veins.

  Killing again would be easy.

  He walked around the house, pacing, gaining energy with each stride, summoning up the courage to do the deed. This one needed to be fast and clean, unlike Puckett.

  When he held the pillow over her face, he smothered her with his whole body weight to make it quick, but it may not have been needed. Things were fragile already, and they were just tiny breaths to take away this time.

  The body fit easily into his trunk, the night air cold around him. The car seats were frigid leather. Soon the car would heat up, and things would be better. He whispered middle of the night words to his passenger in the back seat.

  “We’re taking mommy to her grave. Then we’ll be home, and I will give you a name, and I will take care of you as long as I live.”

  My infection is gone, he thought, as he drove with the body ready to burn and bury.

  *NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR - As both a social worker and a writer, I have always believed in the adage that everyone is the hero of their own story. None of us view ourselves as an evil-doer. If there is evil being done, it is for revenge or it is justified based on a hurt done to us. So I write the same scene from inside the head of Latrice.

  Chapter Two: Latrice - 10 am, Day after Christmas

  Fluid filled her eyes and burned like acid. It gathered in her eye sockets and sizzled the color right off of her pupils before spilling over the side. Big teardrops rolled down her cheeks.

  This was all wrong. All of it was wrong and her gut hurt so bad she wondered if the baby would be vomited right out of her.

  The baby was causing this pain. It grew in her like an ulcer.

  “Puckett,” she said. “It was Puckett.”

  The words felt good to say. She blamed Puckett. She knew he hated Puckett, she knew he would believe it was Puckett, and she knew he would kill Puckett like he had killed for her before.

  The first killing was her stepfather. Shot him in the head and then burned and buried both the gun and the body. Since that time, it was like she was set free. Like her prince had kissed her cheek and woke her up. Now she was connected to Zach forever. She was in his skin. She was in his blood. When they fucked, she left part of her own spirit in his bloodstream. She was quite sure his veins were lined with parts of her. Sometimes Zack hated that but she knew it gave him purpose. Without her to serve what would he do? Without lives to take, what would his own life mean? Nothing. Nothing at all.

  Making people her puppets is what she was good at. She’d been getting in peoples’ heads her whole life.

  Zach had fire in his eyes for Puckett now, and Puckett deserved to die slowly for a million crimes, but his seed had never been inside of her, and he certainly wasn’t there when she was walking by 617 Brentwood Street.

  617 Brentwood was now nearly destroyed, bombed out by Zach who fucked the job up being wrecked on Xanax and vodka. It was messy. His target was someone else, but the man was not home, only the man’s son was there. Left alone at 8 years old. She hated to think about it. She looked at the rotting timbers of the house sliding and disintegrating into the earth, day by day, and she had to do some quick self-surgery on her psyche.

  A tragedy. Who would do such a thing? I am glad it was someone else, and not the man I am with.

  It wasn’t hard to distance herself when she looked at the blackened embers.

  Why didn’t she move from this street?

  Because families stay here forever. You don’t get out of here. Everyone on this street is related. Somebody in a house dies, a relative scoops the house up, pays some taxes on it, and invites the other half of the family over to stay.

  Seeing the charred remains of the house was like seeing the in
sides of someone’s body. Like their skin was tore off and just the guts and skeleton were left. It looked ugly. The front window seemed like a mouth, and the big dormer window on the second story was the eye that looked over the whole street. Now the eye was blotted out and the glass was broken. The white was charcoal black. Bars on the windows remained and it looked like a vacant jail cell. The front porch had started to sink.

  Xanax and liquor put Zach into a raging blackout, but somehow he passed the police interview two days later. Stuffed animals and balloons had been placed on the front lawn by grieving neighbors for a week or so, but they became dirty, forgotten, and now were long gone.

  The kid didn’t burn, the smoke killed him, she told herself. Whoever did this, was an evil man, but it wasn’t her Zach.

  She forced the thoughts from her skull and was ready to move on when she saw a light brown boot in the overgrown grass. She tracked the boot up and saw the leg inside a pair of dirty jeans.

  Dead or alive? Was her first question. Alive was her quick answer, since a dead body would have been hidden deeper in the grass, like the last one they found here stuck under some trash. If it was buried nobody would have bothered.

  This brown boot was either part of a sleeping street person or just some wasted fuck. She needed to walk by. She was carrying a plastic grocery bag with five packages of Ramen noodles, a quart of milk, and some lucky charms. The milk made the bag way too heavy. Why do they always ask if she wants her milk in a bag? Like they are too lazy to put the damn thing in the bag themselves.

  She could feel the plastic stretching, slipping, ready to break. She moved her fingers for a better grip but needed to get home before the bag burst and everything splattered.

  But something stopped her. The body. She had to look. She took a few steps closer.