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MEANWHILE, IN MUMBAI.
Horror descended on Indy as she listened.
Not to the dying woman’s blood-soaked whispers but to her own heart.
A heart which was humming gently behind her breastbone, beating with a steady pulsing rhythm that seemed at odds with what Indy thought she should be feeling, thought shewasfeeling.
She distinctly remembered her heart almost exploding in her chest at Ice’s urgent call to shoot, dammit, just shoot. She’d scrambled across the bed with drug-fueled desperation, grabbed her service weapon off the side-table, then turned and shot at the hazy hallucinatory figure beyond the bedroom door.
Yes, her heart had been pounding erratically then, hammering inside her as she stumbled to the bedroom door and looked through it and saw what appeared to be the very same woman from Indy’s waking-dream lying on the carpet and spewing blood from her mouth, snorting blood from her nostrils, oozing blood from her breast, her left breast, that same left breast which Indy had seen—no,felt—just moments ago as she lay in that big bed, burrowed into Ice’s big body, lost in the bigness of it all, the vastness of it all, the madness of it all.
“We have to go, Indy.” Ice was pulling her off the woman now, the woman she was certain was her mother even though of course it wasn’t her mother, couldn’t be her mother, couldn’t be anything but a druggie delusion, a hallucinatory hologram. “I’ve got all our stuff. Get your shoes on. We’re leaving. Now, Indy. Right fucking now.”
“But . . .” Indy started to say as Ice ripped her away from her mother’s arms, dragged her to her feet. “Did you hear what she just said, Ice? Did you hear all that? About Benson, about . . . aboutme! She has the same memory that I just told you about, Ice. How can that be? Oh, hell, I’m losing it, Ice.Did she really say all that or am I hearing things?”
“I don’t fucking know.” Ice held her steady in his arms as they both looked down at the petite fifty-something woman in a blood-drenched hotel staff uniform looking up at them—no, not them but her, looking at Indy, lookingintoIndy, the broken woman somehow hanging on to life like she was waiting for something, couldn’t leave without hearing something, without feeling something, without saying something, something more than the outpouring of garbled thirty-year-old history that Indy could barely remember even though she’d taken it all in, recorded it all in some functional-but-inaccessible part of her brain, storing it with mechanical efficiency, a written record to be perused later.
“She’s saying something, Ice.” Indy wrenched herself out of his grip, got down on her knees, leaned close to the woman again as that terrifyingly certain recognition made her head spin worse than any drug ever could. “What is it?”
“I’m sorry,” came the blood-throttled whisper through pleading, trembling lips, pain-glazed eyes showing a tortured soul yearning for its final release, begging to be set free. “Will you forgive me?”
No, came the coldly silent, violently sudden, darkly shocking answer from somewhere inside Indy.No.
A single word that exploded like a gunshot from some cold dark part of Indy that she didn’t know existed, still wasn’t sure existed, couldn’t possibly exist because it wasn’t her, couldn’t be her,shouldn’tbe her.
Indy tried to fight it back, beat it down, repress it right back to its dark hiding place in her sickeningly steady heart. She tried to smile, tried to nod, tried to say yes, sure, of course I forgive you, no harm done, so what if you smothered me against your poisonous breast, so what if you came back to finish the fucking job thirty years later, so what if I was just an inconvenience, a tool, a prop in your play. No worries Mama, it’s cool Mommy, totally awesome to say you’re sorry now that you’re dying, to beg like perhaps I begged as you smothered me to death, as I wondered what I had done wrong in the first few minutes of my new life, yeah, absolutely reasonable that now when you’re dying like the murderous bitch you’ve always been and suddenly want fuckingforgivenessso you can get into the kingdom of heaven I should just smile and say yes Mama, all right Mama, go with God mama, you’re forgiven Mama, you’re free Mama, don’t let that pesky guilt weigh you down Mama, I love you Mama, I hate you Mama, damn you Mama, damn you to hell Mama.
Indy convulsed like she’d been electrocuted, her eyes almost popping out of their sockets, her tongue almost choking her with its venom, her thoughts indistinguishable from barbs of exhilarating viciousness pricking up from every speck of consciousness in her mind and body, heart and soul.
Indy tried to find her way back, but she couldn’t even see straight. Her vision was a psychedelic mass of black-red spirals and purple-yellow spinners and ugly blue-green tendrils moving like snakes doing a death-dance inside her head. She tried to tell herself it was the drug, just the drug, that it would wear off and she’d see that this woman wasn’t her mother and the venom wasn’t her own and all of it was just frenzied fabrication, manufactured madness, imagined images, erroneous emotions.
But Indy couldn’t break away, couldn’t turn away, was locked in by an overwhelming darkness that was unconscionably natural, disgustingly delicious, perversely pleasurable, lusciously liberating, like it was something she’d always carried in her, something unborn that was finally breaking through to fresh air, to freedom.
“Leave her.” Ice’s voice sounded like distant thunder rolling through the storm-clouds of her mind. “We’re leaving in thirty seconds. I’ll call down for emergency medics. They might get here in time to save her. But we need to be gone before then. Leave her, Indy. She’s not your damn mother. We’re both out of our minds on a psychotropic drug right now. None of this is what it seems. It . . . itcan’tbe.”
It can’t be but it is, Indy thought as that strange unsettling calmness oozed through her like a snake uncoiling itself within her heart, its dark oily scales moving smooth and silent as it came alive within her soul, its length stretching across eons of time, fathoms of space, connecting past and future into one infinite stream of clarifying insight.
Now her spiral-spectacles cleared up just enough to see Ice furiously clearing the room. He was collecting the broken bits of what looked like his phone. He’d grabbed his knife and sunglasses and all the weapons and the single shell-casing from the solitary shot she’d fired. He disappeared into the bathroom, presumably to check if they’d left anything behind.
Just the real world, Indy thought as she turned her attention back to that woman waiting to leave the real world. That’s all we’ve left behind, Ice. The real world.
And what I thought was me.
Because right now there’s someone else alive in me.
An angry child.
A furious fetus.
A rugrat seeking retribution.
Darkness swept over Indy like a wave, and before she understood what was happening she was already doing it, reaching out with those tiny little fingers that were once powerless, that little girl’s rage seething inside Indy as she placed her left hand over Mama’s mouth, pinched Mama’s nostrils closed with the fingers of her right hand, rested her vengeful little baby head against Mama’s torn left breast.
And waited.
She waited for conscience to stop her, but it didn’t.