Which suddenly faded to complete darkness.
She awoke a few seconds or minutes or a year later.
Chloe was someplace else now, not the utility room, but in a larger room, no, a tunnel. Hard to see, since the only illumination was a weak light above her and the focused beam from the masked insect man's forehead. It blinded her every time he looked at her face. She was on her back again, staring upward, and he was kneeling over her.
But what she'd been expecting, dreading, wasn't happening. In a way, though, this was worse because that - ripping her clothes off and then what would follow - would at least have been understandable. It would have fallen into a known category of horror.
/> This was different.
Yes, her blouse was tugged up but only slightly, exposing her belly from navel to the bottom of her bra, which was still chastely in place. Her skirt was tucked tight around her thighs, almost as if he didn't want there to be any suggestion of impropriety.
Leaning forward, hunched, intent, he was staring with those calm eyes of his, those insect eyes, at her smooth, white belly skin the way somebody would look over a canvas at MoMA: head tilted, getting the right angle to appreciate Jackson Pollock's spatter, Magritte's green apple.
He then slowly extended his index finger and stroked her flesh. His yellow finger. He splayed his palm and brushed back and forth. He pinched and raised peaks of skin between his thumb and forefinger. He let go and watched the mounds flatten back.
His insect mouth curved into a faint smile.
She thought he said, 'Very nice.' Or maybe that was the smoke-ring caterpillar talking or the bug on his arm.
She heard a faint hum of vibration and he looked at his watch. Another hum, from elsewhere. Then he glanced at her face and saw her eyes. He seemed surprised, maybe, that she was awake. Turning, he tugged into view a backpack and removed from it a filled hypodermic syringe. He stabbed her again, this time in a vein in her arm.
The warmth flowed, the fear lessened. As darkness trickled around her, sounds vanishing, she saw his yellow fingers, his caterpillar fingers, his insect claws, reach into the backpack once more and carefully remove a small box. He set it beside her exposed skin with the same reverence she remembered her priest displaying as he'd placed the silver vessel holding the blood of Christ on the altar last Sunday during Holy Communion.
CHAPTER 2
Billy Haven shut off his American Eagle tattoo machine to save the batteries.
He squatted back. He examined the work so far.
Eyes scanning.
Less-than-ideal conditions but the art was good.
You always put everything you could into your mods. From the simplest cross on a waitress's shoulder to an American flag on a contractor's chest, complete with multiple folds and three colors and blowin' in the wind, you inked like Michelangelo laboring away on the church ceiling. God and Adam, finger skin to finger skin.
Now, here, Billy could've rushed. Considering the circumstances, nobody would have blamed him.
But no. The mod had to be a Billy Mod. What they called it back home, in his shop.
He felt a tickle, sweat.
Lifted the dentist's face guard and with his gloved hand wiped sweat from his eyes, put the tissue into a pocket. Carefully, so no fibers would flake off. Telltale fibers that could be as dangerous to him as the inking was to Chloe.
The face shield was cumbersome. But necessary. His tattoo instructor had taught him this lesson. He'd had Billy slip one on before the boy had even picked up a machine for the first time. Billy, like most young apprentices, had protested: Got eye protection. Don't need more. It wasn't cool. Wearing a dorky mask was like giving newbies, in for their first inking, a pussy ball to squeeze.
Tat up. Get over it.
But then his instructor had Billy sit beside him while he inked a client. A little work: Ozzy Osbourne's face. For some reason.
Man, the blood and fluid that spattered! The face guard was as flecked as a pickup's windshield in August.
'Be smart, Billy. Remember.'
'Sure.'
Ever since, he'd assumed that each customer was ripe with hep C and B and HIV and whatever other sexual diseases were popular.
And for the mods he'd be inking over the next few days, of course, he couldn't afford any blowback.