The Woman Who Tried to Be Normal Read online

  She fell backwards, hit the ground with a deafening thud, with the animal restraining pole still attached by its noose around her neck. She didn’t move after that, or close her eyes even after minutes had passed with them wide open. I knew she had gone even before her body toppled backwards because the drumbeats I’d been hearing in my ears had stopped way before that.

  Like it was with Daniel, Lilly began looking like a bag of meat and bones that had once contained the essence of Lilly but no longer did. She looked the same as always, and yet not.

  I thought I would taste muddy grass or blood or beef soon enough but as the seconds ticked by, it became increasingly apparent I was tasting nothing at all. Again. I was just blank, like Lilly’s eyes now were. The only thing running across my mind was how short and pointless life really was.

  There was Lilly, looking twenty-one as always, but gone now. A couple of minutes ago, we had plans together. We had been running around together, interacting with each other, strengthening our relationship, but that was all over now. Wiped out by four quick bullets. All her achievements, her conquests, her stories of triumph meant nothing now that she had succumbed to death anyway. She had lost the fight in the end, and like Daniel, she was now nothing but a big waste. Like all the people I’d known who’d died before her, she would soon be forgotten. Her whole life would now be something that once happened but no longer really mattered at all.

  I began to understand then, for the first time ever, why so many people wanted to live forever. It wasn’t because life was worth living. It was only because dying made everything you’d ever done totally meaningless. Man’s desire for immortality had more to do with delaying the inevitable than it did with making the most out of what was.

  It was especially hard for me to see Lilly go because I always presumed she would outlive me. I always thought I would have been able to count on her to deal with my body upon my death, in the manner I wanted. Her being dead showed me life was not at all predictable. Her being dead showed me how even the smartest of human beings could make presumptions that are inherently flawed.

  On my right, I heard harps. I turned in the direction of the sound, without lifting my eyes from the cold, hard ground, and asked, in German, “Why?”

  Wanda laughed. “Look at you, little Hella. All grown up now and talking like a normal person. With a face that’s so much better than the one you were cursed with. And you, sleeping around with men, and women? Who would have thought you would have feelings?”

  At last, I tasted it again. Sauerkraut. It soon tasted like sauerkraut mixed with water. I guess I was relieved to know that I did indeed have feelings after all.

  “Tell me, my dearest Hella, why didn’t you come get her earlier? That’s so unlike you. So unlike Lilly’s little pet.”

  “I haven’t been her pet in a long time. And frankly, you don’t get to judge. You’re as bad as she was. What you did to Violet, Daniel, all those other innocent people—you’re no saint yourself, Wanda.”

  Brown squiggles appeared in front of her icy cold eyes. “I didn’t kill Daniel Ashlock. I thought it was you. Or maybe one of your little freaks?”

  “Why would I? Why would they?”

  Wanda shrugged. “Because you’ve all spent too much time around Lilly? Because you’ve all become just like her? Evil?”

  The animal restraining noose around my neck tightened and the handgun that was still floating in mid-air turned its barrel in the direction of me.

  “I didn’t kill him, and they wouldn’t, I swear.”

  “You would swear, wouldn’t you? Just like Lilly always did.”

  The floating gun cocked itself. Again.

  “You need me alive, Wanda. Remember? I can give you everything you want. You know that.”

  While speaking, I stuffed both my hands into the pockets of my dress pants and felt for the two metal tubes I had, one in each pocket, to restore the confidence I could feel was fast being depleted by the amount of sauerkraut filling up in my mouth.

  They were cold like ice and remained so even after I curled my hands into fists over their hard surfaces and gave them all of my palms’ warmth. I began shivering a little, partly because of how cold they were but mainly because the freezing night wind dashing across my face had activated my body’s self-warming mechanisms and resulted in my muscles trembling to generate heat. I also had the problem of sand from the ground flying into and around my eyes, making me squint and blink more than I would have liked to be doing in the presence of Wanda.

  She, on the other hand, was bothered by neither cold nor sand. That plume of blood-red smoke was still running out the top of her head like smoke from a busy chimney and giving in to the impulses it was making her feel was all she cared about then. “I don’t need you, Hella. Not anymore. I have technology now and access to all the best brains in the world. Together, we could get everything you’ve been hiding from me from Lilly’s body. And yours.”

  The trigger on the handgun moved backwards all by itself. Two loud claps sounded. One in my ears, one outside.

  At the speed of light, I fished out one of the metal tubes from my pocket and used it to shield myself from the bullet that was headed for my forehead. That metal tube was only about three times the size of the bullet and, although long, was not very wide so to put it in line with a bullet was like trying to hit a baseball travelling at 762 metres per second with a bat. A normal human being with an average rate of movement would never have been able to get it done, given that I was only just over a metre away from the barrel of the handgun, but, because I wasn’t a normal human being and could move faster than the speed of light if I needed to, I could interact with the bullet in a manner that felt to me no different from moving in slow motion. I had the speed of a mantis shrimp, amplified. Move, aim, intercept, that was all it took.

  I managed it almost effortlessly. The bullet crashed square into the middle of my metal tube and ricocheted back towards where it came, at an angle which led it right towards Wanda’s head.

  She dodged it in the nick of time but loosened her grip on the animal restraining pole she had been holding in doing so.

  My chance. I yanked my neck to the left and, by pulling at the noose attached to it, dragged the pole out of her hands. At top speed, I flew over to Lilly’s body, unscrewed the cap of the metal tube I was holding and emptied its contents—fluoroantimonic acid, my go-to acid for object removal—over the length of her body while I lifted the noose of the animal restraining pole off my neck.

  Lilly’s body corroded the second the acid made contact with her flesh—a response caused by the explosive reaction of the water within her body mixing with the acid—and sizzled and fizzled like meat in a frying pan while simultaneously disappearing into nothingness. Within seconds, half her body was all that remained of her and by the end of a few minutes, every trace of the person that had been Lilly was gone from the face of the Earth forever. All that was left was the most horrific and unnatural of smells coming out of the smoke that was in the space of the place her body had been in.

  “No!” The smoke that had been oozing out the top of Wanda’s head was now a widening, mushroom-shaped cloud. “No!!!”

  The handgun darted abruptly into Wanda’s hand and she immediately turned it in my direction, curled her index finger over its trigger and pushed down multiple times with ferocity.

  I flew away from her at once. Past cactus and bunch grasses and dry bushes; past pinyon pine, mountain mahogany and juniper trees; dodging bullets left and right as I went.

  She flew right after me, powered by rage and hate and all of the horrible emotions that had led to the destruction of many a human being in the course of history. “I will kill you for that, freak!” she screamed. “I will kill you, and your three monstrous girls, and your monstrous mice, and everyone you love if it’s the last thing I do!”

  “You’re just as much of a freak as we are, remember?”

  I flew up a mountain I c
ame upon in an attempt to shake her but she came right after me. She was taller, more muscular and simply too determined to get me. Nothing I tried put any distance between myself and her.

  “I am nothing like you!”

  She got closer with every passing second. I was already moving at the speed of light, no longer visible to the average human being, but then, so was she. We were physically equal, which was bad news for me. In that second, I hated that I was just the same as her. I wished I had been that little bit different, that little bit faster.

  But, as always, wishing did nothing for me. Wanda got a bullet into my right leg when we were halfway up the mountain and another into the back of my arm when we were three quarters of the way up. When we were just inches away from the top, she got three more bullets into my other leg and one into my hip.

  Eventually, she got five bullets into the back of my neck, one of which ran right through one of my jugular veins.

  Real blood began spilling from my throat into the crevices of my mouth. I knew it was real and not just another emotion of anger because I could see it spilling onto my shoes, onto the sand before my feet.

  I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay conscious for very much longer so I decided to stop running and give Wanda exactly what she wanted.

  Ten bullets hit me right in the middle of the forehead the second I turned around to face her, five of those bullets passing through the exact same hole in my skull. Clearly, Wanda had been practicing for this day.

  I tried my best to stay standing as a searing pain began to engulf multiple parts of my body. It was hard to concentrate on what was around me then, much less think properly about what I needed to do next. While I could vaguely see Wanda standing some distance away from me, I could no longer see the stream of smoke coming out the top of her head even though, logically, I was aware it wouldn’t have disappeared yet. My senses had gone dull and pain was starting to be all that I was aware of... I decided it was time for me to die.

  I let myself fall backwards as Lilly had done and willed myself to keep it together, just for that little bit longer. It was too painful to think with that pounding, scorching pain in my brain and it was difficult to keep my eyes on the blurry humanoid figure that was now looming above me. Blood was gushing out of my mouth like a waterfall and I found myself gasping against my will.

  “Thanks for everything,” the blurry humanoid figure said. “Goodbye.”

  A smaller, darker but equally blurry shape appeared in front of my face, between me and the humanoid figure.

  It was definitely time to die. I gathered what little strength I had left, reached for the metal tube I still had in my other pocket and unscrewed its cap while pulling it out of my pocket.

  “No!” the blurry humanoid screamed.

  Yes, Wanda. Yes. In one abrupt move, I sat up and poured a quarter tube of acid over my toes then screamed as the acid ate away my feet as it had done with Lilly’s body.

  It felt as if I had been covered in burning hot coals, if you must know. By far one of the worst sensations I have ever experienced to this day.

  “Stop!” The blurry humanoid figure lunged towards my tube at top speed so I flung the remaining three quarters of acid in its general direction.

  I saw it flinch and back away so I took the chance to roll towards the edge of the mountain, beyond which I knew there would be a two thousand metre drop.

  By the time I made it over, I had no legs. The acid had dissolved half of me away and I could feel my flesh, veins and muscles being exposed to cold and sand. I felt very light, possibly only a third of the weight I had been before, and I felt simply no longer whole.

  The humanoid figure screamed. More from anger than fear, I think. She screamed again when I turned the mouth of the metal tube I had in my hand towards my chest, tipped myself over the edge of the mountain and plunged into the clutter of vegetation all the way down below.

  Just to make sure she understood what was going on, I screamed another time before hitting the ground, exactly as a normal person would when being eaten away by acid while still alive.

  Just like how all those normal people screamed when I watched them being eaten away by acid, while still alive.

  Chapter 35

  4 August 1975, Monday

  Ten minutes later, I was in a dark cave a good distance away from the mountain I flung myself off, curled in the shape of a ball on dirt, fighting a genuine urge to scream.

  My thighs, or rather the bloody, oozing stumps that used to be my thighs, were sending endless signals of pain all the way to the back of my neck, as were the clumps of bullets in my forehead, neck and limbs. I was pain personified. Pain was everywhere, even in my thoughts. I had to sink my head into my arm to muffle the sound of the screams I couldn’t control. I felt nothing when I sank my teeth into my own flesh with all that pain going on. My skin was dripping sweat everywhere and I was shaking like a plant in the wind.

  Get the bullets out. I knew I had to or risk an infection or inflammatory response. Better now while there were still holes than later when the paths they took on the way in healed and closed up.

  I took a deep breath, focused my mind on where the bullets were then used my mind again to guide them out of the very same holes they made when making their way through me.

  One close to the surface at the back of my neck popped out the way a blackhead would from its pore on a nose. Another came out my back, travelling like a worm through its tunnel. I grunted into my arm the whole time. Doing so hurt and felt… very strange, frankly. Like defecating through the flesh, or having a baby. Once the bullets came out though, I felt way better. Still in pain but less.

  I think I took at least fifteen minutes to get all the bullets out. Towards the end they felt as if they were jumping out of me like eggs from a chicken. They landed on the sand with tiny little thuds.

  Soft thuds. Not loud enough for Wanda to hear, thank goodness. I tasted tap water when I was done and only then did I let myself think more about my lack of legs.

  They would heal, or they would not; only time would tell. I had given myself the ‘old Floridian cure’ the day I gave Gigi hers but with all the chaos that accompanied Daniel’s death, I hadn’t had the chance to observe if it had worked on Gigi or test if it was working within myself.

  The ‘old Floridian cure’ wasn’t the drink I gave her or the injection I gave her after that. It was the second injection I gave her after the injection of anaesthesia took over the Valium drink’s job of keeping her sedated.

  Modified immune cells was what it really was. I’d taken normal human immune cells and modified them so that their chemical signals sounded exactly as the chemical signals of a South California legless lizard’s immune cells sounded to me when I observed them under a microscope. I then injected those modified immune cells into Gigi’s bone marrow and my own, in hope they would alter our immune cells so that our bodies would regenerate in the same way a lizard’s tail could. Only faster, because when I found out what was making the sounds I heard when looking at the immune cells of a South California lizard, I put it all together in human cells in a way that made those sounds come together even faster.

  It wasn’t hard to do but I hadn’t thought of doing so until Hank slapped me. Only then did I understand how important it was to have a body ready for damage at all times. Human beings carry out acts of violence at a frequency that is in no way predictable, much less quantifiable. The only way I could prepare myself for such attacks was to be always prepared. That horrible slap of Hank’s turned out to be a source of inspiration for me; Gigi’s bruises too. Lilly was right again. Every bad event did have the potential of having some good come out of it.

  Oh, Lilly…

  My world began to get blacker. It had been black-ish for some time but now it was an abyss of black I could see myself slipping into and never being able to figure out how to climb out of.

  I could see Wanda in my imagination, flying about the deser
t like an ant on a mission, searching high and low for remnants of my body. I prayed she would never find the bush that hid the entrance to this tiny cave or think of looking for me in here. I needed her to think I was gone for good. Even if I really did die, I didn’t want her to inherit my body and all the treasures it contained within.

  Truth was, I wasn’t beyond blind hate myself. If I could have killed Wanda, I would have. A very long time ago too. I didn’t want to be running from her my whole life. We’d been running away from her for way too long already, at the expense of so many opportunities. I wanted to be able to get on with life in my own way, without having the risk of anyone knowing about my past holding me back. I wanted to start afresh.

  Just like Lilly did.

  And yet she was gone now. Dead before I had the chance to give her the ‘old Floridian cure’. And it was all my fault. She was dead because I refused to believe her and chose to figure things out on my own.

  Obviously, even the smartest of human beings were capable of making fatal errors in judgement.

  With that in mind, I, like every other normal, freshly-dead person, let myself sink into the sand like a piece of lifeless weight.

  I let my sense of consciousness trickle away from me.

  Chapter 36

  5 August 1975, Tuesday

  Ten hours later, I was back on the roof of Baker’s house with my handy knapsack back on my back.

  I didn’t have legs yet but my stumps had developed a somewhat shiny, tingling, itching, reddish layer of fibrous skin over what had been mere flesh and bone and had grown in length so I wasn’t at all bothered by my lack of them. They no longer hurt and at the rate at which they had regrown, I estimated I would be back to normal in a day or so. In the meantime, the holes the bullets made in my flesh were no longer obvious and I could still fly by flapping my arms and curving my torso and bum like a dolphin would when swimming so there was nothing I was really concerned about with regards to my body.