Ch.31: The Midpoint Twist (Part 1)

I lay paralyzed, my cheek pressed against the cold mahogany floorboards, the dust of the rug tickling my nostrils. Through the fringe of the heavy bedspread, I watched the silhouettes of their legs. Julian’s shadow was erratic, swaying like a fever-dream monster.

"Answer me!" he roared.

The sound of a slap cracked through the room, followed by the soft thud of Isabella hitting a chair. I squeezed my eyes shut, my fingernails digging into the wood. I had to stay still. If I breathed, I died. If I moved, Daisy died.

Julian began to pace. The heavy tread of his oxfords vibrated through the floor into my skull. Then, the rhythmic sound of a zipper. A belt hitting the floor.

"Look at me, Isabella," he rasped, his voice dropping into a guttural, wet rattle. "Look at what this cost me. Look at the price of your survival."

I forced my eyes open, peeking through the gap. His tuxedo jacket was draped over the chair. He was unbuttoning his shirt with trembling, frantic fingers. As the fabric fell away, my stomach turned with a violent, acidic surge.

His chest wasn't human.

The skin was a mottled, bruised grey, weeping a yellowish fluid that stained the white silk of his undershirt. Thick, black veins branched out from his sternum like a charred map of a dying city. The flesh was sunken in places, bulging in others, pulsating with a sickening, uneven rhythm.

He wasn't just sick. He was rotting from the inside out.

He reached up to his neck. His fingers hooked into a seam I hadn't noticed, right beneath the jawline. He pulled.

*Schlick.*

The sound was like wet leather being torn from a drum. He ripped a thin, translucent layer of synthetic skin away from his face. The "handsome doctor" came off in a single, ragged sheet, revealing the nightmare beneath.

One side of his face was a ruin of exposed muscle and blackened bone. His eye, milky and bulging, stared at Isabella with a manic, terrifying intensity. The smell hit me then—the cloying, sweet stench of gangrene masked by expensive sandalwood.

He threw the mask onto the floor. It landed inches from my hiding spot, a hollow, smiling rubber face staring back at me.

"I’m the one who needs the serum now," he hissed, his exposed teeth glinting in the firelight. "Isabella’s dose was just the test. I’m the primary subject. I’m the god who conquered death."

He looked down at his rotting hands, his breathing becoming a wet, whistling sound.

"But the body is ungrateful. It wants more. It wants the infant's marrow. It wants the full extraction."

I pressed my face into the floor to keep from vomiting. The savior of pediatrics, the man the world worshiped, was a walking corpse held together by stolen blood and high-grade plastics.

The handsome doctor is a monster. Literally.