Page 107 of Skin Deep

I huffed and crossed my arms. What a load of shit. I wasn’t worth anything to anybody, least of all him. Boone wanted the same thing from me as the orderlies at Twin Valley Behavioral Health, and the prison guards before that. I’d learned the hard way that once I gave in, once I let horny, older men have my body, they’d quickly throw me away without a care. To them, I was an object to be used, nothing more.

I closed my hands into fists. They all thought they’d gotten away with it, but not if I had anything to say about it. I didn’t care if it was the last thing I did; I was going to see them alldead.

The dogs leapt up into the front seat like the passenger princesses they were and the Jeep lurched forward.

Wattson clicked on his pen light and used it to look me over. “Lucky son of a bitch,” he muttered.

Despite the dark and the bumpy ride, Wattson found every one of my scrapes and bruises. He tore open some wipes to clean them up. The worst was on my foot, which was throbbing and still bleeding. I winced as he drew the alcohol wipe over the open cut, my fist tightening around the seat.

“You know, if you wouldn’t run, you wouldn’t get hurt,” Church said in his stupid British accent.

I glared at the back of his head, visualizing it exploding into a wet, sticky mess. He wouldn’t be so jolly good then, would he?

“Fuck,” I hissed again as Wattson shifted my foot and pain shot up the side of my leg.

“Easy, Pup.” Boone’s hand was suddenly squeezing mine in some mock show of sympathy.

I fought the urge to jerk my hand away and instead squeezed back.

“I don’t think it’s sprained,” Wattson offered, still fucking with my ankle. He clicked off his pen light. “Rest, ice, and elevate.”

“Suck my dick, fucker.” It wasn’t my most creative insult, but I was in a lot of pain.

Wattson sighed and quit poking me. “Maybe a gag would do him some good too.”

“Naw, I like his creative Xion-isms,” Boone said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “By the way, this little outing of yours is gonna cost you. You must really like working for me.”

I crossed my arms and glared at the floor. While I didn’t mind the work, I sure as hell didn’t want to work for him in his stupid junkyard, or his car repair shop. That was why I ran. I couldn’t stay there forever. I had places to be and people to kill.

The Jeep rumbled as we rolled onto the road, making a sharp left. My heart sped up and my throat tightened at the sight of the sign for Junkyard Dogs Salvage Yard. We went up the road a short distance before making the right turn into the junkyard, and my home away from… Well, not a home away from home, considering I’d never had a proper home. But I’d slept in worse.

Lines of junked and repaired cars greeted us, the prices written in Boone’s messy hand on the windshields along with the words, “AS IS”. The office was beyond that, a large U-shaped building with an attached garage where they worked on cars. Behind it loomed steel towers of crushed cars, discarded appliances, and broken dreams crushed into square billets to be carried away and melted into something new.

A tiny sliver of a lonely moon hung like a fishhook in the black sky. It was cool enough that a few white fingers of frost appeared in the shadows, but outside the shadows, it was just warm enough to be tolerable.

On nights like this, my brothers and I used to sneak out the bedroom window. We’d curl up arm in arm on the sloped roof, fingers intertwined, and just lie there in our special silence. A lot of people seemed to believe multiples had some sort of telepathic connection, but Xander, Xavier, and me didn’t. We just understood each other so well we didn’t need words to communicate. I knew what every twitch and tic in my brother’s faces meant. Glances contained whole sentences and we could tell stories to each other from across the room with simple gestures.

At least, that’s how it used to be.

Then something happened when I was fourteen that drove us apart. The voices started filling the place where my brothers used to be, slowly pushing them away. Hearing voices that they couldn’t was scary enough, but losing my connection with Xander and Xavier… It was like losing my own limbs. I couldn’t even explain to my brothers why I suddenly had jumbled thoughts where they used to be. Back then, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I didn’t have the words or the tools to cope with my psychosis, let alone to explain it to others. By the time I did, it was too late. The damage was done, and my brothers were gone. They were dead to me now. Sometimes, it felt like I had died with them. On days like today, I certainly felt like a corpse.

Stop looking at it. He’s looking at it. Why are you so stupid?

They’re going to poison you.

I winced and closed my eyes against the assault of foreign voices, all talking over one another. They weren’t real, even if they felt like they were. If I turned my head, there’d be a woman sitting next to me, whispering in my ear and an angry man telling me to stop and start various tasks without rhyme or reason.

And then there was the one I only knew as Eyes, a nervous voice without a face, always whispering, always making my shoulders itch.They’re watching. They’re always watching.

Sometimes, they were quiet, but never for long even with the medication.

When I opened my eyes again, I was no longer in the Jeep but standing in the doorway to the trailer I shared with Boone. It was tucked in the back of the junkyard alongside half a dozen others, all belonging to the men who worked for him.

To call Boone’s guys mercenaries was a stretch. They did odd jobs for money and ran the junkyard on the side. I suspected they laundered money through the car repair garage, but I didn’t exactly have proof. Most of the work they did consisted of going places and doing things that were either borderline illegal and flat out dangerous. They were like the A-Team on steroids.

Time stuttered, reversed, and I saw myself walking up the stairs into the trailer, leaning on Boone’s shoulder because the cut on my ankle hurt. Then I was back in the present, watching him move a newspaper aside to pick up his cigarettes.

The words on the newspaper morphed and changed before my eyes, certain words and letters standing out in bold. Put together, it was gibberish that meant nothing to most people, but to me, it was a secret coded message sent from my handler in the shadow government. He was warning me about the cameras the secret service had placed in Trixie and Morticia’s eyes. My identity was compromised and I had to get out of there.

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