be-come

"I can't do this anymore," Eileen whimpers helplessly into Henry's arms, her makeup, tears, and blood joining the many stains of the night on his what-was-once-white shirt. Her fingers dig roughly into his arm, into the newly formed bruises that she doesn't remember inflicting when she lost her sanity a few moments ago and attacked the both of them.

Henry should feel shocked, angry, or even bewildered at this admission, but he doesn't really feel anything at all; in fact, he's not surprised and doesn't blame her. It's to the point where he thinks he can't do this either. But he knows better than anyone that he has to. And he knows that with Richard's ghost and a psychopath chasing them down, they can't stop for anything, not even this.

"I know," he murmurs, and in his mind he's soothing and sympathetic though in an arbitrary reality he's just patronizing, "but we have to keep moving."

She breaks down into his chest then, whimpers growing into hysterical sobs, and Henry wonders if he can throw her over his shoulder and still wield his nine-iron Excalibur. "Calm down, Eileen. We can't stop like this."

"Kill me," she whispers over and again as if his words were never uttered. "Just let him kill me. I can't do this anymore."

Of course Henry won't let her give up and die. When the disturbing noises from far off seem to get closer, he roughly ignores her breakdown and pulls her along with him. She sobs loudly at this, but he doesn't seem to care; their ultimate survival is of the utmost importance. He pulls them into an alley and then pushes her back when they're accosted by dog-monsters.

All the while Eileen's cries grow louder and erratic, and with the growling of the dog-monsters it makes for a cacophonous nightmare to Henry's ears; he can kill only one of the sources of the noise, though.

Once the creatures are disposed of, he takes her back into his arms, and she quiets as they pretend that nothing happened. "Am I dead yet?" she asks tentatively, but Henry won't deign her a response as he thinks it's an extraordinarily silly question.

Instead he kisses her hair matted by sweat, blood, and other substances; it smells like figurative shit, but Henry can't complain because he knows his scent is worse. "Come on, Eileen," he murmurs gently against her, "You have to pull yourself together. We have to stay alive."

"I don't want to," she whispers and wraps her arm around his neck. "Please don't make me. Can't we do something else?"

Henry gazes into her eyes that seem to stare past him like he's not even there, and he realizes that he's dreamt of this before - without the dog-monsters, and the serial killer, and all the ghosts that plague him. He's dreamt of his neighbor's arms around his neck in any number of scenarios where he finds the nerve to talk to her. And now it's real; but he doesn't know what to do. So he asks, playing along with her attempts to circumvent their reality: "What do you want to do, then?"

It's as if the sound of his voice brings Eileen back from her far-off destination. She mumbles his name repeatedly until she realizes what she's saying; Henry realizes it as well, and then she realizes her own words again.

He doesn't know what to do.

But Eileen, she's desperate for any distraction. She wants him to feel as incapable of controlling himself as she is at any given moment. So she kisses him in an explosion of desperation and pent-up thoughts. She doesn't even wait for a response and goes on to grind herself against his body fully, wrapping a bruised leg around his waist. Eileen's kind of amazed she pulled that off in spite of her temporary handicaps.

And Henry's just kind of amazed - dazed, rather. He can't quite think straight all of a sudden, but he quickly finds that he doesn't even need his brain as his hands move all on their own. They run down her sides, considerately avoiding her back, until his palms find her rear. As his hands grip her cheeks through the fabric, Henry is secretly aware of this and is quite proud of his limbs for possessing the balls that he always thought never hung from him. Then he finds out that his lips and tongue have been to work without him, too. His mind eventually catches up with the rest of his body, and he slides a hand between them (his own, he assumes, though sometimes he can't tell) to grope at her breasts pressed flush against him.

When he realizes that Eileen has unbuttoned his jeans and is haphazardly stroking his erection that he hadn't exactly noticed yet, his mind leaves him once more; Henry's not quite sure it'll come back safely again.

He isn't a desperate virgin (desperate, yes; virgin, no), but his dick is apparently acting like it. It confuses Henry a little, and Eileen seems to notice, reveling in it, even. Or it in her since she's managed to hike her dress up over her hips with her panties casually discarded. When she whispers into his ear that she wants him to fuck her like a frat boy, Henry's coherent thought joins God in death. He stares at her as if neither of them are all there anymore, which may very well be the case.

She's too impatient with his zombified state, so she leans against a building wall and pulls him against her. With a quick reminder of his newfound mission in life ("Fuck me" she moans against his neck), Eileen guides him inside her.

Henry is not a zombie; he is an animal, and his body knows what to do even if his absent brain doesn't. And so he fucks her, his hips pumping crazily like malfunctioning pistons.

...But something is wrong. The machine has stalled, and Henry is suddenly trapped inside her, unable to thrust himself in or out. It has been so long since he has had sex with a woman or has even felt sexual pleasure, and he cannot tell if this is normal, if his penis usually expands to the proportions of a jockish ego and allows him to proceed no further.

Eileen notices this halt with a surprised 'oh', but she is unsurprised when her face melts and decays, her rotting flesh dripping down to other parts of her body to harden and form a pattern of lesions as her bones contort to unnatural shapes; what little of Henry's thought that remains does not approve of her new state, and so he tries his damndest to flee to nowhere.

"There was a HOLE here," Eileen says, and she has become a dog-monster; Henry panics as he realizes that he has not gotten stuck but has become as well:

-it's gone now-

(she eats him alive)