Chemisorption

Title: Chemisorption
Pairings: James/Maria
Rating: NC-17 for disturbing shit.
Summary: There was a smell.
A/N: This story is, in fact, the reason I am over here at AFF.net. I wanted to show this sick, sick thing to the world, but Y!gallery would ban me faster than a ninja cheetah set on fire due to the looming presence of va-jay-jay. So here you go.
Edit: Made two unimportant changes which no one will ever even notice because they were bothering my hopeless OCD.

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There was a smell.

There was a smell, and it was, of course, something like blood. Something like rust and sulfurous rot and black, stagnant water. Something like stinking, infected wounds and death shit and the sick vomit of a body breaking down from the inside. Something metallic and sweet and nauseous, unwholesome, at once corroded and corrosive—but it was worse than all those things. It was a whole elusively, sublimely greater than the sum of its parts. It was eye-watering, mind-altering, something unholy, against life, against creation itself, if it can be said that good and evil have a smell. It was, in fact, a stench.

And it was everywhere.

No matter where James Sunderland wandered or stumbled or fled like a weak black fly—into the Woodside Apartments, into Brookhaven Hospital, into Heaven’s Night, into the fog, into the sirens, into the dark—there it was, hooking its taloned fingers up his nostrils into his brain until he spluttered and gagged. He’d huddle on his knees, nose to the ground, and breathe in the acridity of the thin yellow bile it forced from him. That smell was bad, yes, but he gulped it in, welcoming the way it drove out the other for a little while, until some roaring malignancy of the town forced him from his huddled worship.

Worship. Hah.

Even in the rare times he found somewhere safe to sleep, it woke him from his dreams of Mary. He would ball himself up and bury his face into his clothes to find some scent of himself, some human scent. But there would only be the stench.

Then her. James was fascinated by her bewildering face, so like his wife’s, and more than fascinated by the barely-covered curve of her rear, the obvious swell and plunge of her breasts, the sinuous pendulum movement of her hips, shapely legs and skin peach-velvety and smooth. But it was her scent that made James helpless. She smelled human—like cheap perfume and clean sweat and her leather clothes and something else that made him ache and split his head between memories that couldn’t possibly have existed. He blushed, his hands shook with nervousness and shame and need, but her scent made him kiss her like he was starving, bury his face into her breasts and thighs and the curve of her neck, burrow into her like a maggot. He fell asleep like that, loving her. He forgot the stench.

But then her sweetness turned down, like a mouth, like her red-painted lips moving the horrible wonderful way she sucked him off until he sobbed. He wanted her flesh, yes, seemingly more now than ever—he fucked her with desperation turned savagery, revulsion rising in him, racing against lust. At last it seemed that her sweetness was the sweetness of vomit, of death, of congealing blood and meat rotting into slime, and when he rammed the stolen Great Knife through her belly the breath she belched out at last was tinged with the iron stink of blood.

And then not even fear held back his screams.

Now he couldn’t sleep at all.

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And so things were different.

Where James had avoided monsters, he frantically hunted them down. He did his work with plank and pipe and gun and Great Knife and dragged their corpses to the top-floor room at the Woodside he’d claimed as his own. He clumsily ripped open their bellies and tore out their deformed organs, scratching out crude nests slippery and drooling with black blood. They reeked sharply of that viscous ichor, of the fatty cancers devouring insalubrious bodies. The tangy slurry of digestive juices and torn meals, especially, pushed gorge into the back of James’ throat.

But their smell, for a while at least, was of living things: fresh blood, fresh marrow, fresh meat, fresh agony and hate still hot and electric like ozone mixed with jet fuel. And while he was inside, he could sleep.

And when the bodies began collapsing into rot—into the stench—there were always more; more new and hideous nests, and more monsters to drag away the old.

But then, as Maria had done, even the monsters of the town betrayed him. The nests held him safe for four days, at first, then three days. Then two. Then one. After days and nights and days, such blurred time, he worked his dulled Knife into an uncounted demon; a fat thing like a bloated cross between an ape and a dog. The stench was a nightmare hand that sprung from the monster’s belly and squeezed him until his ribs cracked.

There was nowhere left to go.

It followed him as he fled down the stairs, floorboards creaking heavily and cracking like pistol shots. It followed him as he tripped and sprawled in the dirt outside and struggled back to his feet. It followed him as he ran into the fog, mindless with fear that stole over him like a nausea, like a cancer, like the fog, like the dark.

Then, in the middle of the street, James stopped as if he had struck a wall.

He inspected his black-caked hands. “It’s not following me…” he murmured. He appeared to have reached some sort of conclusion.

He raised his head. “It is me,” James remarked to the air, as if to a colleague. He scratched at his arm, almost experimentally, watching the skin color along the tracks of his ragged nails. He scratched harder. Blood seeped out in streaks; he tasted it with a quick swipe of his coated tongue. It was, of course, fresh.

It smelled good.

But there wasn’t enough to make It go away. Not yet.

It hurt. It hurt a lot, especially as he worked his way through the skin. Eventually his hands became reluctant as he dug into fibrous red muscle, but that was okay, because they could still hold his lightest weapons and there was plenty of skin on his body and he did have teeth, after all. Everything was okay, because the deeper he scratched, the stronger the air hummed with fresh red blood. Stronger than the stench. Stronger, even, than the sirens.

Perhaps James had forgotten how drawn the monsters of Silent Hill were to the stink of human blood, more swiftly than to light or screams or even sin. Perhaps he didn’t care.


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