RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Writer's Block Toughened Glass

The Maquette had always unnerved Adrian. When he had first met her, she still liked to be known as Sarah Collingwood - the daughter of a vicar, a Cambridge Politics graduate and a recently elected member of the local Labour council. After she was diagnosed HIV positive and the effects of the Silex implant had taken hold on her body, her physical features gradually became smoother and less distinct, until she resembled an abstract sculpture of the human form. She slept with tubes in her mouth and nostrils to prevent them from sealing up completely during the night and carried a craft knife to separate her body parts when they became fused with one another. Once, when Adrian had stayed overnight at one of the Silex medical facilities, he had awoken to the sight of her cutting her legs apart after they had merged together while she slept.

It struck him as absurd that something so grotesque could be moving around in the small kitchenette of his East London bedsit, filling the stainless steel kettle with water, rinsing out a pair of tea stained mugs in the sink and searching the cupboards for the packet of Digestive biscuits.

“How much do Silex pay you now?” she enquired.

Adrian was sitting on an old green settee in the adjoining room.

“The same as they pay you I expect.”

“They stopped paying me when my mutation turned out to be my cure. They only want you for your weakened immune system. It’s the only way they can cultivate their implants in human tissue. For all their talk about keeping you in good health, it’s not in their interests for you to stay alive in the long term.”

“When did they cut you off?”

“A fortnight ago. I appealed of course, but I didn’t want to bother you with it. If you were getting what I was getting, then it’s hardly worth having. I thought that you might be looking for other sources of income.”

She emerged from the kitchenette carrying a tray containing two steaming mugs of tea and the near empty packet of biscuits, her head tilted at angle where the lower part of the neck had begun to join with the shoulder.

“There’s a ex-copper by the name of Dancer. He’s been acting the cunt and now enough people want him dead for it to happen.”

She placed the tray down on a small occasional table and took a seat opposite Adrian on an uncomfortable high-backed armchair with worn upholstery and dark wooden armrests.

“I’m not killing anyone.”

“I’m not offering dear. I’m going to stick a shotgun in his pig belly and blow his intestines out through the back of his suit.”

She sat bolt upright in the chair, staring directly at Adrian as if she was waiting for some kind of reaction. Her eye sockets were shallow indentations in her skull, with small holes in the skin just big enough to allow light into the pupils. She might have been smiling, although it was difficult to tell.

“I had enough beatings from the Met when I was down and out. Fuck should I care.”

“Well, quite.”

Adrian ran the tips of his fingers along the edge of the wooden table allowing them to sink into the solid object. Where it had been penetrated, the surface turned almost liquid, the tremors sending dark ripples spreading out across the grain of the wood.

The Maquette attempted to lift one of the mugs off the tray but was unable to grasp the handle. She removed the craft knife from the black leather bag that was resting on her lap, pushed out the blade and began to slowly separate the digits on her right hand.