Chapter 2: Her Nine Lives.

(Part 9): B.

Another one for the overflowing fridges.

Sighing, he pulled the sheet off. For a second, he was frozen. Then he jumped back in shock and dry heaved. He braved one more look and immediately ran to the sink. Retching and vomiting, he avoided looking at the table behind him. During his ten-year role as a forensic doctor, he had seen many things, ranging from decapitations to corpses boiled in acid.

This was just disgusting.

Gingerly, he turned around, now steeling himself and ready to face the body and its eyelidless, open, dead, glassy eyes that stared at him as if it was still alive. It was something out of a horror movie. Breathing deeply, he picked up the tools of his trade and began examining.

The man was about 35 to 40 years old. Caucasian. Quite large in stature. Blunt force trauma to the back of his head with a dense, perhaps metal, object. Not enough to perhaps cause death, but incapacitate him for sure.

His eyelids, nose and ears were missing, and the bruises and blood around the wounds indicated that it had been done perimortem. Jotting it down on his report, he took a piece of cloth and placed it over the dead man's eyes, perhaps out of respect for the dead, but more so because the eyes haunted him. The eyes… looked terrified. Shivering, he continued.

His penis and testicles were missing as well.

The doctor picked up a saw and made a Y-incision, opening the dead man up. Picking up a scalpel, he opened up the stomach and found all that was missing. Ears. Nose. Eyelids. Testicles. Penis. His stomach roiled; the fact that everything had traveled by peristalsis into the dead man's stomach… meant that he had been alive and had been forced to swallow his own… parts.

It took the doctor twenty minutes to recover from that. After a visit to the men's room, a quick chat with the mirror and a splash of water on his face to clear up more vomit, he returned very hesitantly. This wasn't a mob killing. This was… inhuman.

He turned the body over and as he moved down, he discovered one last present.

A switchblade embedded up the rectum.

Shakily finishing the exam, he hastily covered the body again with the white clothes and wheeled it over to the already-full freezer and locked it in. No one would come for him… no one around these parts rarely came to collect the dead.

The image of the corpse ingrained in his head, the doctor ripped off his coat and tossed down his tools. He was done for the day though the shift wasn't over. He needed to get the picture of those eyes out of his head. He was going one place and one place only.

The bar.

His eyes widened to immeasurable proportions as he stared directly down the barrel of a .22 Smith & Wesson. His .22 to be exact. It was all a blur- in fact he still couldn't fathom as to how the prey became predator and vice versa.

The girl he had been sent to kill stared at him. He couldn't exactly see her eyes- a hoodie hid most of her face. But he could feel the ice and it sent shivers down his spine. Posture nonchalantly relaxed, one hand languidly stuffed in a pocket, she seemed quite calm… too calm. The pistol in her grip didn't quiver in the slightest.

This was one of the rare instances that he felt fear. Fear for his life.

"Who? Why?"

After an eternity of silence, her quiet voice spoke. Void of any emotion or tone of any shape or form, the words were uttered coolly and disinterestedly, but the very real threat was unmistakable. It roughly translated to 'tell me, or I'll hack your balls off with a switchblade and feed it to you, then laugh as I saw off your head.'

He shivered. He knew he was staring death in the face… but he had to… Else, it'd be his family. The boss had no mercy.

Lying was unwise… but it was his only choice at the moment. Tell her the truth and he would hunt him down. He'd rather risk a bullet in all actuality.

"I didn't come here to kill you."

The girl was silent- the gun didn't flinch. She called his bullshit and he internally cringed as he saw her finger curl fractionally around the trigger. Frantically, he decided to settle for half. Hopefully it would be enough to earn himself some credit- enough to save himself maybe.

"Smith. It was Smith."

Leah, hand still firmly curled around the gun nodded. She had suspected as much. This scrawny little man, she had seen around the arenas. If she wasn't mistaken, he was the accountant and kept all the books for the Manager. She suspected the Manager had sent him on the what he probably knew, impossible mission to kill her. Knowing the little man would fail.

"Please…"

Her finger tightened a little more.

The man knew that he wouldn't make it. He had told her whom had ordered her death, but she wouldn't budge. There was no mercy for him, but the mercy of a quick death.

"Please… please… kill me."

Leah frowned, but said nothing. Waiting silently for him to explain.

"Kill me. Because there's someone far worse after you and now me. I want to save my family… kill me. Kill me, or he kills my wife and kids too."

His eyes were wide and earnest. He really was waiting for her to kill him. He was terrified. Not of her, but someone else. She frowned. He was staring death in the face, and yet, he was more scared of someone else to such an extent that he chose her hands to die in.

"Watch out. He's evil. So evil. I never wanted any part of this, and I guess neither did you. So my last warning to you. Get out. Far away. Always watch your back. Now. Kill me please!"

Her frown deepened in thought, and she mindlessly pulled the trigger. Before the body could hit the ground, she had already turned around and walked away. Regardless, she was leaving today; Elaine had collected all the money. Whoever wanted to kill her would have no chance. Even if he did find her, she wasn't afraid. She'd fought many men before. She'd fight this one too.

She's always won.

She hated to lose.

Right now, she knew that she had lost.

She was cowering in the darkness. Weaponless. Helpless.

She had lost her dream. Her and Elaine's dream. Elaine. She had lost Elaine. The one person she gave a damn about. Her sister, her mother, her best friend. It all seemed like a surreal nightmare; pig entrails seemed to exist only in cheap horror flicks. Who knew that the cheap horror flicks that people so often laughed and scoffed at… in real life were terrifying.

Leah hyperventilated.

Anything, any feeling she had ever dammed up now burst loose, burning her brain in its intensity. She clutched her head, tears involuntarily leaking out. Whether they were out of emotional or physical pain, she hadn't the faintest.

A door creaked open.

This was it. There was no more running.

She had a wound in her side. She was losing blood and this was as far as she could come. The end of the road.

Heavy, clunking footsteps. Shadows being cast on the wall. Her heart hammered out of her ribcage when she saw the outline of a pig's head. This was really, really it. Her dreams, dead. Elaine, dead. Wendy, dead. Wherever she went, everyone died. And now? Soon? Leah, dead. She cowered into a crawlspace as tightly as she could.

He would find her. He would kill her. He could smell her. She knew it.

Shoes. She saw boots. He was here. He stopped. He knew she was here. Slowly, the figure began to kneel. Bend down.

"Hello, Poppet."

She came face to face with the face of a dead pig. She couldn't scream… it was useless. She couldn't find it in herself to formulate any sort of response. He was here. She was going to die. He killed Elaine. Now she was going to die. The smell of decaying meat permeated the stuffy air. She shut her eyes.

There was a whoosh through the air. She braced herself. When it hit her, she was dead.

A thump.

Something thudded heavily to the ground and she opened her eyes. The figure to whom the boots belonged to lay flat on the ground, not moving. Blood seeped along the floor. Another figure had joined the mix, and was crouching over the man who had killed Elaine. She heard hacking noises, and saw a spray of redness.

"Leah."

The sound of her name snapped her back to her senses. There were three people in the entire world who knew her real name. Wendy. Who was dead. Elaine. Who was now dead. And… the bastard who had landed her here without a cent to her name so that she could leave.

"B."

Sure enough, she saw white sneakers and blood spattered blue jeans.

He moved away, silently inviting her to come out. She hesitated slightly, quickly assessing the situation. He had left her here to die, but he had come back. If he wanted her dead, he could have left it to the psychopath and watched quietly. But he had saved her, meaning that he either had some sort of arbitrary attachment to her… doubtful, given that he doomed her to Detroit in the first place… or he needed her.

Either way, he wasn't going to kill her and that was all that mattered.

She crawled out and stood up, eyeing the man in front of her silently, and the dead man on the floor. B had… more than killed him. Flesh was torn from his back and pinned down to the ground like bizarre wings. Onto them were carved random numbers that seemed to have no meaning. Numbers, interspaced sometimes with full stops.

B carefully watched his hopefully to-be-protégée. He frowned slightly. There was a degree of revulsion and disgust in her eyes as she looked at his masterpiece. He had to snuff that last bit out of her. She was so close… so close to being perfect. She was still too… human.

"Why?"

She directed the question at him, her expression telling him wordlessly that she wanted the answer for all possible interpretations of "why."

"Why I left you here… Because I waaaaas bored and it seemed fun. Whyyyy I did that? Again, I was bored. And whyyyy I came back? Because-"

Leah interjected.

"Because you need me."

B raised an eyebrow. She was indeed clever. There could have been a multitude of reasons for his coming here, and she deduced his true intent. She just needed a little… fixing. That was all. She'd be perfect.

"Why would I need you?"

Leah eyed him, and eyed the body on the floor. He hadn't needed to do the things he had done to it. He had made it a calling card; the numbers on the body made no sense to her, and the fact that he would even mark it like that was to taunt the police. It wasn't a dramatic first killing, given that this was Detroit, and B hadn't even moved it to a public place to make sure it was seen, so he obviously didn't care. This wasn't his first killing, so he was a serial. He had swiftly managed to tackle a psychopath with a machete and a whole arsenal of other ungodly tools, so he didn't need an accomplice in murders… so…"

"You want me to carry on your work."

B grinned widely.

"Very good."

Leah was silent, her face giving absolutely nothing away.

"Why? I haven't even killed anyone. You'd be better off getting someone else to do your shit."

B stuck a finger in his mouth.

"True… you haven't killed anyone. But you'd have a talent for it. But before you decide…"

He pulled out a lollipop and gave it to her.

"We have a little stop to make."

Leah stood in a sterile, cold room. A morgue. A man in a coat, whom she assumed to be a doctor, lay dead near the entrance. B quickly stripped the man naked and tossed him unceremoniously under a large pile of dead bodies in a very full freezer. All the while, whistling as if he was taking out Sunday's trash on a trash run.

"Come on, come on!"

As much as she wanted to leave, she always had found B fascinating. His emotion just a tone of voice, he felt nothing. His judgement was never compromised. He was logical and calculating. He was never weak… he didn't have a conscience to ever be weak.

She followed.

"Well, what d'ya think?"

There was a corpse on the floor he had singled out. It took her a while to recognize the face, but she did. It was the man that had raped her… which meant, B had been watching. The injuries to the body were terrible… but…

Leah bent down, tracing the stitches that held the once opened body together.

He was dead. His skin was blue and gelatinous. She poked it. There was a dent where she had poked. He was stripped of his facial features and had no testicles or penis. B… in a strange way, had avenged her. She was… pleased? Happy? She didn't really know. All she knew was that, seeing the man dead in front of her, she really, really wished that she'd done it herself.

B watched. She didn't seem vindictively pleased. She just seemed… pleased.

He smiled.

Yes, she'd be perfect.