Second Skin - Chapter 0003

Chapter 3

Run.

It was the only word that still worked inside Sebastian’s head, and it beat to the rhythm of his own feet against the soaked asphalt, one syllable per stride, run, run, run. Everything else had shut down. The delivery list, the schedule, the cold, the eighteen dollars in change in his coat’s inside pocket, the promise to be home by nine—all of that belonged to a boy who existed ten minutes ago, and that boy had been left behind along with the corner where it all began.

Not looking back was the second thing.

He didn’t know what was behind him. He only knew the horror, and the horror didn’t need form to occupy space: it filled his chest like ice water seeping through a crack, rising up his throat, squeezing his lungs from the inside. It was a physical thing, with weight. Sebastian pushed the Frankenstein alongside his body, one hand on the handlebars, his feet slipping every two steps in the trampled snow mud, and each time the urge to turn his head came, he swallowed it and ran faster.

Because if he looked, he would stop. He knew this about himself just as well as he knew the order of the wires inside the bicycle’s dashboard. If he looked, his legs would understand the magnitude of the problem, and his legs would give up.

So, instead of looking, he thought about his mother.

I thought about Sofia walking through the door of 6B at eleven o’clock at night, the smell of seventy percent alcohol still clinging to her uniform, taking off her shoes in the hallway so as not to wake anyone, finding the covered plate on the table, the note, the half-empty juice. I thought about her sitting on the sunken side of the sofa to wait. I thought about her waiting a long time.

And he was thinking about Camila.

Camila’s hair was still wet from her bath at this point, or maybe it wasn’t, because Camila would drag out her baths and her brother always knew. Camila went to bed at 9:20, swearing it was exactly 9 o’clock. Camila would wake up the next day and someone would need to tell her something. Someone would need to choose the words, and there were no words for it, and yet someone would have to say it, and she would have that small seven-year-old face turned upwards, waiting for the end of the sentence.

That’s what made him run faster than he thought he could. Not courage. The thought of the two faces receiving the news.

Looking ahead, Times Square had ceased to be a place and had become a movement.

The entire square was teeming with people rushing around. A sea of ​​coats, hats, backpacks, abandoned shopping bags rolling across the ground, hands grabbing other hands, a woman shouting a name that was lost before reaching anyone’s ear. Tourists tripped over their own feet on the red staircases. A hot dog cart lay on its side with its crumpled parasol, and the griddle still spewed smoke into the icy air, a smell of grease and onions so common, so typical of a Tuesday, that Sebastian felt his brain freeze for a split second trying to reconcile it with the rest.

Above all, the panels remained on.

Thirty meters of screen on the facade of the corner building, showing a model in a white coat walking slowly through artificial snow, smiling. A soft drink advertisement on loop. A news banner running in red, delayed, still talking about the following week’s global security summit. The light from those screens fell on the crowd in waves of blue, gold, pink, painting the faces of the people running with advertising colors. Sebastian would carry this for the rest of his life: the memory of people fleeing to die under a very pretty pink light.

Among the bodies, he saw the blue uniforms.

The police officers were trying to cross against the flow of traffic, shoulder to shoulder, pushing the sea of ​​people aside with both arms, trying to reach the place where everyone was fleeing from. One of them was shouting something into his shoulder radio. Another had lost his cap and didn’t seem to have noticed. They advanced slowly, like someone entering a river from the wrong side, and Sebastian felt, amidst the terror, a pang of something else he couldn’t name as he watched those men going in the opposite direction from him.

That’s when something fell.

He heard before he understood: a displacement of air, a short, heavy whistle, and the impact. It wasn’t a falling sound. It was a dry, deep bang, the sound of something very dense meeting concrete and winning the argument. The ground transmitted the shock through the soles of his sneakers to his knees. Shards of pavement flew horizontally, a shallow rain of gravel and broken ice that swept across the square and hit the right leg of his pants hard enough to sting.

He fell three, maybe four steps away. If he had swerved to the side a moment earlier, if he had chosen to go around the hot dog cart to the right as he almost did, he wouldn’t have survived.

Sebastian didn’t stop. His legs continued on their own, and he thanked them later, much later.

Through his peripheral vision—and his peripheral vision was terrible, it always had been, the thick lenses robbed the edges of the world and left only a clear tunnel in the middle—he caught a black shape. Large. Too tall to be human. The kind of shape that the corner of the eye registers as wrong before the rest of the brain has time to weigh in. It was very similar to the first one, the one he hadn’t looked at, the one behind him.

He didn’t turn his face away. He lowered his head and accelerated.

A second after he nearly died, the shooting started.

Sebastian knew that sound. It was a silly thing to know at thirteen, but he knew it: he had grown up in three different neighborhoods where the dry noise of fireworks-that-weren’t-fireworks appeared in the early morning and his mother would enter his room without saying anything and sit on the edge of his bed until it passed. There, in the square, the sound was different in quantity. Quick, overlapping crackles, echoing between the glass facades and returning from all sides at the same time, without direction. And with them came the sparks, incandescent flashes coming from the hands of the men in blue, small explosions of white light that appeared and disappeared, marking on Sebastian’s retina the outline of raised arms, pointed at whatever was causing it.

And then came the roar.

It wasn’t an animal sound. Sebastian had heard lions on a school trip, dogs fighting under the window, sirens, alarms, the roar of the subway entering the station. This wasn’t any of that. There was something damp in the sound, something that resembled meat, and a low frequency that he felt in his teeth before hearing it with his ears.

After the first one, came the others. A second one, further to the left. A third one, far away, near the ticket counter. A fourth, and another, and another, until the roars echoed across the entire square and filled all the remaining space between the buildings, and there wasn’t a single person on that corner of the world whose heart didn’t fill with terror at the same time.

Something grazed his body.

It was quick as an arrow, a thin, dark blur cutting through the air less than a hand’s breadth from his left shoulder, and the shifting wind made his cap ride up an inch on his forehead. The thing continued forward and struck the chest of the policeman who was standing right in front of him.

Sebastian saw it up close. He saw it too close.

It was a rope. A thick, black rope, with gray details running along its length like veins, and it didn’t hit the man: it snapped open. It spread across the chest of his blue uniform like spilled paint, like a giant hand with thin fingers grabbing everything at once—his vest, his shoulders, the radio buckle—and in the next instant it became taut.

The police officer was pulled away.

There was no struggle, no time to react. The man simply left the ground, both feet losing contact with the concrete at the same time, his boots still pointed forward in the stance of the step he never managed to complete, and was dragged backward through the air, over Sebastian.

Reflex. It was just a reflex. Sebastian threw Frankenstein over his own body, twisted his hip and threw himself to the ground, and the dirty ice of the square carried him sliding two meters sideways, his coat scraping against the frozen mud, the handlebars of the bicycle hitting his chest. And as he slid, with the world turned upside down and his cheek almost touching the black snow, he kept his eyes open and followed.

The policeman stepped over him. Close. The man’s face was turned downwards, and he was looking at Sebastian, and what was on that face wasn’t pain. It was astonishment. It was the face of someone mid-sentence.

Sebastian stood up. He should have kept running, and afterwards he could never quite explain why he didn’t—he only knew that he stood up, turned his body and looked back, because a part of him still needed to understand the shape of the problem, still thought that understanding was useful for something.

There was something there that shouldn’t have been there.

A humanoid. That was the least wrong word. Tall, almost twice the size of a man, with strange musculature, exaggerated in the wrong places, shoulders and arms too large for the waist that supported them, as if someone had drawn a human body from memory and in anger. The skin was black, not the color black: it was a surface that swallowed the light from the advertising panels instead of reflecting it, traversed by gray details that ran through the muscles like strands of molten metal. The eyes were white, sharp, long, and empty. And the mouth.

The mouth didn’t fit on the face. It stretched from one side of the head to the other, open in rows and rows of thin teeth, thousands of them crooked, overlapping, and an overly long tongue hung out and swayed in the cold air.

The creature effortlessly lifted the policeman by both hands, in the same way that Sebastian lifted his sister to sit her on the bicycle rack.

And with a single bite, it tore off the man’s upper body.

His teeth snapped shut at the waist. What remained fell to the ground, and the sound it made was the ordinary sound of something falling, and that was the part that broke something inside Sebastian: the normal sound. The man’s legs and arms, also severed, lay in the snow illuminated pink by the soda advertisement.

His chest tightened. He couldn’t believe his own eyes, and the worst part was that his eyes weren’t asking permission; they kept sending images, kept showing, and every detail entered and stayed.

And it wasn’t just one.

Throughout the square, the same scene repeated itself in copies. Sebastian turned his head and saw, in the distance, dark ropes crisscrossing the air in different directions, emerging from the hands, arms, and backs of those things, fastening themselves to whoever was running. A man with a shopping bag. A woman in a red overcoat. A teenager with headphones. The ropes opened around the bodies, tightened, and the people were ripped from the ground and pulled backward, all with the same astonishment on their faces, all with the same fate awaiting them at the other end of the wire.

Sebastian didn’t think about anything else.

Fear took over. He bent down, straightened Frankenstein with a tug, and even with his legs trembling, even with his knee burning inside his torn pants, he climbed onto the bicycle in a single movement, his entire body thrown onto the frame.

His right hand went under the handlebars. There was a small metal lock there, installed by himself with a screw and a pen spring, and it existed for a simple reason: so that he wouldn’t accidentally kill himself. Sebastian had built that bicycle from scratch, piece by piece, each weld with a story, and at some point between the third and fourth version of the controller he discovered that it was possible to push the motor far beyond what any factory manual would allow. It wasn’t safe. It burned the battery like a lighter burns gasoline. He had adapted the circuit anyway, because he was thirteen years old and because audacity still came before time, and he christened it overload, and used it exactly twice in his life, both times on an empty street, both times just to see if it worked.

The acceleration of that overloaded engine would have made many cars from the last century envious.

He unlocked it.

The lock came loose with a loud, metallic snap, and the panel in front of him flashed red with a warning he himself had written and never imagined reading in the middle of something like this. The rear wheel started spinning before it hit the ground: it spun freely on the ice with a high-pitched buzz, spitting frozen mud backward in a fan shape, and the back of the bicycle even lifted a hand’s breadth and slammed back down.

The noise echoed across the square.

And the creatures turned around.

All of them. At the same time, with that wrong head movement, snouts raised and shaking in the air, as if they were tasting the sound. Sebastian saw in the rearview mirror—a child’s bicycle rearview mirror he’d found in a Queens container and glued together with epoxy—he saw all those black heads turned toward him, and he saw the white eyes, and there was no anger in them. There was hunger. It was worse.

The wheel bit into the asphalt.

The force first hit his navel and then his chest, a backward pressure, as if a huge, flat hand were pushing his sternum against his spine. The handlebars almost slipped from his hands. The icy air turned like a blade on his face, entering through his nostrils and open mouth, and his eyes watered behind the thick lenses. The Frankenstein sped down the street in an abnormal way, too fast, too wrong, and Sebastian’s vision blurred at the edges, the world narrowing into a tunnel of stretched lights: red, gold, white, the dashboards turning into long streaks of color.

For a second — just one second — he thought he was going to succeed.

That’s when he felt something strange on his back.

It wasn’t pain. It was a weight that appeared out of nowhere, a slight tug, like a hand lightly resting on the shoulder to get attention. He looked in the rearview mirror.

His heart leaped in his chest.

A rope, identical to the others, the same one that had ripped open the policeman’s chest, was attached to the thermal delivery bag—not to him, to the bag, spread over the fabric of the Meridian Express, dark fingers gripping the handles, the zipper, the frayed seam on the side. And it stretched behind him, thinner with each meter, tightening like an elastic band that someone was pulling from both sides.

And he understood. He understood exactly what was going to happen, with the clean, useless clarity of someone who understands half a second too late.

The elastic band has reached its limit.

His body felt light.

All the force that had propelled him forward suddenly returned, in the opposite direction, multiplied, and Sebastian was ripped from his bicycle and thrown upwards. The Frankenstein continued alone for a few meters, its handlebars crooked, and fell sideways onto the street, and he didn’t see it because at that moment he was going uphill.

Going up very fast.

The force gradually diminished, and there was a moment—there really was, he would remember it—when it reached zero and the world stopped pulling. Sebastian remained up there, at the highest point of the arch, his body limp and his arms outstretched, gazing at the New York sky.

Even though it was night, he could see the clouds. They were low and tense, illuminated from below by the city’s glow in a reddish-orange hue, and they moved slowly. And the snow had begun. The first flakes, still scattered, rose and fell around him without any hurry, passing through the beam of the panels, shining for an instant when they caught the light.

It was silent up there. The roars, the gunshots, the screams, everything had faded below, muffled, as if he had buried his head in the water. His chest beat slowly. He was falling and didn’t even know it yet, and for three full seconds the most frightened boy in town floated in the snow, staring at the clouds.

Then his body collided with something.

The impact came from behind and expelled all the air from his lungs at once. Sebastian tried to turn his head, tried to understand what he had hit, and what he saw made no sense even after seeing it.

It was a different creature.

The same white eyes, the same wrong shape, the same overly wide mouth. But this one was bigger. Much bigger. And her body wasn’t black: it was covered in something red and black at the same time, and the two colors moved beneath the surface, dripping and returning, as if the skin were made of liquid trapped inside a thin shell. She was standing in the middle of the square, and how tall she was was clear from the height Sebastian found himself at: above all the others. Above the awnings. Above the line of parked cars.

Her tongue was staring at him. It was unusually long, thick at the base, and it swayed slowly in the air between them, and there was attention in that. There was interest.

The creature raised its head. And its mouth began to open.

It didn’t open like an animal’s mouth. It opened in layers, the jaws spreading far beyond what any joint would allow, and the teeth jutted out as it opened, each row pushing the next, dozens of them emerging from the dark gums like needles being expelled.

An adrenaline surge coursed through Sebastian’s body, and his body reacted before his brain.

He raised both arms.

That was all. She raised her arms above her head, and the straps of the cooler bag slipped off her shoulders, elbows, and hands—and the bag, with the three remaining packages and the handwritten Midtown address label, tumbled down toward that mouth.

And Sebastian fell too.

He spread his legs in the air, and it was the shortest calculation he’d ever made in his life, short enough to fit in the space between one kick and the next: his left foot found the bottom row of protruding teeth, his right foot found the top one. He felt the sharp point piercing the sole of his shoe, felt the slippery, warm ivory under his own weight, and used that as a platform.

He pushed.

With a twist, turning all the force of his body at once, Sebastian threw himself in front of the creature, passed over its shoulder, felt its tongue brush against his trouser leg, and fell.

He fell awkwardly, rolled on the concrete, his hat came off, his shoulder hit it, the roll ended with him face down in the dirty snow and his glasses miraculously still on his face, crooked, fogged up, but there. He spat. He lifted his head.

And he found himself surrounded.

The other creatures had arrived. They were all around, a dozen of them, forming a wide circle, and Sebastian stood on the ground in the middle of it all, waiting for the end.

The end didn’t come. Because they weren’t looking at it.

They approached the red one. All of them. And they did it in a way Sebastian didn’t expect, an almost… submissive way. Their heads lower than their shoulders. Their steps short. The cadence of an animal slowly approaching another, larger animal, without taking its eyes off it. Their monstrous mouths closed.

Sebastian crouched down further, placed a hand on the icy ground, and tried to stand up.

The arm came.

He saw the movement begin and didn’t have time to do anything with that information: the red creature’s arm stretched out supernaturally, extending seven or eight meters as if made of rubber, and closed around him.

The hand was so large that it didn’t need a palm. Just the fingers were enough. They closed completely around his body, pinning his arms against his ribs, pressing his coat against his skin, leaving only his head and legs exposed, which dangled from side to side in the air, kicking at empty space.

Sebastian was erected.

His arm retracted, and he climbed back up, faster than he intended, and stopped at the level of the thing’s face. Its feet hung about eight meters off the ground. Its mouth was closed now, and even closed, its teeth showed through the gaps. Its white eyes, large as windows, were less than a meter from his.

The creature looked into Sebastian’s eyes. And smiled.

Then she bent down a little, bringing her face closer, and he stared back, with no choice, his eyes wide behind the ice-cracked lenses, his chest rising and falling in quick, short jerks.

“Look at that,” said the creature.

The voice came out incredibly distorted, several layers superimposed, deep and raspy, a sound that didn’t come from any throat. And beneath it, in the background, strangely, delayed by half a second, Sebastian could hear something else: a man’s voice. A real man, with an accent, with a sick glee in his words, saying exactly the same thing the monster was saying.

“How I missed this.” Their tongues twitched in the air. “The flesh. The blood. Years trapped in that hole, years, and finally freedom.”

She squeezed a little. Sebastian’s ribs cracked, and he couldn’t even get enough air to scream.

“Be happy, kid. You’ll be the first to satisfy my craving.”

The tongue stretched out again, in a supernatural way, and spread across his face.

Sebastian felt the damp heat creeping across his cheek, forehead, and the corner of his mouth, carrying a smell of iron and something rotten. The tip snagged on the arm of his glasses and ripped them from his face.

The glasses fell, spinning, and disappeared somewhere down below in the snow.

And Sebastian’s world faded at the edges first, then entirely, turning into a shapeless blur of light, red and black and pink, with nothing clear anywhere, and he closed his eyes in terror as he felt his own body, his own head, being pulled toward the creature’s mouth.

Those teeth about to close.

And with the smell of it filling the air, Sebastian closed his eyes tightly and thought about the nine hours.