Bahia
Kerry’s eyes snap open without warning flutter. Brimming with novel internal and external perceptions, they convey a kind of alien humor abetted by her serene sly smile. Effortlessly, disdaining use of her hands, she vaults to her feet with only a subtle twitch of her leg musculature.
A wallhook surrenders its short lab coat. Wrapped in virginal white, unshod, bare-legged, Kerry reaches the lab door and slides through.
Two guards sit relaxed in their groundfloor booth, talking.
“Who’re our replacements today?”
“Maureen and Isaiah.”
“They should be here any minute.”
Kerry’s appearance startles the bored watchers: barefoot, barely clad, radiating a kind of abnormal, seductive vitality. One guard triggers their intercom.
“Can we help you, ma’am?”
Kerry opens her coat, revealing her shining allure, the pitcher-plant perfection of her reworked body. She flattens herself against their booth, breasts mashing distortedly, and squirms as if in heat.
“She’s high on something. We should stop her before she hurts herself.”
The flick of a switch unseals the unbreachable booth. One man emerges. Kerry hurls herself amorously into his arms. Unprepared, the guard reacts with a slow defensiveness. Kerry has time to plaster her lips against his. His eyes widen, he gags, and his legs buckle.
The fallen guard’s partner has a hand on his holstered gun. Kerry steps into the booth with him.
“Hold it right there, lady—”
Kerry smiles, and protrudes the tip of her tongue as if lasciviously to lick her lips. But her drupleted strawberry tongue fails to continue its betokened motion, instead muscling itself forward, hauling its own animated substance easily onto the ledge of Kerry’s lower jaw, the gobbet of stropping, vocable muscle plainly autonomous and impossibly severed from its roots, poising there like a miniscule predator, toad or lizard, before launching itself across the gap and splatting against the guard’s face. The tongue swims down his scream, and he instantly loses consciousness.
Her motions economic and swift, Kerry strips the shoes and uniform from one of the guards. Lower legs into the narrow pants, she finds them difficult to pull up over her hips. With a small kind of shrug or wriggle, redistributing her mass, her hips instantly accomodate themselves to the requisite dimensions. Dressed in her plausible disguise, Kerry leaves the building before the new guards arrive.
A few early workers move through the dawn-rumored streets. Kerry strides boldly, looking about her with evident fresh-eyed pleasure. Some blocks away from the Diaverde buildings, she stops before the window of a travel agency.
A poster depicts a tropical scene: golden beach with sunbathers, palms shading a drinkbar, sailboats asurf. (In fringing jungle, does a feline face hide?) The poster bears a legend, and, her replacement tongue langourously traversing palate and tapping teeth, Kerry pronounces the invitation aloud:
“Come to Bahia.”
The guard’s wallet offers a Metro card with plenty of stripe credit to buy her a ticket on the hourly shuttle to the airport.
In the main terminal, threading among the rifle-bearing soldiers, Kerry heads directly to the nearest woman’s toilet. This early, the lavatory features few users. Minutes pass before a petite red-haired Hispanic woman clad in a floral-print dress enters, trundling a suitcase on wheels. Kerry smiles, and the woman returns the friendly security guard’s expression.
“Would you watch this for me?”
“Sure.”
The woman opens a stall door, is startled to find Kerry right behind her.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
Kerry pushes the woman inside the stall, and seals her cries with a thick kiss. Swallowing Kerry’s third tongue, the woman drops. Kerry arranges her on the toilet, and begins to undress her victim. At the same time, she is dissolving the guard’s uniform, this time allowing the degenerate materials to slip down the stall’s floor drain. But Kerry continues to shed quarts of cloudy liquid mass beyond the weight of the clothing, shrinking and morphing in rippling cascades until she wears the exact appearance of the unconscious woman.
Dressed in new clothes, in charge of her victim’s purse and luggage, Kerry proceeds to a Web kiosk and purchases her ticket to Bahia online, using the small woman’s credit card.
