Begging...12 Kilos
“You chug this, you drown where you sit. I’ve seen it, ain’t pretty. Your body needs water so it’s telling you to drink deep but that’s a lie. You need to sip, slow, and take long breaks between, it not, you die on my porch, slow and sloppy and I don’t get paid.”
Garrett is careful to nod, showing that he hears the warning he was already well aware of. Of course, his body is demanding that he slam the contents of the bottle and begs for seconds and thirds. This isn’t his first or even twentieth dalliance with starvation and deprivation. Sips, slow and shallow and then a bit longer as he can manage, and even then, as tissues soak up valuable liquid and begin to ache, he’ll have to force himself to think before gulping water that will only find its way into the tissues surrounding his heart and lungs.
Garrett will feel thirsty for days, or as many days as he has left, and he’s already weary of just what and how much this single bottle of the stuff will cost him. There’s also the dubious nature of the taste, and smell. Garrett spent months in the Tumor Queen’s cells and even more time as her kept and caged play thing, the first time. He became familiar with the unmistakable after taste of recycled water. This stuff isn’t coming from a well or a cistern or some shallow puddle beyond. There was more to the ancient woman and her leaning shanty than meets the eye. A dared second slow sip leaves Garrett wincing as he swallows. He raises a hand to the spot behind his jaw and comes away with more blood, wet fresh blood.
“How bad?”
Garrett tries speaking again and barely manages to get a few words out before the coughing starts up again.
The old woman is turned away from him when he speaks and she doesn’t appear to hear him at all. Garrett waits and manages another slow, shallow sip of recycled water before she turns around with an old pot in her hands. The ancient begins digging into her bag of shell fish coming up with a handful of small clams before she reaches out for one of the two knives.
“How bad, do I look?”
Nothing.
Garrett takes another small sip and lets the water sit in his mouth for a moment before he swallows it.
“How do my wounds look?”
The ancient woman takes note as Garrett practically shouts. She points the end of her long, thin kitchen knife in his general direction. “I’m old, not deaf. Shout at me again and you’ll be leaving my porch, one way or another.”
After a few more minutes of unbearable silence and a few shucked clams of progress the woman lays her work down but keeps the knife in her hand, pointed out.
“No bullshit?”
Garrett nods, “No bullshit.”
“I didn’t want to startle you but it’s like this. Most of your head looks like shriveled sea weed, the rest looks like a swolled up rat carcass. All that, rolled up hair of yours is tangled up in weeds or stuck to the side of your head with blood. I can’t tell where it all begins or ends. The left side of your head is all bulged out and red and you got a wicked gash running down your cheek to your jaw, the thing opens up and oozes when you talk.”