Owen stopped more than twenty times on the drive from Malibu to his apartment in Oceanside. To stare at the tattoo. He didn’t dare do that while driving, because the image entranced him.
All along the way he thought he saw real blowflies whip past his windshield. At the rest stop near Camp Pendleton he saw a whole cluster of them crawling over the carcass of a dead crow. Owen froze in his tracks halfway to the men’s room and stood there, staring.
Then his jaw fell open as the flies—at least three dozen of them—stopped their busy scurrying and turned toward him. To look at him.
The fly on his forearm throbbed with a sensation that was exactly half the distance between pain and pleasure. He shoved his sleeve up and stared at the ink. His heart lurched to an abrupt stop in his chest. The fly rendered by Malibu Mark was far more than photo-real.
It was real.
As he stood there, watching it, and aware that all of those flies were watching him, the inked fly trembled.
The tiny wings fluttered.
Owen did not even try to tell himself that he was imagining it. He seldom drank, hadn’t done any drugs since getting off the antipsychotics, and wasn’t nearly exhausted enough to be hallucinating. The fucking fly was moving its wings. He saw it.
He felt it.
And … he heard it.
“God almighty,” he breathed.
The buzzing of the fly increased, and all of the other flies—the real ones—began buzzing, too. Owen’s words seemed to echo in the air, sewn into the fabric of the moment.
God almighty.
Was he talking about himself?
The buzzing grew louder and louder and …