Bearing Witness

Jordan woke up the next morning feeling miserable.

She’d woken up in a cold sweat again, and this time shivering with chills. Her father had been quietly furious, complaining to her grandmother just outside her door that she was trying to sneak out of going to church.

Only her mother Karen seemed to be worried, plucking a thermometer from Jordan’s mouth and reading its results. “Your temperature’s normal. But I don’t think you’re faking it.” She shook the thermometer in her hand. “We’ll be out most of the day. We’ve got some canned chicken soup in the pantry and I’ve got leftover cordon bleu in the refrigerator, just the way you like it.”

Karen breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Jordan relax.

“I missed you,” smiled Karen. “I cried the night you left.”

She froze when she heard Debra on the other side of the door. “Karen, we’re going to be late to church.”

“C-Coming.” Karen got up from the bed and went to leave.

----

Jordan waited until the rest of the family left to start getting ready.

Her father had been right. She’d intended to find a way out of going to church one way or another. But getting ill hadn’t been part of the plan.

After a quick shower, she pulled her backpack out from under her bed and quickly checked its contents. Sure that it still contained the parts of Elijah’s ham radio, she finished getting dressed. Jeans, a shirt, and a plain green hoodie.

Grey let her into Frank’s house through the back door. Frank was running errands in town and had left Grey to her own devices. And based on the look on Grey’s face, she was getting cabin fever.

“Not as bad as you, though,” Grey told Jordan while she watched Jordan assemble the ham radio in Frank’s office. “Are you alright?”

“No.” Jordan’s hands shook as she checked every part of the system she’d taken. “I killed a man last night.”

Jordan had expected shock or disgust from Grey. But – “Did he have a face?”

That question again. Both DeVon and Grey seemed to know something Jordan didn’t. “No.”

“Then what you did was a mercy.” Grey leaned against the wall, eyes closed. “It’s not just your face they take. It’s everything that defines you. Your tastes, your preferences… your memories. Your life, or what shallow existence you can call that, is one stripped of identity. Of everything that makes you, you.”

The more Jordan was hearing, the more she wondered if she was safe at home. She had almost finished assembling the set. “Who took Elijah’s face?”

“FELP.”

FELP? Jordan frowned. She’d seen that somewhere before. Her distaste only grew when she realized how much damage she’d done last night with that errant kick. “I damaged some parts. Won’t be able to send or receive until it’s fixed. I need to go into town and find a hardware store.”

Grey’s eyes shot open. “You can’t go into town. It’s not safe.”

“I have to. Where else am I going to get parts to repair this thing?”

Grey’s hand shot to Jordan’s wrist in a panic. “You really don’t know. I thought you were bluffing at first, regardless of what Frank said.”

Jordan blushed from the contact. If she needed any assurances about her orientation, that was enough to seal it.

Grey drew closer, looking Jordan dead in the eye. “…Withdrawal symptoms. The bastards had you on Lethenine. I don’t envy what’s coming next.”

From the blush on Grey’s face, it seemed her orientation was equally aligned. “What’s coming?”

With a huff, Grey broke eye contact and composed herself as she marched out of the room. “You’re going to get worse. Much worse. If you need to go into town, then fine.” She then turned to face Jordan. “But I’m going with you.”

Jordan shook her head. “No, if even half of what you’re saying is right, they’ll be looking for you after that car wreck.”

“And you’re going to need someone with you while you ride out the withdrawal.” Grey stepped back towards Jordan and poked her in the shoulder. “Let’s get going.”

----

Jordan listened to Grey’s story as the two made the hike from the suburbs

As she told it, Grey was from a town buried in rural Oklahoma. Small enough not to appear on most maps, a real ‘flyover’ patch of land. But it was a nice enough place.

It was. Until FELP arrived.

They came slowly. Infiltrating institutions. Gaining control over the levers of power. Businesses, police, city hall.

It was insane to hear her say it. Jordan was unsure how much of it to believe.

Her vision blurred when the two got to the businesses of Green Pines. Everything looked perfect. People were smiling, going on their merry way, there was so much color everywhere...

Jordan stumbled enough for Grey to help keep her upright. “Easy,” Grey told her. “Easy.”

But she couldn’t. Her eye twitched uncontrollably as she looked down the street. There were a gaggle of police down there, dealing with a homeless man. Through the haze she saw it was the same man her grandmother had nearly hit on her way from the hospital.

Color warped, growing more intense and less saturated as two policemen took the man to the ground. A third kneeled on his back and a fourth kneeled on the ground next to his head. Jordan could hear the man scream that he couldn’t breathe, begged someone to do something.

But no one answered. People were cheering the officers.

Jordan wobbled again, gasping for breath as she heard something near the officers growl.

She blinked hard and then she saw. The officer kneeling next to the homeless man was twice the size that she thought he was, his head not human in the slightest. A cat’s head rested on his shoulders, yellow fur dotted with small black spots surrounding a brown center. The head’s jaw distended, growing impossibly long until it scraped against the pavement.

The other officers began shoving the man towards the mouth over his screams. The moment his head crossed into its mouth, the mouth snapped shut on the man’s neck.

The homeless man’s arms whirled around in vain as something in that mouth swirled around. The screams quickly died as its swirled more and more.

After a few more seconds, the homeless man’s head was popped out of the mouth. The other officers picked him up and began dragging him towards a waiting police cruiser.

The homeless man clawed at his head, trying to scream but with no mouth.

The leopard had eaten his face.