The Canadian lumbered slowly back to the black asphalt pavement that lay between the rows of unit lots. He paused with his every step forward; the man grasped his lower abdomen as if to hold his very kidneys in.

Whenever he did brave to take another step, the man's body jerked in violent spasms of what appeared to be intense pain.

He twisted up his upper body each time.

Tasìa glanced back over to the piss stain he had left on the storage unit wall right beside her. A deep rouge color, caused when blood and urine mixed together, trickled down the tin surface.

Tasìa shook her head and grinned with a suppressed chuckle hissing through her teeth. Annebél fucked him up well and true.

The streetwalker pugilist wasn't one to be fucked with.

Tasìa kept her eyes focused on the man and the direction that he walked. She was concerned that depending on where his journey led, he might complicate her own plans.

When his path veered with definite purpose away from the festivities, Tasìa decided to follow.

Her overall plan of action was simple enough. First, confirm whether the three men were ghouls or not.

The skin of ghouls tended to turn an unnatural ocherous yellow. With their extremities of lips, tongue, nipples and genitalia becoming a crusted snot green.

Other identifiers: extremes of morbid emaciation, rigor mortis like grins, mineralized nails of both fingers and toes indistinguishable from smoothed over samite quartz, elbows and knees so calloused as to be chitinous.

Most telling was the development of forked tongues.

If their condition proved to be positively confirmed, she would shoot the three ghouls, and then do the same to the big, ugly badass that greeted the streetwalkers earlier. The latter needed to be done so in dramatic public execution fashion.

Tasìa calculated that a set of swift, brutal actions on her part would demoralize the other organ harvesters and force them to flee from the facility.

If the North Americans left behind the bodies of those she killed, the corpses would be eventually discovered by the local police.

However, even that would work to Tasìa's advantage if a mere four bodies were left behind. That was doable in terms of a cover-up.

The local cops had every incentive to keep the law enforcement arm of the Salvage out of the city just as Tasìa did. Nobody wanted their overarching scrutiny.

It tended to end careers.

That was Tasìa's plan in a nutshell.

Except, this miserable Canuck in front of her, walking around like a wounded pup, was complicating things by his mere presence.

Tasìa grimmaced contemptuously as she watched him.

He walked towards a row of storage units adjacent to the same back row that the allegéd ghouls took off to when they hid.

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Tasìa did not want to kill any more of these people than would be necessary to carry out her plan.

A busted-up faded black Hearse sat in the middle of the asphalt drive between the two farthest rows of the southwestern corner of the facility.

A lithe bodied woman pulled herself out of the driver's seat to face the man. The car door was missing.

She balled up her fist and took up an aggressive stance.

"Leave me the fuck alone, Eddy. Don't try to talk me out of it. It's over."

It was the woman who accompanied the two Canadian men. Her voice no longer sounded buoyant in the way it did when she spoke cryptically of rainbow trout, earlier.

"Bella, come on . . . This isn't the end; this just means that another facet of our experience is about to begin."

As Tasìa hid in a volume of shadow slanted down from the wall beside her, she grabbed her pistol scope out of the fanny-pack.

Intuitive suspicion informed Tasìa that she needed to get a better read on the face of the one the Canadian called Bella.

The woman possessed a shallow cut along the ridgeline of her cheek. Annebél must have smacked her up a bit as well.

"You did this to me, Eddy," Bella seethed, her words becoming muddled in the usage of her sibilants as she grew angrier.

"You talked me into this shit. You said this would be an adventure. Now, look at me!"

A slight ocherous pallor marred the woman's complexion. It was only barely noticeable as seen through the lens of Tasìa's scope.

The woman, however, had likely been watching for this very symptom for months on end as she lived in a state of mind verging on paranoia.

The addiction of harvested organs proved all-consuming to the participants in the vile habit. Often, to the point of literal metamorphosis.

"Bella," the man started to plea with her.

She would have none of it. The woman rushed over and she shoved him with a violent heave. He fell over himself and collapsed into a ball.

"How many times have I told you to stop calling me that? Edward and Bella. It is no longer cute. It is just fucking sick."

She gave him a swift kick in his ass. As he tried to stand up, she pushed on him.

"Just get away from me, you fucking asshole," she yelled.

Tasìa almost felt sorry for the bastard as he choked back tears and proclaimed his love while also scurrying to get away from her fists.

However, Tasìa could not feel an iota of sympathy for him; she knew what he was.

"The fucking losers that I let control my life," Bella muttered as she returned to the driver's seat of the Hearse.

Wherever he crawled off too, Eddy was now out of Tasìa's way. She crouched down as she holstered her .32 and she retrieved her stiletto knife.

Tasìa climbed up the wall of a storage unit to avoid Bella's line-of-sight. She crawled low on its roof to the other side of it. Here she jumped down near the back fender of the Hearse.

From there, Tasìa crept up on the woman; she kept an eye on Bella's movement. The Canadian's head flung around in nearly constant motion.

Bella scrutinized her own face in the car mirror in front of her. She stretched her mouth out wide, displaying even rows of pearl-white teeth.

She stuck her tongue out, raising it up to the mirror for better scrutiny.

Tasìa could only see the woman's eyes in the mirror from her own vantage point. Whatever she saw in the mirror, Bella's eyes widened with fright.

She collapsed in a sob. Tears flowed rapidly. Bella wiped them away, and just as rapidly, her pupils tightened in a menacing glare.

Her eyes appeared all the more crazed and starkly pronounced with the cut on her cheek set like an underscore.

As Bella cursed Eddy once more for several seconds, Tasìa raised up to stand directly behind Bella.

With a smooth, singular motion, Tasìa pushed the blade up against the woman's neck.

"Don't yell," Tasìa commanded, "else I'll cut your throat."

Bella looked back up at Tasìa. Her pupils still lit up, tight and menacing. This close, Tasìa could see the vibrant green of Bella's eyes.

Bella's mouth opened up in a loose grin falling on the curve of her chin.

Tasìa's jaw clenched defensively when she saw the early formation of a bifurcated tongue.

"Did he send you here to shut me up," Bella asked. "Did he send you here to kill me? Well, you needn't bother. I'm about to do it myself."

Bella opened her mouth wider and she put a yellow prescription pill-bottle up against her mouth. Dozens of little pink pills rattled out of the container and into the gullet of Bella's throat.

Tasìa removed the blade from her slender neck. It was a futile gesture to threaten a truly suicidal person.

Even still, she was radiant once more. Bella's brows raised knowingly, her green eyes dazzled in mischief.

A bottle of Wild Irish Rose sat in her lap.

"Oh shit, bitch," Tasìa began, "here I thought I was the one having the shittiest day imaginable."