NOSTU, Part VI: They Say That, When You Die…

By Draven Copeland, Managing Editor

**CONTENT WARNING: This text contains disturbing graphic content including horrific violence, sexual references, and references to suicide**

A soft glow of pale, artificial light filled the evidence room of the Insmith Sheriff’s office, illuminating from the sporadic stacks of tube televisions that lined every wall. Their collective light put the entire room into a state between brightness and darkness, shifting as the images on the screens varied. Vague, pixelated colors lit the skin of the nosu that filled this and every other room of the otherwise lightless building, wide eyes glued to the screens as they played various grainy tapes.

Among these tapes, many scenes of birth and death played; videos taken from within the trees, watching the people that would soon become victims of their god and father; clips of Nostu seminating the parent of one of its children, each of whom were present in the room to watch; shots of nosu sneaking into the homes of their victims’ loved ones and staging their deaths, blood leaking from the dying men and women and filling the screen as the dark red glowed out into the room and reflected in the eyes of the seething townspeople; and many, many more. 

Whenever one of those in attendance couldn’t hold themselves back any longer, they hastily stripped their clothes to begin touching and biting themselves and one another, moaning and hissing in a mixture of pain and pleasure. The rest watched the tapes intently, visibly shaking and squirming in their clothes as they waited for their anticipation to build up enough that they too had no other choice but to join in.

Bella stood in the center of the room, looking around in confusion. She had awoken that morning to her own reflection in the knife held to her arm, screaming just before she was smothered under her own pillow by one of the townspeople while one held a camera and filmed everything. Just before she had fallen into her last taste of unconsciousness, a phone had rung. 

“Sheriff did what?” She had heard one of the nosu say before stars filled the blackness in her vision and tingled into her mind as she passed out.

Now, she was surrounded by seething figures that watched as their siblings writhed around them on the floor, filling the room with intense anticipation. Eve appeared beside her and, without saying a word, kissed at Bella’s mouth and neck before biting her, the tattooed woman’s bloodshot eyes rolling back as she sucked a mouthful of warm blood. Bella started to shout when the sharp teeth pierced her neck, but the pleasure that came immediately afterwards turned the scream into a soft groan, her eyes starting to roll back before Eve pulled away.

“How lucky you are,” Eve said, licking the dark red as it began to drip from her lips. “You almost ended up like one of them.” 

She nodded to one of the screens as she ran her fingers along Bella’s arm. A tape with the word “ERICA” scrawled onto its container protruded from the television’s tape deck, and the grainy footage showed a dark-skinned woman being attacked in her bedroom while the nosu holding the camera zoomed and shifted for better angles. Bella watched in absolute horror as the attacker smothered Erica with a pillow on her bean bag until she seized for the last time, then grabbed the kitchen knife they had dropped and slashed at her arm with ravenous abandon, laughing and looking into the camera with bulging eyes. 

When they were done, the cameraperson set the camera on Erica’s nightstand and angled it so that the viewer could watch as they both sucked on her bleeding wounds, their eyes rolling back into their skulls as they bulged. After messily feeding for a few moments, they pulled empty blood bags from their pockets and began filling them, Erica’s blood streaming out of her wounds and into the bags. Eve smiled with excitement as the tape rewound to the beginning and played over, the darkness of Erica’s closet lightening as the door slowly creaked open and the attacker reached their arm through the opening, snickering as they faced the camera.

“What is…” Bella began, trying to find the words. She was stunned into immobility, watching as the writhing pile of townspeople grew larger with each new member. Tears started to drop from her eyes as her fear rose. “Please… please don’t hurt me.”

Eve snickered, her elongated fangs reflecting the glow of the screens. Bella shuddered, her heart pulsing like helicopter blades in her chest, its rate increasing with every second she didn’t have a response.

“What’s happening,” she whispered through tears. “Who are you people?”

“Jackie was looking for a story,” Eve replied, the sound of her voice making Bella jump. The nude woman waved her outstretched arm to address the scene, and Bella’s eyes followed to see the growing mass of bodies and the screens of violence. “He found one.”

The white-haired man appeared beside Bella, licking at the hesitation marks on her arm before biting into it. His eyes rolled back as he sucked a mouthful from her, and she felt the instantly familiar rush of pain and pleasure she’d felt when Eve had done the same.

“This is the Director,” Eve said. “The first of our kind. He has lived more lifetimes than you could comprehend, seen so many lives violently cut short as our community has grown. He has such vision… the way he films, Bella, it’s like you were there. Like you can feel it for yourself. It’s so beautiful.”

Another screen caught Bella’s eye as the Director pulled back, turning to watch his films with her. On the monitor played a tape with “ROBYN” scrawled on its container, and the trio watched as Nostu vomited black liquid into Robyn’s open mouth in the middle of a dark street, the camera zooming in as she struggled and gagged as a gray lump passed from its throat into hers. The lump caught in her esophagus and slowly worked its way down, her own saliva spilling from the edges of her lips while she squirmed against the creature’s massive, clawed hands that held her arms against the pavement. The nosu who had not already joined the writhing throng watched intently as she thrashed under the massive creature before the streetlight above them, leaving the scene in darkness as Nostu sulked away into the trees. Even in the grainy, black image, her seizing body was vaguely comprehensible as the pixels rattled with her.

“Now wait,” Eve whispered, turning Bella around to face the largest screen in the room, sitting on other screens playing equally horrifying tapes. “You’re gonna love this one.”

The footage rolled back from its beginning, following the Director into a dark hotel room that subtly became lighter as candlelight danced on the walls. As the white-haired man slid the window open, a massive clawed hand gripped the sill, and Bella watched as the creature violently twisted itself into horrific angles to fit its body in through the relatively small opening. Black liquid dripped eerily from the windowsill and onto the carpeted floor as the creature’s bones protruded in various unsightly angles, its slack-jawed head hanging limply from its broken neck as its wide, bulging eyes stared into the camera. When it had fully entered the room, it twisted itself back into form, bones crunching as they slid back into place, finally looming over Jackie’s convulsing body.

Bella turned away as the creature began to vomit a gray lump into Jackie’s mouth, but what she saw around her didn’t console her much at all. The naked, writhing pile of bodies were biting one another, eyes rolling back as they sucked black liquid from the open wounds of their siblings.

Eve lightly grasped Bella’s chin and turned her back towards Jackie’s film. He was tied up on a strange rock structure now, and something was moving beneath his skin. 

“These films are for us,” Eve said. “Nostu,” she nodded towards the screen as the creature came into frame, “has no need for entertainment. It only needs to create and to feed. Which one it chooses is totally dependent on the purity of the child. As you can see, I explained to Jackie that male births usually don’t work out. They aren’t pure. So… well, just watch.”

Bella did. The entire scene played out before her through the eyes of the Director and his camcorder, before the tape rewound to the beginning after Jackie was completely consumed.

“You… you killed him,” Bella said.

“No, no, no,” Eve replied. “We immortalized him. Just like we did with everyone you see on these tapes. They live and die with us, every night. We choose our movie stars, Bella. We choose how the films play out. And then, we watch.”

Another screen displayed Sheriff Wydell shooting at the creature that slowly materialized from the dark corner of his room, the camera held in the opposite corner. Wydell cried before a brief flash sent fragments of his skull into the wall behind him. The creature paused, tilted its head, and receded again into the darkness as many of the townspeople came into frame, climbing through windows and doorways behind which they had lurked, just out of sight. Without hesitation, they began licking his blood off the walls and sucking on the fresh hole in his head as their bulging eyes rolled back.

“That was my mother’s husband,” Eve said, a solemnness in her voice that wouldn’t have been lost on Bella were she not already completely overwhelmed. “He was our ‘blood bag,’ as we like to call them. It was serendipity that he was already our Sheriff before he took on the role. Things tend to work out for anyone who drinks from Nostu’s skin… we’re just lucky like that. And now, because of our late Sheriff’s last-minute decision, he has shared that luck with you.” She leaned in again, kissing at Bella’s neck and running her fangs against the skin, applying just enough pressure that they wouldn’t penetrate. 

“I’d advise you take it,” she whispered into Bella’s ear as her fangs slid along the soft cartilage. “Why not grow your little slice of eternity?”

Bella looked around her at the writhing and entangled bodies that littered the entire room, watching as they moaned and bit and hissed with mixtures of pleasure and pain, black liquid dripping from their mouths and punctured flesh. Shadows and all manner of shades of light shifted on their bodies in time with the film on the screens. No one else was left standing but Eve, who continued to caress Bella, only barely holding herself back from joining the throng.

“What do you say, Bella?” Eve asked intently.

Bella looked down at the scars that riddled her naked arm, now joined by two leaking holes where the Director had bitten her. She thought back to the mirror she had looked into every night and every morning since she had bought her apartment. She thought of the night Jackie had moved in. His idea, not hers, she remembered. If that wasn’t the story of her life, she didn’t know what was. Every day and every night had been a performance. A delicate balance of childlike femininity and sexual prowess. If she wasn’t cute, she wasn’t appealing, and if she wasn’t hot, they’d go to someone else. 

Hell, Jackie would go to someone else anyway, no matter how good her performance was. It would never be enough, she resolved. She could never have love and emotional safety together at once. Not in the digital world or the real one.

“Will you do one thing for me?” she finally asked.

Eve hesitated, seemingly disappointed. “I can’t say until you ask me,” she replied, her breath warm against Bella’s neck. “What is it you want?”

Bella gestured to the screen that was still playing Jackie’s death on repeat. The creature was just starting to pull his corpse into its mouth on the tape and, despite herself, her lip quivered into a smile as she watched. “Make a copy for me,” she said.

---

The stainless steel basin that held the mixture of Jackie and his child’s blood spilled onto Bella’s naked body as she joined the throng, writhing with ecstasy along with the rest of Insmith. Eve watched as the sanguine liquid intensified the ferocity of the squirming mass – they seemed as if they might tear one another apart in their ecstasy. She licked the tip of the basin as mouths bit into Bella’s flesh and took a sip or two each from her veins, keeping her alive but increasingly delirious as the black liquid seeped from their gums into her bloodstream and gave her the high of her life. 

Eve stepped over interlocked bodies as she walked down the hallway and into the Sheriff’s office, sliding the basin into its home under the desk. She was alone in the dark room, the sounds of violent intercourse still echoing in even after she shut the door and flicked on the overhead light. Bathed in flickering fluorescence, she slowly lowered herself into Sheriff Wydell’s chair and stared at the lined paper she’d left on the desk.

It was crumpled from when it had been stuffed into her sibling’s pocket as they’d hastily grabbed it from the Sheriff’s home, off the table beside his favorite chair. There were specks of reddish-brown blood that had misted from his head onto the page, but the scrawled penmanship was still legible. Eve took a deep breath, steadied herself, and began reading.

“Evie, 

“I want to say that I was wrong. In so many ways, I was wrong, but the way I’ve treated you was the worst of all.

“After losing Carol – and after what they did to Marcy – I couldn’t look you in the eye without seeing them. God’s honest truth, I thought about doing what I did today all the way back then. And I thought about it every time I looked at you. How I could see them again. How easy it would be just to sit in my chair and hear their voice coming from the other room in the sky.

“But I couldn’t leave the only thing I had left in this world, Evie. You’re all I had a reason to stay for. I thought that if I did right by you, I could do right by Carol and Marcy, and that they’d forgive me if I could forgive myself. 

“They died because I didn’t have their back. If only I’d believed them, I always thought. From then on, I had your back even when it killed me.

“And Lord, did it kill me. Every time you killed one of these poor people, and every time I watched you watch them die over and over and over again. But I had to let you. If your god didn’t have what he needed, he’d kill all of you without a second thought. He does as much with the deformed ones, it don’t take a genius to know he’d do the same to you when you stopped being useful. Telling myself I was protecting you was the only way I could get through it.

“And the truth is, Evie, the tale’s grown old. I’m tired of hearing it and I’m far too tired to tell it again. I’m not going to keep doing this.

“I hope that you know that, for what little it’s worth, I love you. I love you as I love my own daughter because I couldn’t imagine the life you’ve had without anyone to love you at all. Far as I’m concerned, you’re just as much blood to me as they were. You’re family.

“I’m sorry to have this conversation without you. I’m sorry I never got a chance to say any of this to you in person. And I’m sorry that I never called you anything other than a burden. You were my reason to live. I just can’t keep doing it. I hope you can forgive me.”

Eve set the paper down, her breath shallowing as her eyes welled up with tears. She gasped in a deep breath as she tried to compose herself, her hand accidentally tapping against the computer mouse on the desk as she leaned back into the chair. Pictures of the Sheriff and his family flashed across the screen, smiling and holding one another lovingly only months before the town had ripped them apart. Marcy had been beautiful when she was alive, Eve realized.

She put her head in her hands and whimpered loudly, her tears finally pouring out and sliding down the backs of her hands, pooling onto the table.

“I’m so sorry,” she said between sobs. “I’m so, so sorry.”

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