The smell had bothered him from that morning and he swore it followed his roommate around, getting faintly stronger as he approached and only fading as he departed.
‘Have you got a new aftershave on, Steve?’ he queried, not bothering to look at his mate on the couch. ‘It actually smells like… shit’. Daniel snorted at his own jibe.
The show was terrible. A regurgitated, heavily scripted ‘reality’ offering about home renovations on free-to-air television, interspersed with advertisements for KFC and a telecom agency he would otherwise had forgotten even existed. Two broke uni students hardly had the pleasure of choice.
As soon as the snapping started, Daniel likened it to the sound of gristle on a lamb shank tearing between his teeth.
Steve’s face was splitting open, quite evenly down the middle. His skull was parting and despite it being covered in blood and flecks of torn flesh, Daniel instantly recognised his own face emerging from the human debris.
‘Fuck me’ was all he could manage as his doppelganger opened its eyes and smiled, toothily.