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’A month ago Jane and
Lucy were alive. But not now.
He remembers Lucy’s baby
fine hair dancing around her face in the wind, her skin so
smooth and young. He remembers her high laugh, and her arms
flinging around his neck when he came home in the evening
after work.
And he remembers Jane.
Her dark hair, dark eyes. Full of secrets. He spent six
years trying to learn every part of her. Not only the
smiles, what she showed the world, but her dark corners,
fears. He was so in love, convinced that they should know
everything about each other, so sure that they could.
He understands now that
he never could have learned all there was to know about her.
Jane knew. No one ever knows another person completely, but
she never stopped him from trying. In return he gave her
everything he knew to give her of himself.
It didn’t save her. He
didn’t. And in the end, it turned out that he knew even less
about himself than he did Jane. For example, he’d never have
believed he could kill another human being. But there she
lies on the floor at his feet, body ripped apart. Just like
Jane. Like Lucy.
Her name was Kristy.
He looks at what is left
of her, but he doesn’t see her. He sees Jane. Her smile,
lips parting slow, eyes going dark, long beautiful body
tensing against his, calling out his name. Remembers how her
breasts felt cupped in his hands, nipples stiff against his
palms. How it felt to be inside her, moving in heat,
wetness, her breath at his neck, fingers curved into his
back, digging into his skin.
I love you, she said, so
many times. He always wanted more, all of her, everything,
believing he could have it.
He hangs his head.
Don’t. Fuck, just don’t. His hand shakes against his thigh.
The memories always come
back. Their faces, voices, their past and present together,
all of it his life until the day he came home to find their
blood spewed over the living room, his mind refusing to
comprehend the great looping gouts of red over neat white
walls, bloody demarcations separating them forever. Their
bodies on the floor, pieces of the puzzles they were. Jane’s
eyes, seeing nothing. Jane, who’d understood his intensity,
how he wanted to know everything about her. He’d never loved
anyone like that. And Lucy. Mouth open grotesquely wide,
scream of pain no child should ever know or feel. Dead blue
skin. Dead. He fell to the floor on his knees and touched
them, tried to hold them, screaming inside his head or maybe
screaming out loud, he didn’t know which.
He remembered a sound
approaching from behind, low and rasping. Panting in his
ear. It didn’t matter. He stared down at his red hands and
tried to understand. Looked like he dipped them in paint.
Something hit him and his brain exploded in white noise. He
fell face down into their shredded bodies, their cooling
blood. Tasted like iron. He raised his head and made some
crazy sound, keening, but it seemed far away, like someone
else did it.
Something dragged his
body over the carpet, worried at his arm. The taste of blood
in his mouth spread like a thin stain, wouldn’t go away.
Didn’t know if it was Jane’s or Lucy’s blood. His grief
sharpened into something hot and hard and huge,
uncontrollable. He drove his elbow back, felt something snap
and give way beneath it. Heard a yelp as sirens approached
outside.
He was told the
paramedics pulled him away from the remains of his family,
but he didn’t remember that part.
After a few days he was
discharged from the hospital. The first weeks after, he
didn’t shave or sleep much, didn’t bathe, just waited at his
parents’ house. The police talked to him a lot, he
remembered that. Then he was finally allowed to go home.
He opened the door and
stared in shock. The walls were white and blank again, the
carpet new. He tried to see the blood beneath the paint,
angry that Jane and Lucy had been so efficiently erased. His
parents had arranged that. Wiped out all that was left of
them.
He still had his
memories, though. He learned never to turn them aside, not
even with their tattered bodies and cold blood stamped over
them all like a watermark from the last time he saw them.
They were all he had.
Southerners like open
caskets. They have viewings. Visitation earlier during the
day, come sign the book. That’s the way they’re raised. The
way he was raised. He’s never thought about it before, but
those waxy faces, souls so clearly departed, do the same
thing. Superimpose themselves over the living memories.
Taint them.
Doesn’t matter, really.
His wife and daughter could never have had open caskets.
The gun wobbles in his
grip. He raises it, watches his hand grow slowly still.
Blood drips off it.
He went back to work for
the first time on a Monday, pretended to earn his pay and be
functional so that his mother and father would stop looking
at him with their wounded eyes, like they’d been the ones
that had been hurt. So they’d leave him in peace. So to
speak.
Everybody at the office
looked at him in the same way—quick looks that glanced off
the surface of him, returned, bounced away again. Curious,
uneasy. Looking but not wanting him to see them gawk, like
fucking bystanders at the scene of an accident. They didn’t
know what to say so they said nothing. Preservation
instinct, he thought. He didn’t know what he’d say or do if
someone actually said Jane’s or Lucy’s name aloud to him. As
if they meant anything to anyone there.
They didn’t have the
right.
The hours stretched on.
He quit pretending to get any work done. His skin itched and
prickled and his bones ached like when he was ten and had
growing pains. He alternated staring fixedly at his PC with
pacing up and down the office. He stayed late, reclaiming
his right to be there, though he didn’t really want to be
there.
He stopped at the liquor
store on the way home, bought the biggest, cheapest bottle
of vodka they had. For a minute after he opened the front
door he expected they’d be there, the years of coming home
to them still imprinted on his brain. He unscrewed the cap,
threw it off and drank the vodka warm and straight out of
the bottle. It burned raw in his throat. Tasted like shit.
He stared at the white white walls, thinking about the taste
of blood in his mouth.
No hangover when he woke
the next day, though he’d expected it. Though he wouldn’t
have cared.
He went into work every
day for the rest of the week. He was on time and he always
stayed late. He got nothing done. No one bothered him about
it.
The police hadn’t made
an arrest. He thought maybe they never would. It made him
crazy to think about it.
On Saturday he did
nothing much. He picked up the phone the three times it rang
because it was too much trouble not to answer, though in the
end he didn’t think he made anyone feel better by doing so.
By five in the afternoon he was out of the house again,
headed for the liquor store.
The branches of the
trees were bare and black against the low gray sky. A frigid
drizzle fell. It looked like it might turn to snow. He
supposed it was cold but he didn’t feel it, even without a
jacket.
A woman in the same
aisle at the liquor store wrinkled her nose at him when he
picked a bottle up off the shelf. “Ugh, you really drink
that?” She smiled.
He stared at her. She
was short and slim, curvaceous. Her hair was long and wavy,
brown with gold highlights, some of it still tucked into the
neck of her brown leather coat, a piece of it tucked behind
her ear. He smiled back slowly, feeling it on his face,
though it didn’t feel as if it was something he meant to do.
She flushed, her skin going a pretty pink, and suddenly he
was rigid, aroused.
“I drink whatever gets
the job done.” His voice was low and ragged. It should have
made her run. It didn’t.
“Going somewhere?” she
asked.
He shrugged. “Home. You
have someplace to be?” He listened to the words as they came
out of his mouth, not pushing them away. His dick throbbed
in his jeans. Part of him was horrified.
“Maybe I do now,” she
said. “I’m Kristy.”
He stared at her again.
“Where were you when I was in college?”
She laughed and moved
closer, tucking her hand in his. She looked up at him.
“Where’s your coat?”
***
He wasn’t able to touch
her in the living room where they died, so he watched her
from the kitchen chair, pulling steadily on the vodka
bottle. He felt warm. Blurry. All the jagged edges were a
little more bearable. But something rose fast behind the
warmth, something he tried not to feel.
I’m not that. I won’t
be.
She pulled off her shirt
and sank to her knees between his spread thighs. Her breasts
were full, nipples pale dusky pink. She looked at him for a
moment like he might turn away from her, whatever façade she
wanted him to see slipping to show a terrifying need. He
didn’t understand it. He didn’t know her. Maybe she needed
someone, but not him. Nobody needed him anymore. He wanted
to tell her but didn’t.
She reached out, touched
his face. He was tall, well muscled from a workout routine
he’d followed once upon a time before his family died. She
was tiny compared to him.
“You look so . . .
hurt,” she said, her voice soft.
He wrenched his face
away, closed his eyes. She put a hand to the back of his
neck, pulled him forward and nuzzled his throat, scattered
kisses over his face. “You don’t have to tell me. You don’t
have to say anything. Kiss me. Don’t you want to?” she
whispered. She licked his cheekbone, light flick of wet
warmth. He turned his head a little closer into her. Didn’t
want or mean to do it. She smelled like rain and musk. She
pressed her body closer, warm, promising something he didn’t
want and needed more than anything. He ground against her
before he could stop.
“I saw you,” she
breathed against his ear, “and I just . . . I wanted you to
let me . . . ”
His hands moved to both
sides of her head, yanking her forward. His hands dwarfed
her face. His mouth slammed over hers. She made a tiny,
needy sound in her throat that went straight to his dick. He
pulled her legs up and around him in a single swift motion,
and she scrabbled them around his waist, pushing her body up
so that her face was above his. Her eyes were all pupil, her
lips soft and swollen. Open, waiting for him.
He pulled her down,
swallowed her up, thrusting his tongue inside, fucking her.
She moaned, thrashing her tongue over his. Her hands worked
under his shirt, tugging at it, and he broke away long
enough to rip it over his head and throw it aside. She was
on him again before the shirt hit the floor, fingers
smoothing over skin, stopping at a nipple, pinching hard.
Her head ducked, sealing her lips over her fingers and his
nipple, mouthing him greedily, teeth nipping, fingers
rubbing. His blood roared in his head and through his body,
his cock. He pushed her back and thrust a hand down her
pants to the soft skin of her stomach, gliding down to her
slit. His fingers dropped over her clit and rubbed, felt her
hot and swollen. Dipped a finger lower and pushed into her,
in and out, rough, then added another. She cried out,
throwing her head back and rocking into his touch.
With his other hand he
tried to unbutton and unzip her jeans. Her hand batted at
his, impatient, taking over. She stood and backed up a
couple of steps, pulled her jeans down, then a red wisp of
underwear and she was naked in the dark kitchen, need
written all over her, want and lust, shyness. He reached out
and she climbed into his lap, poised over his cock, grasped
him in her hand and positioned him, lowering over him. He
groaned and his hips jerked, slamming up inside her. She
moved with him in tandem, breasts jiggling.
So wet. Tight, slippery
heat.
The something rose in
him again. Adrenaline. Terrible strength. Hunger growing
blacker, larger, overcoming everything else. His humanity.
His grief. He didn’t want to grieve anymore. Didn’t want to
feel. Live. But it didn’t mean he had to take her with him.
He looked into her eyes.
She smiled and touched his face again, then pressed her
forehead to his. He felt her eyelashes brush his cheek. He
held her by the waist, picked her up, pulled her back down
onto his cock as if she weighed nothing. She gasped and
panted, mouth open, breasts bobbing against the smooth line
of her arm as she stroked her clit. His hands moved up to
her shoulders and he pushed and pulled and clawed at her,
fucked her.
“God, I’m gonna come, oh
please,” she nearly sobbed. Her body arched, then stiffened,
jerking against him. He felt her pulse around his cock. She
came down slowly, off a good high, face gleaming with sweat.
Her eyes were soft, drowsy. She smiled.
“I know what this is,”
he said out of the blue. He still didn’t feel connected to
the words when he spoke. His cock felt unbearably hard
inside her. He needed to come.
She rolled her hips
against him. “Why’d you stop? Come for me.” Her voice was
low and lazy, satisfied. When he didn’t answer she
straightened up and focused her gaze on him. “What is it?”
“Something,” he said,
tapping himself on the chest, “in here.”
“Not down there?” she
teased, looking at where they were joined.
He ignored her. “It’s
beginning.”
He’d had the bullets
made, feeling both idiotic and terrified. It wasn’t easy to
make them, so he’d been told. Graphite mold, blow-torched to
keep the metal from hardening before it was all poured in.
I knew what was
happening to me. I just didn’t want to believe.
He’d wanted all of Jane.
He wanted all of Kristy.
He smiled at her and
started moving again, slow and sure. Felt so good. He pushed
his fingers through her hair, cupped her cheek. She sighed,
smiled and closed her eyes, riding him. She kept them
closed, happy, relaxed until he got rough, until his body
changed, grew larger, coarse, fingers in her hair tightening
their grip, muscles humming with trapped energy that grew
and grew until he saw and smelled and felt only her sex and
her blood. He picked up her heartbeat through his skin, felt
it pound faster and faster, threatening to burst. She
screamed, kept screaming when he ripped her body with hands
and mouth, drank her blood, ripped out her tongue with his
teeth and swallowed it. Blood gargled down her throat until
she couldn’t breathe. He split her in two, guttural grunts
and growls bouncing off the walls in the dark kitchen, and
he came just like she had asked him to do.
***
Outside the moon bursts
from the clouds and shows its wide white face, then goes
back in hiding.
She’s on the floor at
his feet, the life and heat gone out of her. He looks down
at the curve of her hip, the delicate hollow where the
collarbone meets the throat. Her blood is black in the dark.
He’s covered with it, drying in a solid sheet over his
chest. He thinks of it warm in his mouth, remembers her
screams.
He hefts the gun up
under his chin like he’s always heard it should be done, so
that the bullet will go straight up into the brain instead
of maybe ricocheting around his skull and not killing him.
Wouldn’t that be
something.
He keeps his eyes on
what’s left of her until he can’t stand the drying blood and
sightless eyes and then he pulls the trigger. |
