One Spent Shell, fiction by Dan J. Fiore

A knot in Skid’s chest. Blood on the floor. One spent shell falls from his gun and Vaughn, Skid’s cousin, his best damned friend, stares up at him. One eye a pulpy exit wound. The other frozen in surprise.

A teller’s phone rings.

“What’s going on in there, Henry?”

A boy cowers in the corner. Just a kid. He stares at the woman he walked in with. Dead now like the rest. All but the two of them.

“I want a truck,” Skid murmurs.

“What were the shots we just heard, Henry?” The voice reminds Skid of his Uncle Simon. “Everyone okay?”

“Stop calling me that,” Skid says. “Nobody calls me that. Just get me a truck. Or a van. A fucking way out of here.”

The voice asks for a hostage. An exchange.

“Transportation might take a while,” it says. “Anyone in there need anything else in the meantime?”

Skid looks around at all the bodies.

“More hostages.”

***

Heartbeat racing, but downshifting. Flak jacket heavy.

Lights flicker and cattle stampede across the roof. Just a chopper passing low overhead.

That cocktail Vaughn cooked up. . . those two thick sky-blue lines. That’s why he went all ate up. Why they’re here now, half dead and trapped. But what Skid would give for just one more bump.

Drive on, he tells himself. Go through with it. Set up all those card decks of C4 along the deposit boxes and at least nab what they’d came for. Just in case he makes it out. Somehow.

The weight aching him settles in his eyelids. He wonders about things Vaughn missed. About unknown doors. Tunnels and secret passages. Like bookshelves that spin. Places to hide. A flashlight through the flesh of his fingers. Dark closets. The dark. Heavy hands on his chest, and the way his uncle would—

The phones ring. Skid sniffs alert again.

Simon says.

He rips the phone cords from the wall.

The boy still sits in the corner, chin between his knees. Shallow, sharp breaths. Eyes wide. Panicked and afraid.

Then, a muffled rattle. Somewhere not far outside. So out of place. It shakes something loose in Skid. Before the burst even ends, he recognizes it:

An AK-47.

***

Two exits. One leading west to the parking lot. The other downstairs, spilling eastward onto Main Street. Skid follows the gunshots to the west. A long, wood-paneled hallway. Double panels of shatterproof glass.

Knots unravel in his back. The one in his gut doesn’t.

All the armored cars, gone. The cops littering the sidewalks, gone. The lot past the entryway, now vacant. Just a hot slab of concrete stretching toward a scattered hillside of rundown houses.

A scream.

Not from outside, but within.

The kid.

***

An empty corner. The lobby, quiet. Air still thick with copper and gunpowder. The kid isn’t there.

And neither is Vaughn’s body.

***

Skid finds the kid in a back office. Balled up under a desk. A black burn mark on his forearm, the shape of a hand.

“What happened?” he asks.

A long moment of silence. The kid won’t talk. The rattle of the AC. Then, nothing. The lights die along with the electric hum.

“Shit,” Skid mutters. He waves a hand under the desk. “It’s all right,” he says. “I won’t hurt ya. I promise.”

Too quick for Skid to avoid, the kid snatches Skid’s wrist.

Skid whimpers and wrestles free. “Don’t,” he says, stumbling back. He can’t breathe right. “Don’t touch me.”

Shame melts the kid’s pale face. Like he did something wrong.

Skid tries to explain. “I don’t like being—” But a voice cuts him off. It comes from the other entrance downstairs.

“Henry,” it booms. “Henry, come to the door, sweetie.”

It’s familiar. Unmistakable. But it can’t be.

“It’s Momma.”

***

Skid can’t believe it. Won’t. Vaughn’s cocktail. That’s all this is. But he can tell from the look in the kid’s eyes beside him that he sees her too.

She stands in the middle of the street. Tight, ripped jeans. A low-cut top. Clothes too young for her age. The age she seems. A bullhorn in her hand held to her bright red lips. “Henry?” she says, and she smiles.

He pulls a trophy case away from the hallway wall.

His head’s fucking with him. He could’ve sworn there were more buildings beyond the street before. Now it’s mostly empty land. Just a handful of structures. Barely noon, but getting darker.

“Let us in, sweetie,” the woman outside says. “Let them have a hostage and they’ll let you go.”

Filled with banking awards and old photos, the case topples. All the items inside fall through the glass, shattering and scattering across the linoleum. He shoves the wooden structure toward the entrance.

An eruption. A crunching boom. He looks up, and his mother is just beyond the doorway. The glass is splintered where the palm of her hand bloodies against it. Red trickles along the cracks. Track marks oozing pink pepper the bruises in the nook of her elbow. “Listen to your Momma, you little shithead.”

One last push. The trophy case blocks out the daylight. The hall goes dark.

Red in the exit sign’s light, the kid stands at the foot of the stairs.

Next to him, a door. A sign.

Do Not Enter.

***

It’s a room of pipes. One looks about the width of Skid’s shoulders.

Blow through, Skid thinks. He could follow it through the drainage system.

The creek was only a half-mile away.

Home free.

He could get stuck. Trapped. He could suffocate.

But maybe he’d rather die in a sewer than live in a cell.

***

Upstairs. Vaughn’s body is still gone.

Skid slings the bag of C4 onto his back and heads toward the steps.

A phone rings.

Skid finds it under a stack of paperwork along the teller counter.

“Your bus is here, Henry,” the voice says. The voice that sounds like Uncle Simon.

“Bus?”

“Best we could do. Just give us the kid and it’s all yours.”

“How do—who says I ain’t giving you some other hostage in here?”

“All we want’s the kid, Henry.”

Skid’s eyes trace the wire coming out of the phone down to the frayed end at his feet. “I—I say who goes.”

“The kid, Henry.” That voice. So clear, so close. Skid can feel on his neck its beer-sticky breath. “Simon says.”

***

A few strides from the western entrance is a yellow bus.

Beyond it: only rough, rolling hills.

A desert at dusk.

Skid shakes his head. Where did the buildings go? The town? Confusion makes him want to collapse. Give up before even taking a single step. Quit being such a pussy, Henry.

He takes out his .40 and shows the kid the empty holes inside. “No bullets,” he says. “Yeah?”

The kid says nothing as the barrel meets his temple.

They push outside.

Quiet settles over Skid like a wet, wool blanket.

In the time it takes to reach blacktop, the sunlight dies until beyond the lot’s nothing but night. Just a vague line of the horizon splitting two warring depths of black.

They near the bus. A murmur rises. Tinny and distant.

Skid enters first, walking the kid backward until they’re both inside. That strange sound detonates. It comes alive in complete clarity. Dozens of children. Maybe hundreds. Laughing. Screaming. Speaking in a language Skid doesn’t want to recognize, but does.

Farsi.

***

Three small, staggering steps up into the bus.

The horde of children turn toward Skid with blank, cloudy eyes that seem impossibly white against their black, charred skin.

A choked sob. It reminds Skid he isn’t breathing.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I didn’t know. I didn’t fucking know.”

The patter of footfalls behind him makes him turn. He catches the last glimpse of the kid before he disappears back into the building.

Something tugs at his flak jacket.

A hip-high girl, barely more than a skeleton. From wrinkled, crisp lips, her hesitant voice speaks. “M—mikham beram…khoo—khooneh.”

Through the windows: shifts in the darkness. A deep shadow buries the edge of the lot. Like black sand pushed by the wind one gust at a time. Swallowing the world. All of it except the street leading out of town. Skid notices a key in the bus ignition.

Someone says, “A hostage for a way out.”

Skid glances over his shoulder. Where the charred girl just was sits Vaughn. Thirteen years old now. A bloody crater in his face. “I saved you, Skid.”

“I didn’t make no deal with you.”

“You know that’s not what I mean. Why shoot me after all I done for you?”

“You ain’t that kid no more, Vaughn.”

“Neither are you.” He nods to Skid’s forearm. Where the kid grabbed him earlier. A black hand mark taints the skin.

Skid looks back at the lot exit. Narrow eyes. Cupped hands at his temples. He leans toward the windshield, and his breath leaves frost on the glass. He can’t tell where the road might end. He asks Vaughn, “What’s the first thing you remember?”

“From?”

“From ever.”

Vaughn seems to think as the wind outside picks up. Black sand pelts the driver-side of the bus.

“Smoke,” he finally answers. “Way it looks against a clear sky.”

Skid nods.

Vaughn asks, “That prove I’m real?”

“Proves you know what I already know about you.”

“Never told you that.”

“You did.” Skid takes a step down toward the bus door. “Was probably just too fucked up to remember.”

“Yeah,” Vaughn says. “Sounds about right.”

Skid risks one last look back toward the bus. He expects to find Vaugn’s smug, grinning face behind him. But only the little burnt girl is there.

“Mikham beram khooneh.”

***

Skid guides the kid into the vault. Back with all the locked deposit boxes. Out at the lot and at the bottom entrance, heavy blows bash against the doorways.

“Stay in here,” he tells the kid.

The dead phones keep ringing.

Eyes growing wet, the kid shakes his head hard.

“Nobody can get to you in here,” Skid says, and his voice cracks. “Nobody.”

The metal door closes with a gut-quaking thud.

Above, skylights break. Glass falls to the tile and on top of the bodies. Faint light from the front hallway flickers with approaching shadows. Skid clutches his .40 tighter. With it, he smashes the keypad on the wall beside the vault.

“Missed your bus, Henry.”

A warped chill stabs Skid between his shoulder blades. He turns to find him standing there over the smear of his son’s blood. Shoulders back. The big gut he always hauled around like a loaded wheelbarrow now spills intestines from a shotgun wound.

It’s weird, Skid realizes, being as tall as him.

“I ain’t going nowhere,” Skid says.

Behind Uncle Simon, black sand takes over the walls, floors, and ceilings. Like blood through a glass of light beer. “Why you being such a pussy, Henry?” Uncle Simon says. “We just want the kid.”

“All this shit today,” Skid says, “made me remember something.”

The dark spreads thick. So deep and carried so easily by the whirlwind around them, it leaves just Skid, Uncle Simon, and the vault. Its speed rises to a solid blur. Like helicopter blades. Its noise implodes under its own weight.

Suddenly: No sound. No movement.

Just them.

“Know what my first memory is?” Skid asks.

Uncle Simon steps toward Skid. “Don’t know that I care.”

“It ain’t an image. Nothing I saw. It ain’t some. . . like, some scene, ya know?”

“Henry,” Uncle Simon says, and keeps moving forward, “you really think that’ll stop me?” He lifts an eyebrow at Skid’s gun.

“It’s a feeling,” Skid says. So close now. The smell of stale cigar smoke in the man’s clothes. Skid almost gags. “A feeling. Like being scared. Or being loved, I guess. But sharper. Deeper.” He drops the gun. “Harder to let go of.”

He stares into that face—a face he realizes now looks a lot like his own. He doesn’t let himself look away. Instead, he wraps his arms tight around those broad shoulders.

He triggers the detonator on the C4 strapped to his back, and that feeling returns. He’s felt it many times before, but never so strong or heavy or rooted in his core. Like a hand tugging at a ball of string in his chest, unraveling it into a loose mess at his feet.

He isn’t sure if he could’ve put words to it that first time he felt it. Maybe the words came later to describe something so overwhelming. But the words come now. Like always he hasn’t a clue what they really mean. What bond the words have to the real, waking world he’s known and survived in for so long.

He tries to say them. Tries to push them from his throat with breath he isn’t even sure he’s still got. He can’t. But they’re there. In his mind they’re loud. So loud they blot out everything like all that night sand.

Until they’re the only thing left in the bottomless, lonely dark.

I want to go home.

Dan J. Fiore has been published by Thuglit, Mystery Tribune, and Hot Metal Bridge, among others. His fiction won grand prize in both the 82nd annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition and LitReactor’s Arrest Us Crime Writing Challenge, and his screenwriting was awarded a First Works Grant by Pittsburgh Filmmakers. He currently works as a creative strategist in Pittsburgh and teaches at Seton Hill University, where he also earned his MFA. For more, visit www.danjfiore.com.

Above Water, fiction by Brandon Barrows

The sky roiled. Heavy, low-hanging clouds hid the setting sun so completely it might as well have been night already. Morgan downshifted, the decrepit Camaro’s gearbox protesting the sudden change, as he took the tight turn onto the long, narrow, pitted dirt road that served as his Uncle Mike’s driveway.

He brought the car to a stop in front of the rusty, once-blue trailer, surprised to see there were no lights on inside. He’d expected to find the old man either preparing supper or already eating it. The Camaro’s struggling engine died, making the area eerily quiet for a moment. As he climbed out of the car, a raspy shout broke the silence. “Out back, whoever ya are!”

It was Mike’s voice. Head swiveling, searching for the source, the young man’s heart started to beat faster, a mixture of apprehension, fear, anger and more than a little shame coursing through his veins. He didn’t really want to see his uncle. It wasn’t that he disliked the man; he didn’t feel like he knew Mike Hughes well enough to like or dislike him. Aside from a few, rare childhood encounters, he’d really only met Mike the year before. What he hated was that he had nowhere else to turn, that he’d been reduced to begging. Again. He couldn’t let those feelings show, though.

A moment or two passed and then Mike came trundling around the side of the trailer, squinting against the gloom. “Who’s ‘at?”

“It’s me, Uncle Mike. Morgan.”

“Oh, hello there, son.” He approached, stuck out his hand for a shake. It always struck Morgan as odd, a little uncomfortable, having his uncle call him that. He’d never known his father and it was too late for Mike to take his place. With his mother’s passing the year before, though, Mike was the only family he had left so he guessed it didn’t matter what the older man called him.

Morgan shook his uncle’s hand, feeling the coarse skin stretched tight over fragile-seeming bones. He was suddenly acutely aware that it would be Mike’s seventy-third birthday in a few weeks. Something like jagged little fingers flicked at his insides. “How you doing, Uncle Mike?”

“Lousy,” the other man said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder. “Damned well’s stopped up. Hope to god I don’t need to get someone from town out here. Lord knows what that’ll cost to fix.” He shook his head, the sparse white strands that clung to his pink-skinned skull bouncing back and forth. “Suppose you got money trouble again?”

The words ripped right through to Morgan’s core. Having his uncle see through him like that hurt. It was also a sort of relief, though, Mike bringing it up first. “Not trouble, exactly…” He hesitated. “I could use another loan, though, Uncle Mike. Just to help me get a few things squared away. You know, keep my head above water.”

Mike snorted. “It’s only a loan if you pay it back, son. This would be the fourth, as I recall.” He turned on his heel, headed towards the trailer. “C’mon inside and we’ll at least have some supper since you’re here.”

The rain the sky had been promising all day began to fall. Morgan followed his uncle into the trailer house.

***

Nothing more was said of the money until after they’d eaten a sparse meal of kielbasa and beans. Hardly anything at all was said, in fact. Mike tried a little football talk, but Morgan didn’t follow the sport and the older man gave up, lapsing into silence.

When nothing was left but dirty dishes and scraps, Morgan finally said, “Tell you the truth, Uncle Mike, I am in trouble. I’ve gotten in with some folks who ain’t very nice.” He swallowed around a lump in his throat. “Or patient.”

The set of Mike’s jaw hardened, the stubbled chin jutting out a little. “Gambling again?”

Not trusting words, Morgan only nodded.

Mike stood, tall and thin. He went to the window and threw it open, letting in the cool, moist evening air. The light from the window danced on the shifting water droplets clinging to Morgan’s car, parked on the bare earth in front of the trailer. Somewhere nearby, a night-bird screeched its displeasure at the storm.

There was trouble in the man’s eyes when he turned back towards his nephew. “How much?”

Hope surged in Morgan’s chest. “Twenty-five hundred.” That wasn’t even half of it, but it would get Carson off his back for a while, give him time to figure something out.

Mike lowered his gaze, shaking his head. “Can’t do it, son. I’m sorry, but I just can’t.”

Black anger washed over Morgan, smothering the little flicker of hope he’d felt a moment ago. He grit his teeth. “Uncle Mike—”

Head still wobbling back and forth, Mike said, “Morgan, keep in mind that I’m on a fixed income and I’ve already ‘loaned’ you at least that much. I worked hard all my life and I ain’t rich. I can’t drown myself keeping your head above water. I can’t give you no more ‘til you pay back what you owe.”

The younger man struggled to tamp down the anger, burning like acid in his guts. Mike just didn’t get it. He had to make his uncle understand. Morgan’s mouth began to move rapidly, the words falling off his tongue, tumbling over his lips. Almost babbling, he told Mike about the dog fighting, the huge bets that he couldn’t cover, how strangers had been hanging around his house. He didn’t mention the beating he’d taken a week ago, the cracked ribs that still ached, or the little Smith and Wesson revolver he’d taken to carrying, stuffed into the waistband of his pants. That, and the tiny, ramshackle house he’d grown up in, were the only things of his mom’s left that he hadn’t yet sold, trying to raise enough money to appease Carson’s thugs. He’d had to slip out of his own home in secret just to come see Mike and even then, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t been noticed. He didn’t dare go back without something to give them.

Mike looked long and hard at his nephew. The face staring back at him looked too much like his younger sister’s. He turned away, wishing he had a better answer for the boy. “I can’t do it, Morgan. I’m sorry.”

“God damn it!” Angry, scared, desperate, Morgan leapt from his chair, bumping the rickety old table, upsetting the dishes with a clatter. “Don’t you get it? They’re going to kill me! I can’t go back without—”

“Then don’t.” The older man’s eyes became watery as he stared out the open window. “You’re welcome to stay here, long as you need to. I’ll put you to work. Plenty to do around here.”

Morgan’s mouth twisted into a look of disgust. “Live in this shithole, in the middle of nowhere? You’ve gotta be kidding.”

The older man’s anger stirred, but it was a weary sort of anger. He felt very old as he swiveled back towards Morgan. “It ain’t the middle of nowhere… it’s less’n eight miles from town and I happen to like it. I got my privacy and I got friends nearby.” His eyes strayed to the clock above the door. “In fact—"

“I don’t care!” Morgan roared, unable to hold back any longer. He’d have that money if it killed him because not having it would kill him for sure. “This is my life, you penny-pinching old bastard! Don’t you understand? I’m—”

Frayed patience snapped. “Not getting one red damned cent ‘til I die!” Mike yelled back. “Then it’s all yours, but until then, I’m through! You hear me?” He could hardly believe the nerve of the boy, begging from one side of his mouth and insulting from the other. No, not the boy – the man, he corrected himself. Despite how Morgan acted, it had been years since he could rightfully have been called a boy.

And Mike had finally had enough of him.

He regretted not being closer with Myrna and her son until it was too late, until his sister got the news that she was terminal. Exhaustion, overworking herself for long years after she should have been taking it easy, all to support her son, to get him out of innumerable ‘scrapes’ as she called them, may not have killed her, but he knew it hadn’t helped, either. The thought of it, the memory of the wasted shell Myrna had become, and how he’d never known until they had no one else to turn to, saddened and infuriated him. Despite those feelings, he’d made a mighty effort in those last few months, and the time since, and he’d come to love Morgan in a way – the way you still love a troublesome child you feel you’ve somehow failed. Morgan wasn’t Mike’s failure, exactly, but he couldn’t help how he felt.

Love didn’t mean breaking yourself, though. It was time for a hard lesson.

“You’re a grown man, Morgan. Your mama’s in an early grave but I won’t let you do the same to me. You climb into that rattle-trap of yours—” he thrust a skinny arm towards Morgan’s Camaro, outside the still-open window, “and don’t you never let me see your face again unless it’s purely social. I hear one more word from you about money and I’ll—”

Black anger turned suddenly red and an inarticulate scream ripped from Morgan’s throat. Before he knew what was happening, he was on the old man, the little revolver in his hand and pressed to his uncle’s temple. He jerked the trigger once, twice and then dropped the weapon, the horror of what he’d done coming down on him all at once. Uncle Mike stood a moment, as if paralyzed, a look of shocked disbelief on his face, and then he crumpled like a string-cut puppet. He fell to his side, spasmed, flopped over onto his back and then was still. Thick, dark blood seeped from his ruined head, pooling on the peeling laminate of the floor.

Morgan screamed and collapsed to his knees, his pulse thundering in his ears, his heart slamming into his rib-cage so hard it hurt. He couldn’t seem to catch his breath and he felt like vomiting. He didn’t know how long he stayed there, staring at the thing that had been his uncle. Minutes, hours, days for all he knew, passed, until finally his pulse slowed, his chest stopped hurting and his lungs filled normally. He rose slowly, his eyes still glued to Mike’s body and the irregularly-shaped oval of red beneath his head, like a bloody halo.

He felt like he should say something, like something needed to be said. He took a deep breath. It came out as: “Serves him right, the old cheap-ass.” He surprised himself. Was that how he really felt? Had part of him been planning this all along? He shook his head. It didn’t matter now. It wasn’t like he could take back what he’d done.

“Yeah…” he said, half-aloud. “I had to.” Mike was an old man, one foot in the grave already. And he’d given Morgan the idea after all. Not one red damned cent ‘til I die, Mike had said. Money was no good if you didn’t use it and Morgan had serious use for it. It was Mike’s life in exchange for Morgan’s. That seemed like a fair trade. How much longer could the old man have lived, anyway? Morgan had his whole life ahead of him.

He did now, at least. Wouldn’t Carson be surprised when he paid off in full? It’d be nice to finally have a little peace of mind. He laughed out loud at the thought.

His train of thought derailed suddenly, snapping him back to the present like someone had flipped a switch. Something had caught his attention, though he wasn’t sure what. He stood listening. The gun hadn’t been very loud and Mike’s trailer was in the middle of nowhere, but Morgan wasn’t sure if there were any neighbors on the other side of the patch of woods that the property abutted. He realized, too, as he stood listening, that he was somehow clutching the gun again. Wouldn’t that be fine, if someone investigating the noise showed up and found him standing over the body, gun in hand? He shook his head at his own foolishness. Maybe Mike was right, maybe he did need to grow up a little, think things through a little more. Maybe—

No, no time for that. He stuck the already-cool gun back into the waistband of his pants. He moved to the cramped bedroom of the little trailer, opened the door of the shallow closet and took from it the battered old cigar box where, he knew, Mike kept his cash. The old man didn’t trust banks, he’d said once, liked to keep everything he owned where he knew he could get his hands on it. That was perfect for Morgan.

He opened the box and let out a gasp. It was empty – no, not empty. Morgan tilted it into the harsh light of the bare bulb overhead and saw, lying flat against the bottom, a leather booklet, long and thin. He plucked the thing out, tossing the box onto the unmade bed, and opened it. It was a bank book. Morgan’s jaw fell open. There was a tightly scrawled line of text across the top of the ledger: “DEPOSIT - $7,133.” It was dated just over a week earlier.

Morgan dropped the booklet. He licked dry lips then let out a little chuckle of disbelief. “That old bastard…” He’d banked the money, put it where Morgan couldn’t touch it. Had he seen this coming somehow?

Morgan laughed again, but it was hollow. It sounded almost like a sob.

He collapsed on the edge of the bed. His thoughts raced. What now? He couldn’t go home, not empty-handed. He sure as hell couldn’t stay here. His eyes fell to the bank book, on the floor near his feet. Over seven grand, everything Mike had in the world.

Everything Mike had.

It was all his now, Morgan realized. Mike had said it himself, it’d be Morgan’s when he died. Something clicked in his head. He began to feel better. Sure, it’d take a while to get his hands on it, but the money was his now, wasn’t it? He was Mike’s only family, after all. Carson would get his money, just as soon as Morgan got it. If he knew it was coming, Carson would wait, wouldn’t he?

And the money wasn’t all, either.

Morgan stood, looked around. The trailer was a shithole, but Mike had owned the land it was on. Selling it would bring in a nice chunk, for sure. He’d be set for a while. And with both his mom and Mike gone, why even stick around? He could sell the house, too. It wasn’t much better than the trailer, but it was worth something. With that kind of money, for the first time in his life, he could make plans. Get out of this hick country, get out of the state entirely, even. Maybe go north, to Pittsburgh. He loved that damned city – the bright lights, the clubs, the stylish women. It’d be nice to go and know you had enough to make more than a night or two of it. Hell, if he was going to a city, maybe he’d just keep going, head all the way to New York. He’d always wanted to see if it lived up to the hype. And why not?

A sudden splatter of rain against the bedroom window drew him back to the moment. The return to reality cooled his enthusiasm. Before he could make any plans, he had to have the money and to get it, he had to make sure he wasn’t caught. For a few minutes, he’d let himself forget what he’d done. That was dangerous. Even he knew that much.

He racked his brains. First, he should get rid of the gun. That was for certain. Then what? Maybe the best thing to do was go home and wait for someone, the police or whoever, to tell him that Mike was dead. He frowned. No, that wouldn’t work. He’d stopped at the Wawa by the crossroads and put a couple of bucks’ worth of gas in the Camaro. The clerk had tried to make conversation, but Morgan wasn’t in the mood and had brushed him off. The guy might remember that and even if he didn’t, there was probably security footage of Morgan.

No, he’d be better off reporting Mike’s death himself. He’d get rid of the gun then call the police, say he’d found his uncle dead. The cops would probably suspect him, but without the gun, what could they do? He’d seen enough television to know how important the murder weapon was. Without it, all they could they do was suspect and, when all was said and done, hand him the money.

But he was getting ahead of himself again. He needed to get rid of the gun before anything else.

Mike had mentioned that the well was giving him problems. Morgan decided that it might just be the solution to his.

He left the bedroom, went down the trailer’s narrow hallway, through the living room, out the back door, flicking on the outside light as he did. In the darkness and the rain, he found his way to the tiny well shed. In the scant light that reached the shed, Morgan saw that the cap was off the well and a small pile of tools was scattered around the base of the housing. Morgan peered down into a pitch-black hole, six or eight inches wide. He saw nothing, but didn’t expect to. He had no idea how deep the well might be, but it didn’t matter – it was deep enough for his purposes. He pulled the gun from his waistband, allowing himself a tinge of relief that it would soon be over. He took one last look at the thing that had changed his life, and tossed it down the hole. It banged and scraped off the sides once, twice, then landed somewhere below with the faintest splash.

The rain was coming harder as he tromped back towards the trailer and by the time he reached the rear door, he was soaked. When he tried the door, it would not open. Panic gripped him. When he’d left the trailer, he’d simply let it swing shut behind him. It had never occurred to him to check whether it was locked. Now, he was locked outside and Mike was still inside. . .

Calm down, he told himself. Front’s still open. He made his way around the side of the trailer, following the path Mike must have when Morgan had arrived. He rounded the corner, walked the narrow space between the house and where Mike’s battered Ranger was parked, then froze. Distant sounds, muffled by the storm but recognizable, stopped him. A car was coming down Mike’s road, approaching rapidly.

“Shit!” He hunkered down in the darkness beside the bulk of Mike’s truck, fresh fear soaking his brain. The road wasn’t long. Whoever was coming would be here any second.

Before he could think of anything, a splash of headlights swept across the front of the Ranger, hurling shadows over Morgan’s head. An instant later, tires rasped to a stop on the wet dirt and gravel.

What now? Had he been seen? If he hadn’t, there was still a chance, but he couldn’t let them find him first. Crouching in the rain and darkness would look guilty as hell.

He stood, pushed his way through the night towards the front of the trailer and the newcomer.

From the cab of a big F250 came: “Mike? That you?”

Morgan knew that voice. Wade Linklater, one of Mike’s town friends.

A second voice added, “Mr. Hughes?” That one Morgan didn’t know.

He stepped out of the shadows that clung to the side of the house. “Mr. Linklater? It’s, it’s me – Morgan Hughes. Uncle Mike… Uncle Mike’s been,” he choked on the last word, “killed.”

“What?” Linklater shouted, hopping down from his rig. Over his shoulder, to whoever remained in the truck, he called, “I knew something was wrong when Mike didn’t show at the rec center. In eleven years, he’s never missed Wednesday night poker.” He crossed the distance to Morgan. He was a big, stern-faced man, not as old as Mike, but with decades on Morgan. “When I called and he didn’t answer, I was afraid he’d collapsed again, had another one of his episodes. Figured we better get out here, but I never imagine. . .”

Called. That was it, Morgan realized. What had brought him out of his earlier daze: the ringing telephone. He’d been too stunned then to even realize what he’d heard. Shit. Linklater was saying, “What did you mean ‘killed,’ Hughes? What the hell’s happened here?” He spoke with an air of authority that reminded Morgan of something he couldn’t quite grab hold of.

Morgan kept silent. He’d planned to report Mike’s death himself, get it out of the way, but everything had happened so quickly, he hadn’t even thought of a story to tell. Now, it was too late. He didn’t know his uncle had a regular card game or friends who’d come looking for him if he missed it. He didn’t know anything about the ‘episodes’ Linklater had mentioned. The information was no good to him now. All he could do was brazen this out.

“I, I, I—” he stammered.

“Let’s not stand out here in the rain, Wade. Won’t do us or Mike any good,” the second voice said, climbing down from the truck. In the light of the headlamps, Morgan saw he was a small, neatly-dressed man wearing rimless spectacles. A compact, black bag was clutched in his hand. “C’mon inside.”

The little man led the way into the trailer. Linklater followed ponderously. When Morgan stepped inside after them, he saw the stranger staring down at Mike’s body with a critical eye. Linklater, too, was staring but his face was angry and his lips moved soundlessly, as if the words couldn’t find their way out.

The stranger spoke: “Well. . .cause of death certainly isn’t in doubt.” He sighed.

Linklater nodded, turned towards Morgan. “What happened here?” The voice was like steel. Morgan felt compelled to obey it. What he’d forgotten about Linklater came to him then: the man was a retired sheriff’s deputy.

“I was coming to visit Uncle Mike,” he began, piecing the words together as they came to him. The story had to be believable, but vague enough to be difficult to prove one way or another. “I heard shots, right before I got up to the house. I mean, I thought I did. I couldn’t be sure with this storm.” He swallowed, ran his tongue across his lips. The other men’s eyes bore into him like hot irons. “I found Uncle Mike like this, and I thought I heard the back door, the one off the living room, open so I ran out that way, trying to catch whoever’d shot Mike, but I lost him in the dark, I guess. When I came back, the door was locked, so I had to come around the side and then you all were here.”

“How long ago was all this?” Linklater asked.

Morgan thought. What was safe? He couldn’t tell the truth. “Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, I guess. I, I wasn’t looking at the clock or anything.”

Linklater looked at him long and hard, his gray eyes peering out from beneath furrowed brows. “And you weren’t, by any chance, the one who ate supper with Mike, were you?” He gestured towards the table and the remains of their meal.

Keeping the panic from his face was difficult, but Morgan managed. He hadn’t even thought about supper! His fingerprints would be all over the cutlery and the can of Coors he’d drank. How to explain that if he’d just shown up?

“I… I didn’t want to mention it, but when I showed up, I’d driven straight from home—it’s more than thirty miles—and I was starving, and there was still some of the food left out on the table so, I—”

The smaller of the two men spoke up, “So you sat down and ate dinner with your uncle’s body lying on the floor a few feet away?” Disbelief was evident in every syllable.

Linklater glanced from Morgan to the other man, said, “How long has Mike been gone, doc?”

Doc? Morgan thought with a start. His eyes fell again to the black bag the man carried. A sick feeling spread through his belly.

The man called “doc” knelt, pressed his fingers to Mike’s neck, to his wrist. He held a palm over the dead man’s mouth and then pressed it to Mike’s forehead. He stood, shaking his head. “He’s still pretty warm. Half an hour, I’d say. Maybe as little as fifteen minutes.”

“I heard the shots!” Morgan cried, unable to stop himself. “I told you that, I told you when it happened. I—”

Linklater looked like he wanted to spit. “And I heard you say it. Doesn’t mean I believe you.” He turned to the third man, “Ben, get on the phone to county dispatch. I’d love to deal with this myself, but. . .” He didn’t finish. He didn’t have to; the look in his eye said it all. “And you,” he turned back towards Morgan, “Sit down and stay put.”

The fear and anger in Morgan exploded. He screamed, “You think I did it? Killed the only family I got?” Spittle flew from his mouth. “You’re crazy! Tell me how I did it, then? He was shot! So where’s the gun, huh?”

Linklater pushed him backward towards the chair he’d sat in while he’d eaten with Mike. Had that really been less than an hour ago?

“Sure,” Linklater said. “I’m the crazy one.” Powerful hands forced Morgan into the chair and then moved over his body with practiced, searching movements. “No gun on him. What do you bet that’s what he was taking care of when we showed up?”

Ben only shook his head sadly as he moved towards the telephone on the kitchen counter.

A frantic minute passed. Ben spoke on the phone in quiet tones. Linklater’s eyes scanned the room, but always came back to rest on Morgan.

Morgan’s heart felt like it was going to burst. His chances of escape were zero. Less than zero. If he ran, Linklater would be on him before he reached the door. And even if he did escape, where could he go? Carson was waiting back home and he had no way of going anywhere else. Hell, there wasn’t even enough gas in the Camaro to go more than forty miles, maybe. All he could do was stick to his story. It wasn’t a good one, but he’d covered all the bases, right? And the gun was gone. That was the important thing.

“All right, see you soon.” The phone was hung up. To Linklater, Ben said, “Deputies’ll be here shortly.” He threw a meaningful glance at Morgan. “They’ll get this sorted.”

“It’s already sorted,” Linklater said.

Morgan shook his head. “This is crazy. I just—”

“Convicted yourself, whether you realize it or not. I don’t know why you did it, but you’ve as good as confessed already. Get up.” He grabbed Morgan’s arm and jerked him to his feet.

“What are you—?”

“Shut up,” the former deputy snarled. “Come outside.”

Morgan’s knees wobbled and he stumbled. Linklater all but dragged him out of the front door of the trailer. It was getting hard to breath.

Something in Linklater’s tone sent tendrils of ice down Morgan’s spine, terrifying him more than anything else had so far. Had he missed something? No. It was impossible. He’d covered every angle. He’d admitted nothing. This was just a tough old man, angry at the death of his friend, trying to shake something loose. He couldn’t prove anything. All he could do was suspect and bully and try to trick Morgan into slipping up.

Outside, the rain had slackened, but showed no signs of stopping. The bare dirt and gravel in front of the trailer was soaked and muddy, and dozens of tiny puddles shone in the light spilling out of the open door and window. Linklater, still gripping Morgan’s arm tightly, stopped just past the trailer’s steps. Ben stepped down beside them, as curious as Morgan was afraid.

Linklater pointed. “Right there, smart guy.” Morgan thought Linklater was pointing at the Camaro. It stood right where he’d left it, dripping with rain and shining in the light from the house. He couldn’t see anything wrong, didn’t understand what Linklater was getting at. Ben took a step forward, tilted his head and gave out a little cry of realization.

Morgan looked from the car to Linklater, then to the other man. The fear was on his face now. What had he missed? What was it that Linklater had found? If he didn’t know, he couldn’t explain it away, he couldn’t—

Linklater said, “You told us you’ve been here half an hour, but it’s been raining more than an hour already. The ground is soaked, there’s puddles everywhere, and yet—” The big man shook Morgan like a rag-doll. “Look, you murdering little shit! Look under the car!”

Morgan looked and his legs went limp. Linklater released his grip at last and Morgan fell backwards into a mud puddle. They were everywhere – except beneath the car. Underneath the Camaro was a rectangle of gravel, dry and grayish-white, protected since before the storm hit. An area just about the size of a jail-cell’s door – or a freshly-dug grave.

The pain in his chest seemed to explode and grow outward, touching every nerve in his body. It felt like drowning.

Brandon Barrows is the award-nominated author of the occult-noir novel THIS ROUGH OLD WORLD as well as over fifty published stories, selected of which have been collected into the books THE ALTAR IN THE HILLS and THE CASTLE-TOWN TRAGEDY. He is also the writer of nearly one-hundred individual comic book issues. Find more at www.brandonbarrowscomics.com and on Twitter @BrandonBarrows.

Annie Works the Midnight Shift, fiction by Steve Liskow

Annie walks into Quickie Mart at nine twenty and finds Lainie, her older sister, leaning by the register reading a magazine. She looks even more bored than she does tired.

“You’re early.” Lainie’s voice is tired, too.

“It’s nothing but re-runs on TV,” Annie says. “They aren’t better the second time. Or funnier.”

“Different commercials, though.”

“I suppose.” Annie looks down the three aisles and tries to count the things they sell that show up on TV. Fritos, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Dr. Scholl’s, Right Guard. If the rest of the night is as slow as right now, she can make a list. There must be easier ways to drive yourself crazy.

Lainie points to Annie’s hair. “That gets any higher, you’re gonna get it caught in the ceiling fan.”

Annie looks up at the blades, rotating so slowly she could probably grab onto one and let it carry her around in a circle. Another way to go crazy.

“Something for when Missus Atwood tells us to write what we did on our summer vacation.”

Lainie rolls her eyes. She’s got beautiful eyes, not as happy as before, but still big and blue. She shouldn’t use all that eyeliner, though. Sixteen Magazine says don’t use as much now.

Maybelline, that’s something else they carry that’s on TV.

“Has it been like this all night?” Annie asks.

“A guy stopped about an hour ago for gas,” Lainie tells her. “He wanted to know where the nearest motel was. Think he had Pennsylvania plates.”

Annie looks out at the two Shell pumps, one regular and one premium. “An hour ago?”

“Yeah.” Lainie jerks her thumb at the cartons on the floor behind the counter. “Good thing the new magazines came in this morning, ‘cause I’ve read all the old ones. Except Field and Stream and Playboy. If I thought it’d stay like this, I’d close up and tell you to go on home.”

“I need the money.” Annie’s barely sixteen. Moms and Dads didn’t want her working the ten to six shift, but it pays five percent more, that’s seven and a half cents an hour. She does six nights a week, so that’s eight hours at time and a half.

“Don’t we all.” Lainie had to drop out of school when she got pregnant. Their parents watch her daughter while she works.

“If it’s gonna be so slow, I can restock the magazines,” Annie says.

“Yeah.” Lainie holds up a clipboard and shows her the invoices. “I’ve already counted them and checked them in, so you can switch out the old ones and dump them into the same cartons.”

“OK.” Annie picks up the new Playboy and looks at the model on the cover. “I like the way her hair curls. You think I could do that with mine?”

Lainie rolls her eyes and lights a cigarette. “You’ve got such a small face, it’d disappear you wore your hair down like that. Besides, you’re too young.”

“I’m only three years younger than you,” Annie says. “Besides, nobody looks at these girls’ hair.”

“Yeah, well you shouldn’t be looking at that magazine anyway.” Lainie blows smoke toward the ceiling and watches the fan blades slice it up.

“I heard the articles are good, they do interviews.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Some guy at school, I don’t remember who.”

“None of the bozos at school can read,” Lainie says. “The only way they get out of this dump is the Army.”

Annie lets the magazine fall open to the centerfold. “I heard they pay lots of money for these pictures.”

“Well, sure. Strippers can do it every night. But you do it here once, everyone’s seen you so you better get a lot.”

“How much you think they pay?”

Lainie frowns. “You shouldn’t think about stuff like this. Come on, let’s count the register.”

Annie moves behind the counter with her. “If they paid enough, I’d pose for them.”

Lainie’s eyes widen. “Don’t talk like that. Moms and Dads’d never live it down. I screwed up bad enough.”

“If they paid me enough, I’d leave this town and never look back. Maybe there’d be enough to take you with me.”

“Yeah, and if our fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a Corvette, I get to drive.”

Lainie counts the twenties and passes them over to Annie to re-count.

“Can I have a cigarette?”

“You’re too young for that, too. Moms knew I gave you a cigarette, she’d kick my butt clear to Toledo and back.”

Lainie passes the tens over and takes the twenties back.

Cigarettes, Annie thinks. They’ve got commercials for them on TV, too. Winston, Tareyton, Marlboro. . .

A car rumbles up near the door and stops. The light shines on a red hood and Annie’s glad Lainie’s still here.

Sure enough, Duane Peasey walks in. Tight white tee shirt, greasy jeans, black high top Converse sneakers.

“Hey, honey. Hey kid.” Duane’s eyes might be raisins in a doughy face, and he looks smarter than his buddy, who’s built like a coat hanger and has zits to make raspberries jealous.

“We got names,” Lainie says.

“Yeah, me too.” Duane leans on the counter and Annie can smell his breath, cigarettes and beer. “You play your cards right, you could be screaming it all night long.”

“I’d rather choke on a rusty rake.”

Duane drops his eyes to Annie’s chest, then back up to her face. “How ‘bout you, little one?”

“I’m working.” Annie feels her skin crawl. Duane and a bunch of other guys got Lainie drunk at a party and one of them—maybe Duane himself—is her little girl’s father, but she was passed out so she couldn’t tell who did it. Duane’s supposed to go into the Army in August now that he’s graduated from high school after five years.

“Your loss. Gimme a pack of Camels.”

“Filters or regular?”

“Regular. Guy what smokes filter cigarettes probably squats to pee.” Duane’s laugh reminds Annie of a mule braying.

Annie bends down to get a pack and feels both boys looking at her rear. When she stands again, she can almost smell Duane’s smile.

“You ain’t a bitch like your sister, are you?”

Annie rings up the sale.

“Thirty cents.”

Duane gives her a crumpled dollar bill and she runs it between her fingers to smooth it out.

“You want me to work that hard, the least you could do is give me one of those.” Lainie’s mouth drops open.

Duane taps the pack against his palm a few times before he pulls off the strip and peels back the foil. He slides one into his hand and points it at Annie’s chest. He gives her that same slimy smile and she remembers everyone calls him “Sleazy Peasey.”

“Give me a light.” Duane sticks the cigarette between her lips and a lighter appears in his other hand. He holds the flame under her cigarette. She feels heat in her mouth.

“You gotta suck on it, little girl.” His voice slithers into her ears. “Like you smell fresh apple pie, right outta your mamma’s hot oven.”

Sharp heat claws down Annie’s throat. She leans over the counter, coughing so hard her eyes tear up and her head feels light. The cigarette drops between her hands and she almost burns herself on the flaming tip.

Duane gives that mule-bray laugh again and his buddy does the same. Annie coughs until she thinks she’s going to throw up, fighting for air, her eyes and nose running and her face burning. When she stops, Lainie shoves a few tissues into her hand.

“You two about done here?” she asks.

Duane drops two more crumpled bills on the counter.

“Gonna put in two dollars of reg out there.”

He leads his buddy back outside. Annie blows her nose and wipes her eyes and doesn’t look at Lainie.

“I’ve got half a mind to close up and drag you home by your ear like a four-year-old.” Lainie sounds like she wants to slap her.

“I didn’t want them to think I’m just some stupid kid.” Annie can barely hear her own voice. One drag on that cigarette, her throat feels like she swallowed a blow torch.

“Guess you showed ‘em, didn’t you?” Lainie watches the two guys laugh by the gas pump. “I should go make sure he only pumps two dollars, but I don’t feel like talking to him again.”

When the Mustang roars off into the darkness, Lainie opens the cash register and they count the fives and singles and then the change. She tucks her cigarettes into her purse and gives Annie a look that reminds her of their mother.

“I know you want the money, but some things aren’t worth it. If nobody shows up by midnight, you can close up early. I’ll be up when you get home, and I’ll fill out your card tomorrow like you went all night.”

“You shouldn’t do that.”

“You’re my sister. One of us has to make it out of this dump.”

Lainie strides out the door and up the road. She’s nineteen and walks like she’s twice that. Have a baby and losing your dreams makes you old quick. The Quickie Mart’s only two miles from their house, which is good since neither sister has a driver’s license.

Annie stands behind the counter for twenty minutes before she remembers her transistor radio in her purse. She turns it sideways and finally gets the best signal she can from Cleveland. The Beatles new record comes on, “A Ticket to Ride.” She turns it up and stacks the magazines on the counter.

Life, Time, Newsweek, Sixteen, Woman’s Day, Tiger Beat, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, Car & Driver, Field & Stream. One at a time, she carries the new issues to the rack next to the anti-acids and pain relievers. She replaces the old ones and counts them before putting them back in the cartons. Playboy stays behind the counter so the little kids don’t see it.

Eleven o’clock, and nobody’s come in yet. A few cars whoosh by the gas pumps, but the most excitement so far is clouds floating across the half moon. Thrillsville. The radio plays Elvis, the Supremes, and Herman’s Hermits. She wonders if they’ll play that new Beatles song again.

She looks at the hair styles in Sixteen. One model has long hair with that fishhook curl at the end Annie’s working on, just brushing the top of her shoulders. The lady on the cover of the new Playboy has the same hairstyle. Annie wonders how old she is. You probably have to be twenty-one to take your clothes off for pictures.

She doesn’t look anywhere near twenty-one. If she looked older and a rich man showed up for gas, could she talk him into taking her with him, leave all this behind?

How can she look older?

Can she make her hair look like that girl on the cover?

She walks down the notions aisle across from the candy and picks up a can of Aqua Net. She shakes it up on the way back to the counter and digs in her purse for her compact.

The door opens and a man comes in, eyes heavy, feet dragging. “You got any No Doz?”

“Second aisle,” Annie tells him. “About halfway down. You want some gas, too?”

“Might as well.” The man’s shirt is all wrinkles and his shoulders stoop.

“Let me have three dollars, the high-test.”

Annie looks out at the big station wagon and makes change for the man’s ten. He leans against the back fender while he pumps, then slams the door and pulls back onto the road. Annie watches until he’s long gone.

The radio plays “Louie, Louie.” All the boys at school say the words are dirty, but nobody can make them out. Probably just a story to sell more records.

Annie finds her comb and leans forward so her hair tumbles around her face, spraying with the Aqua Net until she’s dizzy from the aerosol and her blood rushing to her brain. She straightens up and teases her hair with the comb before looking in her mirror.

She holds up the magazine and looks at the lady, back in her mirror, then back at the magazine. Not bad. Not great, but it makes her look a little older. Like a junior, maybe even a senior.

Not enough. She puts the magazine back and stares at the blacktop outside.

Eleven forty. Another six hours and twenty minutes. That’s three hundred eighty minutes. She’s wondering if she can figure how many seconds that is without using a pencil and paper when she hears her transistor by the register.

It's what’s up front that counts.

Winston, they carry them, too, of course. Duane laughed at her when she choked on his cigarette. She felt like a stupid little kid.

How hard is it to learn to smoke?

Annie turns to the cigarette display behind the cash register. Duane smokes Camels, which Dads calls “coffin nails.” Annie knows filters are milder and studies the colorful packs in their neat little rows. Kools have soothing menthol, so maybe she should try one of them.

Thirty cents a pack. She’s making a dollar thirty-two an hour. She opens the pack with her fingernail and slides a white cylinder out between her fingers. It’s slightly longer than her middle finger, the filter the tan of her mother’s pancakes. She sniffs it and thinks she can smell menthol.

Nobody in sight on the road. She takes a book of matches and twists one free. Close cover before striking. OK. She rubs the head against the flint and nothing happens. She tries again, harder, and the match bends in her fingers. She throws it away, takes another one and pushes harder but still not hard enough. How can people use these things?

One more match, third time’s the charm. She pushes the head against the rough surface with the ball of her thumb and rubs it away from her. The head flares up and she drops everything.

“Damn!” She sucks on her thumb until the sting fades, then pulls it out of her mouth. She can already feel a blister forming. Damn, damn, damn.

There has to be a better way.

She runs her fingers across the cigarettes again, then past the yellow cans of. . . lighter fluid. Of course, a lighter. She digs under the counter and finds the cheapest Zippo in the display. She grabs a can of Ronson fluid and totals her sale on the cash register. Jeez, how can people afford to smoke?

She’s watched Moms and Dads fill their lighters so she knows enough to slide the shell off and moisten the cotton. Drip, drip, drip. The smell fills her head. It’s a little like that Aqua Net, still standing by the cash register. She has to pay for that, too. She puts the Zippo back together, sticks the Kool filter between her lips, and presses her thumb against the wheel on the lighter.

Fire. At last. She holds the end of the cigarette in the flame and takes a deep breath.

A cool nail jams its point into her throat and she’s coughing again. She fights for breath and feels more tears coming to her eyes. It’s not as bad as Duane’s Camel, but it’s not that much fun, either.

She walks outside and drops the cigarette on the ground. Blue-white smoke snakes upwards until she grinds the burning end into the gravel. She’s still coughing.

She finds a box of Luden’s wild cherry cough drops in the aisle next to the pain relievers and returns to the cash register. She’s going to have to work through the night just to pay for all this stuff. She pops a lozenge into her mouth and lets the taste spread across her tongue.

One-fifteen. She sucks another cough drop and wonders if she wants to read Tiger Beat—Paul McCartney is on the cover—or try a crossword puzzle book.

A car pulls in by the gas pumps and two people sit there. She can’t tell whether the car is black or dark blue, but it has a dent in the back fender and the engine needs a tune-up.

Two men walk through the door, both wearing jeans and Ohio State sweatshirts. It’s late at night in June, but they both wear ski masks over their faces, too. The taller one holds a hunting knife in his hand, and the blade looks big as a car bumper.

Annie’s chest turns to ice.

“Open the cash register and nobody gets hurt.”

“We don’t got much here, mister.” She fights to keep her voice steady. “Not enough for you to go to jail for.”

“We’re not going to jail. Just shut up and open up.”

Annie punches the No Sale button and the door clangs open. She reaches for the cash, but the guy comes around the counter and sticks the knife in her face.

“Back up, kid.”

Annie does. The skinny guy scratches his neck and looks around the store while the man with the knife stuffs the bills in his pocket. Two hundred in twenties, a hundred sixty in tens. . .

Annie tells herself it’s a good thing she and Lainie counted it. She’ll be able to tell the police exactly how much they got. The guy shakes his head.

“This is all?”

Annie nods. The knife blade flickers under the lights.

“Pump some gas,” she whispers. “You can fill your tank.”

“Oh, don’t worry, we’re gonna do that anyway.” His raisin eyes look through the red knitted mask. “Maybe I should fill your tank too, you like that?”

Annie feels her throat burning again and her hands turn cold. Her lips move but her voice doesn’t work.

“Whatta you say, kid? Just you and me, right here on the counter.” The guy points the knife at Annie’s tee shirt and she feels three years old, not grown-up at all. She shakes her head and feels her lips trembling.

“P-please,” she whispers. “I’m not. . .”

The skinny guy speaks up. “Don’t do that, D—”

“Shut up.” The man with the knife whirls. “No names, you dope.”

He backs Annie up against the cigarette display and hooks her tee shirt on the point of the knife. He slices through the fabric and goose bumps spring out on her chest and arms. He looks down.

“Hell, not even enough here to grab onto and steer.”

“Don’t do that, man.” The skinny guy speaks up again. “We got the money, let’s get out of here before someone comes.”

“You want us to leave, kid?” Annie feels her eyes cross while the knife hovers under her nose. She presses her lips together and nods.

“Say please.”

Her throat burns and her knees shake. The word struggles up from her lungs.

“Please. P-please leave.”

His eyes stare into hers for hours before he steps back.

“OK. You’re going to be that way about it.” He steps back and his eyes lower. “At least I can grab some smokes, too.”

He pushes her out of the way and takes two cartons of Camels. When he turns back toward the counter, he sees the pack of Kools by the register.

“What’s this? Little girl cigarettes, filters and menthol? You kidding me, kid? You trying to be a big girl?”

He brays like a mule and turns to his buddy. Annie wants to slide through the floor and disappear from the whole wide world until she recognizes his laugh.

Of course! Nobody else calls her “kid,” either. It’s Duane Peasey and his idiot buddy. Annie feels her fear turn to rage. These are the guys that raped her sister, and they were going to. . .

He shows the Kools to his buddy. “Gonna smoke like the big girls. What a joke.”

Annie clenches her teeth.

“You said you were leaving,” she whispers.

“Yeah, I did, didn’t I?” He drops her Kools next to the can of Aqua Net. “Well, one more for the road, OK?”

He takes another carton of Camels and puts it on the other two. He tucks them under his arm and steps back. Annie reaches into her pocket for her brand-new Zippo.

“You want a light before you go?”

“Huh?” Duane turns back and his knife lowers.

Annie yanks the cap off the Aqua Net and sprays it into his face. She pops the cap on the lighter and her thumb finds the little wheel. She holds it under the spray and flicks.

Duane Peasey’s ski mask explodes into bright orange and his shriek fills the whole store. Annie drops the Aqua Net and watches his hands claw at his burning face. Footsteps pound toward the door but she can’t look away. A car engine roars, but she barely hears it between Duane’s screams and the crackle of yarn and flesh.

When he stops screaming and thrashing, Annie steps back. Her nostrils fill with a stench like charred pork and her hands won’t stop shaking, but somehow she manages to dial the Sheriff’s office. The deputies arrive minutes later and find her on all fours, throwing up near the premium gas pump.

Someone calls an ambulance and someone finally thinks to call Lainie, who shows up with her hair in curlers and her nightgown tucked into jeans. Annie falls into her arms and holds on. She hears herself sobbing like a little kid.

“Are you all right?” Lainie asks. “I mean, are you hurt?” Duane’s knife sliced through Annie’s shirt and bra and she’s hanging out for all the deputies to see. They don’t pay her enough to move out of this dump either, and now she’ll never get a second chance.

The scratch on her chest burns.

“I don’t want to work the midnight shift.”

Steve Liskow’s stories have earned an Edgar nomination, Honorable Mention for the Al Blanchard Award (3 times), and the Black Orchid Novella Award (twice). Those stories appear in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, Black Cat Mystery Magazine, and several anthologies. He has published 14 novels, and The Kids Are All Right was a finalist for the Shamus Award in 2015. He lives in Connecticut. Visit his website at www.steveliskow.com.

Nobody's Safe, fiction by Peter DiChellis

I screamed myself awake, leapt to my feet, and jumped into the crowd, swinging my fists. The passengers mobbed me, punching and hollering. I elbowed a ratty-looking guy between his eyes and felt his nose break. Blood and snot flowed into his greasy beard. I tried to yell, “Fuck you!” but a big guy with jug ears and a bad haircut stepped up and pounded me hard in the face. As I fell, my head banged against a seatback. The mob pulled me forward, up the narrow aisle. Night air gushed through the open door and the big guy with jug ears hurled me into the darkness.

“Happy landing!” a frenzied woman screeched.

As I slammed onto the shoulder of the road, the hulking intercity bus belched diesel exhaust and pulled away, headed where? Scattered towns and forgotten hamlets, I imagined, their names printed on furious passengers’ ticket stubs but unknown to me. The crowd stared through the bus windows, some scowling, others shaking their fists.

“What the hell happened?” I shouted. “Where am I?”

I felt dizzy. A bright light glowed in the distance. Walk toward the light, I told myself. The ground seemed to roll and whirl, and my knees buckled. My head began throbbing and my thoughts fractured into disorienting bursts and flashes.

When I tried to focus, odd fragments skipped through my mind: Strange words. Jesus on the moon. Red splotches of . . . something.

What else? Try harder. What did I know? I knew my name, remembered where I lived. I could recall almost everything except what happened earlier today.

Stop, stop walking. My cell phone? In my pocket? No. Maybe fell out on the bus? Or when the passengers threw me off? Too dark to look for it. Walk toward the light.

Wait, stop. Wallet? Yes. Everything in it? Ticket stub? From where? To where? Would the ticket stub help me remember what happened? Too dark to see anything. Keep walking. Toward the light.

My head had cleared by the time I reached the tumbledown little motel with the 24-hour diner and bright, lighted sign that said “Stay Here. Cheap. Cable.” My wallet still held my credit cards, cash, identification, and so forth. But no bus ticket stub. That was in my jacket pocket.

The motel night clerk was a woman, about 80 years old I supposed, with blinding peroxide-orange hair, gaudy blue eye makeup, and teeth the color of corn.

“Cable went bust,” she said. “But I give special entertainment if you pay extra.” She winked and handed me my room key.

I woke early the next morning, still in my clothes, atop a dusty bedspread in a grubby room with dingy gray walls. And without special entertainment.

The phone book in the diner next to the motel showed I’d journeyed to a tiny town about 200 miles south of where I lived. The diner waitress chewed gum and called me “honey” when she poured me a mug of steaming coffee. I took a sip but it made my teeth ache, I guess from the beating I took. What the hell should I do now? I couldn’t call the cops. What would I tell them that made any sense? And for all I knew the bus driver already called the cops on me.

I used the diner’s pay phone to call the nearest rental car company, to get home. They said they’d send a shuttle to the diner to pick me up. I didn't need to phone the cubicle boss about missing work. I'd been unemployed over a month.

Next call: My cell carrier. They said they’d already terminated my account, and were investigating an expensive rash of suspicious charges. They could reinstate the account in a few days, after a review. Or I could pay the $1,472 and get the account reinstated now.

I thought about Patty. Our relationship, almost two months in the making, had begun to wobble. Like a kid learning to ride a bike. She says I don't communicate. I guessed I should call her, but what would I communicate? Hi honey, I'm on my way to Teensy Weensy Rent-a-Car in Cow Pasture County. I woke up this morning in a cheap motel, and all I can remember from last night is I started a fight and got thrown off a bus. Wanna get pizza tonight? I'm still unemployed, so you’re buying!

Sure, that should mend things. Communication. Then again, maybe I’d already called her and just didn’t remember. I wondered what I’d said.

First stop in my Teensy Weensy car, a cell phone store. I bought a prepaid, the cheapest they carried, on sale. I tried to check my old cell’s voicemail, just in case, but got a dropped signal. I tried my home voicemail. Dropped signal again. Nice phone.

***

My brain was still scrambled when I arrived home. Swollen bruises on my face confirmed I'd taken a thrashing. I felt dizzy again, light-headed. Next step: Call my doctor.I thought I’d made an appointment for a check-up weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure.

Look at the calendar. There. Dr. Zarnotski, 4pm yesterday. Had I seen him? I didn’t know, couldn’t remember anything from yesterday afternoon. I clutched at my home phone. My hand trembled a little as I called. A voicemail picked up, a woman.

“You have reached the office of Dr. Michael Zarnotski. Due to the recent tragedy, the office is closed until further notice. If you wish to send flowers, we will receive them here and forward them to the family. If this is an emergency, please call Dr. Wade Winthorpe at …”

She gave a local number. I jotted it down but hung up the phone and fired up my laptop.

My favorite search engine found a current headline from the local newspaper’s website. “Doctor Murdered in Home” it read. I scanned the story.

“Dr. Mikhail ‘Michael’ Zarnotski was discovered shot to death in his home early this morning … Police called the killing a gangland style execution … Neighbors reported seeing the doctor help his wife and son put suitcases into the family’s SUV two days ago … Neither family member has been seen at home since then … ”

The story included a photo of Dr. Zarnotski. Mid-fifties probably, with a genuine smile and a well-tended goatee. A carrot-top in his youth, but nearly bald now. He was tall and fit, I knew, though the photo showed only his face.

What the hell was happening? Had I seen my doctor just before his murder and repressed something awful in my memory? Was my nighttime bus trip a futile attempt to run away? And how should I interpret my frenzied violence on the bus and explosive headaches afterward?

I remembered the ticket stub and called the bus station. Somebody there must know something that would help me. Maybe something I said or did before boarding the bus. I reached a guy named Gene. He said another guy, named Clement, worked the night shift yesterday. Clement was scheduled for the same shift again today, back at 6pm.

“I’ll call then,” I told Gene. “I hope Clement will talk to me.”

“Clement? Oh, I’m sure he’ll talk to you. Why wouldn’t he?”

Worried and flustered, I called Dr. Winthorpe’s office and described my memory problems, but nothing else. After a moment on hold, the receptionist told me to come in right away.

***

A crowd filled Dr. Winthorpe’s waiting room. None of them looked as sick as I felt.

“When was the last time you saw Dr. Zarnotski?” the receptionist whispered.

“Maybe yesterday afternoon. But my problem is, I don’t know … can’t say what happened.”

She was still staring at my battered face when Dr. Winthorpe emerged from a back hallway and greeted me. A short, pleasant man, he seemed to realize right away who I was.

“You just called,” he said. “Dr. Zarnotski’s patient. I want to examine you immediately.”

“But, doctor,” the receptionist interrupted.

“I know. We have patients waiting. But this could be serious.”

“Very serious,” she said. “Doctor, this man …”

He had already disappeared, back down the hallway. The receptionist grabbed her phone, and I followed Dr. Winthorpe into an examination room. A nurse joined us. I recounted my story to both of them.

“Quite a bus ride,” the doctor said. “Episodic memory loss, night terrors, maybe even violent sleepwalking. And what’s this, a fresh needle puncture?”

He pointed to a speck on my arm and turned to the nurse.

“I’ll need a blood sample.”

She drew one and left.

“We’ll conduct a quick test right now,” the doctor said. “It might tell us something preliminary. I'll go check.”

He left me sitting in the examination room, more confused and frightened than I’d ever felt in my life.

When he returned, Dr. Winthorpe lingered in the hall and gaped through the open doorway, leaving me alone in the exam room. He blinked before speaking and stayed in the hall.

“Preliminary results . . .” He stammered and flushed. “Preliminary results indicate injection of high dosages of a drug type generally known as neuroleptics, as well as a sedative type generally known as benzodiazepines.”

I sat, dumbfounded.

“A third substance,” he continued, “perhaps a slow release amphetamine, could not be conclusively identified through preliminary testing.”

“A sedative, an amphetamine, and … what is the first drug for?” I asked.

He blinked again.

“Typically, it is used in the treatment of violent, hallucinatory schizophrenia,” he said. “But in your case, based on the unusually high dosage and substance mixtures, in my opinion someone was trying to erase your memory.”

“Erase my memory?”

“Please leave now,” he said. “I'll contact you with anything further.”

And he was gone.

I wandered down the deserted hall, back to the waiting room and the exit. Like the rest of the office, the waiting room was empty now.

Except for two men.

They looked like a couple of bulldozers, built wide and thick, geared to smash anything that got in their way. The tall one stood at least six-two, the squat guy maybe five-ten. They both wore wrinkled suits. They both wore mean looks. And they both were looking right at me.

The tall one showed a badge. “Sergeant Detective Kirkwood,” he said. “Homicide.”

The squat guy gripped my arm so hard my hand went numb. “We need to ask you some questions. The receptionist called and told us all about you.”

They shoved me into a corner. Kirkwood said they were investigating the murder of Dr. Zarnotski.

“You were a patient of his?” he asked me.

“Yes.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“I can’t remember, maybe yesterday.”

“Yesterday, but you can’t remember? You think we’re morons?” Kirkwood stared. The squat guy smirked and pulled out a pair of handcuffs.

“I’m under a doctor’s care. For memory problems.”

Kirkwood considered this. “Are you being treated for a mental disorder, sir?”

I felt dizzy again. “I don’t think so. Not right now anyway.”

“Are you a drug user?”

“No. Do I need an attorney?”

“Where were you last night, from 9pm until just after midnight?”

Excellent question.

“Two hundred miles from here, on a bus with twenty other people.”

“You think anybody on the bus would remember you?”

“I guarantee it.”

“Yeah?” the squat guy said. “We'll check it out, Mr. Memory.”

“You had a nasty fight with someone,” Kirkwood continued. He scrutinized my battered face, waiting.

“On the bus,” I told him. “Not with the doctor.”

They verified my contact information so they could reach me. Home address, home phone, email. I described my new cell phone problems, but gave them the number anyway. I promised myself a better phone with more reliable service, tomorrow. Any carrier, any price. Kirkwood handed me his card and said he’d be in touch. I was considered a “person of interest,” he told me.

I thought afterward how tough it might be for the cops to find the bus passengers. Where had they traveled by now? The detectives could track down the driver, of course, but he had his job to protect. I doubted the employee handbook encouraged throwing someone overboard and abandoning him on the side of the road. The driver’s memory might conveniently get worse than mine.

Was there anything I could do to unravel what the hell was happening to me? Yes! Call the bus station again. Maybe the night shift clerk saw something, Clement. His shift would start in less than an hour. I wasn't hungry so simply rested in my car, waiting, thinking, struggling to make sense of the most recent 24 hours of my life. I soon realized I couldn't.

Time to call Clement. I hoped he had shown up for his shift. Gene seemed certain Clement would talk to me, but why? And what might he recall?

Someone answered on the first ring. “Bus depot, you got Clement.”

Thank God. I gave him my name and crossed my fingers. “Clement, I really need your help. I was in the depot last night, but I wasn’t feeling well at all. Maybe someone else had to buy my ticket for me. I don’t remember. You were working … ”

“Yessir,” he interrupted. “Gene here told me you called before. You was the fella who tied on a good one, was sleeping it off on the bench there, then got all rambunctious on Uncle Ned’s route down south. Uncle Ned’s the bus driver, my uncle. He says you was … ”

“Clement, do you remember … ”

“Talk about tying one on. One time, I went over to this titty bar on Route 4. There was these two off-duty strippers and we got to drinkin’ bourbon and beer. Well, I don’t need to tell a fella like you what happened next, but here goes … ”

“Clement. Who bought my ticket last night?”

“Yessir. The tall fella, bald, with the little red beard. Beard reminded me of my cousin Earl, but his beard ain’t little, just red. And he ain’t tall nor bald neither. But I surely remember that little red … ”

The phone signal began breaking up. “Clement, I have to go.”

“Alright then, but you’re missin’ a real fine titty bar story.”

The phone connection dropped and I sank into the car seat. What the hell was happening?

Tall, bald, little red beard: Dr. Zarnotski. My doctor had sent his family away, and then drugged me and put on me on a bus to nowhere, just before he was executed by gangsters.

I tried calling Detective Kirkwood. The call went through. I told Kirkwood what Clement had revealed.

“Talk to Clement yourself,” I suggested.

“You’re already in the clear. We got the story straight from Doc Zarnotski.”

“My God. He’s alive?” “Hell, no. Dead as disco.”

“Then how could he … ”

“He emailed his attorney a letter to be opened on his death. A rambling confession, really. The attorney just called, gave me as much of the story as she could. The doc was dealing drugs. Pills and medical opiates, mostly. Also some antipsychotics. He was trying to cover himself and protect you, with the injection and the bus ride, because of something you saw. We don’t know what. Remember anything yet?”

“No,” I whispered. “Nothing.”

“It’s hard to know everything because the doc’s letter was a mess. He definitely was an addict, pretty far gone too. He’d started selling to a couple of Russian thugs, hard cases. They were pressuring him, threatening his family. No doubt they killed him. One is a big guy with a tattoo on his face. Jesus hanging on the cross. You see anybody like that?”

“I can’t remember.”

I thought about the results of my blood test. “Detective Kirkwood. You mentioned antipsychotic drugs.”

“The Russian mob sometimes uses them on their own enforcers. To calm them, keep them under control. These are not people you want to bump into.”

I asked the question grinding in my gut. “Detective, did you tell me all this because … am I safe?”

He paused a beat. “It’s a dangerous world. Nobody’s safe.”

***

My appetite for food seemed gone for good, but I drove to a popular chain restaurant to try to eat. The restaurant was bright and lively, filled with the aromas of steaming soup and grilled meat and the sounds of ordinary people having ordinary fun. I wished I was one of them.

Two hours later, I pulled into my driveway, my dinner uneaten, plopped cold into a take-out bag. Home again. Warm, inviting, home.

I got as far as the porch. A noise in the night made me turn and look. A man holding an assault rifle rushed toward me, his dark clothing almost blending into the night. He gripped the rifle in one hand while making a slicing gesture across his throat with the forefinger of his other hand. I pitched the take-out bag and vaulted into the house. Bolt the door, I told myself. Call 911. Panicky and shuddering, I wondered if the cops could get here fast enough to keep me alive. I bolted the door. But I didn't call 911.

Because it was too late. Two Russian gangsters were waiting in my living room. One with a gun. One with a knife.

The knifeman, tall and bulky with jagged teeth and a massive shaved head, stepped behind me. But not before I saw the ornate tattoo covering the right side of his face, ear to nose, temple to neck. Jesus on the cross, red tears of blood dripping from his tortured eyes.

The gunman, holding an automatic pistol, remained seated on my couch. Much shorter than the knifeman, he looked like a rough middleweight brawler: Immense shoulders, a feral gaze, and sandy hair cut too close to hide the white scars and purple scabs mottling his scalp. He pointed me toward the chair across from him.

His accented voice was low and quiet. “Sit. Be comfortable like me.”

I sat, shaking.

The knifeman moved behind my chair, standing so close I felt his breath and smelled his body odor.

“The doctor was selling you drugs?” the gunman asked.

I shook my head no.

“But you saw him sell drugs to us. One time, but many drugs. And saw mad arguing until the doctor gave me my shot, my medicine?”

“I don't know.”

His words “my medicine” finally registered. The guy with a Jesus tattoo on his face and a knife in his hand wasn’t the one taking antipsychotics.

Silent nearly a minute, the gunman fixed a chilly glare on me.

“You don't know,” he said. “Don’t remember anything, from your big injection?”

“Nothing.”

He surveyed me another moment. “It seems you really do not remember us. Compliments to the dead doctor. But I could not let him live. Or you.”

He motioned to the knifeman, who lumbered to the front window and reached to shut the curtains. The gunman stood and aimed his automatic at my forehead.

“Will be best to close your eyes,” he told me.

Before I could close them, I heard the crack of two shots fired. Both Russians fell to the floor, bleeding and convulsing. The front door exploded off its hinges and two SWAT cops burst in, one coming high, one low, both carrying assault rifles.

That’s when I blacked out.

***

Kirkwood and his squat detective were watching my house, they told me afterward. Kirkwood’s investigators discovered my personal records were missing from Dr. Zarnotski’s office. So Kirkwood deduced the Russians had taken them and might hunt me down.

When he saw the gangsters enter my house, Kirkwood called in the SWAT guys. They arrived seconds before I did. The man who rushed toward the porch with an assault rifle was a cop trying to signal me to keep quiet and stay out of the house. When the knifeman moved away from me and the gunman stood and took aim, snipers shot them both through the window and the two SWAT guys busted through the door. Kirkwood had tried to call me an hour before but my worthless cell phone kept dropping him.

“You almost screwed up the whole operation,” the squat detective said to me. “Get a decent cell phone.”

The next day, I did. I used it to call Patty and send flowers to Dr. Zarnotski’s family.

Peter DiChellis concocts sinister tales for anthologies, ezines, and magazines. He is a member of Friends of Mystery and the Short Mystery Fiction Society, and an Active (published author) member of the Mystery Writers of America, Private Eye Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. For more, visit Peter’s Amazon author page or his blog about short mystery and crime fiction, A short walk down a dark street.

***

Notes: This story is an original work of creative fiction. All people and events described or depicted are entirely fictional. Any resemblance to actual individuals or events is unintended and coincidental. Specifics about Russian criminal tattoos and the general use and potential side effects of certain broad classes of medical drugs are based on information from several published sources. All descriptive details, however, are fictional and dramatized.

The Whores Go Down With the Stars, fiction by Sarah Jilek

I wait in the hotel lobby while June blows him. We usually give them the option—me, the ballerina-small brunette, or June, the thick, tall blonde, panther tattoo wrapped around her muscled thigh. She sometimes falls asleep with that thigh, that jewel-eyed panther, draped over my hips.

The clock on the wall above the spectacled receptionist reads 6:23 PM. It doesn't take thirty-two minutes to suck someone's cock. Something's wrong.

I push my cuticles back with my thumbnail. I keep accidentally making eye contact with the receptionist, who's reading a book called The Power of Today. A big, red-lettered quote on the back cover reads, “This book made me realize my own invincibility!” She smiles awkwardly every time our eyes meet. Honey, I want to tell her, stroking her straw-blonde hair, there is so much more than this middle-of-nowhere nothing Illinois town. At the edge of the horizon, past the sunset, there is a shining desert beacon, a glimmering oasis by the sea. That’s where I’m going: to the land of palm trees and pep pills. I’m going to be a star.

I stand and walk to the elevator, pacing in front of it. I can't go up there. It could turn bad and he could leave and not pay, and then we'd never get to L.A., would never rise from our warm haven of West Hollywood bedsheets to clink mimosa glasses together at the Ivy.

Instead, June wouldn’t talk to me for days. When we’d stop for gas and I’d ask her what she wanted from the convenience store, she’d just keep staring at the pump instead of me. I’d buy her a thirty-two-ounce raspberry slushie and it would turn, untouched, to warm blue syrup.

I bite off my thumbnail and spit it onto the tile. What is taking so long?

My finger hovers over the elevator button, but I drop my hand, sighing. A boy squeals nearby, startling me, then bolts around the corner. He’s maybe six or seven, wrapped in a wet hotel towel, hair spiked. He smells like chlorine. His slim, acne-scarred mother follows him, staring at her phone. The boy presses the button, jumping in place, and when it dings, the mother glances up. I give her a thin smile, and, after a second's hesitation, she smiles back. She holds an arm out to block the door from shutting.

“Oh, no, that’s—” I blurt out, shaking my head.

“Oh, okay,” she replies. The boy wraps his arms around her waist and presses his damp face into her stomach. She smooths down the spikes in his hair, a calm smile washing over her face. Is she remembering how she used to hold her baby? As the door slides shut, her eyes flash to mine. Me, the awkward, pacing woman in the hotel lobby. She knows exactly what I do.

I inspect my blurry reflection in the door, combing through my dark hair with my fingers and wiping the smudged mascara from under my eyes. I take a deep breath, running my tongue over my straight teeth and practicing my angles, my soft smiles and my grins. The crack between door panels bisects my thin face, warping it: the left side smooth, smiling, but the right side sagging, dissolving into smudged ripples.

My stomach sinks, and I punch the button and climb onto the elevator, which smells like old cigarettes and lingering chlorine. June is probably fine, but at least I can listen outside the door for the usual sounds: the strangled grunting that means he’s about to cum, or the soft moans June sometimes makes to hurry it along, the ones that send a twinge between my legs.

The door opens on the third floor and I get out, my heart pounding. As I approach room 308, my steps silent on the teal geometric carpet, I feel like I'm sneaking into my sister's room to read her diary, find out about the sex with her high school boyfriend, my eyes scanning too fast to understand—tongue, pressure, dried cum in my underwear— and my cheeks burning.

Two more rooms to go. I lean against the wall, stepping slowly. An angry bark. I freeze, inhaling sharply. A woman’s shriek. I swallow, holding my breath. June can handle it. She once pulled her neck knife on a guy who grabbed her ass at a Quick-Stop. Almost got us arrested. She keeps that knife under every hotel pillow.

A loud thud. Another. A sound like heavy clapping. It’s skin hitting skin, I realize. I'm frozen, stuck to the wall, still holding my breath. I take a few steps, then stop again. The fluorescent strip of light above my head flickers.

"Stop," a small, tame voice pleads. It takes me a second to realize it's June. Grunts and a whimper on the other side of the wall. The door— 308, staring me in the face.

I could go back downstairs. Creep back the way I came. If June can't fight him off, what's my skinny ass supposed to do?

More grunts and thuds, something smashed. A sob. Another.

"Don’t—"

My key card is slippery in my hand. My thumb oozes blood where I bit off skin.

"No—"

I push the card in and shoulder open the door. It's dark in the room, the hallway light cutting a triangle onto the carpeted floor.

The man stands at the foot of the bed, pants around his ankles, his bare ass pale. He turns toward me, squinting. June lies on her back beneath him, wrists bound with something— a zip tie? He's holding the room phone above June's head, his arm ready to swing down, the receiver dangling, brushing her bare stomach. The phone’s shadow hangs long and dark on the wall.

June meets my eyes—hers wet and bruised—and blinks. Her mouth moves, and she rolls slightly to the side beneath the man's body, uncovering a corner of the pillow.

The knife. I run to the side of the bed and dive onto it, fumbling under the pillow. I grab the handle—hard, cold wood, and something slams into the side of my face, knocking me off balance and off the bed. The hard plastic block of the phone. My ear rings—I'm deaf. Hot pain stings my ear and cheek.

I face him, holding the knife, his fat, sweating face still shocked. A strange, whistling rattle fills my head and it hits me what I’m about to do. June half-gasps, half-sobs, and I stick the three-inch blade into his gut, watch his jaw go slack. He raises the phone again and I put up my left hand and knock it away, stabbing again and again and twisting the knife, my face still burning, my ears still rattling.

He grunts and coughs blood into my face and onto June, gurgling. It tastes like hot metal. Like a fever. I keep stabbing him, spit pooling at the corners of my open mouth, until he slumps forward on top of June.

I pant, adrenaline pounding in my chest. My ear rings. The air conditioner rattles in the corner. I realize only now that it’s what I was hearing the whole time.

I help June shove off his body. She looks down at her black bra soaked in blood. I let out a sigh and cut through the zip tie binding her wrists. They’re marked with red. She sits up, wiping her face, smearing blood over her nose and mouth. I swallow, holding up my hands.

"Look, I fucked up," I say, my voice breaking. "It was too long—"

She kisses me hard on the mouth. She tastes like sweat, like his sour skin. I lean in.


8:02 PM

At the hardware store, we lift everything from the cart onto the belt: a 64-pack of Hefty garbage bags, a huge Bissell steam-cleaning vacuum, a gallon jug of bleach, a bucket of Rug Doctor carpet cleaner, a Libman Wonder Mop and three empty five-gallon buckets, a jug of Certol International bathroom cleaner with hydrochloric acid, two Craftsman claw hammers, two Ace twelve-inch hacksaws, and a five-pack of Craftsman carbon steel pliers.

June walks to the cashier ahead of me, reaching for the dead man’s trifold leather wallet full of cash in her back pocket. Her wet hair smells like lavender shampoo from the shower we took together. I remember the softness of the skin under her eyes, how her eyelashes brushed my thumb when I wiped blood from that spot under the hot water. I reach out and hook that thumb into her belt loop. She turns, startled, her mouth open.

I glance at the cashier. He’s maybe in his early twenties, with a stubbly half-goatee and spaghetti-noodle arms sticking out of his black polo. His eyes flit between my finger in June’s belt loop, the heap of stuff we picked out, and the cash-filled wallet. My left ear pulses, ringing again. June gives him an awkward smile, standing up straight so that her tits lift and her nipples show under her tanktop. She has crazy eyes, though, and the cashier doesn’t even glance at her tits. That’s never happened before. He hesitates, hand hovering over the mop handle, then glances over his shoulder to the other register, where his red-polo-clad manager has his back turned to us.

I reach across the belt for a red lollipop from the impulse-buy rack and tear off the wrapper. The sudden motion makes him pause, and I stick the lollipop into my dry mouth—sickly cherry. I suck on it, twirling the stick around, then pull it out of my mouth with a wet pop. I give him my best soft smile, making sure that it reaches my eyes— a romantic comedy smile; a girl-next-door smile.

He blushes and starts scanning.


11:12 PM

“We’ll have to flush him,” June says as we stand over the unmelted body in the tub.

We filled it up with the acidic bathroom cleaner, poured it thick and pale green over the pudge of his stomach, into the gaping stab wounds, across the patches of wiry hairs on his chest. We watched a House Hunters marathon on HGTV, sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the pile of bloody sheets. June said House Three’s mint-green retro fridge didn’t go with the granite countertops. I disagreed: a pop of color was just what the kitchen needed, especially with all the natural light. As we watched, the sun set behind the curtain and the bathroom fan whirred behind the closed door. Every so often, a whiff of searing citrus fume made my eyes water and my nose run.

Dissolving his body didn’t work, and June says we can’t risk carrying him out—too many cameras. We have to cut him up in tiny pieces and flush those pieces down the toilet.

“Checkout time is noon. We’ve got just about twelve hours,” June says. She hands me a hacksaw and a hammer and gets to work sawing, the muscles in her tanned, confident arm pulsing. I can barely breathe in the bathroom, but we can’t open the door. I stare at myself in the mirror as she saws back and forth, at my Beatles t-shirt hiked up over my nose and mouth. I look funny with the tools—the hammer’s too heavy for me to hold without my arm shaking. June’s sawing is rhythmic, and I wiggle my eyebrows along with it, raising one eyebrow and then the other as the blade works back and forth.

Then June holds out an arm to me by the wrist. Blood drips from the sawed-off end, just below the missing elbow, onto my white ankle sock. My gut churns. June wiggles it around, like, we don’t have all day, the limp fingers flopping against her hand. I set down the hammer on the bathroom counter and grab the forearm. It’s cold and sticky from the bathroom cleaner. My thumb stings where I bit off the skin hours ago. We forgot to buy rubber gloves. In the mirror, I hold the arm, blood dripping into the sink. I meet my own eyes, hold them, and take a deep breath. It’s a new role, I tell myself. A role I’ve been practicing for. The role of a lifetime.

I lay the arm on the bathroom counter, hold down the wrist with my left hand (try not to think about the pulse that used to pound there), and cut into the skin with the hacksaw. The blade bites in easily, blood blooming onto the metal teeth and spraying onto the white laminate counter. I work the saw back and forth until it hits bone with a horrible scrape that jars my wrist. I glance at June, who has the other forearm already resting on the rim of the bathtub, palm up, and is at work on the left upper arm, her jeans rolled up around her ankles.

I lean into the blade, sawing with all my might, splinters of bone flying, embedding themselves into the skin of the arm and into my raw hand. I keep sawing, the smell of blood and chemicals pressing in on me, wet and sharp. The friction gives off the stench of warming meat. My eyes water and snot leaks from my nose and over my lips, tasting salty. Every now and then I wipe the blade on a bath towel to clean the teeth of muscle, fat, and bone shards. My left ear throbs, ringing intermittently.

I drop small pieces of him into the toilet, flushing it as I go: first and second thumb joints, first ring finger joint, whole pinky. His cock, taken from June and chopped into three pieces after I caught her staring at the severed thing bobbing up and down in the bathwater. Eventually I have a system down, and June and I are in sync. I imagine myself as the star of a thriller, camera focusing on the piercing blue of my eyes, darting over the shining blade and the gleaming muscle and fat of the limbs. My slender fingers cracking ribs, blood and marrow flecking my forehead and eyelids.

I dump the rest of the foot I’ve been chopping into the toilet and flush it. The toilet sighs and stops with a clunk, and the foot chunks swirl in the rippling water. June’s head jerks up, pliers in her hand. She’s got a bunch of his teeth lined up on the bathtub rim.

“It won’t flush,” I pant, suddenly lightheaded.

She wipes sweat from her forehead with her upper arm.

“What do we do?” she asks me, glancing at the toilet, like I’m supposed to know.

“One of us needs to get a plunger from the front desk,” I say, and she looks down at her pliers, at their jaws covered in pulpy blood.

“Okay,” she says, nodding. My stomach sinks. I thought, like always, that she’d offer to handle the problem. But she’s already back to work, grasping a molar and yanking it out.


4:16 AM

The hallway air feels fresh and cool. I’m in my last clean outfit, a tight, butter-yellow minidress. I’ve put my hair up in a bun and covered it with a baseball cap to hide the flecks of blood on my scalp. I’m just a manic pixie dream girl, I tell myself as the elevator bell dings and I step on. They wear weird shit like this all the time. The elevator lurches to a stop, and my empty stomach rears up. I grab the smudged metal bar with a raw, red hand.

When the door slides open, I stroll to the front desk. The same receptionist is there, a steaming paper cup of coffee next to her; she’s nearing the end of her book. I think of everything that has happened above her head since she started it, and heat blooms on my cheeks.

She looks up as I approach and smiles. I smile, too, but it’s like I’ve forgotten how—my mouth jerks unnaturally, and my eyes feel too wide. I clear my throat, glancing over the desk at the upside-down book. “Nothing prepared me for the day I realized that I was invincible,” a sentence reads. The receptionist’s eyes are watery—is that from lack of sleep, or is it the book? Has it resonated with her that deeply? Has she changed?

I’ve been quiet too long. “Um. . . can I borrow a plunger?”

She frowns, staring at my arm. A clump of glistening flesh sticks to my bare bicep. My hand twitches to wipe it off, but I realize that I can’t. That to remove it would be to acknowledge it. So, I don’t blink. I will my eyes to water. Seize the day, I tell her with my eyes. You’re invincible. She searches my face, eyes widening almost imperceptibly behind her square glasses. My vision blurs. This is the most important thing you will ever do. Her mouth twitches, and her nostrils flare—does she understand? She purses her lips. Finally, she gives me a glorious nod.


4:21 AM

I can hear June laughing from outside the door to room 308. It’s a maniacal laugh, a deep chuckle punctuated by high-pitched cackles. The only other time I’ve heard her laugh like this was when she was stoned out of her mind at a porno theater in Nashville. But, no—even that laugh wasn’t this crazed. I slip in the key card and open the door, making sure the powder-blue “Getting Some Shut-Eye” sign stays in place.

When I open the bathroom door, the smells hit me again, harder than before. Shit and blood and acid and vomit (mine, in the sink). June squats in the tub, shaking with laughter. Tears roll down her cheeks. Next to her, two broken hacksaw blades and a gouged thigh.

I set down the plunger and crouch next to the tub. June giggles and takes a breath, exhaling hard. Her eyes are red and watery. For a second, I think she might be high, but I don’t smell weed. The panther on her thigh shrinks away from me, lips curled over its fangs.

“We’re fucked,” she says, wiping her nose and tapping the femur, her fingernail hitting the jagged groove she cut into it. Half of me wants to cry, too, seeing her like this. The new half, the half just born tonight, wants to smack her.

“No, we’re not.” I reach for the hammer on the countertop and hand it to her. She takes it, cradling it in both her chafed hands, sniffling.

“Come on,” I tell her. “It will be dawn soon.”

When the toilet finally flushes again, after I’ve plunged it for what seemed like an hour, I cry. We keep working. June pounds the bones with the hammer until they break. I use my hammer to crack the skull, prize it apart with the claw. I hold it over the toilet, let the brain leak and splash into the bowl, force down the gagging in my throat. It smells like sickly meat, like diseased fluids. I wonder which part of that brain wanted to smash June’s head with the phone. If there was a part that just wanted to cum in her mouth. I wonder how my brain looks, if I could glimpse that new half of me sparking inside it.

The last of the brain plops into the toilet, and there’s a rapid, hard knock on the door. I freeze, glancing at June, tear tracks oiling her cheeks. I’ve never seen her so scared.

I swallow. “It’ll be fine,” I whisper, my throat raw. “They’ll go away.”

But they knock again, three times, even harder. My whole body shakes. I set down the mangled, dented head on the counter.

“Don’t answer it,” June pleads, crouched in the tub, her eyes hooded and dark.

“We have to.” I flush the brain and then wrap my hair in one of the few clean towels buried in the stack. I wipe blood smudges from my cheeks and hands and leave the bathroom, shutting the door behind me. I change back into my minidress as another succession of knocks comes.

“Be right there,” I call, my voice wavering. I kick the pile of bloody sheets behind the bed, along with all the bags and packaging from the hardware store. The walk from the bed to the door is slow and sickening. I flick the lock and grab the cold door handle, licking my lips and tasting blood. I crack open the door, wedging myself in the doorway.

It’s a large man in a too-tight gingham button-down and khakis, with a walkie-talkie strapped to his waist. He reminds me of the youth group leader at the Vacation Bible School my mom made me go to one summer. I smile sleepily at him.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but according to some of the other guests, there’s a bunch of loud noise coming from this room,” he says, gesturing with his hands and then wringing them, pursing his lips at me like he’s sure he’s giving me a good scolding.

I tilt my head, feigning surprise, then nod slowly. “That must have just been the music. Sorry. My friend’s really into goregrind right now,” I say, shrugging. “We’ll try to keep it down.” The man narrows his eyes at me, glances behind me into the room. Can he see the bloody handprints on the bathroom doorframe? Is he explaining them away in his mind? He takes his walkie-talkie off the clip. What would June do? I keep myself firmly planted in the doorway, allow one smooth leg to jut out over the threshold, my toe curling on the hallway carpet. He glances at the ridged muscle of my flexed thigh, then nods, shifting uncomfortably, replacing the walkie-talkie.

“Well, good. Okay. If it gets loud again, I might have to—”

A deafening clatter from the bathroom. It sounds like June threw a goddamn hammer at the mirror or something. My ear starts its dizzying ring again. A cackle, then June starts singing. The man touches the door like he’s coming in. “The goldfish sing all night…” June sings. I almost back away, but I plant my feet and hold my ground. He frowns, lets his hand drop.

“What was that?” he asks.

June sings, “The whores—” then erupts into laughter again. It’s that poem she’s always mumbling—Bukowski? —but she’s never sung it before, much less to a made-up tune.

I shrug, pulling up the strapless dress so that more of my thighs are exposed and adjusting my tits beneath the top. His eyes linger there.

“My friend is a little bit drunk,” I say, grinning and rolling my eyes, looking him up and down, like, I’m a little drunk too—maybe enough to think you’re cute. “. . . go down with the stars. . .” June sings, stars long, low and melancholy.

I trail my finger down the doorframe—there’s caked blood beneath my fingernail.

He sighs, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. I’ve got him.

“Just try to keep it down,” he says. He actually winks. I give him a wink in return before slinking backward into the room and slamming the deadbolt.


11:26 AM

The vacuum whirs, its steam bathing my face. Dawn broke under the bottom of the curtain hours ago. The stained bedclothes rest in black garbage bags. I scrub the vacuum hose over the carpet, the sound of it deafening. On my hands and knees, I scan the floor for tiny specks, my lower back achy and sweating. June scrubs the wall and the fake headboard.

On one of the beige leaf patterns in the carpet, there’s a bell-shaped spot that won’t come out, no matter how hard I scrub. I sit back on my heels, sighing, and glimpse something black in the corner of my vision, at the foot of the bed. June’s sheathed neck knife. I pick it up, that cold wooden handle still bloodstained, and slip the lanyard over my head, tucking the knife under my Beatles T-shirt.

A tap on my shoulder startles me. June stands over me, staring at the door. I switch off the vacuum, my ears ringing in the sudden silence, and turn.

The hotel maid stands in the doorway, one hand on her cleaning cart, her mouth hanging open. She takes it all in: the half-scrubbed stains on the wall, the hulking garbage bags, the bare mattress, the trail of blood leaking out from beneath the bathroom door. She’s pale.

June doesn’t do shit but stare back at her. I scramble to my feet and hurry to the door, grab her warm hand and pull her in. The woman yanks her wrist free, her long braid swinging.

“Wait,” I tell her. I snatch the dead man’s wallet off the TV stand and fish out a handful of hundred-dollar bills.


11:57 AM

I wash my hands. The bathroom gleams white, the grout spotless. The toilet smells of bleach and lemon. The vacuum shudders to a stop in the bedroom. I come out and June unplugs it and stands, panting. All the blood smears are gone from the leaf-pattern beige carpet and the walls and the headboard. The sweating hotel maid tosses her sponges into her bucket of bleach water and loads it onto her cart. She leaves without a word, the cart’s wheels squeaking on the carpet. June gazes at me across the room and opens the curtain, filling the room with daylight. It’s blinding. Spotless.

We lift the garbage bags and our suitcases into the trunk of the Mustang, and June slams it shut. Outside, it’s cool, and a light breeze lifts our damp hair. It feels good. I pull her close—at first she resists, but then she relaxes, pressing her warm, chapped lips to mine. My chest swells. We both laugh.

We are hungry, so we drive to the Jewel down the road. June pushes the polished cart, and I walk in front of it as if in a dream, passing through aisle after colorful aisle, grabbing everything that looks good, my stomach rumbling. A hot rotisserie chicken, perfectly golden-brown. A pound of macaroni and cheese from the deli counter. Bunches of fat, black grapes. Jars of dill pickles and green olives. A tub of rainbow sherbet. Glazed chocolate doughnuts. A package of hardboiled eggs. Pistachio fluff, brilliantly green. Bags of ridged potato chips and bricks of cream cheese. Two-liters of cola and lemonade and grapefruit soda. A gallon of two percent milk. A can of cherry pie filling. A 24-pack of Miller Lite and a bottle of cabernet. A red-and-white checkered tablecloth, and, at a tiny kiosk right before the checkout line, like it was waiting the whole time, a bouquet of white roses.

***

I drive us to the forest preserve on the edge of town and we hike a quarter-mile uphill on the gravel trail to the scenic overlook, panting. Behind me, June complains about the straps of the plastic bags cutting into her sore hands.

There’s no one else at the top, I’m thrilled to find. We shield our eyes with our hands and gaze out over a rolling meadow that’s impossibly green.

I choose a spot in the shade of a massive sycamore tree. I lay out the tablecloth and we dig through the plastic bags, pulling out our feast. The heroines, battered and bruised, arrive at the glorious end of the film. The smell of the chicken makes my mouth water, and I pop open the plastic lid. We didn’t buy a corkscrew, so June uses her lighter to nudge the cork out of the bottle of cabernet. It pops, and she hands it to me. I take a long swig, the mouth of the bottle still warm from the flame. The rich wine runs down my throat, acidic and buttery, and warms my belly. I hand it back to her and dig into the chicken, twisting one of the legs loose.

It breaks, exposing the gleaming white knob of bone. The wine sloshes in my gut. The red-purple streaks in the wet meat, the crispy flesh. The sycamore leaves rustle overhead, and sunlight stabs the tablecloth, burns the red and white into my eyes. The blood-dark wine stains June’s teeth. The meat in my hand is warm. The mass of macaroni noodles, wet and tangled and sloppy. The dark clots of cherries rolling in syrup. June tears off a chicken wing and sinks her teeth into it, those wine-stained teeth scraping bone, tearing flesh. I run my tongue over my pearly teeth, remember her grinding his to powder with the hammer. How she pulled them from his pulpy, bleeding gums as expertly as a dentist.

I set down the chicken leg. June has stopped eating, too. She gazes at the bounty of food spread out between us, her throat working. At the sweating gallon of milk and the blinding sheen of the cream cheese packages. The panther’s ruby eye glares at me, its sleek body curled around her smooth, muscled thigh. June’s eyes are bloodshot, creased around the edges, as if one night has aged her a decade. I stare until I can’t bear to look at her anymore, and then I turn my head and gaze out at the wide green field, the neck knife pressing into my sternum. My left ear rushes and pounds. The sun’s so bright that it hurts, but I hold my eyes wide open, even though they water and ache. When I finally close them, my vision fills with acres of bleeding grass.

Sarah Jilek is an MFA candidate in Fiction at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Her novel, Jiada, was published by Indigo Sea Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in Switchblade Magazine, Alcyone Magazine, and in the Illinois edition of America’s Emerging Writers. She has read at Noir at the Bar in St. Louis, and at several other bars throughout Southern Illinois.