Bottled Abyss

by Benjamin Kane Ethridge

  Faye didn’t consider this option and still focused on her husband. “You said you believed me about the grove! You said—”

  “I do believe you,” he answered, his head lowering, “I do, it’s just…it turns out that yes, I do love Janet. I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone before.”

  Jane closed her eyes. Son of a fucking bitch…

  Faye’s shock passed over her, turning her to stone. Her mouth dropped but it took a minute before words formed. “Are you crazy?”

  Evan let out a breath of relief and his eyes flicked to Janet pleadingly. “I love her, but she won’t take me back.”

  “You’re a fucking asshole,” Janet spat.

  Silence marinated between them, then slowly rotted.

  Evan’s voice cut through the calm. “Go on then, go get yourself arrested or killed, both of you.” He stormed off into the bright green glow of grass and sunshine. “To hell with you!” he added, turning around momentarily.

  Janet swallowed something nasty and tried to interpret Faye’s face from the side. It was an unreadable tableau.

  “Faye, I’ve hated myself for a long time now. What else is there left to say? What do you want me to say? None of it will make you feel any better. I just don’t want to be in this alone. Please, just let him go. Come with me. Let’s just forget the past. It only hurts us, right?”

  Faye pulled her hand out of Janet’s and walked away.

  Vincent Baker dribbled the last bit of lighter fluid over the whore’s stomach, making it pool in her belly button. Her eyes were fierce and wild, mouth clenching her ball-gag in assumed curses, body sending vibrations through the wrought iron head board. The rich man, beside her, free of his bindings and gag, lay unconscious from the heavy sedative and soda Vincent had given him earlier.

  “I’m sorry I lied to you,” he explained to the softly snoring man. “My intention was to find a way to let you escape, but plans have changed and I’ve got to get moving. Don’t take it personal. Just business is all.”

  The fumes made Vincent burp uneasily into his fist. The whole apartment had been doused in the stuff and it was overpowering. Hopefully it all caught, but if it didn’t, whatever… Carlos had already taken all the equipment down to the truck. Everything else in the apartment, including the lease, had been purchased with a credit card for an Atlanta man six years dead, so they weren’t Vincent’s material items to really lose.

  Vincent glanced around. He sort of liked that gargantuan mahogany entertainment center in the bedroom. It was easy to get behind to check wires and make adjustments. Have to look for something similar in a furniture store…

  Carlos honked the horn outside.

  “Impatient prick,” muttered Vincent as he took out his wallet. It was difficult to pull out the two forged credit cards while wearing latex gloves. He picked up the rich man’s much nicer Armani wallet, pushed the cards inside and shut the wallet up in a cookie tin on the night stand. This wasn’t as clean as engaging Highland-8 or another group for hire, but it was quick.

  The whore made a growling sound, which surprised Vincent for all its depth behind the red rubber ball filling her mouth.

  Well, quick for me, not for you honey.

  He took out his lighter and put a flame to a puddle that had accumulated between her ankles. The fire caught at once and engulfed her feet, traveled in yellow-orange procession up her legs, over her pubis, where it fanned out and caught the rich man’s body as well. The sound of crackling fat, the gags of the whore, along with the fumes made a shot of vomit rise into Vincent’s mouth. He stripped off his gloves and tossed them into the fire, which already lapped the wall with hungry red-gold dragon tongues.

  “See ya,” he said, hand over face.

  He made sure to dead bolt the door and then silently went down the concrete stairs to the front of the apartment complex. Black beanie pulled down almost past his eyes, Carlos waited there in his F250, the engine idling noisily. Vincent climbed in. “Get a move on.”

  Carlos shifted and wheeled the truck around. Night had fallen since they started this sudden move. It had been a long time coming and Carlos seemed happy for it. He’d hounded Vincent to leave ever since the crash with Josue. Vincent didn’t run away though, he relocated, and that only happened when he decided. Fear wouldn’t drive him.

  They got on the 215 freeway and Vincent settled back in the plush seat and closed his eyes. “Did you take that bank bag out to the desert?” he asked,

  “My girl did. Don’t worry, your name wasn’t involved.”

  “I’m not worried. So then, what’s up with that? You never talk about her.”

  “Who?”

  “Your girl.” Vincent drew out the word in an idiotic way.

  “Well, her name won’t be involved either.”

  “Smartest thing you ever said.”

  “You just haven’t known me long.”

  “Thank God.” Vincent stretched his arms. “What’s your long term plan here? You get some nice heavy pockets, what then?”

  Carlos wet his lips and pulled up his beanie a little to see the road better. “There are family members I’d like to bring up here. Maybe I can start a gardening business and they can work for me. I don’t know.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “Enlighten me then.”

  “Why change what works? I’ll just go on plundering.”

  “Just doing what we’re doing until you’re old.”

  “Until I’m dead, whichever comes first,” said Vincent thoughtfully. “I hope my life will be worth something when that happens.”

  “You could be an organ donor.”

  “I want to be a man of means.”

  “Yeah? Big mansion and all that?”

  “Not really. Probably not. I don’t like real estate. It seems…fishy to me,” said Vincent. “I just want the funds that it takes to be a better person.”

  “Weird outlook.”

  Vincent shrugged. “And what’s your net worth?”

  “Hell if I know.”

  “That’s right, because it doesn’t matter. You don’t matter.”

  “Says you.” Carlos played with his radio, searching from commercial to commercial.

  So much to do, thought Vincent as he got comfortable again. Find a hotel. Call his police contacts. Read the news. Make sure his assets were protected. He needed to sort through his spreadsheets and find a suitable corpse to finance his next location. Some leg work had to be done to get that working with grease, and then there were the bank accounts that needed reconciliation.

  Oh no…

  “Oh fuck, I can’t be that stupid. I can’t be…” Vincent grabbed his face and patted his forehead as though to draw out his thoughts faster.

  Carlos changed into the slow lane. “What’s up?”

  “Did you see me bring some fancy leather shoes?”

  Carlos scowled. “What the hell are you talking about man?”

  “Loafers, asshole, did you see me bring anything like that in the box of shoes I brought down?”

  “Maybe, shit, I don’t remember.”

  Vincent groaned. “No, no, I didn’t.”

  “Who gives a shit about your shoes?”

  “It’s not the shoes, stupid ass. My flash drive with all my accounts. That’s where I keep it, in one of those Gravati shoes. Fuck! I wasn’t thinking about it. Probably all that damn honking you were doing.”

  “Don’t blame me! You don’t have a listing of the accounts on your computer, why?”

  “Because, dick, I’m not betting my freedom on my desktop computer’s firewall, that’s why. Now turn around!”

  “Oh that’s funny. Yes, please, officer—do sign me up for arson. No thanks.”

  “Pull over, Carlos. Pull over and get out. I worked too hard for those listings to lose them now.”

  “There’s a fire Vincent.”

  “I’ll put out the goddamn fire.”

  “No, this is your mistake. You have to live with this shi
t. Serves you right for acting all high and mighty—”

  Vincent rammed his switchblade into Carlos’s neck and blood warmed his fingers. His partner stared at him with a goofy look of shock and pawed at the knife futilely. Vincent grabbed the wheel in his free hand and guided the truck into the breakdown lane. He brought his leg around the stick shift and tried to step on the brake. The truck gunned forward and slid back into the fast lane. The rear of a yellow van came flying closer.

  Vincent released. “Holy shit!”

  He tried the brake again. The truck’s engine churned and sped faster toward the van. Someone honked outside. He brought the truck back into the breakdown lane again. Vincent rocked forward, a muscle in his abdomen spasming, and then stepped hard on the brake. In a hurry he put the truck in neutral.

  The truck halted. Carlos attempted to lift his hand but had bled too much already and his command over his body was gone. His bronze skin had lost its hue and his eyes searched through his distress for an answer. Vincent popped open the driver door. Carlos stared at him with a sick red grimace and tried to say something.

  If he got anything out, Vincent didn’t hear.

  Carlos’s body slammed to the dark ground and rolled down a storm culvert into a collection of obscure sage bushes. The headlights from cars flickered inside the truck, each time making Vincent grimace with vulnerability. He scooted over to the steering wheel. Aside for the sticky red glove on his right hand, he was quite amazed how little visible blood was left behind in the truck.

  Which means dick if you’re caught, he reminded himself.

  He peeled off, weaving through traffic, looking for

  the next available exit, praying the fire had not spread to his closet, to the shoes.

  6

  Traffic on the 215 had been monstrous. When Janet finally arrived at Vincent Baker’s apartment, she discovered it locked and shrouded in cavernous looking shadows. She attempted unsuccessfully to slide a credit card through the jam. Since arriving the bottle was making all sorts of noises, and presently was engaged in another fit. Bubbling, gurgling and squealing at times. It was nerve-wracking, despite the isolation of this particular apartment, because she knew other people lived not ten feet below.

  She wiggled the card once more and didn’t feel it catch. In middle school Janet and her friends had used their school IDs to open locked classrooms and maintenance rooms. So her method and practice should have been sound. Either the school doors had been cheap or she was too rusty at lock-picking, but it didn’t really matter one way or another; she wasn’t getting in like this.

  She’d knocked on Baker’s door several times. The lights were on but signs of life were nil. The smell of barbeque hung faintly in the air. Someone must have been grilling nearby but she couldn’t find where.

  Headlights blared downstairs as a vehicle pulled alongside the street. Janet swallowed her thudding heartbeats and put the credit card back in her pocket. All she had to do was talk Baker into taking the coins. She’d gone over it in her head a thousand times. He was a man. Straight or gay, he’d give a strange woman some time. He’d listen. She’d smile. Pardon me. Are these yours? I found them here. Then she would spill those death tokens into his hand and watch for the Fury.

  And Baker would die. Five times. Suffer those poor children’s previous fates.

  Janet smiled in spite of her shiver. It was getting colder out. She had no idea how Vincent Baker looked, but something told her she’d know him when she saw him.

  A car door slammed hollowly in the night and footsteps echoed. In the shadows she waited for the new arrival to climb the stairs. She arched her neck and listened for how close they were. Another set of footsteps unexpectedly accompanied the first. The slapping, clicking of high heels.

  Oh shit, she thought, he has someone with him.

  Joyful conversation rose and fell as a couple turned down the sidewalk leading to the other building. Janet shook her head in self-disgust.

  To her right was a window with a screen. The glass looked strange, a little concave almost. She wrapped her gloved fingers around the frame and easily popped the screen off. Even through her cotton gloves the screen had been warm to touch in the relatively cool winter night. She set the screen against the iron railing behind her. With a glance left to double check, she put her hands against the glass and pulled them away from the surprising heat there. The molding around the window, she could see, had become gummy and loose. Near a heater maybe?

  Janet pushed her shoulder into the window and the pane gave away with a sludgy, smacking sound. The glass fell into the apartment, flinging the cloth drapes away in a brief bellow, and then struck something inside with a deep, glassy cluung!

  She stood back in disbelief. That barbecue smell inundated her now, like she’d opened a smokehouse room with beef jerky and sausages hanging from the ceiling. There was also a strange, astringent smell that lurked in the general sooty ambience.

  With care, Janet moved the drapes aside. The apartment within assaulted the senses. Scorched paths raced from floor to ceiling, crosswise on the carpet, over the walls. A tube TV had thrown a dramatic spread of glittering glass over the blackened areas, looking like diamonds in a coal mine. In the far corner, particulates fought with each other in a generous cone of light cast from a single stand lamp, which had suffered some burn wounds of its own. Janet made out the sturdy, upright red shape of a fire extinguisher sitting on an art deco coffee table. Foam trailed from its hose.

  What had gone on here? Burning of evidence? An accident?

  Janet brought her leg through the window, her jeans flexing tightly at the motion. She pulled through the opening and let the drapes draw away as she stepped into Vincent Baker’s apartment. The bottle made a gur-gur-gur-greeeee sound as she went. She had thought about leaving it behind but since that last violent passing she’d experienced, Janet couldn’t go anywhere without the bottle by her side.

  She crossed a hall to a rather large bedroom for such a low-rent apartment. Most of the walls had sustained major burn damage. A charred closet door was thrown open and several jackknifed pairs of shoes lay chaotic across the floor. Janet hadn’t studied the room completely when something twitched in her peripheral vision.

  The bed had been, for all intents and purposes, an ash heap, a concentrated source of the now-defeated fire. Janet had first mistaken the blackened husks on the bed as the shapes of bedding, maybe a large comforter destroyed with the rest, but as she came closer to the edge, she saw the two human beings there, nearly burnt to the bone.

  The larger of the two bodies flashed its teeth, which were bright white in contrast to the blackened flesh surrounding it. A slow wheeze, followed by a fizzy sound, emerged from the burn victim’s mouth. The deathly ill sound reminded her of something the bottle would utter.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  Janet tilted the bottle over the dying person. Almost seeming eager, the brownish red fluid poured free and baptized the charcoal creature that had once been human.

  In only a second’s time, pieces of flesh crawled over the body and twisted together, to fold and glow with the paint of new life. Janet stood back and watched the carbon run together with red and pink and white, building and rebuilding in a symphony of restoration. Great white shoots of hair erupted from the individual’s head. Three lumps grew from the crotch, inflating and heating at their core, bringing back male genitals. Threads of red swirled and stiffened over the man’s chest, creating nipples. The Caucasian skin brightened and stretched, though it did not go taut, much of it sagging and wrinkling with age. Liver spots appeared, seeming to strike the body in random places like falling rain.

  A coin erupted from the old man’s mouth and his thin gray eyebrows rose in wonder. Janet stooped down with the coin purse. She opened its clasp and nudged the coin inside with her tennis shoe, not trusting her cotton gloves.

  The man’s mouth was moving. He was trying to form words. Janet closed the purse and leaned closer to hear him.r />
  “What… how…” he kept repeating.

  “I can’t explain it now,” she whispered into his newly formed ear, “but I need you to tell me now if you are Vincent Baker.”

  The man digested the name for a moment. “Vincent?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  Slowly the man moved his eyes to something in the room. Janet followed his line of sight to a tall, largely unburned entertainment center in the corner of the room.

  Janet turned all the way around and looked more closely. The bottle wobbled spastically and thrashed out of her hand. She had no time to wonder what that was all about, however, for a bald man with a long goatee stepped from behind the entertainment center, switchblade in his hand.

  Evan waited in the Jeep, listening to a Social Distortion song explain how high school was such a bore, while he maniacally drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He could tell nobody had been home at Baker’s apartment and Janet was trying her hand at breaking and entering. Evan had only followed to make sure she wasn’t going to get hurt. If she got arrested, that was on her.

  He’d tried to call Faye after the appointment with her OBGYN had finished, but she wasn’t answering his calls. She would have called if the baby was in trouble. He deserved being shunned, he guessed, for being honest now when he should have just been honest in the beginning. Lately whenever he saw Faye, he was just going to see her up against a shed in that orange grove, some strong Mexican guy gleefully drilling her from behind, while she luxuriated in every thrust. That never happened, but it was so easy to envision, it might as well have been true.

  He didn’t know what to think. He just knew she was guilty. And that didn’t matter. He had fallen out of love with her. That was that. Janet would have been perfect if she just discovered the robot underneath Faye’s skin.

  What am I doing here? Screw both of them. They’re both selfish people.

  No, he loved Janet.

  But on the other hand, Evan had to admit Faye did make him feel needed.