Red-Blooded Heart

by V. J. Chambers

  But he’s not dead yet. I know better.

  I bring down the bat again. And again. And again.

  Blood spatters the walls. Blood spatters Deke’s coat. Blood spatters my face.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  -deke-

  There is a lot of freaking blood.

  I have killed before but never like this. Never breaking open a person’s skull and spattering blood and brains all over everything. It smells like copper and it smells like death and it is all over me and I want to vomit.

  Juniper looks down at what’s left of Henry, and she drops her bat. She lets out this funny mewling noise and she stumbles backward. She collides with the wall and she slides down it.

  Outside, Daisy is barking.

  The door is open.

  Cold air is coming in.

  I don’t move for some time, but eventually it’s the door that prompts me to do something. I go and close the door, blocking out the frigid cold.

  I look back at Juniper. She is shaking. Her teeth are chattering.

  “Hey,” I say. “It’s all right. I closed the door. It’ll warm up.” And my voice comes out raw, as if I haven’t used it in weeks.

  She sucks in a sharp, noisy breath. Her teeth continue to chatter.

  “Fucking A, Juniper,” I rasp, “you okay?”

  She shakes her head. “Fine,” she manages, but her teeth are still chattering and she is shaking all over.

  Fuck. Did I just help this girl murder someone only for her to have a psychotic break?

  “Get up,” I tell her in my scratchy voice.

  She doesn’t move.

  “Get the fuck up,” I say, and my voice is stronger. “You can’t just sit there. You wanted this.”

  “Shut up,” she says, looking at me with horrified eyes.

  I look away. I can’t handle the look in her eyes.

  I get up and sink my hands into my hair. I turn away and look around the tiny trailer. It is neat as a pin except for the spatters of blood climbing the walls and cabinets.

  “You wanted this,” I say again, but quietly, so quietly that she might not even hear me.

  She buries her face in her hands. She doesn’t say anything else.

  Damn it.

  “Look, we have to clean,” I say.

  Nothing from Juniper.

  “Juniper, you hear me?”

  She just shakes.

  Oh, fuck all of this.

  I can’t deal with Juniper falling apart right now. There’s shit that needs done. I need to get rid of the body, for one thing. Luckily, I came prepared for that.

  I go out the front door into the cold night, and I retrieve my bleach-splattered tarp. I bring it in, and I lay it down on the floor next to the body, and I start to unfold it.

  I concentrate on unfolding the tarp, because I’m not sure I can stand the thought of touching the body. I wish we would have thought about the blood. It got everywhere. It’s all over my coat. This is my only coat, and I’m not even sure I’m going to be able to wash it out. But regardless of that, I have to wear it now, for all of the work that lies ahead of us tonight, and I want it off. I don’t want all this blood all over me.

  Okay, well that’s an unfolded tarp all right. There’s not a whole hell of a lot else I can do with it.

  I step back to survey the body. It’s bad. His head is just… crushed. I feel like gagging, but I don’t.

  Instead, I turn away and draw in several deep breaths.

  I look at Juniper.

  She’s standing up now. She’s looking at her hands, which are covered in spatters of blood, and she is still shaking. “I’m fine,” she says in a high-pitched voice. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Right,” I mutter.

  She lifts her chin, and I watch her trying to pull herself together. “I wanted it. This is what I wanted.”

  “Yes, it is,” I snap.

  I turn back around, and I nudge the body with my shoe.

  And then realize that I really don’t want blood on my shoes. Of course, too late. The spatter went onto my boots too, and I don’t have numerous pairs of these either, and this is shit. Really, it is. The smell of death is clinging to me, and I don’t know how I’m going to get rid of all this evidence, and why the hell couldn’t she have just shot him, damn it?

  Screw it. I nudge the body again.

  Huh. I think I might be able to roll it over onto the tarp.

  “You think you might give me a little help?” I say to Juniper.

  “Sure,” she says, but she doesn’t move.

  Okay, look. I wanted to be the one who saved her, didn’t I? Well, apparently, she bit off more than she could fucking chew. She needs me.

  I suck in a breath, and it helps, thinking that I’m doing this for someone, for her.

  I turn back to the body, and I manage to roll it over onto the tarp. When I do, it’s a little better, because Henry’s face is visible instead of his crushed skull and his face doesn’t look as bad.

  I take another deep breath. Okay. I can do this.

  I use some rope to tie the body up in the tarp.

  “Deke,” says Juniper.

  “It’s okay,” I say, giving her a grim smile. “It’s okay. I got you.”

  She shudders, but there is a grateful look on her face.

  It’s all I need to see.

  I drag the body out of the house and across the driveway to the back of my truck. Grunting, I hoist the thing into my truck bed. I make sure the tarp is secure and that nothing is getting out. Then I head back into the house.

  Juniper’s in the doorway. She’s been watching me. “Holy shit,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I say.

  She puts her hands to her mouth and she smears red blood onto her chin.

  “We need to clean,” I say again.

  * * *

  -juniper-

  It’s good to have something to do, something to focus on, because I am not sure how I feel.

  I am trying to convince myself that the feeling that I have is a good feeling, but I’m not sure if it is. I never considered that I would feel guilty, oddly. When I conceived of the idea of killing Watson, it never seem immoral to me. He was a bastard. He deserved to die. Killing him would balance the scales and protect his future victims. It seemed right.

  So, I never thought I would feel bad, but I think that I do.

  Maybe it’s only the shock of all the blood.

  So much blood. There are little spatters of it everywhere. It went so far. We have a lot to clean up.

  I find cleaning supplies under the sink and we begin.

  At first we clean in silence, but then the cleaning begins to help me feel better. This is a mundane task, not a particularly pleasant one, and it takes the audacity out of the act I’ve just committed. “You know,” I say to Deke, “you were insistent that we do it at his place, but I’m not sure this was such a great idea.”

  “You were going to do this in your own house,” says Deke. “Imagine how much worse that would have been.”

  I shudder. Oh, thank God I didn’t kill him in my house like I planned. I would never be able to eat in that place if his blood had been spattered everywhere. I would never be able to sleep there. “You’re right.”

  “I didn’t know you were going to hit him so many times,” he says.

  “I was… I was just making sure,” I say.

  He nods. “That’s probably smart. Can’t say I’ve always done that myself.”

  “Really?” I say. I half-think he’s going to launch into some story about not properly killing somebody, but he doesn’t. So, then I begin to wonder who it was. Was it the detective? Was it Graham? I can’t think that it was his stepfather…

  Of course, maybe Deke has killed far more than those people, and he’s lying to me about that.

  I point at the ceiling. “How are we even going to reach that?”

  “Use a chair,” he says.

  We clean.

  We scrub the pla
ce with bleach. We use all of Watson’s paper towels and all of his dishrags and all of his sponges. All of them are ruined.

  How long we clean, I couldn’t say. It’s a long time. Hours and hours.

  When we are finished, we put all the rags and towels and trash in a bag and throw it in the back of the truck with the body. We will have to burn all of the bloody rags at some point later.

  It is bitterly cold and a little windy as we leave Watson’s house. It is after midnight. The sky is dark and starless. All I want is to go to bed, but Deke has told me that we have to get rid of the body as quickly as we can. We can’t take the chance that anyone will find out what we’re doing if we wait.

  I couldn’t sleep, anyway, not knowing that there was a dead man in the back of Deke’s truck.

  We drive into the night.

  Daisy howls mournfully from the kennel.

  “What are we going to do about the dog?” I whisper.

  “You want her?” says Deke.

  “I… that dog will hate both of us, won’t she, after what we did to her master?”

  Deke shrugs. “Well, we can’t let her starve. I’ll take the dog if you don’t want to.”

  I turn and peer out the back window of the truck, hoping for a last look at Daisy, but instead, all I see is the tarp that is wrapped around Watson’s body.

  I face forward again.

  It’s going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  -deke-

  “Is that snow?” I’m not sure if I mean to say it out loud or not. When I first see the little dots of white, I think they are stars, but then I realize they are rushing for the windshield.

  “Holy shit,” she says from next to me in the truck, whipping out her phone. “What with everything, I haven’t been paying a bit of attention to the weather.”

  “Yeah, me either,” I say. I’ve been obsessed with her and with thoughts of leaving. It’s early for snow, anyway. We usually don’t get anything significant around here until January or later. There are always exceptions, of course. “It’ll probably just be blowing around. I’m sure it won’t be much of anything to worry about.”

  “Are you really? Sure?” she says.

  “Well, I mean, that’s a figure of speech.” I grip the steering wheel. Currently, we’re still on the road, but we’re going to go off the road onto something that’s more like a trail very soon. I’ve got a good truck, and it’s good off road, but off road in the snow is a different thing entirely.

  “I’m having trouble getting the page to load,” she says, moving her phone higher, like she’s hoping there’s a better signal near the ceiling.

  “What page?”

  “The weather report page, that’s what,” she says, and she wrenches her phone over toward the window, holding it there for a minute. “Oh, wait, here we go.”

  “What?”

  “Um… it’s not good,” she says. “There’s a Winter Storm Warning in effect. They’re predicting eighteen inches.”

  I slump against the seat. “Geez.”

  “So, what do we do?” she says. “Oh, God, why didn’t I check the weather before I decided that I was going to go and invite him to my house? With all that snow, he wouldn’t have made it up to see me anyway. This was all a bad idea from the beginning. Bad timing. Bad execution and now—”

  “Shh,” I say. “Stop freaking out.”

  “We have a dead body in the trunk and it’s going to be a blizzard.”

  “Look, all we have to do is get the body out in into the woods and then dump it,” I say. “It takes time for eighteen inches of snow to fall from the sky. We’ll be fine. We just have to do this quick.”

  “Will it be okay to leave the body in the snow? Won’t it freeze and be preserved and take longer to, you know, decompose?”

  “Sure,” I say. “But it doesn’t matter, because no one’s going to be out there looking for him.”

  “Well, what if they do come looking?”

  “They won’t. He’s got no ties. I bet it might be until spring before anyone realizes he’s even gone. And then they might even think he just up and left.”

  “But his truck is still there,” she says. “How would he go anywhere without his truck?”

  “Okay, well, I don’t know,” I say. “But don’t panic. This will work.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” I say.

  But what I am thinking is that I am not ready for a big snow and neither is she. I packed half of my stuff up and then we unpacked it and left in unceremoniously piled outside my place. I don’t have enough firewood close. What I do have isn’t covered, so it’ll be wet and unsuitable to burn. I should be getting home and getting all that taken care of, not dumping this body.

  Why did I ever agree to help her?

  Of course, it’s a good thing that I did. For all her bravado, there is no way she would have pulled this off by herself. The way she fell apart back there…

  On the other hand, she seems to have recovered fairly well from that. Maybe she would have managed on her own in the end after all.

  * * *

  -juniper-

  I’m nervous. We drive for what feels like a very, very long time. We go off the road and travel on a narrow path between trees where the bare winter branches of the trees scrape against our windows like the long, crooked fingers of old crones trying to crack open the car and get us. And I think we deserve that. I think that I have done something that I probably should not have done.

  But.

  Well, it is done now.

  And what I know is that I want to survive, so I will do whatever it is that I have to do to keep from being discovered and punished.

  From time to time, I hear the coywolves howling. Nervous, I begin babbling about how the coywolves killed my chickens, and Deke seems surprised.

  “They never bother me,” he says.

  “Well, they bothered me,” I say. “They killed every last one.”

  “You can have a few of my chickens,” he says. “You’ll need eggs if you want to make it through the winter. Or aren’t you staying anymore, now that your mission is complete?”

  “I can’t leave right away,” I say. “That would look suspicious. I’ll be here for a while.” And I wonder if he thinks that now things are okay between us, because I let him help me kill Watson. And I wonder if things are.

  I try to summon all the outrage I had toward him for the way that he spied on me without my permission, but I can’t access it right now.

  Maybe I am in shock or something. I always thought that people went into shock when bad things happened to them, not when they did bad things to other people, but maybe the body reacts the same way. Maybe it’s a survival instinct.

  All I know is that I don’t feel much of anything. I am numb inside.

  “So, you’ll take the chickens, then,” he says. “And I’ll come look at the coop, make sure it’s safe from the wolves from now on.”

  I want to tell him to stop ordering me around and encroaching on my life. I can’t summon the energy for that. I do need eggs. I had thought that I would just get another batch of chicks shipped to me and begin the brooding process all over again, but it would be nicer to have full-grown chickens already.

  “I have too many chickens anyway.” He is still talking, and I think I want him to shut up, but I don’t seem to have the energy to figure out how to achieve that. “Eggs are always getting wasted. I go out and get them, of course, but sometimes I can’t eat them all before they go bad. Do you know the trick about storing them in oil to keep them good even without refrigeration?”

  “I spent all my time researching homesteading before I moved out here,” I mutter. “Yes, I know that trick.”

  “Good,” he says. “I’ve thought about freezing them. Not in the shell, but cracking them open and freezing them like that, maybe individually? You ever freeze an egg?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Sometimes I get sick of e
ggs. You can’t eat eggs every morning for breakfast every day without getting sick of them, you know?”

  “I guess,” I say. How do I get him to stop talking?

  Abruptly, he pulls the car to a stop. “Okay, well this is the end of the line. The trail isn’t big enough for a vehicle from here on out.”

  I don’t feel as though it’s been big enough for nearly ten minutes of driving, because of the way the branches have been scratching up against the car.

  The car lurches backward.

  “What are you doing?” I shriek. “I thought this was the end of the line.”

  “Turning the truck around,” he says. “I can pull in there.” He points to a wider area that he is backing the truck into.

  “Oh,” I say.

  It’s a tight fit, and he goes up and back and up and back lots of times, but eventually the truck is facing back the way we came. He turns the keys in the ignition.

  The snow is falling outside. Even through the trees, the ground is covered. It’s not deep, not even an inch yet, but it’s coming. I remember all the articles I read online about how to prepare a homestead for a winter storm, and I think of how I haven’t even gotten the big broom I wanted to sweep snow off the solar panels. This is all bad, isn’t it?

  I should feel frightened.

  I’m still numb.

  Deke gets out of the truck.

  I follow suit.

  Howls greet us. They seem to come from all directions, and I shiver. Because of the sound and because of the cold and because of what I’ve done tonight.

  “Well, they’re out in full force tonight,” Deke mutters as he is opening the back of the truck. He slides the tarp down to the edge of the truck. “We’ll have to carry the body.”

  “Oh,” I say, thinking that sounds like hard work.

  “If it gets too much, we’ll try dragging it.” He has worked up some ropes so that they are almost like a harness, and they go over my shoulders and around my waist. The ropes are connected to the body.

  Deke puts the ropes over his shoulders like a backpack. He goes first.

  I bring up the rear, gripping the tied-up tarp, even as most of the weight is being distributed over my body.

  We begin to walk into the woods, leaving the truck behind.