Flesh

by Laura Bickle

  He slips his hands over his eyes. “Dammit.”

  I had him. “Give it just a couple of days.”

  He looks at me. “You get a little bit of time. A little bit.”

  I exhale a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “Thank you.”

  He frowns at me. “I’ve never been the best person to have in charge of anything. Besides which...I heard yelling down there. Including you. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that from you before.” Garth leans forward.

  “Yeah, well. There was an incident at school.” I glance at Amanda, unsure of how much I want to tell her. But it seems like we’re operating on total honesty here. Garth’s rules. “They arrested Rafe today, on suspicion of murder.”

  Amanda’s hands fly up to her mouth. “Murder?”

  “Your murder. They found the note. They’ve apparently been watching Rafe. He doesn’t have an alibi.” My words tumble over one another. “He’s in big trouble.”

  “Not yet,” Garth says. “They don’t even have a body. I don’t think they can prove murder unless they can show she’s actually dead.”

  “Mom saw her dead. So did you, me, and the Sheriff. I identified her.”

  Amanda stands up. “I have to go tell them what happened.”

  “No you don’t.” Garth grabs her arms and sits her back on the bed. I continue to barricade the door. “That will create a massive shitstorm. Rafe may go free, but Charlie’s right. You’d be a lab rat for the rest of your undead life.”

  “I won’t let him sacrifice his life for me!” Tears well in her black eyes. I wish I could understand that kind of love, but I’m uncomfortable even having glimpsed it.

  “Just give us some time to think. There has to be a way out of this,” I say. There has to be. I just can’t see it yet.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Predictably, I am grounded.

  And it means absolutely nothing to me. I watch the bus pause at the end of our driveway for a minute in the morning before it rumbles on down the road without me. I’m pretty sure Mom has made some arrangements with the school to keep me home for a couple of days. Maybe forever.

  Garth, Gramma, and I eat breakfast around the kitchen table. Gramma has made French toast over the fireplace grate. The sugary sweetness of the maple syrup puts me in a really calm, ordinary place, as if it’s a regular weekend morning. Normal.

  Until Gramma puts a paper cup beside my plate. There are pills in it. “Your mother asked me to make sure you took your meds today.” She pointedly turns her back.

  I would feed them to the dog if I didn’t think they’d kill him. I calmly take the cup over to the trash can and dump it in before I scrape my plate.

  Gramma is humming to herself. “All done? Good girl.”

  I kiss her on the cheek.

  “Where are Mom and Dad?” Garth asks.

  “They’ve gone to town to see a lawyer. The Jackson family served them with a subpoena, and someone’s put together a petition to get your mom recalled.”

  “Recalled? Is that like an impeachment?” I blurt.

  “Yeah.” Gramma nods.

  “I thought that was for presidents with extracurricular activities.”

  “Well, coroners get recalled. It’s is an elected position, and enough angry people can make it happen.”

  Garth and I swap glances. Jesus Christ. It feels like we could lose everything.

  “Are they coming home soon?” I squeak.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t expect them back before mid-afternoon.” She glances at us. “As for myself, I intend upon cleaning up the back garden and taking a nap. I trust that the two of you will find something to do.”

  “Yes, Gramma,” we say in unison.

  “Good kids.” She goes to the sink and starts placidly scrubbing dishes, looking as if she’s lost in thought.

  With Gramma on our side, Garth and I will have a whole lot less sneaking around to do. Though there’s still some involved in getting Amanda safely out of the house. I’m willing to exploit Gramma’s goodwill in turning a blind eye to us defying my grounding and medication regimen, but I think asking her to ignore a walking corpse is a bit too much. She’s already had a major heart attack. I won’t risk another, not with all the stress that’s already piled on her.

  I tell Amanda as much in my room. Garth has suggested a solution, though. We stand around it and stare into this thing he’s brought upstairs.

  “In there?” Amanda just looks at us, crossing her arms. “You want me to get in there?”

  “Well, it’s not like you’re going to suffocate. I mean, you can’t, right?” I ask.

  We stare down into the black drum set bag that Garth uses to haul some of his musical junk around. He’s emptied it of percussion instruments and even dumped the potato chip crumbs out. We figure that if Amanda scrunches in, she could probably fit.

  “I’m gonna get carsick if you drive me around in that,” she says.

  “That’s just to get you in and out of the house.” Garth pokes at it.

  “But aren’t people gonna recognize me if they see me?”

  “Not if you keep a low profile.” Amanda’s wearing jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt. Garth even dug through his props from The Rocky Horror Picture Show to find a blond wig.

  With some struggling, I get the wig on her head properly. We pull the up hood up to hide the craziest of the frizz and put a pair of sunglasses on her to hide her unnatural black gaze. I finish it off with some makeup. I’m tempted to use Gramma’s special corpse makeup, but I use my own pink lip gloss and a bit of blush.

  “There. You look completely incognito.”

  Amanda sighs and sinks into the bag.

  “It’s only for a little while,” I promise.

  She gives me the finger as I zip her up.

  “Really, it doesn’t look like there’s a body in there.”

  Garth grabs the handles and starts to haul Amanda down the steps.

  “Gentle!” I caution him.

  We head down the steps, past the second floor. Gramma has the radio cranked up, and I’m sure that she’s doing her best to not pay attention to us. We get out to the drive and heave the bag into the pickup. The bag wriggles and emits muffled complaints as we put it on the jump seat. I take the shotgun seat, and Garth grabs the wheel. We go a mile down the road before I lean back and unzip Amanda.

  Blond frizz is stuck in her pink lip gloss, and her sunglasses are all askew. “Gah. That’s not fun. You know there was a story a couple of years back about some guy who tried to smuggle his bride along on their honeymoon in a checked suitcase? She didn’t survive it.”

  “Sorry. But we know you’re made of sterner stuff.”

  She kicks my seat sourly. “Where are we going?”

  “The museum,” I tell her. “I want to see if there’s any more info about the Devourers and the flood that stopped them.”

  “You really think they just went to sleep after that?”

  “I think….it seems like the River God was satisfied somehow. Maybe it was the flood. Maybe it was the sacrifices. But something pissed him off and something else made him happy again, and then the Devourers went away.”

  Garth rubs his temple.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I have a hard enough time with a singular conventional god. And all the life-after-death stuff still blows my mind.”

  Amanda kicks the back of his seat now. “I can only imagine the magnitude of your spiritual crisis.”

  Bickering ensues. I am beginning to think that it was a bad idea letting Garth in on this. He’s getting all existential and asking her questions that she doesn’t know the answer to.

  “Did you see any bright lights?” he asks.

  “No,” she grumbles.

  “Did you see any people who have already passed over?”

  “Just the floater dude. Does that count?”

  “Did you feel like you were suspended over your body or anything?”

  “I’m telling you, I ha
d no metaphysical anything. I blacked out and then I woke up.”

  “Do you think that—”

  “Dude. I’m not Jesus. I didn’t feel anything, and I don’t have any answers.”

  “But you’re the only person I’ve met who’s come back from the dead.”

  “And it makes no friggin’ sense. Wait your turn, dipshit.”

  Finally, we pull up to the museum. “Sit tight,” I say. I’m not used to the ring of authority in my voice, but I sort of like it. I hop out of the truck and head inside.

  Mr. Haskins greets me when I arrive. My heart pounds a bit—I’m afraid that he may have figured out that some items have gone missing. But I don’t need to worry. He’s got other problems—he’s covered in black soot, this time.

  “Uh, hi, Mr. Haskins. What’s up?”

  He holds his arms up, like a surgeon up to his wrists in blood, trying not to touch anything. “There’s a raccoon up in the duct work. Somewhere.”

  This does not surprise me. “And you’re…chasing him?”

  “I thought that I would try to close off the ducts that led to the bowels of the museum, and then I could gently herd him outside with a broom. But a whole line of duct work on the second floor fell down as I was crawling around up there. So I’m trying to wire it back up. Oh, and there’s a raccoon running loose around the museum.”

  “That really sucks, Mr. Haskins.” Poor guy. What was it my Gramma says? If it wasn’t for bad luck, he’d have none at all?

  “I don’t think it’s rabid or anything,” he says. “But if you see it, let me know. I’m going to set up a live trap at the end of the hallway.”

  “Will do.”

  I edge away, down to the basement, trying to avoid Mr. Haskins’s sooty footprints. I hear him clomping around upstairs and a bit of mild grumbling. He’s remarkably good-natured for the crap that keeps happening to him.

  I close the basement door behind me and switch on the lights. I cross to the basement window and struggle to pry the painted-over sash open. It finally gives way with a threatening crack. I stand on my tiptoes and wave my hand outside.

  Garth’s and Amanda’s faces peer into the window. “Took you long enough,” my brother says.

  I give him a dirty look. “Come on down.”

  Amanda goes first, wriggling through the narrow window frame. Her wig catches on it, and she has to retrieve it, swearing. I have no idea how Garth’s gonna get his ass down here, but he seems to be able to suck it in enough to slip through. He tears his T-shirt and lands gracelessly on a cardboard carton.

  “So this is where you work?” Amanda asks, surveying the dingy space.

  I make a game show hostess flourish. “My oasis of sanity.”

  “So what are we looking for in this hoarder’s paradise?” Garth pokes at a mildewed box.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” I admit. “But I think we need to find some more specifics about the lost settlement of Mooresville…about where exactly this all happened, and why the River God was pissed off to begin with.”

  “Okay.” Garth’s hands are in his pockets. “Where do we start?”

  “There are five more boxes from the Cattell Estate. We should see if there’s anything left in them that could help us.”

  We tear into the cartons, dumping them all over the table. Glass perfume bottles rattle around moldering bits of paper. Most of the paper is just junk—old theater programs, receipts, and birth certificates of people long dead.

  Garth sighs, flipping papers onto the floor. “Somebody saved payroll records for the mill for nearly two hundred years.”

  “Let me see that.” I take the papers from him. The dates are from 1840—the same time period as the journal. “The mill must have first started up then.”

  “Looks like it.” Garth thumbs through the records, shaking out some wriggly silverfish that fall to the floor.

  “Hey.” I can feel connections beginning to form in my brain, tenuous and insubstantial as a spider’s web. “Amanda, you said that you first saw Bob at the mill, right?”

  “Yeah. Around the shallows.”

  “I wonder if something about the mill construction woke him up, or ticked him off, or somehow triggered the Devourers.” The words come out in a rush; I want to get them out before they evaporate.

  “Is there anybody from the family who gave the museum all this stuff still alive?” Amanda asks.

  “We buried Alice Cattell about eight months ago,” Garth said. “It was kind of a sad funeral. Nobody really came.” He screws up his forehead, thinking. “There wasn’t much in the way of family. The arrangements were made by the caretaker of the estate, I think.”

  “I wonder if the caretaker was the one who boxed up all this stuff.” Amanda chews her lip. I hope she stops before it gets bloody.

  “Maybe we should talk to the caretaker.”

  Garth whips out his phone and starts googling maps. “I’ll get the address.”

  I kick at the last empty box, disappointed that we didn’t find a big shiny answer at the bottom of one of these cartons. The box skids across the floor and hits a tower of other containers.

  Something explodes from behind the wall of junk. I stifle a shriek. A gray blur scuttles across the towers of boxes, clawing and chattering.

  “A raccoon!” Amanda exclaims.

  Brown eyes peep at us from the top of the boxes.

  “Scare him toward the window,” I say.

  The raccoon has other ideas, though. He teeters on top of the boxes, zips under the table, rips through the papers and bounces off the wall like a pinball. He winds up in the corner, hissing at us like an angry cat.

  “Dude, the window is open!” Garth grabs a piece of torn cardboard and tries to herd the raccoon up the wall and toward the draft.

  The raccoon seems to get the idea. He lifts his head, sniffing the cold air. He scuttles up the wall and pulls himself up over the windowsill. He pauses at the top, looking right and left, before vanishing down the alley.

  Garth and Amanda stack a couple of boxes below the window. They climb up and shimmy through the window before I even hear footsteps on the floor above.

  Garth’s boot has barely vanished through when the basement door opens.

  Mr. Haskins pauses at the top of the stairs, staring at the devastation in the basement.

  “I, uh…got the raccoon out,” I announce weakly.

  Mr. Haskins kneels down and picks up a shattered lamp base. He cradles it in his arms like one would a baby. His eyes are glazed over. “That’s good, Charlie. Very good.”

  I’m not sure if he really means that or if he means I’m fired.

  “Actually,” he says before I can apologize, “I came down to tell you that you can’t leave. The police have cordoned off the block and are asking everyone to stay inside. There’s a hostage situation going on. They’re saying that a dead guy is holding up the bait shop.”

  *

  Mr. Haskins closes the window and I go upstairs, to the second floor. We peer out a window with a rotting casement and wavy glass. Cruisers are parked kitty-corner all over the block, lights blazing. There are four of them there—probably the whole Sheriff’s Office, so this is definitely serious shit. I wonder where Garth and Amanda went, if they’re hiding or if they took the truck and bailed. I hope to God the cops don’t see them.

  “We should really stay away from the windows,” Mr. Haskins says. But he makes no move to tell me to go back to the basement. This is a small-town thing. There’s never any action, and you just can’t look away or MYOB when something happens. He disappears for a moment and returns with a couple pairs of binoculars.

  The bait shop is about a block away, the nexus of a flurry of movement. The Sheriff crouches behind an open car door, gun drawn. I’ve never seen him draw a gun before. Across the street, behind another car door, Deputy Kevin is shouting something incoherent. Through the binoculars, I can see that there’s a dude in the front of the store with his arm around a woman’s neck, holding
what looks like a fishing knife. He looks familiar, though a little overripe and swollen. I squint.

  Shit. It’s Jesse Cormac.

  “Um, I have to go to the bathroom,” I lie.

  Mr. Haskins makes a noncommittal noise as he stares through the binoculars, transfixed.

  I flee to the basement. I climb up on the boxes, open the window, and shimmy out, scraping a knuckle in the process.

  “About damn time.”

  I look up to see Garth and Amanda standing in the alley, looking around furtively. Garth’s truck is parked behind them.

  “We gotta get out of here,” my brother says.

  “We can’t. The cops are around front.”

  Amanda covers her mouth with her hands. “Crap. Did they see me?”

  “No. There’s a hostage situation at the bait shop. And it looks like Jesse Cormac is the one holding up the place.”

  “Jesus Christ,” my brother mutters.

  “What do we do?” Amanda’s gnawing on a fingernail again. I really wish she’d quit chewing on herself, because I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it, and I’m not convinced she’s gonna stop. Besides, anxiety feeds anxiety, and I really need to keep mine at bay.

  “We could go hide in the museum until it blows over,” I suggest.

  “Well, we can’t stay out here,” Garth says. “If he runs, the cops may see us.”

  “I want to get out of here,” Amanda hisses.

  I understand the impulse to run, I do. “But the cops don’t know what they’re dealing with. Somebody could get hurt, bad.”

  The decision is taken away from us when a deafening hail of bullets rings out from the other side of the building. I reflexively put my hands over my ears and cower.

  “Get in the truck.” Garth orders.

  I climb into the cab of the truck, Amanda on my heels. Garth slides behind the wheel. He turns the engine over. “Get down.”

  I kiss the floorboards with Amanda, expecting Garth to peel out and take the back alleys out of here.

  But he doesn’t.

  I dare to look up.

  There’s a glow-in-the-dark tattoo shining in the dimness, and it’s attached to an arm holding a knife. Jesse’s arm.