by Matt Shaner
The upstairs, unlike before, was dark. The blackness seemed thick, and like before, the door leading down to the basement was open. The power saw noises stopped, and we heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn’t take any time to format any image of what would turn the corner. We were standing to the right of the door, and I felt my fists clench. Sweat started down each of our foreheads from the raging fire. The steps came up slow, and I felt the fear from everything else around us collapse in under its crushing weight. Then he turned the corner.
Bryan walked into his kitchen and smiled at us. He did not wear a shirt. He was wiping his hands with a rag soaked in red. I hoped it was paint, and then dismissed that thought quickly, remembering what awaited us downstairs.
“Hey! Another guys’ night. All right. What should we do?” He asked. He genuinely asked. That scared me. His reality was literally everything that lay around him.
“Well, that’s totally up to you,” Shawn said. He reached for something, and I was glad that duty didn’t fall on me.
“Why don’t you guys come downstairs,” he said. “I have a surprise for some of you.” He looked at me with a faux disappointed scowl.
“Sure, let’s go,” I said. I don’t know if I felt brave, but we needed to progress. On the upper floor we had an exit. Nothing could get done up here, unless we went down to his level. Shawn and Drew both looked at me. Drew tilted his head, and I gave them the symbol to wait. I wanted there to be no escape for him.
We walked downstairs. Bryan led the way followed by Shawn and Drew. I went last, trying to gauge things as much as possible. I could see the lights were much dimmer then before. When he hit the basement, Bryan walked to the right. We followed.
I was impressed for a second with his set up. The chair with his hostage now sat in the room to the right. He had rigged a semi-complicated torture mechanism. Bryan placed a sawhorse in front of the chair. Three things sat in front of the sawhorse: a pair of floodlights and a stereo. The guy sat, still duck taped, with the lights glaring into his eyes and a pair of headphones taped over his ears.
“The lights are for the headlights, the last thing my son ever looked at with his eyes. The stereo,” he walked over and turned up the volume, the guy jerked in the chair, “is noise so loud that maybe he can understand the screams he created.” We could clearly hear the music outside of the headphones, and I couldn’t imagine what it sounded like to him. I heard some heavy rock with a bunch of screams and guitars.
“I understand,” Shawn said. Drew and I looked at him. “I know what it felt like when my baby almost took a golf ball to the head. Remember that?” Bryan just watched his creation. My eyes met with Drew, and I pointed him to the table at the left where the entire assortment of tools was bloody. A hammer sat on the edge of the table. Drew worked back over to it.
The lighting in the place gave us an advantage. The floodlights projected Bryan and his hostage into huge wall shadows. I stayed on the edge as Drew made his way back over. He slipped the hammer into my hand, behind my back. Bryan was focused and didn’t see anything.
He reached and tore the headphones off the guy’s head. We all jumped. He ripped the tape from his mouth. Now I could hear the music clearly and loudly, there was no way he had any hearing left. The guy gasped for breath.
“How do you feel?” Bryan asked.
I knew the guy couldn’t hear. He turned his head, whimpering.
“How—do—you feel?” Bryan asked again, slower.
“So what are you planning on doing?” Shawn asked. I worked my way closer to Bryan.
“Let me go. Please,” the guy said. His voice was a whisper.
“Give me my son,” Bryan said. “Give me my son back!” He slapped him.
“I’ll do whatever you want. I . . . I, I’ll pay. Take anything. Just let me go.”
Bryan put his hand over the guy’s mouth after that statement. “You took my son and you’re on my time now.” He took his hand away.
I noticed the guy’s look change. He turned his unseeing eyes to Bryan’s direction.
“You know what. Fuck it. Kill me. Kill me pansy. I’m glad I hit your damn kid.”
That did it. Bryan was caressing something at his hip, and I found out what it was.
He pulled out a screwdriver and plunged it into the guy’s throat. He pulled it back out and then jammed it into an eye, and we acted. It all happened so fast. The guy’s head slumped with the screwdriver propping it up on the sawhorse. Drew grabbed Bryan’s knees. Shawn wrapped his arms around his chest, but Bryan threw an elbow to Shawn’s head and knocked him down. He kicked Drew off, pulled the screwdriver out with a sickening sound and turned to me holding it up.
“You want to be brave too?” he asked. He started to laugh. I saw Drew get his bearings and rise. Shawn moved on the floor. Bryan lifted the screwdriver to put it down into Drew. I yelled and Drew looked up, rolled to his right and grabbed Bryan’s arm as it missed him. I raised the hammer, bought it into the back of Bryan’s head, and he fell, out cold.
I remember that it didn’t feel like much. When you play baseball and you hit the home run, the ball leaves the bat with no resistance. In golf, when you hit the perfect drive, it flows through you cleanly. My swing with the hammer felt that way. A dark circle of blood formed on the back of Bryan’s head. The blood from the other guy worked its way across the carpet. Drew stood at my shoulder, and Shawn walked over to us. His eye was already starting to blacken.
“I think he’s dead.” Drew said.
“Which one?” Shawn asked.
“Both.” I said.
“It was self defense.” Shawn said. He looked at us, and we agreed. I thought for a second.
“Three to one? Never. Our pal over there,” I pointed in the direction of the lawyer across the street, “will have me under for murder, and you two for accessories.”
“We need to do something,” Drew said.
“Bury them in the forest. Clean this place from top to bottom, and if Julia ever comes back, say Bryan left,” Shawn said.
“What do we do with his car?” I asked.
“We say he walked,” Shawn said. “We each saw him one night, walking, down the street and out onto the road. He never returned. He trashed the house and decided to not come back, victim of a mental breakdown.”
“I don’t know,” Drew said.
“Look, whether you like it or not, we’re in this,” I said. I pointed to everything. “When do we start?”
“Tonight, late. Tell everyone that Bryan called us over. He needed support,” Shawn said.
“I’ll be here,” I said. We looked at Drew. “Look man, this is quick and painless.”
“Ever see CSI?” Drew asked.
“Not out here. We do this and clean the place up industrial-style. We put them in the forest, deep.” I couldn’t believe I just spoke the last sentence.
“Burn them first.” Shawn said.
“Fine,” Drew said.
“This is our only choice. You want to spend the next decade or two next to Bubba in lockup?” I asked.
He smiled.“ No, you’re right. Quick and easy,” he said.
We agreed to meet back there later in the night.
I’d like to pretend that day never happened. I wish it never happened. All we did was defend someone’s life, good or bad. He would have killed us too. I did not want to end up in that chair or worse off. You’d think, after going through that, we would be ready for the night. In a way, we were. I inspected Bryan’s garage and found shovels. I threw them on the kitchen floor and put out the fire. I turned the lights off, and we shut the front door. We went home and waited.
Chapter Fifteen
Later That Night . . . The Cleanup
I told Val I couldn’t sleep and walked downstairs and into the kitchen. I opened the fridge
and poured a drink. The glowing numbers on the microwave read 12:50 am. We agreed to meet in ten minutes. Standing in that kitchen, even after everything that happened, I did not feel tired. The nerves and adrenaline flowed freely through me. I weighed out all of our options. I still didn’t believe that I killed someone, even out of self-defense. Bryan was my responsibility.
I wondered if he would haunt me. His face already did. The entire incident in the basement replayed in my head. I knew he had lost his grip on sanity. I knew he would have hurt any of us just as quickly. I knew that nothing would bring his son back, and maybe, in a small way, he was determined to join him. I poured out my drink, looked at the clock and made my way out the door, making sure to be as quiet as possible.
I walked down the road to the house and noticed that the lights, as we left them, were still on. Anyone driving by or watching wouldn’t notice anything different. I arrived at the front door and listened for any noises to indicate that Shawn or Drew beat me to the place. I heard nothing. For a few moments, the night seemed to get heavy, and the darkness pressed in on me. I expected to see a car turn in, Julia, coming home after second thought to find her husband dead in the basement. I expected to see Bryan open the door and reach out, grabbing me and pulling me back into his private hell. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes, two figures made their way down the road. Finally, we stood at the door. We looked at each other and went inside.
The first thing I noticed after swinging the door open was the smell. A stench rose from the basement stairwell. After taking quick inventory of the rooms on the entry level, we noticed nothing changed from when we left. During the initial minutes of the clean up, we didn’t speak. No words were needed. We each wore gloves and slowly walked over to the stairs. Shawn cringed at the smell.
“I guess he didn’t get up and walk away,” he said.
“True. Well, where are we going with him?” Drew asked.
The idea I was considering in the kitchen flashed back to my head. “The forest. I still think we need to do what we talked about before,” I said.
They both looked at me. “We need to burn him in the fireplace.” They nodded. We started down the stairs. I noticed our footprints from earlier, laced in blood on the carpet. This cleanup could take a while.
I turned the corner into the room, and my mind kept racing. What if he wasn’t there? What if something was different? I didn’t think I could take a change. Of course, I also didn’t know what I expected to change. Dead men don’t move or tell tales. One thing I realized is, that despite having the events of the past few hours hammered into my head, I still noticed more things. With the full lights on, the details of the wounds and the bodies stood out. The close details of the mess, including blood that found its way across the room, came to life, and we knew the clean up would take a serious effort.
“Let’s work left to right,” I said. We went to the tarp that covered the pool table, filled with the bloody tools, and gathered it up. I sent Drew upstairs to get the fire going in the fireplace.
“We should burn as much as possible,” Shawn said. I agreed. It took us an hour to handle the exterior things. We lifted, washed, scrubbed and moved until the only sign of life was, ironically, the dead bodies. The fire in the living room howled with all the fresh fuel. The humid night outside seemed to penetrate the walls leaving the entire floor a sauna. We used the tarp to wrap and tie the bodies for easier transport. The blood made it slippery, but the tarp gave us the luxury of not having to touch their cold skin.
“Who goes first?” Drew asked.
“Bryan’s smaller. I think we should save the easiest for last, especially in this heat,” Shawn said. We untied the body and let it drop to the floor. I took the upper part and wrapped my arms around under the shoulders. Shawn grabbed the middle and Drew took the legs. The journey up the steps was not easy. We dropped him three times, and I made mental notes to go back and clean those spots. Finally, we placed him down in front of the fireplace.
“You know,” I said, “these Grand Estate models come with an extra large fireplace for the extra large family space.” I quoted the pamphlet we received at our first meeting. They laughed.
“Well our friend here will enjoy his new home,” Drew said. We mimicked our arrangement for climbing the stairs and inched him over until we were so close to the heat that we couldn’t take it.
“On three,” I said. We counted, swung the body and tossed him in. The smell of death drifted over the room. We didn’t move. Something about the sight just kept our attention. Here was a person with a family, who grew up with a childhood like the rest of us, meeting his end in a fireplace. I justified our actions to myself thinking that we did him a favor. Would you rather tell the relatives about the screwdriver thing or just that he vanished? We watched the skin disappear, the rest of it and finally only a powder remained. The only sound, other than the fire, was the wall clock ticking off the hours.
“That’s cremation for you.” Shawn said.
“One more to go; should we finish this thing?” I asked.
Drew looked nauseous.
“I’ll give anything to get out of this house.” Drew said.
We went back downstairs. Bryan’s body lay peacefully on the floor. We couldn’t see his face, and I just hoped his eyes weren’t open. We bent and turned him over, and as I expected, they were. Carrying Bryan up the stairs was a much easier task. We laid him in the same spot as the other guy.
I imagined his children running through these rooms on the first night we met. I saw Julia with her fake smile, and Bryan with his crazy one. “I guess this is goodbye, Bryan.” I felt myself sigh involuntarily. “I hope you understand we did what we had to.”
I heard Drew step up beside me as he placed his hand on my shoulder. “There’s something we need to do before we . . . say goodbye.”
Shawn let out an exasperated breath. “What? Come on, we need to get this done.”
Drew looked at me and swallowed hard. “We need to remove his teeth, otherwise they may survive the fire—“
“Oh hell,” Shawn interrupted, “they might be able to identify him then.”
I rubbed my forehead. Drew was right. It needed to be done. “Shawn, go get us some pliers. Two if you can find a second pair.”
Drew said softly, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Don’t worry about it. Shawn and I will take care of it,” I assured him.
In the end it took more than just pliers. It took a hammer, a chisel and a strong stomach. Drew had to leave the room until we were done. Shawn had to keep his eyes shut for some of it. I gathered the pieces up, making sure I didn’t miss any. Once I had them all, I wrapped them up in toilette paper and flushed them down the toilette. Then I waited for Drew to come back and Shawn to get a hold of himself. It took them a few minutes to say their goodbyes.
When we finally picked Bryan up, I thought I felt something. His chest constricted. I shook the thought away. We started the three-count. One. It constricted again. Two. I heard a soft moan.
“Guys,” I said, but before I could get any further into it, Bryan was in the fire.
He screamed.
The body flinched, curled up, and he kept screaming. Drew turned and vomited. Shawn and I didn’t move. We watched. Bryan reached a hand out. The screams kept coming. They turned to a language we didn’t understand, and Shawn picked up the poker laying in a stand next to the fireplace. He raised it above his head and whipped it down into the fire directly onto Bryan’s face. The noises stopped. Shawn turned back to me. We looked over to Drew, and he barely raised his head from the floor.
“Not a word of this.” I said.
“Nothing. You hear us?” Shawn turned to Drew.
“Silence.” Drew said, and he vomited again. The fire roared, and we stood there sweating. Bryan, like the other guy, turned into pow
der. The sun started to crest over the hill, and we agreed to go home. The clean up ended. I swept all the remains of the fireplace out into a trash bag.
We walked outside and around the back of Bryan’s house. Shawn handed me the shovel from Bryan’s garage, and I dug a small hole into the ground. We dropped the bag into the hole as our faces were covered with the orange glow from the new morning.
Chapter Sixteen
The Bad News at Work . . . Breaking the Boundary
This far in our story, with everything that had happened within the walls of The Reserve, we felt invincible. We came and went, living on with the weight of the past. I actually thought we were in the clear until one day at the office.
I work in a complex that handles financial transactions for large-scale clients. The buildings are all designed with creativity in mind, and no matter how many paintings they hang on the walls, you still feel absent of any life when you go inside. With the events that happened, my performance and my appearances there lessened. I didn’t care if I showed up late. My personal days were shot. I wondered exactly what I should tell the boss, “Sorry I witnessed two murders and covered one up, can’t come in today?” I’m sure that didn’t fall under the category of doing things to improve the company vision.
Our supervisors, like at every other business in the country, generally hated us, and one in particular seemed to focus on me. Kevin, the supervisor, would stop over to my desk every now and then to remind me how much he despised my effort and results. This morning, after I arrived ten minutes late, he came over and asked me to follow him into one of the meeting rooms. I walked behind him, fielding looks from all the others, wondering and knowing that it could not be good.