by M. R. Carey
Then Marc grabbed her by her hair and pulled hard, wrenching her head back. And yes, she was awake again, in charge again, but this was a situation that needed her urgent and earliest attention.
“Bitch!” Marc growled. He raised the knife high over his head. Always an amateur move, Beth thought. He had the killer instinct, no doubt about it, but he indulged his cruelty and his rage in stupid ways. With a knife, you just had to bear in and push hard, making the blade do all the work.
But she had the experience of a thousand deaths to call on, whereas he was always a virgin.
She twisted free of his grip, leaving a clump of hair and probably scalp in his clenched fist. The knife whipped past her face, a blur of silver metal and grim intention. Leaning into the blow, Marc lost his balance and staggered.
There was no time for finesse, or second chances. Beth whiplashed forward, slamming her head into his stomach. With a grunt of pain and shock, Marc folded around the place where she’d connected. He leaned heavily against the wall. Dropping the knife, he pressed both hands to his belly.
Beth scrambled up, groping across the counter until her hand found the vulcanized rubber handle of the flashlight baton.
Marc saw it too—but only when it was swinging at his face.
The first blow broke his jaw.
The second, to the side of his head, dropped him where he stood.
Liz twittered faintly. What are you doing what are you—
The third time most likely sealed the deal, because Beth swung with both hands and put all her weight into it. She felt the shock of impact, and when she lifted the baton up again there was a moment’s resistance, as though it had embedded itself in something that pulled and held.
No don’t do this please don’t don’t don’t
All the many blows that followed were therefore rather celebratory than efficacious. But Beth felt like she had a lot to celebrate and overkill was a concept she could seriously get behind.
When she finally ran out of energy she checked for a pulse, just to be sure. She used the carotid artery, and she pressed hard: it gave her a pleasant thrill to have her hand on Marc’s throat. There was no trace of a pulse, which didn’t surprise her because there was very little trace of a head. Her fingers came away wet and sticky. That didn’t surprise her either, given how many times she had brought the baton down on his face. She stared at the asymmetrical mass that topped his shoulders. The darkness hid the extent of the damage, but she sketched in the details in her imagination.
“You like that, sweetheart?” she whispered. “I sure did. Best it’s ever been.”
There was a sound of puling and weeping from somewhere nearby. Beth didn’t mind. Liz would give up soon enough when she realized how things stood. There was nothing for her here.
An amorphous psychic shriek of panic greeted that thought. Beth winced. “Keep it down,” she muttered. “Fuck’s sake!”
What have you done?
“What you should have done a long time ago. You’re welcome.”
She found the light switch and turned it on, steeling herself for another siren-scream when Liz got a good look at the body. But there was nothing. Of course, Liz wasn’t in touch with her own flesh right then. Again, this time was different. Instead of the two of them playing a doubles match with the one nervous system, Beth was in sole control.
She feasted her brand-new eyes at leisure. Marc’s broken body wasn’t much to look at in itself, but the sense of achievement and satisfaction she felt when she looked at it was dizzying. Intoxicating.
You’re insane!
“Probably,” Beth muttered. “I hear voices.”
She searched the body quickly but methodically. The keys were in one of Marc’s back pockets. She grinned when she brought them out and felt the satisfying weight of them. The full ring. It was always possible that he had kept his duplicate key to Liz’s place separate, since he had no business owning it at all; but no, the cocky bastard had just stuck it in among all the rest of them. Which meant she could proceed with Plan A.
Liz didn’t respond in words, but Beth felt her sick horror. Plan A implied a Plan B, which made it clear just how much care and how much time had gone into this.
“Thought I was making it up as I went along?” Beth asked as she fetched one of the dustsheets and laid it out on the kitchen floor. She gave a rich, deep chuckle. “Not a chance. I’ve been working you, babe. I knew you’d let me in sooner or later if I hung around long enough.”
She had to stop talking for a while. It took serious effort to roll Marc’s body onto the sheet. His ruined head left soggy clumps of blood and bone and tissue on the floor and on the plastic. She wrapped the sheet around the dead man, sealing it at the ends with duct tape.
You can’t do this! You can’t!
“Well, technically you did it.”
It was you! It was you, not me!
“Really? Fingerprints don’t lie.”
Oh God, they’ll put me in jail! You’re leaving me to face a murder charge!
Beth straightened, finally nettled. The whining little shit was so slow on the uptake it was actually kind of funny, but it was also getting on her nerves.
“Who said anything about leaving?” she asked.
Silence, for a moment. The right-after-a-thunderclap kind of silence, where the air sucks itself back into the empty space where the deafening sound just was.
She felt a sensation like a gust of wind and Liz was on her, scrabbling and clawing at the edges of her mind. But she found no purchase there, just slid away like butter off a hot knife.
“Yeah,” Beth confirmed. “That’s not apt to get you anywhere.”
Get out! Get out of there! Let me back in!
“Why? So you can mess your life up some more? To the victor go the spoils, Lizzie girl. That’s me—the victor. And this piece of meat I’m wearing is the spoils. You don’t figure in the equation at all.”
You can’t! You can’t!
“You’re getting a mite repetitive, if you don’t mind me saying. Of course I can. What, you think I’m stupid? Anything you can do, I can do better.”
Liz didn’t waste any more time protesting. She attacked again, trying to squeeze herself through the interstices of Beth’s thoughts and back into the driving seat.
Beth held the line but didn’t hit back. Hitting back would give Liz something to hold on to. She felt the assault like an attack of pins and needles, prickling her scalp, fizzing along her nerves. It waxed and waned, waxed and waned, but went no further. She was braced for it. She lowered her head and stood with her arms folded while the buffeting wave intensified and peaked and started to fade. Until her other self had spent all her resources in fruitless pushing and thrashing around.
Beth knew from bitter experience how hard it was to keep hold of your sense of yourself when you didn’t have a physical body as an ally. Water that’s been poured out onto a level surface will spread and spread and spread until it’s a thin film just about held together by its own surface tension. Exhaled breath on a cold day starts as a visible cloud, but all that vapor is gone a second later, its shape and substance stolen by the air.
Liz’s struggles, never very strong, got weaker. It would have happened in any case, but her pointless, wasteful efforts to get back into her own flesh made it happen faster. She used herself up quickly, until like that exhaled breath she was gone.
I won’t let you
I’m going to
You can’t do this to
Let me in let me
In let me
And finally silence.
None too fucking soon.
Beth unfolded from the crouched position she had unconsciously adopted, and flexed her fingers. It was a long time before she stirred again after that. Where killing Marc had energized and elated her, she felt as though this second, psychic murder had used up some vital part of herself. She was so depleted that she could barely think. She could only stand there until the feel of cold night a
ir on her skin, cold tiles under her bare feet, brought her back to herself.
She made herself move. She went to the sink and splashed cold water on her face. Then she poured herself a brandy from the bottle Liz had found earlier, and drank it down in a single burning gulp.
There was a lot to do. She’d better get to it.
Cleaning up should probably come first. She looked around the kitchen. Her hard work with the baton had spilled a lot of blood. Fortunately, apart from her own clothes and skin, it had mostly ended up on hard surfaces that would be easy to clean. She filled a bucket with hot water, poured in some disinfectant and got busy, working outward from the body in tight circles. Half an hour was all it took to remove all traces that she could see. The bucket was like the slop-pail at a butcher’s shop. She poured it carefully into the disposal, running it at its lowest setting. That would be enough to grind down the detached bits of Marc’s brain matter that she had mopped up, but hopefully not enough to wake the kids or the upstairs neighbors. Then she rinsed out and disinfected the bucket itself. And finally the baton, which needed serious work because it had a lot of Marc-stuff congealed onto it and its studded surface held on stubbornly to impacted gobs of hair and tissue.
She set it down at last, pristine and shining. She was going to have to make another pass around the room later, a forensic sweep, but this would do for now. To a casual inspection, the kitchen was clean.
The next hurdle was to get the body into the car. She unlocked the side door and propped it open. Then she went out to the car and opened the trunk. There was a ton of junk in there: old clothes and papers for recycling and an ancient sports bag containing God alone knew what. She transferred it all to the back seat. Measuring the distance from the car to the house, though, she saw it wouldn’t do. She couldn’t drag a man-sized sack of something thirty yards along the sidewalk and just hope nobody would see. It was too big a risk, even at 3:00 a.m.
So she was going to have to take a smaller one.
She got into the car, leaving the door slightly open so nobody would hear the slam. She reversed up onto the drive as far as she could, almost jamming it up against the side of the house. Now she would only have to move the body about twelve feet. There was relatively little chance of being seen by the Sethis, since only their living room windows faced onto the street and they would be all tucked up in bed by now. The car itself would shield her from people passing by on the sidewalk if anyone was still out walking at such a crazy hour.
All of this had taken way longer than Beth would have liked, but the upside of that was that she had got most of her strength back after the unwelcome and draining task of getting rid of Liz. She pulled Marc’s stiffening corpse out of the kitchen and into the side alley by his feet, a few inches at a time, until she had him lying right up against the rear of the car.
The next part would be the hardest. He outweighed her by almost a hundred pounds, and he was taller than her too so the angles would work against her. She approached it like a puzzle. Taking the spare tire out of the car exposed the steel stanchion to which it had been bolted. She looped a length of rope from the garage around the stanchion and tied the free end around Marc’s knees. By hauling on the rope, she was able to raise his legs up past the rim of the trunk and fold them so they draped over the edge. She secured them in that position so he couldn’t slide down again.
Lifting the upper part of his body was still hard, but it was a lot easier with his lower extremities tied in place. She got him just about high enough, gripping him tightly underneath his shoulders, and leaned in hard, jacking him up by tiny increments until finally he slid over into the trunk. She untied the rope and tossed it in beside him.
The corpse still wasn’t lying low enough. She had to peel the duct tape off the plastic sheeting and free Marc’s legs so she could fold them back on themselves. After that, she was able to haul him round into a better position and push the trunk’s lid closed—which she did as softly as she could.
“Okay,” she murmured, to herself alone. “We’re good. We’re good. We’re out of here.”
She wondered if she should wash and change before she left. She couldn’t see the blood that had congealed on her face but she could smell its bittersweet reek and feel its stickiness on her skin. Even licking her lips brought a battery acid taste. Her clothes hung heavy on her, plastered with Marc’s vital fluids. But she was going to get dirtier still, and what she still had to do would take long enough as it was. Better just to wipe off her face and hands and cover the rest with a coat. Preferably one with a hood she could put up to cover her face, in case anyone was watching at the other end of this transaction. She couldn’t rely on the lateness of the hour.
She went back into the kitchen. She was headed for the hall closet, but that was as far as she got. Molly was standing right where Marc had fallen, in her pajamas, hair tousled and feet bare. She had her back to Beth, but she turned at the sound of her feet on the tiles.
“Mommy,” she said, blinking sleep-dazzled eyes as she stared at the gory apparition in the doorway. “Did you hurt yourself?”
Beth’s first instinct was to grab the little girl by the shoulders and shake her violently until she told the truth about how much she’d seen.
Even as she moved, she put the brakes on that panic reaction. This was Molly, for God’s sake! Liz might have been the one to squeeze her out in this world, but that didn’t change a thing. She was still Beth’s kid. All Beth’s now, and nobody was going to hurt her. Ever. She didn’t have to be afraid of a parent’s crazy rage, or a stranger’s. Not now she had her mommy to protect her.
“Come here, baby,” she said, her voice breaking a little. She knelt.
And Molly came trotting docilely, trustingly, into her arms. Beth folded her into a tight embrace—and bit her lip to hold in a gasp of surprise and wonder. The warmth of this little body, the scent of clean cotton, the softness of sleep still on her. It was the first human contact Beth had experienced in what felt like a hundred years that wasn’t born out of violent rage. She was overwhelmed, so dizzy with it that she almost overbalanced and dragged them both down onto the tiled floor.
“You smell funny,” Molly said, her voice muffled. “And there’s all blood. Mommy, why is there blood?”
“It’s not blood,” Beth lied. “It’s cranberry juice. Mommy’s all right, Moll.”
“Mommy’s fine,” Molly agreed. “She spilled some juice. All over the floor.” Beth laughed in spite of herself. Her daughter’s glass-half-full outlook welcomed the lie and made it her own. She wouldn’t look any further.
But what the hell was Moll doing here in the first place? And what could Beth do with her now? She had places to be and shit she needed to do. “Baby,” she said, “you should be in bed. How did you get down here?”
“I had a bad dream,” Molly mumbled, still holding on to her, head on her blood-boltered chest. “I dreamed you were fighting and you got hurt.”
Beth’s heart jumped and twanged like a broken bedspring. “Fighting?” she repeated stupidly. “Who was I fighting, baby?”
“I couldn’t see. But you got hurt and you shouted, and I woke up. I knew it was just a dream because nobody else woke up, but I wanted to make sure you were okay. So I came down.”
Beth ruffled her hair. “Well, that was good of you, Moll. And brave. But you’re gonna have to go back upstairs now, okay?”
“Okay,” Molly said, resigned.
But it wasn’t okay. Beth had already started to disentangle herself from the cuddle—reluctant, heartsick, like an addict craving the next fix while she was still coming down from the last one—but she held on to Molly’s hands so she couldn’t leave.
Because what if she climbed those stairs again and Pete or Parvesh Sethi was waiting for her at the top? What if they asked her where she’d been and she told them how Mommy spilled dark red juice all over herself and all over her clothes? And what if she mentioned the baton, which Beth now realized she’d left out on th
e kitchen counter, or the plastic sheeting, or even just the fact that Mommy had been outside in the middle of the night? It wasn’t wise to let her go now, while the memory of those things was still vivid. And though the alternative felt insane it was probably the lesser of the two evils.
“Would you like to go for a ride with me?” she asked in a low, conspiratorial tone. “In the car?”
Molly looked doubtful. “It’s night time,” she pointed out. “It’s all dark outside.”
“I know. But you’ll be with Mommy so it will be okay. It will be an adventure. Like Harry and Ron and Hermione in the dragon lands. What do you say, baby girl? Shall we do it?”
Molly was sold. She forgot her doubts and nodded vigorously. “Okay! Let’s do it!”
“Great stuff,” Beth said. “Mommy’s just going to wash her face and put a coat on. And we need to dress you up warm too, don’t we?”
Which took about ten times as long as any sane person would have guessed. Dressing Molly, like doing anything with Molly, required a running commentary. She told the story of each article of clothing as she selected it and put it on. She also wanted to talk about the paint job. What colors her bedroom was going to be (Beth couldn’t even remember, so she said it would be a surprise) and where her pictures and posters would go on the newly painted walls.
Finally Beth got her suited up and into the car. She was still wearing her blood-stiffened sweater, hidden under a Trespass windbreaker. She had scrubbed the blood off her face and hands (the thick strata under her fingernails would have to wait for now) and put on a fresh pair of jeans. She would pass a casual inspection. Anything more than that and she was probably already fucked in any case.
“Where are we going?” Molly asked as she started the car.
“To plant some flowers,” Beth told her.
“In the night time?”