by Ania Ahlborn
He stripped the body first, cutting away the blood-soaked tank top with a pair of kitchen shears. He counted eighteen stab wounds, most of them centered around the stomach, a few near the shoulders, one in the neck. Momma liked knives. When she wasn’t stabbing, she sliced jugulars instead. Once, she’d cut a girl’s throat so deep that, when Michael dragged her down into the basement, her head had nearly come clean off as it bounced down the steps.
He cut away the woman’s underwear and stared at the triangular patch of velvet between her legs. That’s when he started to feel that familiar twist. It was a rolling ache at the base of his guts—the same feeling that had overwhelmed him when Reb had bent that nameless girl over the hood of his car. That arousal made him hate himself even more than he already did. Something Rebel had said echoed in his mind: You’re human, ain’t ya? It was wrong to feel it. He knew that. But he was human. Only a genuine monster would never feel anything at all.
Michael shot a look up to the storm door. He was alone, would be for hours. His hand trembled as he placed it on the woman’s breast, gently kneading it with his fingers. He leaned over her body and let his eyes flutter shut, holding his breath as his lips brushed across hers. He tried to imagine Alice naked, alive but lying perfectly still, breathing in and out. But the memory of Reb’s leering grin tainted the moment. This was the same woman who bucked and fought against his brother just beyond her front door. He pulled back, imagining Reb sneaking up on her, throwing her to the floor, forcing himself on her. Except that the woman’s dead eyes and gray lips were replaced by Alice’s face, her expression shifting from a smile to inexplicable horror, desperately trying to fight Rebel off, pressed into a mattress, her gaze turned toward an open door, Michael standing there, staring, a roll of duct tape circling his right wrist.
Please, Michael, don’t. . . .
The ache between his legs was gone, replaced by a rush of queasiness that threatened to fold him in half.
He leaned back on his heels, furiously wiping his mouth on his forearm, the taste of the woman still lingering there. The wave of sickness took a moment to pass. When it did, his gaze settled on the gold necklace around her throat—M for Misty. Unclasping it, he slid it into his pocket, then tipped his chin skyward. A meat hook winked at him from overhead.
It wasn’t much different from field dressing a deer. With the body hanging by bound ankles, he sliced open the neck and waited for the blood to slither down the drain. The rest he did on autopilot: Making an incision just below the breastbone and up to the pelvis. Spilling out the cooling guts and preserving the stuff Momma liked in half-gallon plastic bags and old containers she’d saved up. He cut along the Achilles heels and drew what looked like stocking seams along the back of the legs with the tip of his knife. The seams continued across the body, making the woman look more like a sewing project than a human being. Sliding his fingers beneath one of the seams, he loosened skin from muscle before giving it a firm downward tug.
Rebel had asked Michael to save a girl’s skin only once. He had tried to fashion a leather jacket out of the hide but had failed miserably. So he made the remains into an ugly little leather doll he had given to Misty Dawn instead. When Misty discovered it was made out of a person, she shrieked and threw it out her bedroom window. For all anyone knew, it was still out there somewhere, rotting among the wild grass and weeds.
Dismembering the body was the final step. It used to take Michael a better part of six hours, but now he could do it in less than three. He knew exactly how to twist arms and turn legs to pop them out of their sockets. He knew just where to stick the knife blade to separate tendon from bone. It was quick, precise, clean. He wrapped each butchered body part in paper and stacked them in the standalone freezer that hummed in the corner of the basement. Michael saved a thick haunch of thigh for Momma, leaving it on top of the freezer as he hosed down the floor.
By the time he was done, there was hardly any sign that something so brutal had occurred there. It was just a basement, upgraded with a drain in the middle of the concrete floor, a hook in the ceiling for field dressing, and a freezer in the corner for preservation. Michael assessed his clean-up job, and when he was satisfied that everything was in order, he grabbed the fresh hunk of meat he’d wrapped from the top of the freezer and climbed the cellar steps. Upon entering the house, he tucked the brown package into the refrigerator, got a drink of water, and went to his room. There was no point in thinking about how Momma would use the meat, no use in mulling over what he’d find on his dinner plate. As Wade had put it, and as he was fond of reminding them anytime they needed a refresher, folks like the Morrows didn’t have much. They got by living off the land or, as Momma had made it, off of whatever wayfarer they found along the road. Thinking about it only made a hard life that much more difficult. So Michael didn’t think about it. Any more guilt and he’d buckle beneath its weight.
• • •
Kneeling in front of his bedroom window, Michael retrieved a rusty framing nail from his desk drawer and pushed the frayed curtain aside. His fingers drew across a series of notches beneath the sill, tucked away where no one would see them. Ducking down so he could see what he was doing, he added a fresh notch next to the others—almost thirty in all—and then he crawled into bed and closed his eyes.
He held the golden M in his closed fist as he drifted off to sleep, wishing it was an A instead.
• • •
Despite Michael’s long night, when Rebel appeared at his door and announced they were driving in to Dahlia, Michael’s exhaustion evaporated like rain on a hot summer day.
“Can you give me half an hour?” Michael asked, his fingers crossed that Reb was in a decent mood. He had never asked for extra time before. But rather than scoffing and telling him to get his ass downstairs in five minutes, Reb shrugged and muttered “Whatever,” before stalking down the hall.
Michael showered, shaved, brushed his hair and left it loose, remembering the way Alice had looked at it the first time they had met.
Are you in a band?
He searched his closet for the cleanest pair of pants he had—not an easy feat, seeing as how his standard pair of jeans hadn’t been washed in over six months. He pulled a T-shirt that he had picked up at the Salvation Army but hadn’t worn in years over his head. It was a little small, but he liked the design. A man Michael didn’t recognize appeared in black and white with an electric-blue and pink lightning bolt painted across his face. When he brought it home, Misty had told him it was the coolest shirt she’d ever seen. She had known who the guy on the shirt was, but Michael couldn’t remember his name. And he wasn’t about to ask her what it was now, sure she wouldn’t take kindly to him dressing up for the record-store girl.
When he finally appeared downstairs and met Rebel on the back porch, Reb stared at him as though he’d never seen Michael before in his life. Wade looked up from his newspaper, and Momma glanced up from mending a sweater, noting Reb’s surprise.
“Shit,” Reb said, “I hardly recognized you.”
Wade was more suspicious. “Where you two off to?”
“Town,” Reb told him.
“What for?”
Reb exhaled an aggravated sigh and turned to fully face his father. “To see what the hell we’re gonna do about Michael’s birthday. Shit, seems like I’m the only one who even remembers.”
Wade raised an eyebrow, then gave Michael a half-hearted smile. “I didn’t forget,” he said, but he wasn’t altogether convincing.
“Yeah, okay.” Reb rolled his eyes. “Either way, we’re goin’.”
“Dinner’s at six,” Momma said automatically—a statement she hardly had to voice. Dinner was always at six. “Don’t be late.”
“Wouldn’t miss it.” Reb caught Michael by the elbow and dragged him down the steps.
Once they arrived at the Delta, Rebel paused before pulling open his door. “Jesus H,” he said, “You got it bad, huh?”
“Got what bad?”
Michael asked.
Reb shook his head and laughed. “Nothin’. Never mind. Get in.”
• • •
But the closer they got to the Dervish, the more uncomfortable Michael felt. It was as though the woman from the night before was reaching out from beyond the grave. He imagined her nails scratched down his cheeks, leaving deep gashes across his face like trails in soft earth made by the dragging heels of the dead. You’ve got blood under your nails. Michael’s eyes darted to his hands, but they were clean. Except they’ll never be clean. They’ll NEVER be clean. Michael twitched and grimaced, and Reb gave him a guarded glance.
“The fuck,” he muttered. “You finally losin’ your shit or what?”
Michael wrung his hands in his lap. What did he expect to happen? For he and Alice to live happily ever after? Pretend that he had never full-body tackled a girl as she ran along the soft shoulder of a highway? Forget that he knew exactly where to cut to make someone bleed out in less than sixty seconds? Pretend he never suspected what was on his plate?
It was like a bad joke: Hey, have you heard this one before? Two serial killers walk into a record store . . .
He and Rebel weren’t even hiding. Hell, Reb drove a metallic-brown yacht and dressed like an Appalachian John Travolta and nobody batted an eye. It was a cosmic wisecrack, a dirty trick that was made that much more wicked because nobody knew it was being played.
I catch things.
She’d figure it out. She’d look across the record stacks and see the face of a killer. She’d smell it on his breath. Except that maybe they’d be married by then. Maybe they’d have two grown kids. Maybe she’d be into gardening and he’d make a living fixing cars or selling furniture—an honest living—when he wasn’t visiting Momma and Wade out of the sense of guilt he felt for leaving them. When he wasn’t climbing into Reb’s Delta and going on joyrides that would end with a hitcher in the trunk and dismemberment in the basement.
Rebel had told him stories about women married to axe murderers before, completely oblivious that the monster was in the bed rather than under it. That’s what had happened to that John Wayne Gacy guy, but Michael still wondered if something like that could be true.
When you got someone that close, Reb had said, it’s safer to have ’em in on the deal.
In on the deal. As though killing people was as innocent as fishing or joining a bowling league.
“You ever think about quittin’?” Michael asked, slowly turning his head from the trees that zipped by his window to give his brother an indirect glance. He looked down to his hands before Rebel could catch his gaze.
“What?”
“All this,” Michael said, motioning to the interior of the car, as if its steel dashboard and eight-track player would somehow clarify his question.
“What’re you talkin’ about?” Reb asked, but the tone of his voice suggested he knew exactly what Michael was saying. It nearly screamed I knew this was coming! Like a parent faced with delivering the sex talk. Reb was suddenly the brother who had to explain why being an accessory to murder was nothing to worry about. Just a fact of life. A growing pain.
When Rebel pulled the Oldsmobile onto the highway shoulder just outside of town, Michael swallowed against the wad of nerves that had clambered up his throat. Reb gave him a stern look. “You bein’ serious?”
Michael pulled his shoulders to his ears, as if dismissing his own question. “I guess not.” He peered at the frayed denim of his jeans. “I just wonder if maybe you ever thought about leavin’ home.”
“Why would you wonder about somethin’ stupid like that?”
“Because Alice said she thinks about it. She said she wants to go to Pittsburgh or Columbus or someplace. Maybe even New York City.”
Reb scoffed. “Yeah, New York my ass. You know how many losers dream about New York City?”
So many that the dreamers crawl out of the sewers.
“She ain’t goin’ nowhere, Mike.” From the way Reb said it—so matter-of-factly—Michael actually believed it. “People like us don’t leave. We don’t go nowhere. She’s gonna die in this shithole just like you and me. And no, I don’t think about leavin’. You wanna know why?”
Michael nodded faintly, but he was afraid of the reasons.
“Because blood is thicker than water, and maybe you’re too dumb to get what that means, but—”
“I know what it means,” Michael cut in. “It means family comes first.”
Reb leaned back in his seat, looking impressed. “Huh. This comin’ from a kid whose parents dumped him on the side of the road. That’s pretty good.”
There was a beat of silence.
Michael shifted his weight uncomfortably.
Rebel leaned against the steering wheel.
“Besides, ain’t nobody keepin’ you here, are they? I don’t know about you, but I don’t see any handcuffs around your wrists, no shackles around your feet. You wanna blow outta here, blow outta here. Ain’t nobody gonna beg you not to go.”
Michael looked up, trying to judge whether Reb was being earnest or not. Could it have possibly been that easy? Could he just stuff his knapsack full of clothes and leave the Morrows behind?
“Except maybe for Misty,” Reb said, cutting into Michael’s thoughts. “She’d probably care. If you bail, you’d be ditchin’ me, and if you ditch me, Claudine ain’t gonna be getting a steady stream of girls. So you know . . .” His words trailed off as Michael slouched in his seat. He didn’t need to hear the rest. “Your mind’s gettin’ muddy. You ain’t thinkin’ straight. She’s got you all screwed up. Good thing I’ve got a way to fix your problem, though.”
“What do you mean?” Michael looked up, curious, and Reb smirked at his eagerness.
“You show her you mean business. Show her you ain’t just some passin’ John, right? Show her that she belongs to you and she ain’t goin’ nowhere unless you say so.”
Michael frowned. That plan sounded complicated—besides, who was Michael to say Alice belonged to him? What if she didn’t like him as much as he liked her? That made a difference, right? There wasn’t some switch you could flip in someone’s mind and make them your own.
Rebel reached out and patted Michael’s knee in a chummy sort of way. “I just want my little brother to be happy,” he said. “Believe me, Mikey, you follow my lead and you can have her forever.”
18
* * *
IT WAS STRANGE how quickly Michael’s feelings toward that tie-dyed record shop could change. The last time he and Rebel had pulled into the Dervish’s parking lot, his palms had been sweaty with nervous excitement. But this time he was reluctant.
He wasn’t sure whether he could follow Reb’s advice, wasn’t sure if he even liked the idea of owning anyone, especially Alice. But he certainly didn’t want to lose her either. Those three hours he’d spent with her in a darkened movie theater, the way she had scooted closer to him in the backseat of Reb’s car—it had been the best night of his life. He wanted to relive it over and over, and he couldn’t do that if Alice packed up her stuff and left Dahlia behind. Maybe if he went with her. But they were practically strangers. There was no way she would ask him to go with her, but if she stayed here . . .
“Here.” Reb arched his back to lift his butt off the seat, fished his wallet out of his back pocket, and handed Michael a ten-dollar bill.
Michael peered at the money, then gave his brother a quizzical glance. “What’s this for?”
“Show her a good time,” Reb advised.
Except Michael had no idea what a “good time” was, not when it came to a girl like Alice. “How?”
“Hell, I don’t know,” Reb muttered, pushing the car door open. “Figure somethin’ out.”
Michael watched Rebel stalk across the parking lot. He took a breath and shoved open the passenger door, his thoughts momentarily derailed by the temperature. It was getting hotter by the day, the trees wavy and distorted like some psychedelic trip. The air felt th
ick, hard to breathe. And while Michael would have been content standing out in the parking lot for hours, contemplating his next move, the heat forced him forward.
The little bell above his head jingled, the cool air of the place hit him head on, and like déjà vu, Alice looked up from the counter and smiled. A couple of customers milled around, flipping through records, their heads bobbing to the music pumping through the speakers. It was stuff Michael actually recognized this time. He’d heard it on one of Misty’s stations. She always laughed at the lyrics. Something about boogying with a suitcase and doing the milk shake.
Rebel and Lucy were near the back of the store. She was giggling, and he was leaning against the wall with his ankles crossed, looking slick. Michael sucked in a breath and stepped across the front of the building. His eyes swept the place, snagging on the golden arches through the window—an oasis just across the street. He caught Alice’s eyes wandering the front of his shirt, but Michael was too distracted by his thoughts to give her a chance to react. If he didn’t act fast, Lucy and Reb would disappear into the storeroom and Alice would be stuck working the front. He watched her mouth quirk up into an amused grin—lips parted, words balanced on the tip of her tongue—but he cut her off.
“You wanna get somethin’ to eat?”
She looked surprised, as though it was the last thing she had expected him to ask. Shooting a look toward the back of the store and the customers that were there, she gave Michael a playful glance. “You buying?”
“Sure,” he said, his fingers crumpling the ten in his pocket. If anything, she’d accept the invitation just to get out from behind that counter. After all, she hated her job, right?
“Hey, Luce,” Alice called toward her friend. “You’re in charge.”
“Where’re you going?” Lucy asked.
“I’m going on my lunch break. Michael’s taking me to a five-star restaurant.”