by Jesse Grey
“Run!” Bridge matched the maniac’s power and delivery when he shouted the command.
Communally, they sought sanctuary on the far side of the ceme-tery where most of the woods prepared to take its claim over the land the cemetery engrossed. It was then that Bridge observed his friends running into the woods for shelter. He stopped just in front of the forest’s opening, spotting some unexplained wooden stakes discarded by an earlier visitor, seeming like additionally misplaced building materials. Instincts thundered inside of him, his own per-sonal monsoon of survival as Bridge scooped up one of the stakes and joined his friends in the shrouds of the forest, just out of reach from the grounds.
“What is that?” Lissa’s eyes honed right in on the weapon in her friend’s veined grasp.
“Life insurance.”
They all quieted as footsteps prodded closer to them beneath the bribery of the leafy protection. Reticence kept them all inanely tepid. Their heartbeats enveloped every sound, pounding on their ears like hollow drums while their pulses put their souls in some variant of a chokehold.
Just as he was sure Sumner was close enough, seconds from ac-costing them, Bridge lunged forward, his stake poised to strike its victim with white hot apathy. The stake connected with flesh, Bridge forcing all of his weight into the burrowing of the blunt object. He fell on top of his mark, the bloody stake protruding from the once alabaster neck, having nicked the carotid artery without attempting to do so. Bridge’s aim was to critically subdue Sumner, so he’d meant to hit Sumner in the chest, non-fatally, of course.
Not only was the person underneath him shorter than anticipat-ed, thus defining the volatile laceration, but this person was without a doubt not Sumner Shadows.
They came out to see the brawl just as Bridge rolled off of the older woman, tears queued in his eyes over what had just accidentally ensued. His friends were horrified, looking beyond for a sign of Sumner that wasn’t available. The bleeding woman’s eyes were the size of a landing strip, aching in expansion as her entire carcass con-vulsed.
“Oh God!” Lissa shrieked, her cheeks glistening with obvious emotion.
“What’s happening?” Abram’s hands meandered over his buzzed blond hair and tangible beard.
The aging bleeding beauty clawed at the stake in her neck. Bridge scooted over in the grass toward her, sobs and swimming pool cries pouring from him like a fountain of sensibility.
“I’m so sorry.” He cried. “I thought you were someone else, someone trying to hurt us.”
Through bloody teeth, she managed to spit out, “I heard a scream.”
Mercer sniffled violently, his best struggle at keeping himself in one coherent piece.
She reached for the stake again, but Bridge swatted her hand away. “No, you’ll bleed out.” Then, to his friends, he said, “Why isn’t someone calling the cops?”
“No, it’s too late.” The woman said, despite her increasing trem-bling. “I know who really did this.” She started to cough up a sizable quantity of dark blood, and she quickly added a final decree as she placed a hand on the stake still in her neck, her eyes unclouding as an admittance foxtrotted on her tongue. “Make sure you kill that bastard.”
And then she yanked out the stake, a gasp emerging from her as the blood in her carotid flowed freely without its previous barricade preventing its euphoric release. The crying stopped as Bridge rose to his feet, all of them eyeing one another abrasively. Could the woman that had just died by their hand been aware of and openly addressing the desired termination of Sumner Shadows?
“She knew him?” Mercer prompted.
Not caring, Bridge paced, eyes glued to the body of the life he had just ended.
“This is bad.”
They all knew it was true. They knew the moment that they had stepped foot onto the land of Armor Falls Cemetery that their night had gone south. The four of them were a collective of panic, while they stared down at the fallen body in front of them.
“This is really bad.” Bridge said once more.
Lissa ran a hand through her long brunette hair. “Where is he? Where’s Sumner?”
Still pacing, Bridge regarded his friends by saying, “Lissa, who cares? There’s a body!”
“He lured us here. We have to find him.”
Stepping away from the body, Mercer stated, “We need to get out of here.”
“Where do you suggest we go, Mercer? The police? Arclan?”
“Somewhere that doesn’t have us staring at a dead body, Bridge!”
“Enough!”
Abram serrated his silence to wrangle everyone back to the spec-trum of rational thinking. They couldn’t lose it. Not now. There was a murder involved, and their ‘friend’ was missing. They couldn’t lose it now when they were so close to losing it all.
“We’re going to prison. I’m gonna get life without parole.”
Abram, abruptly the epitome of calm, countered with, “No one is going to prison.”
Lissa eliminated the small distance between the tall blond and herself, grabbing his hand eagerly.
“Abram, please tell me you have a plan.”
He looked around, his eyes locking on the woods on the outskirts of the cemetery.
“Grab a leg.”
“Are you fucking crazy?” Mercer said, ever the explicit language for him. “What about this woman’s family? What about everything and everyone important in her life?”
“What about our lives, Mercer? Do you want them to be over because of an accident, over an act Sumner drove us to commit? The police won’t believe our story, not even Adelaide.”
Bringing up her mother stirred up another round of vehement conflicts within Lissa, administering fret alongside the contours of her heart. Abram caught the eyes of every one of his friends thor-oughly, hoping that they really grasped that there was only one feasi-ble choice blazing at them like a field of flickering fluorescents.
“So, grab a leg.”
Hauling the body into the woods was the easy part. They ran in-to difficulty when deciding who would have to dig the grave. Ulti-mately, Mercer and Abram stepped up and made a cursory two foot grave. Finished with its mediocre development, the two boys looked to Lissa and Bridge, who were both mimes during the morose opera-tion.
“Should we say something or?” Mercer recounted.
“If she knew Sumner, she knew what he was capable of.”
“Bridge!”
“What?” He scoffed at Lissa harshly. “Sumner did horrible things to us over and over again. This woman, whoever she was, was aware of that. Or was I the only one in attendance as she pried that stake from her own neck?”
“Stop.” Abram sighed a gorge of a huff. “No turning on each oth-er, alright? From now on, we’re in this. A united front. We make a pact right now. We tell no one. Ever. We take this to our own graves. All in favor?”
A feeble smirk on their lips, the friends admired the fearless way Abram commanded their dire circumstances. They all simply gave confirmation with the decline of their heads.
After that, easing down the body into its new earthy home was a breeze. Mercer was smoothing out the top of the grave when they heard a loud scuffle nearby.
“What was that?”
Bridge shook his head at Lissa. “Probably just an animal or something.”
“Well we should go before that animal becomes a person.” She braced her arms over one another.
“What do we do, about Sumner?”
Mercer’s words paused their forefronts of thought. Sumner could have been out in the cemetery running amok, lurking and waiting for their blood to cake around his knuckles. This could all have been part of an even bigger scheme to have them rot in jail.
“I’ll take the stake and burn it.” Bridge cleared his throat. “No murder weapon, no crime.”
“Sumner just attacked us.” Mercer jeered. “Aren’t you worried about explaining that instead of destroying evidence?”
“No, I’m not, not when I’m worryin
g about the murder that just happened, Mercer.”
“We go home.” Abram stated, taking the shovel and tossing it back toward the cemetery. “And none of this ever happened.”
“Agreed.” Lissa tilted her head to prove so.
Reaching the adjoined consensus, the four of them left the DIY gravesite and executed the short hike out of the woods and back to the white lit cemetery. When they broke through the trees together, each of them were on edge that Sumner would pounce on them as fast as a lethally ravenous lion that had been deprived of premium sustenance. But all that met them when headstones came into view was the quiet night around them, licking the back of their necks with late night perspiration.
“Let’s just get back to the Jeep and go home.” Mercer nodded.
Holding onto the stake, the bloody tip stained and drying, Bright gave a bow with the decline of his head as it changed axises. “Tonight never happened.”
In unison, Lissa and Abram too said, “Never happened.”
Walking back the way they had ran, Mercer was in front leading them back to his vehicle, so he was the first to see the limp form in the dark.
“Guys,” he said, his tone oozing disbelief and alarm. “Over there.”
Upon closer analysis, they happened to come across the late Mar-jorie Shadows’ grave just as they had before, and lying on the ground crumpled about a foot from it was Sumner, just as they had left him.
“Is he actually dead?” Lissa’s breathing hitched an octave as she aroused the proposition.
Bridge was incapable of opening his mouth for his usual retort of woe, because the idea that they had killed two people tonight as op-posed to one was so mind melting, he thought he might just sponta-neously combust in the middle of Armor Falls Cemetery, a bonfire in mourning over the night’s abysmal coil of encounters. Mercer must have been concealing identical logic, because he immediately leaned against the closest headstone, his muscles craving the assist to keep him standing. Falling back into the helm of authority, Abram gradually approached the slumbering Sumner, torn between wanting him to stay unmoving and hoping that another person hadn’t gulped their last batch of life-supporting air on their watch.
Fingers pressed against Sumner's neck, Abram relaxed into fac-ing his friends. “He's alive.”
Maybe it was a thrust of adrenaline emptying itself throughout Sumner's bloodstream, or maybe he had been waiting for Abram to be in his current proximity, but as Abram hefted his pair of fingers from his flesh, Sumner snarled to life and swept the towering blond from his feet with the unyielding jab of his tensed arm.
Lissa's scream arrived just before Abram’s ungrateful thud to the ground, his friend's stunned reactions much slower than Sumner's vengeful intentions. He climbed on top of Abram and without paus-ing to ponder on his impulsive scheme, plunged a previously con-cealed knife into Abram’s skin in one swift slice to sever his once imperfect flesh.
A roar slashed in every angle through the cemetery, Abram cry-ing out at the splicing of his skin. Writhing the blade in a miniscule lopsided oval, Sumner reveled in the tearing of tissue.
“She’s mine!” The angry-cries came pouring out of him. “She’ll always be mine.”
While reeling from the pain, Abram glanced over at Lissa, al-ways knowing that it had gotten under Sumner’s skin that he had taken the girl Sumner had always been crushing on, much like Sumner’s knife was doing a great job of at the moment. Unable to handle what was happening, Lissa yelled in unmatched fury, throw-ing out her leg and kicking the assailant with all the gusto she could conjure. Sumner fell from his position of straddling Abram once more to cracking his head alongside the protruding edge of the near-est headstone, knocking him out cold in one sufficient bang.
“Abe,” Clearing herself of lingering animosity, Lissa bent down and covered Abram’s wound, which was still seeping blood even through her firmly placed fingers. “You’re going to be fine.”
He kept quivering, utterly petrified at what just came about with him and the person he used to consider his best friend in the uni-verse, his shaking getting worse and worse as the seconds ticked fast-er than a stopwatch. Lissa looked at her remaining friends, at Bridge hugging his murder weapon like it was going to save a life in con-trast to the one it had taken, tears coming to his face as he aimed his eyes at the tremoring yet statuesque state Abram was currently thriv-ing. Which left Lissa only one choice.
“Mercer, get over here.”
Obliging mindlessly without much verbal restraint, Mercer saun-tered over to the pair, his lip quivering at the sight of one of his best friends in such withering peril.
“Hand on the wound.” Lissa directed with falsified confidence. “Don’t forget to apply pressure.”
“What?”
“Now!”
He knelt down in a flash, taking a knee and taking over for her as she rose like a phoenix from the wilting embers of their night. She reached for her back pocket, doing what they should have done at the start of the incursion of this terrible evening, her hands finding her phone.
Bridge fidgeted in place, flustered by her agile dialing. “What are you doing?”
“Calling my mother.”
“Lissa—”
“Abram is traumatized!” She bellowed, her indignation masquer-ading her absolute terror that welled against her ribs, rattling the cell of her fragile heart. “Bridge, he needs help! We can keep our pact about...earlier,” Her reference didn’t need to be clarified. The freshly evoked grave was still too close to be a fading murmur of recollect. “But we are not keeping quiet about Sumner shoving a knife in my boyfriend’s chest!”
“Where’s Sumner?”
Mercer’s words felt icy on all of their spines, because when they turned back toward Abram’s twitching frame, his was the only one in view.
“How is that possible?” Bridge cried.
As Abram lied on the cold, earthy ground, unable to do anything but withstand his searing agony and his abrasive convulsions, he dwelled on the simple evidence that he was within a centimeter of losing his life, his mind, and everything else he held up on the pedes-tal of his still young life. And it pained him worse than the knife had when it severed his skin that the bringer of the most brutal pain of his life was the person he used to trust more than any living thing ever to exist.
In one night, they had gone from running for their lives to be-coming a teenage clique of murderers to almost earning their own graves in Armor Falls Cemetery. And it was too much to deal with as Abram’s view was clouded by darkness, allowing the void to swallow him up, not caring if he ever came out of it as long as he was safe from the sinister sociopathic scandals of Sumner Shadows.
22
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Finding someone in a sea of skeletal faces and sugar skull manifestations resulted in being challenging when Salem stepped onto the scene at the Mathison farmhouse. Everyone had gone all out, really committing to Bridge’s theme both in time spent and cultural accuracy. The music was a cavalcade of genres that perfectly described Bridge Mathison. As Nicki Minaj’s ‘Roman’s Revenge’ screamed from some outside subwoofers, he realized just how vast the Mathison’s land was. The farmhouse itself was a giant erected in their honor, surveying the five acres they owned with supreme scrutiny. The dark wood of the farmhouse harmonized the Día de los Muertos concept exquisitely as people paraded through the massive front lawn where everyone could dance, eat and drink: the party trifecta that was a perfect concoction to make the night unforgettable.
That’s when Salem spotted Kirby’s recognizable anatomy over by one of the drink tables, pouring neon hued alcohol into three sepa-rate solo cups. His devilish face paint must have spooked her, since she jumped when she glanced at him, missing one of the cups she was filling and caused the dark red tablecloth to be coated in sweet sticky saturated liquor.
“Dammit, Salem.” He was merely glad that she could see his fea-tures underneath all of his faultless makeup, her gasp enough to up-turn his lips
in amusement.
He popped his eyebrows a couple times at her. “It’s good, right?” Salem gestured toward his intricate red paint. “I figured Bridge would appreciate the effort.”
“So it’s all for Bridge? That why you’re here tonight?”
“Partly.” Salem stated. “But I was also hoping that you and I could talk about us finding that woman the other day.”
“I’m just here to have a good time, Salem. To let loose and forget heavy stuff like witnessing Paige’s crash.”
“Seriously, Kirby. The fact that you even know her well enough to recite her name is exactly what I’m talking about.” Salem’s gaze zeroed in past her vigorous deflection. “It’s clear that something big is at play here. I’m just asking for you to be real with me about it.”
Kirby gracefully grabbed her drinks and whipped away from the table, Salem trailing her as they glided over the lawn.
“Yes, there’s a bigger story.” She ultimately pronounced. “All you get, all I even really know, is the guys are convinced that Paige has been stalking them since school started.”
“What? Kirby—”
“Not now, Salem.” She looked toward a clearing, a break in the crowd of people, where Faith and Willa were hanging out until her return with their drinks. She faced Salem again, making sure to really spray her dialogue with as much conviction as they truly carried. “I just want to be a girl at a party tonight.” Her nose imploded in on itself as she eyed her friend. “Why don’t you go find Bridge and just be two boys at a party?”
Her drinks pointed her in the direction of where her friends were waiting for her. Once she handed Willa and Faith their cups, their eyes remained on Salem.
“Okay, why haven’t you introduced us to that ghost of boyfriend past yet?” Faith cooed suggestively.
“Seriously, Salem is delicious,” Willa sighed, a faux indication of her heart’s romantic pitter patter. “Even if I am sort of already taken.”