by Andrew Post
She saw legs standing in the dining room doorway. Then they slowly came farther into the room, rolling their steps the same as she had, their breathing just as fast – chemically stimulated, thrilled for the chase, she could not say. She remained crouched next to the dead body, tracking the party guest’s legs as they moved down alongside the table. They stopped every few feet, made a sharp sound like a tiny gasp, and then a Solo cup would clonk to the floor. Less concerned about the chase and more interested in hunting for last sips. They moved on and once they reached the far end of the room, stopped again, shifting their weight from side to side. Listening for her.
Heavy footsteps faded in, moving quickly, the hardwood floors creaking and popping as they approached. “Anything?” She recognized his voice at once. Merritt Plains.
“No, nothing,” the party guest said, sounding afraid to be asked this question by this person, to have to tell them they hadn’t found anything. “Did you find anything?”
“You think I’d be asking you that if I had?” Merritt said. “You spoiled kids are fucking useless.”
“Hey, asshole, I’m not spoiled. Nobody handed me anything. I worked hard for what I have.”
“Is that so? Let me see your hands.” The one pair of legs approached the second. “Soft as a baby’s ass, like I thought.”
“Hard work doesn’t always mean shoveling shit. But by the look of you, you wouldn’t know anything about that. I designed an app that allows a customer, with one click, to price compare any item among seven hundred retailers both online and brick-and-mortar. What I did revolutionized—”
Mel flinched at the shot. She watched the one pair of legs go rigid and then topple over. Into sight fell a man who stared blankly, missing the left side of his head.
A snap of metal. A smoking shotgun shell bounced to the floor with a hollow knocking sound. A second metallic snap. And then Merritt Plains’ stocky legs turned and walked from the dining room. Distantly, Mel heard someone say, “What was that?” and Merritt Plains tersely respond, “False alarm, keep looking.”
Mel knew she couldn’t stay under this table all night. But as she crawled out from under it and moved to press herself against the next wall, she asked herself what her actual objective was now that she’d freed herself from the upstairs guest room. Getting the fuck away from this place was the obvious answer. But Felix, as far as she knew, unless his guests had turned on him and bled him dry, was still around somewhere. It’d be rude to leave without saying goodbye, she thought, that voice nothing like her own – this smirking, sick voice, the same that suggested upstairs she just take a little taste, that it’d make her feel better.
She was about to move into the next room, which, when she peeked out, appeared to be the house’s main hall, but then a mob of partygoers came stampeding past. They weren’t taking the chase very seriously, laughing and teasing each other as they pattered down the hall, jumping over things, seeing how high they could jump, and, though they were armed to the teeth, acting like it was the last day of school. They were high and if they found her, would use her to make themselves even more high.
She waited until it was silent in the hall before stepping out. The front doors were barricaded with a pile of furniture that nearly reached the ceiling. Turning to look the other way, deeper into the house, she saw a long sheet of plastic running the length of it, pools of crusting blood in the low spots of its wrinkles. A slip-and-slide. Dried splats on the walls with fragments of busted balloon clinging on – and clean marks in the splats, like tongues had resorted to licking at the blood staining the walls when the supply had started to go dry. More Solo cups, in stacks, in pyramids, set on the floor to spell out words like yummy and morE plZ. Mel had nearly crossed to the other side of the hall but stopped as a man strode out into view, looking bored with this whole affair, dragging a musket behind him by the barrel. He stopped to pick something up off the floor. A bent, half-smoked cigarette. He patted himself down, oblivious to Mel standing fewer than three steps away from him. He spotted her, gave a small start, and laughed. “Hey. You don’t have a light, do you?”
Mel said nothing.
And then she watched it dawn on him. “Oh, it’s you. It’s you. Guys, it’s her, she’s here, I found her.”
She rushed him, coming in low with the kitchen knife. He screamed and tried to get the musket raised but failed to do so in time. She brought the knife up under his chin and his shout was cut short. She could see the blade in his mouth, but only the middle portion of it – the tip had pierced his palate. But he was still alive. She tried to get his hand off the musket, but he wasn’t letting go. She brought up her cast and pushed the blades against his chest, ground it into him back and forth. “Let go of it. Just let go of it.”
His free hand came up and grabbed a handful of her hair. She ground her cast into his stomach deeper, pushed up on the kitchen knife. There was a click that echoed in his mouth as the brittle barrier gave. His pupils shot wide, emptying. He dropped in a heap with the knife still deeply lodged, yanking it out of her hand.
People had heard him and were now coming. She could hear them, laughing as they ran, in that way people do when stoned – an empty-headed giggle that they, themselves, were likely unaware they were making. Mel abandoned the knife planted in the man’s head and snatched his musket up from the floor. A girl in a sequined dress came stomping around the corner missing a shoe and Mel turned, the rifle at stomach-level with her, and squeezed the trigger. A puff of smoke and a thundercrack that was likely heard miles away.
The rifle flew out of Mel’s hands and crashed into the wall behind her, leaving a sizable dent, the trigger guard taking the skin off her index finger’s knuckle with it.
The girl lay blown open on the floor, the pink coil of her guts spilling out over her party dress, twitching and gurgling. And as she stared up at the ceiling, her life rapidly leaving her, she wasn’t spitting out the blood she was coughing up in an attempt to get a clear breath – she was swallowing it, licking her lips, savoring it, eyes rolling back in euphoria as she happily drowned in herself. And all at once she went still, one wet sigh, smile wilting.
Doors crashing. Storming footfalls. More than one. Several.
Mel abandoned keeping quiet and waded through the trash and stumbled into the nearest room with its door unlocked. She closed it behind her, throwing the deadbolt. When she turned around, she saw in the moonlight pouring in from the windows a swath of gray – ten, fifteen dead bodies lay sprawled across the floor. Some had their eyes open still. A few were clothed, most were naked. Some bore bullet holes in their foreheads. A few had their heads staying on by a thread. It was the source of the smell she’d first picked up in the kitchen, of ripening decay. A mondo den’s version of a cool-down room except unlike a club there was no ice water, no frigid leather sofas to put your hot skin against. These partiers were not getting back up anytime soon.
Rampaging in the hall behind her. Things crashing and breaking. A gunshot, spat curses and stomps – coming this way.
The bodies provided poor footing when she tried to move across them. There was no floor visible, only more flesh, one corpse giving a sad wheeze when Mel stepped on their stomach, trying to get as far away from the door as possible. There was a window on the other side, but she didn’t have time to try it. They were at the door. She lay down among the dead, tried to control her panicked breathing, and did not move a muscle.
* * *
Merritt threw back the door to the drawing room and raised the MP-9 as he shouldered his way in.
There were too many bodies to even open the door all the way. At the start of the hunt, Felix had given Merritt a bag along with everyone else, and just the same as they were, he was eager to take in every last drop right there, the thirst not in any way concerned about tomorrow, much less later.
Still riding the high, sated for the time being, he felt he was weightless, like h
e wasn’t running around the house in his big, bulky body looking for Melanie but gliding as if he’d left his husk behind, only a mass of nerves now that could zoom about like a ghost shot from a cannon. He kept getting flashes of himself finding her and tearing her limb from limb without so much as a gotcha. He kept seeing these visions so often that he began to wonder if they were premonitions, possibilities, and he wanted nothing more than to make them come true. But also there were visions of him killing Felix, matching the ones his imagination had forged for him while on the drive out here after loading Brenda into the trunk. All that time to think, telling himself that he was making the right decision to just murder Felix the minute he arrived – but then he hadn’t, he’d forgiven him, the crooked old fuck had used his fancy words and had turned him around facing the other way again.
Merritt remained looking across the dead bodies in the drawing room. Watching each one’s chest for signs that they were breathing. Then the next, then the next. And one of them, a twelve-year-old boy with an unnaturally bent neck and milky eyes, sat up and with a stomach-turning crack, turned its head to look at him. “Why not kill them both?” Winston said. “Whichever one you find first can go first and then the other one can wait their turn and go second. How’s that for a plan?”
* * *
Mel lay tasting vomit and blood and feeling the papery legs of flies walking across her closed eyelids. She listened to Merritt Plains’ quickened breath fewer than three steps away. On mondo, the central compulsion was to always be moving. To deny it, to attempt lying still, it was like every muscle would either rip itself apart or tie itself in a knot. She suffered it, the agony of keeping still, because an assuredly worse kind awaited if she gave herself away.
“But how do I know that’s the right thing to do?” Merritt said, seemingly unprompted. No one had said anything before that, not that Mel had heard.
All she could hear was her blood pounding in her ears, feel it throb in the sides of her neck. Without moving her head, she opened one eye and noticed her cast was exposed to the moonlight. The razor blades that weren’t as rusty as the others were still reflective. With careful, small movements, she pulled the cast closer to her side – cutting herself in the process – but kept pushing it down until it was hidden between her and the corpse beside her, slicing it as well. Black blood began to dribble out and soaked into her shirt, cold and thick.
“Felix said it was just a misunderstanding,” Merritt, over there, said. A few seconds’ silence. “Maybe he wasn’t lying this time. What I think I should do is just start by finding Melanie, then I’ll bring her to Felix, and see how he reacts. If it seems like he’ll try fucking us over again after that, we’ll just kill him, then Melanie, everybody else left in the house, and be done with this place.”
There was no lack of insanity in this house, but as she listened to this, Mel now understood Merritt Plains had brought the most.
“Melanie?” he said softly. “Are you in this room right now?”
She did not let him know that she was.
“Can you hear me?”
She did not confirm that she could.
“I’m sure you’re scared. I’m scared too. It sure seems like Felix has flipped his wig once and for all this time, doesn’t it?” When that garnered no reply, he said, even softer, kindlier, “If you’re in here, come on out. Let’s talk. I don’t want to hurt you, I swear.”
Mel held her breath, tried to talk her heart into slowing down – it did not listen.
“I’ll give you to the count of three. Don’t be what makes me do something we’ll both regret. One.”
Mel did not speak or move.
“Two.”
Mel said a silent goodbye to her uncle, to her parents, to Dani.
“Three.”
A blast of automatic gunfire. The flies scattered. Pieces of dead people went flying up and rained back down. A damp fleck of somebody landed on Mel’s face, over her lips. She clamped them shut, but with it so close to her nose, she got a concentrated dose of its smell.
A jangling of spent bullet casings.
He’d stopped shooting but did not leave the room. Only reloading.
Her ears rang, but she could still make out his heavy breaths – right there, close enough she could throw out an arm and high-five his shoelaces. She did not.
It took everything in her to remain still as Merritt opened fire again, spraying across the corpses one way then going back the other, making an X then a figure eight until his gun snapped empty. Her face was covered over with broken skin and rotten juices, she had inhaled some dry, unspeakable fragment up her nose and felt it lodge in the back of her throat, but she didn’t move and as far as she knew, miraculously, she had not been struck by a single bullet. The door creaked shut and the bolt clicked.
Mel sat up and cleared her face, wanting to retch but not wanting to make any noise, just concentrated on swallowing and swallowing. Breathe, breathe, you’re alive.
Something shiny out of the corner of her eye. She turned and while the door had shut, Merritt Plains was not on the other side of it, but this side, standing in the dark. He was moving something in his hands. Clicks and clacks. Reloading.
Mel shot to her feet and without the time to spare, used her cast to break the window. She tried clearing the shards that were still stuck in the frame. A final double click behind her. She pitched herself forward, leading with the cast, and felt the cold air on her skin – and broken glass drag down her abdomen and across her shoulders and neck. Ripping gunfire, the exterior of the house erupting along with her, freed dust and particles of ruptured insulation. She rolled forward, felt she’d detached from the world for a breathless moment as she fell, seeing sky then the snow on the ground then the sky again, and crashed, the snow providing scant padding to break her fall.
She righted herself and slipped and stumbled, moving toward the trees. Another salvo of gunfire from the window behind her pelted into her shoeprints in the snow, clots of dark and frozen earth hitting her in the face, getting in her eyes. She pushed through the scratching brush, screaming and arms flailing, blind in the darkness swallowing up the forest floor, bark and branches falling around her head as another round of bullets was sent into the dark after her.
Chapter Sixteen
The Little Bastard wasn’t exactly built for off-roading and it was certainly too cold for convertibles tonight, but Felix, lately, seldom had the time to take his prized possession out for a spin. He’d taken the Porsche around the house once and now was making a second pass, taking his time, only getting stuck momentarily when hitting a low spot in the yard, scanning each window as he hummed it, holding the revolver, his arm hanging out the side of the car like he would on a summer drive, a nice little bolt around the hills trying to imagine what it’d been like when James Dean was in this same driver’s seat, saying to Rolf Wütherich, his companion on that fateful night, “That guy’s got to see us. He’ll stop.”
Felix was frustrated. You mean to tell me that thirty party guests – last time he bothered doing a headcount, anyway – cannot find one young woman? The house is big, sure, but it isn’t that fucking big. He’d given them the firepower both in the form of metal in their hands and some in their bloodstream too. But, again, it seemed like if he wanted something done right it was going to be up to him to do it. Son of a bitch.
Gunfire on the east side of the house – naturally, given his luck, on the exact opposite side from where Felix was. So he dropped it into third and gave the Little Bastard a poke with the spurs and, nearly throwing himself down into the goddamn woods, got up to a reasonable speed he could maintain so long as he took turns wide, and started over that way. Naturally, by the time he arrived, the excitement had already died down. Merritt was standing in the window of some room. Felix could not access the mental map of his own house to determine which room it was exactly at this moment, looking out into the brush
that made up the back forty of the property.
Felix called up from the car, “Was it her or were you seeing things?”
“It was her,” Merritt said, up there.
“Tag her?”
“I don’t know.”
“Which way she did she go?”
Merritt pointed.
Felix put Little Bastard in park and stood up to reach ahead, over the windshield, and dig through the trunk. He picked up his tommy gun, which the guy who sold it to him, though he didn’t have a certificate of authenticity, swore once belonged to none other than Frank ‘The Enforcer’ Nitti. Felix fitted it with a drum mag, racked it, and lit up the trees, aiming low, watching the snow and battered brush go flying. He paused to listen for any sounds of an injured woman, gave the trees another few dozen rounds, and stopped to listen again.
When he looked back up at the house, Merritt was still looking out, that wide mug of his unreadable as always.
“You want to come out here and help me?” Felix shouted. “We know she’s out here. No sense in you standing around in the house at this point, is there?”
“I’ll be right down,” Merritt said, and the window filled back in with darkness as he stepped back from it.
“Fucking moron,” Felix said. “Should’ve shot you when I had the chance. Had that giant head of yours turned looking the other way and everything.”
And when Felix turned his own head to look toward the woods again, he saw a flashing movement, numerous tiny things catching the moon’s glow – right before it collided with his face and split his eye open. He toppled back inside Little Bastard, smashing his head on the rim of the passenger-side door. He put a hand over his face, feeling he’d been cut several times across the cheek and temple, deep cuts. His face now felt ribbed for her pleasure. He only had a second to register he’d dropped the tommy gun to the floorboard. He plunged his hand toward it, but another hand picked it up. He looked up at her, a shadow-shape against a dark sky. He knew her well. Knew her shape. Could tell you it was Melanie Latisha Williams from a mile away on a moonless night. Except, every time he saw her before, her arm did not look like some sort of spiked sleeve, some shit they’d wear in the Dark Ages.