On the darkness of the highway, Emma was alone, encapsulated in the black. In the silence, she could forget to classify her victim as company. When she abandoned the speed and the isolation of the lanes and the streetlights invaded her capsule, the muscles in her back gnarled up and curled toward her spine. She gripped the steering wheel tightly, her palms slipping in the blood still wet on her hands.
She perched on the top of her pelvis, hugging the steering wheel the way her aging mother did. The road assaulted her through the windshield at such a harsh angle. Her breathing became tight and restricted, her heart pounded in her ears, her eyes stretched wide. Every nerve under her flesh arched into high alert and overstimulation.
When the garage door rumbled down over her and stopped with a thud on the cement, a layer of fear uncoiled from around her heart. She had made it home; she was hidden within her garage. She breathed out heavily and sat, still clutching the steering wheel, until the light clicked off. She even sat frozen and paralyzed for a few long moments in the darkness.
If I don’t step out of the car, it’s not real. If I don’t open the trunk, I can’t know that he’s actually dead. Right now, he’s that cat in the box that is both alive and dead. If I stay here forever, he’s both alive and dead, and I am both guilty and innocent. Or if I leave the car running, I die with him. Ronnie would probably be the one to find us when I didn’t answer for a couple of days. She would probably have Josiah with her. She would find this moron in my trunk and would not even be surprised. Am I even surprised?
She reached down and flipped off the ignition. She was not going to die for this random guy, just like she was not going to die for Justin. Once again, she was going to figure it out, reinvent herself, and find a way to deal with her new and unexpected circumstances.
The sound of her heels against the floor echoed through the dark as she fumbled along the edge of her car and splayed her hands out in the darkness until she found the light switch. She mentally inventoried additional locations she would need to bleach out his blood. Everything she touched, every single thing she came in contact with since the punch.
She slipped her heels off and abandoned them beside the door into her house. She would be so sad to see them go. They were one of her favorite pairs—tall, red, and striking. The concrete bit coldly at the soles of her feet as she reluctantly moved back toward the still cooling vehicle.
The garage was largely vacant. Most of Justin’s possessions had occupied the garage. The house was predominantly unchanged from when he left. The garage was where his absence was visible. Perhaps that was why Emma had forsaken the space completely after he left. She had not depressed the garage door opener since his departure, parking in the driveway even in the snow. She did not want to see the emptiness inside her.
In the far corner, sheets of drywall leaned against the wall. Tools, folded strips of plastic, and other supplies heaped in a haphazard pile of true Justin style. Emma would have almost found comfort in the idea that Justin abandoned the remodeling project because he left, but the home improvement accoutrement had resided forgotten in the corner even before his infidelity was born.
Justin never committed to anything.
More rage blazed up from that aching hole at Emma’s center. It was Justin’s fault. It was all his fault that she was here.
Why couldn’t he have just loved me? Why couldn’t I have just been good enough? Why couldn’t we have just had a family and been happy and normal? Instead, he’s having sex with some bikini-clad cocktail waitress, and I’m about to dismember my date.
Emma moved toward the trunk with purpose, fueled by the heat brewing in her belly. She noted all the blood smeared over the rear of the car and took mental notes on what to clean. She pressed the trunk release button and the lid slowly ascended.
Mark appeared as a puddle of bloodied flesh, his mess of limbs collapsed flat. His mouth hung ajar, relinquished by lax facial muscles. One arm fell across his face, obstructing his remaining eye. Was he dead? He looked dead. Emma leaned in deeply, bringing her ear beside his body.
A shallow rasp crept up to her.
Of course, he’s alive. No one dies from keys to the eye.
She stood up out of the trunk, tiptoeing her way across the cold garage floor. The cement was so chilled it felt wet beneath her toes. She took elongated strides to leap her way to the supplies in the corner. She grabbed the stack of plastic sheets and spread them out over the length of the garage floor. The thin layer of plastic managed to dull the cold slightly. She coated every inch of the floor in the opaque layer, including behind the trunk of her car.
When satisfied that she had accounted for every scrap of floor, she walked around to the trunk to heave Mark out. She loomed over his body, puzzling for a moment. It had been difficult enough to tip him into the trunk in the first place, with gravity on her side. The prospect of dragging him out seemed far more daunting.
If I’m going to kill someone, I’m going to have to figure out how to manage the body.
As the thought wandered calmly over her mind, Emma managed the perspective that she might need to be worried that she was so calm and nonchalant in the situation. In merely the course of this one evening, only since the assault with her keys, her mind began to feel foreign to her. Through the chaos, she managed to note her thoughts forming in unfamiliar patterns and her emotions responding unexpectedly. She did not have the time to be concerned, so she could only register both how different and how natural it all felt.
She reached in and grasped Mark’s ankles, tugging them awkwardly up and out of the trunk. His legs dangled limply over her bumper, shoes swaying gently as she jostled him. She pulled his feet downward and let her grip climb his pant legs, guiding his lower body out, again relying on gravity to do the work. When his hips crested the bumper, his body plummeted in kind. Emma groped to slow his descent. Mark crumpled in a sickening squash onto the floor.
Man, I’m glad I put the drop plastic everywhere.
Mark’s body collapsed unnaturally. He piled on top of his own bent legs, his arms draped awkwardly over his torso. Although a muffled moan spilled from his mouth onto the concrete, he still did not move.
“Fuck,” Emma breathed. “I guess I’m committed.”
She moved over to the tools and retrieved a hammer from the top of the pile. She tested the heft in her hands, bouncing the murder weapon in her palm. Suddenly, everything felt more deliberate.
She took a deep breath and brought the hammer into the back of Mark’s skull. The crack echoed against the garage walls, and something about the noise sounded familiar and comfortable to her. A jolt of unmatched excitement rocked her. She sneered broadly and happily when she brought the hammer down once more.
When she stopped, Emma listened. There was no rasp, no groan. Only silence. She pushed his shoulder to unearth his face from below his now dented skull. Emma had never seen a dead body before. When she laid eyes on what remained of Mark now, she did not need to check a pulse to know he was gone. His lone eye sat disturbingly wide and unfixed, appearing milky in its flatness.
Emma thought of the deer.
She suspected regret and guilt should be swelling over her chest, yet the emotions surging through her at the sight of her victim were unexpected, uncharted.
I did this.
It was power behind those words, pride. Not shame.
I am capable of ending someone’s life.
The smile was wholly inappropriate on her lips, but she could not deny how naturally it appeared. She was relieved that no one was here to witness her giddy confrontation with her sin. She reached up with her bloody hand and forcibly wiped the devious grin from her face, noting she would need to later scrub that cheek.
Focus. Get rid of the body.
Emma ripped herself from basking in the sight of her dead date. She bent over and wrapped her fingers around both Mark’s wrists, his skin already surprisingly alien. Whatever made flesh living and human had bled out of him when the hamme
r snuffed out what was left. She held tight and leaned back, finding she was no match for his body weight. Her grunts bounced off the walls.
She released Mark’s wrists and his hands fell, slapping against the plastic. She could not drag him, so she stepped over his heaped body and shoved at him until he splayed onto his back, then she dug her hands under his hips and pushed until he flopped onto his face. She rolled him over and over until he spread out over the space where Justin’s car was once parked.
She could never manage the corpse whole. She needed it to be in smaller pieces to be able to transport it.
“Well, Mark,” Emma said to the body, “let’s see what your heart is really into.”
Emma did not have an expert level knowledge in tools. She only knew that a saw would cut through skin, muscle, and bone. It did not have to be neat where he was going.
She moved to strip the bloodied clothes from the corpse. She grasped first at his shirt, contorting his arms in inhuman angles behind his back, attempting to wrench the fabric free. Sweat beaded on her forehead as she struggled. Without his cooperation, undressing him was more challenging than wrangling Josiah into pajamas.
“Screw this,” she mumbled. “I’m cutting them off.”
Emma fetched a pair of scissors from the kitchen and chopped lines through the fabric, ripping the articles of clothing open and off his body.
To think I would have wanted to strip him for sex a couple hours ago.
She tugged off his boxers.
Good thing I didn’t.
She spread out the now naked body in crucifixion pose and fetched the Sawz-All from the pile of tools, figuring it would not be loud enough to arouse the suspicion of the neighbors through her garage door.
I’ll start somewhere simple. The wrist is probably the smallest.
She plugged in the saw and flipped the switch, buzzing it to life in her hand. The vibration of the blade reverberated up her arm. She pressed down into Mark’s still cooling flesh and braced it into position. Then, without hesitation, she plunged the wiggling teeth into his skin.
The blade was more motivated than Emma expected. It ate through the wrist ravenously and did not hesitate until it met the bone beneath. Emma grinned again as she held his arm tighter and pushed down harder on the saw. Then the hand fell disconnected onto the plastic, and a new blood pool formed.
The hand looked different separated from the body. More dead and less human. Her brain wanted to tell her it was an intricate and lifelike Halloween decoration. The thought slipped over her consciousness and she had to reach out and poke the still spongy flesh to remind herself that, though cold, it had been part of a person.
A thread of surreality wove through her perception, allowing her brain to wobble along the line of sanity she had always considered hard and rigid. Dancing on the edge now, she appreciated how flexible and fluid it felt, like standing ankle-deep in murky waters.
She wanted to pick up the severed hand, slap it a high-five, and laugh her brains out. She wanted to curl into a ball and weep until she had completely dehydrated herself. She wanted to burst out of her garage and run barefoot in the dark until her feet were bloody stumps. She wanted to call Ronnie and confess. She wanted to drag a blade across her own throat and just end it all.
The humming of the saw in her hand brought her back from the mental precipice and grounded her against the vibration of the nerves in her body. She cackled, the sound startling her as it echoed off the garage walls over the buzz of the saw.
“This is so ridiculous,” she whispered. “How did I even get here?”
Justin, she thought again.
“Enough of that bullshit.”
She bumped the hand aside, rolling it over itself, and stretched out the nubbed arm. She plunged the blade into the inside of his elbow, cringing at imagining how sensitive that flesh was living. She moved slowly and methodically, first carving down through the skin and muscle, then bearing the teeth of the saw down through the resistant bone. She segmented the body at each joint until it was light, manageable pieces and a cumbersome torso.
A sea of blood had formed beneath her work, spreading out and pooling far across the plastic floor. Emma was kneeling in it when Mark was finally in a pile of pieces.
Exhaustion crept into her body below the adrenaline pumping hard through her system. The task ahead was so utterly daunting. There was just so much Mark to get rid of. Chunks of body, gallons of blood, and everything into which it had come in contact. However, prison loomed as a very undesirable alternative. Though potentially she would have better luck finding her soulmate in a women’s super max facility.
She shook her head and pulled her body up from the blood ocean on her garage floor, almost at peace with her focus, shifting now to all the Mark residue splattered around her.
Her phone rang.
The mechanical singing seized her heart in her chest. Her brain forgot the normal, scripted response to such a sound. Her eyes rattled frantically in her head while she desperately scrubbed her hands against her pants and clawed for her phone.
“Hello?” she said, straining for normalcy in her tone.
“Emma? Are you okay? You never texted me after the date!” Ronnie practically yelled into the phone.
“What if the date had gone super well and I was sleeping with the guy right now?”
“Come on, I know you better than that. This Don Juan killer shit and breastfeeding has me all paranoid.”
“Relax. I’m fine.”
“Wait, why do you sound so funny? Are you in a parking garage or something?”
“No. I’m in my garage.”
“What? You haven’t been in that garage since the divorce. Why in the hell are you in there?”
“The date did not go well.”
“Jesus. How bad did it have to be for you to go in there? Why would you go in there?”
“I guess I’m wallowing little.”
“I’m coming over.”
“No, Ronnie. I’m fine. I needed to be depressed for a while.”
“Are you sure? Are you okay? You sound funny.”
“I’m fine. I’m about to head to bed anyway.”
“Okay but I’m coming over in the morning.”
“No, Ronnie. I’m going to go for a run in the morning. Clear my head. Probably a long one. I will come over for dinner, if that’s okay.”
“You have me worried, Emma. You don’t sound okay.”
“Trust me, Ronnie.”
“Okay. I’ll be texting you in the morning. Goodnight, Emma.”
“Goodnight.”
With Ronnie’s voice fading from her ears, Emma resurfaced to her new reality. Just her and pieces of Mark, alone in her crime.
***
Hours later, Emma climbed behind the wheel of her car, the acidic odor of bleach eating at her nasal cavity. Her eyes burned from the smell and from the weariness lurking beneath all her excitement and agitation. Cool water droplets splashed on her shoulders from the trailing ends of her hair. The dark road in front her wound up and westward.
She reached down and brought the energy drink to her lips, the last addition to her strange midnight shopping trip. It was necessary even as the unnatural taste pooled along her jaw. Her heart did not need aid in perpetually fluttering, but her eyelids did require persuasion to remain ajar.
Daybreak fractured the night above her, the wheels beneath her crunching to the trailhead. Her hiking boots had been so neglected they now felt foreign around her toes, even as the groove of her shape still remained in the sole. She drained the obnoxiously large can into her mouth, stepping out of the car and heading back to her trunk.
She half-expected Mark’s one remaining stupid eye to greet her again when she lifted the lid. Instead, what remained of Mark sat in clean and neatly packaged bags. Justin’s lack of commitment had rewarded her again when she discovered he had left all of his hiking packs and backpacks alongside hers in the storage closet.
She had lined each b
ag with a garage bag to prevent leakage. Mark’s torso, including his unimpressive penis, was shoved into her tall backpacking bag that she had used all of once before the murder. Then she had played Tetris as she stuffed thighs, feet, hands, and arms in two more large packs. She had gathered up all the bloodied evidence, absorbing the raging pool of blood in some old towels before rolling and folding and tying to trap the mess within the plastic. She removed the battery from Mark’s cell phone and wrapped the pieces and his wallet in amongst his dissected clothing. She packed up the clothes and beloved shoes she was wearing, all her cleaning supplies, the cloth lining from her trunk, cramming it all carefully into three more bags. The bags each bulged and threatened their seams.
Six bags will be at least three trips.
She reached into the naked metal trunk and retrieved the headless handle of the shovel she had purchased. She heaved the torso-laden pack onto her back and gathered up the tent bag she emptied and stuffed with crime scene evidence.
Her boots on the trail scraped quietly against the silent dawn. She swung the shovel handle ahead of her in stride, allowing the end to bump along the rock with each step. She would appear like a normal hiker, backpacking out to a campsite with gear, a tent, and a walking stick.
She leaned forward against gravity and against the weight of this portion of Mark, climbing the grave altitude of the mountain path. She trudged for close to an hour, until the sun climbed out from behind the eastern edge, then she departed the trail. She wandered through scrubby grass, unearthed boulders, and towering trees until the trail was a distant memory.
She halted to scan the entire circumference around her. Satisfied she was completely alone, she dropped her bags. Mark’s torso landed with a thud. He was heavy.
I should have frozen him and sent him through wood chipper, Emma mused. That was always my favorite method in all my shows. Might have been suspicious to buy a body-sized freezer and a wood chipper though.
The Rest Will Come Page 19