by McBain, Tim
The Hole
9 years, 67 days after
He leaned forward, bent at the waist, his torso hovering over the table, inching nearer and nearer to her face. The lantern lit his face up from below, making him appear demonic and strange, the shadows all turned upside down. He smiled, but it looked more like a snarl, and the shadows made his brow look heavier, more aggressive.
She stood, though the motion surprised her as much as it did him. He took a step back, and a surge of adrenaline made her legs tingle, so she stumbled for a second.
Something banged behind her, and they both jumped. It took her a second to realize that she’d pushed out of her chair with such force that it had toppled over, the back slamming into the concrete slab underfoot.
They looked at each other for a moment of total silence and then he laughed. A nervous giggle that only lasted a few seconds.
“What the hell are we doing out here?” he said.
He leaned back, and the shadows shifted over his face, returning his brow to something human.
“Seriously, what are we doing? What are you hoping to accomplish with all of this?”
“It’s like you said before. We’re just straightening things out.”
He folded his arms his arms over his chest.
“Just say what you’re going to say, then.”
“I could make a lot of trouble for you, but I don’t think that’s necessary.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Then again, what I know is quite valuable. I’d be a fool to not use it to my advantage.”
“Right. I understand. But let me ask you something. If I did what you think I did, why wouldn’t I twist your neck out here in the dark tonight and be done with it?”
“Because the additional trouble wouldn’t be worth it. $500 a month is all I ask. Not so much, is it?”
He laughed, a mouthful of yellow teeth glittering in the lantern light.
“That’s it?”
She nodded.
“Fine. I’ll pay you. This seems like a lot of running around for that kind of money, but whatever.”
“Then we’ll shake on it.”
She stepped forward, extending her left hand. He was still laughing a little to himself, and his eyebrows flexed a moment in confusion. Perhaps he was thrown by her offering her left to shake rather than her right. His hand rose, locked with hers. Their eyes met a beat later.
Her right arm fluttered out of the robe sleeve like an escaping bird. She stared right into his eyes as she jabbed the needle in his neck and slammed the contents of the syringe into his artery. He barely had time to gasp before his eyelids fluttered and he fell into her on his way to the ground.
Dragging the body through the woods had been easier than she’d imagined. Maybe the ground being slicked with dew had helped her cause some, a lubricant to ease the friction. The effort was enough to get her out of breath, but moving the unconscious heap wasn’t the great strain on her strength she thought it might be. She gripped each ankle, and he glided over the ground on his back, a trail of flattened plants marking the way they’d walked.
Now the body rested on the lip of the hole, and as soon as she got her wind back, over the edge he’d tumble. She didn’t think she’d be able to maneuver the lantern fast enough to actually watch him plummet the eight or 12 feet down, which was too bad. She’d just shove him over this cliff etched into the Earth and watch him disappear into blackness. Not as viscerally exciting of an image, but it would have to do.
Her breathing slowed, grew more even. The small fire that had raged in each of her lungs subsided little by little until it was a dull warmth.
The night felt impossibly cold against all of the places her sweat had moistened, and the effect was heightened when she moved, standing now from her resting spot. The air touched the wet places, pressed itself against her.
She lifted the lantern and looked down at the unconscious figure. He laid facedown, mouth and nose pressed right into the dirt. The light danced over him with the lantern’s swing, but otherwise, he was still. He’d look dead if not for the breath inflating his torso over and over, making his ribcage expand and contract.
She took a deep breath, holding it for a long moment and letting it out as slowly as she could. Her breath formed swirls of steam in the air before her. She couldn’t remember if it had been doing that all the while or if it just started in that moment. It sure seemed like the latter.
She placed the lantern on the edge of the hole and moved to the body.
Her fingers squirmed to get under his torso, one hand worming under the collarbone while the other wriggled under his belly. She tested her positioning a couple of times, hefting the body and letting it drop. It seemed like this would work.
She lifted and pushed at the same time, the dead weight rising just enough for the neck to adjust a little, making the head sink below the torso. The body grated over the sand, the legs dragging behind the torso.
All at once, she thrust both hands up, flipping the body like someone flipping over a table or desk in a tantrum. The whole scene went into slow motion. The arms seemed to trail a beat behind the torso as though on some delay, whipping around like those of a ragdoll. The head lolled on the neck, shimmying and reversing its slump from forward to backward.
Some part of her knew even as it was happening that this must only be taking a fraction of a second, but in the moment it felt like the body hovered there for a long time. It remained suspended over empty space, a limp figure waiting to fall.
And then it tipped just a little, the head seeming to pull lower than the rest, and the shadows swallowed it whole. It was just gone.
The impact with the earth sounded incredibly heavy, a slap and a thud and a crunch at the same time.
She lifted the lantern, some panicked part of her expecting to find the hole empty, but he was there. He appeared utterly motionless for a beat, but his chest expanded and contracted again, the air still rushing in and out of him.
Good.
She grabbed the shovel handle which protruded from the pile of excavated sand nearby and pulled it free, the metal scraping all the way out. She worked a while to cover the body, flinging sand from outside the hole and adjusting the lantern to check her coverage.
With this long distance, somewhat scattershot approach, it took about 25 minutes to cover him enough that he wasn’t visible from her vantage point. She didn’t figure she needed to be too thorough about it.
The ketamine she’d injected him with – an animal tranquilizer — would keep a man of his size immobile for at least twelve hours from the time administered, though she thought it likely that he would be conscious for several hours before the paralysis wore off.
By the time she put the shovel back, the sky had gone gray. The sun would be up before long.
She put the lantern back in the shed and went out into the woods to wait. The sewage truck would arrive within an hour or so.
Sitting behind the tree, the excitement washed over her in pangs, surges of bliss that made her body shake, an electrical tingle that trembled through her arms and pricked pins and needles into the palms of both hands. It didn’t feel real. That was all she could think over and over again. None of it felt real.
She heard the tanker’s engine first, and the smell hit a couple minutes after that. Sound traveled pretty far out here in the dead quiet world, and it was slow going to get out to the place – two track dirt roads that were pretty rugged and washed out in spots.
She didn’t know why she wanted to see it, why she insisted on hiding here to watch it with her own eyes. It wasn’t out of fear that he’d somehow escape his fate. There was very, very little chance of that. It was catharsis she was after. This murderer would be tucked down into a hole that Shelly helped dig. It felt right.
When the trucks finally arrived, she slumped against the tree to stay out of sight, only braving the occasional glance. She covered her mouth and nose with the sleeve of her robe as the truck dumped its slud
ge into the hole. It didn’t help much. The smell made her dry heave a few times before she got used to it.
Men’s voices called out to each other, but she couldn’t make out the words over the drone of the engines and the splatter of the sewage slapping the bottom of the hole. The white noise lulled her into a daze, those pulses of excitement the only things keeping her thoughts rooted in the here and now at all.
The sounds shifted in time, the tanker’s engine hit a lower tone as it pulled out, and the other trucks went to work pushing the dirt piles into the hole. Two pickups with blades attached scraped sand over the precipice bit by bit. This she poked her head out to watch, though she wasn’t sure why she felt safer. Maybe the lack of the tanker’s diesel rumble offered a sense that the threat had lessened.
Within about ten minutes, the whole thing was over. The trucks drove over the freshly filled spot on their way out, perhaps to pack things down.
She waited as the sounds of the engines trailed away, waited until they were gone entirely before she rose from her hiding spot.
Her heart beat faster as she picked her way through the plants to get to the discolored slab of ground. It was a sandy shade like the underlayers of earth around here, indented a little. Something about that seemed strange just then, the notion of the inside of the ground pulled out and shoved back together out of order.
The foliage petered out into the clearing, and then she was there. Standing over it. Walking on it. The soil gave a little underfoot, the slightest squish.
Her excitement hit a peak just then, fluttered in her chest a moment, and waned. She didn’t know why. It just seemed to wilt all at once, a gaping empty place left where it had been.
She listened for a moment, not realizing at first what she was doing. He was alive under there, under layers of piss and shit and sand. Possibly awake, too. But he made no sound.
She felt no satisfaction, she realized, as she walked back over the soft ground to go home. Not really. No gratification. Shelly was still gone. Nothing would bring her back. She didn’t regret it exactly, but this empty feeling wasn’t how she expected to feel once it was done. Not at all.
The void opened her up and let the nothing inside. The big nothing. Of all this time left to fill, of all this death and loss waiting around every corner, of all of these savage feelings that came and went and could never quite find relief, could never quite find fulfillment.
Maybe the part of her that wanted these things — the animal part that wanted vengeance and violence and control over the big nothing — maybe it could never truly be satisfied.
Ray
The Compound
315 days after
He rolled over onto his back, his arm radiating sleep-warmth into the cool spot on the mattress it now rested against. For the moment, he had lost the thread of the conversation. He remembered that she woke him to talk, that he had even responded to her, but the memories of what either of them said eluded him.
Oh. Of course.
He knew this day would come. She had hinted at it so many times.
“We’ll see,” he said, his voice carrying that low rumble of someone who just woke up.
He tilted his head back and looked at the blackness where the ceiling should be. It was still hard to get used to the total dark that night provided now that the electricity was gone. No streetlights glinted through the windows. No digital alarm clock reflected red numbers off of the lacquered top of his nightstand. Nothing. His eyes still looked for these things when he first woke up.
Her voice drifted out of the darkness, reedier than usual.
“We have a chance to do something special here and now. Something that will outlive us by a long shot. Something for our child.”
Though he couldn’t see her, the picture of her pregnant belly took shape in his mind, that oblong swell of flesh in her middle, the skin pulled all taut in such a manner that it sometimes looked fake, like she was smuggling a cantaloupe or something under a layer of flesh-toned latex.
“I’ve seen it firsthand,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Seen it?”
“Faith healings and the various other parlor tricks you’re talking about. Mediums. Healers. We used to put them on the bill as opening acts whenever we went on the road. In the early days, I mean, before my face was all over TV. The gimmick-hawkers drew big crowds that they didn’t know what to do with, but I guess that’s where I came in.”
He fell quiet for a moment, and the darkness seemed to deepen around them, like maybe there wasn’t a ceiling up there at all, just the abyss.
“It’s show business, right? These guys provided the visual spectacle. The special effects. You watch a guy hop up out of a wheelchair, or a tumor get plucked from someone’s gut, blood smeared everywhere, it’s a striking image. Even when you know it’s fake, it’s a striking image. And the breath just gets sucked out of the room every time. People want to believe, you know? They need something to believe, and here’s something right in front of them that sure looks the part. Flesh and blood that their eyes can see, can believe.”
He scratched his chin, stubble bristling at his touch. The scrape of fingernail against facial hair seemed loud in the still of the night.
“Those guys didn’t know how to form a bond with the audience, though. They didn’t know how to make strangers identify with them, how to make them feel empathy for them. They could never stop selling that spectacle, stop selling themselves as miracle workers. That worked great in the short term. Every big gathering got them a bucketful of cash, but how do you keep it going? How do you form a bond, an ongoing relationship? You can’t pull out that flashy stuff to the same people every day. It loses all meaning.”
She sniffled, and he thought she was about to say something, but she didn’t. After a beat, he went on.
“You have to make yourself vulnerable. Open up and let them see that there’s blood in your veins, too, that you bleed and hurt just the way they do when something wounds you. That’s how you hook ‘em for good. Peel off the bandage to show ‘em your wound. The one that’s red and angry around the edges. The one that never quite heals.
“People think marketing is about getting someone else to do what you want, and I guess that becomes the end result, but marketing is about relationships. Relationships are about trust and communication. If I communicate with you to the degree that you feel like you know me and you trust me, then I don’t have to sell you anything. Not really. You will want to buy before it even comes to that.”
He trailed away there, feeling like he’d diverted from his original point, and she spoke:
“That doesn’t sound so bad to me. We can use this venue to draw a big crowd, and you can form a relationship with them. We’re not tricking anyone ultimately. We’re not taking anything from them. We’re helping them find a community, and they’re helping us grow ours.”
“All based on a lie. Or a series of lies.”
“White lies. Think of it this way. Do you think the world is worth fighting for? Do you think a path to redemption exists for us, both as individuals and as a group? As parents-to-be?”
“I must. I’m still here.”
“Well, you can believe it’s that way, and I can believe it’s that way, but it’s like you said. Everyone else, they need to see it to believe it. They need their eyes to believe it for their heart to believe it. We’re giving them that, and that’s as far as it goes.”
“I just… I thought I was done with it is all. Done duping people, done lying and cheating and selling false hope.”
“That’s just pride, though, isn’t it? What you think is best is sitting right in front of us. Turning away from it is pride.”
He blinked a few times, unable to visually tell the difference in the dark, though he could feel his eyelids sliding over the wet of his eyes, feel the lashes peel apart from each other.
He wanted to tell her that this kind of thing is a corrupting force for everyone with a hand in it, but he
couldn’t. Maybe she was right in a way. And maybe he could hold onto the darkness himself, hold the corruption in his skull so she’d never have to know the awful truth of it. Maybe he could keep her safe, keep the baby safe.
“I’ll do it, alright? But let’s talk about the particulars in the morning.”
She fumbled toward him in the dark and kissed him on the bridge of his nose.
He closed his eyes, but he didn’t sleep. He listened to her breathing slow down. She was out within a few minutes, but he kept listening for a long while anyway.
There would be a price, he knew. He couldn’t convey that to her, perhaps, but there would be a price for this choice.
Erin
Rural West Virginia
265 days after
Erin ducked under a load of lumber tied up in the back of a crumpled truck. She was taking her time with this recon mission. It looked all clear, but she wanted to be sure. Not like the overpass situation. If Marcus and Izzy had been there… Well, she tried not to think about how that might have gone.
So far though, this end of the bridge looked as deserted as the other side. Erin slid under an eighteen-wheeler and crawled to the other side. Bits of gravel stuck to her palms, and she paused to brush the grit from her hands before continuing on. She passed between two cars forever frozen in gridlock, scanning for movement. Nothing. And then she heard the almost-musical tinkle of glass shattering. Her head whipped around. It had definitely come from the other side of the bridge.
A few moments later, a scream pierced the air.
Izzy.
She straightened, no longer concerned about sneaking, and then she was sprinting back over the bridge. The pavement thudded under her boots as she ran down the length of the semi and squeezed past the lumber truck.
A break in the wreckage provided a glimpse of Marcus inside the office trailer. He was at one of the windows, knocking glass away from the frame. What was he doing in there? And where was Izzy?
Her first thought was that the men from the overpass had found them.