Gristle & Bone

by Duncan Ralston

  She turned to Meat, who smiled goofily. "Are you sure he's a virgin?" she asked Kevin.

  "Why would I lie about that?"

  "I dunno," she said. "You just seem like the type."

  "What type?"

  "A liar," she said with a smirk.

  Kevin laughed, trying to keep the camera steady. There was something familiar about that smile he couldn't quite put a finger on, so he zoomed in until her slick pink lips filled the screen, blurred and pixelated, as he hoped for a revelation. Nothing came.

  "I like this chick," he said, zooming out wide.

  "Me too," Meat said, leaning in closer to her. The tent in his shorts seemed to agree.

  IAN WATCHED THEM peel away from the mall from the driver's seat of his microcar. Kevin hated the thing, and refused to ever sit in the passenger seat—which was just fine by his little brother, who preferred to drive alone. He only drove the girls out of necessity, not because he was interested in their company. Most of them weren't very interesting conversationalists, anyhow. They talked about their modeling careers, how Meat's dick had torn them up inside, the latest celebrity trends, fashion. All except Amber Dillon, who'd attempted to act like a ditz, but had slipped up and identified quotes from Kierkegaard and Proust when he'd oh-so-casually rhymed them off during their pre-shoot vetting. Unfortunately, Ian had never had the chance to have her in the seat beside him.

  The fact still plagued him: if he hadn't popped a tire at the exact wrong moment, she might have lived.

  No Jim Alan Biggs. No police investigation. No scores of reporters still haranguing them for interviews to this day. He and Amber would have had a nice, pleasant conversation as he drove her home. Maybe he would have asked her on a date, though he doubted he would have had the guts. Even if he had, she likely would have shot him down. She was an eleven, a million on the Scoville scale, and educated, too. Not to mention the fact that he was a pornographer, ten years her senior. Amber Dillon had dug a hole down to their level, had slummed there for a few hours, raped and murdered as a consequence, her gored remains left under the Tuttle, clothing and flesh torn in neat shreds by Biggs's utility knife. He'd cut her throat while he fucked her, then carved off her clitoris and labia, leaving her with nothing but a gaping red hole between her legs. He had torn off both nipples and areolae with his teeth (they were never found, and police suspected he'd eaten them), gouged out her right eye without damaging the eyelids and left it hanging over her ear, the eyelids sucked in like the lips of a toothless old man. The other eye he had left pulled wide open, staring up at the underside of the Causeway. Inexplicably, he'd removed her left shoe, as he'd done to all of his victims. There seemed to be a method to his madness, though it was never deciphered, nor had he revealed it himself. He'd laid Amber out like some macabre tableau, a ghastly, Ripper-like exhibition of the finitude of mortality, and depravity without bounds.

  Karl turned right onto Northeast 36th, and Ian grew concerned. Where the hell is he going? he wondered. First he peels out from the curb like a madman, gonna get us nabbed by the cops, and now he's driving toward—

  "The Causeway," he said aloud, pounding a fist on the steering wheel. "What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing, Kevin?"

  As they crossed Biscayne, the van suddenly began to swerve.

  Caught behind a freight truck pulling onto the Causeway, Ian couldn't see the van up ahead until it slammed through the guardrail and bounded down the slight grass rise along the Interstate. He nearly swerved off the road himself watching it happen, bumping along in the ditch until he steadied the car, easing off the gas. He pulled over on the side of the road, unbuckled, and got out. Another trucker blew past, blasting the horn. Ian flattened himself against the car door until it was gone, then hurried around the front and vaulted over the guardrail.

  The tires had carved ruts in the dead grass to where the van had smashed into a tree, radiator smoking, the front end crumpled. The sliding door opened as Ian ran toward it, hoping his brother was okay, hoping the other guys hadn't been hurt too badly. Hoping the girl was uninjured, too—they didn't need another tragedy occurring so close to the place where Jim Alan Biggs had left Amber Dillon's mutilated remains.

  It was Zara who stumbled out. Ian had gotten close enough to see she was bleeding, and it must have been a deep cut or a head wound, because she was drenched in it. She looked terrified, her blue eyes dazed as she weaved back and forth for a moment before finding her footing, arms held out to steady herself as if she were walking on a tightrope.

  "Zara? What happened? Are you okay?"

  The girl startled at his voice. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but let loose a scream, so high and tremulous he felt it crawl up his spine.

  "It's okay," he said, approaching her with his hands held out. "Everything's gonna be okay." He couldn't make himself sound convincing. She ran from him, tripped on the grass and fell weeping to her knees, fingers digging into her damp hair at the scalp and pulling, like a woman possessed.

  Ian stopped at the opened van door. His hands rose reflexively to cover his mouth, a habit he'd picked up from his mother before she'd left the Howard brothers home alone with Daddy and had never come back.

  "No," he said, barely a whisper, further muted by his hands. "Oh, God..."

  A massacre...

  Holding the door to steady himself, his guts rebelled, but nothing came up when he doubled over, just a dry, hacking cough that ended in futile retching.

  She did this? That skinny little thing?

  Ian moved toward her, menacing now. He stopped again and bent at the waist, gagging and coughing up a thick wad of saliva he spat on the grass. "What did you do to my brother, you crazy bitch?"

  Zara recoiled, kneeling on the balding lawn, her butt resting on the bruised backs of her legs. She shook her head violently, muttered something so quiet that Ian couldn't hear her above the swish of traffic—although he was standing over her now, hands unconsciously balled into fists. Her own hands lay limp at her sides, painted with the blood of his brother and friends.

  "It wasn't..." She took a deep, shuddering breath before finishing: "...me."

  "No? Then who the fuck was it, Zara? Everyone else is—" The lump in his throat wouldn't swallow. "Everyone else is dead."

  Ian had seen the horror in a single glance. He was in no rush to experience that grim tableau again, but he realized he would need to get the tape before the cops showed up. They would want it as evidence, and he would never get to see what Kevin had recorded, what had happened to his big brother, and—he loathed to admit—his friends.

  "It was her," Zara muttered from behind him, as he moved toward the van, its door lay open like the entrance to the world's most macabre carnival ride. Ian peered back over his shoulder. Zara stared off cold at the underside of the bridge, where until 2010 sex offenders had made their home, and where, in 2005, Jim Alan Biggs had placed Amber Dillon's body, a gruesome gift to the gods of Magic City.

  "Her," Zara repeated.

  The sharp stench of urine and iron-rich blood stung his nostrils as he climbed into the van on his hands and knees. Kevin had been skewered to the passenger seat, Karl's sword plunged through his chest. His blood had soaked the back of that seat; the tip of the blade peeked out from between his shoulder blades. It was sharp, but it hadn't been used it years, and should have been dulled. Without assistance, Zara simply could not have plunged it through the seat and through Kevin's chest. She couldn't have cut Ugly's head clean off with a single blow, the stump of his neck so smooth it looked like it had been done with a table saw. Despite these physical impossibilities, the evidence said otherwise: aside from the three of them, the van was empty. Unless she'd somehow convinced them to do each other in, Zara Chase, 110 pounds soaking wet, had slaughtered them all by herself, and in less than ten minutes.

  Her, she'd said. As if she'd disconnected from herself.

  Meat's glassy eyes seemed to follow Ian's progress as he hunted for the camera. His genitals had been mut
ilated, chest and throat scratched deeply. Snatching looks at the body to be sure it hadn't moved, his left hand squelched on the carpet, leaving a full handprint in the blood. Jesus, he thought, jerking his hand away and wiping it on his cargo shorts. Jesus, I'm so fucked. Inspired, he pressed his bare knee into the handprint, hoping to obliterate it. The cold, tacky feel of it on his skin made him gag again. When he raised his knee from the carpet, the shape of his hand was gone.

  The camera had fallen from Kevin's hand beside Zara's shopping bags, which had tipped over and appeared to be empty. He brushed them aside and snatched the camera, ejected the tape and pocketed it in his shorts. His own shoulder bag, which he'd been wise enough to bring along (though he'd forgotten he was wearing it), held several blank tapes. He jammed one into the compartment and snapped it shut, then backed out of the van on his knees, avoiding the spreading stain.

  His gaze fell on his big brother, and the bleeding, wormy thing shoved into the O of Kevin's mouth. His gorge rose again when he realized what it was, and he barely made it out of the van before everything came up, a boozy, chunky mess splattering on the grass between his feet.

  Zara was still crying, head in her hands. He thought about going to her, but instead he backed away, as the sound of sirens rose in the distance. Once his back was turned on the scene of the crime, he felt a sudden urge to run, and when he got to his car he didn't spare a single look back, only dropped it into drive and spun his tires, peeling away from the side of the Interstate as fast as the little electric thing would go. He drove all the way to the Surprise Lake canal before he realized he was on the wrong side of the bridge.

  On his way back across the Tuttle, police cars had lined up along the guardrail, the EMS and a fire truck, bubble lights spinning. A cop in an orange safety vest flagged westbound traffic through. The scene was a zoo: cops, plainclothes detectives, forensics, the EMTs leading a hysterical Zara Chase, draped with a gray blanket, to the ambulance. They'd find his prints on the camera. Once they realized who the victims were, they'd wonder why Kevin hadn't recorded the session, leaving them with only a blank tape.

  Then they'll come for me, Ian thought, and his foot reflexively pushed on the accelerator.

  BACK AT THE house in Coconut Grove, Ian popped the tape into the player and rewound it to the beginning. He brought a bottle of Macallan 18 back to his chair, and pushed Play.

  Kevin's voiceover, zooming in on Zara with her hands full of bags out front of The Shops. "It's Thursday, around one o'clock. We're at The Shops, in the parking lot, and it looks like Little Bo Peep here's lost her—"

  He fast-forwarded.

  "—to do. You want this?" the girl asked, and yanked off Meat's shorts, going down on him with zero hesitation. Ian watched, mesmerized, until Zara rose from Meat's groin. "Now are we gonna fucking drive, or—"

  Fast-forward: a blowjob in high speed. But suddenly Zara had the sword in her hands, pointing it at Kevin, at Meat, and Ian rewound the tape. Pushed Play.

  "I want you to take me where it happened," Zara said calmly, sitting beside Meat with her nipples poking out from above her top.

  Kevin's voice, from behind the camera: "To where what happened, sweetie?"

  Her eyes looked dark on camera, more like brown than blue. "You know what I mean," she said.

  "No, seriously, honey, I don't—"

  "She means the overpass." This was Karl. Meat's jaw dropped, eyebrows upturning. The camera swung toward the driver.

  "How the fuck do you know what she means?"

  Karl never took his eyes off the road. They passed the truck (the one Ian had been stuck behind when the van hit the guardrail). "I saw her," Karl said. He ran his tongue over his braces. "The other day, in the rearview, when we dropped off the girl. I saw her, man!"

  "Don't you fuckin' say it, Karl. I will kick your fuckin' ass if you say her name."

  Karl's fluffy chin quivered, but he said nothing. The camera swooped back, pausing on Zara's shopping bags. For some unknown reason Kevin zoomed in on one, until its emptiness filled the screen. Movement within startled Ian—black, writhing movement. He sat up rigidly, and moved closer.

  Earth and insects filled the screen. Worms. Beetles. Flies. Crawling and wriggling over each other, moving blindly in the dirt. Scavengers of the grave.

  "What the hell?" was all Ian could think to say, rolling back in the chair to get away from the image on the screen. His brother breathed something similar from behind the camera.

  The video distorted, garbled, and the bag was empty again: a grotesque magic trick. Kevin zoomed out so both Zara and Meat were in frame, side by side.

  "Take me to where I died," Zara muttered. Her words would have been barely audible if Ian hadn't cranked up the speakers. Meat turned to look at her, eyes wide in growing fear.

  "She's fucking crazy," Kevin said. "Fucking loony tunes."

  "Take me to where I died!"

  The image shook at her scream. The picture broke apart in a digital garble.

  Ian rewound the tape, then played it back in slow-mo. The distortion, the digital artifacting, seemed to originate from Zara, and it followed her as she rose to grab Karl's katana off the wall. She was spatial, temporal garbage, a digital Picasso of ones and zeroes, blocky chunks of her image scattered over the entire frame—a pixelated, polychrome hot mess.

  Her voice became distorted. He thought he heard Kevin, vaguely, incanting that most forbidden of names: "Amber? No, Amber, don't—!"

  The sharp snick of the blade silenced him, and the camera fell from his hand, rolling on the floor of the van next to Karl's severed head. The lens struggled to focus on Karl's scruffy mustache, before the video ended with a stark blue screen.

  The rest of the tape was blank.

  Ian rewound it to a few frames before her image fractured the first time. He was drunk now, and the sun had dipped behind the giant Ficus outside his window; its massive branches, draped in Spanish moss, made a canopy over the street. The den had grown dark, the kitchen lights lambent. He hadn't bothered to reach back and turn on the overhead, probably couldn't even have managed it in his drunkenness. The screens gave the room a bluish glow as he stared at a freeze-frame close-up of Zara's face, a jittery image, shifting between two frames. He sat up abruptly, the leather chair creaking, and moved in so close to the main monitor he could feel it prickling all the little hairs on his face.

  In one frame, Zara's eyes were blue, just like they'd been when he'd met her. In the other—and the certainty of it made him swig again from the half-empty bottle—they were brown.

  The kitchen lights flickered, then went out.

  Ian threw a look over his shoulder, fear dulled by the alcohol.

  A shape moved in the dark beyond the kitchen island. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until sparkles danced behind his eyelids. Then he pulled them away, blinking sharply into the darkness.

  The shape in the kitchen jittered, grew larger, spreading out beyond the gas range and his La Marzocco espresso maker. It moved jerkily over the island, through the island, turning every physical thing it touched into swirling, agitated pixels. Convulsing. Churning.

  "Amber."

  He spoke her name on a whisper, and the looming pillar of digital smoke took on her fluctuating, nebulous form. The Amber manifestation flickered and buzzed through the living room and into the den, wearing the face, the eyes, the lips of a thousand women: mothers, lovers, saints. "Amber, I'm so sorry." He had to shout over the churning din of white noise. "I'm sorry!"

  The monstrous cloud wouldn't stop, swallowing up more and more of the room in its digital cyclone, deafening as it bore down on Ian.

  Ten years, he thought. The bottle dropped to his feet, spilling liquor the color of her name onto the carpet. It was almost a relief when he let Amber take him.

  From the Miami Sun, pg. 4:

  ...The coincidences are too significant to ignore: the sexual assault and murder of Amber Dillon, a Psychology student whose life was cut trag
ically short after going undercover in the seedy underbelly of the Miami porn industry, and the apparent revenge murders of Filthy Lessons operators, Ian and Kevin Waterman, by 19-year-old Dana Gallagher and an unknown accomplice. Both crimes occurred in the same location, on the embankment under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, very near what was once a refuge for registered sex offenders.

  Gallagher, an undergraduate student at the University of Miami, which Dillon herself had attended, came from a religious background, with no history of delinquency. According to sources, Gallagher and her friends had performed a séance several nights prior to the incident, replete with Ouija board, during which Gallagher had jokingly asked to speak with Dillon, ostensibly from beyond the grave. It is in the opinion of this reporter that the account is a highly dubious attempt to create an urban legend... and an especially insensitive one, in light of ongoing tragedies of its ilk.

  Gallagher herself claims not to remember any details leading up to or after the incident. She remains in custody until the date of her trial.

  //END USER

  THE DAY THE world ended, Mason Adler's phone woke him with an email from himself.

  Without his glasses, he had to blink away the sleep dust and bring the screen closer to read it in the dim morning light falling through the blinds. He scanned the address letter by letter, then read it again backwards to be sure he hadn't missed one, certain he must be mistaken. But no, his address and the sender's were the same. The subject line read, simply: READ ME.

  Mason selected the message, hovering his finger over Delete. Ignoring the voice of reason (which often sounded like his big brother, Mike), he opened it.

  PLEASE REPLY, it read. No more or less than that.

  He frowned, clicked Reply, and typed PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST! in angry all-caps. Without a second thought, he sent it.

  The phone buzzed instantly, the new message indicator dinging its cheerful Doonk!

  Three messages awaited reading in his inbox. One was from his parents (with the subject More Notes from the Road; they were driving across the States, and his dad liked to give their emails titles that sounded like books), and one from his brother with no subject line. Probably some disgusting JPEG Mike had found in one of the darker corners of the net, as was his custom. The newest was from Mason Adler. Suspicion building, Mason read it.