Marcy jumped in after him, planting a foot at either side of his prone form. Michael groaned and looked up at her through a mist of tears. He still couldn’t believe what was happening to him. The dumb bastard. Marcy adjusted her grip on the shovel handle, taking it by the base and holding it in front of her like a jackhammer. Michael squealed and tried to back away, but there was nowhere to go. The back of his head connected with moist earth and he stopped moving. His mouth opened to issue a last plea for mercy.
Then Marcy squatted and drove the shovel blade into his throat. A fountain of blood erupted around the dirty blade, and Marcy watched the gory cascade with a mixture of revulsion and fascination. Michael bucked beneath her and flailed at the shovel handle. He had to know he was doomed by now, but he was fighting her with everything he had. She leaned forward and used upper body leverage to drive the blade deeper into his throat. The grind of steel on bone made her stomach lurch, but she kept bearing down and finally Michael died.
She swallowed hard and let go of the shovel handle. Her heart was racing and her breathing was shallow. She stared at Michael’s very still face and tried to make herself feel something other than numbness. The strange positive buzz of before seemed to have at least temporarily deserted her. She stared into the boy’s unseeing eyes and tried to discern some hint of the human being he’d been, but whatever he’d possessed that had made him uniquely Michael was gone forever.
And she’d caused that. She was a killer. She thought about the bum in Overton Park the previous summer, recalling vividly the way he’d dropped and not moved after the second blow to his head with the heavy wine bottle. They’d taken his booze and pitiful handful of pocket change. Marcy remembered the way the dark blood had oozed from the gash at the back of his head to stain the grass beneath him. She was almost positive he hadn’t been breathing when they’d left him. There’d never been any verification of the homeless man’s death. But Marcy’s gut told her she’d become a murderer for the first time that summer evening.
This was different in so many meaningful ways. The old wino had been little more than a walking casualty anyway, a ruined shell of a man no one could possibly care about, as evidenced by the silence of the local media on the matter. It was as if he’d never existed at all. But she’d known Michael since childhood. Had watched him grow up and struggle to fit in before gravitating to her little clique of outcasts. She knew his likes and dislikes. His favorite bands and books. She knew each member of his family by name. In a way killing Michael was sort of like killing family.
She touched his face, stroked his cooling cheek. “I’m sorry this happened, Michael. If only you’d been quiet and fallen in line like the rest of them…” As she said the words, the vague sense of purpose—of destiny—she’d felt earlier reasserted itself. “I did what I had to do, damn you. Wherever you are now, I hope you know that. But I’m sorry anyway, okay?”
The dead boy said nothing.
Marcy got to her feet and hauled herself out of the hole.
Then she noticed for the first time that the front of her clothes was splattered with sticky, coagulating blood. There was more gore on her hands and arms. Shit, it was everywhere. She’d have a hell of a time explaining all that blood to everyone back at the house. Then there was the matter of Michael’s absence. It wouldn’t be terribly difficult to put two and two together.
Dammit!
Marcy flicked blood from her hands and shook her head in disgust. This was what she got for acting rashly and not thinking things through. But the burst of self-directed anger soon dissipated. She’d done this thing and there was no way she could take it back. She could only move forward and maybe devise a way out of this mess on the fly.
She spied the pile of freshly turned earth next to the grave and had an idea. She grabbed a shovel and dug into the pile, working feverishly to return the earth to the hole. She stopped when she reached the concealed layer of topsoil at the bottom, the damp earth that was nearly like mud. She knelt next to the diminished pile and scooped up handfuls of the dark soil. And she smeared the damp dirt across the front of her shirt. The mud blended nicely with the blood, effectively obscuring the gore without cleansing it, which would have to be good enough for now. She smeared more handfuls of mud over the front of her jeans. Using the remaining water from her bottle, she was able to remove most of the dried blood that clung to her forearms.
She would look more of a mess than she should, she supposed. As for Michael, she would tell the others he’d gone for a walk. The fiction should buy her some time, maybe enough to clean up and concoct a better story.
Satisfied that she’d done all she could do to cover up what had happened, she turned away from the half-filled grave and began the short trek out of the woods. She soon emerged through a line of trees and entered the large field behind her house. The field was overgrown with weeds and was dotted here and there with ancient, discarded farm equipment. Marcy trudged through the weeds toward the house, which sat on a hill a quarter mile away.
She and her sister had inherited the property a year ago, after their parents were killed when their Subaru stalled on some train tracks. They were drunk and messed up on some other stuff. As usual. With the radio blasting, maybe. And so they probably never heard the blaring horn of the locomotive that eventually plowed into them, crushing them like bugs in a can. Marcy initially had a vague notion about reviving the property as a farming enterprise. But she’d soon recognized the idea as foolhardy. She wasn’t up to all the work it would require anyway.
Most people would love to have a place of their own that was paid for, but Marcy mostly found it to be a pain in the ass. She was bad at remembering to pay things on time. And there was so much to remember. Property taxes, water bills, power bills, and miscellaneous upkeep expenses out the goddamned wazoo. She’d already squandered much of the money her parents had left behind, of which there’d not been very much, and there was no new money coming in. The prospect of having to get a job filled her with dread and made her want to bolt. She wondered if the crazy things that had happened since the summer—the murder of the bum, the abduction of the woman, and Michael’s slaying—were symptoms of some kind of self-destructive downward spiral. Then she thought about that some more and laughed. The laughter was manic, verging on hysterical.
She reached the rear door of the house and—as silently as possible—let herself into the empty kitchen.
She heard muffled but obviously agitated voices. The sound seemed to be coming from the living room. Moving as stealthily as possible, she crossed the kitchen and entered the hallway that led to her bedroom. She paused at the archway that led to the living room. The voices suddenly stilled. Not that it mattered. She’d heard enough to know they were talking about her. And not in a positive way.
She glanced in and smiled weakly at their apprehensive faces. “We’re about done. Michael’s gone for a walk, but he should be back shortly. I’m gonna get cleaned up and then we can talk everything out, okay?”
Ellen was sitting away from the others. She was on the floor in a corner of the room, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her eyes were full of tears when she looked at her sister. Then she frowned, noticing the mud on Marcy’s clothes. “Are you . . . okay?”
Marcy made her smile go brighter and nodded. “Yes. Absolutely. Cheer up, little girl. Everything’s going to be just fine.”