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.”
The smile fell off her face as she turned away from them and continued down the hallway. Her room was at the very end of the hallway. The door was still closed. No one-not even Marcy-had managed to work up the nerve to venture into the room again. And no wonder. The woman bound to her bed possessed some level of telekinetic or supernatural ability. Marcy experienced a chill as she recalled the way the woman had reached into her mind and temporarily shut down her motor control. She wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of being in the strange woman’s presence again. But there was just no way around it-she needed something in the room.
As she neared the door, she detected a stench emanating from the other side. The source, of course, was Sonia’s corpse, which remained exactly where it had fallen several hours earlier. Marcy paused at the door, her hand hovering shakily over the doorknob. She put her ear against the thin wood and listened for any indication that the woman was awake. She heard nothing at first, but then detected the low sound of very shallow breathing. Not giving herself a chance to think about it any further, Marcy gripped the doorknob and turned it, rushed into the room and closed the door behind her.
Her gaze went immediately to the woman tied to her bed. She was lying very still. Her head was turned to one side, a sheaf of jet-black hair falling across her face like a veil. Her chest rose and fell very slightly, and the softest of snores confirmed that she was asleep.
Marcy hurried to the dresser to the left of the bed. She knelt and opened the bottom drawer, brushing aside some puttering-around-the-house raggedy clothes to find the L-shaped lunk of metal concealed at the bottom. The 9mm Glock felt good in her hands, the molded plastic grip seeming to adhere to her flesh like a living thing. She stood up and looked at the sleeping woman. It would be so easy to kill her now and remove one big fucking problem once and for all.
But the others would hear the shot and freak. Maybe run.
She swallowed hard.
Just do it.
“Right.”
She went to the door and opened it smoothly, stepping back into the hallway with as much stealth as she could muster. She was midway to the living room archway when Michael’s cousin stepped into the hallway, saw her holding the gun, and opened his mouth wide.
Marcy raised the gun and squeezed the trigger.
The bullet hit his chest dead center. Redness like a rose petal stained the front of his shirt as his body was propelled backward. Marcy blanked all thought from her mind then. She hurried into the living room and saw that the other boys were on their feet. Two of them were standing near the sofa and screaming at her. The other one, an Asian kid named Kim, was edging toward the front door. Marcy swung the Glock in Kim’s direction and squeezed off two shots. One whizzed by him and punched through drywall. The second drilled a hole through the back of his head. Then she swung the gun back toward the remaining two boys, who were backing away from her now, their faces shiny with tears as they begged for their lives. Marcy squeezed the Glock’s trigger two more times and both boys fell dead to the floor.