She must have drug herself away, perhaps to somewhere safer. Or maybe there was a phone down here. Maybe she’d been trying to claw her way to it so she could call for help.
“Daryl….”
Her voice was louder now, but only because he was closer to the source. It still sounded raspy and pained, as if each breath might be her last.
“I’m here, Mama! I’m comin’ for ya.”
The cellar was cluttered with bloated cardboard boxes that smelled of mildew, appliances that Earl had hauled down over the years, and a lifetime’s worth of castoffs. His Daddy’s old tools, dress forms that almost looked like dismembered torsos floating atop a sea of junk. So much stuff that it’d take forever for him to find her on his own.
“Keep talkin,’ Mama. Guide me in. I’m comin’”
“Daryl, hurry… it hurts so bad.”
The old woman sounded as if she were nearly in tears and her son tore through the collected debris in a frenzy. Old newspapers fluttered in the air while boxes of books toppled their contents onto trunks that grated across the hard, bumpy floor.
“It hurts….”
“Hang on, Mama!”
He rounded what almost appeared to be a miniature Stonehenge of bookshelves and end tables and saw her feet poking out from behind an old chest freezer. Scrambling through the junk, he cried out in relief: “I see you! I see you, Mama! Hold on, I’m almost there!”
As he came to the freezer he fell to his knees, so intent on helping his wounded mother that the jolt of pain may have as well been half a world away. He grabbed her shoulder as tears trickled from his eyes.
“Mama, I….”
But something was wrong. Her skin was as cold as the floor he knelt on. She shouldn’t be that cold, should she? Even with blood loss, she….
His confusion was cut short as her head lolled to the side. Where her eyes should have been were what looked like two squished slugs and the tip of her tongue poked out from between lips as dark and blistered as a singed hot dog. The he noticed, for the first time, that her dress was ripped and tattered. The yellow fabric was covered with inkblot-like stains and the waxen flesh below was marred with ragged gashes. One of the pockets she’d sewn almost seemed to be peeling away and he saw something that looked like a thin wedge of metal lodged into her belly like the head of a large staple. However, the piece that still stuck from the skin looked jagged, as if it had actually been the part of something large and had broken off.
Another scene replaced the one he’d imagined earlier. In this retake, Mama still toppled down the stairs, but only after she’d been brutalized by that bitch and bastard. Maybe she was already dead when they tossed her down like a bag of garbage. Or perhaps that first tumble snapped her neck. But at some point, as she rolled down into the darkness, the handle had snapped off… it all made sense.
Daryl then noticed the semi-circular gash in her lower abdomen and the something glistening and pink that seemed to be trying to force its way through the cut. Lots of blood there. So much that it was impossible to tell that the dress had ever been yellow to begin within. And that was probably what killed her.
He shook his head vigorously as the weight of these thoughts finally sank in. When he’d first started noticing these things, his body had turned numb and that anesthetic-like feeling had quickly spread to his mind. He was actually able to think more clearly than he normally could… but, at the same time, he felt detached from the process. Almost as if it were a movie he were listening to as he faded off to sleep.
But now that feeling was beginning to fade.
Mama couldn’t be dead. She just couldn’t. If she were dead, then how did she call to him for help? How did she let him know that her body was even down here to begin with?
As Daryl struggled with these questions, Mona yanked on a piece of cord from her hiding place. The cord rounded one of the stair banisters and snaked up to the top of the steps. But when she pulled, the thin rope was drawn taut and the door it was tied to slammed shut.
Daryl sprang to his feet at the same moment Mona threw the switch on the breaker box and plunged the cellar into a darkness so complete that it seemed as if they’d been set adrift in space. She removed the welding goggles that had already adjusted her vision to the gloom and tried not to giggle as Daryl’s screams pierced the darkness. The acrid stench of urine flooded the air as he tripped and fell in the clutter and she suspected that by the time she was through playing, that shit would also add its pungency to this mess in the terrified man’s pants.
This was going to be even more fun than she’d hoped for….
SCENE SIXTEEN
Earl looked down at the dead body before him. No final snorts of air flared the nostrils, nor did the chest rise and fall even marginally. The dark eyes already had a glassy look to them, as if they’d been secretly replaced with marbles at the moment of death, and the pool of blood surrounding the body looked as if it had caused the snow to sink down ever so slightly. Almost as if its heat had melted through the top layer as the thick, red liquid spread out from the trio of bullet wounds that punctured its tawny fur.
The bellow that erupted from Earl’s throat escaped with such ferocity that has jowls shook as he threw back his head. Raising his fists to the sky, he punched at the air as if he could somehow sock whatever God was responsible for this squarely in the jaw. The tendons in his neck bulged and his eyes were clenched shut so tightly that the tears of frustration squeezed from them ran the risk of freezing his lashes together.
“A fuckin’ deer? Are you kidding me? A mother fuckin’ deer?”
On the short walk to the body, Earl had already figured everything out. He’d drag that dickhead out of the wood by the feet; Hell, would fireman carry the corpse if he had to. Once he’d made it back to the house, if Daryl hadn’t already killed her as well, he would have propped the dead body up on the living room chair and made it watch as he and Daryl took turns with that little cunt. And she would have been forced to look at it the entire time. He would have superglued her eyelids open if he’d had to. And then, the last thing she would see as the life drained out of her ravaged body would have been her sorry excuse for a man. The pathetic loser who couldn’t even manage to keep her safe.
And he’d been pretty certain that was the way it would have turned out. Daryl wasn’t capable of finding a Christian in church, much less one woman in a two story house. Earl wouldn’t have been surprised if his little brother were sitting in the police car with the doors locked and awaiting his return. It sounded like something that turd would do.
But now there was a chance that this beautiful plan had been flushed down the crapper. That piece of shit was still out here somewhere, still hiding and running through the woods. And, even though it was highly unlikely, there was the possibility that Daryl might actually find the woman. And an even slimmer chance that he wouldn’t get his ass kicked by her. And if Earl ended up hauling nearly two hundreds pounds of dead weight all the way back to the house for nothing, then someone was going to pay.
“I’ll find you yet, cock knocker. Mark my words.”
Stepping over the deer, Earl took up the trail again. Luckily, it wasn’t still coming down like it had earlier in the morning. If that type of accumulation had still been falling from the sky, then the footprints would have been all but covered now; there were hundreds of square acres of wilderness out here… miles and miles of nothing but trees, rocks, and hills. Unless you knew the landmarks, you could freeze to death before ever finding your way to a road or another house and, after that, it could be years before some hunter stumbled across your scattered bones. If you were ever found at all.