For a moment, Matt’s eyes flittered over Earl’s shoulder and his smile broadened until it looked as if he were shooting a dental commercial in the midst of a blizzard. When he next spoke, his voice was much louder as he squatted down and picked up a handful of snow.
“Killing your mother… that was something else. A real hoot, as you’d say. You should have heard her. The screams, the crying… the way she clung to me like a frightened kid just before I tossed her ass down those stairs.”
By this time Matt had stood again and he drew back his arm like a baseball player winding up for a pitch. Hurling the snowball at Earl, he continued talking, his voice loud and rapid.
“You should’ve stayed down out there in the forest.”
Earl tried to dodge the projectile but it splatted against his face squarely and exploded in a shower of snow.
“You should have just laid out there and let the storm bury you and then things might not have turned out this way. If nothing else, you could’ve hid out there in the woods. Let us think you were dead and then come crawling back home once we were on our merry way. But, no. You had to think you were Mr, Tough Guy, didn’t you? You had to have your revenge. How’s that working out for ya, sport?”
Earl staggered forward as if barely clinging to consciousness. He’d turned the useless gun over in his hand so that he now held it by the barrel and brandished it like a club. Matt, however, seemed nonplused by the man’s stop and go aggression. He continued scooping handfuls of snow from the ground, rolling them into loose balls, and lobbing them at his attacker. And the entire time his monologue continued in its rapid fire delivery.
“Your little plaything’s dead. Your mother’s dead. Your brother’s dead. And soon, you’ll be dead, too. See, me and Mona we’ve been at this a long, long time. That I-77 killer they’ve been prattling on and on about on the radio? Yeah, that’s us. You won’t be the first family we’ve killed, not by a long shot. But I can say this: you were certainly the most interesting.”
A snowball thudded against Earl’s chest as Matt hopped from foot to foot.
“You know what your downfall was, Goliath? Your anger. I had to teach my wife how to channel hers, just like my Daddy taught me. But you? You let it blind you. You let it lead you into my little trap out there in the woods. It’s the reason you’ve got more arrows in you than a flowchart. And it’s also the reason why you’ve been listening to me prattle on and on without every realizing that this was about to happen.”
Earl never heard the whoosh of the crutch as it cut through the air. Just as he’d never heard Mona making her way through the snow as Matt’s taunts covered the sound of her progress. One moment, he was simply trying to focus on the snowball tossing asshole in front of him; and the next, pain shot through the back of his skull as a flash of brilliant light exploded in his field of vision.
He fell to his knees and wobbled there as his hands touched the back of his head and came away bloody. Before he’d even had a chance to comprehend what this might mean, however, Mona swung the crutch again. This time, it thudded against his temple and, as the world went dark, Earl Gruber fell face first into the snow.
At first, he was only aware of muffled voices that sounded as if they were originating from somewhere in the back of his head. No real words. Just a lull that rose and fell in volume. Bit by bit, the sounds began to string themselves into words; with comprehension there also came a pounding pain in the back of his head that was ten times worse than any hangover he’d ever suffered through.
“… sit him up.”
“Damn it, Mona, I’m doing my best. He’s a big fucking guy.”
His body was being jostled. He could feel his rolls of fat jiggling as he was shifted and positioned and, somehow, he knew that was no longer outside. It smelled like home here. Slightly musty, a trace of Mama’s powder lingering in the air…
His eyelids fluttered open, but there were only blobs of color where detail should be.
Was he sitting up? It felt like he was sitting up….
“Shit, sweetie, he’s coming to. Be a dear and whack him again, okay?”
His head jerked to the side as something hard and unforgiving slammed into his cheek. Darkness overtook him again and when reality next reasserted itself, it did so with pain unlike any he’d ever known.
It’d taken a lot of work, but Matt and Mona had managed to drag Earl’s unconscious body into the house. By the time they’d made it through the front door, they’d both collapsed in the foyer and lay there, panting in each other’s arms and grinning like a young couple who’d just lost their virginity. Earl had moaned once or twice, but every time the large man had seemed to be coming around, Mona would swing her crutch with a well placed shot to the temple.
Dragging his fat ass up the stairs had probably been the hardest part. It’d taken close to an hour, with frequent breaks so that Matt could pant for air while he stretched his aching back. By the time they’d made it to the little hallway at the top, Mona had knocked Earl into oblivion so many times that the crutch was bent and the side of his face was nothing more than a swollen bruise.
Now the large man was propped in a chair with his arms stretched out before him. His head lay on a tabletop and the couple stood on either side of him, smiling at one another.
“You ready to do it?” Matt asked playfully.
Mona nodded her head so quickly that she looked like one of the bobble-heads people put on the dashboards of their car.
“Yeah,” she said, “I wanna see what it’s like. See what the big deal was.”
“Okay then, sweetie. One the count of three. One….”
“I love you, Mattie.”
“I love you, too baby.”
“You said two.”
Mona’s eyes sparkled and she winked at Matt, who smiled back.
“Did not. I said too, not two.”
“Same difference.”
“Two….”
“Now you’re just repeating yourself.”
“Three!”
The couple simultaneously swung the hammers that Mona had found in the shed behind the house after they’d killed Mary. The metal hit the heads of the spikes that their other hands held in position, but the metallic ting was overpowered by the bloodcurdling scream that blasted from Earl’s wide mouth. His eyelids flew open as the sharp tips of the nails rammed through his hands but by then Matt and Mona had already swung again. The nails thudded further into the same tabletop that they’d found Darlene Honnicker impaled to and Earl tried to yank his hands away from the torture that burned within them. But it was too late: he was securely staked to the butchers block table and the action did nothing more than send bolts of agony racing along his arms.
“So,” Matt asked as he stepped back to admire their handiwork, “what do you think?”
“I don’t know…. I mean, it goes with the room and all. But it’s just not my style, you know? I’m just not into the whole shabby-chic thing.”
Matt shrugged and picked up the red can that sat by his feet.
“Yeah, I can see what you mean. It seems… I don’t know, kind of like American Gothic meets The Scream. Interesting conversation piece, for certain. But, in the end, it’s just not us.”
As he spoke, Matt walked around the room, liberally splashing gasoline on the floor and table. He walked out of the room backwards, leaving a wet trail to mark his passing and continued through the bedroom and into the hall. When the can was nearly empty, he screwed off the little spout, returned to the windowless room, and doused the rest over Earl’s flailing body. The fumes were sharp and pungent and wavered in the air like heat in the desert. Almost immediately, he and Mona began coughing as their eyes watered with tears.
“Come on, Mattie… let’s blow this joint.”