Ed kurtz, p.20
Ed Kurtz, page 20
Walt loomed over him now. The cleaver in his hand glinted in the light.
“Sorry, Brandon,” he said softly. “Wish you’d just stayed home.”
With that, the blade shot up high, ready to speed back down into Brandon’s skull.
Brandon gasped. Then he lunged forward and thrust his head into Walt’s groin. Walt groaned in pain and dropped the cleaver. The blade sank into the hardwood floor with a dull thud. Brandon made a tight fist and pounded it into the side of Walt’s head. With a startled mewl, Walt collapsed to the floor as Brandon leapt up to his feet.
Lurking just a few feet away, her rough, flaky hands curled into claws, Gwyn growled like a wild animal. She swiftly moved between Brandon and the front door. Brandon did not hesitate; he bolted for the back of the house, instead.
Walt grumbled something incoherent. Gwyn screamed.
Brandon could hear her huffing, her bare feet slapping rapidly against the floor as she ran after him.
He sank into the darkness of the back of the house. An instant later, he crashed against the backdoor. His fingers fumbled in the dark for the doorknob, found it and twisted the cold metal knob. It was unlocked. Brandon yanked hard, threw the door open and burst out into the frigid winter night.
The moon cast a gray sliver of dim light across the expanse of the backyard. Brandon sprinted into it, his lungs already hot and bursting from the exertion. He had to keep going; that thing was still close behind, hissing and scrambling after him. Between rasping breaths, it tittered and mumbled.
Brandon pumped his legs harder. Sweat seeped out of every pore in his head, instantly cooling in the freezing air and chilling his skin. He wanted to stop, to catch his breath, but he had to keep on. The dreadful image of poor Hershal, disemboweled and his dick and balls cut off, was burned into Brandon’s brain. It was enough to drive him on, keep him running, in his desperate fear of meeting the same ghastly fate.
Somehow, the worst part of it all was knowing that the woman ate it. Give it to me. That’s what they did. They killed people and cut them up and ate them.
A tiny squeak shot out of Brandon’s mouth when the ground disappeared underneath his feet. He only fell for a fraction of a second, but it seemed like he was drifting through space for a while. When he landed, he sank into softness rather than slamming against hard ground. It felt a bit like sand, but less densely packed.
Brandon scurried in the low place, losing his sense of which way was up and which was down. He kicked his legs and thrust his arms out. He felt like he was in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night. One hand rubbed against the slick, muddy wall of the hole he must have fallen into. Another sank deeper into the sandy morass around him, stopping when his fingers pressed against something hard. He felt around for its boundaries, determined that it was round and not too big to pull out. Brandon figured it might be good for a weapon.
Above him, pebbles and dirt skittered and rained down into the hole. The scabby woman. She roughly g i gg led .
“Little man,” she cooed awfully, “it’s not yet time to be down there. Don’t you know that’s where the scraps go?”
Brandon scowled. Finding purchase on the object in the powdery mound, he dug his fingers into it and yanked it out. It was only then that the hair tumbled down from the object’s top and coiled around Brandon’s hand and forearm. He was holding a rotting human head by its gaping eye sockets.
He shrieked and dropped the head. It smacked against the grainy surface, kicking up a cloud of the stuff. The substance floated into Brandon’s face, filling his mouth and nose and stinging his eyes. At first it was irritating. Then the burning agony set in. It was as if acid had been poured into his eyes and down his throat.
He clawed at his face, frantic to rub the smoldering powder away, but he only made it worse. His hands were covered with it, too. The acerbic powder reached his lungs, his chest contracted painfully. He could no longer breathe.
Slowly suffocating while his eyeballs burned, Brandon thrashed violently in the pit. He could neither see nor speak, but he could hear the hideous lady at the mouth of the pit cackling wildly at his death throes. His tongue swelled and protruded out of his gaping mouth. As the asphyxiation reached its crescendo, Brandon’s skull felt like it was going to burst.
He was dead before he could find out if it would.
Walt had expected to butcher one body that night; he’d prepared for it. Two bodies was something else altogether. It was twice the work. Plus, it was a school night. He sighed grouchily as he stripped naked in his bedroom. There just wasn’t any sense in further sullying his wardrobe.
Back in the foyer, he screwed up his mouth and shook his head at the destruction before his eyes.
It was such a nice floor. Now he’d probably have to have it replaced.
“Damn it.”
Shoving the floor to the back of his mind, Walt got down to business. First he unrolled the dusty blue tarp Gwyn had dragged into the house. There lay Brandon, still and well-dusted with quicklime. The quicklime had absorbed most of the vomit, a job usually reserved for sawdust. Walt sighed and set to undressing the corpse. Once it was naked, he took a damp dishrag and wiped it down, top to bottom and back to front.
A raspy laugh came from behind him when he reached the body’s flaccid genitals. He sneered.
“Very funny, Gwyn. Especially when I’m doing this for you.”
The laughter died out, but only gradually. Walt dropped the rag beside Brandon’s corpse and stood up.
“Come to think of it,” he went on, “I don’t see why you can’t do it yourself. You’re perfectly agile. Stronger than me.” He picked up the cleaver and held it out to her. “Why don’t you cut it up this time?”
Gwyn’s lips spread apart, showing her gleaming white teeth.
“You like it.”
“Cutting up bodies? No way. It’s disgusting.”
“Taking care of me,” she said coquettishly.
Walt dropped his head slightly and smiled. She was right. He was repulsed by the bloody work of dismembering human corpses and stripping the meat from their bones, but in the end he delighted in what it meant to Gwyn. He did relish taking care of her, being her au pair with benefits. And he had no intention of stopping.
Not ever, if that’s what it took.
With a deep breath through his nostrils, Walt lifted the cleaver up over his head and brought it down with a resounding thwack, dead in the center of Brandon’s chest.
In her usual seat in the second to last row, Alice sat alone in the classroom. She was almost always the first to arrive, having no first period to speak of, and she enjoyed the rare moments of calm silence. No one to pick on her. No horny guys to stare at her embarrassingly large breasts, or to pretend to like her just until they got a chance to actually see them, or touch them. Not that Alice was ever going to fall for that again.
The first time had been at the end of seventh grade; Joshua Hansen. A chubby kid himself, Joshua had not usually joined in with the others when they chanted fatty or lardo or tubby tits. He did call her Alice Phallus once, having apparently just learned the word and made the immediate connection, but luckily it never caught on. And even after that incident, she still let her guard down at the Spring Formal when he led her outside to the gravel-strewn playground and started to feel her up. The episode was awkward and vaguely humiliating, but Joshua moaned and grunted so much during the act that she allowed him to continue. He really seemed to be enjoying himself. Maybe, she thought at the time, he could even wind up her first boyfriend. Certainly the rosy-cheeked dork wasn’t anyone’s first choice of paramour, but she had to start somewhere.
The following Monday, word had spread like wildfire. Alice Hawkins is easy. She’ll let you feel her boobs if you’re just nice to her. Alice is a slut.
The legacy of Joshua Hansen.
She’d kept her head down for the rest of that school year and most of the next, but the same song played for Alice twice more during eighth grade and once at the beginning of the present year. That last one went further. Much further. “All the way,” as Brandon Zuern told everybody in a ten mile radius after the fact, and with much the same results as her encounter with Joshua.
Alice thought she’d never stop crying. But she did. And she made up her mind that boys were revolting, no exceptions, and that she was on her own from here on out. Then came Adiel Gallagher. She wasn’t a boy. But the mere thought of her made Alice flush hot with shame and confusion.
She opened her composition book up to the midway point, to the page where she’d left off a blue ballpoint sketch of a dragon exploding out of the roof of a building. The building bore an uncanny resemblance to the school. The charred and flaming bodies splayed all around the building’s perimeter could have been anyone, but she knew who they were. Two of them—one impaled on one of the dragon’s teeth, the other dangling from the sharp tip of one of the beast’s claws—possessed particular identities in Alice’s mind. They were Hershal and Brandon, neither of the nondescript figures specifically one or the other. Just like they were in real life, the nasty boys were interchangeable.
Now she worked on some of the finer details: the dragon’s scales, the building’s bricks, the dancing flames and the shadows they formed. All of it in blue, against a backdrop of faint, straight blue lines.
Maybe it’s my blue period, she thought.
The classroom door jerked open and two of Alice’s classmates filed in. Naturally, neither of them made eye contact with her, even though she smiled and looked them straight in the faces. She quietly sighed.
Back to my dragon.
Soon, more kids started to fill up the room. Mr. Blackmore was not far behind. He was shuffling papers on his desk and half the students were shouting and wandering around the room when the bell rang. Alice kept her eyes on the drawing.
“All right,” Mr. Blackmore croaked. “Let’s settle down.”
Alice tore her gaze away from the raging beast in her composition book and looked up at the teacher. He looked terrible. His face was drawn and pale, his eyes dark and puffy underneath. Practically the spitting image of her stepdad when he was hungover after a bender in town. All except for the massive bandage wrapped tautly around his right hand. Alice furrowed her brow.
“I don’t know about you,” Blackmore droned on, “but I could use a quiet day. For that reason, I’ve brought two different film version of Romeo and Juliet you can vote on.” He rustled in his briefcase, coming back with two clear plastic video cases. “I’ve got the 1968 Zefferelli version, and then here’s the more recent MTV generation update.”
The class roared, all but Alice. Their choice was clear.
Mr. Blackmore smiled thinly.
“As much as I expected. Too bad for some of you lads, though.”
Blackmore stuffed one box back into his briefcase as he extracted the tape from the other.
“.the older one’s got some naughty bits this one lacks.”
A litany of moans filled the air, most of them distinctively male. Alice pursed her lips and looked back down at the dragon in her composition book. She was waiting for the compulsory crass remarks to come spilling out of the resident class clowns, Hershal and Brandon. But as the class quieted down, all Alice could hear was the squealing of the A/V cart’s wheels and Mr. Blackmore fumbling with the tape and VCR. It clacked into the machine and began to whir. Alice looked back up just as Mr. Blackmore switched off the lights. The gray and white static on the television screen gave way to the flickering FBI warning.
A pair of whispers hissed across the room. Mr. Blackmore went, Shhhh.
Alice waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, eager to get a look at the room around her. The bright image of the studio logo on the screen helped.
Narrowing her eyes, she glanced over to the corner of the room where the worst kids in class usually holed up, tittering and cutting up.
They were not there.
Skipping, she thought. They’re going to be pissed when they find out they skipped a movie day.
Shrugging and pushing the thought to the back of her mind, Alice returned her attention to the drawing on her desk. There was just enough light from the television and the window in the classroom door to work by. Ignoring the film she’d seen ten times already, she continued to flesh out the dragon’s many scales.
The boys were nowhere to be seen at lunch, either. Usually Alice caught sight of them bumbling around the courtyard between the gymnasium and cafeteria, harassing some girls or surreptitiously drinking gin from plastic water bottles. Not today. That settled it; Hershal and Brandon had not come to school at all. Probably they were smoking dope in the woods behind Brandon’s trailer park or wandering aimlessly around the outlet mall, looking for some trouble to get in.
Alice poked a limp, greasy French fry into her mouth and arched an eyebrow. Those boys were doomed.
There was a lot of work do to after school was out, and Walt was beginning to feel the pressure. For one thing, he needed a chest freezer, one of those big deals folks sometimes kept in the garage for storing excess meat. He’d managed to dig the circulars out of the newspaper in the teacher’s lounge, but his many chatty colleagues made it difficult to look it over. Accordingly, Walt brought the ads with him to his next class—where he also played a videotape in lieu of teaching—and pored over the deals while most of the kids slept, made out or zoned.
Hines’ Electronics was advertising a sale on appliances that included a seven-cubic-foot freezer, which Walt circled in red ink. It was perfectly affordable, only two hundred dollars, but he doubted the freezer had enough space for his needs. The twenty-five cubic footer at Red’s Discount Appliances looked far superior, but that one really jacked the cost on him. $687.99. Walt puffed out his cheeks and ran a cost-benefit analysis in his head.
Hershal could not have weighed more than a hundred twenty pounds in his prime; that is, when he was still whole. Minus his entire skeleton and probably half of his internal organs—and additional water weight—the remaining bounty would probably amount to less than fifty pounds. His good buddy, the late Brandon Zuern, was a bit larger than the impish Hershal, so Walt estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five pounds of meat from him.
Beside the Red’s Discount Appliances ad for the large chest freezer, Walt wrote: 115 lbs?
Walt looked closer at the ad, studying the appliance’s features. Lift-out baskets (that he would toss in the garbage), quick-freeze option (whatever that meant), audible and visual temperature alarm system and easy to read electronic controls. None of this helped Walt’s leftbrained mind make sense of the problem. The fact that Red’s claimed the freezer could hold over eight hundred pounds of frozen food, however, helped immensely.
He grinned and tore the ad away from the circular. This was the one.
And with loads of space to fill up.
Walt could butcher four more their size and have room to spare.
In a way, it was a frightening thought. Five were dead already, thanks to Gwyn’s sudden appearance in Walt’s life. The creepy redneck who trailed his sister to his house was certainly no big loss, and the boys all but sealed their own fates. Amanda, on the other hand, was a painful death to experience. Still Walt thought of her often, sometimes for days on end, wondering if her horrible demise could have been prevented in some way. She should have stayed away, should have read the signs that the house was not safe. That Walt was not safe. He never really knew if he actually loved her when she was alive and he was no more certain of that niggling question now that she was dead and gone.
Well, not quite gone. Her very slowly dissolving bones remained in the corpse pit behind the house. But at least he no longer had to see them, now that they were completely submerged beneath an ever-growing mound of quicklime.
Poor Amanda.
Still, Gwyn had to feed. It was every living organism’s natural born right. Survival of the fittest and all that. Walt was not responsible for her existence, he only took it upon himself to sustain it. He neither knew from whence she came nor did he care. As long as she was happy, Walt’s heart was at ease. And thatwas love.
There just wasn’t any doubt about it: Walt loved Gwyn more dearly, more passionately and savagely, than he’d ever loved before. He would slaughter the whole damn town if she asked him to do it, no matter how repulsive he found the act of killing and stripping the flesh from a fellow human being’s bones.
With that consideration lingering in his brain, he looked up at the dreary, dozing faces in front of him. Only about half of them paid any attention to the film. Others napped, fiddled with handheld electronics or passed notes between them. One of them, Rob Scaife, gazed at the ceiling with glassy eyes while he mindlessly scratched the omnipresent red spots on his forearm. Track marks. Walt had successfully ignored the obvious issue thus far—it was much more than his paltry salary was worth to intercede on some loser junky’s behalf— but he studied the prematurely balding boy more carefully now than ever.
After all, who would ever miss a junky?
Floating through the rest of her day in a haze, Alice was more than a little relieved when the last bell finally jangled at three o’clock. It was the weekend’s herald, and although she had no particular plans Alice was glad to be getting away from the school grounds for a couple of days. So she packed her books up into her black denim book bag, slung it over her broad shoulder, and commenced the labyrinthine journey through the dim and dusty hallways that eventually led its captives to the brightly lit outside world. She crossed the front quad, rounded the rusty flagpole and walked through the teacher’s parking lot on her way to her third-hand Subaru station wagon in the student lot.
Along the way, she caught a glimpse of Mr. Blackmore unlocking his hatchback. He stopped and began to stare at her. She only looked back at him for a fraction of a second before quickly whipping her head back to the sea of shitty used cars in front of her. But she knew he was still looking at her, following her with his watching gaze. It was all at once embarrassing at exhilarating; troubling and flattering.
