Dead Echo

  Chapter 37: The Neighborhood, Now

  Forty-five minutes after Skate was killed the sun spread a bloody canvass over the neighborhood. The people who’d emerged from their houses in pursuit of Carolyn Skate found themselves, almost wonderingly, milling around in the neighbor’s yard of the atrocity, many still with farming implements in their hands. They looked confused, exhausted. Nobody looked at anyone else and no one spoke. As it got darker everyone just drifted off, at their own varying paces, back down the streets to their homes.

  Angie Pullman, the woman of the T-shirt and panties (both of them now ripped and blood-spattered), entered her house through the front door. She had a damnable headache and wanted nothing more than to lie down on the couch, on the floor even.

  But there was the issue of the machete.

  She looked at it regretfully and moved into the kitchen. Placed it on the counter and began filling the sink with hot water, squeezing in a large amount of dishwashing liquid in the process. For the next ten minutes she cleaned the long-bladed knife with a sponge she typically kept nearby for the dirty dishes. She was thorough, meticulous, as if honing the blade to a new sharpness, and when she was done she moved on to the counter and then out through the living room, following the dripped trail of blood from the kitchen to the front door. This took her another fifteen minutes to clean and by that time she was sweating badly and the headache was worse.

  She brought the sponge back to the sink and cleaned the area again, including the bucket she’d fished out from underneath to counter to clean the drip line, finally watching the last of the pinkish water swirl away down the drain. She caught her reflection in the window in front of the sink and looked down at her scanty clothing. In a studied, physical dead-pan she carefully stepped out of her panties and eased the shirt over her head, trying to avoid most of the blood. She took the bloody rags into the living room and opened the glass doors of the fireplace. It was stocked with dry oak from the winter before and she threw the things inside. Went back to the kitchen and retrieved the machete. Placed it under the bed in one of the bedrooms. The house, like most others in the neighborhood, had three bedrooms, but there was one she’d not entered in the better part of two weeks. It was her son’s, Phillip’s, but it was locked solid from the outside. It had been a simple enough thing to turn the knob around one day while he was napping.

  Phillip was three.

  She then walked slowly back to the living room and after a few fumbling attempts with the matches and gas, got a good fire going. It was still damnably hot but Angie took no notice. She lie down flat on the floor, naked as the day she was born, and passed off to a dreamless sleep while the fire crackled over its evil burden.