“You bastard,” Sven said. “You killed Bill. But—but why? But what? What are you doing? And what’s wrong with you?”
Bob didn’t reply, his stupid, bloody grin didn’t move, and he kept shuffling across the lawn toward Sven, dribbling blood and bits of flesh.
Sven ran around the slowly-shuffling Bob to the tree in the very front of the front yard. It took Bob a few seconds to register that Sven was somewhere else before he began the fit of spasms that turned his uncoordinated body around. From under the tree, Sven picked up the E-Z Curl Bar that he used for biceps curls. When the weather was nice Sven liked to work his arms on the front lawn. He loved it when people passed by and admired his physique. Some would roll their eyes—the jealous ones. Sven knew that his arms were something to be shown off. And most importantly, Ivan approved, always keeping Sven company during the front lawn arm-pumping sessions.
Sven looked at the bar in his hand, then around at the bloody mess in his yard. The bar wouldn’t be enough on its own to make up for it. Sven picked up four of the ten pound plates on the ground and put them on one end of the bar. He clipped them, then let the bar hang from his right hand like a club. It swung at his side as he waited.
Bob shuffled closer. It’d be nice to swat at Bob with his own tennis racquet, Sven thought, but that meant touching it, and Sven didn’t want to touch anything Bob had touched. The bicep bar would have to do. As Sven patiently waited for Bob to shuffle closer, more screams came, some distant, and some not.
Chapter 23
Bob was close enough now. Sven took a breath, steadied himself, squeezed the hell out of the bar, and swung. The plates on the end of the bar hit Bob square on the left temple. Bob’s head exploded into a shower of dry, grey flesh, covering the hedge behind him. The headless body stumbled on toward an open-mouthed Sven for a few dragging steps, then collapsed. The blow had left Bob’s headless body with a dry stump at the neck.
But why not a wet stump? Wasn’t it supposed to be a wet stump? Sven’s junior high school math teacher, Mr. Newman, had loved to threaten students by saying, “I’m gonna rip your head off and spit down the wet stump.” Sven didn’t understand the gravity of this threat until years later—until now.
Looking at the dry stump, Sven wondered what Mr. Newman would have to say about this. He had been a good math teacher—one of the best. Mr. Newman would know what to do with Bob.
Sven shook his head and retreated from the flashback of his junior high school math class, leaving young, puny Sven and his protractor behind.
The headless tennis player’s hands clawed at the ground and his legs still moved like the legs of those wind-up toys when they fall over. Then he was still.
Sven dropped his makeshift club and let out a ragged breath, feeling shaken and confused.
There was a faraway hissing, and then it was closer, and then Sven was back, stepping backward out of the body’s tainted odor. It was Ivan—Ivan was still hissing.
“It’s okay now,” Sven said, and reached back with his left hand to pet Ivan on the head.
“He’s done, his tennis days are over.”
Ivan bit Sven’s finger. Not hard enough to get to the bone, but hard enough to draw blood. Sven winced, pulling his hand away.
“Why’d you—”
Something grabbed Sven’s ankle. He looked down at the hand and understood at once why Ivan had been hissing. It was Bill’s hand, but Bill had been killed, hadn’t he? Sven wriggled his ankle free and turned around, again getting a whiff of the syrupy odor, which a back part of Sven’s brain was starting to connect with the mind and body-numbing effects he’d been experiencing in the past hour.
Most of Bill’s torso was gone. There were exposed ribs and pieces of organs strewn about, but nothing that could hold Bill’s lower half and upper half together. But Bill’s top half was moving, moving away from his lower half! His hands were opening and closing, reaching for Sven’s feet. Bill’s mouth was opening and closing too, the teeth clicking much too hard against each other.
The bottomless mailman looked up at Sven, locking on with his one remaining eye. Like the others Sven had seen so far, the eye was a dull, empty blackness, and it was a relief to look away from it into the empty socket of the missing eye. The mailman inched forward, pulling himself along with his hands and chin, putting distance between the remains of his torso and his torn, motionless legs.
Bill’s mouth ate grass as it gnashed its way to Sven, who knew that it wanted more. It wanted flesh. It wanted Sven’s meaty calf. Sven could feel it in the black stare of the mailman’s remaining eye. Sven stared in utter disbelief as the disconnected top of the mailman kept coming, it was so sickeningly terrible, it was so—Ivan snapped him out of it with a frustrated meow.
Sven shook himself, patted Ivan on the head—to maintain his own grip on reality and not at all to comfort Ivan—and walked to his car. He unlocked the car, threw his gym bag on the passenger seat and set the backpacking Ivan down in the passenger seat’s foot well. Sven turned the key, and the engine started.
“Thank God for that,” Sven said, thankful that bit of horror movie cliché was not coming to pass.
Ivan meowed.
“That would have sucked, if the car hadn’t started.”
Ivan didn’t respond, maybe because it was obvious, or maybe because he was a cat and was beyond such mundane discussion.
Sven rolled the windows down a few inches so he could hear the outside world—the now dying outside world? He didn’t want anything to sneak up on him. He pulled forward so that he could get out from in front of Lars’s car, backed out of the driveway and turned onto Lewis Mountain Road, putting the University of Virginia grounds behind him.
Killed Bill, who was not quite killed all the way through, kept on inching his way across the lawn, forgetting his legs behind him.
Chapter 24
Jane didn’t have to wait long as she stood turning her knuckles white with the squeezing of the utensils. She had been in the kitchen for what seemed like only a few moments before the sound of dragging footsteps stopped outside the door. Something began to scratch at the door in short, fitful bursts, then stopped.
Jane swallowed, her eyes fixed on the door. Then she scratched the top of her head with her fork and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her knife-wielding hand. She looked at the wine refrigerator and realized that she wanted a drink. It probably wasn’t the best time for one, she thought, but then she changed her mind. It was the best time for a drink. How could there ever be a better time?
Jane edged closer to the wine refrigerator. The door of the little refrigerator was facing sideways relative to the door of the kitchen. She wouldn’t have to turn the refrigerator to get a bottle out. That was good.
She held her breath as she put the knife and fork down on top of the refrigerator. She kneeled in front of the wine refrigerator’s door and cracked it open, then listened. She heard nothing, so she opened the door a bit more. Then she listened again. She still heard nothing, so she opened the door farther, just enough to take out a bottle. There was still no noise from outside the kitchen.
Jane reached her hand into the wine refrigerator and closed her hand around the neck of a bottle. She lifted it, and began to pull it out, inch by tedious inch. When she had gotten the bottle halfway out of the refrigerator, the scratching came again, more frantic than before. Jane yelped and almost dropped the bottle, banging it against another bottle in the wine refrigerator. She cursed under her breath, pulled the bottle all the way out, and taking the knife and fork up again, she retreated to the back of the kitchen, clutching the wine bottle and her utensils.
The wine refrigerator sat in front of the kitchen door, its own smaller door ajar. Jane looked at it, but decided she wasn’t going back over there to close it. It was unplugged now anyway.
Abruptly, the scratching grew louder.
Jane set her knife, fork, and bottle down on the counter. She opened a cupboard, stoo
d up on the tips of her toes, and reached in. She took out a large, long-stemmed wine glass, and set it down next to the bottle. Then she looked around the kitchen, trying to remember what came next.
She remembered. She opened a drawer and took out her favorite foil cutter and a corkscrew. The foil cutter was built into a skunk figurine. The corkscrew was an ordinary corkscrew. Jane used the skunk to cut the foil off the top of the bottle, then uncorked the bottle with the corkscrew. The scratching stopped in time with the pulling of the cork.
Jane looked at the skunk and sighed. It had been a gift from Vicky. She was going to help Vicky and everything was going to be alright. She just needed a drink first.
After filling her glass to the brim, Jane took two large gulps and sighed. Then she looked at the bottle. It was a semi-dry Viognier from a local vineyard. Jane thought it was a bit too sweet for semi-dry, but she was sometimes wrong about these things. At that moment, the wine tasted like the most wonderful thing in the world, despite any possible inaccuracies in its avowed sugar content.
Jane picked up her glass again and brought it to her mouth. She took another big gulp, and just as she was in mid-swallow, there was a loud bang on the kitchen door, and then another, along with a tearing, splintering sound. Jane choked, spluttering wine out of her mouth. Some of it went on the floor, some went back in the glass, and some went on her hand, which she had brought up by reflex.
Jane’s mouth dropped open in astonishment when she saw it.
Vicky’s hand was sticking through door, boring its way through a mess of jagged splinters. There were splinters sticking in Vicky’s hand and arm, but that didn’t stop the arm from thrusting in and out of the hole it had made, from turning and twisting and digging out a wider opening for itself.
Then the arm retreated back through the hole, and was gone. It left just a little bit of blood around the splintered wood. Jane was surprised there wasn’t more blood, because it looked like the splinters had cut Vicky up pretty good.
Hyperventilating, Jane picked up the bottle of semi-dry Viognier and began to pour herself a fresh glass. Then she stopped herself. What was the point of that? This was a serious enough occasion to obviate the need for all formalities. Jane brought the bottle to her lips and took a few healthy swigs. Some of the wine dribbled down her lip, and she wiped at her mouth with the back of her hand.
Then there came more banging, and two sets of Vicky’s fingers were through the hole in the door, pulling at the splinters and rough wood, trying to make the hole bigger.
I have to do something, Jane thought, feeling trapped and hopeless. She looked at the wine bottle for answers and took another swig.
Then she took up the knife and fork again, and took a step toward the door, careful to stay away from Vicky’s probing, excavating hands.
“Stop it Vicky,” Jane said. “Vicky? Do you hear me? You’re very sick, and you have to stop it. Okay? Can you hear me? Are you listening?”
A low, angry moan came through the hole in the door. Or was it a hungry moan?
“Seriously Vicky, I mean it. Stop it, or I’m gonna have to defend myself. I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t make me.”
There was another moan.
“Really, don’t make me. Please?”
Vicky tore a large piece from the middle part of the door. It wasn’t big enough to get through, but at the rate Vicky was tearing through the door, it wouldn’t be long until it was.
Jane knew she had to stop that from happening.
She was feeling the effects of the wine now, and slurred her words. “That’s it Vicky, I’m sorry but I have to.”
Jane brought the fork up and stuck it in Vicky’s left forearm. There was little effect. A drop of what Jane could only interpret as stale blood leaked down one of the fork’s tines, and dropped to the top of the wine refrigerator. Vicky’s hands kept on scraping away, as if Vicky felt nothing. Another chunk of door came away with a hollow rending noise.
Jane shook her head, withdrew the fork, and fork-stabbed Vicky again, in the other arm this time.
That also had no effect, so Jane withdrew the fork again, and fork-stabbed Vicky again, in the shoulder this time—the shoulder that was now peeking through the rapidly enlarging hole in the door. Vicky still didn’t react, and Jane didn’t try to get the fork back this time. She left it sticking out of Vicky’s shoulder, skewering its last weenie dog.
Feeling more light-headed than she should have from the wine, Jane backed deeper into the kitchen. “What am I going to do with you?” She picked up the wine bottle and took a panicky gulp. The wine was getting warmer, and didn’t taste as good as it had when it was cooled to its appropriate drinking temperature.
Jane picked up another knife for the hand that had previously held the fork. She didn’t know what to do next. Should she try to kill Vicky? Was Vicky still alive? And what the hell was that smell?
The knob began to shake, and the door rattled on its hinges.
“Don’t come in here,” Jane yelled, trembling. “Don’t you dare. I’m late for work and you’re making such a mess. I’m not gonna clean all of this up, that’s for sure.”
Jane looked at the Viognier, shrugged, and downed the last of it. Why not?
Then, with a rattle and the sharp splintering of wood, the door came off its hinges.
At first, Vicky tried to push past the dislodged door while it was still in front of her, jammed between her and the wine refrigerator. That wasn’t working, and after too short a time, seemingly by trial and error, Vicky staggered backward, letting the door fall outward, away from its frame, and away from the wine refrigerator.
Then Vicky reversed, lurching forward again, and shambled straight into the wine refrigerator. It was as if she didn’t see it in front of her. She bumped into it, backed up, and then tried to walk through it again, repeating the process.
“Now look what you’ve done with the door,” Jane said, brandishing the knives at face level. “Stop it, or I’m gonna cut you, I’m not kidding this time. It’ll be worse than that fork sticking out of you.”
Jane pointed a knife-wielding hand to the fork sticking out of Vicky’s shoulder.
“I’m gonna cut you right in the face.”
Vicky walked into the wine refrigerator again, and she was getting the hang of it. Each time she walked into it now, she edged it a little out of position. A path was opening up through which she would soon be able to stagger.
“Now don’t you come in here,” Jane said. “I’m warning you.”
Jane ran up to the wine refrigerator and pushed it back into position while Vicky was backing up from a bump against it. Vicky reached out and tried to grab Jane, but Vicky was too slow and awkward in her movements. Jane sidestepped out of the way and swiped at Vicky’s outstretched arm with a knife. It put a gash down the length of Vicky’s forearm. Vicky didn’t react, and no blood came out of the gash.
Vicky reached for Jane again. Jane backed up now, and began to look for a way out. Could she get around Vicky? It didn’t look that way. Vicky was slow-moving enough, but the space was too small to get around her without getting grabbed, and if there was one thing Jane wanted to avoid, it was Vicky’s grip and slobbery, diseased mouth—although the mouth looked much drier now than it had before...not that a dry mouth meant Jane was into it, of course. Vicky was trying to bite her, of all things. The gall of some people!
She and Vicky weren’t working out as roommates anyway, Jane thought, and wished there was a man around to help, someone bigger than Vicky.
Jane gave the empty Viognier bottle a sad look, picked it up, and threw it at Vicky’s head.
“Take that you beast,” Jane said.
The bottom of the bottle made a nice thunk against Vicky’s forehead. Jane was proud of the throw. I should’ve kept up with my softball team, she thought, and then wished there was a bat that she could swing at Vicky’s head. She gave a quick thought to retrieving another wine bottle and swinging that, but decided it w
as better to avoid getting too close to the wine refrigerator, where Vicky was now doggedly stumbling back and forth, intractable in her pursuit of Jane.
Jane backed yet deeper into the kitchen. She turned to the window, and saw her way out.
Chapter 25
Lorie tried to shake off her sudden disorientation. She felt off-balance, like she was about to fall over, like the feeling she got when she stopped too suddenly after a sprint, only worse. She instinctively backed away from the entrance into the living room, bumping into Evan.
“Hey,” Evan said, “watch it.”
Lorie felt better at once. “There’s a weird smell in there, like...” but Lorie found that she didn’t know how to describe it. “I wouldn’t breathe in if I were you.” Lorie didn’t want to breathe it either, but she thought her mom might have been hurt, so she had to see what was the matter.
She pinched her nose, stared at Evan until he rolled his eyes and did the same, and walked into the living room. Two of the lamps by the sofa, one an antique, were smashed to bits on the wood floor.
Lorie felt a stab of regret on seeing the broken antique lamp. It had been her grandmother’s, and her grandmother had always tried to keep her from playing with the patterned beads that hung from the lampshade. But they had been fun to play with, and made a fun jangling sound when—
Then Lorie saw her mom, and immediately forgot her grief over the ruined lamp.
Chapter 26
But it wasn’t that easy.
Jane pulled and pushed on it, but the damn window just wouldn’t open far enough for her to get out. It was hard to reach to begin with, being positioned above and behind the sink, and even when Jane climbed into the sink, she couldn’t get enough leverage to budge the old, stubborn thing open wide enough.
Deciding on an alternate course of action, Jane climbed out of her perch in the sink, and took out a heavy cast iron pan from under one of the counters by the stove. She swung the pan at the glass. The pane cracked and broke, but not completely, so Jane kept swinging at it. As Jane beat on the window with the pan, the wooden cross-hatchings on the window began to crack along with the glass, and Jane knew that given just a little more time to work on the window, she would be able to break out and escape.