Dweller - Jeff Strand [48]
This morning, he’d had two friends. Now he had none.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Burn the whole forest down,” Larry suggested. “Just pour gasoline over every square inch, light a match, and watch this place go inferno.”
“I might,” said Toby.
“Yeah! We’ll dance in the flames! It’ll be the party of the century! Burn, burn, burn!”
“You want to know the best part?” asked Nick. “Watching Owen run through the woods with his hair on fire. Total body burn. I’ll cheer for that. Hopefully I’ll even have a bucket of water in my hand that I can refuse to throw on him.”
“It wasn’t Owen’s fault.”
“Oh, of course not, his claws aren’t bloodstained at all. Somebody else grabbed his jaws and opened and closed them on Melissa’s arm. Owen’s just a big furry puppet.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I don’t know crap about what you mean, Toby. I just know that you should destroy that thing. Get a machine gun and pump six thousand bullets into its chest. Flay the skin right off its bones. Better yet, get the army involved, have them drop a whole atomic bomb right smack-dab on his cave. Turn Owen into a pile of glowing white ashes.”
“Not painful enough,” said Nick.
“I don’t even care about making him suffer. I just want to see something spectacular. Flames or an atomic blast. Wipe him off the map.”
“He’s my best friend.”
“Are you still clinging to that? Toby, I know you don’t think of me as a father figure, but I’m going to share a piece of wisdom with you: When somebody tears your girlfriend apart and scatters her guts all over the ground, he ceases to be your best friend. He ceases to even be a pleasant acquaintance. It’s pretty much mortal-enemies territory.”
“But he’s the only thing I’ve got.”
“Well, yeah, now. Because of him. You don’t have to open the valentine with the time bomb just because it’s the only one in your mailbox. If you’re that needy, move to California and live by your mommy and daddy again.”
“I don’t need your advice.”
“You know what’s sad? We’re dead, and Melissa’s dead, but you’re talking to us instead of her. That’s pretty fucked up. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find her.”
“Priorities, man. She was ugly, but she was a lot better looking than this guy.” Larry pointed at Nick. “And she was a great lay. Even without a basis for comparison you know she was a great lay.”
Nick nodded. “That toy thing was sensational.”
“Both of you, just shut up and go away.”
“No, I want to see how you deal with this mess. It’s snowing, so that’s a point in your favor. Cover the tracks. Cover the blood. What are you going to do with the body?”
“I don’t know.”
“Won’t be easy to bury her in frozen ground. You’d need some heavy machinery. You may have to take her home with you.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Yeah, I suppose keeping a mangled, rotting corpse at your place is a bit morbid. And the cops might find that kind of discovery fairly interesting if they search your house. So you can’t bury her and you can’t take her home. I think you’re pretty much left with dragging her off the main path and building a nice little makeshift aboveground grave.”
Toby whispered infinite apologies to Melissa as he carried her through the woods. She was so light. Half of her face remained, though her eyes were gone, and there was no expression. No scream, no grin, nothing to show what she’d once been.
He gently placed her on a pile of snow. She sunk down into it a bit, not enough to hide his crime, but enough to bring fresh tears at the sight of her moving away from him.
He pushed snow over her, burying her.
There should be some kind of marker. A cross or something to memorialize her.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Larry.
Of course, he was right. There was no place here for honoring his dead girlfriend. This was about covering up a horrible crime. Nothing else mattered.
He couldn’t leave her out here forever, but the forest was huge. Nobody would find her before the snow melted. Not even Owen.
He was freezing to death.