Rites of Extinction

by Matt Serafini

  “Knew you were good,” Cortez says.

  Rebecca doesn’t want to get his hopes up. He already seems to think a superhero has come waltzing into town in order to help with his problem. “Somebody literally told me,” she says.

  “Still, been in town, what? Half a day? We’ve got three victims total. Plenty of debate on what Cassie knows and what she actually did. Two psychologists have given her a victim’s profile. Hear them tell it, her mind’s warped and Paul just affected her in a different way. Attorneys are keeping her out of the straight jacket for now. Monitoring bracelet ain’t enough, you ask me, but whatever keeps her out of Bright Fork proper . . .”

  After her visit, Rebecca thinks it’s easy to imagine Cassie being knee-deep in these killings. It doesn’t take a hypnotist to make a teenage girl do something crazy in the name of love when her brain has already short-circuited. “Tell me about the other two murders.” She was beginning to research them when the headache struck. Rebecca doesn’t want to think about that now.

  “Father Kindry out at St. Cecilia’s. I don’t even know what to say about that one. Melted the church tabernacle and poured it down his throat. Left him on the altar for Sunday mass, dead five days.”

  “Animals,” she says.

  “Third was a night nurse, Marci Rooker, on her way home in the early morning. Looks like Paul staged car trouble and clipped her the second she stopped.” Hopeless laughter scrapes his throat. “That’s what being a Good Samaritan gets you.”

  “And you can’t find him?”

  “I’ve looked,” Cortez says. Suddenly she’s aware of all the empty Styrofoam cups stacked in the waste bin beside his desk. The deep stubble growing out of his cheeks. The raccoon circles that look drawn on with Sharpie beneath his eyes. “All I do is look.”

  “You’re not looking in the right place,” she says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Cortez looks at her hard so there’s no mistaking it. Sanctioned violence passes unspoken between them. Rebecca lets that settle inside her heart. She’s already got stone cold hatred pumping through all four chambers. If she can take a little heat off the sheriff, that’s a burden she’s willing to shoulder. Thinks maybe she is a superhero, after all.

  Because not everyone needs to be fluent in this type of grief.

  “One last thing,” he says.

  She only pauses, doesn’t turn.

  “This town looks to me to protect it. Your history, your troubles . . . I’m taking a chance on letting you walk.”

  “You are,” she says. “Because you want this too. His death is the only thing that keeps you going.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s better than any other motivation. Nothing distracts from that kind of focus.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to find him.”

  “Just don’t—”

  “I won’t.” Rebecca doesn’t even know what he was about to say. It doesn’t matter.

  Cortez stands and Rebecca pauses in the doorway to ensure he hasn’t changed his mind. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Your side mirrors are broken off. Your rearview mirror was wrapped in duct tape. Had to undo that, at least. Safety issue. I’m responsible for all roads in and through this town so . . . well, I’m sure you understand.”

  She leaves without another word.

  10

  FIRST THING SHE DOES WHEN she gets to the car is tear the entire rearview mirror off its mount and stuff it inside the garbage can across the street.

  Her hands are soaking wet with runny soot as she hurries back across the crosswalk.

  11

  “BECKS . . . WHERE ARE YOU?”

  “Someplace warm.”

  “Where?”

  “Key West. You’ve seen pictures.”

  “You’re bullshitting me.”

  “Never.”

  “You’re on the run? Never going to come in?”

  “I’m bullshitting. Remember?”

  “Goddammit, why? Why do you always do this?”

  “Nothing left to do.”

  “Let it go. I still need you.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Tell me where you are so I can help.”

  “You mean so you can send the cops to pick me up.”

  “Becks—”

  “The cops here understand. Better than you.”

  “How can you say I don’t understand?”

  “Truth’s painful.”

  “You don’t even know what the truth is anymore. That’s why you’ve got me on speed dial. Any more dreams you need vetted, or is your brain working again?”

  “Remember the macaroni lion?”

  “Yes,” Bret says. “Goddamn right I do. Jaime’s picture that you hung over the dining room table.”

  “Yeah, well, better than the canned art you buy at Home Goods.”

  “You dreamt about the macaroni lion?”

  “No. I remember it.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I remember the day she made it. Fusilli for the lion’s mane. Her idea. What was she? Seven? I was so proud. Couldn’t wait to see where life took her. She was always good at finding her own path. At putting her stamp on things.”

  “I know, there’s a million of those memories . . .”

  “You never understood.”

  “I understand you’re obsessed. And talking to me about macaroni lions.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Don’t put this on me. You broke Benny’s nose.”

  “He tried to stop me.”

  “Jesus Christ . . . is that a threat?”

  “Not if you don’t try and stop me.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Rebecca hangs up and tosses the phone atop the bed. She considers turning it off for the night, but it doesn’t matter.

  She sits on the table with a glass of melted ice in her hand. The water’s tepid but it tastes good. Still manages to cool her heated insides.

  Around her, the room’s mirrors are blotted. Her sweatshirt is draped across the bathroom vanity while the bed’s comforter is stretched tight to cover the head-to-floor piece.

  The temperature control keeps her skin perpetually cool and pocked by gooseflesh. She’s nude because she no longer trusts her body and prefers to keep an eye on it whenever the curtains are drawn and the doors are locked.

  Sometimes at night her legs itch and she scratches them red in her sleep. Sometimes it’s worse. On the night of her escape there was a moment of panic that drove her to freedom. She sprung up in bed to find her breasts had doubled in size while her hands, appropriately aged and veiny for a woman fast-approaching 50, had smoothed into that of a woman’s less than half her age.

  And you don’t take those symptoms to the doctor, otherwise you wind up right back in Straightjacket City.

  When that stuff happens, the mirrors show you the truth. Except, the mirrors have turned against her. Rebecca no longer looks at them.

  She fears that something lives inside her. Something that splits her brain in two and makes reality feel like it’s always a dream away. Whatever’s happened, whatever’s doing this, makes life feel like a fever.

  Beneath the bathroom mirror comes the tapping. That one slow clinking fingernail patters the glass. An indifferent jangle that makes her feel achingly helpless, almost numb to the sound.

  She thinks about the six-shooter and remembers her new pal Cortez is holding it for her. Can’t help but wonder whether or not she’d turn the gun on herself in this weak moment. Cash out forever. Or keep to the trail because it’s hot and she’s close. Too close to quit.

  Will Paul even remember? Why do we assume we leave such little impression on others? Rebecca worries about that because she’s spent the last year trying to imagine the look on his face once he realizes it’s her who’s come to put him down. And she knows he must be out there somewhere expecting it.

  Her phone leaps back to life with another silent glo
w. She envisions Bret hunched over his phone, oversized fingers tapping QWERTY glass. The image uncouples her train of thought. She laughs cruelly, even as persistent tapping glass reminds her nothing’s funny anymore. She crosses the room on bare feet. The thin carpet freezes her soles, but it’s a refreshing ripple through her baking body.

  “Let us look.” A gravel-laden voice says, nearly atonal and muffled beneath blotted mirrors. “Let us see.”

  Rebecca rushes to the phone, snatches it off the bed. She doesn’t want Bret’s nagging words but has never heard voices beyond the glass. This part’s new. The game’s changing. Faster since arriving in Bright Fork.

  The migraine returns with tremors. So much pain she wants to die.

  Her forehead itches. She touches her fingers to the surface there and finds small mounds of flesh jutting outward. Little beads that feel like full-headed pimples, raw to the touch. Breathing pustules, startling enough to force a shriek from her throat.

  Her scream startles the room into silence.

  The pain’s gone.

  So are the voices.

  Everything except the tapping.

  That never stops.

  Rebecca reaches for the bourbon.

  12

  UNDERNEATH TAPPING MIRRORS WAITS A dream.

  Rebecca sleeps on the floor in a makeshift bed of mottled sheets—a situation better suited for a family dog they never got around to having. Her mouth is dry like sun-beat sand and the empty pint of Wild Turkey leaks noxious fumes into the air.

  And still, the dream slips through. It comes with arms like blankets, swaddling her inside comfortable memories:

  The macaroni lion.

  Thursday diner dives with Jaime.

  Driver’s ed practice sessions—one in particular where Jaime slammed the gas instead of the brakes and obliterated the Bartons’ prized petunias and part of their picket fence in the process.

  Two weeks at Disney World when Jaime was nine and thought Mickey Mouse was her bestie.

  Sleepless Christmas Eves, Jaime worried what would happen if Santa couldn’t figure out how to get inside the house since they had no fireplace.

  See that, Rebecca thinks. I had a real life once.

  She tosses over. Fluttering eyes find the motel wall one inch from her nose and Rebecca thinks nothing of it. Her bourbon-soaked brain is anchored to the void, eyelids closing fast.

  The dream returns before she even realizes it’s missing.

  And now she’s settled into another memory.

  This one’s got the sweet-sour smell of lemonade. It colors the air with nostalgia. A tall woman moves in irregular, jagged time, like frames cut haphazardly from a film reel. She jump cuts all the way down the porch steps and vanishes just before reaching the cornfield. Long stalks wobble in the spot where her body disappeared.

  Rebecca watches from the porch and feels compelled to follow. From the house, a gathering speaks in distorted trumpets. Charlie Brown adults who’re saying nothing she wants to hear. She peers in through the screen door and finds only people-shaped shadows projected across a distant kitchen wall. Clanking plates, scraping forks, muted and careful laughter—all of it out of reach.

  Forever just around the corner.

  The cornfield’s preferable.

  Rebecca moves toward it. Anything to get away from that warbling crowd. Anyplace they can’t follow. The one place they won’t go.

  She remembers this day in vivid color. You always do when it’s one of your parents who goes.

  Rebecca doesn’t need Bret to validate this. Maybe the hospital tried to make her forget things, but this is safe and secure inside her soul. The death of her mother at fifty-seven years of age, cut to the bone by a double dose of ovarian and breast cancer.

  Poor woman never stood a chance.

  Rebecca has never forgotten her mother’s last words. The doctor had just briefed them on prolonged treatment and felt hospice was premature. As soon as they were alone, Mom reached up, took Rebecca’s wrist and spent the next five minutes conjuring the energy to speak. It came out sounding like gravel, but Mom was determined to spit every syllable. “Ain’t putting my family through any more of this. I’m dead no matter what I do. Last gift I can give is to punch out tonight. Only way to do it, as far as I can see.”

  She was dead twelve hours later, resolute in her decision to spare her family an onslaught of future headaches.

  Funerals are tough. Everyone wants to know how you’re doing. They come offering comfort and consolation they can’t actually give. They want to share memories of the departed because that’s what they came to do and believe in their hearts that you need to hear every word they’ve got on the subject.

  Rebecca doesn’t want any of that. What she wants is five minutes to herself. And that’s where the corn comes in. She follows the flickering woman as the stalks slap gently against her face.

  The woman in a mourning dress kneels on tamped earth, staring up at the sky. Streaks of mascara shimmer in the sunlight, making it look like she’s crying tar.

  The woman turns at the sound of an approaching body.

  Familiar words come out of her in Rebecca’s voice. “Can you not?”

  Rebecca stops dead, unable to process this. Those are her words and not for this stranger to steal.

  Still, the stranger continues, “Jesus Christ. My mother is dead, and you can’t give me five fucking minutes to process it? Five minutes to think about her without you bothering me?”

  Rebecca starts toward the stranger with arms outstretched.

  The stranger doesn’t want her. “Can’t your father get you juice? Play with you? Tell you what’s for dinner? What do you need me for? Can you please just leave me the hell alone?”

  But Rebecca needs a hug. Continues forward, arms wide. The stranger doesn’t want it, tries to push her back. “Get away from me,” she growls, aiming for Rebecca’s shoulder. But her aim’s off, and that misplaced hand cracks Rebecca in the nose, sends her stuttering back, falling on crushed stalks.

  And then Rebecca’s memory is back where it belongs. It’s her kneeling on the dead stalks, looking into the runny eyes of her eight-year-old daughter. Blood drips from Jaime’s nose. She looks hurt and terrified because Mom has never snapped at her this way.

  “Jaime,” Rebecca starts.

  Way too late. Jaime turns and rushes back toward the house, stalks ruffling like ripples in a pond as she goes. The only time Mom ever hit her.

  The dream says Jaime remembers it even today, stunned her mother could be so cruel.

  Rebecca has never felt lower. She falls against the corn as the sobs come on hard and seemingly never stop.

  To this day, that betrayal in her daughter’s eyes is the thing she regrets most.

  13

  THE “GET BLACKOUT DRUNK” METHOD isn’t foolproof, Rebecca learns.

  She sits with her knees against her chest, squinting against the encroaching sun that tries breaking through the spaces around the drawn shades.

  Last night’s dream has shaken her.

  She rises and stretches to get the crimps out of her back. This kind of sleep isn’t sleep and she feels somehow worse for even trying. She showers and dresses and brushes her teeth twice to exorcise the bourbon stink from the back of her throat. That’s no use. She’s going to be suffering that awful taste on her tongue for a long time.

  She craves chicken and waffles. All the maple syrup she can stand.

  She places the DO NOT DISTURB placard on the doorknob and calls down to the front desk. Last thing she wants is some unsuspecting maid coming in here to yank the sheets down off the mirrors.

  “What kind of a request is that?” the manager demands.

  She assures him she won’t be smearing shit all over the walls. “I just like my privacy,” she says.

  “I don’t really care what you do,” he tells her. “It’s why I charged you double. Security deposit. New policy. If I find shit on your walls, you don’t get it back.”

>   She cracks the door and sunlight stings. Has to slip behind her Ray-Bans to weather that discomfort, because this is going to be a long day.

  “Still don’t know who hired you.” The manager stands in the office doorway. She gets the sense the old pervert likes to watch her leave because he does exactly that. Stares at her ass from over the coffee mug tipped against his mouth.

  Rebecca drops into the driver’s seat. Glances at her phone out of habit and finds a thread of unread messages from Bret, all of them fixing to talk her out of this.

  She deletes them without reading and turns the ignition.

  14

  REBECCA FINDS HERBERT FARM NESTLED firmly into the middle of nowhere. The door opens with a cowbell clink as she pushes inside the general store. The place is all wood panels, impeccable produce piled into wicker baskets. Homemade shelving displays a pyramid of Herbert-branded salad dressings and marinades. Newman’s Own has got nothing on these folks.

  The register is unmanned. This part of the world is just that trusting. Even after murder comes knocking, it still trusts.

  Rebecca makes the rounds, browsing and enjoying air sweeter than a bakery. The back counter is stocked with fresh meat pies.

  “Can I help you?”

  A young woman appears through swinging kitchen doors carrying two more steaming pies. She places them next to the others and shoos Rebecca away, as if she’s going to sew her germs inside the settling crusts.

  Rebecca flashes the photo of Paul like it’s a police badge. “Did you know him?”

  The girl suddenly looks like her day’s ruined. “No. Don’t know him. But I know who he is.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Killed the sheriff’s sister . . . those others . . .”

  “Know where he is?”

  She doesn’t bother to answer that one. Just stares like, come on.

  “What’s your name?” Rebecca asks.

  “Danielle.”

  “Did you know the sheriff’s sister, Danielle?”