by T. H. Moore
He had searched all the cupboards and found only nonperishables and other items that required cooking, so he returned to the refrigerator, hoping to find something that he and Elaina had overlooked in their haste. He shuffled and shoved the containers they had already emptied, then spotted it in the back: a large Tupperware container. He slid it out and pulled it open to find the leftovers of an Aussie meat pie.
I’ll only eat a small piece, he thought.
Forgoing any eating utensils, Charles scooped a modest piece of the Aussie pie with his index and middle finger before stuffing it into his mouth. He chewed the cold meal and savored every morsel before washing it down with a can of soda. He belched, took another scoop of the food, and finished the can of soda before returning upstairs to the master bedroom.
There, he took his place among his pillow formation with plans to retire until Elaina finished her bath.
Charles closed his eyes and relaxed to the sound of the Jacuzzi jets from the other side of the door. He felt himself drifting away toward what he expected to be the most enjoyable sleep he’d had in ages.
That euphoria was broken when the buffet of food and drink he consumed began a loud rumbling inside of him. His eyes shot open and he sat up on the bed. His feet were hanging off the sides while he patted himself on this chest. A grotesque belch erupted through his esophagus. Along with it came a foul stench that reeked of a muddied combination of the beer and all the foods he had eaten since breaking into the house.
He could sense that his body was displeased with the sudden collage of food and beverages, and already it was too late. He darted to the bathroom door and turned the knob, forgetting that Elaina had locked it. He pushed and slammed into the door as it refused to give way to him.
“Elaina, I’m going to be sick,” he pleaded through the door.
“I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m not moving,” she calmly responded. “Find another bathroom to be sick in. I’m not going to let you ruin this for me.”
“Open the door,” he replied, violently shaking the handle. “I’m about to shit myself.”
She laughed. “Now I’m definitely not opening the door. The last thing I want is to be in the same room with you while you’re releasing whatever projectiles are set to shoot out of your ass. Sorry.”
His stomach grew angrier by the second. He clenched his buttocks, hoping to trap the buildup of gas and excrement that had already worked its way down from his colon. He turned in circles like a confused dog. Hot flashes rushed through his body, and he began to sweat. An overwhelming feeling of nausea hovered over him. The pressure in his stomach had reached its breaking point.
He stopped in his tracks, took one last scan of the bedroom, and spotted a ceramic wastebasket in one of the corners. He lunged at it, yanked down his pants, and sat down. His toes clenched the thick carpet, his fingers mimicking the motion against his belly.
Charles let the robe he had taken from the closet fall off of his shoulders and settle on the floor. He had barely had time to position himself over the top of the wastebasket before everything came out of him in a rush. Some of his waste spilled over the sides as he evacuated everything he had consumed within the last hour.
A few seconds into his humiliation, the bathroom door swung open. Elaina peeked around the open space, looking baffled first by the sound and then by the sight of a naked, shivering, and flushed Charles hunched over with his backside hovering over the wastebasket.
He watched in shame as she released the largest smile and burst of laughter he had ever seen from her. He moaned as his backside sounded off like a tone-deaf trumpeter.
Elaina’s smile gave way to a look of disgust. Despite the embarrassment, Charles’s backside continued to empty into the small basket to the point that he began to fear it would overflow before he was finished. He looked over at Elaina, embarrassed, his thighs burning from the torturous position and his rectum transformed into a violent fountain of feces.
“Now that’s just disgusting,” Elaina said before slamming the door and returning to her perfumed bath.
Chapter 28
“WAKE UP! THEY’RE HERE!”
Charles awoke to the sensation of Elaina shaking him. He found himself in the bedroom, curled up on the formation of pillows he had sculpted on the bed while Elaina took her shift on lookout for the returning couple.
He snapped to attention and leapt from the bed, disoriented by the nearly forgotten amenities of civilization.
“We have to hurry,” Elaina said, rushing downstairs ahead of Charles.
In the far corner of the living room stood the luggage they had packed with a new, stolen wardrobe for themselves. Next to that was a trash bag full of groceries they had sacked from the kitchen.
Just as they had planned, Charles hurried down the stairs and took his position behind the front door, waiting to set the ambush.
“That’s not going to be a problem, is it?” Elaina asked, nodding to how Charles was shaking the sleep out of the arm he had slept on for too long.
“I’m fine,” he assured her.
Elaina nodded, then opened her mouth as if she had more to say, but hesitated.
“What’s the matter?” Charles whispered while keeping an eye on the couple as they gathered their belongings from the car.
“We’re going to just tie them up, remember?” Elaina reminded him. “You aren’t going to—”
“Shhh, they’re almost at the door,” he whispered forcefully as he brandished his knife.
Both their backs were against the wall, where the door would swing open. He reaffirmed his grip on the handle of the dagger and whispered in her ear. “If they cooperate, there won’t be a problem. We’ll just do it the way we talked about. By the time they free themselves, we’ll be long gone.”
Charles took one last peek out the small window to see the approaching couple fifteen feet away. He looked back at Elaina standing beside him and put his index finger to his lips. He could hear the couple’s feet approaching the door, the baby crying, and the husband turned the doorknob.
They didn’t lock the front door either, he thought, and he wondered, as he had for perhaps a thousand times, why people were so trusting.
The latch of the door released, and with the palms of her hands, Elaina cushioned the impact of the door swinging open. The couple took a few steps into their house before Elaina slammed the door shut.
Without hesitation, they charged their targets. Elaina toppled the wife and child, sending them both to the floor. Charles subdued the husband and had his knife up against the frightened man’s throat before the man even knew what was happening.
“Don’t you even think about fighting back!” Charles ordered.
“My baby!” the mother cried out, struggling to her feet with the child in her arms. “Please don’t hurt us.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt your baby,” Elaina told her. “Just relax.”
The frantic crying of the baby heightened the tension.
“We don’t have much money,” the husband pleaded. “But whatever you find, you can have.”
“If you two follow our instructions,” Charles said as Elaina struggled to control the protective mother, “we’ll be out of your home and on our way.”
“Just take what you want and leave!” the mother demanded, her tone sharp. It seemed that Elaina’s words had somehow given her courage, and her fear had morphed into indignation. She slapped angrily at Elaina’s hands as Elaina reached for the thrashing baby. “Don’t you touch me or my baby! Is that my blouse you have on?”
“It’d be wise for your wife to relax,” Charles advised the husband.
“Honey, please don’t!” the man begged. “There’s no reason to—”
“Why aren’t you doing anything?” she interrupted.
The man stared at her, then glanced at Charles. His face had gone pas
te-white. With the knife at his throat, he seemed too terrified to speak further.
“You’re such a fucking coward,” she said venomously. “My father warned me not to marry you. What kind of man are you that could see his wife and son treated this way? Fight back, you fucking loser!”
Charles’s expression went cold as the wife’s emasculating words echoed in the canyons of his memory. A scowl developed on his forehead, and before he quite knew what was happening, he had driven the blade into the man’s neck. A short gurgle emanated from the husband’s mouth before spurts of blood gushed over the wooden floor.
Elaina and the dead husband’s wife watched in horror.
“Why would you do that?” Elaina questioned after she had found her voice.
The man’s wife was making little gasping sounds, as though unable to find her breath. She shook in terror as she stared into the face of Charles’s demon. Her legs betrayed her and she sank to the floor, still holding the screaming baby.
Charles rose out of the bloody mess with Elaina and the wife’s eyes following him. He walked over to both of them and crouched down, the knife dripping blood from its tip and onto the forehead of the young woman he had just made a widow.
“Happy now, you loudmouthed bitch?” Charles asked with a snarl. “No need to worry about being married to a fucking loser anymore!” He kneeled next to her and wiped the blood from his knife onto her yellow blouse.
“Charles, that’s enough,” Elaina said, her voice strained.
The wife’s trembling grew stronger, which sent shock waves of fear into her child. His howling escalated. Charles looked down at the child.
“Quiet this damn baby before you personally witness a really late term abortion,” he warned.
The wife clutched her child close to her bosom. She seemed to have run out of insults and invectives.
“Where are the keys to your car?” Elaina said.
The woman stared dumbly at her.
“The keys!” Elaina smacked the woman in the face.
“My husband has them,” she said, still gasping. “They’re in his pocket.”
Charles still had a sinister smile on his face. “You stay there and keep her in check,” he instructed Elaina while he returned to the body.
He pulled the man up from the blood-drenched floor and started searching his pockets.
“You’re probably smiling down on me from heaven, grateful I saved you from this raging bitch,” he said to the dead man. He continued his search for the keys, getting more frustrated with each empty pocket. Then finally he heard the jingle of metal. “Of course they would be in the last pocket I checked,” he said with a chuckle. He pulled the handful of keys from the dead man’s pocket and relocated them to his own.
“You have the keys … now just go,” the wife pleaded through her sobs as Charles walked over to the strips of bed linen they had shredded to use as restraints and blindfolds.
“Such a terrible hostess,” Charles said to Elaina with a tone of disapproval. “Nothing like Oodgeroo.”
Elaina crouched down next to the whimpering widow and tied a blindfold around her head, then began tying her hands. “Start counting to a thousand,” she ordered. “If any peacekeepers trail us, we’ll make sure to finish what we started.”
Sobbing quietly, the woman nodded.
Charles gave Elaina the remaining strips of material and reached out for the baby. The woman sensed what he was doing and recoiled from him. He touched her cheek with the tip of the knife.
“We can’t tie you up if you’re holding a kid,” Charles explained with exaggerated patience that didn’t match the demented look on his face. “If we don’t tie you up, then we’ll have to kill you. You decide.”
Elaina jumped in to defuse the standoff. “Give me the child, and I promise I won’t hurt him.”
Still the mother refused. But then, as Charles touched her cheek again with the knife, she relinquished her grip and quickly handed the baby to Elaina.
Charles watched as Elaina cradled the child and looked upon its face as if in a trance. “Come on and hand him over while you finish tying the mother up,”
Elaina complied with obvious reluctance. Charles patted the crying child on its back and carried it over to the bloody remains of its father. He then propped the baby up against the dead man, and the baby stopped crying.
“Will you look at that?” Charles quipped as the child sat in the puddle of his dead father’s blood, smacking at it with his tiny hands. “Daddy managed to stop the little one from crying.”
“Eloah, deliver us from this evil and wickedness,” the blindfolded mother prayed in fear.
Charles rolled his eyes at the mother’s prayer and motioned for Elaina to grab the suitcase and trash bag of groceries. After peeking out the window, he opened the door. Elaina extended the retractable arm of the wheeled suitcase and shuffled past Charles toward the car.
“Remember now,” Charles said to the wife. “Count to a thousand before trying to untie yourself. I’d hate to make your child an orphan because his mother couldn’t follow directions.”
Then he took one final look at the infant, whose onesie was now saturated in blood.
“When you hear the door shut,” he said to the wife, “start counting. Don’t move until you reach a thousand. Got it?”
She nodded. He could see that she was trembling all over.
He closed and locked the door between him and Elaina, who was waiting outside. She whipped her head around to peer through the windows at the top of the door. Charles pressed his index finger against his lips, signaling her to be silent. She dropped everything onto the ground and stared through the glass at him.
The mother was counting aloud. “ … five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten… ”
Charles could see the concern on Elaina’s face.
“ … eighteen, nineteen… hello? Are you there?”
When the blindfolded and restrained widow received no response, she started to struggle against her bonds. “J. R., Mommy’s right here. Don’t you worry. Mommy’s coming.”
Charles watched as she writhed and jostled her body around the floor, trying to break the strips of material that bound her hands behind her back. She rolled onto her back and tucked her knees into her chest so she could slide her arms under her body and bring them to the front. Now she could use her hands to remove her blindfold.
The moment she pulled it away, Charles bent down to greet her face to face. He muffled her scream with his hand clamped over her mouth. He shook his head in disappointment.
“What happened to the other nine hundred and eighty-one numbers?” He asked.
“I’m sorry! I just wanted my baby.” She cried the last of her muffled words through his hand.
“Excuses, excuses,” Charles said as he pushed the restrained woman over and climbed on top of her.
She tried in vain to fight him off as her eyes danced about the room. When she saw her child playing in her husband’s blood, streams of tears fell from her eyes.
“Why do you shed tears over a fucking loser?” Charles asked, throwing her own words back at her as he positioned the knife outside the soft tissue between the open space of her ribs. “’You fucking loser,’” Charles repeated as he looked down at her ring finger. “Those were the last words he heard from the woman he loved so much that he put a diamond on her finger. Just another ungrateful, spoiled bitch.”
She offered no defense. To be honest, Charles didn’t think she would have been capable of speech. He continued his condemnation as more tears flowed from her eyes.
“You know what he should have said to you before I opened his arteries?” He forced the blade to pierce her flesh just below the skin. “Fuuuck… youuuu,” he said in a slow and exaggerated tone. “That’s what he should have said. Fuck you.” He pressed forward so the weight of his body thrust th
e blade through her left breast and into her heart.
Gradually the widow’s screams subsided to low moans as her face and body writhed through the pain.
“Fuck… you,” Charles repeated as she groaned from the blade shredding the tough tissue of her heart.
Several seconds passed before her body went limp. He climbed off her and looked over at the baby, who was still busying himself finger painting with his father’s blood. He had crawled back over toward his mother, leaving behind him a trail of bloody hand- and knee-prints on the floor.
Charles looked up toward the door at Elaina, who was still watching from the window. Her face was pale, and he had no doubt that she would be offering her opinion of his latest actions.
As he stood and exited the house, Elaina stared at him, clearly repulsed. He cared little. He pulled out the keys to the car and pressed the button to unlock it. He scanned the street once more and opened the driver’s side door. Elaina remained standing by the door to the house, mystified, the stolen luggage and groceries still lying on the ground where she had dropped them.
“Breaking into their home, stealing their clothes, food, and car wasn’t enough?” she said. “You had to take their lives, too?”
Charles picked up the luggage and garbage bag and put them in the car before jumping into the driver’s seat. “I spare the kid didn’t I? Now, get in the car Elaina. We don’t have time for another philosophical discussion about the meaning of life.”
Elaina dragged herself to the passenger side of the car, but even after climbing in, she pressed against the closed door trying to stay as far away from Charles as the confines of their stolen vehicle would allow.
“Your philosophy is not of life,” she muttered, as though to herself. “Your philosophy is only of death. Torture and death.”
Charles slammed the transmission lever into reverse and backed out of the driveway. “What did you think was going to happen after they’d seen our faces?” he demanded. “The only reason that child isn’t bleeding out next to his parents is because he can’t identify us. Otherwise, I’d have slit his throat, too.”
