by Daniel Parme
I went on. “I was kind of hoping I could, you know, do that. With Virginia’s body, I mean, if I’m going to end up eating her anyway.” I was proud of myself for not backing out. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to convince someone to let you dismember, cook, and eat one of your friends, but it’s no easy task.
Dick didn’t say anything. I think it was because he simply couldn’t find anything to say. He had to have been surprised by my request. It was all he could do to look over at Gregor and wait for the hairy chef to answer me.
“It sounds like an ok idea to me,” he said. “I’m going to carve her up anyway. I don’t think Walter would be ok with you having the whole body, though.”
“I don’t think I could eat her whole body anyhow. She’s not exactly a small girl.”
Gregor put a hand on Dick’s shoulder. “What do you think, Pearson?”
Dick said it sounded fine, if that’s what I wanted to do.
“I think it would be good for me, Dick.” And you know, right then, I kind of thought it would be.
So it was settled. I would come by the next night, Tuesday, the day before I would become a murderer, and perform my own little ritual. Gregor would teach me. “But tonight,” he said, “I have to bleed the bodies, the way you would with a deer. It makes the butchering a much less messy job.”
Chapter 41
I was late to work again on Tuesday. I was bloodshot and a little wobbly because I couldn’t get to sleep the night before. I couldn’t sleep because I had a cousin who’d been a hunter. One day he had me go into his garage to get something (a rake or a baseball bat or something, it’s not really important), and when I turned on the light I was met with a buck, spread eagle and hanging from the rafters. It was bleeding drops like a leaky faucet onto a tarp spread over the floor. The head was just hanging there, the way I imagine a dead guy on an inverted cross, only with a really long neck.
That’s what I saw. Darkness, the sound of dripping water, and then BAM! out of nowhere, a big-ass dead animal suspended from the ceiling, its cold juice pooling on the floor.
I could have killed my cousin.
I couldn’t sleep that night because I was stuck on this vision of Virginia hanging there like that, only with bigger breasts and significantly less fur.
You might think I couldn’t sleep because I was freaked out about carving her up the next day, but I was actually pretty cool with that. It was the idea of her being bled that kept me up.
We’ve already talked about this. Eating people, for any reason, really fucks with your head. I mean, shit, I was planning to murder people. More than a handful of them, even. But sometimes it’s not about being crazy. Sometimes it’s about survival.
Then again, sometimes being a little crazy helps.
I couldn’t sleep because after returning home from work, I opened my mail to find another envelope with a letter and polaroids inside. A few months ago, these were always the most exciting letters. Who doesn’t want to get dirty pictures in the mail, right? These pictures were, without a doubt, dirty, but not in that wonderfully arousing way.
These pictures were of Adam. Or part of Adam, anyway. They were shots of his head with its long hair and 70’s sideburns. They were shots of his head, and that’s it.
No body. No Zeppelin t-shirt. No jeans. No cowboy boots. Just his head, alone and on its ear on a shiny table.
And the letter wasn’t much of a letter, either. All it said was, “I wouldn’t tell anyone else the password.”
I couldn’t sleep Monday night because this was some cold, twisted shit.
I couldn’t sleep because who can sleep after that? You can forget about counting sheep. Forget about warm milk, NyQuil, a bottle of wine.
Just forget about sleeping. It won’t happen.
But let’s get back to being late for work.
Like always, Eli was there with Dick. Creepy little Eli with his albino-pale skin and his tics. Creepy little Eli with his lack of conversational skills. Creepy little Eli was there because he’d worked the graveyard shift, like always.
He just sort of stared at me for a minute. “You’re late,” he said.
“No shit?”
“Forty-five minutes late.” He kept staring, like the first time I met him. “And you look like shit.”
“No shit?”
“What’s your problem? I’m the one who’s been stuck at work.” He was right; I may have been a little fucked up in the head, but I knew I was being an asshole.
“Sorry,” I said. “I just couldn’t get to sleep last night.”
“It was a rhetorical question, Travis. I really don’t care.”
“Asshole.”
He cocked his head and smirked. “Eat me,” he said. “You obviously haven’t had your power breakfast this morning.”
I desperately wanted to say something back. Anything. But I was either too stupid, too tired, or too shocked. It took longer than it should have for me to find my voice. “Huh?”
“Oh, come on. You drool like Pavlov’s dogs anytime you get near one of them.” He thumbed towards the back. “It’s easy to tell who does it.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He swung his bag over his shoulder and went for the door. “It’s ok. I’ve tried it, too. Just didn’t like it much.”
“What didn’t you like about it?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m just not as fucked up as you.” He wasn’t trying to insult me. At least, I don’t think he was. He said it matter-of-factly. And then he left, without a smile.
I sat behind the counter and worried about Eli ratting me out to, well, someone. I didn’t get too caught up in it, though. I didn’t have the time. I had a plan, or most of a plan, at any rate. I had to focus. I’d have to cross that Eli bridge when I got to it, if he cared to build that bridge in the first place.
But let’s get back to my plan. Well, it wasn’t much of a plan, really. It was more of a play it by ear kind of thing. Choose your own adventure. Mad Lib.
_________ decided he had to __________ a bunch of people. He figured that __________ would be his best option.
The best option that came to my mind was poison.
The thing about working in a morgue is you’re surrounded by a shit-ton of chemicals.
Something in this place had to be lethal. I had about an hour and a half to find out what it was and figure a way to smuggle it out before Dick got to work.
Most people steal a stapler from work, maybe some pens or an ink cartridge for their printer at home. I used to take shit like that all the time.
But not anymore. That guy wasn’t even me. This was the new Travis, the transformed character. Changer of stories, slayer of cannibals. This was the new Travis, mass-murderer extraordinaire, but with just a hint of Robin Hood in there somewhere.
PEP was the enemy, the roaches that scatter when the lights go on, the rats that dig into your cereal, and I was the exterminator.
Of course, even exterminators need some sort of pest-killing agent, so I had to do some quick research, and there’s no better time to research the potential hazards of chemicals than when your boss is off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does when he’s not at work.
I had only a short time, but I wasn’t worried about it. We had internet access there at the front desk, and trust me, if you want a crash course in Murder 101, there’s nowhere else to go. God bless the web.
I don’t want to bore anyone with a lot of details about all the chemicals we had, which of them were poisonous, and at what levels they became lethal, but I will tell you that I could have taken out most of the city if I thought it was necessary.
In the end I decided on Hydrogen Cyanide, which, as coincidence would have it, is used to kill rats. It’s remarkably versatile stuff. It can kill you if you ingest it or inhale it. It can kill you if you get enough of it on your skin. In liquid form, it’s called hydrocyanic acid, and it’s colorless or very light b
lue. As a gas, it’s clear as the air.
It’s some wicked shit and can kill you in minutes. I fell in love with it instantly.
Apparently, some people are of the belief that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun swallowed cyanide salts rather than let themselves be captured by the Allies. This has nothing to do with my story. I just thought it was interesting.
Anyway, all this learning only took about forty-five minutes, so I had plenty of time to get into Dick’s office to find the key that unlocked the cabinet with all the chemicals, find a full bottle of the stuff, throw it into my bag, return the key do Dick’s office, tape the key to Dick’s office back up under the front desk, and sit there, checking my email and feeling hopeful about my next twenty-four hours.
I was looking forward to this, like going to a baseball game or waiting for the hooker to show up at your door.
As it was, I had no hooker. It was only Dick who showed up. “How we doing today, Travis?”
“Oh, we’re good. Slow, easy day so far.”
“What have you been doing, then?”
“Checking my email. You interested in any sort of penis enlarging drug? I can get you any kind you want. Pills, powders, creams. And every one of them is the only one that actually works.”
He chuckled. “No thanks. I’m a little too old to worry about the size of my dick. At this point, a bigger pecker would only make it that much harder to get it up.”
For a second, I thought maybe there was some way I could do this without having to kill him. I mean, I couldn’t picture Dick actually killing anybody. I couldn’t even see him hurting anybody. If everyone else was gone, he’d really have no reason to kill me, either.
“So,” he said, “are you excited about tonight? With Gregor?”
I sort of gasped, sort of laughed. “I don’t know if I’d say excited. Anxious, maybe. I’m not really looking forward to it, but I’m not running and screaming from it, either. So I guess I’m saying I’m not sure how I feel about it.” The truth is I wasn’t sure, and I was beginning to think that this whole ritual thing might just have some merit. I’d have loved to go deeper into it with Dick, but knew it would have been a bad idea.
“Yeah, I can understand that. It’s kind of like the first time you have to kill someone, and –” He cut himself off, and his eyes got fucking huge. He’d let it slip. He was a murderer. “I mean, uh…”“No, it’s cool, Dick. Sometimes you just have to do certain things, you know? Survival. I understand.” And I did.
I also understood that Dick would have to die whether I liked him or not. Pity.
Chapter 42
If you’ve ever spent any time high in the mountains of some almost-but-not-quite charted area of Canada, you’ve learned to hate Canada and everything Canadian. All of it. Fuck it. Fuck Dudley Do Right and the Barenaked Ladies. Fuck Rush. Fuck the almost-but-not-quite French. Fuck hockey, except for Mario Lemieux. Even free health care. Fuck free health care. If you’ve spent any time in those mountains, you’ve learned that even free health care has been sent by the Devil as a plague upon this Earth.
But a hatred for Canada is only the tip of the iceberg that carved out those mountains in the first place. You’ve learned much more than that, unless you died there. If you died there, you lucked out.
If you died, you haven’t had to learn that blood does not wash off with snow. You haven’t had to learn that a person’s thigh, although plentiful, is tough and almost gamey, while the bicep is tender and succulent and tastes a lot like filet mignon. You haven’t had to learn that you can only eat so much at one sitting before you vomit, and not because you’re too full.
If you died, you haven’t had to learn how to crawl without causing too much pain to your already broken legs. You haven’t learned that six heavy jackets, three pairs of long johns, four pairs of heavy pants, and five and one half pairs of socks are just enough that you don’t freeze to death at night, but not nearly enough to keep you warm.
If you died, you haven’t learned that you can, and will, do whatever you need to so you don’t. You haven’t learned that you’re capable of surviving some pretty brutal shit.
If you died, you’re dead. If you didn’t, you’re alive.
And that’s all it comes down to, really. Alive or dead. Predator or prey.
If you died, you haven’t had to learn how to mix a cocktail of water and Hydrogen Cyanide. You haven’t learned that its given name is Hydrocyanic Acid. You haven’t learned that you can do this in the privacy of your own home. All you need is a big fucking pot and the proper ingredients.
It’s amazing what you can learn if you’re not dead.
Chapter 43
Virginia’s lips were the same pale blue as the acid in my backpack. She looked as cold as her sarcasm had been and was lying on her back, which was never her favorite position, although I’m sure she preferred it to being dead.
“You sure you want to do this?” Gregor was petting his face, his beard poking through the gaps between his fingers. He was already in his apron, the same kind of thick, rubbery apron we had at the morgue. His gloves lay across the legs of one of the other corpses.
“I guess.” I couldn’t take my eyes off this blue girl I used to fuck. This was going to be hard.
Gregor tossed me an apron and a pair of gloves, but I wasn’t paying attention, so they hit me in the chest and fell to the floor. I picked them up and stared at them a moment. They make clothes for every occasion, I suppose.
“Well, let’s get started,” he said. “I’ll coach you through it.”
“Actually, Gregor, I was kind of hoping to be able to do this privately.”
“Privately?”
“Yeah. I was hoping maybe you could show me on the other bodies, and I could do her by myself. Alone, I mean.”
He stroked his beard and bit the inside of his cheek. “I’m not sure Walter would be ok with me leaving you alone in here.”
This would not do. I got my lip quivering. “It’s just… We were really close, and I think it’ll help me deal with it, you know?” A pretend sniffle. “Please?”“Well, I guess it couldn’t hurt. This is basically just a big prep kitchen anyway.” Not all cannibals are heartless bastards. Like Dick said, it’s the stigma.
I wiped my eyes and nose with the back of my hand. “Thanks.”
“Let’s start on this tubby bastard, then.” He slapped the cold belly of the man with the gloves over his legs, put the gloves on, and grabbed a cartoon-sized meat cleaver.
It was an awful lot like carving a chicken, pulling appendages away from the body and severing them between the joints. And that cleaver, it was fucking sharp, separating the meat from the bones like peeling an overripe banana.
“Some people,” he said, “prefer boiling the entire appendage before carving it because it’s easier to get the meat off the bone. But I’ve found that the boiling tends to toughen the meat. I’m a much bigger fan of doing it like a butcher.” He said it like this was just any old conversation. We could have been talking about baseball or American Idol.
I didn’t say much of anything. I tried to make it look like I was paying too close attention to what he was doing to bother with what he was saying.
He noticed my silence and the lack of disgust on my face, and he asked why I seemed so calm about this, why I wasn’t turning green.
“I’ve done this before, sort of. Remember?”
“Then why do you need me to teach you?” It didn’t sound like he was suspicious of anything, but one can never be too careful about such matters.
“Well, all I had was my pocket knife, so I couldn’t really do much more than cut off a little chunk at a time.”
That satisfied him, and he moved on to showing me how to go about getting to a person’s liver. “It’s really the only organ that tastes any good, assuming the person wasn’t a heavy drinker. Well, and the brain, of course.”
Of course.
The first body took about an hour
but would have been quicker without all the explanation. It would have taken about half an hour, judging by how long it took Gregor to finish the next body, a prettyish blond woman, a little chunky and about thirty-five, I’d say. He didn’t talk me through this one. He just let me watch.
The next would be mine, and he would talk me through it if I needed it. But I didn’t want to start yet. I needed a cigarette. This was sort of a stressful situation, you understand, and I kept getting little flashbacks of Erica and Jason, the way I cried the first few days of it, the way I didn’t after that.
So we lost the aprons and gloves and stepped out for a smoke, me with my Camel Lights, Gregor with his Djarum Blacks.
I asked him how he was planning to prepare dinner tomorrow. “Unless you’re one of those chefs who prefers to keep his methods a secret, of course.”
“If you’re going to keep things secret, they should be much more important than whether you braise or broil a steak.” It was a great answer. “Besides, people ought to be able to eat a good meal even if they’re cooking it themselves.”
He told me that the secret to cooking a good steak is to sear both sides so the natural juices are trapped inside, keeping the meat tender. “Of course, everyone here likes it rare, so it’s pretty juicy anyway.” He listed the ingredients he was planning to use, and what he was going to prepare as sides (mashed potatoes with garlic and green onion, and sautéed yellow and green squash, if you’re interested.), and then he told me about one of his personal favorite tricks. “Most people just season the surface, but I like to season it from the inside out. You could always just marinate it, but that takes a while and gets a little messy. I like to inject it with whatever I’m in the mood for. Soy sauce or worcestershire or whatever. It doesn’t make a huge difference, really. It’s just a little faster. It’s just the way I like to do it.”
And there it was, Gregor filling in my Mad Lib for me. Tonight, he would inject all this flesh with mostly Worcestershire sauce before putting it in the fridge, allowing the meat to soak it all up.
