Bleed

by Ed Kurtz

  “Clem Lundeen,” Walt ruefully answered. “If that one was the worst of the lot, then this one’s a very close second.”

  Gwyn dropped quickly to a crouch when she reached the kid. She thrust her terrible face close to his and slowly stretched her mouth wide open. Clem shuddered and emitted a quiet whimper.

  “Please,” he begged.

  Her tongue shot out. It was long and it glistened in the light. With a sensual moan, she pressed her tongue to Clem’s jaw line and ran it up his face, licking and salivating on his sweaty, pimply skin. When she was done, she licked all the way up the other side. She then retracted the tongue into her mouth, shut her eyes and pursed her lips. She was savoring the flavor of him.

  “Mmmm,” she hummed. “Delicious.”

  In spite of himself, Clem felt his crotch squirm.

  Christ, he thought. Not now!

  But he had no control over it. No matter how horrifying the bloody tableau before him was, and despite the stomach-churning sight of this abominable woman all covered with crusty, peeling scabs, the fact that she was licking him…

  Gwyn’s tongue slid over his lips, probing them. She shoved it between his lips, and the boy didn’t resist. He trembled as she explored the inside of his mouth, licking his tongue, his teeth and the insides of his cheeks. As long as he kept his eyes squeezed shut, it was not totally unpleasant. Even a little nice. To be sure, he’d never done anything like this with a girl before. Now her hand slid up his leg, slowing at the thigh and gliding over his swelling groin. Clem softly moaned as Gwyn closed her hand around his crotch and gently squeezed. She pulled her tongue out his mouth, flicking the tip of it against his upper lip. Then the hand went away, too.

  Clem took in a sharp breath and waited for the exciting sensations to continue. When they didn’t, he held the air in his lungs and cracked one eye open.

  Walt loomed over him now. The cleaver in his hand glinted in the light.

  “Sorry, Clem,” he said softly. “Wish you’d just stayed home.”

  With that, the blade shot up high, ready to speed back down into his skull.

  Clem gasped. Then he lunged forward and thrust his head into Walt’s groin. Walt groaned in pain and dropped the cleaver. The blade sank into the hardwood floor with a dull thud. Clem made a tight fist and pounded it into the side of Walt’s head. With a startled mewl, Walt collapsed to the floor as the boy leapt up to his feet.

  Lurking just a few feet away, her rough, flaky hands curled into claws, Gwyn growled like a wild animal. She moved swiftly between Clem and the front door. Clem didn’t waste a second; he bolted for the back of the house instead.

  Walt grumbled something incoherent. Gwyn screamed.

  Clem could hear her huffing, her bare feet slapping against the floor as she ran after him. He sank into the darkness of the back of the house. An instant later, he crashed against the back door. His fingers fumbled in the dark for the doorknob, found it and twisted the cold metal knob. It was unlocked. He yanked hard, threw the door open and burst out into the frigid winter night.

  The moon cast a gray sliver of dim light across the expanse of the backyard. Clem sprinted into it, his lungs already hot and ready to burst. He had to keep going; that thing was still close behind, hissing and scrambling after him. Between rasping breaths, it tittered and mumbled.

  Clem pumped his legs harder. Sweat seeped out of every pore in his head, instantly cooling in the freezing air and chilling his skin. He wanted to stop, to catch his breath, but he had to keep on. The dreadful image of poor Jarod, disemboweled and his dick and balls cut off, was burned into his brain. It was enough to drive him on, keep him running, in his desperate fear of meeting the same ghastly fate.

  Somehow, the worst part of it all was knowing that the woman ate it. Give it to me. That’s what they did. They killed people and cut them up and ate them.

  A tiny squeak shot out of Clem’s mouth when the ground disappeared underneath his feet. He only fell for a fraction of a second, but it seemed like he was drifting through space for a while. When he landed, he sank into softness rather than slamming against hard ground. It felt a bit like sand, but less densely packed.

  Clem scurried in the low place, losing his sense of which way was up and which was down. He kicked his legs and thrust his arms out. He felt like he was in the middle of the ocean in the dead of night. One hand rubbed against the slick, muddy wall of the hole he must have fallen into. Another sank deeper into the sandy morass around him, stopping when his fingers pressed against something hard. He felt around for its boundaries, determined that it was round and not too big to pull out. Clem figured it might be good for a weapon.

  Above him, pebbles and dirt skittered and rained down into the hole. The scabby woman. She giggled.

  “Little man,” she cooed, “it’s not yet time to be down there. Don’t you know that’s where the scraps go?”

  Clem sniveled. Digging into the powdery mound, he thrust his fingers into it and yanked the object out. It was only then that the hair tumbled down from the thing’s top and coiled around his hand and forearm. He was holding a rotting human head by its eye sockets.

  He shrieked and dropped the head. It smacked against the grainy surface, kicking up a cloud of the stuff. The grains floated into Clem’s face, filling his mouth and nose. At first it was irritating. Then the burning agony set in. It was as if acid had been poured into his eyes and down his throat. He clawed at his face, frantic to rub the smoldering powder away, but he only made it worse. His hands were covered with it. The powder reached his lungs, his chest contracted painfully. He could no longer breathe.

  Slowly suffocating while his eyeballs burned, Clem thrashed violently in the hole. He could neither see nor speak, but he could hear the hideous lady at the mouth of the pit laughing wildly at his death throes. His tongue swelled and >protruded out of his open mouth. As the asphyxiation reached its crescendo, Clem’s skull felt like it was going to burst.

  He was dead before he could find out if it would.

  43

  Walt had only expected to butcher one body that night. In fact, he’d prepared for it. Two bodies were something else altogether—twice the work, and it was a school night. He sniffed morosely and stripped naked in his bedroom. There just wasn’t any sense in further sullying his wardrobe.

  Back in the foyer, he screwed up his mouth and shook his head at the ruin before his eyes.

  It was such a nice floor. Now he’d probably have to have it replaced.

  “Damn it.”

  Shoving this to the back of his mind, Walt got down to business. First, he unrolled the dusty blue tarp Gwyn had dragged into the house. There lay Clem, still and well-dusted with quicklime. The chemical had absorbed most of the vomit, a job usually reserved for sawdust. Walt set to undressing the corpse. Once it was naked, he took a damp dishrag and wiped it down, top to bottom and back to front.

  A raspy laugh came from behind him when he reached the body’s flaccid genitals. He sneered.

  “Very funny, Gwyn. Especially when I’m doing this for you.”

  The laughter died out, but only gradually. Walt dropped the rag beside Clem’s corpse and stood up.

  “Come to think of it,” he said, “I don’t see why you can’t do it yourself. You’re stronger than me.” He picked up the cleaver and held it out to her. “Why don’t you cut it up this time?”

  Gwyn’s lips spread apart, showing her gleaming white teeth.

  “You like it.”

  “Cutting up bodies? No, I don’t. It’s disgusting.”

  “Taking care of me,” she said coquettishly.

  He dropped his head slightly and smiled. She was right. He was repulsed by the bloody work of dismembering human corpses and stripping the meat from their bones, but in the end he delighted in what it meant to Gwyn. He did relish taking care of her, being her au pair with benefits. And he had no intention of stopping.

  Not ever, if that’s what it took.

  He lifted the cleav
er up over his head and brought it down with a resounding thwack, dead in the center of Clem’s chest.

  44

  In her usual seat in the second to last row, Alice sat alone in the classroom. She was almost always the first to arrive, having no first period to speak of, and she enjoyed the rare moments of calm silence. No one to pick on her. No horny guys to stare at her chest, or to pretend to like her just until they got a chance to actually see them, or touch them. Not that she was ever going to fall for that again.

  The first time had been at the end of seventh grade; Kyle Casey. A chubby kid himself, Kyle hadn’t usually joined in with the others when they chanted fatty or lardo or tubby tits. He did call her Alice Phallus once, having apparently just learned the word and made the rhyming connection, but luckily it never caught on. And even after that incident, she still let her guard down at the Spring Formal when he led her outside to the gravel-strewn playground and started to feel her up. The episode was awkward and vaguely humiliating, but Kyle moaned and grunted so much during the act that she allowed him to continue. Maybe, she thought at the time, he could even wind up her first boyfriend. The rosy-cheeked dork wasn’t anyone’s first choice of paramour, but she had to start somewhere.

  The following Monday, word had spread like wildfire: Alice Hawkins is easy.

  She’ll let you feel her boobs if you’re nice to her.

  Alice is a slut.

  The legacy of Kyle Casey.

  She’d kept her head down for the rest of that school year and most of the next, but the same song played for Alice twice more during eighth grade and once at the beginning of the present year. That last one went further. Much further. “All the way,” as Clem Lundeen told everybody in a ten-mile radius after the fact, and with much the same results as her encounter with Kyle.

  She thought she’d never stop crying. But she did. And she made up her mind that boys were revolting, no exceptions, and that she was on her own from here on out. Then came Adiel Gallagher. She wasn’t a boy. But the mere thought of her made Alice flush hot with shame and confusion.

  She opened her composition book up to the midway point, to the page where she’d left off on a blue ballpoint sketch of a dragon exploding out of the roof of a building. The building bore an uncanny resemblance to the school. The charred and flaming bodies splayed all around the building’s perimeter could have been anyone, but she knew who they were. Two of them—one impaled on one of the dragon’s teeth, the other dangling from the sharp tip of one of the beast’s claws—possessed particular identities in Alice’s mind. They were Jarod and Clem, neither of the nondescript figures specifically one or the other. Just like they were in real life, the nasty boys were interchangeable.

  Now she worked on some of the finer details: the dragon’s scales, the building’s bricks, the dancing flames and the shadows they formed. All of it in blue, against a backdrop of faint, straight blue lines.

  Maybe it’s my blue period, she thought.

  The classroom door jerked open and two of Alice’s classmates filed in. Neither of them made eye contact with her, even though she smiled and looked them straight in the faces.

  She quietly sighed.

  Back to my dragon.

  Soon, more kids started to fill up the room. Mr. Blackmore was not far behind. He was shuffling papers on his desk and half the students were shouting and wandering around the room when the bell rang. Alice kept her eyes on the drawing.

  “All right,” Mr. Blackmore said. “Let’s settle down.”

  Alice tore her gaze away from the raging beast in her composition book and looked up at the teacher. He looked terrible.

  His face was drawn and pale, his eyes dark and puffy underneath. Practically the spitting image of her stepdad when he was hungover after a bender in town. All except for the massive bandage wrapped tautly around his right hand.

  “I don’t know about you,” Blackmore droned on, “but I could use a quiet day. For that reason, I’ve brought two different film versions of Romeo and Juliet you can vote on.” He rustled in his briefcase, coming back with two clear plastic video cases. “I’ve got the 1968 Zeffirelli version, and then here’s the more recent MTV generation update…”

  The class roared except for Alice. Their choice was clear.

  Mr. Blackmore smiled thinly.

  “As much as I expected. Too bad for some of you lads, though…”

  He stuffed one box back into his briefcase as he extracted the tape from the other.

  “…the older one’s got some naughty bits this one lacks.”

  A litany of moans filled the air, most of them distinctively male. Alice pursed her lips and looked back down at the dragon in her composition book. She was waiting for the compulsory crass remarks to come spilling out of the resident class clowns, Jarod and Clem. But as the class quieted down, all she could hear was the squealing of the A/V cart’s wheels and Mr. Blackmore fumbling with the tape and VCR. It clacked into the machine and began to whir. She looked back up just as Mr. Blackmore switched off the lights. The gray and white static on the television screen gave way to the flickering FBI warning.

  A pair of whispers hissed across the room. Mr. Blackmore went, Shhhh.

  Alice waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, eager to get a look around. The bright image of the studio logo on the screen helped. Narrowing her eyes, she glanced over to the corner of the room where the worst kids in class usually holed up, tittering and cutting up.

  They weren’t there.

  Skipping, she thought. They’re going to be pissed when they find out they skipped a movie day.

  Shrugging and pushing the thought to the back of her mind, she returned her attention to the drawing on her desk. There was just enough light from the television and the window in the classroom door to work by. Ignoring the film she’d seen ten times already, she continued to flesh out the dragon’s many scales.

  ***

  The boys were nowhere to be seen at lunch, either. Usually Alice caught sight of them bumbling around the courtyard between the gymnasium and cafeteria, harassing some girls or surreptitiously drinking gin from plastic water bottles. Not today. That settled it; Jarod and Clem hadn’t come to school at all. Probably they were smoking dope in the woods behind Clem’s trailer park or wandering aimlessly around the outlet mall, looking for some trouble to get in. That, or they really did rob Mr. Blackmore and skipped town.

  Bullshit.

  Alice poked a limp, greasy French fry into her mouth and arched an eyebrow. Those boys were doomed.

  45

  There was a lot of work to do after school was out, and Walt was beginning to feel the pressure. For one thing, he needed a chest freezer, one of those big deals folks sometimes kept in the garage for storing excess meat. He’d managed to dig the flyers out of the newspaper in the teacher’s lounge, but his many chatty colleagues made it difficult to look it over. He brought the ads with him to his next class—where he also played a videotape in lieu of teaching—and pored over the deals while most of the kids slept or made out.

  Jake’s Electronics was advertising a sale on appliances that included a seven cubic-foot freezer, which Walt circled in red ink. It was perfectly affordable, only two hundred dollars, but he doubted it had enough space for his needs. The twenty-five cubic-footer at Red’s Discount Appliances looked far superior, but that one really jacked the price on him: $687.99. He puffed out his cheeks and ran a cost-benefit analysis in his head.

  Jarod couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred twenty pounds in his prime; that is, when he was still whole. Minus his entire skeleton and probably half of his internal organs—and additional water weight—the remaining bounty would probably amount to less than fifty pounds. His good buddy, the late Clem Lundeen, was a bit larger than the impish Jarod, so Walt estimated somewhere in the neighborhood of sixty-five pounds of meat from him.

  Beside the Red’s Discount Appliances ad for the large chest freezer, Walt wrote: 115 lbs?

  He looked c
loser at the ad, studying the appliance’s features. Lift-out baskets (that he would toss in the garbage), quick-freeze option (whatever that meant), audible and visual temperature alarm system, and easy to read electronic controls. None of this helped Walt’s left-brained mind make sense of the problem. The fact that Red’s claimed the freezer could hold over eight hundred pounds of frozen food, however, helped immensely.

  He grinned and tore the ad away from the circular. This was the one.

  And with loads of space to fill up, Walt could butcher four more their size and have room to spare.

  In a way, it was a frightening thought. Five were dead already, thanks to Gwyn’s sudden appearance in Walt’s life. The creepy redneck who trailed his sister to his house was certainly no big loss, and the boys all but sealed their own fates. Amanda, on the other hand, was a painful death to experience. Though the memory was fading, Walt thought of her often, sometimes for days on end, wondering if her horrible demise could have been prevented in some way. She should have stayed away, should have read the signs that the house was not safe. That Walt was not safe. He never really knew if he actually loved her when she was alive and he was no more certain of that niggling question now that she was dead and gone.

  Well, not quite gone. Her slowly dissolving bones remained in the corpse pit behind the house. But at least he no longer had to see them, now that they were completely submerged beneath an ever-growing mound of quicklime.

  Poor Amanda.

  Still, Gwyn had to feed. It was every living organism’s natural born right. Survival of the fittest and all that. Walt wasn’t responsible for her existence, he only took it upon himself to sustain it. He neither knew from whence she came nor did he care. As long as she was happy, his heart was at ease.

  And that was love.

  There just wasn’t any doubt about it: Walt loved Gwyn more dearly, more passionately and savagely, than he’d ever loved before. He would slaughter the whole damn town if she asked him to, no matter how repulsive he found the act of killing and stripping the flesh from a fellow human being.