by Schow, Ryan
Abby wiped her nose, not knowing it was blood, but not stopping the flow of awfulness she was heaping onto her mother. Something must be wrong with her because she was never this mean.
“So when you call me up and ask if I will ever love you the answer is a resounding no. I mean, really, Margaret, do you think you deserve it? You know good and well you don’t!”
The minute she snapped off that last word, her final insult, her body bucked forward and more blood drained from her nose, and now her eyes and ears, too. She dropped the phone in the water and gripped the sides of the tub. Brayden didn’t look at her nudity, he saw only her face, only the trails of red making their way down her cheeks, the sides of her neck, around her lips. She sat up and a cloud of red water bloomed like a poisonous rose flowering between her upper thighs.
Abby’s body convulsed a couple of times and then the vomiting began. He got to his knees, took her hand in his and just did the best he could to be with her as this process passed. After she was beaten badly and almost killed in Santa Monica, this same kind of purging happened. This massive healing had produced the same kind of slough-off of ruined tissue as the healing in L.A. Brayden worried, but only a little. Because this was the second time around, he worried less.
She vomited once, twice, three times. All red chunked with bits of greyish, sludgy flesh that did not float but rather sank quickly to the bottom of the porcelain white tub. The door flew open and Netty rushed in, but pulled to a stop with a gasp.
“Call 911,” she screamed to Georgia.
Brayden screamed back, “Do NOT call 911!” Then to Netty: “This is normal. It’s okay.”
Georgia’s face appeared in the doorway, her alien eyes flashing with concern. Abby vomited again, a liquid projectile of ruined muscle tissue and tendons. Netty said there was nothing normal about this and then something happened to Georgia’s eyes, for just the slightest fraction of a moment: they began to flood black. And her skin, it took on a thin, almost transparent look, exposing the inner workings of her face.
Brayden blinked in the sight, and then she was normal again.
WTF???
“Abby?” Netty said, between flushings, her eyes growing moist. “Is this normal?”
Abby nodded her head then threw up again. The entire tub was now pinkish-red water. He tried not to imagine the hazardous human waste piled at the bottom of the tub, and then he struggled mightily not to imagine the excretions leaking out her vagina and anus.
She looked like the crucifixion of Christ if Jesus was an unnatural genetic miracle of science, and instead of being nailed to a cross, the long haired bearded HE was actually a smoking hot SHE and was nearly beheaded in the bowels of luxury then sent to bleed out in a bathtub in downtown San Francisco.
Talk about a big-time boner killer.
The vomit ceased after two or three more offerings, and that’s when Netty said, “Brayden, let me in there. I think she needs her privacy.”
Abby put her hand up, stopping her friend. “I want him here,” Abby said, her eyes now running with clear tears, rather than crimson ones.
“Are you sure?” Netty asked.
She nodded her head. The thing was, even at her worst, Abby was still incredibly beautiful to Brayden. He tried not to think of this, fought to just be her friend, but the truth was, he really was in love with her. And for whatever reason, he was happy she wanted him to stay.
She took his hand again, held it tight, then leaned forward and pulled the drain on the tub. The coppery, metallic smelling water bubbled, then started to circle around the drain.
“Can you stand?” he said.
She shook her head, “Not yet. Give me a minute.”
When the water was halfway drained, she said, “I think I’m okay now.” He took her hand again, not looking at the red rivers trailing down her chest, over her water-chilled nipples, down toward her belly button.
Together they stood her up and though inside he was once again boiling over with sexual want, with a level of rampant need he never experienced before—one that left him desperate and consumed, one that positively destroyed him—he kept his cool. Remembered to breathe.
He looked at her ass and the sight brought him to physical pain, it was that perfect. He looked at her belly, only for a second, and then her vagina and his own legs felt terribly unstable to say the least. He didn’t want to look anymore because he couldn’t take it. And it was impolite. But his eyes forsook him. Finally the trance broke and he reached for the faucet that turned the shower on.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Not really.”
It took a moment for the water to get hot, and then she stood in it. She turned and faced him, fully nude, almost as if she were unaware (but she had to be!), and put her head under the stream. She closed her eyes and once more he marveled at the sight of her, hating her for this, loving her for this, wanting to forget, wanting to remember.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, his voice trembling with lust. She nodded that she was okay, so he pulled the shower curtain closed at sat down on the toilet seat. He couldn’t breathe. His heart was beating rapid fire in his chest.
He turned and both Netty and Georgia were staring at him. He felt like the kid who got caught peeping in the girls’ locker room. His face blistered red and both girls saw it.
“She asked,” was all he could say.
Netty said, “So you did this before? You’ve seen her like this?”
“Yes. In Santa Monica. After the producer and his wife, after…after…” He didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to tell them she was like this after he watched Bryn Giardino kill her husband then blow her own brains out.
Unable to handle his own emotions, he stood, walked past them and said, “I’m going back to the hotel. Just have her call me in the morning.” He left both his cell phone number and his room number at the Fairmont with them, knowing Abby’s phone was waterlogged and ruined.
Outside, he called a cab and waited in the cold until it arrived.
A Coward’s Last Stand
1
Margaret hung up the phone, her body numb, her mind all but resigned to the fate she feared most. Over the next few minutes she catalogued all the things she had done wrong in her life, then she thought about all the terrible things Abby said to her and realized her daughter was right. She was a terrible mother. A monster.
Unworthy of love.
Deep down, even though she stopped drinking and stopped with the pills, she was a narcissist, a shallow, loveless woman obsessed with vanity and reputation. She exuded no substance, no real value. She was driven by the meaningless pursuits of publicity, social status and material consumption. And if she took a moment to reflect on her true self-worth, the only thing she ever created in life was Savannah, this beastly looking thing she could barely love. An ugly duckling who transformed into this swan who would never, ever let Margaret forget that she was inhuman, heartless and unlovable.
Margaret hadn’t truly changed in rehab. She just stopped drinking and doing drugs. Now she wanted both the drink and the drugs. She even thought of doing them in such excess as to put the entire world and her sorry life behind her. But she wouldn’t. Suicide was selfish, a coward’s last stand.
She thought of Maggie and her crying slowed.
She thought about how she would feel if Abby killed herself, or if Christian did such a thing.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “I can’t be this person anymore.”
Finally she picked up the phone and dialed Christian. He answered on the second ring. The background noise sounded like he was watching TV, which would have been annoying had she not been so depressed.
“Margaret?” he said. That’s how he answered the phone, as if Margaret’s caller ID was wrong and someone else was calling.
“Hi,” she said, her voice trembling.
“You okay?” he asked. The background noise was suddenly gone, muted. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
“She hates me,” Margaret said. Then, barely intelligible, she said, “I deserve it. I’m a terrible person. A failure as a mother.”
“You can’t change the past,” he told her with a tenderness in his voice she wasn’t used to.
“I know,” she said. Then: “I think I’m ready.”
After a long moment, he asked, “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
Margaret didn’t want to fault him for the hope plaguing his voice, or how he breathlessly awaited her answer. She tried desperately not to hate him for wanting her to change everything about herself; he was right, though. They would never be a complete family again, not while she was still…herself. Not while she was still alive. She was the reason they were a broken family.
The reason Savannah was now Abby.
The reason Atticus was now Christian.
She tore them apart at the seams with her bad behavior, her judgments, her preoccupation with beauty and perfection in spite of her ugly family. Everything about her was cancerous, toxic, a poison piled upon those who needed her love most.
“Yes, Atticus, this is precisely what I’m saying.”
“It’s Christian.”
Her tears were dried completely. She felt a sudden and profound emptiness. She wondered, is this how death row inmates feel walking that final walk? The difference was, no one was leading her to her death. She was walking toward it willingly. On her own accord, she would erase herself from this world. Just disappear. Vanish. This wasn’t suicide, this was the diet soda version of it. There would never be a body. Nor would there ever be any evidence to mark her exit.
She would just be…gone.
“I know your name, Christian. Just…I don’t know…will you make the arrangements? Please? And don’t tell Abby.”
“We have to tell her something,” he said.
“I know. Just—”
“When the time comes,” Christian said, “we’ll tell her you’re traveling abroad, that you realized we needed space from you, that there’s a very real possibility you might never return.”
“You’ve thought about this,” she said, the reality of this moment slamming into her with brute force. It left her nearly breathless, this awful realization.
“I have.”
Now she couldn’t cry if her life depended on it. “After the terrible things she said tonight, that’s probably the most believable story I can imagine.”
“What exactly did she say to you?”
“She doesn’t love me. In fact, she hates me.”
“I know.”
“That things will never change.”
“No,” he said, solemn, his voice teeming with sorrow. “I don’t think they will.”
Resolved to her fate, she said, “Make the arrangements, Christian. Like I said, I’m ready.”
Ode to the Butcher
1
Lately it seems my nightmares are every bit as real as waking life. It’s like I can’t distinguish between the two anymore. How many times will I die in my sleep before I die for real? And when it comes to death, when is enough enough? When is it too much?
I wake up alone. I wake up next to Georgia. I wake up sweating in hell.
Then I wake up for real and I can’t go back to sleep because to be restless, to be wide-eyed and irate without sleep, is marginally better than seeing Gerhard’s scab ingesting monster, the bald boy with the knife, the Giardino’s, Gerhard, the pink gel, my own blood and vomit, my sensei, Maggie dead in the bathtub…oh my God, when does the list end?
Is this why I have become a masochist? Why I now have a death wish? Because the idea of ending it all feels so much better than going back to sleep? Or living one more day?
Georgia is snoring lightly beside me. Then I’m out again, dead to the world, finally lost in a deep, dreamless slumber…
….until the alarm goes off and I realize today is the day we’re going to kill Dr. Aribert Heim, former Nazi war criminal, the Baden-Baden gynecologist and as-yet-indelible Butcher of Mauthausen.
For a second the world seems right again.
Justice will be served.
Who says a girl can’t have the worst night ever and still wake up on the right side of the bed?
2
The first thing you need when killing someone is zip-ties, because nothing makes murder as difficult as fighting with a squirmy victim. And of course, it doesn’t hurt to have canvas and ropes because it’s not the easiest thing in the world finding a body bag.
Next is the selection of the murder weapon, which is never a black and white affair. It’s never just a cut and dry decision. You have to ask yourself, what have you got the stomach for? Do you think you can shoot someone in the heart or the head? Can you do it standing so close their blood sprays back on you and not completely freak out? Because when you freak out, you get caught.
What about a knife? A hammer? A hatchet?
In my case, I think I have the stomach for a hammer. The way that Nazi f*ck cut open my chest, poured gasoline into my heart and set me ablaze, that’s how anxious I am to hurt him. Me doing the up close and personal kill, I truly believe in my heart the hammer is the right tool.
Moving on…
Rule number…whatever…is never take your own car to the scene of the crime. That’s why the first thing I do when I get up is call a cab company and tell them to pick me up in two hours.
The next phone call I make is to Brayden. He’s groggy, but I don’t care. For the skin show he got last night, he can wake right up and do whatever it is I say. With my foregoing of modesty, I have earned it.
“Pull as much cash as you can out of the ATM then come over here,” I tell him. “But take a cab, not that boat of death you call a car.”
“Good morning to you, too,” he says.
“Be here in two hours,” I tell him and he’s like, “Sure thing.”
Netty’s suddenly in my ear telling me to call Sensei. I make the dreaded call, telling him I have a personal problem I need to attend to. Naturally, he doesn’t believe me. The way he seems to know everything sort of freaks me out. Stay focused, I tell myself.
Stay calm.
We eat breakfast while I make the list:
Hammer
Rope
Zip-ties
Canvas
Butcher knife
Gag cloth
Shovels
Gloves
Duct Tape
Staring at the list, I know I’m forgetting something. It’ll come to me, I tell myself. But then some voice in the back of my head says, “Yeah, when it’s too late.”
There is no clear conscience when it comes to one person killing another. There is no state of calm unless you’re a serial killer, and even then, those guys have to be pretty loopty-doopty in the head to do half the heinous shit they do. We’re talking fried freaking circuitry.
So when Brayden gets here, we have a brief pow-wow, then hop into the cab when it gets here and head straight for the car rental agency where I get the same beat to crap panel van I rented the last time. We spend the morning doing a supply run.
Every so often Netty ruins the mood by asking if this is really necessary and I say, “Yes, it most certainly is,” and she just shakes her head, her feet getting colder by the second.
“Look, Nettles,” I finally say, “you’re not going with us because the last thing I need you to be is an accessory to murder.”
“But Georgia can go?” she asks, deadpan.
“She’s different.”
“Oh, and how’s that?” Netty quips.
“Yeah,” Brayden says (he hasn’t taken his eyes off her since she got here), “how’s that any different?”
“Because I’ve already killed someone,” Georgia announces, monotone, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Brayden and Netty, their gosh damn jaws hit the floor.
“I wasn’t going to tell them,” I tell Georgia. “You did that on your own.”
“Tha
t’s okay,” she says. Her eyes are practically glazed over at this point. It’s the kind of look kids get on road trips after the excitement has burned off. “What will it matter after today anyway?”
“Good point,” I say.
Lunch is long and quiet, and I can’t stop thinking about the van and all the supplies it holds. We are really going to do this. That’s when my stomach drops into my colon and I start to get a case of the chickenshits. But then I remind myself of what happened. That he tried to kill me.
That he took Rebecca.
Rebecca…
For some crazy reason, I keep expecting the guilt to hit me like it did in L.A. just before we went to the Giardino’s house to kill him. It never hit. Somehow I convince myself it’s my gut telling me this is the right thing to do. Not that killing Maggie’s rapist wasn’t the right thing to do, it was. Perhaps I’m just getting a stronger stomach for this type of thing.
Which scares me, and those around me. I guess it’s a good thing that we’re leaving Netty behind.
3
Just before sunset, staked out at the sidewalk in front of Gerhard’s lab in the panel van, it’s almost time. For the last hour Brayden’s been telling Georgia all about her life at Astor Academy. She listens like it’s gossip or something. Like he isn’t talking about her. Or her previous life.
And me?
I’m so in my head right now. Too queasy with the details of what’s to come to add anything of merit to the conversation. Not that I’m anxious to make small talk. I can’t stop thinking of Rebecca. I can’t stop thinking of Heim. And I can’t stop thinking of the things Arabelle said when we last spoke.
When I called her, which was right after lunch, Arabelle admitted the doctor was going through a transformation, that he was trying to emerge, but was having a hard time waking into full consciousness. When I asked if Gerhard could deliver Rebecca’s babies without Heim, she said he could. She said both her and the doctor (Wolfgang Gerhard will no longer be his name) would be able to do it, no problem.
