by Ryan Green
He drew out the pistol and put a round in the back of her head, just to be sure. He strolled across the room and gave the boy the same treatment, right in the dark bruise between his eyes. The room smelled sharp as the taste of a penny. He would have to deal with that, too. Couldn't have any surprises getting spoiled. Startled awake by the gunshots, little Barbara began to cry.
Ronald glanced at his watch as if his cuffs weren't flecked with his wife's blood. Barely five minutes had passed since he first opened the door. He chuckled to himself and decided to take a break. This was harder work than he would have thought, and he hadn't even gotten to the heavy lifting yet. He fetched a beer out of the fridge and settled himself by the kitchen table, tapping out one of Becky's cigarettes and lighting it with practiced ease. He let the familiar flavours and the familiar motions soothe him as he planned out his next moves. This had been almost startlingly easy. He couldn't understand why more people didn't do it. Sure, he might be a little sore in the morning, but what did a few pulled muscles matter compared to peace of mind. He drew on the beer again and forced himself to smile. He was hurting, but he was putting it right. One body at a time, he was putting it right. The next steps were the most laborious—disposing of bodies and… he stopped. He couldn't concentrate with that ceaseless caterwauling going on. Why wasn't Becky shutting that damned child up?
He let out a snort as he realised. Then he set his beer down with a clunk. There was no rest for the righteous. He walked through to little Barb's room with the pistol held behind his back. There was no point in scaring the girl. It wouldn't make his job any easier, and besides, it wasn't like she had much of a chance to screw things up yet. When she looked up at him with her big tearful eyes, he tucked the pistol away out of sight. He bent down low and wrapped his arms around her, and she didn't know what to do because he had never given her more than a barked order and a glance before. The tears stopped immediately. His hands slipped up her skinny little body to the back of her neck. Then they slipped around it. Then he started to squeeze. He closed his eyes but he could still feel her. He could still feel the warm meat of her throat caught between his worn hands and the desperate fluttering of her heartbeat where his fingertips bit into her flesh. He could feel her bones grinding in his grip. It was less like choking a person and more like crushing a baby bird. If she struggled, it was so weakly that he did not notice, and if she cried he could not hear her over the rush of blood in his ears. He let her drop back onto her bed after he was done. This room didn't smell of blood, at least. Only the acrid stink of urine hung in the air over Little Barb's body, as if she had pissed the bed in her sleep again one last time instead of having it wrung out of her like a dirty towel.
Ronald ambled back through to the living room and flicked on the TV. He still had work to do, and he had no plans of slacking off, but the background noise would help calm the screaming still rattling around in his skull. It would drown out the little gasps and the echoes of the gunshots that were still bouncing around in his ears. He finished his beer and then set to work dragging the corpses outside. He lifted the cinderblock off one corner of the cesspit and folded the tarpaulin away. Running through each step just as he had imagined it. With the tarp pinned back, he tossed the ruin of Becky and the body of Gene Junior into the hole then kicked them across to the far side to make more room. He snatched up the crowbar and threw that in with them too, just to be sure not to forget it later. Barbara's sodden clothes presented a whole other problem to navigate. Just the thought of handling a piss-soaked corpse made Ronald's stomach turn. He fetched a black refuse sack from in the kitchen and stuffed her in as quickly as he could, touching her as little as he could manage. She was still as warm as a living girl. Out at the pit, he lowered the sack that held Barbara down beside her mother with more gentleness than he had ever intended.
Ronald swiped at his eyes with his cuff. This was the mission. This was the only option that they had left him. Getting soft wouldn't change the facts. It would just make him a weakling and a coward on top of everything else. He knew that he was alone up here on Mockingbird Hill. He knew that nobody could see what he did here, but even so, he wouldn't let any son of a bitch see him cry, even if it was the big man up in the sky. He fetched out a can of kerosene from beside the generator and sprinkled it over his wife and kids. The charnel house stink in the pit subsided as the vapours of the kerosene overpowered it. He had some spare barbed wire to drag over the pit once it was full, to keep wild animals from gnawing at them or hauling them out into the open. But he wasn't going to go to the trouble of fetching his thick gloves until he was done for the day.
Back in the house, Ronald made a half-hearted attempt to mop the blood away and left the doors standing open so that the smell would air out. He had to get things under control before the kids got back from school. He went back to running through the plan in his mind, and as he slipped back into that rational mode of thinking, his movements became more controlled. He mopped down the linoleum floor of the mobile home with all the precision he had once used on the decks of a ship. He stripped Little Barb's bed, tossing the contents into another refuse sack that he added to the septic pit before covering it over and replacing the cinderblock that hides his morning's work. He threw one of Becky's good towels on the mattress to soak up the last of the piss and then went back to fetch his last beer from the fridge. He settled himself down in front of the television with his arm propped up beside him so that the watch was aimed right at his face. He laid the pistol beside his other hand, just in case any more surprises presented themselves and interfered with his perfectly scripted plan.
The hours turned by slowly. The television had never held his interest. It was just something to stare at while he waited for his next task. Nothing on the screen made it further than his eyes. Inside, he was still turning his plan over in his mind endlessly. Quashing any treacherous voice of resistance or reluctance that he might have found lurking in his head. When the time came, he tucked the gun back into his belt, covered it with his jacket and went down to meet his kids as they came off the school bus.
The four Simmons kids didn't know how to handle their father meeting them from the bus at the bottom of their driveway. It was the first time he had ever taken an interest beyond the mandatory, and most days they would take their time strolling up the slope just to have more time free of him. Was this his latest attempt to control their lives? Just popping up at random points during the day when they didn't have to deal with him? Their natural suspicion must have shown on their faces because he sniggered and said, ‘Christmas is coming. Your mom likes surprises. You work it out.'
He congratulated himself on the delivery of that simple sentence because it set the four of them whispering amongst themselves, completely distracted from anything that he might be doing. Better yet, it wasn't even a lie. Just a statement of some random facts. He didn't have to hold it in his mind. He didn't have to trick the world into believing it. He just had to keep on walking. The actual lie would come up at the house, but there he would only have to sustain it for a brief moment. They walked past the grave of their mother, brother and sister without noticing a thing out of place. The red clay of the earth covered up any gory stains nicely.
He led them through to their rooms and finally let the lie tumble out as smoothly as he could: ‘There's a special surprise for each of you, but your mom wants to see each of you enjoy yours, so you're to come through one at a time when I come to fetch you.'
All four of their faces lit up as he told them. It was the happiest that he could ever remember seeing them, but then again, he didn't usually bother to look at their faces. Their height and hair were enough to tell them apart, and if he sometimes yelled the wrong name it didn't do the other one any harm to have a scare to keep them in line. He took Loretta through first, leading her through the living room where the faint metallic smell of blood still lingered to his adrenalin heightened senses. Out through the sliding doors and around to the water barrel at the r
ear side of the building. He turned to look at her. Sweet Loretta was as old as Sheila had been when she first turned on him. She had her sister's eyes, her heart shaped face. His love for Loretta had never been as intense or as turbulent as his feelings towards Sheila, and he had never laid a hand on her in the way that people about town might have sneered at and called wrong, even if she did belong to him. The hair was wrong, the height was wrong, and even a casual glance at her all bundled up in her heavy jacket told him that the body was all wrong, but she was still just close enough to being Sheila that it made things simple.
Ronald grabbed a handful of her hair and shoved her face through the ice on the top of the water barrel. She bucked and tried to get a grip on the barrel's edge to pull herself out, but that first gasp of shock when the cold water hit her face had already done half the work of drowning her. She was his child as much as that bitch Becky's, so she had some fight in her. When she discovered that she couldn't push back against his weight holding her down she reached up and tried to claw at his hands. Her nails were kept clipped short like all his girls.—he wouldn't put up with any of the sluttish nonsense of growing them long and painting them.—so they skittered across the leathery skin of his hands leaving nothing more than a trace of dead skin lifted up. In reply, he jammed her neck down against the rim of the barrel and put his full weight on her. In his mind, he recited his plan over and over. This was the easy part. The quiet part. The part with no risk. He knew that they had betrayed him. He knew that they were defying him at every turn. This was what they deserved. He felt a dull clunk as the full weight of his body and the unbending edge of the metal crushed together through the soft tissue of her neck. Her struggles stopped instantly. Ronald hauled her to the septic pit and tossed her in. There was no blood and no screaming this way. It made everything so much easier. He went to fetch Eddy next.
One by one he went through the motions. Eddy didn't struggle like Loretta. He seemed surprised for a moment, then just seemed to accept his fate. Marianne jammed her elbow back into her father's face once the water hit her skin, and she probably would have been able to fight her way free of a man who lacked the determination that completely filled Ronald. Little Becky was the last. She was too short to reach over the top of the water barrel, so he led her to the edge of the septic pit full of corpses, wrapped his fingers around her little throat and squeezed the life out of her until her face turned purple and her eyes rolled up into her head. If she fought him he couldn't remember, but he suspected that she died helpless and hopeless just like her mother. Submitting when she knew that she was beaten. He didn't know if he could call that cowardice, and after this busy day, he didn't have the space left in his brain to think it through.
He poured some more kerosene over the corpses and then fetched out his good gloves and the barbed wire, cursing the vicious stuff each time he felt it prickling at him through his coat. He went as slowly as he could, laying it crisscrossed over the layer of bodies in the pit as though it was just another chore, but he was losing sunlight so quickly that he had to rush more than he would have liked. He rolled the tarp back over and dropped the cinderblock in place with a groan. It had been a long day and he was cursing himself for forgetting to pick up a six-pack while he was in town. At least he wouldn't have to worry about anyone pretending that they weren't scowling at him when he went to pick some up in the morning.
Ronald waited out the days until his next targets came into sight. He was a sharpshooter, and he knew just how the game was played. Unlike his military days, he had the comforts of home all around him, as much beer as he could carry, and most comforting of all, the exact time that each target was going to reach the spot where he was waiting. Becky had been planning Christmas for months. She had gone on and on and on about it until he was about ready to tear her head off, but instead, he had swallowed the fury down and forced himself to absorb the details as if it was a mission briefing. Becky might not have realised it at the time, but she was the enemy. She had been the enemy from the first moment that she had turned against him. Every word that she spoke was intercepted intelligence, even if it was difficult to consider a single word that she mumbled out to be anything resembling intelligent. She had been feeding him enemy positions, numbers, and supply lines since he first gave her a handful of cash for a Christmas tree. Ronald just wished that he had thought to buy the Vietcong a Christmas tree or two while he was over visiting them.
As much as the traitors who had slipped through his fingers might have loved their mother, they hadn't been willing to sacrifice their Christmas Day itself. Boxing Day had been portioned off to visit their own flesh and blood, while the scum that they were shacking up with were considered a priority on the holy day itself. If he hadn't loathed Becky so thoroughly by the end, he might have felt sorry for her, watching her wilt as every one of her children stabbed her in the back just the same way that they had turned on him the moment he showed a moment of weakness. Their arrivals were to be staggered through the day, ostensibly because of different travelling times, but really as a way to create a buffer. Billy, his wife Renata, and their runt Trae were due first, at around about midday. They were going to test the waters and make sure that their miserable old monster of a father wasn't going to cause any trouble before Sheila arrived with her little white knight an hour or so later, along with the baby she had stolen and the bastard she had birthed to the filthy little usurper who had stolen her from her loving family in turn. It would not stand. Ronald would not stand for it. Not for another moment. That was his girl. That was his baby. He made them both. He brought them both into the world. How dare that boy snatch her from his grasp. She belonged to him. Ronald brought his temper back under control as he watched the clock ticking around to midday. He only had to contain it for a little longer. All of the fury. All of the ways that he had been wronged. It was all going to be washed away. He was going to get them all and not a single tremor of anger would be left inside him. The static that had been shrieking between his ears since the moment his father died would fall silent. He knew this. He had absolute confidence that when these wrongs were righted, he would be able to live as other men lived, riding on the wave of chaos instead of being drowned beneath it.
The clock ticked around to midday, and he was out of his seat like a bullet out of a gun, stalking first to the door then the windows, looking out towards the driveway and then back to the patio doors again so he could look out and reassure himself that nobody and nothing had been troubling his septic pit. He had chased the dog away from it a couple of times over the last few days when it was let out of its pen, and he was going to let his .22 chase it off if it tried to snack on his dead babies again. They were all loathsome traitors who deserved nothing more than burial in a pit dug for an outhouse, but they were still his, and the dog had no right to them. He stumbled back and forth through the house, pacing and waiting and grumbling for a full five minutes before he heard tires coming up the driveway.
He grinned despite himself at the sound of gravel and wet clay being flung up against mudguards. He tried to force the smile down and then realised what a perfect disguise it would be. With his beard all turned white he probably looked like a jolly old Santa Claus right now. He waited patiently by the door for as long as he could, listening as the engine was turned off, listening as they got out of the car, listening as they got their brat out of the back seat, then he pulled the door open and took a step back, grin still fixed in place. He flicked the safety off his pistol and drew in a steadying breath. Any second now.
Billy came up first, placing his wife and child behind him, safe from harm, like a real man should. It would have been enough, once upon a time, to make Ronald forget all the ways that this boy had tried to do him harm. It would have been enough to give him a spark of pride. As it was, all that it did was delay him in raising his arm just long enough for Billy to see the gun and let out a gasp before the first bullet took him right in the sternum. The bullet punched through his heart and then ratt
led around, bouncing off his ribs. Billy looked from the gun in his father's hands down to the dark wet patch on his shirt as though he couldn't put the pieces of the puzzle together. As if he didn't know what he had done. As if he didn't deserve a thousand times worse.
Renata was a brave girl. When she saw her husband hurt, she rushed forward to help him. She was a pretty thing, too. Lovely thick hair. It was a shame that the far side of it filled up so suddenly with fragments of skull and juicy pink brain matter as the bullet tore through her head. Ronald gently exhaled then tucked the still hot gun back into his trousers, letting the heat seep into his bones and ease his aches as he lumbered out into the cold. Their little boy Trae was out there, gaping at his parents' corpses and shaking. He smelled like he had pissed himself. What was it with these children and pissing themselves? Didn't they know how inconvenient it was? When Ronald came out of the house the kid lost all strength in his legs at the sight of him. Ronald would have laughed if it weren't so pathetic, to think that his blood had been diluted to that. He scooped Trae up and carried him to the water barrel. The ice was thinner this time, so there was no satisfying crunch as he threw the child in, but it was much sweeter to hold him by his ankles, completely submerged, than just push his head under. No matter how the boy writhed and wriggled there was nowhere for him to go. When he stopped squirming around, Ronald just let go and let the worthless little runt fold up on himself in the barrel, out of sight and out of mind.
