by Loretta Lost
“Sophie doesn’t,” I say, wincing at the pain in my feet. “Sophie wears black, but Scarlett wore red. It was part of my hacker persona. I was known as Red_Stiletto in certain online communities for a while.”
“Seriously? That sounds like a superhero.”
“That’s exactly what I was going for!” I say happily, feeling nostalgia for my hacking days. I always felt like such a femme fatale when I put on those shoes, but I knew I was going to get myself in trouble someday. In the distance, I see the mausoleum up ahead, and Luciana is not there alone.
I am worried that she has run into trouble for a moment, but then I recognize the outline of Cole’s body in the darkness. Also, I see him step forward and slam his foot into the door of the mausoleum, causing it to fall open.
“Whoa,” I say in surprise, although we are too far away to be heard. I want to make a joke about how death has made him more masculine, but I don’t think Zack would appreciate such a comment. Also, the pain in my collapsing legs is distracting me from my ability to have a sense of humor. “Can we stop for a second?” I ask him, moving to lean against another tombstone.
“No,” he says at once, scanning the area with his gun pointed out at the cemetery before slipping his hand around my back and dragging me toward the mausoleum. “We need to warn them, and get better cover. Come on.”
As he drags me forward, I see Luciana and Rodriguez both covering their faces and coughing. Cole is just standing there and staring.
“Hey!” Zack shouts, waving his arm as we approach. “Get inside! There’s an armed man out here.”
They all turn to look at us, and Rodriguez begins to fumble to open the large mausoleum doors. By the time the doors are fully open, Zack is guiding me between them. I don’t even have time to ask why the others were coughing before it hits me.
That smell.
Oh God, that smell. I lift my hands to cover my face, but it does nothing. It causes my eyes to water, obscuring the darkened mausoleum from view. The smell is startling at first, but then it builds and builds, until it’s suffocating. Covering my nose and mouth with both hands, I blink to clear my eyes so that I can focus.
And then I see where the smell is coming from.
There are dozens of dead bodies in here. Dozens.
They are all in various stages of decay. Some of the bodies even seem freshly killed, like they may have been alive earlier today. As I gasp a little at the scene before us, the odor continues to build and intensify. Some of the bodies have decayed to the point where the flesh is sloughing off their bones. There are large flies buzzing all around us, and maggots squirming in empty eye sockets. I feel like after entering this room, we might crave sticking our faces in buckets of rotten eggs or portable toilets just to get some fresh air.
The smell is so jarring to my senses that it takes me a minute to hear a woman calling for help. She is seated at a table. I walk forward, carefully, examining my surroundings, but there is still a slight ringing in my ears. I turn back to look at the others, and they are all gagging and coughing, placing their sleeves over their faces.
I can’t hear what they are saying, through all the noise that isn’t there, so I try to read their lips.
“What the fuck is this?” Zack asks, with a look of horror on his face. He steps around the table carefully, his gun pointed at all the bodies, checking for signs of life.
“There are name cards at each seat,” Luciana points out.
Rodriguez is focused on advancing on the living person in the room who is screaming for help. People? Person. It’s hard to tell. Everything is swirling around me in a bevy of confusion and chaos. And death. I feel Cole’s hand on my arm, and I realize that I am standing numbly and just staring at everything in horror. I suppose I should try to accurately describe the scene before us.
There’s a dining table in the center of the mausoleum. It is very long. It must have about ten seats? It’s hard to count right now. There’s a dead body sitting at each of those seats, posed as if eating a meal.
It is like a tableau.
Only instead of living actors holding perfectly still, we have… human taxidermy.
I notice then, at the far end of the table, there is a familiar, fake-looking blonde woman, screaming her head off for help with perfect lips and eyebrows. So there was some sound in here, after all. She is tied to a chair and gagged, so it’s difficult to understand her. Rodriguez is removing the gag from her mouth.
“He’s going to come back!” she shouts. “You can’t be here. He’ll be back anytime now. Please…”
“Who will be back?” Rodriguez asks.
“Jeremy!” she screams. “I’m so sorry I did all those terrible things. He forced me to. He was going to hurt our mother if I didn’t. She’s so weak, and I can’t bear to see her get hurt anymore.”
“Is that your mother?” Rodriguez asks, gesturing to a wheelchair in the corner.
Brittany nods.
I can’t tell if the woman in the wheelchair is dead or alive. She fits right in with all of the other dead bodies. There are skeletons designed cleverly to appear as if they are pouring drinks for the people at the table, who will also soon be skeletons. It’s actually set up in a somewhat artistic way. If you stare at the gruesome and grotesque long enough, you will start to find some beauty in it.
“This empty seat,” Cole points out, and his voice comes from very close to my side. “It has my name on the card. He shot at me, intending to kill me and add me to this collection.”
“Other foster children,” Brittany explains tearfully. “Our parents were horrible people. The only good memories we have are from when our parents were away, and we would sit down to have dinner with the kids they fostered. Jeremy said that it was the only thing that made him feel like he had a family. So when our mom had a stroke, and we both came home to take care of her, Jer couldn’t stop talking about wanting more people at the table. To eat with us. I didn’t know he’d gone so crazy. I had to go along with his plans to try and save my mother.”
“There’s a place setting at this table for Scarlett, too,” Zack points out from the other side of the table.
“He’s going to be here soon,” Brittany screams. “He’s coming back soon!”
“Where is he now?” Luciana asks, lowering herself to look at the girl. “We’ll go to him.”
“He lives in the main house of the cemetery. He was so angry that he didn’t get a body from killing Cole. He always digs up the graves, and this one was empty. He was so, so angry. He killed so many people.”
To be perfectly honest, I’m not totally sure what’s going on. It’s a little confusing and unsettling. It’s hard to breathe in this stuffy room, filled with death and disease. You always think you’ve experienced a lot in life, until you walk into a room with a dozen dead bodies neatly arranged around a dinner table like a scene from a religious painting.
“Let’s get out of here,” Cole tells me, taking my arm and trying to guide me outside. But I feel too frozen to move.
“It was great work finding this place, Shields,” Luciana says between coughing and covering her face with her sleeve. “Great work, as usual. We’re going to find Jeremy and save a lot of lives.”
“Did your brother kill the woman you were impersonating?” Detective Rodriguez asks, stooping beside Brittany with a tape recorder. “Dr. Annabelle Nelson, who was found dead at The Mind Spa clinic where you were working as her assistant. Her body was found maimed beyond recognition.”
“Yes, he killed her. And he forced me to poison Cole in the steam room. He said he would kill our mother if I didn’t. And Mom’s the only family we have left.”
“The old woman is alive,” Zack declares, as he examines the corpse-looking thing in the wheelchair. “She’s barely breathing. She needs medical attention.”
There’s so much happening all around me now that it’s hard to focus. Everyone seems to easily know their role, and what to do, and how to help. I’m just staring at the
bodies with dread, feeling an ice-cold numbness and terror rushing through my veins.
“Come on,” Cole says, wrapping his arm around my back. “Let’s get some fresh air.”
“Be careful!” Zack says. “She said the killer would return at any moment.”
“He’s lonely,” Brittany says as she looks out at the table. “He kills people because he’s lonely. He wanted Cole to join him. He wasn’t upset you killed our dad. He just wanted you to be his friend, and join his collection. I’m not mad either. Our dad was awful, so you’re kind of my hero. I’m sorry my brother tried to kill you.”
Cole turns back, looking at the woman uncomfortably. He is guiding me outside the mausoleum when gunshots are heard.
“Get down!” Zack and Rodriguez shout at the same time. But I am still too frozen to move. I find myself scanning the cemetery for the shooter. I want to look at his face. Is it the man from before who held the gun to my stomach?
My frozenness results in Cole covering my body with his and tackling me to the ground. I have the air knocked out of me, and my skull hits the cold stone floor of the mausoleum. The impact jostles me back to reality, and I feel suddenly more clearheaded. I can see everything with pristine detail. I can see the ceiling of the mausoleum, and how inferior the design is to anything Cole would make.
Cole does great ceilings.
I hear Zack shooting back at Jeremy from the other side of the door. His rifle is more powerful than all of our handguns, and he moves with great precision due to all his expert training. The gunshots are so loud. I turn my face to the side, trying not to hear them.
“Get him to cover!” Zack shouts at me, while he is reloading.
It takes me a second to process what he means. Then I realize that my hands are sticky, and Cole isn’t moving. “Oh my god,” I whisper as my heart skips a beat. “He was hit? Where? Where was he hit?”
“Just move him!” Zack yells.
Tears begin sliding out of my eyes as I try to shimmy out from under Cole, at the same time that I am dragging his body. I see the large bloodstain in the back of his shirt, to indicate that he’s been shot in the lower back. “Cole,” I murmur, dragging him to safety. He is very heavy.
“There are multiple shooters!” Rodriguez says. “We have to take them down fast. We’re kind of trapped in here, vulnerable to a grenade.”
Grenade? What are these people talking about? Who would just have a grenade lying around?
When I realize that the type of people who collect a dozen dead bodies would probably also have grenades, I swallow down a bit of bile. The bile tastes like rotting death and tears.
Reaching out, I put pressure on Cole’s new bullet wound, or where I think it might be. Luciana rushes to my side, pulling up Cole’s shirt to check the damage. She curses, turning back to look at Rodriguez. “Call an ambulance!” She retrieves Cole’s gun from his hand, where he is still tightly clutching it. But this causes him to stir.
“What happened?” Cole asks groggily.
“Don’t try to move!” Luciana says to him. “You got shot in the lower back. You could be paralyzed from the waist down.”
Cole groans he pushes himself up slightly, to look at me. “You okay, Scar?”
“I’m so sorry. You were protecting me.”
Grabbing my leg, and trying to lift himself up, he turns slightly to look down at his new injury.
“Fuck!” Cole says, getting up quite suddenly. “Not again. Fuck this shit.” He moves across the mausoleum to where Zack is focused on shooting at our attackers. “Hey, buddy, can I borrow this?”
“My rifle?” Zack says hesitantly, with hurt in his voice. “Why? Fine, here. Why not! You already took my girl, you might as well have my gun.”
Somehow, I think he seems more reluctant to part with the gun than the girl, because his hands won’t release the weapon, and Cole has to struggle to yank it away.
“Thanks,” Cole says, testing the weight of it in his hands. There is something deranged about the way he is speaking and behaving. He seems almost cheerful. He seems… cracked.
Rodriguez continues shooting while this exchange is happening. He does not have an opportunity to turn to look at Cole, but he utters a warning. “Hey, brother…” he says, in a cautionary tone.
“Cole,” I call out softly, seeing that there is blood dripping down his pants from his bullet wound. “What are you doing? Calm down!”
But he ignores me, and walks right out of the mausoleum holding Zack’s rifle. My heart leaps into my throat, and I turn to Luciana with a look of terror on my face, which she returns. Now I know the answer to my question. I have made a really bad decision by convincing Cole to leave the desert. He was mentally unstable. He is now completely unhinged. He begins screaming at the top of his lungs as he walks forward, on some kind of suicide rampage. My heart leaps into my throat as the endless barrage of gunshots begin.
“I AM SO FUCKING SICK AND TIRED OF GETTING SHOT!” Cole screams out into the cemetery as he unleashes a huge volley of bullets at our attackers. Someone hollers as though he’s been hit. “AND YOUR FUCKING MAUSOLEUM IS DESIGNED SO FUCKING BADLY! HIRE A REAL ARCHITECT! A TODDLER COULD DO A BETTER JOB WITH LEGOS.” Pausing to take a deep, rasping breath, he continues. “SERIOUSLY. GIVE ME A FUCKING BOX OF LEGOS AND I CAN DESIGN A BETTER MONUMENT TO THE DEAD. PLASTIC LEGOS WOULD BE MORE RESPECTFUL THAN THIS LOPSIDED, DROOPING, MISERABLE PIECE OF SHIT—AND PROBABLY A SUPERIOR MATERIAL!”
“Hey!” says a voice from out in the cemetery, one of the shooters. “You jackass! I was the architect, and I’ll have you know this is a perfectly modern—”
Cole releases at least a dozen bullets directly into the man’s head. “No, it isn’t modern. It’s bad. I mean, it’s awful enough you had to kill all those people, but to put them in that monstrosity? I’ve designed better barns for livestock. Oh, well, he’s dead now. He’s not going to design anything else. Problem fixed!” Cole walks back into the mausoleum and hands Zack his rifle, patting him on the back in a friendly way as blood drips down his legs.
Everyone stares at him in shock. My throat has gone very dry, and I want to stand, but my legs won’t work. Did he really just do that?
“What?” he says with a shrug. “It’s a pet peeve. Stupid designs like this really bug me.”
“Jesus Christ,” Zack says, exhaling and sinking back against the stone wall with relief. “You’re fucking insane, man. How did you do that?”
Cole shrugs. “I played a lot of video games to de-stress in college. Same concept, right?”
“No,” Zack says with wide eyes. “I mean, maybe if you’re operating a drone from miles away. But in real life, if you try to be a hero and do stupid shit like that, you end up losing an arm or a leg. Or worse. What the hell would make you walk into the line of fire like that?”
“I was inspired by this girl we both know,” Cole tells Zack softly. “She calls herself fireproof. I figure that if she’s willing to walk through the fire for me—the least I can do is try my best to become bulletproof for her.”
My heart melts as he turns to look back at me with a boyish smile. His eyes are shining with an otherworldly sort of strength and love. It is the same look that he wore on the day I first met him, all those years ago.
“Okay, man,” Zack says, checking his gun, which has been completely emptied of bullets. “You win.” I’m not sure if he’s talking about the gunfight, or me, but he slaps Cole on the shoulder. “We’re good. I’m really sorry about being bitchy earlier. You’re a total badass, man.”
“He is,” Rodriguez says, wiping his brow. “And very, very cool. I thought we lost you for a second there, buddy. It did look like a scene directly out of a video game.”
Cole grins proudly. “Thanks!”
When Cole begins moving over to me, I struggle to pull myself to my feet on my shaky legs. I exhale as I run my hands over his chest, checking for bullet holes, with my mouth slightly ajar. I don’t know what I am expecting to find, but I imagine
that he will be so riddled with bullets that it feels like touching a cheese grater. Instead, his body is smooth. I can’t find a single hole. He doesn’t seem to have any more injuries. “Cole,” I whisper in disbelief. “What did you do?”
“I killed a lousy architect,” he answers, pushing me back against the wall for support as he presses his lips and body against mine. His mouth is hot and he tastes vaguely of gunpowder. His body is plastered against mine as he kisses me with such fervour that I can feel the insane amount of adrenaline pumping through his body. “We should celebrate.”
His kiss makes me dizzy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this side of Cole. It’s not possible. How did he manage to do that without getting hurt? Zack should have been able to handle this. Zack has the training, and Cole just works a desk job, like me...
Brittany has been sobbing the whole time, but now she is finally able to speak. “Did you kill my brother?” she screeches. “Did you get Jeremy?”
“Oh, he got him,” Rodriguez says, scratching his head as he looks at Luciana. “I think Cole just went beast mode. Like Rasputin.”
“Rasputin?” Zack asks in confusion.
“Come on,” Luciana says softly, moving over to us and touching our shoulders. “Let’s get out of here before the cops arrive, since Cole is supposed to be dead. We’ll say Zack shot him.”
“I’ll text you an address nearby,” Rodriguez says. “There’s a trusted doctor there who can take care of Cole. Again.”
“What are you talking about, Roddy? I’m perfectly fine,” Cole says as he exits the mausoleum, stretching his arms up to the sky. “I actually feel great. Better than I’ve felt in days.”
I stare after him in bewilderment, before glancing at Luciana and sharing a puzzled look. I swear, there’s even a small bounce in his step that wasn’t there before. Taking a deep breath, I pull myself off the wall where he pushed me, and move toward the exit of the mausoleum. But before stepping out of the room, I turn back to look at all the other people behind me, both living and dead. Zack, Rodriguez, Brittany, vegetable Mrs. Brown, and a dozen decaying corpses. I shoot them all an incredulous look.
