Melancholy: Episode 3

by Charlotte McConaghy

  It takes me too long to get him the few feet to my door, and inside we make so much noise I’m certain Pace will come out at any moment. Miraculously she doesn’t, and I manage to get him into my room.

  I return to the woman’s dead body and clear away all traces of Luke’s presence – my footprints and the tracks of him being dragged. It’s so, so horrible, but I use my thumbnail beneath the thin fabric of my t-shirt to clean beneath her fingernails in case there was a struggle and any of Luke’s skin got caught there. Now that Meredith is here, I can’t take the chance that Luke’s DNA could be found on Lace’s body. There is nothing in her mouth, nothing caught in any of her clothing or shoes, so I wipe my footprints away as I backtrack to my place and shut the door.

  Breathing heavily, I lock myself in my room and stare at Luke. He’s on the floor as I don’t have the strength to get him onto the bed, plus he’s covered in blood and I need to be careful not to stain the sheets.

  This is very, very bad.

  It is not the blood moon. Not the anniversary of the day he was injected.

  There were no physical signs leading to this like there always were for me – none of the illness, the bruising on the body, the bleeding gums and nails. If anything, he has been getting stronger, more energetic, his body the picture of health. But there were emotional signs.

  I go to the bathroom, take a towel and wet it under the shower. I use it to wipe Luke’s body, cleaning the blood as best I can. He’s shivering slightly as I scrub at the skin around his mouth – the blood’s clearly been here for a while, which means he killed the woman several hours ago, probably closer to yesterday’s side of midnight. Unlike with Batch, he did kill his victim outside my house, instead of taking her there posthumously. The blood from her neck was all over the ground and it was undisturbed. She also had the discoloration marks that Meredith was talking about, from the accumulation of blood that happens over a few hours.

  Which means he went from tearing her throat out with his teeth to almost immediately losing consciousness. Oddly, it’s like something just switched off in his brain, whereas during my changes I made my kills and then wandered for hours after, some part of me unable to stop moving.

  It’s also curious that nobody heard anything – wouldn’t Lace have screamed as she was being attacked?

  Frankly, none of it makes any difference. The only thing worth knowing at this point is that I can’t let anyone find out who killed her. And it strikes me as really, really awful that I just cleaned her fingernails and looked inside her ripped trachea while the one and only interaction we ever had was her slapping and then spitting on me.

  I get out my largest pair of pants and drag them up over Luke’s hips – they’re way too tight to do up, but they’ll do for now. I can’t get a sweater over his shoulders or chest so I just cover him with a blanket. I don’t want him to wake up naked and not knowing where he is. It is the worst, most emotionally disorienting feeling there is.

  A knock comes from the door. “I’m naked!” I shout quickly.

  “Why?”

  “I’m getting changed.”

  “Well I’m hungry. Meet you at the Den?”

  I can’t let Pace be the one to walk outside and discover the body. She doesn’t deserve to see that, nor do I want her implicated like I was.

  I duck through the door and close it behind me. “Pace, hold up.”

  She turns and waits.

  “I’ve been really lightheaded,” I say. “Do I have a fever?”

  She frowns, but crosses to press her hand to my forehead. “You feel okay,” she murmurs. “But you’ve been giving a lot of blood lately, so you might feel fatigued. Do you want to stop by Ranya to check on it?”

  “Guess so.”

  “I’ll go with you now. Get dressed.”

  I make sure she doesn’t get a look at my room, pull some clothes on and duck back out, locking the door behind me.

  We walk in silence toward the infirmary, which is in the opposite direction to the body. Ranya is just opening up for the morning when we arrive. Before we have a chance to say anything a shriek cracks through the air behind us. Ranya is running toward it, and we follow her. I brace myself, moving more quickly so that I can beat Pace. Someone I don’t know – an older woman – was the one to discover the body, and now more people are following the scream.

  I grab Pace, pulling her away from the body.

  “Don’t, Dual!”

  “You don’t need to see it,” I implore, trying to shield her.

  “I’m not a child – ” She catches sight of the mangled corpse. Slow breaths move in and out of her lungs, and I can’t work out what she’s thinking. Then she says, “It wasn’t Hal. Batch wasn’t murdered by Hal.” And wanders away to the Den for breakfast. My eyes fall shut with a whole-body weariness.

  Quinn and Raven arrive and start sending everybody away. The sounds of sobs and wails follow them.

  “I bet you guys feel good about yourselves,” I say coldly. The leaders of The Inferno look at me, and I look at them, not backing down. “And before you get any ideas, I wasn’t even here,” I forestall. “Ask Ranya.”

  “She wasn’t,” the doctor agrees. “She was with me when we heard Kristin’s scream.”

  They start questioning poor Kristin, and all the while the body just gazes up at us with sightless, milky eyes. We stay with Ranya as she examines it. “She’s been here for about five hours,” the doctor says as she feels the rigor mortis that has set into the limbs. So that’s around 1 am.

  “Your house is closest,” Raven says to me. “Did you hear anything?”

  “Nothing,” I say honestly.

  “Could she have been brought here after the attack like Batch was?” Quinn asks.

  Ranya shakes her head. “All the blood’s here – that’s where her throat was ripped, and then she wasn’t touched again.”

  “Start asking everyone in the vicinity if they heard anything,” Quinn tells Raven, who nods and heads off, for once without argument.

  “The killer might have been able to incapacitate her before doing this,” Ranya suggests. “It would explain why she didn’t scream.”

  “If the vocal cord was the first thing to go, she could have been alive for who knows how long without being able to make a sound,” I say.

  “How do you know that?” Quinn asks me sharply.

  I shrug. “A basic understanding of human anatomy. You might try reading a book some time, Quinn.”

  “So whoever did it was strong and fast and probably very quiet,” Ranya surmises.

  “Or known to her,” I say. “If it was a friend, she wouldn’t be on her guard.”

  “We’re all friends,” Quinn points out, and I realize it’s essentially true. Inside the wall it’s safe. It is meant to be safe.

  “What would she have been doing walking around in the middle of the night?” I ask, trying to ask questions that will take their minds off the kinds of people who are strong and skilled and fast.

  “No idea,” Quinn says. “She’s been unwell, since Batch. Maybe she was …”

  “Grief-stricken,” Ranya supplies and Quinn nods.

  I shake my head. “Let me know if I can help at all, but it’s not really my area.”

  “What is your area?” Quinn asks.

  “I guess it’s trains now,” I say calmly, not reacting to the barb. “Can I go?”

  Quinn waves me away and I head into my house, making sure all the curtains are open so it doesn’t look like I have anything to hide. I would have loved to annihilate them for the gross misjudgement they made in killing Hal, but I don’t have time. In my bedroom Luke is thankfully still out cold.

  A major problem occurs to me now though. Quinn will go straight to Luke’s house, if Raven hasn’t already, as he’s their point man on all things murder. When they find the man of the house not in, it’s going to look very suspicious.

  “Luke,” I try again, bending to shake him gently. This time he stirs. He licks h
is dry lips and groans. Slowly he winces and opens his eyes. They are badly bloodshot, but thankfully the blood vessels haven’t all ruptured, leaving him with terrifying demon eyes like I used to get.

  “Easy,” I murmur. “You’re okay.”

  He tries to sit up, groaning again in pain. “What – ” He blinks a few times, notices where he is, looks down at the pants I put him in. “What the fuck? What’s – ” Another wince as he reaches for his head. “Jesus, my skull feels cracked.”

  He swallows a few times, takes a few breaths through his nose, and I watch as his skin is literally sapped of all color. I lurch into action just in time to grab a hat for him to vomit into. As he heaves, I gently stroke his back, avoiding the skin scraped raw by gravel.

  “This is my favorite hat.”

  “Sorry,” he pants.

  “You okay?”

  He’s not, but he manages to sit on the bed. “What the hell is going on?”

  I don’t want to tell him. I really, really want to spare him. But in a way I suppose it’s better to have someone who loves you explain it than to have to wake up and work it out for yourself, alone. “I found you beside Lace’s body this morning.”

  He frowns, not understanding. I watch his hazy mind tick over and clarity come to his eyes. Along with panicked horror.

  “They have no idea it was you,” I say softly. “I brought you straight here and destroyed any evidence.”

  “What the fuck?” he demands hoarsely. “It’s not even the blood moon!” Despite his raging headache, torn skin and obvious nausea, he starts pacing the room. It’s scary, watching him. This isn’t the despair or guilt I expected. This is fury. He slams his fist into the wall, breathing through the pain, then does it again and again until I try to stop him. “Don’t touch me!”

  I raise my hands quickly. And watch him keep punching the wall. Hurting himself. The pain, I realize, is grounding him.

  Luke eventually stops in exhaustion. His hand is bleeding.

  I see something in his gaze that fills me with more fear than I have ever known. It’s an apology. For the goodbye he is about to make.

  “I’ll confess,” Luke says quietly.

  “And be killed,” I manage to utter.

  “Yes.”

  I lick my lips and stay very calm. I try to stay very calm. But in his eyes there is a world of regret and pain and love and sorrow and it is making it very hard for my heart to keep beating as it should.

  “Luke Townsend,” I say. “I told you once that I was going to kill myself. Do you remember how that made you feel?”

  “Of course. But you also told me that I didn’t get to control when you died,” he replies. “That it was the only choice you had left. You were right.”

  “And then I learned about Dave. And I realized that the cruelty of it, the selfishness, wasn’t worth the relief of my own guilt. Hurting you wasn’t worth anything.”

  He doesn’t answer, just watches me and there’s that horrible apology still there, no shift at all of the sadness in his farewell.

  “I wanted to die,” I admit desperately, “and sometimes I still do, but most of the time I’m very glad to be alive. It will change, what you feel now. It won’t always hurt this much.”

  “Josi,” he murmurs. “Two innocent people who couldn’t escape me. A third, who took the blame and died for it. I don’t know when I could change next. The people in here are like caged prey.”

  I cross to take his face in my hands. I struggle to keep them from trembling. But he feels far away. I reach for him but can’t find him. There is so much fear in his eyes. “You are not dying for them. For what they did to you, in the city.”

  “I did this to myself,” he says, low and rough. His eyes glitter and I have a resounding sense of animal sliding over my skin. “I injected myself.”

  “Because they backed you into a corner!”

  He shakes his head, but I hold him more firmly.

  “Listen to me. There’s no use pretending. It is the worst thing in the world to have to live through – being responsible for the deaths of innocent people. But you are going to live through it, Luke Townsend. Because I do, every day, and I need you to help me save what’s left of humanity. I can’t do it on my own.” I swallow, unable to help the tears that are forming in my throat. “Please,” I whisper, voice breaking. “Don’t make me do it on my own.”

  Luke’s jaw is clenched so tightly it feels like his teeth will shatter in my hands.

  But something gives way inside him. I see a guilty kind of relief bow his shoulders. The succumbing to all of life’s wants. He has plans for us, I know. And a desperate need to fulfill them. I am begging him to do so, despite the anvil of weight dragging him in the opposite direction.

  Luke nods, moving into some place between. As we skirt the grounds of the camp and rush to reach his house before anyone else can, a kind of limbo stretches out around us. A limbo in which we will wait for our lives together to begin. Wait for the day when we can start the fight. And wait, as will be the real difficulty from now on, for the day when he kills again.

  Chapter 22

  March 12th, 2066

  Josephine

  The second murder has left The Inferno sick with horror. I can feel it all the time, throbbing in the air. A week since Lace’s death, and I’ve finally managed to convince Luke that we must keep going with the case. If we stop searching for the murderer, people might start looking at us instead.

  It is sickening, of course. Beyond sickening. Luke is barely keeping his head above water. So I push him and prod him and sometimes I guilt him – I do anything and everything to make sure he lives a little longer, one day at a time.

  We don’t meet in secret. We can’t. Raven is watching us too closely.

  This evening after dinner Luke and I go to Eric’s house. He looks like a walking ghost. I’ve brought him a plate of food because he wasn’t at the Den. He takes it and puts it untouched on the table, then motions for us to sit on the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “Sorry for everything. It’s unbearable.”

  He nods.

  “We’re still trying to work out what happened. And I need to tell you that I know you and Hal were involved with each other. I knew before he died.”

  Eric blinks. “He told you?”

  “I saw the two of you one night. I didn’t say anything.”

  He sighs. “Yes. We were involved.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say again, and it sounds pathetic. Luke is silent beside me, going through his own personal torture of guilt. “Look, I have an awkward question to ask you. You were Batch’s best friend.”

  Eric nods.

  “Do you know if he was seeing anyone? Besides his wife?”

  Eric frowns. “What?”

  “We have some forensic results that lead us to believe he was.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” he sighs, resting his head in his hands. “Yes. It was me.”

  I’m confused.

  Eric takes a breath. “Hal and I have been together for a few years. Had been. He … broke up with me recently because he wanted to try to make it work with Pace.” He stops, shaking his head in disbelief. “The kid was seriously messed up. So I let him. I fucking knew he’d come back. But sometimes people have to try stuff. They need to know. So whatever, he went and had his little fling with his best friend, and I waited around feeling like a bit of an idiot. Batch and I … We’d been best friends since we were kids. He came over and we slept together. It was a bit stupid and it surprised us both. He left my place late and he was murdered that same night. Hal and I got back together, briefly, and then he was murdered too.”

  I breathe out in a rush. I don’t know how to take it in, the amount of grief he must be enduring. I don’t know if he even knows how to take it in. He seems numb and lost and utterly dazed.

  “Eric, I … Fuck.”

  “Yeah, fuck,” he agrees.

  “Do you …” I take a breath and try to gather my thoughts. “Do
you remember what time Batch left here that night?”

  Eric shrugs vacantly. “Maybe like four or five?”

  So he left this house and was killed on his way home. It makes sense, suddenly, all that time we couldn’t account for after Batch’s shift on the wall had ended.

  “Why are you doing this?” Luke asks suddenly, looking at me.

  “What?”

  He stands thunderously and heads out the door.

  I look at Eric awkwardly. “Sorry. He’s … a bit unwell.”

  “Hal told me about the two of you.”

  My mouth opens but nothing comes out.

  “He was really fascinated by the story. I was too. By the man who was so … loyal to this woman he’d left behind. We knew about you long before you got here, Josephine.”

  I meet Eric’s eyes. Smile a little helplessly. “I could never live up to the story.”

  “You have,” he says. “You have surpassed any story.”

  Something catches in my chest and I don’t understand. “Why?”

  He thinks about it, considering me with that face I really like, and really liked even the first time I saw him. “You’re resilient,” he says eventually.

  And I am so close to tears that I have to stand and make my way to the door. He follows me. “I know it probably doesn’t mean anything, but I’m here for you, any time you need anything,” I tell him.

  Eric nods. “You’re the only one who knows the truth,” he admits. “I mean they probably guessed after my toast, but I feel … I might need to keep seeing you.”

  “Please do.”

  He kisses me on the cheek and I hug him tight for a few seconds.

  Outside Luke is standing with his back to me, looking out over the veggie garden. “Luke.”

  He turns to look at me with such disappointment that for a second I can’t believe he is the same person. He has never looked at me like that. “Why were you doing that?” he asks. “Putting him through that?”

  I don’t know how to answer, filled abruptly with shame.

  “Why are you forcing us through this fucking charade, Josi?”