The Rest Will Come

by Christina Bergling

“Ba-ba!” Josiah shouted, arching his back for emphasis.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. Well, I think shirtless selfie boy is just the right match for Jennifer.”

  Having lost interest in her ramblings, Josiah toddled off to find mischief in her un-baby-proofed house. Emma tucked the trick line away and returned to being auntie instead of Jennifer.

  ***

  “There’s my boy,” Ronnie cooed enthusiastically when she walked through the door.

  Josiah abandoned his toy and marched straight to her with his arms extended and fingers flexing in and out. Ronnie scooped him up and nuzzled him.

  “Aww, you actually do love him,” Emma teased.

  “All it takes is five minutes away to remember that. Thank you so much for giving me a break.”

  “Anytime. I need my auntie time too.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “I think I’m going to have a date.”

  “What? I thought you were out of the game.”

  “Ha! It’s not what you think. Just meeting Brandon from my old work.”

  “Okay, that’s definitely not a date.”

  “Your Don Juan killer been up to anything lately?”

  “No, I haven’t seen anything lately. He must be taking a break. Smart move to not get caught I suppose. The only missing persons that have popped up have been guys in their 30s. One in Colorado Springs recently. He probably fell off The Incline or something.”

  “Sometimes people just leave. Who knows how many people nobody noticed?”

  “True enough. I better get Josiah home. Terrence will want to get his boy time in. We’ll do something soon, yeah? Maybe a girls’ night or something?”

  “Definitely.”

  When the door closed behind Ronnie and Josiah and Emma’s house fell silent again, she groped for the trick line to plan Jennifer’s date for the night.

  ***

  “It’s so cool that you wanted to go see a horror movie. Most girls never want to see a horror movie. They don’t like the blood, I guess. And the fact that you picked a drive-in movie, old school,” Manuel said after she picked him up from his house.

  I could just kill him now, skip the entire date.

  He was already in her vehicle. Still, part of her needed to let him play out the sad little charade.

  “I’m glad you’re impressed,” Jennifer responded.

  “What’s your favorite horror movie?”

  “I’m not really into movies or TV. Like it says in my profile, I prefer to be outside or reading.”

  “Oh,” Manuel’s voice struggled for an instant. “Then why did you pick a drive-in movie?”

  “Because you said how much you like movies and I used to love going to the drive-in theater when I was a kid.”

  “Oh, well that’s still awesome.”

  “So you like to work out?”

  “What?”

  “You have so many topless pictures in your profile.”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess. I go to the gym sometimes.”

  Jennifer parked her car along the last row of the drive-in parking lot with the large silver screen centered in the distance. All the other cars lined up in front of them, tall trees obscuring anything behind. The back row was strangely isolated. Manuel looked excited by her parking selection. Perhaps he thought it indicated she intended to get frisky once the sun set and the film started.

  “We should probably watch from the back seat, don’t you think?” Manuel said without looking at her.

  Emma rolled her eyes hard. The exhaustive sigh could be heard echoing in her head.

  “Sure. My front seats actually fold down, so we can see.”

  They settled into the less than comfortable back seat as the movie flashed on the giant screen before them. Before the trailers even poured into the feature presentation, Manuel’s hand crept to her thigh. His other arm snuck behind her to circle her in closer to him. His advancements were neither subtle nor stealthy.

  First time he meets me, and he’s already breathing on my neck, already groping at my body. Is this how dating is supposed to go? Am I missing something here? Am I supposed to put out and hope he isn’t using me? Am I supposed to hold out some predetermined amount of time to try to convince him to care about me beyond sex?

  Old thoughts rose in Emma’s voice.

  Too many games. Too much pretending. Acting like you don’t want what you want to eventually get what you want. I know what I want now, pure and simple. I want to be in control. I want to kill them. One by one.

  The movie unraveled on the screen in the formulaic horror arc. By the time the serial killer had emerged and knocked off a few supporting characters, Manuel had completely wrapped himself around her. Jennifer knew he was no longer watching the movie.

  I guess I’m going to have to kill him or have sex with him at this point.

  Manuel’s hand slid up Jennifer’s back, lifting the hem of her shirt to expose the skin above her waist. His other hand brushed along her face, angling her toward him, his fingertips moving toward her hair. Jennifer cocked her head to avoid his fingers discovering the wig, and dove into his kiss to distract him. Manuel opened his mouth receptively and squeezed around her.

  Some base and destructive part of Emma wanted to follow this carnal path, to romp with Manuel in the cramped back seat of her car prior to introducing him to the trunk. As Manuel’s tongue wormed through her mouth, she thought of the Don Juan killer Ronnie insisted on perpetually bringing up. She reminisced on the admiration she had for him when Ronnie said the victims were never raped. He never had sex with them, consensual or otherwise. His murderous motives were pure.

  From the corner of her eye, Jennifer saw the killer stalking the poor final girl through a dilapidated house in the middle of nowhere. The music twirled on a high pitched edge, gathering all the suspense into it. The crescendo was coming.

  She pulled back from Manuel, her hands against his chest.

  “What is it?” he asked, mouth still pulling toward her.

  “I have condoms and a blanket in the trunk.”

  Manuel stiffened, his hand already on the door handle. “Pop the trunk. I’ll go grab them.”

  Manuel leaped from the car before Jennifer even pretended to reach toward the lever. She reached under the collapsed front seat to retrieve the heavy metal flashlight and pulled the handle for the trunk.

  The blanket was clearly visible on the top of the trunk. Emma had made the condoms more of a treasure hunt. Manuel dove waist deep into the trunk and was clawing around through the dummy contents when Jennifer crept up silently behind him. She peered over the car at the movie screen. The killer continued to hunt the final girl. The movie fell quiet until he emerged, brandishing his gleaming butcher knife. When the soundtrack exploded, Jennifer tapped Manuel.

  He whirled around to look at her, bringing his head slightly out of the trunk. Jennifer raised the flashlight high and brought it down into his face. Even over the blaring death scene on the screen, she heard his nose collapse into his skull and all the breath heave out of his chest in a grunt. As the movie killer hacked up the last nonessential character between him and his final girl, Jennifer brought the flashlight into Manuel’s face until the sputtering stopped.

  She tipped and tucked Manuel into the trunk, tossing the bloodied flashlight on top of his collapsed form. She took a step back and panted deeply in the night air. Her eye caught the clear stars in the distance first. Then she checked her surroundings. The one car that had parked in the back aisle with them rocked subtly on its suspension. A thin layer of fog obscured the windows. When the transition between scenes silenced the movie, she could make out the moaning.

  Jennifer thought it was safe to assume they were not paying attention to what she was doing beside them. All the other cars were in front of them, passengers most likely fixated on the screen or each other. The shield of trees behind isolated Jennifer standing over Manuel’s limp body in the trunk.

  She reached beside Ma
nuel’s limp feet and retrieved the bleach wipes. She bathed her face and hands and the full back end of the car. Then she dug into the bag tucked against the corner of the trunk and pulled out fresh clothes, a baggy shirt and yoga pants. The night air nipped her skin as she changed clothes in the open. She relished being alone in the back of the dark lot beside the rocking sedan.

  ***

  Emma stood in the shower the next day, washing the crusted layer of sweat and dust from the hike from her body. Her muscles ached down to the bone, thin layers of acid still nibbling at the surface. Her body felt weighted by an exhaustion that burrowed toward the center of her skull, struggling to tug her consciousness down with it.

  She pulled the handle of the faucet to bring the water to a scalding edge, drawing lines of burning heat down her skin and thickening the air she sucked into her lungs. With the fatigue in her body, Emma’s mind took on additional weight to match. Her thoughts became heavier and slower, winding her down toward that aching hole below her stomach.

  She had not thought about that hole for a long time. There had been no sinking pain while she was pretending to be Deidra or Jennifer or any of the other venomous women she concocted on public internet or untraceable burner phones.

  Emma abandoned the steamy bathroom and curled up on the couch, cocooned in a blanket in front of mindless television. Anything but a romantic comedy where the quirky leading lady ended up with her changed and newly evolved man after they resolved their epic miscommunication.

  Manuel was scarcely cold beneath the soil, but she already felt the slow itch tickle the bottom of her chest. She was aware she needed to be patient, to wait out the news, to allow her crime to cool and drift off into the past. She wanted to hunt. She wanted to be holding a new trick line in her hand, messaging a new victim. She wanted to be crafting a persona and luring a deserving suitor.

  She did not want to be herself, alone on her couch in a quiet house.

  Maybe this isn’t my cure, Emma thought, knitting her brow. Maybe this is only a distraction.

  She permitted her thoughts to stray and meander uninhibited. Mark surfaced first, his mangled face and dead eye peering out past her fistful of keys, materializing from her memory in vivid detail. At the recollection of the damage she caused, her heart lifted. She was animated; alive. The hole at her center collapsed in on itself until she felt whole again.

  Nate and Manuel tucked and folded flashed before her, limp and lifeless in her trunk. She remembered the excitement of stealing their breath while they bent into their coffins unaware. They never saw it coming. They thought they would bed her, use her, and discard her. They never imagined she would be taking something from them. A surge of power flowed at the sensation of pushing their legs into the trunk and concealing them beneath the lid.

  The pulse of the unadulterated thrill of her secret, her other life covered in plastic and buried in the mountains, resonated through her. In that guilty rhythm, she felt at harmony with herself, the cells in her body in symphony with the amalgamation of personality firing inside her brain.

  You are nothing but a killer. You did not find a partner or have a family because you do not deserve them. You are a killer. That is who you are, and that is what makes you happy.

  Something in Emma resisted the simplicity of her truth. She was not supposed to be a killer. She was not supposed to acquiesce to murder, much less perpetrate it. She was supposed to be horrified by what she was doing, the way Ronnie worried compulsively about the Don Juan killer. She was supposed to be scraping and crying to find her partner and her family, finding a way to live the life she always wanted.

  Am I the girl who I have been my entire life, or am I the killer I think I am now? Do I want a life with a family, or do I want death in the trunk of my car?

  Justin surfaced in her mind, washing up on her consciousness like a piece of garbage from the depths of the ocean. She always found him at the base of that consuming hole in her person. He was the impact that had created the crater.

  I should kill Justin, she thought then hesitated. No, that would get me caught for sure. He’s not worth the risk or effort.

  All roads led back to the naïve girl who fell for the idea that he loved her fully and unconditionally and that she was worthy of the life she wanted. The thought flashed over her mind that she was who Emma truly wanted to kill.

  Chapter 20

  Months passed quietly while Emma questioned herself. She felt like a killer in her cells while a lonely girl in her mind, and she did not know which to heed. No one missed Manuel in the news. Someone missed Nate. Scrolling through MyBook, Emma caught the story shared by a Colorado Springs acquaintance from her childhood. Nate’s dumb face was in the thumbnail, again in a flat-billed hat. His wife had reported him missing.

  I knew that son of a bitch was married.

  The image of the stark wedding band tan line on his finger in the bar light flashed over her eyes, a familiar rage flaring behind her ribs and into her cheeks.

  She did not dare click the link on her real phone. The preview text was enough to indicate that the missing man had a wife and two young children, and police had no leads.

  Son of a bitch.

  There was not so much as a passing mention of a missing man in Pueblo. Manuel did not appear on the radar at all. Although by her own timetable she was free to launch a new hunt, she hesitated, perched on the decision between her life or the deaths of others.

  Emma sat at her desk with earbuds in her ears, the colored spreadsheet expanding infinitely on her screen in front of her. She clicked and stared at it until her monitor blurred.

  Elizabeth peeked her head around the edge of Emma’s cube, tapping her keys on the metal frame supporting the canvas wall. Emma instantly remembered the way Mark’s face concaved under the blow of her keys, the sensation of her fingers tangled within his dying wound. She shook her head to shake the memory loose and smiled up at Elizabeth.

  “Lunch?” Elizabeth asked.

  Eric appeared behind Elizabeth, towering over her petite frame and gently massaging her shoulders.

  “E-squad lunch?” he echoed.

  “Fine,” Emma said, popping out her headphones. “But only if we go to Happy Beans.”

  “Of course, honey, I love Gladys,” Eric said, tilting his head. “That old queen gives the best advice.”

  “I told you.” Emma chuckled, following them to Elizabeth’s car.

  The E-squad, as Eric so flamboyantly dubbed them, sat around the small table in the coffee house, nibbling on bagel sandwiches, their oversized coffees venting steam between them.

  “So this new boy,” Eric said, deliberately placing his sandwich back on the plate and folding his hands.

  “What’s his name?” Elizabeth asked, still chewing.

  “Skylar,” Eric purred. “Can you believe that? Isn’t that like the gayest name you have ever heard? I feel like I’ve bagged myself a twink, but ironically, he’s super butch. You wouldn’t guess he was gay right off.”

  “Are you sure?” Emma joked. “Or is that only in comparison to you?”

  “Hey now, bitch. I burn brightly because that is who I am. Skylar is a little more…muted.”

  “So how is it going?” Elizabeth asked.

  “He is a daddy in the sack.”

  Emma cringed. “I don’t need to know that.”

  “Yes, you most certainly do. One of us needs to be getting some action, and it surely has not been you two celibate bitches.”

  “Hey!” Emma said. “We would have no problem getting laid.”

  “Yeah,” Elizabeth joined. “The problem is getting action from guys who are not assholes.”

  “Amen,” Emma said.

  “Use ‘em and lose ‘em, girls. That monogamy, long term relationship bull is some socially constructed slavery. Shake your shackles, and go have fun! Drop them before they can drop you is what I always say.”

  “So how long does Skylar have?” Emma asked.

  “Until he act
s shady or like a clinger. Either direction and I’m out.”

  “Sounds so simple,” Elizabeth said, giving Emma an exasperated face.

  “All right. I have to go talk to Gladys before we head back,” Emma said, rising from the table.

  Elizabeth and Eric giggled as Emma walked across the familiar store to the counter. One customer stood in front of her, collecting his coffee. He wore a flat-billed baseball cap low on his brow. Emma immediately saw Nate’s hat spill from his head and into her readied trunk as the tire iron punctured his skull.

  Emma stopped breathing. Gladys’s customer stepped aside, and Emma approached her at the counter.

  “Eminem!” Gladys grinned. “I thought that was the E-squad over there.”

  “Will these nicknames never die?” Emma forced air back into her lungs and a smile across her cheeks.

  “No, apparently, they are going to multiply instead.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “Come around here so I can hug you properly.”

  Gladys and Emma met in the small hallway where the counter terminated. As always, Gladys reached out and gathered Emma in deep, wrapping her entirely in her embrace. Emma breathed in to smell Gladys’s sweet aroma that emanated softly below the coffee scent soaked into her skin. She momentarily collapsed into the hug.

  “What’s wrong, sugar?” Gladys said as they stepped back.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You can’t hide from me, Em. That light I saw in you last time isn’t there. What happened? What’s going on?”

  “I’m just struggling, I guess. Still trying to find out who I am or what I want.”

  “Emma, you have to stop thinking so much. Everyone is trying to figure those things out. Most people their whole lives. Go with what you feel.”

  “I just keep thinking that I might not be who I thought I was. I might not want the things I always thought I wanted.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “It might be.”

  “Or is it an unknown thing?”

  “It is definitely unknown.”