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I turned away, stepped outside, put my hands on my knees. Breathe. Slow, deep breaths. I stood upright, let the steam rise past my eyes, my soul making a run for it. Knees felt like jello. I laid back against the door frame of the shed, then felt it sliding against my back. My ass was cold, suddenly. Snow soaking in. I was surprised to see I was sitting, legs splayed out in front of me, no strength to stand.

Hey, look at the bright side...

What would that be?

...

I got nothin’.

The thing is, it wasn’t some guy that got killed, a kid behind the counter at a liquor store or rival gangster in a drive-by. It was a girl. Small, defenseless. Alone. Why do guys like me—young, creepy, lonely—snatch and kill girls like her? More images flashed through my head. Clawing fingernails, screams, tearing fabric. Was that real, or my imagination making things more awful than they already were? Would I find scratches on my arms? Teeth marks on my fingers?

Rapist-Murderer David Wong was executed tonight...

I had a memory, an old Sunday School lesson of a demon-possessed man who could break chains with his hands and beat roomfuls of men into pulp, bones crunching under his fists. This was a town where things like that still happened, where little slimy monsters appeared in old houses and men who were clearly not, in fact, men accosted you in your car. It was a town full of things that lurk in the shadows and snatch bodies and hijack minds.

Whatever had been done to the person in the tool shed, I had done it. There was no question. I didn’t want to do it, to be sure, but I had done it just the same. And the thought, the gargantuan thought that swallowed me the way the impossible idea of eternity will swallow you upon arrival in Hell, was that nothing would ever, ever, ever be right again. Christ. The weight of it.

No shit, asshole. That’s why you have to act. She’s dead, you’re not. Think. Do know what they do to guys like you in jail? The river isn’t frozen over yet, just take the body and dump it, cut off the head and the hands and dump it. This isn’t your fault-

No. I wouldn’t do that. I had a vision of friends and family—and she had to have family, somewhere—living the rest of their lives not knowing what happened to Amy Sullivan. No, they deserved to know. They deserved to know I did it and to see me strapped to a table with a needle in my arm.

Oh, you can shove that thought right up your ass, Paco. Now dump that gun, dig out the slug. Leave the body where they can find it and-

Yes, I’m Tony Soprano all of a sudden. Ditching bodies and cracking wise to the cops who come around. I had this vision of me in the interrogation room at the Cop Shop, coolly dragging on a cigarette while they tried to give me the third degree, demanding to know why all of the witnesses had suddenly reversed their testimony.

“Gee, I don’t know, officer,” I say, coyly. “Maybe they were afraid they would have an accident.” Then I could put the cigarette out in his eye, just to show him I wasn’t scared.

I chuckled, a sound that came out like a cough. I made myself breathe. One step at a time, that was the only way to handle things after they spun out of control. Step one, breathe. Step two, stand up. Go inside the shed, take a look, make sure it’s her-

-Oh, hey, that’s right. You might have a whole collection of corpses stacked around here-

-then go to Amy’s place and tell John. Just tell him, no bullshit. Then call Drake and show him the body. Tell him the truth, tell him I blanked out and there she was. Let’s face it, if I’m this dangerous it’s better that I be locked up. For everyone’s safety.

I climbed to my feet, put my hand on the door-

Okay, fine, just go in and unwrap her and face this thing, just face what you did-

-and closed it. I snapped the padlock shut, then trudged inside the house.

Looking back, if I had gone in and seen what was in the tool shed, I would have put a bullet in my own skull one minute later.

Chapter 11 – Amy

I followed my own tire tracks as I made my way back through town. I kept the dome light on and threw nervous glances behind me every four seconds or so. At Amy’s house I found John hunched under the hood of his Cadillac. I walked up to him, the horrible news coiled inside me like one of those chest-bursters from Alien. I said, “Your battery dead?”

He glanced at me and said, “I hope not.” I noticed a set of jumper cables coiled in the snow around his feet. Hooked around one elbow was a knotted string of what looked like Christmas tree lights. “Christmas is coming late for that motherfucker. As soon as I find it. I kind of threw a kick at it and it flew into a heating vent. You got my gloves?”

“Uh, no.”

“Okay... can I have a brownie?”

I walked past him, toward the house, not wanting to share the most horrific news of my life standing in snow and freezer-burn wind.

He caught a glimpse of my face as I passed. He stood upright, alarmed. “Dave? What’s up? Did you change your shirt?”

“Put that stuff back. I, uh, think I got it figured out.”

“What? You do?”

I walked away, stepped into the warm house, thinking this was going to be another of life’s little awkward conversations. I stood in the ancient living room and rubbed the cold from my fingers. I heard John approach the door and suddenly ideas hit me, quick and desperate, panicked wild fastballs of thought.

I could tell them it was an accident.

Yeah. You can make it work. You can march people up to testify about the time you severed an artery in your arm trying to carve a pumpkin. You can pull the emergency room records from the time Jennifer had to rush you to get half a cup of candle wax scraped off of your scrotum. There was the hot glue gun incident. People would believe it, would see that you’re not a murderer but are merely an incredible dumbass. You see, officer, I was driving past the house and I observed through the window what appeared to be some kind of shaved baboon, apparently escaped from a nearby circus. The animal was clearly thin and malnourished, which I believed made it an even greater threat to the inhabitants of the home. Naturally I produced a weapon and subdued the creature with a single gunshot. Now, interestingly, it was at this moment that my penis accidentally fell out and I found myself-

CRUNK. CREEE-UNK.

That sound, above me. Creaking floorboards.

I stopped, held my breath, listened. The wind? Above me, a door clicked shut. Unmistakable. Just like that, I was moving. I stepped quickly and softly toward the stairs, eyes on the darkened doorway at the top. John was just now coming in from the front yard, I put up a hand to stop him. I pulled the Smith from my coat and pointed it, suddenly eager to shoot whatever came down. It wasn’t a good day and I was ready to take it out on somebody.

I heard another door open, then close. Are the most dangerous creatures the ones that use doors or the ones that don’t? I eased myself up the stairs one at a time, softly. My feet hit the creaky wood floor of the hallway. Every door in the hall was closed but one, the bedroom. The library seemed like the logical one to check first. I very slowly and very quietly cranked the brass knob until the door clicked free, then swung it inside. Nothing but darkness. I tried the light and it came right on.

No jellyfish. I backed out, took a step and tried the door on my right. The bathroom. No need for the light. I could see right away that the room was empty and—look at that—the fat bag was gone. Toward the bedroom now, the gun in front of me in both hands, arms rigid, like the turret on a tank. The blood pumping past my ears, that cool sweat again. My clothes must have stank of it. Something moved from the door of the bedroom, out of the light and into the shadows, something almost as tall as a man. Thin. Moving upright, something with a gray torso like a Rhino and carrying something small that might or might not have been a weapon.

Holy shit! It’s a shaved baboon!

The thing saw me and froze. I stepped forward, a trickle of sweat crawling down my forehead and landing as a burning speck in my left eye. I saw, through the sights of the pistol, that I was looking at a young, very thin and pale girl draped in a gray University of Notre Dame sweatshirt that she wore like a dress.

I said, “Oh! Amy! Hey!”

Is it her or her damned ghost, Dave?

A legitimate question. Amy took several steps backwards. The thing in her right hand was a toothbrush and she was nervously rubbing the bristles with her thumb as she retreated toward her door. Her other arm ended in an empty sleeve.

“Hi,” she said, in a too-loud squeak. “Can I, uh, help you?”

“No, no. It’s fine. We were just worried about-“

I made a huge mistake. I reached out, casually, I thought (it’s hard to come off casual with a gun in your other hand, I guess) and went to take her arm. It was madness, but I had to see if it was her, if she was solid. I went to grab her arm, wrapped my fingers around a very solid and very real forearm. She pulled away and when I went to catch the spot where her hand would be, I grabbed only air.

She ducked back through her bedroom door and slammed it shut. I looked stupidly down at my empty fingers and realized two things:

Amy Sullivan was alive, and she no longer had a left hand.

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.