She bent her head to me and I closed my eyes tight, anticipating the touch of her lips against my neck in the moment before she bit through the skin and ripped my throat out.
Instead of that though, she pressed those icy lips to mine and kissed me. I heard my own voice in my head screaming for me to wake up, to prove this all a nightmare. Her hips began to gyrate as she rubbed herself up against me and slipped a hand under the bedsheets. “I’ve missed you,” she breathed, mouth at my ear, dry tongue flicking against my neck.
“Fuck this,” I said, to no-one and everyone. “Fuck this, fuck this… ”
Her fingers coiled around my dick, finding it warm and inexplicably ready.
“Fuck this!”
She stripped back the sheets and guided me into her. She was rough and dry and cold, but she wasn’t holding back. “I love you, Ray,” she said, grinding on top of me, grinning wide. I saw a woodlouse crawl out of her ear, wander aimlessly over her face. “Tell me you love me.”
“Fuck this!” It was all I could say and I couldn’t stop saying it. “Fuck this! Fuck this!”
“That’s it, Ray. God, yes. I love it. Just like that. I love it…”
“Fuck this, fuck this, fuck this—”
She wanted me to come. She wanted me to make her orgasm. She wanted me to finish what we’d started in the bar.
I tried. And passed out long before.
I woke with the dawn, surprised I was still alive. My dick ached, like I’d been fucking sandpaper all night. And I wished I had. For a time, I lay staring straight up, not wanting to look round, not wanting to confirm what I already knew, but finally I did. She was sprawled out on the bed beside me, stiff, unmoving… dead. Deader than ever. Dead, dead, dead Deanna.
I suppose other men might have broken down then, wrestling with their own sanity, calling into question everything they’d ever believed, unable to trust themselves or the physical world. Not me, though. I don’t like to waste time over-thinking things.
I wrapped her body in the bedsheets (fuck sleeping in those again), carried her downstairs and out to the truck. My garage was littered with engine parts, mechanical projects and winding lengths of chain. I gathered all the shit together and piled it up on top of her then drove her out to the swamp.
It was still too early for most people to be out and I knew a spot near the water where no-one would see us. I’d taken her there to fuck often enough back when we were fucking. When she still had a pulse. I parked the truck, dragged her body, bundled up with bedsheets and metal out to the water’s edge and rolled her in. She sank fast… and deep.
I swung by the liquor store on the way home. When I got back to the house, Lenny Warner was waiting for me. The prick always looked too well-rested for a cop. He stood on the porch steps rolling a cigarette as I approached.
“Where’ve you been, Ray?” He didn’t look at me when he said it.
“I didn’t realize we had an appointment,” I replied.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he lied. “Thought I’d swing by. Wanted to ask if you’d seen or heard from Deanna.”
Oh, boy, but if you only knew. “If I never see that girl again, it’ll be too soon,” I said. “And I’m not answering any more of your questions.”
“Not without a lawyer, huh?”
I shifted the brown bag of booze into my left hand and unlocked the front door. “Get off my porch, Lenny.”
“Deanna’s missing,” he said. “Ain’t been seen since two nights ago at Buster’s. She was supposed to lock up, but in the morning the doors were open, all the lights were on, her car was still there but she wasn’t.”
Try the bottom of the swamp. “You saying I had something to do with it?”
“You sayin’ you didn’t?”
“Goodbye, Lenny.” I swung the door shut in his face.
It was too damn hot in the house and the whiskey couldn’t cool me down. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass in one hand, bottle in the other and never letting go of either, as the sun swept across the sky and finally set in the west. I didn’t move from my chair except for the odd twitch or jump whenever I imagined I could hear Lenny’s prowler coming back up the drive or a soft knuckle’s rap on the door.
Yeah, right. Like she’d bother to knock.
That’s when the bad thoughts started to sneak up on me, there in the kitchen. Thoughts about what I’d done, what I’d seen, what I was doing, whether any of it was possible. What did it mean? Was it real? Was I mad?
“Fuck this,” saying it again. “Fuck this, fuck this,” and drowning all semblance of thought with alcohol. Drink till you can’t think any more. Drink till it’s all numb and easy. Drink till the morning comes…
I didn’t make it till morning. I passed out on the kitchen floor shortly after midnight.
When I woke up, dizzy, sick, drunker even than when I’d passed out an hour before, my dick was in her mouth.
She looked up at me, smiling with hooded black eyes, leaking filthy gray tears over filthy gray cheeks. Blonde hair slick, matted damp against her head, strands coiled around her neck like thin throttling fingers.
Her head rose and fell in rhythm, blue lips tight around my flesh, mouth so cold she’d numbed my cock. The putrid lizard skin stink from her was overwhelming. I turned my head away and puked—a violent, burning jet of bourbon and bile that broke like a wave across the tiles.
Deanna’s hand moved, rattling chains, sliding under my shirt, caressing my skin with her white, wrinkled fingers. She left a dark smear wherever she touched me.
“No,” I begged, in a voice soft as ash. “No more… ”
Her head snapped upwards and she let my dick slap back against my belly, something more than mucus on her chin. Fluid trickled from her ears, nose and eyes. She raised her naked, water-logged body up to straddle me again, carelessly draping chains across my legs. They didn’t seem to bother her.
She positioned herself over my cock and with two fingers splayed the lips of cunt. Black water splashed out over my crotch in a foul gushing stream.
She opened her mouth and I heard the echo of blood and swamp water bubbling in her throat. “Now,” she rasped. “Now, tell me you don’t want it.”
I couldn’t tell her a damn thing.
When the dawn came up, I was crouched in a corner of the kitchen, my mind on the pistol in my truck. That was a definite way out. A bullet in the brain could at least put my mind at ease.
But then my thoughts strayed from the glove compartment to the flat-bed and the big bag of tools I kept there. And I thought of the big old saw, sharp and strong.
I stared at Deanna’s gray, bloated corpse in the middle of the floor, still wrapped in chains and vegetation, lying stagnant in her pool of waste liquid, my spent seed lining the walls of her dead womb. I thought of how easily the saw would sink into her flesh, cleave her sodden bones apart, what short work it’d make of that crumpled pile of stinking meat.
I stood, rising dizzily onto my feet, went out and returned with what I needed.
Two hours later, I was six miles outside of town and Deanna was beside me in the passenger seat. Or rather, she was in the foot-well of the passenger seat… in a black plastic bag… in bits.
Wherever I spotted an unguarded garbage can, I pulled up and dropped a little piece of her in. After a few hours driving, she was spread out across more than half the county.
Before heading home, all trace of her gone to rot at the bottom of over a dozen different trash sites, I stopped off at the church to say a prayer for the dear departed. I prayed to God that her soul might at last leave the earth and find peace in the hereafter. And leave me the fuck alone.
Then I went next door to the Christian Center and made their day by buying the whole place out. I bought
