Back From The Dead

good start and brought his right foot out in a hard straight-forward kick. The toe of his sneaker caught the hippie on the bridge of the nose, rocking his head back with a heavy force. The sound of foot striking face was like that of a watermelon hitting the floor and cracking.

Tom almost fell against the car from his forward momentum, and as he backed away to rain down more kicks, Harry squirmed out of the hippie’s grip. “Motherfucker,” he growled. “I’m gonna smash his fucking face. I’m gonna fuck him up!”

Tom stomped the hippie about the face and neck. Harry was about to join him just as Victor ran up. “Stop!”

Harry got one good kick in but Victor held him back. “Stop! He’s dead!”

Tom stopped. Looked down at the hippie.

The hippie was lying on the ground, not moving.

A very large bloodstain was pooling around the hippie’s head.

“Oh man!” Tom said. In hindsight he would not remember saying that. In the years that passed when he sometimes thought of the incident, he would remember feeling a sense of extreme fright. Killing the hippie had not been part of the evening’s plan. Kicking his ass, yes. Beating the shit out of him and his girlfriend, of course. Raping his girlfriend…not really. Victor’s sexual assault toward the girl would open Tom’s eyes to Victor’s nature, and it would affect their friendship from that point forward. But really, slapping them around a little had been the only thing on his mind that evening.

They certainly hadn’t meant to kill them.

“Are you sure?” Harry asked. He looked as shocked as Tom felt. He was standing over the hippie, eyes wide, face panicked.

Victor took a step forward. He looked freaked out. “I don’t think he’s breathing. And look at his head!”

The hippie’s girlfriend started screaming from the backseat of the Nova. “You killed Billy! You killed him! You killed him!”

“Oh shit!” Harry said. He seemed paralyzed with fear.

It was Tom who sprang into action. He lunged toward the car, got the back door open and grabbed the girl. Her screams became shrill. “Let me go! Let me go!”

Harry and Victor could only stand and watch as Tom dragged the hippie girl out of the car. Once he pulled her out, she tried to fight him, but he had at least a foot on her in height and a good seventy pounds over her. He drove her to the ground, kneed her in the stomach and locked his hands around her throat.

Victor and Harry watched as Tom strangled her.

That was another thing Tom tried to unsuccessfully erase from his memory over the next twenty-six years: his hands around the hippie girl’s throat as he strangled her.

They never even learned her name until after the Missing Persons posters went up a week later.

Behind him, Victor was freaking out. “Oh my God, man, he’s killing her!” His tone of voice seemed to suggest they should do something about this. As in, stop Tom from killing her.

Any other time, Tom would have agreed. But this was not any other time. If this chick lived, all three of them would be brought up on murder charges based on her testimony.

She had to die.

And because she had to die, Harry and Victor did nothing to stop Tom from strangling the hippie chick to death.

* * *

Two hours later.

There was a brief period where Tom thought Harry would leave them there, grow a conscience and head straight to the police, lead them over here to the woods where Tom and Victor waited near the corpses of the two dead hippies. He even voiced this to Victor, who shook his head. “Naw, Harry won’t do that. It’s only gonna take him forty minutes to grab a shovel and he’ll be right back. He won’t let us down, man.”

And he didn’t.

Tom felt a tremendous sense of relief the minute he saw the headlights of his Nova appear in the distance. Even so, for a moment he thought it was somebody else — a cop perhaps, some wayward traveler, a couple kids maybe looking for a secluded spot to neck. A few seconds later Tom heard the unmistakable sound of the Nova’s engine and felt the weight come off his shoulders.

As the Nova pulled up, he and Victor got to their feet. They’d been talking and already had the plan in action. For now it would wait until the two hippies were buried.

Harry got out of the Nova and tossed the keys to Tom, who went to the trunk, unlocked and opened it. Three shovels lay in the dark recess. “I even got that kiddie shovel I used to help my dad with when I was eight,” Harry said.

“A shovel’s a shovel,” Victor said, grabbing one and heading to do the work they had to do.

Before Harry left to retrieve the shovels, they’d dragged the hippies about a hundred yards into the woods where they’d found a small clearing. Now they headed to where they’d left them, shovels slung over their shoulders. “You sure nobody knows about this place?” Tom asked again.

“I’m certain,” Harry said. “Only time you’ll see anybody out here is during hunting season and the ground is frozen solid that time of year.”

“And we’re digging these guys five feet down,” Victor said.

Between the three of them, they dug a five foot by three foot hole that was about chest deep. It took them two hours. By the time they got that far down they were tired, sweaty, and dirty. Victor glanced at his watch during a break. “It’s gonna be daylight in a few hours. We should probably throw ‘em in now and start shoveling dirt over them, otherwise we’re likely to get caught.”

The thought of getting caught was the decision maker. They dragged the hippies’ bodies to the hole, threw them in, and started shoveling the dirt over them. Filling the hole wasn’t as time consuming as digging it. By the time they reached the surface, sweat ran down their bodies in rivers. Harry shoveled the weeds and grass they’d dug up, tamping it down in the soft earth to give the appearance it wasn’t dug up. “That’s poison ivy, man!” Victor exclaimed.

“Yeah, and I’d rather get a case of poison ivy than have somebody come through here and wonder what’s buried there,” Harry exclaimed. He was on his hands and knees, trying to place the torn up vegetation back into some semblance of normalcy. “The shit isn’t dead, we can plant it back here and the next few rains will…you know…make it all better.”

It was a strange theory, but it worked. Because nobody ever found out where the missing hippies — whose names were Billy Thompson and Candace Drombowsky — were buried.

When they were finished they paused for a rest by the Nova. “Whatever happens,” Tom said grimly, his voice and features stern as he made his intentions clear. “We say nothing about this. Not to future friends, not to chicks we eventually marry, not even to a goddamn priest or pastor if one of us decides to turn into a born-again Christian. You guys understand?”

Harry and Victor nodded. Harry was leaning against the Nova. For the first time it looked like the trauma and horror of that night were making their presence known on his features. “Nothing to nobody,” he said. “Not even to ourselves.” He looked at Tom and Victor. “We shouldn’t even talk about it to ourselves.”

Tom nodded. Victor said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

“It’s settled then,” Tom said. “After tonight, this didn’t happen. If for some reason the cops question one of us, we know nothing. We tell our parents we went out to the Jersey Shore.”

“We’ll tell them we went to the fucking Pine Barrens,” Harry said.

“Even better,” Tom agreed. “The fucking Pine Barrens. And we were never in Reading, never saw these two. We’ll shower up at Harry’s place by eight o’clock ‘cause his folks will be gone by then and that’ll be that. I’ll get the car washed. We’ll be done with it.”

“Done with it,” Victor sighed.

“Damn straight,” Harry said.

And they were done with it by ten A.M. that morning. Nobody asked them about their whereabouts the previous night, nor did the police come inquiring about whether they’d run across Billy Thompson and Candace Drombowsky. Even when Missing Persons posters went up around Berks and Lancaster County with their faces and