Outside, the snow had melted.
Despite the stink, she discovered she was starving. Rummaging around the house, she found some pop-tarts in the kitchen. Unable to eat with the putrescent smell in the house, she took the box outside and ate one while draped in one of her blankets. Still hungry, she ate one more and sat down on the porch steps to think about her predicament.
No one had come looking for George. That was good. But first she wanted to know how long she’d been asleep, apparently fighting off the infection on her neck. She pulled off her bandage and felt for the wound. Her neck was smooth—remarkably, the wound had healed completely.
How could she tell what day it was? Her fitness tracker and cell phone were dead. With cell phone devices prohibited on the vigil, she had drained the cell phone’s battery to avoid temptation—but where was George’s phone? Maybe it was shut off, preserving the battery? She finished her meal, went back inside, and searched his body, finding his smart phone in his jeans pocket. When she pushed the button at the side, there was no response. She pushed all the other buttons—no luck. Pushing each button down for a long time elicited nothing. It was as dead as George was. Was there a landline? Maybe she could use that? Or maybe she could plug in the smart phone and gain some charge, assuming she could find the charger lying around?
Not so fast. She paced around the room. What would the police think? Even if I had time to bury him, he would still be reported missing. Would I get away with killing him? My prints are all over this place. Plus, he had been sick and without a weapon. How could I justify self-defense? Even though that’s precisely what it was?
That she’d used her sword would seem a little weird, and she certainly couldn’t say he had been dead before attacking her. That last part she doubted, anyway. She could explain her prints in George’s house—she had been there before. She would have to say she’d been in the cabin the whole time, and only now did she find the body. But as for the murder weapon, there might always be traces of his blood on her sword if she didn’t clean it properly. Could she dispose of her grandfather’s sword?
No. Her grandfather would not want his sword disposed of—even buried temporarily—and he would want her to tell the truth and face her fate. So, she would tell the truth, except for the George already being dead part—no one would believe that anyway.
Should she leave George’s body the way it was or remove it from the house? Her story would be more credible if she left the body where it was, or at least dumped outside, but it seemed so . . . disrespectful.
She retrieved blankets from his bedroom, and as she started to cover the body, she noticed his head was oddly misshapen. It had been bashed in and fractured with a lot of matted, dried blood in his hair. When she felt the skull, she realized that although the skin was unbroken, a part of his skull was missing, not just cracked. A part of the skull was actually missing.
Ignoring the maggots, she broke the skin of the depression with the end of her sword, cutting a hole inside the perimeter of the missing part of skull. She then pulled it off. What she expected to see was brains, but she saw none. She shined her flashlight into the hole in his skull. There were brains in there, but someone had removed a chunk.
Jocelyn finished covering George with a pile of blankets, and then took a long hot shower as she hadn’t had a proper shower or bath in over a month. She would bury him under the cover of night.
Saint Michael still didn’t respond to her. Neither did Skunk. She meditated and traveled on a shamanic journey, and, to her astonishment, encountered no one. On her journey, she went to the jungle she liked to go to sometimes, but none of the various foliage would talk with her, as if they were all asleep and couldn’t wake up.
Her apprehension was strong. She had come to rely on her guides, but now she was on her own.
Then she suddenly realized she had taken no meds while recovering from whatever that was. She was susceptible to all kinds of delusions and hallucinations if she missed taking them. So, she took her final dose.
She was surprised she hadn’t started hearing the voices yet.
Laughter came from outside the house, and Jocelyn fled to the front bedroom, shutting the door behind her. She crossed the room and peeped between the beige curtains. Four people were walking on George’s driveway. They looked weird—pasty white in the face, one with a sore on his cheek similar to George’s. Three men and one woman—the woman carried a shotgun and a few shells on a belt. Did they suffer from the same affliction as George?
She didn’t trust them. Would they attack her the same way as George? George used no weapons, yet still attacked ferociously. Add a shotgun to the mix, and she wondered how much damage they could do to her if she waited for them to attack? Should she attack first? Clearly, George must have told them she was in the cabin. That’s why they brought the shotgun. They knew she was in training to become a powerful shaman, and these small-town types, being invariably super-religious, had come to kill her. It would be perfect. No one knew she was here at all, except for them, and to them, she was a threat.
George had seemed innocent enough. Now that she thought about it, he always looked a little pale, but at the time, she surmised he was some kind of albino. But
