Hard Bite and Other Short Stories (7 page)

The movie ended and Juanita tilted her head closer. “Now you want to for.” It was a question. Ozzy was about to say he was hungry but realized with a start that it was time to administer injections back at home. Careless, he’d completely forgotten.

Juanita saw the alarm in his face. “Something no good?”

Through a pantomime it was agreed she would accompany him back to the house and then they would go for food.

The house looked forbidding as Ozzy pulled up. He really hadn’t noticed before; long shadows from the overgrown hedge gave the house a bearded look, like a wizened old face, frowning. He was distracted by Juanita cracking open the car door on her side.

He assumed she would wait for him in the car but no, she followed him up the weed-sprouted walk. There was nothing to do but let her in. He turned on some lights.

“
Alone here you?” she asked, looking around at the old furniture, the worn rug. She didn’t seem not to like it.

He heard himself answer; as if from another room, “Alone, yes.”

“
No familia? Mother?”

Again, the disconnected voice from somewhere outside himself, “My parents died. The house is mine.”

“
Sorry,” she said.

He told her to wait and climbed the stairs. He could feel disapproval radiating down the hall, curling in his stomach. His steps slowed and the wooden floor creaked long and slow, like the tread of a dead man walking. Entering the bedroom, it seemed for a split second that the bed was empty, the covers undisturbed, as though no one was there, and no one had slept there for a long time. He blinked rapidly, and familiar shapes rose under the sheets, writhing. Ozzy flung the covers back. Burning eyes stung him.

“
I’m allowed. This is my house now,” he whispered hoarsely.

Mommy telegraphed her disgust. Without her gag she would have spit and hissed at him. Mommy did not like other females in the house.

His heart thudded; opening the drawer, fumbling for the syringe.

He hoped he wasn’t making noise that Juanita could hear. You just couldn’t tell how sound carried in this old house, sifting through the old floor heating vents. Like the times Daddy heard him crying in his bed and came upstairs. Heavy feet on the stairs, listening in the hall. A witness, with no inquiry. It was like having a peephole for parents to see and hear everything, but understand nothing.

Ozzy’s thumb found the plunger, the needle stabbed and did its nasty work. He snapped the sheets back over their nodding heads and wiped the sweat off his forehead before rejoining Juanita.

They went to a little Mexican restaurant. The food tasted homemade and the bill was more than reasonable. He drove her home and the smile she gave before getting out of the car was like watching a sunrise. Then, her little feet went lightly down the walk and into the house where she rented a room. Ozzy felt himself grinning.

A check of the rearview mirror before pulling away from the curb, and there they were in the backseat. The three of them sitting, eyes sparkling.

Kirker spoke first, “She likes you, I can tell.”

“
I like the name Juanita,” added Leng. “You could ask her to be your girlfriend.”

“
Maybe fuck her,” said MacIntire.

Ozzy’s mind raced. He’d never had a friend let alone a girlfriend. Friends were supposed to be a nuisance.

“
But it doesn’t have to be like that anymore,” offered Kirker.

Ozzy sounded suddenly panicked. “Huh?”

The trio in the back gazed at him calmly.

“
You know what you have to do,” declared Leng.

“
It’s time to get rid of them,” MacIntire smiled.

Ozzy uttered a murmur of uncertainty.

A little smile played on Leng’s lips. His eyes were impish.

***

He spent the day immersed in worry. Are Mommy and Daddy clean enough? Never before had the apparitions pestered him at work, but every time he found an alone space, there they were.

MacIntire appeared at his elbow. “If they’re not clean enough by now, they’re never going to be.”

Never going to be? Then Mommy and Daddy might go to hell anyway. He might send them there, it would be his fault. The thought wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

Periods of confusion always plagued Ozzy, but today was the worst ever. One moment he was sure it was Mommy and Daddy who had done wrong. Then his mind shifted and it seemed he was the wrong one, the flawed one, the one who never did anything right, the one to blame. Perhaps the truth lay somewhere in the middle. Maybe he’d never find the truth. Maybe it was just as well.

After dinner, his audience followed Ozzy to the kitchen, where he fetched a large butcher knife and then climbed the stairs. In the master bedroom, he made a show of severing an extension cord, peeling back the plastic casing to expose the wires. The other end he plugged into the wall.

Behind the gag, Daddy’s mouth was moving. Ozzy didn’t have to lift the corner to know what he was saying. It was a well-worn mantra of the last three years. We have done nothing wrong. Ozzy let go a hearty laugh and sparked up the extension cord. The wire sizzled blue. Shrieks and moans, louder than ever before, shuddered off the walls. The young murderers clapped and whooped as Ozzy provoked a fandango of convulsions on the bed.

“
Go, Ozzy go,” shouted MacIntire.

“
Cleaner and cleaner,” hollered Leng.

“
Let’s be blood brothers,” yelled Kirker. He picked up the knife.

Mommy and Daddy watched through tears, as Ozzy offered his arm for cutting. Only the plaster-of-paris Virgin Mary hanging over the bed seemed unmoved.

***

The next morning, Juanita waited at the coffee truck. Ozzy never showed. He must be working through break, she thought. That was normal for office employees. At four o’clock she washed up in the girls’ restroom sink and fixed her hair. Still no Ozzy. She asked his boss and the boss said Ozzy hadn’t shown up to work. He found it odd, seeing as Ozzy’d never missed a day since his hiring. The boss tried the home phone but got no answer.

Juanita waited at the coffee truck the next day and the next. She asked his whereabouts in Spanish and in broken English, the best she could. No one had answers. After three days she stopped asking and went to the house.

The front door opened easily. Hesitantly, Juanita let herself in. “Ozzy,” she called. The house was so still. She shivered. Something drew her to the stairs without looking on the main floor at all. “Ozzy?”

Subtle creaks on the stairs under her light weight. Creeping down the hall, dustballs fleeing before her steps like tiny ghosts. The door to the first bedroom was open. A boy’s bedroom, arranged with institutional neatness. Clothes hanging, blankets folded.

She continued down the hall. “Ozzy…sick you?”

At the master bedroom door. Gooseflesh prickled her neck, perspiration on her upper lip. She turned the knob, opened the door—just a sliver—and saw the old-fashioned bed, neatly made and empty. Then his arm, Ozzy’s arm, slashed.

The wall striped with blood.

The throbbing hum of blowflies. †

M-N-S (n) murder-necrophilia-suicide

It was a botch job, an embarrassment to the division and my standing as chief. It hangs onto me like a bad smell and there’s no shower strong enough to wash it off. I was stripped of my position, of course, excommunicated by the hierarchy. The only thing remaining is my existence, and I’d love to be rid of that too.

We’d infiltrated a murder-suicide about-to-happen. Family Homicide was my orbit; infanticide, matricide, patricide and my specialty—interfamily murders. I hustled down the corridor, hardly noticing the odor of smoke. It was always there, in stronger or fainter degree, depending on what else was going on around the building. Fire was a constant around that place.

A new guy was working with me—Horton. He’d qualified by successfully offing his family and then himself—no survivors, leading story on the local news for 48 hours. Shortly after he transitioned to Hades and met me, his mentor. I’ll spare you the gory details; the little children lying slaughtered as their mother died of shock, the blood-soaked stuffed animal that told the story in one money shot on the news. It was spectacularly horrific enough to inspire a flurry of backslapping and high fiving around here, kudos, and a recommendation for me.

Yes, I had subtly engineered Horton’s mind until he thought my murderous plans for the family were his idea. After tracking him for several months, I’d finally penetrated Horton’s consciousness during a prolonged binge of booze, mutant weed and porn. Three days of no sleep had blurred his brain nicely and made him vulnerable to suggestion of a demonic nature—allowing me to introduce myself, as the song says.

And now Horton and I were working together—he’d sat in on a few jobs in the last few weeks, we were on top of the paperwork, and today, he was flying solo under my watchful eye. We had a depressed fellow on Long Island in our sights, and it was going to be easy work nudging him into a murder-suicide with the wife in the next couple of hours—or so I thought.

The brushed-steel corridor of our high-tech building was whisper-quiet with its glass-wall views of the pandemonium outside. There, the fires raged, where new inductees to Hades burned to death over and over for the first few weeks. It’s considered purifying. Smoke and ash clogged the air—so thick you choked, and died of a heart attack or asphyxiation. But the minute the agony was over, you revived, and it happened all over again. Funny thing about hell, death is never permanent. There’s only one state of being: undead.

Sweaty, soot-covered men with fewer qualifications than me toiled out there with old-school pitchforks, prodding newbies into the roaring flames. I and my unit got to stay in the building with air-conditioning and ice water. Lunch was brought in, dinner too. We never left. We never slept. Otherwise, it meant instant demotion to outside, stoking the blistering blaze. The pressure, to use a cliché, was intense.

After my introductory torture by fire, they informed me that whatever crime I’d committed at TOD (Time of Death) was what I would labor at day in, day out for eternity. That’s how I got assigned to Family Homicide.

Jogging down the corridor, I passed endless rooms crammed with pale men hunched over desks, piled high with paperwork. Files of death certificates, arrest warrants, stays of execution—confetti that showers individuals wedded to crime—were piled on desks, tables, chairs, the floor, choking every inch of elbow room. Paperwork was crucial to verify our sometimes fallible surveillance and intelligence. It was excruciatingly boring work, usually reserved for cop killers, and as I chugged down the hall, a swarm of hornets materialized around a man falling asleep at his desk. One moment his lids were drooping closed and the next his eyes bulged at a cloud of angry buzzing overhead.

“
I’m awake! I’m awake!” he screeched. Too late, the hornets dove, stinging his eyes, face and every pore of exposed skin. The office door slammed shut, blanking out his cries for help.

I barely noticed. The urge for sleep was unending, and some fresh horror always materialized to thwart it. That’s Hades for you.

I sprinted the last few yards of steel corridor to the End Room, where we conducted End Days as a unit. The room was kept in cool, semi-darkness, with dozens of monitors showing our target at home alone, losing control of his own mind as we silently invaded—it could take years to work up an End Day.

Selling a mortal on murder takes skill, and it takes particular finesse to sell one on the murder of a family member—blood being thicker than water and all that. Family homicide required a lot more boundary-busting than say, the murder of a friend. It’s easy getting a mortal to randomly kill someone they don’t know. But terminating a person they’ve known since birth...well let’s just say humans need help with it—and that’s where someone, excuse me, something like me steps in.

“
Hi guys, how we doing?”

My unit looked up from various tasks with the weary hatred that meant business as usual. Horton was at the command console, whispering into his headset, keeping up a steady chatter, beaming straight into the target’s mind.

“
C’mon do it. What are you a pussy? Life is shit. You know you want to...”

I gave Horton a thumbs up and leaned in to get a better view.

His name was Arlitz. Ian Arlitz. Wife and daughter the lights of his life. He had a so-so career heading up customer service departments and now the departments were dissolving—and rematerializing in India. Arlitz couldn’t see his future, so he thought there wasn’t any.

“
This isn’t right, this isn’t right,” his thoughts were saying.

“
There’s nothing ahead of you. Might as well end it and take the family with,” Horton answered.

Natural Born Killers flickered silently on Arlitz’ flat screen, while Marilyn Manson sucked any hope out of the air. Horton had covered all the bases in terms of getting him past the usual mortal inhibitions.

“
Maybe it’s for the best.”

“
Yessss. She’ll be home soon, why drag this out any longer?”

Everyone in the End Room electrified at the sound of Arlitz’ front door opening. We heard a distant, “Honey, I’m home,” coupled with, “Hi Daddyyyyy.”