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Five

There was no use in putting it off any longer. I opened my eyes with a shake of my head and forced myself to stare at the door to the dining room. The doors were almost never closed, and they looked unnatural to me that way. Sure, they were pock marked with long scrapes and one of the glass windows set about head high in the door was busted, leaving bloody shards like teeth, but even without all of that it would have looked odd to me. Now it just confirmed my feelings about this place. Except it hadn’t been like this. I knew it hadn’t. I was pretty sure it hadn’t.

There was nothing to be gained from staring at the doors, nothing worth gaining at least, so I carefully opened one. The door swung cleanly on its hinge, revealing in full what I could only see a hint of through the tiny square of broken glass: the room was worse than the halls. It was, thankfully, mostly empty; but what people were in there though weren’t a pretty sight. What was left of them. I didn’t let myself recognize anyone in the room, I just refused. That might’ve been Sally’s head, that half a skull there, but I wouldn’t let it be. I couldn’t let it be.

I rejected it. It wasn’t real, none of this was real. I had problems, I did. Turning, I started to leave the room but stopped cold. I had to know if she was in there, which meant I had to recognize the bodies, as best I could. I wanted to cry. My stomach churned at the thought but I turned back into the room.

Checking the bodies, and body parts, to see who they were did me in. I added vomit and bile to the mess of blood and rubble on the floor at least twice. Dry heaves crippled me, leaving me leaning heavily on a table, slick with grease and rotten spilled milk. It was while I hunched there, bent over the table with my stomach trying to claw its way out of my body that I noticed the bullet holes in the floor and chairs.

Those puzzles they used to sell at malls, the fields of dots that you would stare at endlessly until a picture formed out of them, swirled into focus from hidden view, it hit me like one of those. I looked around the room again, the missing piece in place, and saw it all over again for the first time. There had been a gun fight in here, fight was the wrong word; there had been a slaughter in here using lead slugs as a medium for its dark art. Carnage. Massacre. Terms swarmed to my forebrain in a useless attempt to make sense of it, to label it and lock it in a nice box. Each severed limb, splotch of bone and strange shaped bit of meat and gristle had been part of a person. I couldn’t secure it away all safe and warm. It had to be dealt with.

She didn’t seem to be there. Dealing with it became easier suddenly, like a breath of slightly less rancid air. Maybe I would taste fresh air again sometime, but until then I’d take what I could get. I fumbled in my pants and found nothing, cursing slightly. On one of the tables near the door was a pack of cigarettes, only a small splash of blood on it. I stole a smoke from the dead and lit my ill gotten gain, drawing hot smoke deeply into my lungs. A bark of laughter escaped me, turning into a cough and then another series of dry heaves as I noticed the no smoking sign by the door. I left the room and kept searching.

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Crazy Little Thing is copyright Adam P. Knave.