9
Chapter Nine
SIN
Pulling Reese uponto the bed, I switch spots with her. This is shit no one should have to see. I grab my boxers from the floor and quickly slip my clothes back on, trying to get the burnt image out of my head before I turn back to face it again.
“This is too real,” Reese says. Her words don’t make a ton of sense considering what the past few hours of her life has looked like.
“Just look away. I’ll take care of it,” I tell her. When I say I’ll take care of it, I mean I’m going to throw a sheet over them and close the doors back up.
Reese slips back down into the covers and pulls the sheet up to her chin. Her eyes are wide and I want to focus on her more than I want to turn around and place the sheet over this family of four. “They look like a happy family,” she says. I don’t know how she can tell that by the rotting corpses we’re looking at, but I suppose she may be looking at the dress the woman is wearing, the pearls around her neck, and the large diamond ring dangling from her half-eaten, bony fingertip. The man is in a suit, maybe a businessman and the two little girls are both in what looks like school uniforms. They must be twins, same size, same color hair, same everything. The parents are holding hands, which are looped tightly around the two little girls tucked between them.
My heart aches like it hasn’t ached in a long time. I know I never grew up with a normal situation. Dad lived his life to hurt mom, to make her feel like she wasn’t worthy of being his wife. Mom was too ignorant to do anything about it until it was too late, and I never could figure out why the two of them got married. The only logical explanation would be an oops—me. When I got old enough to understand what was going on and how incredibly wrong it all was, I told Mom to leave him. I thought it was a simple matter of walking out the door, but what I didn’t understand was Dad had deeper issues than I ever could have comprehended during my younger teenage years. He was obsessed with mom, yearning for control and domination of every aspect of her life. He was a scientist too, and she was always one step above him because of her previous experience and knowledge—this made him crazy and jealous, I guess. I don’t truly know the truth behind their relationship or the lack thereof.
“Sin,” Reese snaps me out of my foggy haze. I look over at her, noticing the pale hue coating her face. She looks like she might get sick.
“Hand me one of the sheets,” I tell her. Reese quickly slips her clothes back on and hands me the sheet she had wrapped around her.
I kneel down and move closer to the closet, inhaling the rotting scent of corpses that was released into the room when she opened the door. I swallow hard and pull in a sharp breath to hold for as long as I need to be within reaching distance of this family. I pat my hand down the man’s sides, looking to see if he has any other weapons on him, but there’s nothing except a baby doll lying face down by the side of his leg. I take the doll and tuck it between the little girls’ arms. As I pull the sheet over them one by one, my hand runs along something firm when I rest the sheet over the woman. God, this is fucking horrible. I didn’t check the pockets of her apron, so I feel around inside, finding a pistol.Who would have thought?I pull it out and place it down on the ground beside me. When I move back to cover them up, the four of them fall over like a stack of dominos, revealing their backs, all of which are hollowed out, gutted, with maggots crawling out of every opening. “Oh my God, those fucks must have sat them like this when they were done with them.” Gagging against the bile rising in my throat, I quickly finish covering them up and slam the closet door between us.
When I turn back to Reese, tears are trickling down her cheeks, one by one. “I can’t comprehend any of this; it’s like a bad movie. This stuff isn’t supposed to happen. They must have been hiding from the Juliets. They must have heard them coming while they were eating.”
“The Juliets apparently found them,” I confirm.
She pulls herself up on the bed, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Did you see that jug of water in the fridge?”
“Yeah.”
“You think it’s okay to rinse off with that?” she asks.
“No. The water could be contaminated. The only thing we can trust is rain. I’m sorry.” I hate the disappointed look in her eyes. She hardly complains about anything and I know the feeling of wanting to take a shower—being clean would feel so good, but we can’t. It’s not worth it.
She slides off the bed and walks into the master bath, closing the door behind her. I can imagine going to the bathroom herself without someone watching her, or using a toilet instead of the pail she was forced to use in the shed might feel like a luxury right now. Though, I’m not sure how she can see in there with no electricity. The sun is almost completely below the horizon and darkness is beginning to cover the white-colored room in a gray hue.
With the little light left, I go back through the drawers, seeing what else I can find. For a well-off looking family, they don’t have much to show for it. There’s a backpack propped up against the nightstand with a laptop inside, but it’s completely useless without any electricity or Internet.
Rummaging through the drawers, I take out a few clean shirts and pants while also stumbling across deodorant and a small wad of cash. “Forgive me,” I say quietly. I take it all, robbing this family of whatever they had left.
Reese steps out of the dark bathroom, bringing a breeze of fresh air with her. “You okay?”
She smiles a touch as she runs her fingers through her hair. “She had some dry shampoo and lotion—I don’t remember smelling something so beautiful.” A nice fragrance is something I used to take for granted; now it’s a treat to smell something that isn’t rotting. And Reese definitely isn’t rotting. She’s incredible and smells the same.
“I found some stuff—a laptop, clothes, and cash.”
“I found painkillers and a first-aid kit in the bathroom. Oh! Come here!” She walks back into the bathroom, and I follow, but she meets me at the doorway with a folded towel. Pressing it up against the side of my face, she says, “Smell. Inhale as much as you can.” I do. Fresh laundry, it sends a chill down my spine and I want to suffocate myself in this scent. I would never have thought that the day we left home before coming to Chipley would be the last time I’d smell fresh laundry.
We lived in a large ranch style house and the laundry room was in the bathroom, centered in the middle of the house. Whenever Mom did a load, the entire house filled with the scent of fabric softener. It always made our house smell like a home.
I figured we’d have the same amenities in our Chipley house, seeing as we were told we’d have a working kitchen, bathroom, and a place to sleep. We did have a dishwasher, but no washer and dryer. We had to wash our clothes by hand, which left the material of all my clothes kind of stale and they smelled like fragrance-free soap water, or a little like mildew if they took too long to dry when it was cold out. There was nothing homey about our house in Chipley, but I was told it was temporary. Plus, it was a way to get away from Dad, and a way for Mom to further her career of what I now know to be torturing people.
Reese and I stand still, both of our cheeks pressed against this towel. “We should sleep on this tonight, breathe it in all night.”
“We should,” she agrees. “But before we go to sleep, I want to eat some more.”
She lifts her cheek from the towel and heads out of the bedroom. I follow her, tossing the towel onto the bed. I find her in the living room, rather than the kitchen, though. She’s walking toward the blind-covered window. “Reese, what are you doing?”
“I thought I heard something,” she says, continuing toward the window with slow and cautious steps—questioning steps.
