“How long before they find him, you think?” Moody asks.
“It’ll be a few weeks,” I say. “He has a wedding ring. Someone will be looking. But not here.”
“Seems like a place kids would come to drink,” Iris challenges my logic.
“They won’t go down this incline,” I say. “No footholds. Nothing but trees and brush. They’ll keep to the trails.”
Iris considers this, and after a moment she nods. “Okay. So we just roll him.”
“We get on our knees and roll him,” I say. “No kicking. Shoe prints.”
“Who’s doing it?” Moody asks. She looks at me, and my heart thuds in my chest.Not me.This isn’t how my first time is supposed to go, with this man who is meaningless, whose story I don’t know. I am thinking of my mark from the diner again, how beautiful he is, out there waiting for me to come to him. He’s supposed to be my first. Serendipity. I’ve already decided I’ll kill him in a way that forces us to look into each other’s eyes.
Iris knows what I’m thinking. She reaches around her head to wind her ponytail into a bun. “It’s really time you pulled your weight, Sis,” she tells me. “You’re long overdue.”
“Hey.” Moody stands between us, shielding me from Iris’s impenetrable stare. “It’s her first kill. She deserves for it to be special.”
“Does she?” Iris’s calm breaks just slightly. She is exhausted from days of driving, recovering from her latest kill while listening to Moody and me prattle on excitedly about my upcoming first. “Then, would you care to explain why you’ve gotten us into this situation? Sis should be out there learning about her mark right now.”
“He saw both of us,” Moody counters. “What was I supposed to do?”
Not bash him with a tire iron, I think but don’t say.Let him go hometo whoever is missing him. Let the pages that will soon print his missing posters be used for something else.
Iris glares at me where I stand behind Moody’s shoulder. She’s gauging me, trying to figure out how I let this happen. Moody has an itchy trigger finger, but I’m a voice of reason, and she usually listens to me.
“In any case, here we are,” I say. “We have to deal with it.” Taking sides with either of my sisters won’t play well—even if I do hate Moody for putting us in this mess. I want to be following my target right now, watching his silhouette through the blinds as he moves around his bedroom. I want to be imagining how he smells and what it will be like to touch him, and whether to bury him in one piece.
Iris is still looking at me when she tells Moody in a harsh whisper, “We aren’t supposed to kill people just because they inconvenience us. Lovers only. We talk it over. We plan.”
“It was an emergency,” Moody says, stubborn as ever. She seems pleased with herself. She did this to protect us, and she wants us to thank her for it. Now it’s my turn to step between them before this turns into a fight. Our victim is writhing in the darkness, moaning with terror in his eyes as we talk of killing him.
“Iris.” My voice is gentle. I meet her eyes. They’re beady, the green of them practically gone in the darkness.Please, I’m telling her. Please don’t make this more complicated, more awful, than it already is. My sisters have six kills between them, three apiece. The last time I tried to find a victim of my own, I panicked, ruined everything, and Iris had to save me. Iris is right to be irritated, but I can’t let this kill fall to me. The first kill is special. You can’t get that back.
For me, and only me, Iris softens just enough to see reason. She points the flashlight at Moody accusingly. “Fine,” Iris says. “I’ll take this one. But this can’t happen again.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Moody’s sarcasm flirts a precarious line and I shove her, which only makes her giggle.
Still, Iris doesn’t seem bothered as she saunters over to the man, flashlight in her teeth. He looks up at her, wild-eyed, like she’s an angel that has just swooped down from the skies in a swirl of hellfire. The sound he makes is pitched and small, like a mewling little boy. When people know they’re going to die, they become children again. They shrink back down to when they were still aware of how helpless they truly are. Back when there were monsters in closets and skeletal hands reaching out at them from under their beds.
This man hasn’t been a little boy in a long, long time. But all 250 pounds of him is quivering now, and tears make his eyes shine. He looks up at Iris, and he doesn’t plead with her the way he tried with me. Iris has a way about her, and when you look at her, you know that you’re already dead.
“It’ll only hurt a bit,” she says. “And then it’ll be just like going to sleep.” She uses both hands to suffocate him. One on his mouth and one on his nose. She straddles his chest, and he bucks with a lot of strength, given how concussed he is. He grabs at her arms, but he doesn’t have the strength left to pry her off of him.
Suffocation is one of the slowest ways to die. If you have practiced lungs, like a diver or an athlete, your lung capacity is better. You can hold your breath for minutes.
This man isn’t a diver. It takes little more than a minute for his limbs to fall slack. Iris holds on for another minute just to be sure. We can’t have him gasping anew after we leave and clawing his way back through the brush to identify us.
Once Iris is satisfied that he’s dead, she stands, and it’s my turn. I wield the tire iron again as I kneel beside him. He’s still and waxen,his eyes closed. I probe my fingers inside his mouth, still wet and warm. I rap the iron carefully against his front teeth. They’re spaced apart, but pearly and clean.
The front teeth come out easily, only chipping a little. But those little bits won’t be enough to hold against his dental records, so I let them crumble away down his throat. It’s an arduous process, pulling teeth, but I let it take however long it has to. He took care of his teeth; no crowns or fillings, which is an unexpected but appreciated thing. He’s not wearing any buttons or a belt—nothing but his wedding band to wipe my fingerprints off of, but still, I’m careful about where I touch him. If we’re lucky, the coyotes and crows and bugs will eat away at anything identifiable before he’s found.
It’s better to work without gloves. Gloves leave fibers. Traces of latex, microscopic strands of cotton or plastic or rubber—all of which is more damning than DNA. But fingerprints will be long gone once the skin starts to rot.
When it’s done, we push him over the ledge and he rolls down the embankment. He barrels between trees and shrubs until he’s out of sight and the snapping of branches ceases.
I try to stop it, but my imagination flares up, bright as the stars in the cloudless sky.
He has a wife at home, twirling her wedding ring as she texts him for the thirtieth time. We checked his pockets for a phone so that we wouldn’t be tracked, but he isn’t carrying one. He’s left it in the truck, the screen lighting up and going black again with each unanswered message. She wonders if he’s left her, if this is a punishment for a fight they’ve had or a callous remark she made in passing.Can’t you do the damn laundry for once?
