23
Tyler Hill sat on a flat rock at the edge of McMillan Lake, knees tucked under his arms. The hot sun throbbed on his shoulders as water dripped down from his recent swim. Lacey Flowers lay on her back next to him. An open copy ofThe Grapes of Wrathobscured her face from the harsh sun. The thump of house music emanated from a Bluetooth speaker nearby.
Tyler’s friend and college roommate, Walter Towles, sat on the far end of the rock, sucking on a vape and puffing smoke rings that dissipated into the air. Walter was a muscly guy, a gym rat with eyes set deep into his skull and a broad head with a military cut of black hair.
“Hey, Lacey, you want some?” Tyler held out a can of beer beaded with water.
He watched Lacey’s toned stomach and the curve of her breasts as she removed the book from her face, shading her eyes with the other hand, and sat up in one lithe movement. She squinted at the beer’s label.
“Oh, gross. No. Where are those canned Cabernets?”
Tyler shook his head. “We forgot them in the car.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have some, then.” She grabbed the can and took a swig, and handed it back. She rolled onto her stomach close to him, the sunscreen sticking their arms together, not unpleasantly.
Walter began to rap along to his music, filming himself with his iPhone and throwing up gang signs for the camera. Tyler had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Trust fund Walter was the furthest thing anyone could be from gangster.
“Wanna jump in again?” Lacey asked, moving her head to kiss his shoulder. He breathed in the scent of her cherry shampoo and the sweetness of her sunscreen, and turned her chin to kiss her more fully, running his other hand across the toned muscles in her thigh.
“Definitely.” Tyler stood, limbering his arms above his head, and regarded the lake.
He had been taking girls here since he was fifteen. The routine was perfected now. Two days at the lake, then take her to that fancy restaurant Egg and Bone, and then back to his place. He regarded Lacey, a bead of sweat trickling down the curve between her breasts. He liked Lacey maybe even enough to take her out on his motorcycle.
He scooped her up in both arms. She shrieked as he hollered and heaved her into the lake. She surfaced, laughing, and pushed the sheet of hair from her face.
“Tylerrrr!” she said. “It’s cooold!”
He ululated and dove in. He opened his eyes, looking up at Lacey’s kicking legs near the surface. He could see for miles down here. Fish flittered about where the water got darker below. He watched as a particularly big fish—a cutthroat trout, he was pretty sure—flicked its tail toward some reeds near the shore and nipped at something white and sluglike, circling around and diving at it again in that plucking manner that fish had. The sluglike thing was poking from a black shape tucked in the reeds near the shoreline. It looked out of place.
He breached the surface of the lake, gasping from the cold, and whipped his hair out of his eyes.
“Tyler, you all right?” Lacey called, seated again from her position on the rock.
“Yeah!” he shouted back. “I think I found something!”
He dove again, eyes open, seeing the blurry white thing in the reeds once more, and frog-stroked over to it. The trout was still picking away at it, clouds of silt kicking up. As he got closer, he realized it wasn’t a slug at all. He couldn’t quite make it out in the murky water he’d stirred up, but it was fat, like an elongated golf ball, poking from a suitcase. The white thing was extruding from a gap where the two zippers had come apart.
Tyler surfaced, realizing it was shallow enough to stand. The water was up to his chest, and the suitcase was by his feet. He reached down,blindly grasping, and snagged its handle. It was heavy. Putting his face in the water, he opened his eyes to see what he was doing. Maybe he should unzip it. He wiggled the zipper to open the suitcase. It partially unzipped, and the sluglike object became dislodged and floated lazily sideways—with a glint of gold. He grabbed it and stuck it in his pocket to investigate later, keeping the other hand fastened on the zipper. He
grimaced, took a deep breath, and then tucked his face back into the
water to resume working at the zipper. Slowly, it inched open. Small pieces of debris floated upward and into his face from the widening crack, obscuring his vision. The zipper was caught on something inside the bag. He gave it one more enormous yank, and the zipper came free in a jolt. He felt something squishy float out and bump softly against his shins. He waved at the specks of white debris, trying to make out what it was.
Suddenly, a face emerged from the silt, floating up toward him—a grotesque visage, fat eyes extruding like golf balls, lips blue and sucked in, forehead tight and glossy like a water balloon about to explode, skin mottled with lilac, one ear hanging by a thread, filaments of flesh waving.
Tyler jerked his head out of the water with a scream and thrashed about, trying to get away even as he could feel several more soft things floating out of the suitcase, bumping his legs as they trundled up to the surface. He made a mad scramble for the shoreline, clawed fiercely through the reeds of the bank, falling into the mud and scrabbling his way back up.
Hearing his screams, Lacey came running, a panicked look on her face.
Out of the water, he turned, gasping and watching in horror as the suitcase’s contents gently surfaced, like a nightmarish game of bobbing for apples.
“Oh my God, oh my God, Tyler! Are you okay?” Lacey cried, not yet seeing what he saw.
Walter jogged after her in bare feet, laughing. “Holy shit, dude. You sound like a dying pig.” He then halted as they both saw what was now floating on the surface.
Walter pulled out his phone and began to record. Lacey began to shriek.
Tyler reached into his bathing suit pocket with a shaking hand, fingersclosing around the thing he’d retrieved. He drew it out and opened his palm. A bloated finger, violet in color, wearing a gold band.
Lacey continued to scream as Walter now swung his phone from the collection of body parts to focus in on the finger in Tyler’s frozen hand—which he dropped with a yelp.
“Holy shit… holy shit… holy shit,” Walter kept murmuring as he once again turned his camera toward the dismembered body parts drifting to shore.
