Chapter 23: The Reckoning
The blood pooled dark around their shoes, soaking into the rotting floorboards. Hugh lay crumpled on his side, the gash in his throat a black smile. Vera sprawled on her back, Marnie's needle still jutting from her neck.
Marnie stood there waiting for the calm to come. That familiar settling, the way the world went soft and quiet after a kill. Instead her heart just kept slamming. The hunger sat in her chest like a hot coal that wouldn't dim.
Joaquin was watching her the same way she watched him. His chest rose and fell hard, blood spatter freckling his arms. He blinked, and his hand came up to push a curl off her face, a strand slick with blood that had dried tacky.
Marnie grabbed his wrist.
The moment her fingers closed around him, the feeling in her chest caught fire. She yanked him forward and bit his lower lip hard enough to taste copper. He growled and shoved her back against the shack wall so hard the boards groaned.
Their mouths crashed together, all teeth and blood and spit. His hands tore at her clothes, yanking the borrowed blouse open so buttons scattered across the floor. She clawed at his belt, her nails raking welts into his stomach.
"That's it," he snarled against her throat. "You fucking animal."
"Say it again," she hissed, dragging her nails down his back hard enough to draw blood.
He threw her down onto the floor, into the spreading pool that had run from Hugh's body. The blood soaked through the seat of her pants, warm against her skin. She didn't care. She laughed, breathless, and grabbed him by the hair and pulled him down on top of her.
They rolled and fought and fucked in the slick red mess. She got on top of him, pinned his shoulders, rode the line between pleasure and violence. He grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and slammed up into her, matching her pace.
"You think you're in charge, bitch?"
"I know I am, you pathetic piece of shit."
He flipped them, crushing her into the floorboards, and her skull cracked against a board but she bit his shoulder and tasted blood and sweat. He laughed, dark and wild.
"Filthy cunt," he said.
"Your filthy cunt," she said. "Say it. Say I'm yours."
He drove into her so hard the whole shack shook. "You're mine. Every fucking drop of you is mine."
The sun crept toward the horizon through the slats, gray light bleeding into the dark as they went at each other. They challenged and submitted and broke each other down and rebuilt themselves in the blood of their dead spouses. Her hands at his throat, his teeth at her breast, their roars and moans filling the shack until the light turned gold.
When they finally went still, slick and raw and spent, the world came back in pieces. The flies starting to gather. The smell of iron and sex.
Marnie lay on top of him, her cheek pressed to his chest, both of them smeared red. His hands came up to cradle her face. She looked at him, and his dark eyes held the same thing she felt.
I never want this to end.
She opened her mouth to speak, and he said it first, barely a whisper. "We're not done, are we."
"No," she said. "We're not. But we need to bury them before anyone finds this place." She pushed herself up, naked and filthy, and looked down at him. "Then we stage the show. Make the whole neighborhood talk."
He pulled on his jeans and reached for the knife. She dressed in silence, the borrowed blouse buttoned wrong, the stain spreading dark across the silk.
They started at the far corner where the boards had rotted soft. Joaquin pried one up with the flat of the blade, and the nail screamed out of the wood. Marnie grabbed the edge and hauled. The board came free with a wet crack, and they tossed it aside.
It took an hour to clear a strip wide enough. They worked without speaking, the only sounds the groan of wood and the thud of their boots. Vera's body went down first. Marnie took the ankles, Joaquin the wrists, and they swung her once and let go. She landed with a heavy slap that sent dust curling up from the hole. Hugh followed. They didn't look at the faces. They didn't need to.
Joaquin climbed down with one of the lye cans from the shelf. He tipped it and shook a thick white coat over both bodies, the powder settling in the hollows of their chests, in the open mouths. The smell hit Marnie hard, sharp and chemical, and she turned her face away.
She shoveled first. The dirt came out in wet clumps, dark and cold, and she didn't stop between throws. Joaquin spelled her after twenty minutes, and they traded off until their arms burned and the sweat ran channels through the blood still drying on their skin.
Eight feet.
Joaquin measured it with the handle of the shovel when they'd both climbed out, the shaft long enough to stand upright in the hole and still reach above the lip. He nodded once and looked at the mound of loose dirt.
"Gravel and clay on top," he said. "That way if anything sniffs around, it gets nothing."
Marnie nodded and found the gravel piled behind the shed, a small rusted heap left over from something. They shoveled it in and tamped it down, then a layer of clay dug from the bank, then the dirt, a foot at a time, until the floor was level again.
They fit the boards back into place. They were warped now, cracked along the edges where they'd been pried, and Joaquin pressed them down with his heel.
"I'll come back later," he said. "Fix them proper. Nobody comes out here anyway."
Daylight was breaking through the slats, gray and thin. They walked to the creek behind the shed, the water brown and cold, and stepped in. It was deep enough to crouch in, and the current pulled the blood off them in rust-colored ribbons. Marnie scrubbed her arms with grit from the bottom. Her hands were raw. Her joints ached.
Joaquin stood waist-deep, water streaming off his shoulders. Watching her.
"Our lives will never be the same after this," he said.
"I didn't think it would."
Silence. The creek gurgled around their waists. The hunger that had driven them inside the shack was gone, worn down by shovel work and lye and eight feet of dirt. What settled in its place was something quieter. Heavier. A longing that pressed against her ribs.
"I'm glad we did this," she said.
"Me too."
"I never want this to end."
He stepped toward her, water sliding off his chest. "I love you too."
The water rose around them and ran cold over their feet. She reached for him, and he came. They fucked there in the creek, slow and deep, the cold numbing their skin so every touch came through sharper. She wrapped her legs around his hips and he held her against the current, thrusting up into her with a steady rhythm that made her gasp against his shoulder. Her hands gripped his wet back and she came with a long shuddering cry against his neck. He followed a minute later, grinding into her, mouth open on her throat.
When it was done they stood in the water a long moment, breathing. The sun had climbed over the treeline, and the world was going gold.
They dressed in the clothes they'd pulled from Hugh's and Vera's cars, stiff with dried blood. Joaquin walked to the old Ford he'd stolen months ago, parked under a dead oak a half mile up the logging road. The engine turned over on the third try.
They drove back with the windows down, the morning air pulling cold across their faces. The neighborhood came into view. Their houses. The hedges. The shutters.
Joaquin pulled up in front of his place and killed the engine.
"See you later, neighbor," she said.
He smiled, tired and sharp. "Likewise, Mr. Marsh."