Body Counting Read online

  Tony felt the mortar with the edge of his finger. “I don’t think he’s been in there for that long. I have no idea if it’s gonna smell. I hope not. It shouldn’t take that long, I guess. We should still be able to get out of here by six in the morning or so.”

  “Doesn’t really matter how fast we do it, does it? Those two upstairs are dead now. We don’t have to worry about them waking up.”

  Tony nodded. “I guess that’s the only plus of this horror show of a fucking night.” He brought the sledgehammer back. “You better stand back, Vern. And cover your eyes.”

  Vern retreated to the farthest side of the room as Tony brought the sledgehammer fiercely into the wall. On the first strike, the brick cracked a bit, an indentation appearing. The hammer went through the wall on the second hit, three bricks falling into the other side. Dust poured out of the head-shaped hole like smoke.

  The smell was immediate. Both men put their sleeves over their noses simultaneously.

  “Jesus Christ!” Tony shrieked, reaching into the inside of his jacket and removing a flashlight. “It smells like he’s only been dead for like a week.”

  Tony turned on the flashlight, shined it through the hole in the wall, and peered through. “Well, there is a body in there. The poor bastard is pretty decayed.” He held out the flashlight to Vern. “Want to look?”

  Vern shook his head.

  “He’s sitting in a chair, head down,” Tony continued. He picked up the sledgehammer. “May as well finish it up.”

  Tony soon had created a hole big enough for a man to fit through. “We don’t want to make it too big,” he said, grinning. “Less work for me. Okay, Vern, crawl through and get the key.”

  “What?” Vern asked, backing up.

  Tony glared at Vern and tossed him the flashlight. “You heard me, you fuck. I’m the one who has to do all the bricklaying work. The least you can do is climb in there and get the goddamn key!”

  Vern stared at the hole in the wall nervously. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this, Tony. I’m easily spooked. What if his ghost is in there?”

  “Vern, climb through that wall, or I’m keeping all the money myself. I’m not doing everything.”

  Vern held the flashlight before him like a gun. His face was pale. “Where the hell is this key supposed to be?”

  “Don’t know. On the corpse somewhere.”

  “You mean I’m gonna have to go poking and prodding around on his body? Disgusting, man. What if I catch a disease or something?”

  The doorbell rang upstairs. Tony and Vern looked up at the ceiling together, mouths open.

  “Who the fuck is going to be at the door this early in the morning?” Tony asked, still looking up, his voice a whisper.

  “How the hell should I know?” Vern answered.

  The doorbell rang again, this time twice in a row, followed by loud knocking.

  They went upstairs, trying to move as quietly as possible. The doorbell rang again.

  Tony crept over to the front door and peeked through the eyehole. He turned back to face Vern and whispered, “It’s a fucking cop. You’re gonna have to answer it and get rid of him.”

  “Tony, are you out of your mind? What if he knows the people who live here?”

  “Vern, if we don’t open the door, he may think something is wrong and call for backup. Someone must have seen us come inside. Fuck, man, our car is right outside.” He removed the gun from his jacket and ducked behind the loveseat. “Hurry, man. Open the door and get rid of him.”

  Vern opened the door a crack. “Can I help you, officer?”

  The policeman was a tall lanky man with a crew cut of blond hair. He was fingering the gun in his holster. He studied Vern’s eyes through the crack and said, “Sorry to bother you so late. I’m Officer Sharney. Someone reported two suspicious men near this house. There has been a rash of burglaries lately, as I am sure you know.”

  Vern offered the policeman a fake laugh. “Well, things are pretty quiet here, officer. I’ve been up reading. My wife Ethel was asleep.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I disturbed you then, sir. It never hurts to be on the cautious side.”

  “Not a problem at all. I’m glad to have someone around like you to tell you the truth.”

  “Thanks for saying that, sir.” Sharney said. “Listen, you mind if I use your bathroom?” Sharney asked. “I promise I’ll be in and out.”

  “Uhh … sure, officer,” Vern said, stepping back as Tony ducked down. “Come on in.”

  The officer entered the doorway, looking around suspiciously. “Thanks so much, sir. Where is it?”

  Vern froze. In his panic he could not remember even seeing the upstairs bathroom. “The b-b-bathroom?” He pointed behind him with his shaking thumb. “It’s back there.”

  “Thanks,” Sharney said, and walked toward the end of the room. He entered a room and came out a few seconds later grinning. “Where did you say the bathroom was again? That’s the kitchen.”

  Vern grinned sheepishly. “Sorry.” He pointed to the hallway to his left. “It’s over there.”

  Sharney walked down the hallway, then stopped after peeking in a room. He removed his gun from his holster. “Sir, that’s a study. I’m going to have to ask you to get down on the floor and put your hands behind your back. It’s damn suspicious you don’t know where your own bathroom is.”

  “Officer, I think you better be the one to get down on the floor,” Tony said, standing up from behind the loveseat.

  The officer stared at Tony for a second before making a sudden movement with his gun.

  Tony fired once. A bullet hole appeared in the center of Officer Sharney’s forehead.

  The policeman fell backward, landing heavily on the carpet, legs twitching spastically. Blood streamed from the wound and down the sides of his face.

  “Oh my God,” Tony whispered, the gun falling from his fingers and to the floor. “Could we fuck this up any more? Jesus Christ, even if we get away with this, Pope is going to have us killed.”

  “Tony, why the fuck did you do that!” Vern shrieked.

  “Vern, I didn’t have a choice, man. In case you are forgetting, we have two corpses upstairs and one below. We would have been going to jail for a long time.”

  “Tony, you just killed a fucking cop. Now we are going to jail for a long time. We didn’t kill any of the other people in this house. Not on purpose anyway.”

  “We’ll work it out, Vern. Trust me.”

  “When you kill a cop, you don’t work it out. They are going to come down on us fucking hard.”

  “We can put this cop in the wall with the other corpse. No one will find him. They’ll just think he vanished, or something.”

  “You better hope they think that. If we don’t get away with this, they will have us executed.”

  Tony put his gun back into his jacket and leaned over the cop. “Let’s get him downstairs.”

  They carried Officer Sharney down into the basement and laid him next to the pile of boxes.

  Vern looked down at the corpse. Sharney seemed to be staring at the wound in his forehead.

  “The body count is rapidly rising, man.” Vern said. “Something tells me we aren’t cut out for this kind of work.”

  Tony nodded. “I agree with you, Vern. Now get into that hole and get that goddamn key. We need to do this quick and get the hell out of here before more cops come snooping around.”

  “Okay,” Vern said, knocking some of the brick away. “Hand me the flashlight as soon as I drop in. Being in the dark with that thing is going to be terrifying.”

  Tony watched Vern wiggle through. There was a small coughing fit and then Vern’s dirt-smudged hand exited the hole. “You want to give me the motherfucking flashlight, please?”

  Tony put the flashlight into his hand. “Here. Chill out, man. We’ll get through this, I know it.”

  “Whatever, man,” Vern said, turning on the flashlight. “Holy shit, the smell is bad in here.”


  Vern was in a small brick room no wider than ten feet. The corpse sat in the chair, head low. There was a massive wound from a bullet or shotgun blast that had exited the back of its skull. It was badly decomposed, pieces of jawbone extruding from the flesh of its face. Its hand hung on the side of the chair and white bone protruded from the end of its fingers.

  Vern felt the corpse’s pockets, feeling for any kind of object. In the right-hand pocket he found what he was looking for. “Okay, I got the key.”

  There was a pounding from the brick wall on the other side of the small room. Vern shined the light against the opposite wall, watching dust and plaster fall into the beam.

  “Tony, something is coming through the fucking wall,” Vern hissed.

  The wall exploded and three bricks fell to the floor noisily. A flashlight beam shined into room, hitting Vern in the face.

  “Uhhh … Vern,” A voice said from the new hole. “You ain’t going to fucking believe this. There is a man standing in this room. He’s alive and he looks just like you.”

  Vern watched in dumbfounded horror as an exact replica of himself stared through the hole.

  “What the fuck, Tony?” Vern-Two said, staring at Vern in the small brick room.

  Tony-Two peered back into the hole. “Who the hell are you?”

  Vern tried to speak but could only hiss.

  Tony peered into the original hole. “Vern, what the hell is going on?” He made eye contact with his double. “What … the … fuck?”

  Five minutes later, all four men were standing together in the basement over the cop’s corpse.

  “I feel like I am on acid,” Tony said, walking around his own double and looking him up and down.

  “You feel like you’re on acid?” Tony-Two asked, looking at his double sideways. “How the hell can this be happening?”

  Vern-Two was kneeling over the cop’s corpse. “You killed your cop?”

  “Wait a second,” Tony said. “Did you guys come to this house to get a key?”

  “Yep,” Tony-Two said. “We got the couple sleeping upstairs from chloroform. A cop showed up and we managed to knock his ass out before he got a good look at us. He’s tied up in the kitchen. All we had to do is get the key, wall it back up, and get the fuck out. Now we find you … guys here. What the fuck is going on? How the hell can this be possible?”

  “It must be another dimension,” Vern said. “Like in The Twilight Zone. I don’t see any other way to explain it.” He stared his own double in the face. “We fucked our own reality up pretty bad. We accidentally killed the couple upstairs.”

  Tony-Two looked mortified. “How the hell did you manage to kill two people accidentally? And why the hell did you two kill the cop?”

  Tony shook his head in embarrassment. “Let’s just say it ain’t our fucking night.”

  Vern-Two walked over and studied Vern. “So, what the hell do we do now?”

  “We go back to our own reality,” Tony-Two said, staring at the dead cop. “Let these two dumbfucks clean up their own mess.”

  “There is one problem,” Tony said.

  “What’s that?” Tony Two asked suspiciously.

  “There’s only one key,” Tony said, aiming his gun at Tony-Two and pulling the trigger.

  Tony-Two took a bullet in the chest and fell to the floor, blood pooling away from his stocky body.

  Vern-Two tried to flee up the stairs but Tony shot him twice in the back. He rolled down the stairs and onto his face.

  “Tony!” Vern shrieked. “Why the fuck did you do that! Now we got five fucking bodies!”

  Tony turned to his friend and smiled painfully. “You aren’t thinking. They did everything perfectly in their reality. All we gotta do is go to their side, get the live cop and those two fatties upstairs. We bring them into our reality and fucking boom—everything is fixed. We then throw all these bodies over to their side.”

  “You know what’s really, really, really sad about what you just said, man?” Vern asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “That it makes so much fucking sense.”

  Vern and Tony just stared at each other for several seconds before breaking out into laughter.

  The basement of the second reality was an exact replica of the one that they had started in. They walked up the stairs, their eyes scanning around for any signs of movement.

  They found Officer Sharney tied up and blindfolded in the kitchen. Duct tape was wrapped around his head, covering his lips. As soon as he heard them enter the kitchen, he began to emit muffled shrieks, his legs kicking around spastically.

  “Ah, there he is,” Tony said, kicking at the cop’s leg. “All alive and well again.”

  It took them nearly thirty minutes to carry the kicking cop back to their own reality. They put him in the kitchen and went back down into the basement. The bodies of their doubles lay dead on the floor before the stack of boxes, a massive pool of blood congealing around them.

  Vern stared down at his own corpse and shook his head. “I think we do too much drugs, man. Smoke too much weed.”

  Tony, who was just about to cross back into the hole, stopped and turned around. “Why you say that?”

  “We took all this shit way too easy, man. We just went with the flow.”

  “So what the hell does that have to do with weed? We’ve found obstacles and we are overcoming them. Sounds like normal human behavior to me.”

  Vern chuckled. “Obstacles, Tony? We accidentally killed the two upstairs, we moved on. We kill a cop, we move on. We find another reality, and all kinds of weird shit goes down, and what do we do?”

  “We move on?” Tony asked, grinning.

  Vern smirked. “The question was rhetorical, dickweed. Anyway, this is insane. Tony, we are moving live people from another reality. We barely question this, we just do it.”

  “What the hell do you expect us to do, Vern? And what in the flying fuck does this have to do with smoking weed?”

  “I think we’ve smoked so much of it that we don’t feel shit anymore.”

  “Vern, if you don’t think I find all this shit fucked up, you’ve lost your damn mind. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I’ve committed murder tonight for the first time, and it makes me feel like shit, man. But you know what I’m going to do the second we get home?”

  “Fire one up?”

  “Exactly,” Tony said, climbing back into the hole.

  Vern burst out into laughter, then stopped when he saw the corpses again. “When we gonna move our bodies back into the other reality?”

  “After we get the live versions of those two fat fucks upstairs,” Tony said, already climbing through the second hole.

  Tony helped Vern through the hole and they left the basement. They went into the parlor and up the stairs, putting on their ski masks again. The portly couple was lying quietly in the upstairs bedroom, totally out cold from the chloroform that the Tony and Vern doubles had given them.

  Tony stared at the massive woman, shaking his head dejectedly. “This is going to take my back out, I know it.”

  “Not only do we have to do this,” Vern said. “But we have to do it quick. The faster the better. The cops might be showing up over there any minute. We’re gonna have to drag her whenever we can, I guess. Ain’t no fucking way we’re going to be able to lift her that much.”

  Tony had to break a large hole into the two walls, but they managed to get the woman into the original basement.

  An hour later, Tony and Vern had managed to get the snoring husband and wife upstairs into the original bedroom. The corpses lay under the sheets peacefully where they had left them.

  Tony laughed bitterly. “I just realized something. We could have just left everything the way it was and just went into the second reality and lived there. Why the fuck did we do all this work? Now we gotta carry these dead fat fucks to the second reality. I guess we can leave them in the basement.”

  Vern smiled. “I didn’t even think of that. And
once again I throw up the topic that we do too much drugs. If we were clear headed, we would have thought about this way back when. I bet our doubles didn’t do any drugs, that’s why they didn’t fuck shit up.”

  Tony grabbed the dead woman’s leg. “Let’s get this the hell over with. I still gotta put that brick back in. We need to get these corpses over there.”

  The basement seemed darker when they got to the bottom of the stairs.

  Tony peered into the hole, knowing what it was immediately. “Fuck! The hole is gone. We can’t get back into the other reality!”

  Vern looked like he was about to cry. “Tony, you gotta be fucking kidding me! What the hell we going to do?” He pointed to the corpses. “We have three corpses here. We still have a corpse upstairs. And now we got a live versions of all of them—including the cop!”

  Tony’s face was red with tension. “You still got that key, Vern?”

  “Yeah.”

  The portly man that had died of a heart attack earlier was at the top of the stairs. He must have awakened and heard the noise from the basement. “Oh my God!” he shrieked. “Who the hell are you guys! Everything is backward!” He noticed the corpse of his wife. “Ethel! You killed Eth—” the man clutched his chest and then promptly fell down the steps, landing face first in the growing pile of corpses.

  Tony and Vern just stared at the corpse pile, shaking their heads sadly.

  “Oh my motherfucking God,” Tony said. “I think we should just leave. Let’s just take the key and get the hell out of here. If we stay here any longer we’re going to be mass murderers. Now we have all the bodies on our side. Two cops, two fat fucks, and two Ethels. Good God.”

  “What about the wall?” Vern asked, staring at the gaping hole.

  “Shit, I forgot about that,” Tony said, rubbing his eyes. “Okay, let’s throw all these corpses in the hole, with the exception of that fat bastard there.” He pointed at the bearded man on the floor. “We need to put him back upstairs in the bed. I’ll start laying these bricks. It shouldn’t take that long. You better go upstairs and check on Ethel, too. And make sure that fucking cop is still tied up. Thank God, as long as she and the cop are still alive, things are better.”