Body Counting Page 4

  After they got all of the corpses into the hole, Vern went upstairs to check on things. Tony worked as quickly as possible, wanting to get the hell out of the house. By the time Vern returned, Tony was laying the last brick.

  “Ethel’s dead again,” Vern said. “She was awake when I walked into the room. Fell over with a heart attack again.”

  Tony shook his head and laughed. “I hope the cop is still alive.”

  “Yeah, he’s alive. Still tied up on the floor. What the hell is with the heart attacks and this house? I bet if we look in the fridge we will find nothing but pork chops and deep-fried shit.”

  “You ready to get the everloving fuck out of here?” Tony said, fixing the last brick.

  “Hell, yeah,” Vern said.

  They carried the portly man back upstairs and placed him in the bed with his dead wife, doing the best they could to make it appear as if they died in their sleep. After checking on the cop one final time, they walked out the front door. The sun was coming up as they got into the car.

  As they drove down the street, Vern said, “Tony, what the hell do you make of what just happened there? We are now mass murderers. There are seven corpses in that house because of us. Including corpses of our own doubles.”

  “It’s God,” Tony said, turning out onto the main road.

  “What the fuck you talking about, ‘God’?”

  “He’s fucking with us. And he has a damn fine sense of humor. What happens back there proves He exists to me.”

  “Well, that’s good that he has a good sense of humor,” Vern added. “I bet he’s gonna laugh his ass off when we both go to hell.”

  “That, my friend, is probably true. Would you fire up that last joint, please.”

  Vern looked over at Tony. “You sure, man? I’m starting to think that maybe none of this shit really happened. That maybe the one we fired up before we got to the hamburger place might have been laced with acid.”

  Tony grinned wickedly. “That means it’s good shit.”

  Vern nodded. “True.”

  “After we give this key to Pope, we’re done. No more crime business. It ain’t our thing.”

  “Agreed.”

  They laughed, riding straight into the rising sun, clouds of smoke trailing from the windows.

  Things were good until Tony accidentally ran over the paperboy ten minutes later.

  The Eyes of God

  “You went another way, partner.”

  Those were the last words spoken by the judge to twentieth-century serial killer Theodore Bundy after he was sentenced to death by electric chair. Those five words could just as easily apply to me.

  I lived the better part of my life being a good part of society, and my crime would seem like a good deed at first glance. I am guilty of bringing my son back into the world of the living.

  In the year 2000, I lost my three-year-old son and wife to a fire. I was totally destroyed. Every part of me wanted to die in that fire. I spent the rest of the year dancing the line between suicide and madness. I threw myself into my real estate business, stepping on anyone I could in the process. I cared for no one, not even myself. That attribute made me a very wealthy man. The money meant nothing to me; I would have thrown it all away to get my wife and son back.

  Throw it away I did.

  In the year 2015, I read some wonderful news. There was a scientist by the name of Dr. Chillingsworth who was offering his rather expensive services to the bereaved. One phone call and I found all the information that I needed.

  First off, cloning my wife would be useless, as she would be a child if she re-entered the world. My son, Justin, was the obvious candidate as he was only three years old when he died.

  Many people would say that paying money to clone my son’s DNA was morally wrong. They would say that I am going against God’s wish. To them I would ask if this were the same God that took my wife and young son.

  To say that it was God’s wish that my family was ripped violently from my life is just plain evil. I would not worship a god whose wish it was to wound me so deeply. To go against the will of a God such as this would give me great pleasure.

  The day we exhumed Justin’s corpse to extract the DNA was not easy for me.

  I demanded to see the body, as I felt I owed it to him. Looking down upon his hard, burned skin was quite sobering. I could still see traces of his singed blond hair dotting the top of his head. I touched that leathery flesh and smiled at the thought that he would come back into the world.

  I put my fingers on his shriveled black hand and whispered, “We will be joined again, Justin.”

  Looking into the fetus chamber for the first time was an unnerving experience. It was a small glass case filled with liquid. Inside, I could see the first traces of my son as he re-entered the world of the living. As I looked at his miniature hand moving around in the tank, it hit me at what an amazing thing I was doing. I was literally bringing my son back to life. That thought made me feel omnipotent. It was like fighting God. To take back the unattainable is a very empowering feeling.

  I returned every day and watched him grow back into my son. One time, as I tapped on the glass, I swear he opened up his dark eyes and looked at me.

  “Yes, Justin, it’s Daddy,” I said, smiling and putting my hand against the chamber. He looked at me tiredly, a blurry shape through the glass, and then closed his eyes.

  That moment changed me in many ways. For the first time in fifteen years, I felt the will to live. The smile that had so violently burned away from my face along with my wife and child was returning.

  Many months later, Justin emerged from the fetus chamber. The first time Doctor Chillingsworth put my son into my arms, I wept. It was a miracle to be holding my formerly dead son in my arms once again. I could feel his tiny heart beating against my chest. He reached up and tugged at my beard, something he did eighteen years ago the first time his mother handed him to me. He was totally identical to the baby that was delivered all those years ago.

  Some would say that my son was not the same Justin, that I had merely brought back an obscene copy. If it were my dead wife, Sarah, that would be the case. A new Sarah would not have the same experiences, or even the same parents. My son is a different case altogether. When my son died fifteen years ago he only had three years of life experience, most of that experience being the learning of motor functions. It was true that he would not have his mother, but for the most part it would not be difficult to replicate many of the same experiences of the original Justin.

  One night while staring down into the eyes of my son, I perceived something that frankly scared me sober. I was looking down into his dark eyes, calling his name. He was watching me with the eyes of an adult. It is difficult to describe the feeling that one gets when the eyes of an infant look at you with complete and sentient understanding. He frowned, studying me oddly, and struggled to speak.

  What was even more frightening to me is that I innately understood that he knew how to speak, it was just that the body he was in lacked the ability to do so properly. He did manage to squeak out in an eerily odd voice one word.

  “Why?” he asked, his small hands clenching as he scowled, wide eyes studying me.

  That word froze the smile on my face, shattering my happiness. Over the weeks, I struggled to communicate with him. All the while, he studied me with his angry eyes, shaking his little fists at me. We devised a system where when he blinked once it meant yes, and twice for no.

  “Are you the same Justin that died?” I asked, realizing with a peculiar sadness that I did not want to touch him.

  One blink, then his eyes narrowed abruptly and blinked twice.

  That confused and terrified me considerably, although I did not understand at the moment why. I got up quickly; I was not ready for this.

  I fed him and changed him just as any father would, but I refused to look into his gloomy, intelligent eyes. I watched his lips move as he swallowed his food and tried to ignore the strange Eng
lish words that exited his mouth, sending my blood into ice.

  He started chanting my name at me all the time. He never called me father—he used my surname.

  “Brad,” he would say over and over, struggling to get my attention, only it sounded more like Brah.

  I realized that I no longer wanted to communicate with my son because I feared the answers that he would give me. As the weeks flew by, I learned that the thing that I brought back was really a doorway into the afterlife.

  “Brad, it’s me, Sarah,” my son said to me one day in his odd, alien-sounding voice.

  I was weeping as I looked upon the face of my lost wife. It was not physically her face, but rather something that I couldn’t quite place. Perhaps it was the way the eyes studied me.

  “You were wrong to do this, Brad.”

  The sentence sounded phonetically like “Yooo wurr rong to doo dis, Bra.”

  I looked down into the face of the infant. “Sarah, is it really you? I missed you so much. I love you.”

  “Listen to me, Brad,” the baby said. “You have to send Justin back. What you did can destroy us. It can destroy all of us.”

  “I don’t understand, Sarah,” I said, shrinking away from the penetrating gaze. “Are you and Justin in heaven?”

  The baby shook its head. “Brad, you must end this.”

  “If you are suggesting that I kill Justin again, it’s simply not going to happen. I don’t have it in me.”

  “Brad, I know this is hard for you. But we belong where we are. You must end this now.”

  “Go away, you thing!” I howled, tears running down my face. “You’re not my wife! Leave my son’s body now! He’s mine! I took him back!”

  “You had no right to this,” the baby said.

  I pulled the baby close to my face until I could smell its cloying sweet breath. “No. I had every right to this, goddammit. I had every fucking right in the world.” His wide, all-knowing eyes studied me calmly as I spoke. “It was fucking God who had no right to do this to me! If he wants to take Justin back, let him do it! But I’ll be damned if I’m not going to try and stop him!”

  The baby seemed to go unconscious for a few seconds, his head falling limp on his weak neck.

  When its eyes opened again, I knew I was looking into the eyes of God.

  We stared at each other silently.

  The eyes had lost their pupils, as if they had been eaten up by the darkness within. What scared me most was how not human the eyes were. I was looking into eyes that were able to see through me, understanding everything that I was. I felt weak under the stabbing gaze and my knees buckled. He shook my son’s head back and forth as if damning me. Justin went limp, his head falling slowly to the side, and was still.

  I knew my son was dead. I fell to the floor, too weak to stand.

  The bastard had not even given me an explanation as to why Justin had to be taken from me again. I deserved an answer. I felt the anger burning through me like the fire that had originally killed my wife and son, consuming my rage and channeling it into a new path.

  The coroner said that my son had died of natural causes. It was simple heart failure and was not preventable.

  Today I decided to do it again.

  This time, I’m cloning both Justin and Sarah. I’m going to demand the answers that I deserve to know. This time I am going to film everything. If I do not get my son back, I will have taped proof of his arrogance. I will expose God to the world as the killer of my son.

  I watched them from the fetus chamber with angry pleasure. Sarah already had her eyes open and was studying me through the glass, eyes totally cognizant. Although part of me was terrified of what I saw before me, one side of me felt powerful.

  Once again I was taking something back from God.

  The first few nights I had the babies home, they said nothing. Instead they would stare at me with their penetrating gazes.

  I waited patiently for them to act, filming their eerie little wise-old-men faces. I wanted to show the world the arrogance of God.

  On the sixth night, I awoke to a terrifying noise. The sound of an infant laughing mockingly would send any man’s mind deep into madness. The laughter of a baby is supposed to be one of the true joys in life. I still remember the first time I heard my son laugh so many years ago, as it has haunted me in my sleep.

  The strange laughter I was hearing now sounded demonic. Every minute or so the laughter would subside slightly to a frightening chuckle, before erupting once again into a roar.

  Camera in hand, I walked slowly to the nursery door and opened it.

  Justin detonated into an even more extreme laughter as I stepped inside, eyes wide with maniacal glee. The infant Sarah held out two tiny palms toward me, both of them dripping with blood. She had turned into a stigmatic, the wounds in her palm mimicking those of a crucified Christ.

  The blood dripped down her miniature arms, staining her azure blanket. She kept her face down while looking up at me, a large toothless smile underneath her button nose. Justin continued to howl in glee.

  I dropped the camera to the carpeted floor and fled the room.

  The next day, an epidemic crawled its way across the world. In a simultaneous moment, hundreds of thousands of pregnant women miscarried and bled out. Many of them died. The epidemic stretched itself across the planet. What seemed like a microscopic action by Chillingsworth and I had caused gigantic damage to the world. We had forcibly opened a doorway to God, and then had it slammed violently shut into our faces.

  Chillingsworth called the next day with his concerns for Sarah and Justin. It turns out they had two other babies in the fetus chambers who had died of massive hemorrhaging, turning their milky waters into a thick, red soup. I promptly hung up.

  I ventured back into the nursery, my fists clenched tightly at my side. By this time, Justin too had transformed into a stigmatic. Blood snaked down his forehead and into his face from his phantom crown of thorns.

  Justin and Sarah immediately thrust their little bloody palms at me, their laughter wafting through the room like the buzzing of insects. They laughed in perfect unison, mocking me cruelly.

  Tears running down my face and into the crib, I pulled Justin’s pillow from underneath his bleeding head. He continued to laugh, all the while stabbing into me with his dark eyes.

  I put the pillow to his face and pressed down.

  I could still hear his muffled laughing. It was a sound that to this day I still hear in my mind like the melody to a disturbing song. He ran his blood-covered hands onto his blanket weakly, smearing them with his own vital fluids. After a minute, his laughter slowed and grew weaker.

  Sarah continued to shriek with maniacal glee as I murdered my son.

  A few minutes later and I suffocated her as well. When I was done, I fell to my knees in the center of the nursery and shrieked, sobs of anguish shaking my body. I cried until I exhausted myself, finally passing out into a much-needed sleep.

  I awoke to a strange giggling.

  Justin and Sarah were staring down at me from the crib, their blue faces grinning wickedly. Their eyes still looked dead somehow, as if their very soul had been tainted. Then, as if my grief was hysterical to them, they began to howl in laughter.

  I fled from the room, their laughter following me like the wings of bats.

  That night, for the second time in my life, I watched helplessly as my wife and son died in a fire, unending tears falling down my face and into the dirt.

  I could still hear my babies laughing as the blaze destroyed the house.

  I walked away, the house burning behind me in the darkness. Two years later, and I have never been able to stop the tears that run down my cheeks. They have already become stained lines in my face, and it’s an affliction I deserve.

  Amongst the other homeless men and women, I am known as the Crying Man—a name I fear suits me quite well.

  No new baby has been born into the world since that horrifying night. The women simply misc
arry after a few months. It’s as if God has closed the door on the human soul. The world has begun to disintegrate right before my tear-filled eyes. It appears the inability to give birth has killed hope in our society. Without that hope, it seems we become colder and lose a major part of what it is that makes us human.

  My theory ventures into blacker territory. I feel that knowing that we will cease to continue as a race has robbed us of our souls. It’s killed us in a profoundly brutal way.

  Our hope is dead.

  God has turned his back on us for my crime. Now here I sit in an increasing sea of violence and homelessness and ponder the darkening future.

  The thought that I may be the last human being to look into the eyes of God is not a comforting one.

  Dust in the Wind

  “I ain’t no goddamn preacher,” the old man said, adjusting his wide-brimmed hat on his head in a vain effort to shield his leathery skin from the sun. A dark shadow sliced across his wrinkled face, reminding Harold of a raisin painted up as a yin-yang.

  “You look like a preacher to me,” Harold said, squinting his eyes and brushing back his shoulder-length blond hair. He looked away and sat back on the rotting bench, his hand tiredly slapping at a slow-moving fly. “And if you are a preacher, why don’t you preach away some of this sunshine. Perhaps add a cool breeze to ease my wait.”

  The old man turned his head languidly toward Harold and studied him for a moment, his tongue wetting his chapped, bleeding lips. A line of sweat fell down from the inside of the preacher hat and down his temple. “You know somethin’, son. If it weren’t so goddamn hot, I would lay an ass-beatin’ upon you that even Jesus might appreciate. Never could take to a man who is too damn stupid to wear his hair short out in the desert and doesn’t have a hat to keep the sun from his eyes.”

  Harold smiled at that. “Well, if Jesus would appreciate it, that would be some beating. The hair stays, old man. It’s what makes me so pretty. I hate hats, too.”