Beating Heart Cadavers (13 page)

Fields frowned.

“Is that your new speculation?” she asked coolly, still unwilling to give up the front.

“No, that's what he told me: though he didn't explain why.”

Fields smiled.

“Like I said, I'm sure you'll find out eventually.”

Ch. 18

“Fuck.”

The word hit the breeze in the early morning, mixing with the inhalation of nicotine and appearing as thin blue lines of smoke in the air around him. He brought the cigarette back to his mouth and took another drag, but it had burnt down to the filter and blistered against his lips. He tossed it to the ground and stomped it out with a well-shined shoe to leave a black mark on the pavement and then headed inside to the institution, telling himself that the job would be just as easy. He shut his eyes as he walked down the white hallways and tried to remember Merdow's words of advice:
it's just like drowning a cat
. Only, when he arrived at the room and looked down at the blond-haired, sleeping form of Caine, knowing that Ratsel was expecting his body on a slab in an East Onerian morgue in several hours' time, it didn't seem like drowning a cat at all.

“Fuck,” he said again.

“Is everything quite alright, Mr. Sawyer?”

One of the nurses stuck her head into the room and Jasper quickly straightened and put his hands behind his back to address her.

“Perfectly fine. I just didn't want to wake him.”

“Oh, of course not – he's a sleepy little thing, isn't he?” she said, coming into the room and smiling widely with her brightly-stained lips. The room where Caine was kept was rather small, and standing so close to the nurse, Jasper was forced to suck in her unyielding perfume with every breath of air that he drew. It traveled down his throat and into his stomach, making him ill.

He cleared his throat.

“Yes, he certainly is.”

The woman continued to smile. Her lipstick was the same orangey red as her hair, which was just visible in its tight curls beneath her nurse's cap, and her lined-eyes went over Jasper's odd complexion and foreign uniform with equal interest.

“So what department are you? Normally we only get Family Services up here,” she told him. “Occasionally there's a security officer, and maybe a Justice Worker … but I've never seen one of you before.”

The albino straightened a little, hesitating between his want to be admired for being a Spöke and his desire to remain unknown.

“I'm sorry, ma'am. That's classified government information.”

“Oh, of course,” the woman said, offering a nod. “Well, the paperwork's all ready for you – all that you have to do is sign.”

She held out a clipboard with a stack of papers on them and indicated to the correct line. Rubbing his fingers together, he stiffly jotted his name down on it.

“All right – it's all set then,” she said. “You can take him any time.”

Jasper hesitated.

“Well, I should wait for him to wake up,” he said.

“No, no – just rouse him. He won't mind. He'll be excited to know that he's going home.”

She smiled widely again and put the clipboard under her arm. Jasper wondered if she'd be quite so friendly in giving up her patient if she knew that he was there to kill him.

“Would you like some help collecting his belongings?”

Jasper clasped his wrist as he looked around the sparsely filled room. Apart from the small cot where Caine laid, there were a handful of toys and a chest of drawers where his clothes must have been. The empty bag laying open on the floor read
Simon
in brightly colored letters.

Jasper clamped his mouth shut.

“No, that's – that's not necessary,” he said.

“Well, if you change your mind, just give me a holler,” the nurse said, moving to the door. “The bunny is his favorite, just so you know: he'll want that on the train ride back to East Oneris.”

She pointed to a stuffed rabbit laying on the edge of the cot next to the child, and Jasper nodded numbly. When she had gone, he stepped over to pick it up: the white fur matched his skin.

“Excuse me,” he said, nudging the boy's shoulder. He wasn't sure how to address him: calling him by his first name didn't seem like the type of thing an executioner would do, but calling him Caine was too much of a reminder that he was about to kill the son of his sister's best friend. He was glad that she was dead, he realized, for she wouldn't hesitate to kill him if she ever knew what he was about to do. “Boy – get up.”

The blond-haired child sleepily opened his eyes and fixed them on Jasper's purplish ones. It was a good thing that he didn't speak, the albino thought, because he wasn't certain that he could handle any remarks about his appearance. He had had quite enough of that in his own childhood. Of course, if the boy had been able to make nasty comments about the tone of Jasper's skin, it might have made it easier to do away with him. He scooped the child up in his arms and shifted him around a bit in an effort to make it seem like he knew how to handle him. As the boy curled his arms around his neck and leaned his face into his shoulder, Jasper felt his mouth twitch. No, he thought, no amount of mockery would make it easier.

It's like a cat: like drowning a cat
, he told himself as he walked from the West Onerian institution and off the main path to a side road. Only, with the way that the boy hugged himself to him and gurgled sleepily, he didn't seem like a cat at all. He seemed more human than anything that the albino had ever come across, and even Jasper's distaste for his non-Onerian mother and spoon-fed father didn't make him more inclined to do what he had promised to do.

He's a cat. He's a cat. Drown the fucking cat.

He repeated the words to himself as he walked, his step bouncing from the weight of the boy in his arms and the stones beneath his feet. There was an abandoned bridge further out in the town that he had visited beforehand, overgrown with foliage and away from the prying eyes of residents. The water below it was muddy and still, but it was several feet deep. He only needed four; the boy stood just over three.

He wasn't sure how they were expecting him to do it. He didn't have a gun – he wasn't high up enough for that sort of privilege – and they hadn't offered him any sort of weaponry. On his way out the door, he had considered grabbing a knife from the kitchen, but had opted not to with the knowledge that he would never be able to slit the boy's throat. He considered that he should have called Merdow and asked him to come with him: the doll-like man would have leaped at the chance to kill Caine's child. But Ratsel had asked Jasper to do it directly, and he knew that it was a test every bit as much as an actual need to do away with the boy.

He stopped when he reached the bridge and put the child down upon the rusted red metal, wondering if his own heart had rusted over or if perhaps it had run dry after nearly thirty years of use, and it was simply emptily beating on. He hadn't charged it in over a decade now, after all. Perhaps there were repercussions from going without the Hilitum that he had just never noticed before. But whether or not his heart could, he could still function, he knew. He wasn't weak.

Simon was still rather sleepy, and he gurgled from his spot on the metal beams. As he sat in utter unawareness of what was about to be done, he reached up to the albino with his little fists, letting them break open to reveal tiny fingers.

“Bunny.”

The albino paused uncertainly. He had been told that the boy couldn't speak.

“Bunny.”

Simon reached up, bobbing a bit in his effort to grasp back onto his carrier. Jasper quickly pulled the stuffed rabbit out and handed it to him.

“Bunny,” the boy said again, leaving the creature by his side and pointing instead to Jasper. The albino's jaw shifted at the perceived accusation, though he supposed that he did look a bit like a larger version of the motionless white puppet.

“Yes, bunny,” he said, his voice low in contrast to the child's excited one. “Here it is. Hop, hop, hop.”

He took the toy and made it jump across the boy's lap in what he hoped was a playful way. Being the younger sibling, he had always been accustomed to being the one entertained rather than the one initiating the games, and his experience with children hadn't increased over the years: it wasn't as though people regularly asked him, of all people, to watch their offspring.

“Bunny.”

Simon's outstretched hand opened and closed a foot from Jasper's face as though he was hoping to clutch onto it rather than the stuffed animal. His face was so alight with joy that Jasper momentarily lost his nerve, but then he shook the feeling away. He wasn't weak, he reminded himself. The other Spökes did this all the time, and it was without the aid of a cold and unfeeling metal heart.

They didn't kill children, though. The other men killed men, and yet Jasper had been tasked with killing a boy. Perhaps that was how Ratsel viewed him – as an adolescent who was still too young to do the job of a grown man. It made sense, of course: that was how everyone viewed him.

He took out the cord from his jacket and wound either end around his fingers, deciding whether or not to turn the boy in the other direction before he did it. The image of his sister's form stalking away from him flashed before his eyes, though, and the knowledge that Merdow had put a bullet straight through her back anyhow kept him from doing so. He swallowed back the urge to be sick and unbuttoned his jacket.

“Bunny?” Simon asked, his high-pitched voice growing feint as he watched the albino pull a large rock over to them. His eyes lingered on the cord as it wrapped about the stone, and his eyes grew wider as the Spöke proceeded to strap it to his leg. “Buh-ney.”

Jasper methodically took another rock from the pile he had formed earlier and wrapped it around his other leg. The next he held to his stomach, twisting the cord around his midsection in order to keep it in place. As the boy continued to call him by the pet name, he took the last bit of cord and wrapped it around his face to keep him quiet, stretching his mouth open like a gutted fish. As it cut against the skin, the boy began to squirm in discomfort.
It's like a cat, it's like a cat,
Jasper thought, using Merdow's voice to urge him on as the boy wriggled in his grasp.
Force it under the water or it'll come back and claw you to get out. It's just a fucking cat –

“Mwah – mwaahh –”

Simon writhed against the cords, unable to move due to the heavy weights holding him down, but still struggled painfully as he attempted to get free. He was so tiny that his body fit right underneath the arch of the albino's body as he knelt over him to lift him up, and for a moment he remained sheltered there so that the Spöke could prepare himself for the weight that he was about to lift over the side of the bridge. As Jasper moved to the edge of the metal to hold him over the side, the thought of what he was about to do came to him with full force, and the realization that he couldn't kill a child no matter what the boy's parents might have been or what it would mean when he returned to Spöken headquarters was so apparent that his muscles slackened from their rigid grasp, but the boy was thrashing so wildly that he didn't have the time to step back and place him safely on the bridge –

The child plummeted into the muddy stream, sending a spray of filthy water up all around him, and there was a terrible moment where his head bobbed back up to the surface despite the weight of the stones that should have been holding him down. Jasper had used the last bit of rope to cover his mouth rather than add the final rock, and the five pounds was the difference between sinking and floating in limbo. As he shut his eyes on the sight of the blond hair flopping from side to side against the otherwise peaceful waters, he instead envisioned standing in the bathroom of his childhood home with Merdow as he watched the older boy force a rat under water.

“Look at it's tail – look at it's tail, Jasp,” he had said, laughing excitedly. Jasper hadn't known how to respond. He thought he ought to have been excited, too, but the creature's thick black tail was whipping in the water like a snake reeling back to bite them at any moment, and he felt as though he was going to vomit.

“Look at it – look at it! Fuck, that's good: it's fucking convulsing now, Jasp!” Merdow had exclaimed, acting rather like Mr. Sawyer did when he had had too many drinks and the dinner conversation turned to politics. “Its eyes are ready to pop – look at the size of them –”

Jasper made a noise and turned his head away, certain that he could smell the creature's fear of death rising up from the bathtub.

“Jasp, look at it – you're missing the best part! It's about to –” Merdow gave a collective sigh, his excitement dying along with the creature. “Ah, fuck. That was quicker than I thought it'd be. What a cunt.”

Jasper turned his head slightly back to the tub. The rat had stopped squirming and instead laid face-down and bloated as it floated on top of the water. He had thought that they would take it out back to put in one of the holes where Mrs. Sawyer was intending to plant her phlox that Merdow viewed as a pre-dug grave, but the doll-like boy had insisted on leaving it there for Fields to see when she got home from Caine's house.

“I'll cut off the tail first,” he said, squinting as he thought it through. “She can find that bit later.”

Fields had evidently been too preoccupied with her privileged friend, though, and hadn't returned home before dinner as they had expected her to, so it had been Mrs. Sawyer who had discovered the mutilated creature floating in the red tub water. Jasper remembered how she had screamed upon seeing it there, her voice shrieking through the house as she ran down the stairs to get away from it, and of how harsh her breath had sounded as she shook in fear of what she had seen. She had come to the kitchen to get her heart medication, one hand clutched to her chest as she breathlessly went to the cabinet, but had fallen to her knees upon the floor before she reached it, right next to the table where Jasper was doing his math homework …