Facial (6 page)

The face’s mouth opened wider.

Wider.

It was a struggle for sure, but you know what? He got the head in there. I couldn’t believe it. Dirk’s head disappeared from sight, the face closed its mouth, and we stood there for a few moments, listening to crunching sounds.

I thought it would be funny if the face let out a belch, but it didn’t.

Finally the chewing stopped. The face licked its lips. “I thank you.”

“Where’s our reward?” asked Carlton.

“Have patience.”

“You’d better not be reneging,” said Carlton. “I’ll go get some dog crap from my neighbor’s yard and drop it down there if you’re reneging.”

“I will pay my debt.”

The face closed its eyes. It began to glow with a soft, otherworldly blue light. It opened its mouth and a beam of that blue light shot out, quickly growing in intensity until it almost hurt to look at it, but I kept looking because when else are you going to see freaky shit like this?

Suddenly the light disappeared.

Three small items landed on the ground with a clink. Greg stepped on one of the gold coins before it could roll away.

“Those were salvaged from a sunken pirate ship,” the face informed us. “They have great value. Spend them wisely.”

“We’re rich!” I shouted, even though I had no idea how much gold coins salvaged from a sunken pirate ship fetched on eBay.

We each picked up a coin. This could have turned into a situation where one of us picked up two coins and it became a tense standoff, but that didn’t happen.

“Are you sure you don’t want to eat the rest of him?” asked Carlton, nudging the headless assassin with his toe. “Otherwise we’ll have to bury him somewhere.”

“Then bury him. You have done me a great service, but further rewards await you, if you are willing to let go of your moral qualms.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Carlton. “Qualms are gone. We’ll definitely kill more people for you, no problem.”

Carlton and Greg both looked at me.

It was not a fun look.

To be fair, there were only four of us in the basement to look at, and to be additionally fair, when a comment like “We’ll definitely kill more people for you” is thrown out there, it makes sense to look around at the others in the room to gauge their reaction.

But considering the circumstances, I don’t think that it was too big of a stretch to think
These fuckers are gonna kill me
!

Was it overkill to grab the hacksaw and start waving it around? Was it going too far to shout, “You sons of bitches aren’t going to get me!”? In retrospect, yeah, it was. Though it was less overkill than when I actually swung the weapon at my employer.

I got him in the upper arm. It was a good hit with a lot of force behind it. Unfortunately, a hacksaw isn’t an axe, and you can’t really lop off a body part in one hit.

I was by far the biggest guy in the basement, but it was two against one, and one of them had picked up a mop. He whacked me on the back of the head with the wooden handle, and I fell to my knees, and he whacked me again, and they both started stomping on me, and I apologized for my behavior, but I don’t think they heard me, and then my part of the story came to an end.

8

Carlton

“Do not damage his skull!” said the face.

I stopped my foot in mid-stomp, feeling a bit sheepish because I’d been about to do exactly that. “We can wreck the rest of him, though, right?”

“Yes,” said the face. “But leave his skull unbroken.”

So we beat Jasper to death without hurting his head.

I’ll be honest and admit that there’s a point, even if you aren’t a trained medical professional, where you can pretty much figure out that somebody is dead. We went far beyond that. It was as if Greg and I were trying to find out how much we could flatten him out. We had gold on our minds, and when I was a kid, I’d read that you could take a piece of gold that weighed less than a couple of packs of chewing gum and pound it thin enough to cover a football field, so maybe that’s what I was thinking.

Not that we stomped on him anywhere near that much. That would have been depraved.

Finally my legs started to get tired. I think Greg’s legs were tired, too, but he didn’t want to admit it. We quit crushing Jasper and stood there, catching our breath.

As you can probably guess, things were suddenly very awkward.

I’ve already said that I’m a man who takes responsibility for his own behavior. I don’t go around blaming the ills of society for my problems. But hear me out. If
you
stomped a man to death, even in self-defense, and you kept stomping and stomping while bones snapped and organs squished and flesh split and fluids spurted, is it really so far-fetched to suggest that there may have been other forces involved? Greg and I squashed the
fuck
out of Jasper, a guy I’d always liked. Doesn’t that seem unusual to you? Again, I’m not trying to deflect the blame away from myself, but it’s worth considering.

The face opened its mouth wide.

Jasper’s head had already come off, so there was no need to argue about who would handle that task. I picked up the head and shoved it into the mouth, with much less effort this time because apparently the mouth had widened.

More blue light. Two more gold coins.

To me, the payment shouldn’t have been reduced just because there were fewer of us now, but then again, the face had tripled its original offer after we jammed Dirk’s head in its mouth, so who was I to complain?

“Again, I thank you,” said the face, in unison. It said this in unison because there were now two of them, side by side. The eye colors and nose shapes were different, but they kind of looked like siblings.

“Is that other face you?” I inquired.

“I am many,” said the faces.

“That’s weird as hell,” I said.

Greg was wiping the sole of his shoe off on my bottom stair, which, even though there was splatter all over the floor, seemed kind of inconsiderate. This lack of courtesy was, to me, the real reason his wife was having affair after affair after affair.

“So,” I said to Greg, “Jasper. He won’t be missed by anyone, will he?”

“He’s got a wife and two kids,” said Greg.

“Damn.”

“With a third on the way.”

“Fuck.”

“We shouldn’t have murdered him.”

“Hey, if somebody has a pregnant wife, they shouldn’t go around waving hacksaws at people. It’s irresponsible. We wouldn’t have killed him if he hadn’t been aggressive like that.”

“I don’t know. I have to admit that I was sort of leaning in that direction before he picked up the hacksaw.”

I sighed. “All right, I was, too. Screw him. He’s not family.”

“He was a good employee. Always reliable. Always available to talk. He’s the reason I didn’t need therapy. If he hadn’t been there for me every Tuesday through Saturday, I don’t know what I would have done.”

Greg looked like he was going to cry. I hadn’t seen him this upset since last night’s confession that he’d hired a hit man to kill Felicia’s lover.

“Still,” I said, “the hacksaw is an important element of what happened. You can’t succumb to paranoia like that without consequences. Look what he did to your arm.”

“It’s barely even bleeding.”

“True. But only because you took action. Don’t think for one second that he wouldn’t have stood there and sawed your arm off if you’d let him.”

“Doesn’t it bother you what we did?” asked Greg. He gestured to the gore that covered the floor in a twenty-foot radius. “This is the kind of crime they make documentaries about. Why would we do this? We’ve always been so passive.”

“Honestly, I think it looks worse than it really is. This floor wasn’t designed for drainage, so stuff is spreading out. Is there any blood on the ceiling? Nope, not a drop. Is there any on the walls? Yes, but only one wall, and this basement has four.”

“What about his hands?”

I looked around but didn’t see them. “Where are they?”

“I don’t know, either! You know why? Because
they’re no longer recognizable as hands
!”

“Calm down,” I said, pointing to one of many, many wet red blobs. “That’s part of one. You can see the fingernail.”

“I’m not trying to add tension to what is already a very stressful situation,” said Greg. “But I feel like we were a little out of control.”

“Fine. That’s fair. I’ll admit it. If we’d taken the time to think things through, it probably would have played out differently. Not our finest moment by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, hey, we got the job done. Not all brothers can work together so well.”

“We’re horrible people.”

“No. Horrible people would steal Jasper’s gold coin. We’re not going to do that. In fact, we’re going to give it to his family. Not in person, of course, since his wife would think it was kind of bizarre for us to give her gold from a pirate’s lost treasure, but we’ll slip it under the door or put it in their mailbox or something, we’ll figure it out, maybe we’ll sell it and send them a check for the cash value, but however we handle it we’re not going to steal it, and I’ll bet you that ninety-eight percent of the people in our situation
would
steal that coin, the thieving bastards.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“I’m not trying to say that today you and I didn’t suck. We did. There’s no argument. But we didn’t suck as much as we could have, and I think that’s something to be proud of.”

“I guess,” said Greg.

“May I interject?” asked the faces.

“Sure,” I said. What was I going to say, no?

“Few would deny that today’s act of violence was more hostile than necessary. But where you saw mental illness, I saw passion. A passion for one’s work that is rarely seen in contemporary times. If a custodian was sweeping a floor, and he continued to sweep until nary a speck of dirt remained, would you think him a madman?”

“A bit OCD, maybe,” said Greg.

“Then today the two of you succumbed to obsessive-compulsive disorder about the task you were completing. Nothing more. You did your job with pride, and much like the aforementioned custodian, you are to be commended.”

Greg and I stood there for a moment, taking in the face’s words of wisdom. He was right. Any disinterested minimum-wage-earning slacker could lop off a head, but Greg and I had proven our dedication to the craft.

We weren’t merely not wrong about what we’d done; we were right.

Greg and I smiled at each other, and Greg let out a sheepish little chuckle. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just get so nervous sometimes. I doubted my moral compass. It won’t happen again.”

We gave each other a hug.

I laughed. “I’d feel guilty about hugging you like this if we didn’t both already have blood and guts on us.”

“I don’t have any actual guts on me, do I?”

“Yeah. There’s at least one.”

Greg laughed as well. “Wow. Whatever that is, it must’ve had quite a trajectory to end up on my shoulder.”

We both laughed some more. (Although only for a few seconds. It wasn’t minutes of laughing. Just some extra chuckles at the absurdity of it all.)

“I was thinking—” we both said together.

“You first,” I said.

“No, you first,” said Greg. “I want to make sure that what I’m thinking isn’t as dark as what you’re thinking. What were you thinking?”

“Killing spree.”

“Oh, yeah, yours is way darker. I was thinking of another victim, not a whole spree.”

“
Spree
may have been the wrong word. Three to five more. Maybe six.”

“Let’s not commit ourselves to six quite yet,” said Greg. “We’ll start with one, and if that works out, move on to two, and if we’re still cool with the idea, we’ll go to three, and then from three we’ll probably be able to figure out if we actually want to do the whole six, don’t you agree?”

“Excellent plan,” I said.

My doorbell rang.

“Did you order a pizza?” asked Greg.

I shook my head.

“Could somebody be delivering a pizza to the wrong house?”

“Conceivably.”

“Do you have nosy neighbors? Jasper did a lot of screaming while we were killing him. What if somebody heard it and called the police?”

I cursed. “That’s a definite possibility. I mean, I don’t know how much lung power Jasper had, but I got the impression that he was screaming at the top of his lungs. So, yeah, I suppose it could be the authorities investigating. Damn. The noise level is something we really should have thought about.”

“Well, we can’t think of everything.”

“No, you’re right.”

The doorbell rang again.