J.T. Warren - Remains

The sheriff’s jaw bulged. He pulled the wheel to the side and the car started to slow. “What did I tell you, little girl? What did I tell you?” he started asking with a hiss in his voice.

“So it’s true.” My whole body sagged under the weight of it.

“What’s true?”

I looked back through the mesh at Kevin, who nodded. His eyes were blurry, and his chin quivered. The sheriff looked over at me out of the side of his eyes, then glanced lazily back at Kevin. He shook his head, and turned his eyes back to the road.

“Boy, when I took this here town over, it wan’t nothin’ but a truck stop, ‘cept for trains. People bringin’ drugs through, women whorin’—I put a stop to that,” he said, poking himself in the chest three times with his finger. “ I did, not any of them pansies on the town council, y’hear?” He shook his head. “Y’know, don’t nobody say mean things when you’re gettin’ results, now, do they? No, sir. I come in here and start cleanin’ this little shithole of a town up, and it’s ‘Aiken saved us a’gin. But a man starts to try to get cozy and—,” he trailed off. “After a while, son, you’ll see what I mean. You try to do your job, but all the little red tape starts to mount up in your way. All the little pencil boys start to pile up on ya’ thinking they can get some dinner of’n ya. Well, sir, I wan’t gonna’ take it.” He was slowing the car down. I watched as the needle started moving from 45 down to 40. I knew that if it ever reached the big white ‘5’, I was going to die. I knew it in all of my bones.

“Boy, don’t you never watch none of them Discovery channel shows?” he asked, and I waited. “First thing a lion does when he takes a buncha fee-males is to kill off all the cubs. Don’t want to have to support another man’s issue,” he said, jutting his head forward a bit and screwing his eyes nearly closed. The look would have been comical, if it wasn’t for the situation. “Way I see it, I’m just doin’ what I’m s’posed to be doin’” he said. “I could try to fight ’em down all I wanted, but in the end, I knew I’d have to breed ’em down. Only gawd damned thing the Brits ever did right, son: you can’t just burn ’em out, you got to breed ’em out, too.”

He was pulling the car to the side of the road while he slowed down.

Then he reached down, and unsnapped his holster. He meant to kill Kevin. Once he killed Kevin, I knew he was going to kill me for having seen him do it. I knew I had to get the gun. Even then, though, my mind kept screaming at me to be still; that this would all pass soon if I was just a good boy and sat still.

I lunged for the gun. Or, better, I tried to. My muscles were rubbery and my breathing was wrong. The only thing I managed was to hit the sheriff in the stomach with my limp hand. I missed the gun completely. By happenstance, though, my arm was lodged up under his, and he couldn’t steer well. He looked down at my hand and then back up just in time to see the telephone pole we were about to careen into. He put both his hands on the wheel and tried to jerk it to the left. I’ve never been able to figure out if he did that to try to avoid the pole, or to make sure my side smashed into it instead of the front.

It didn’t matter, though. The front end hit.

The last thing I saw before I went out was the dashboard coming toward me in slow motion. The last thing I heard was someone on the CB radio trying to reach the sheriff about a fire at my parent’s address.

I was standing in a clearing, surrounded by miles and miles of trees. It must have been fall, because the leaves were this explosion of color. Overhead, a huge airplane screamed by, barely above the tops of the trees. I followed it with my eyes. Just as it went out of sight above the trees, I saw someone’s hair blowing in the wind. The hair was black. I wondered why I couldn’t see more of them.

When I looked down, it was Randy. He was dressed in his school uniform. He smiled at me, and reached out to take my hand. I put my hand over his, and then immediately jerked it back. His hand was warm, and that scared me.

I tried to talk, but nothing happened. He smiled again; his hand was still out for me to take. “It’s okay,” he said, but I never saw his mouth move.

I put my hand over his again, and closed my fingers. His palm was impossibly warm, almost too hot to hold. He turned and tugged me along behind him. We walked for hours over the fallen leaves, and uneven ground. The wind was blowing hard. I knew that because I could see his hair flying around, but I couldn’t feel it against my skin. The sun was moving faster and faster across the sky. As night came, a storm moved in. The moon came up and over us, flying. The trees were enormous and went on mile after mile. I thought, my legs should be tired, but they weren’t.

When the sun rose again, it seemed as if we’d jumped far ahead of ourselves without walking. We were standing next to an open space in the ground. He was beside me, and our hands, clasped, hung between us. The hole was perfectly six foot. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it as surely as I knew I was breathing air. Six foot long and six foot deep. I looked at him, and his eyes seemed to take up my entire vision. I could hear the buzzing of flies. “Katy,” he said, and smiled that smile of ‘I’m sorry’. He pointed into the hole. I looked, and with just the sliver of light that fell to the bottom of the hole, I could make out some finger bones nearly covered by dirt.

He let go of my hand. I looked back at him quickly, and saw that he was climbing down into the hole. “Where are you going?” I tried to ask, but there was no sound except the buzzing of a fly.

“This is where I go,” he said without looking up, and then disappeared. The flies seemed to be growing, because the buzzing was louder, now. It seemed like a horde of bees were above me.

I looked up to see where they were, and the buzzing got louder. I was sure they were all over me; that I was covered in them. I knew they were crawling through my bones and out my mouth. Still, they got louder.

When I opened my eyes, the buzzing was earsplitting. I wanted to tell someone to make it stop, but I couldn’t see anything. I could feel my body starting to wake up under me, though. It seemed hot and loud inside me. I wanted to move, but something told me not to. I wondered where Randy had gone, and then I remembered. ‘In the hole’ I thought.

“Mikey, please. Mikey, please get up. Mikey—,” someone kept chanting my name over and over, in a whisper. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were nearby. “Mikey, Mikey, please —,” it kept saying.

“I can’t see anything,” I mumbled.

“What?” someone whispered from behind me.

“I can’t see anything,” I said, trying to speak more clearly.

“Lift up your head,” someone whispered, “and try to be quiet; I don’t think he’s dead.”

I tried to lift my head, and it moved. I tasted blood in my mouth. My nose was starting to wake up with the rest of me, and it hurt badly. I lifted my head some, and saw that I had managed to go partly into the dashboard. Blood was everywhere; on the spidered glass of the windshield, on the smashed dashboard, all over my shirt and legs. I looked around for a few moments, still dazed. The world kept swimming in and out of focus.

“Mikey, you have to get his gun. Mikey, hurry , please; get his gun and his keys and get us out of here. I don’t think he’s dead,” someone said. I turned, and saw Kevin lying up against the mesh divide between the front and back seats.

I looked down where I knew the gun was. The holster was unsnapped, and I reached for it, but my hand went awry, and hit him in the stomach. The wet smack of it made me retch, but there was also a grunt. I heard Kevin flinch back from the meshing with a startled yelp. I felt more than saw bloody mess coming from my mouth and hitting my pants. My mouth was alive with the taste of wet copper, like sucking on pennies. I moved my hand again, and got it around the gun. I pulled and it came free. It was enormously heavy, though. It took everything I had to lug the gun from the sheriff’s hip onto my lap. I reached for the door, but everything was still moving far too slow.