chapter iii
madmax
"REEFER RICK'S HOUSE? ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS?"
"Yeah," Eddie said, as he felt a hand across the bottom of Rick's porch swing in search of a spare key. "Pretty goddamn serious, Valerie."
Val paced back and forth across the porch while Eddie scoured for the key. Her hands ran through her hair over and over again as she replayed the scene in her mind—Chrissy's body flying to the ceiling, her bones snapping in two, her eyes popping and dripping blood out of their empty sockets. Now that she was somewhat more clear-minded, Val lifted a hand to her face to find a few drops of dried blood staining her cheeks. She scratched it off, fighting back the bile that was clawing its way up her throat.
"Jesus, I'm gonna be sick," she muttered, clutching her gut. "That was fucking—vile. Jesus."
Eddie finally found a key buried beneath the pillows on the swing. "I know, I know, I was there too—so can you stop talking about it, please?" He inserted it into the lock and pushed the door open, gesturing for Val to go in first.
"What the hell happened to her?" Val continued, ignoring Eddie's pleas for her to stop. She made her way inside the familiar home of her ex-drug dealer. "I've never seen anything like that before. That was some.. some real fucked up shit."
"You don't need to keep saying that," Eddie said. Val's eyes followed him as he rummaged around for something. "God, he doesn't have any food around here?"
"Considering the fact that he got arrested and hasn't been able to keep the place stocked, I don't think so," Val sneered, rolling her eyes. "How could you even think about eating right now? I feel like I'm about to puke up whatever mush they fed us for lunch."
"If you do, please be sure to aim for the toilet," he said, his face buried in an open cabinet that looked to hold just pots and pans inside. "I'm not looking for food to eat right now; I'm looking for food to eat in the future so you don't go feral and try cooking me."
Val froze in her tracks. "How long do you think we're going to be here, Munson?"
He stopped his searching and turned around to face her, his usually jovial expression replaced by that of complete seriousness—which looked incredibly out of place on the face of Eddie Munson. "Let me lay it our for you," he said slowly, closing the gap between them with a few steps. "As of a few hours ago, Chrissy is dead."
"Yeah, I gathered that," Val snapped. "Thanks for the help, Captain Obvious."
"Would you just shut up and listen?" His sharp tone drew Val's lips together out of pure surprise. Eddie held up both of his hands. "There are two ways this could go. The first is that they rule her death as some kind of freak accident, okay? That's the best-case-scenario. But that involves the cops entering my home to find all of my stocks, which ends with them arresting me."
"And the second way?" Val asked, but she was pretty sure she already knew what it involved.
"The second option," Eddie said, lifting one of his hands higher than the other, "is that they find her body in my trailer and decide that 'Hey, huh, maybe the freak did this!', and they come after me with pitchforks and torches."
"So what the hell do I have to do with this?" Val asked, growing uneasy, shifting her weight between her feet. "Either way ends with your ass in jail, if they catch you. But I don't have to be associated with this shit. Nobody knew I was there."
"No, you're right." Eddie swept his hands toward the door. "So of course you're free to go, princess. If you so please."
Val's eyes narrowed. She ran through a billion possibilities and 'what-if's in her mind. Was it possible that somebody had seen her go into his house, and run out with him thirty minutes later? There was definitely a high chance—the trailer park was pretty well-populated. And not many people spend their Friday nights shut in their homes...
