What Happens in Vegas... An Empire of Blood Short Story

2

As the echoes of Jackie's scream faded, Karen's weeping was the only sound in that desolate place. Jackie looked dumbly at the car as if she were trying to think it back to working condition. She turned and looked down the long road that had brought them there. Broken buildings and abandoned cars littered the view. Cars. Maybe we can take one of the cars. She ran around to the passenger side of her car that would now take them nowhere.

A thick, painful feeling gripped her chest as she looked down at her blubbering sister. Her face wrinkled in worry as she reached for the door handle. She took a deep, quiet breath and pulled the door open. Leaning down next to her sister she spoke in a soft voice trying to hold back her own broken dam of emotion.

"Oh my god, Kare-Bear, I'm so sorry."

Karen's sobs increased. She put a hand out to push her sister away. Jackie cradled Karen's hand with both of hers and said, "I promise I'll get us out of this. I won't let anything happen to you."

Karen shook with another wave of weeping, pulled her sister closer, and the girls embraced for a long moment.

Jackie whispered in Karen's ear, "Let's go, maybe we can get one of these cars to start and get the hell out of here before it's too late." With that her sister stiffened. "What's the matter, Karen?" But even though her sister didn't answer, she knew what it was.

The bodies.

A strong wave of nausea came over Jackie as the image of that first dead man came back into her mind and refused to go away. That gaping hole for a throat and the bloated gray shell that had once been skin covering his body. She looked at her sister and that same tight stubbornness inside her,the one that had gotten them stuck in the first place, took over and she gripped Karen's hand and pulled.

"Let go!"

"No, we're getting the hell out of here before we can't!"

Karen tried to fight her hand away from Jackie, but it was no use. Karen had never been an active child and now Jackie was thankful for it. It was more than that. She was thankful for everything about her sister. She had never known until that moment just how much she really did love her. She knew now, though. She loved her enough to drag her kicking and screaming all the way to the city limits if she had to.

Karen eventually gave up and begrudgingly came of her own will. They smelled the driver of the first car long before they were close enough to make out its license plate. The smell was pungent in a way that Jackie had never expected. The intense, thick muskiness of it made Jackie's head hurt more and more the closer they came to the huge blue Lincoln. The sun had since been swallowed by the horizon, leaving behind an eerie dusk.

If someone had told Jackie what was left of the woman would look even worse than the man they first saw, she would have thought they were shitting her. But they wouldn't have been. It was obvious from the multiple gaping wounds she had been torn to shreds by multiple attackers. Her head hung sideways over her right shoulder and her collarbone showed through what was left of the flesh that had been ripped out of her shoulder. A quick look under the steering wheel revealed a medium-sized keychain of keys hanging from the ignition.

Jackie had been too shocked by the view to hide it from her sister in time and Karen let out a wailing scream that sent the coldest shiver down Jackie's spine like ice. Jackie held firm to what they had to do, though. What she had to do. She took Karen over to the sidewalk and sat her down against the wall of the tan granite-walled building and left her there curled into a ball. She walked back over to the driver side of the car and took a long look at the woman and made herself imagine her little sister sitting there.

As tears streamed down her face she pulled open the door and reached out for the body. Underneath the coarse fabric of the woman's suit, Jackie could feel the stiff limbs of her arms. As she picked up the body, it felt as though it were made of a slightly heavier form of hardened Styrofoam. She fought back the lurching in her throat and put all of her strength into tossing the body aside into the road. It landed with a series of cracks as both legs and one of the arms tore free from the lifeless torso.