Ashes, Ashes

17 - A Trio of Corpses

Terror had left me momentarily  senseless, unable to make sense of what was happening. I felt pressure on my wrist, a strong grip trying to heave me to my feet, and I could make out the silhouette of a person, disparate features -- blonde hair, a fur-lined parka hook -- but it took a minute to put all of the pieces together into a single image that made sense, and another long moment to realize what any of it meant. 

"Dawn?" 

"I heard screaming," she said, and she sounded bewildered but calm, and I thought she must not have looked into the doorway yet, she must not have seen Abby's body hanging boneless and twitching, or else she'd be screaming too. "So I ran back." 

Had I been screaming that long? I stared at her, uncomprehending. 

"We...didn't get very far," she said, and looked down. 

I dusted myself off, shivering, snow melting on my skin. "Where's Richard?" 

"Back that way." She gestured vaguely toward the tree line. "He found a car." 

A jolt of adrenaline shot through me then. A car? "Parker?"

She shook her head. "No. We didn't recognize it. It's back on this path between the trees over there, like somebody tried to hide it. Richard wanted to see if he could get it started, and I told him that was a waste of time, and he blew up at me so I wandered off to keep looking for Parker and then I heard you screaming so I came back." 

The matter-of-factness of this struck me as very strange, especially considering the near-hysterical determination she'd had about finding Parker, but I didn't have time to think about it. There were too many other things -- more important things -- that needed to be addressed. 

"So what were you screaming about?" Dawn asked, stepping away from me now and turning to scan her surroundings. "And where..." 

She trailed off, frowning, her gaze catching the broken window and scanning slowly sideways, and I wanted to tell her something, wanted to warn her, stop her from finding out this way -- but I couldn't squeeze the words out past the lump in my throat, not in time to stop her from seeing. 

"Abby!" Dawn ran forward, angling her body toward the open doorway. "Oh my god, Abby!" 

"No!" I yelled, finally able to make a sound, watching as Dawn ran toward the open doorway. "It's trapped! There might be more traps!" 

She either didn't hear or didn't care, because she was through the threshold, embracing Abby's body on its pendulum, and at first I didn't understand. But then I realized she was trying to get her down; she was trying to untangle the axe blade from the back of Abby's splintered skull as though that would help, as though there were anything at all that could be done for her. 

"Logan, damn it, come help me!"

"There's no point," I protested, cemented to the spot. I felt a sting of tears, a pinprick threat of emotion at the back of my eye, but they lingered there, caught up behind the same dam that had held back my grief for Laurel. "She's dead. There's nothing we can do." 

Dawn stumbled backward, Abby in her arms, and I saw that the axe had worked loose, pulling free with a gentle sucking noise. Something gelatinous spilled out, and Abby's head lolled bonelessly, flopping over backward to stare blankly at the still-gray sky. 

Dawn screamed then. 

That at last drew me out of my horrified paralysis, and I went to her side, catching her shoulder before she could fall backward in the snow the way I had. We stood there, the three of us locked in some awkward and awful dance, and I thought -- absurdly, unwantedly -- about rat kings, those mythic monsters made of dozens of rats whose tails had grown tangled and tied together, a seething mass of bodies. Laurel had written a book with a rat king in it, once, I thought, and realized even as I caught myself trying to remember which book it had been that my brain was just trying to shield me from the awfulness of our current situation. 

When life becomes unbearable, the brain looks for an escape. That's the sacred job of fiction.

Laurel had said that once. 

But there was no time for escaping now. 

I dragged my consciousness back to the moment. I forced myself to focus. "Dawn," I said. "We have to leave her. We have to get out of here." 

"We. We can't. We can't just -- " 

"Let's lay her down over there," I said, and tried to find some gentleness to inject into the words. I realized that my body was trembling, but I could no longer feel the cold. "Let's...let's go find a blanket, like we did with Liza. Would that be okay?" 

Liza's name drove it home, that awful reminder that this was the second corpse of the morning. Laurel and Liza and Abby, a trio of corpses, and I wondered -- selfishly -- if this was my life now, if my life was just a curse of watching the light go out in the eyes of my friends. 

Was this my price for what I had done to Laurel? 

(Not done to. Done for. Done for. She had begged me to help her. She had threatened me. If I hadn't done it, she would have done something worse, she had said that, she had meant that, if it wasn't me she would have done it by herself and she would have been alone and it would have been so much worse, that was true, that needed to be true, I needed that to be true)

No. Stop. Back to the moment. 

"Let's just get her laid down," I was saying, my mouth moving on its own, finding that soothing tone that you use to comfort a dog during a thunderstorm. "Let's just go lay her down over here, and we'll go back for a blanket, okay?" 

And Dawn, malleable in her terror, nodded numbly, the two of us arranging to drag and heave Abby's slender body back into the threshold of the office building, neither of us daring to step inside. 

We'd need another blanket, I remembered, as we backed away from the door. A cover for the custodian, the corpse sprawled out by the utility closet. Three blankets for three corpses, and we still had no idea where Parker was.