Kayson leapt over Wendy's shredded torso and kept running. When Vanessa reached the corpse, she faltered. Her living eyes met Wendy's dead ones. No spark of life remained. The sweet rotting stench had already set in. Wendy's skin had already begun to turn gray. Flies buzzed with grotesque enthusiasm as they crawled and rooted through the exposed guts. Vanessa wondered how much time had passed. She didn't think it had been that long, but maybe time worked strangely here. Maybe Kayson was on to something. They'd no-clipped and wound up in some dark and terrible place. Somewhere that didn't work the way her world worked, somewhere that had no way out.
Keep going. You gotta keep going.
She tiptoed around the bloody parts and resumed her sprint.
Kayson was far ahead. He hadn't bothered looking back. Werth had stopped screaming, and she feared the worst. Still, they needed to be sure. God, if the rats had done him in, she'd never forgive herself.
Running for what felt like the hundredth time that day, her leg muscles throbbed and burned. Her breath felt like a solid thing lined with barbs as it rushed in and out her lungs. The hot breeze made by her momentum caused her eyes to water. The tears blurred the scenery ahead, rendering the broken-down rides and dilapidated buildings into impressionistic smears. She half-groaned, half-screamed and pumped her arms faster, lengthening her strides. As she strode, she blinked to try dislodging the moisture.
She spotted the others at the Tilt-A-Whirl. Kayson stopped running and put his hands on his hips. Hannah stood across from him, arms crossed. He wasn't looking at her, though. He was looking at Werth, laid out on the pavement and glistening with something dark.
Vanessa slowed to a stop as Kayson crouched beside his brother. Werth's uniform was torn in places and soaked with blood. Too many bites and scratches to count shimmered up his legs and torso. Two particularly messy wounds, one in his belly and one in his crotch, still bled in small, infrequent spurts.
"It was the rats," Hannah said. Vanessa looked at her. Kayson kept staring at Werth, whose lips were twitching open and closed. "He didn't try to run. He wanted to fight them."
"What the fuck?" Kayson said with almost no breath behind it. He sounded deflated, defeated. "What the fuck," he said again with no additional energy.
Werth's eyes were dim bulbs. Kayson cradled his hand and stared into his face.
I'm sorry, Vanessa wanted to say, but the words wouldn't come. I'm so fucking sorry.
"Bro," Kayson said. "You can't, man. You can't."
Werth blinked to acknowledge him. It was all the dying man could muster.
Something violent jerked his body. More blood leaked out the corners of his mouth.
"Darren, no," Kayson said, and Vanessa realized she hadn't known Werth's first name. "No, man."
Werth fell still, and Kayson wailed. He kept hold of his brother with his right hand and rammed his left fist into the pavement. Neither Vanessa nor Hannah spoke as he cried. Neither tried to stop him from hitting the blacktop.
When he spent himself, he slumped, still holding Werth's hand. Blood trickled from the knuckles of his left. Shards of gravel stuck to his flesh. He stared down at his lap, where he held his brother's now limp hand.
Hannah shifted from foot to foot. She looked anywhere but at Kayson or Werth.
Vanessa counted to ten before saying, "Kayson, we—"
Before she could get another word out, he said, "No."
She stopped and waited for him to elaborate. He looked up at her, tears glistening on his black face tattoos, then back down at his dead brother.
"It's my fault," he said.
She thought about what he might mean. She retraced what had transpired in the last several minutes. He'd told her not to stop the song, not until they'd dispatched the other guy in the hood.
"You can't blame yourself," she said. "We had to get past—"
"Not that," he said, his voice heavy with weariness. Hannah joined Vanessa in watching him for what he'd say next. "It's my fault we're here in the first place."
"What?" Hannah said in a harsh whisper.
"That night before we wound up here … fuck, even before that. The night he decided to be a cop."
"What are you talking about?" Hannah said, now shrill, nearly hysterical.
Kayson ignored her, making eye contact with Vanessa.
"I got some shit to say."
"Well, you better say it fast," Hannah said.
She was staring past them at something in the distance.
"What? Why?" Vanessa asked.
Kayson followed Hannah's gaze.
"Oh, shit."
She knew before she looked, but she looked anyway. Smoke billowed from the other side of the wall. The fire was back and much bigger.
____________________________________
On the night his older half-brother decided to become a cop, Kayson Werth went with a group of friends to an abandoned house in the MacGregor neighborhood. The colonial revival-style abode stood unoccupied after its owners and their children were murdered a decade prior. The killers were never found. The motive behind the killings remained unclear, but authorities suspected they were of a ritualistic nature. Local horrorcore rapper Lil Wolfman wanted to shoot his newest music video inside.
Kayson would need to start applying for colleges in a year, but God-willing, he'd be in high enough demand by then that he wouldn't need to worry about it. Not like he could afford to go anywhere other than community college anyway. Shooting videos and maybe, eventually, a badass horror movie wasn't just the dream; it was all he could imagine himself doing without wanting to kill himself. The video for Lil Wolfman's track "Messiah of Evil" would be his third directing credit, and everybody knew third time was the charm.
The song itself slapped too. Its beat featured samples from an online musician's track, laid beneath some 808s and reverb-heavy snare. For the verses, Lil Wolfman had taken his inspiration from the 1973 film that shared the track's title, as well as references to haunted house stories both well-known and obscure. It all made for a dark, evil vibe that peaked with its spoken chorus about vomiting beetles, mealworms, and lizards, a new gospel of the grotesque.
Made up in corpse paint and wielding a variety of sharp weapons, Kayson and the others aimed to craft a horrorcore classic with lineage to black metal and '70s exploitation cinema. It would be a slam dunk.
Kayson and the others entered around back, through the kitchen window. At one point, someone had boarded it up, but with some adjustments, everyone could crawl through, even Lil Wolfman, who was not as small as his name suggested. There were seven kids total, and Wolfman entered last, grunting and cursing all the way.
Once inside, everything smelled like mold. Kayson switched on his camera to shoot footage of the dusty, disused room. The light attached to the camera bathed everything in grayish luminescence. Cabinet doors hung off broken hinges. Cobwebs filled every shelf. Green-white grime ringed the waterspout in the kitchen sink. Most of the tile on the floor was cracked underfoot, and roaches scattered in the camera's light. A chandelier dangled precariously from wires that looked like something had gnawed through them.
"Shit looks killer," he said, continuing to film.
"Hell yeah," Lil Wolfman said. "Get it."
"Where did it happen?" one of the others asked. The kid was made up in corpse paint and wore a Lord Bile T-shirt. Kayson thought his name was Tim. "The murders, I mean."
"Bedroom, right?" Kayson asked.
"The master," Wolfman said.
"Should I head up there?" a girl named Teena McShane asked. She was the only one aside from Wolfman and Kayson who wasn't made up in corpse paint.
"Yeah," Wolfman said. "Get undressed too."
Even though they'd discussed it beforehand, Kayson expected some pushback over the nudity. It wasn't like they were paying her. But Lil Wolfman, hefty and hairy as he was, had a strange magnetism to him. Women just did shit for him, sometimes even outrageous things, even when his only reasons for asking boiled down to the simple phrase, "for the content."
Teena nodded her assent and headed up the stairs. To kill time while she got ready, Kayson filmed Wolfman lip-syncing lyrics to "Messiah of Evil" in front of a crumbling brick fireplace while the kids in corpse paint stood on either side of him like good little satanic soldiers. To keep the flow, Kayson played the instrumental tracks on his phone.
When she called down that she was all set, they went upstairs. Kayson got a good shot of everyone's boots as they climbed. He started behind everyone, then rounded the front and panned up to Wolfman's bearded face. The rapper fixed a dark-eyed glare at the camera. Kayson nodded his approval.
"Looks sick as hell," he said.
They got to the bedroom. Wolfman drew a large pentagram on the floor, and Teena lay inside, positioning her limbs and head at each point. She'd kept her bra and underwear on, but Wolfman didn't say anything. The corpse-paint-wearing kids gathered round her. All of them held knives.
Kayson called action and the mock ritual commenced. He got close-ups of Teena whimpering in fear, panned over each of the cadaverous faces, and got Wolfman spitting his best rhymes while gesturing with a curved knife that had a brass-knuckle grip. It was all good shit, Kayson thought. Ugly-looking, but that was the point.
When they finished, he called Darren.
"Hey, Kay," his big brother answered. "How's the shoot?"
"That's a motherfucking wrap! You still bringing us beer?"
"It's sitting on ice already. Still want to party in the murder house?"
"Yeah, why not? You're not bitching out, are you?"
Wolfman and the others overheard Kayson's quip and laughed.
"I'll be right over," Darren said.
Around fifteen minutes later, he parked out front.
The cop drove by just as he lifted the case of Hamm's out of his trunk.
"Oh, shit," Kayson said, watching the cop stop, turn on his lights, and back up.
The others were sitting in a circle in the living room while Kayson stood at the window. After he cursed, Lil Wolfman came to his side. He peered through the opening in the boarded-up windows, his perpetual scowl holding.
"Should we peace out?" he asked.
Kayson didn't answer him. He only watched as his brother and the stocky officer exchanged words he couldn't make out. Darren put the case back in his trunk and held up his hands. The officer stood firm, hands on hips.
Without warning, the cop slugged him. Kayson's heart leapt up to his throat. He didn't know if his brother mouthed off or something. It wouldn't have surprised him, but still. The blow caught him and Darren completely off-guard. Darren stumbled back, and his Achilles tendon caught the curb. He fell and the cop was upon him.
Lil Wolfman was already gathering the others to leave.
"Out the back," he said. "Kayson, come on."
Kayson didn't say a word. He just watched as the officer placed a foot on his brother's chest and leaned forward with all his weight. Darren Werth was no slouch. Kayson had seen him fight more than once, and he usually came out on top. He was broad-shouldered, taller than average, and strong. Pinned on his back was not a usual position in which he was likely to find himself. It was too far away for Kayson to make out all the details, but he could've sworn he saw fear in Darren's eyes.
He wanted to go down there and help but worried doing so would make things so much worse for them both. Sure, he'd brought a gun, but wasting a cop was not high on his bucket list, satisfying as that might be. He only stood at the window and prayed he wouldn't watch his brother get killed. The time that passed was agonizing. It could've been ten seconds, it could've been ten minutes. When the cop finally took his boot off Darren's chest, Kayson let out a heavy sigh. The officer said something else, pointing his finger in a threatening manner. Darren stayed on his back, just taking the scolding with no protest.
Then the cop loaded the beer into his cruiser's trunk and drove away. No citation or anything. Just some physicality and theft. Craziest shit Kayson had ever seen, and he'd seen some crazy shit in his relatively short life.
The cop drove off, but Darren stayed down. Kayson ran out the back. Lil Wolfman and the others were long gone. When he reached the front, Darren had sat up and was staring down into the gutter.
"Bro, you all right?" Kayson asked.
Darren looked up at him. His eyes were red and glistened with rare tears.
"You gotta stop this shit," he said.
You. Not we. Not I.
"What're you talking about?"
"All this fake-ass hard shit. All this partying. It's gotta stop."
"You high or something?"
Darren stood. He balled his fists. "No, I'm not high."
"You offered to get us beer. I didn't put a gun to your head. I could've gotten it some other way if you didn't want—"
"Just shut up. Just shut the fuck up." Darren got up, got into his car, and drove away.
Kayson didn't know what to make of what had just occurred, but a week later, Darren Werth dropped out of trade school, where he was studying to be an electrician, and signed up for police academy. The transformation was nearly immediate. He started working out excessively, talking shit on his old friend circle for being fuckups, talking shit on Kayson for being a fuckup, and even diming Kayson out to their parents for everything from smoking weed on their back patio to drinking underage.
Kayson reckoned his brother had stared death in the eyes that night outside the murder house. It was the first time since childhood he'd been truly humbled and humiliated, dominated. Death had worn a cop's uniform that night. Determined never to let someone humble, humiliate, or dominate him again, he'd opted to don the uniform himself. Kayson could've given his brother grace if he'd just admit this to someone, even if just to Kayson. Instead, though, he fed his brother the same bullshit he fed everyone else. He wanted to do something meaningful. Help clean up his community. Give back.
No. He was just a scared little kid in a grown-ass man's body. Too scared to even tell his little brother just how scared he was. Worst of all, Kayson remembered those words now—you gotta stop this shit—as he approached the closed-down freakshow with Vanessa and Hannah. He remembered those words and thought Darren might have been right in a way and that somehow all this was his fault, even down to the imprisonment of the others, the rats, and the fire.
He pondered this as the itch in his chest where the hooded creature had scratched him started to spread.