My Brother\'s Keeper
There were pieces of the walls scattered across the floor like confetti. The room smelled like bile and two scared animals. He had been watching August as he lay unconscious on the floor.
August was far from well. He wouldn’t stop rolling his head across the concrete in the same nauseating motion, over and over and over again. Occasionally he would groan in pain or discomfort but such were the sparsity of these noises that Oscar jolted when they happened. Every thirty seconds or so, his eyelids would part just slightly, and his pupils would roll back, leaving behind a narrow sliver of bloodshot whites for Oscar to look at. If ever he were to wake up, it had to be soon.
Oscar was not right himself, either. His saliva tasted like bile and metal. The mucus on his tongue was tacky, and the roof of his mouth was dry. He was dizzy, and there was blood on the back of his head, caking his hair. But that was all. His malaise was not nearly as worrying as August’s. A hangover, it must have been. A bad one. But he didn’t remember drinking.
The walls were a sick, greenish off-white with huge shreds of paint and drywall missing, chipped away from decades of wear, the dark cinder blocks making themselves known beneath. There were stripes of black mold leaking from the ceiling, itself brick and bare. There were large rectangular overhead fluorescent lights like the kind one finds in a school or a prison, they flickered with the spasticity of a trembling hand. The floor was naked cement and littered with little bits of rock and rubble, a piece of trash here, a rusty screw there. A crack house for tetanus and pneumonia.
Oscar checked all four walls three times over and did not find a single window. But there was a door, a huge, thick aluminum door with rusty hinges and a thin, indestructible handle. At its lips was a massive hasp the size of his biology textbook and a large padlock clamping it shut. He couldn’t see any light coming from behind the threshold.
There was a dog bowl beside the door filled with cloudy water.
Suddenly August retched. It was loud and obnoxious, enough to startle Oscar out of his tentative trance and put him on his feet. Oscar scooted closer to him and tapped his shoulder with the toe of his shoe.
“Auggie,” he whispered. “Hey. Wake up.”
August opened his eyes, sat up slowly, and wobbled.
“Fuck,” he rubbed his head and groaned.
“Auggie,” Oscar knelt beside him. “Where are we?”
“What?”
“Where are we?”
August blinked slowly and rubbed his crusty eyes. Then he looked around, at all the walls, at the lack of windows, at the locked door. His nostrils flared at the smell of the mold and his fingers grappled at the drywall chips on the floor. He wiped his dampening palms on his shirt as his brown eyes widened with concern.
“Shit if I know…”
August gagged again.
“Are you okay?” Oscar asked.
“No, dude,” he groaned and rolled over onto his side. “I feel like shit.”
“What did we do last night?” Oscar stood and got a better look at his surroundings, rubbing his head and blinking.
“I don’t know. Last I remember I was in my room.”
“I was walking home.”
“We really didn’t do anything?”
“No.”
“Did you come over?”
“Not that I remember.”
August belched, then gagged again. A hot trickle of sour bile dripped from his throat to the tip of his tongue.
“Shit, dude.”
Oscar staggered to the door. He pulled at the stainless steel handle. The door moved just a little, jiggling within its socket, but the padlock stopped it. The sound of the impact echoed. Oscar pulled at it again, harder this time.
“There’s a lock on it,” mumbled August.
“I see it. It’s just a padlock. I can kick that shit off.”
Oscar reared his foot back and kicked the lock. With a loud clang the padlock jingled against the hasp and the door shuddered. Oscar reared back his foot again, August covered his ears.
Again this happened. And again. The hasp did not budge, and the padlock did not give.
Oscar fell backward, panting.
“No,” he whispered. “No.”
August covered his face. “Oscar,” he said.
Oscar jumped back onto his feet. He furiously yanked at the door, as if by some miracle the bar on the lock would snap in half. The sound of metal slamming against the hasp as he jerked at the handle scrambled August’s eardrums, and he salivated with nausea. He covered his ears with his hands.
“FUCK!” Oscar screamed. He slammed his fist against the door. His knuckles were red, wet and raw and there seemed to be the beginnings of a hole on the bottom of his shoe.
“Oscar,” said August.
“What?”
“We’re trapped.”
Oscar fell to the ground, panting.
“No shit.”
August rubbed the back of his neck.
“I have a fucking quiz in the morning…” Oscar breathed.
“You’re seriously worried about class right now?”
“I’m sorry I actually have shit to worry about.”
August pressed his face into the concrete. He covered it, pale and damp as it was. Gently, he wept. A sniffle puffed from his nostrils and his shoulders heaved.
Oscar’s expression loosened, and his shoulders relaxed. The guilt settled. He scooted closer to August and stroked his back.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just… scared. We’re gonna be fine. There’s gotta be a way out of here.”
August gagged again.
Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.
Oscar was not yet convinced of the padlock’s infallibility. In between furious fits of kicking and yanking the hasp, he wrapped his fingers tightly around the padlock and hung from it like a chimp until the soreness from his feet had dissipated. And while he hung, he thought.
The images flashed like strobe lights in his mind from serial killer documentaries, shock pornography he’d been exposed to in middle school, sickeningly contemporary news headlines. One could not help but wonder if this wasn’t the prelude to something else, something profoundly, historically horrific, something to be used in later literature as a scholarly example of the extremities of human depravity, the lengths that man is willing to go to immortalize himself. Oscar imagined a picture of his face on the screen of a family television, the story out for all to hang their mouths open to, a house member casually sweeping the floor nearby, muttering, “oh my god,” having their obligatory moment of silence and staring, and then passively moving on, not to think of it again unless as a reason to convince themselves to keep the door locked at night.
Oscar hammered his fist on the side of the hasp frantically, then tried hanging on it again, loosening himself as much as he could, mentally adding pounds to his body weight. He heard August shuffle and groan.
August. August. And what of him? Oscar could not help but be frustrated by his dormancy. Reasonably, he was compassionate. Compassionate as he could be, understanding how abdominal discomfort worked, of course, but not quite understanding just how cruelly August’s gut had been crocheted. But even then, he could not help but let his anger at being the only one who cared about being trapped slither into the gap between his heart and his mind. Had August no survival instincts? Was he so weak that he could not bear the pain for long enough to double the weight hanging from the padlock to more quickly force its collapse?
Despite everything, Oscar could not stop his mind from drifting back into affection for him, recalling their high school years as vague acquaintances who seemed to always click like partners with never the time to spend with each other, their late-night intoxicated oaths as friends for eternity in college, their habitual academic intersections in every city library, midnight plans, blunt rotations, lunch together, things he knew he would miss. Suddenly his frustration was replaced with panic. He pounded his fists against the door, rested his head on it, and sighed.
He recalled an old, vague memory with the vividity of a fresh trauma. It was what had sowed the seeds for his fascination with surgery, with the body. Frog dissection, eighth grade. There was a lump in the spaghetti-like tangle of its small intestine, perfectly smooth and artificially spherical. Oscar, unknowing, had thought at first that it was the stomach, as large of a space that it had taken up. It was half an inch in diameter, this unnatural bulge, the girth of the small intestine only being about half a centimeter. This wasn’t an obstruction. But when he took his scalpel and cut into it, expecting it to be soft with walls of strong, stripy muscle, something shiny and hard rolled out of it. He picked it up with his gloved fingers, held it into the light.
It was a ball bearing. The bastard had swallowed it whole, and it had traveled down along with everything else. It was a marvel of Nature or God that the thing hadn’t died because of it.
Or maybe it had.
And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD. And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof.
Oscar traced his hand along every crumbling brick, every soft spot on the floor, every inch of the narrow crack in between the door and the wall. August kept swaying, retching every handful of minutes, his head rolling to and fro on the floor as one intoxicated. Oscar jerked away from his exploration and snapped his head in his friend’s direction.
“Auggie,” he snapped, “Do you mind telling me what the hell is wrong with you right now? Maybe it’ll help me understand why we’re here.”
“I don’t know, man. I’m so sick.”
“Like puking sick? Cold sick? What kind of sick?”
“Clearly puking sick, Holmes.”
“What did you eat last night?”
“Nothing that would make me feel like this.”
“Did you drink?”
“I’m not dehydrated.”
“Alcohol.”
“N… no…”
August bore his teeth like a rabid animal and threw his head back. His eyes rolled back into their sockets.
“What’s wrong?” Oscar pounced onto the floor beside August just in time to watch him lift up his t-shirt and reveal the jagged, angry red surgical scar beneath. It was fresh, not more than an evening old, still wet with the discharge that oozed from it.
Oscar gasped and covered his mouth with his hand.
“I’m gonna die…” August cried. “I’m gonna die…”
“Hush. You’re not going to die. Stop.”
Oscar pinched the hem of August’s shirt to keep it lifted, and he leaned in closer to examine his abdomen. The wound had purpled with internal bleeding, black and yellow with tissue damage. It lacked the professional straightness and precision of a proper surgical incision. There were bits of red flesh peeking out from under the skin where the sutures had not been properly tightened. The sutures themselves were sloppily done. They were diagonal, made by one single, long thread. Whoever made the incision had cut August open and sewn him back up just like a doll.
He reached out and touched the wound. The orifice where the two pieces of flesh met each other was raised and pale. Bits of white fascia were making their presence known beneath the half-assed sutures. He pressed his fingers against it and August squirmed and bit the back of his hand.
The abdominal wall had been severed.
“I hope you’ve been studying,” August panted.
“...what?”
“Use your pre-med for some good and tell me what’s wrong with me.”
Oscar ran a sweaty hand through his sweaty hair.
“Go on,” said August. “What’s the prognosis? Am I fucked?”
“...Someone’s been playing around in your guts.”
August gripped Oscar’s wrist. Oscar pushed him away.
“Someone put us here,” Oscar continued. “Pervert. Serial killer. Something. I don’t know. We just need to wait till he comes back.”
“Don’t say that,” August begged. “Please don’t say that.”
“What else can I say?”
August rolled over onto his side and curled into a fetal position. Oscar laid down next to him. Beads of cold sweat were starting to form on the dome of August’s forehead and on the bridge of his nose. Oscar wiped his friend’s face with the sleeve of his shirt.
He began to think.
An image of his mother trying to call him darted across his racing mind. When she would have done this, if done at all, was impossible to tell, with no windows and not a clue what time of day it was, if the sun was up at all. He had a neuro exam a week from the night he had gone missing. There had to have been missed classes by now, a roommate pacing across the floor with the police outside their door, asking with their foreboding, implicit voices to come talk.
He looked at August’s damp face and the misery strewn mercilessly upon it. How cruel a human could cut open someone so young and so utterly helpless was God’s knowledge. August was vulnerable. He was weak, brittle, completely unfit to—
“Oscar,” whined August, gripping his stomach.
“What?”
“Do you think we’re going to be okay?”
Oscar looked at the sutures. He traced with his eyes the lines of the scar and noted how the hypertrophy was starting to ensue, how livid and ugly it seemed to grow every second.
“Yeah,” said Oscar. “We’ll be fine.”
“What do we do?”
“We’ll…”
There was only so much time. None to think.
“We’ll wait. We have to wait for now.”
“I’m thirsty…”
Oscar’s eyes darted toward the bowl of water on the floor. He clenched his teeth at the thought of it. But it did not take much contemplation for him to drag the bowl from the wall to August’s head and scoop a mouthful of it into his cupped hands.
And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering; But unto Cain and his offering He had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.
And so they waited.
Neither was sure how much time had elapsed since they woke.
It had to have been days. A hundred hours of thinking for Oscar and a hundred hours of writhing and pain for August. With no windows there was no telling. Neither had a cell phone or watch.
When August wasn’t curled into himself or facing away from his friend, Oscar stared at his stomach, tracing the outline of the scar from underneath the shirt. He noticed that August’s stomach was beginning to bloat, perhaps along the scarline. He would have to get a better look at it. There was a blockage somewhere, a vessel or thing keeping the chunks from traveling down to the colon. An object, it needed to be. A severed organ would have rendered poor August dead. And an abscess so large will not form so quickly.
Oscar held his speculation close. With bitter awareness he allowed himself to be astonished that August had lived this long.
Their only clock was the mold. August did not notice its growth. Oscar did. He had made an impression in the wall with one of his fingernails, right where the tip of the longest stripe of mold had ended. In the time that they had been there, the mold had grown several inches past that, trickling further and further down the brick like the immortal bars of a ghostly cage.
The bowl of water was nearly empty. There were puddles of their urine on the cement opposite to the door. Something had to happen soon.
Suddenly August sat upright. He rubbed his head, ran his fingers through his hair. He wiped the sweat off his freckles and took a deep breath in, then out, like one christened. The muscles in his face relaxed, and the wrinkles of pain and fear that had held his pale cheeks in bondage for so long seemed to slither away into smoothness. He even grinned a little, the first smile since they’d been there. But beneath the biological facade, his hands were trembling, and the corner of his mouth or an eyelid would tick or jolt every half second or so with the spasticity of a freshly beheaded salmon.
“Hey,” he said. “I feel great all of a sudden.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. Look,” with shaking legs, he peeled himself up from off the ground and stood precariously on both feet. “I’m standing.”
Oscar stood with him. He reached out to touch August, who’s twitching smile faded, and who took a step back apprehensively. But Oscar pinched his ear, dragged two fingers down from the side of his head, and planted them right underneath his jaw at the top of his neck, in that tender sweet-spot where the carotid artery pumps at its loudest. August’s pulse was racing.
“Not for long,” said Oscar.
“You think it’s adrenaline?” August asked. “Do you think I’m fucked for real now?”
“Are you lucid enough for me to ask you a real question?”
August laughed.
“Lucid…” he scoffed. “Sure. What?”
“What do you think he did to your stomach?”
“He probably harvested an organ,” August replied, casually. “Why?”
“I’m just wondering. I have a theory, though.”
“What?”
“Do you think that… that instead of taking something out, he put something in?”
August turned his head down to his stomach. He looked at it carefully and then slowly looked back up with the wide, terrified brown eyes of a veal.
“...What do you mean?”
“I mean why would he harvest one of your organs, do nothing to me, and then lock us in a room together?”
The corners of August’s mouth drooped.
“Someone’s gotta notice that we’ve gone missing,” he pivoted, quietly. “The police are probably looking for us right now. They’re close.”
Oscar sniffled.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming for us, Auggie! I really don’t,” Oscar smiled at him with wide eyes and a tight mouth that was choking on its own breath. “I think, best case, we’ll end up on the news, and worst case, we’ll end up missing forever.”
August looked like he was beginning to suffocate.
“It’s been days, August!” Oscar yelled, his smile dissipating, replaced with a snarl. “Days! If one of us doesn’t get out of here soon—”
“One of us?” August whispered.
Oscar balled his fists.
“Auggie,” he whined.
Something snapped. August ran to the door and began banging his fists on it. Even while his legs shook and staggered, he kicked at the hasp, trying his damndest to shatter the unyielding padlock, all to no avail. Such was the energy of the sacrificial goat.
“HELP!” he screamed. “SOMEBODY HELP US!”
“Shut up!” Oscar screamed. “SHUT UP! YOU’RE GONNA DRIVE ME FUCKING CRAZY!”
“HEEEEELP!”
Oscar whacked him on the side of his head with the palm of his hand. August staggered backward and onto the floor. He hoisted himself onto his palms and his nose crinkled into an expression of potent, virile hate.
He grabbed Oscar’s leg out from under him and sent him toppling to the ground like a mannequin. There were sounds like the grappling of two rabid hyenas as August tried to straddle Oscar with his leg in his adrenal grasp. He leaned into Oscar’s sacral region, with what intent, only a street fighter could tell, but his proximity made it easy for Oscar to kick him in the jaw with the sole of his tennis shoe.
August’s head fell backward onto the floor with a thud.
Oscar spent a few minutes panting. August was limp like a sheepskin.
When August woke, the pain had returned in all of its hateful treachery. As the ceiling spun around in circles, a double-image of bleak dilapidation, he noticed Oscar hovering over his face. He felt a cold hand on his abdomen where the scar was, pressing down against it. When he opened his eyes, the hand was gone. It had skittered away and settled back down on Oscar’s lap where it belonged.
“What if I felt around the sutures?” Oscar asked. “Maybe just…try to peel the skin back? Take a peek inside? We’ll never know if we don’t try.”
August’s eyes grew glassy. His nose crinkled.
“I mean… you’re probably going to die anyway,” Oscar continued, “so I don’t understand why you don’t just—”
“FUCK YOU!” August screamed, hazy, slurring his speech despite his volume and hurling strings of saliva of Oscar. “Fuck you!”
“...Right. Ok. I’m sorry. Please answer my question.”
August pounded his weak fists against the floor, palms empty.
If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted, and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at thy door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.
“So we’re waiting.”
“Yes,” said August. “Fuck is wrong with you?”
“I’m hungry and thirsty and I don’t want to die.”
“I don’t either.”
“Do you wanna play I Spy?”
“Fuck no.”
“I spy with my little eye something…”
“The sound of your voice is gonna drive me insane,”
“Something shiny.”
“Please…” August moaned. “Please stop…”
“Can you guess?”
August rolled his head across the floor. The world would not still. Everything twirled around him in nauseating circles, bullying him. He was starting to feel the pain again. He rolled over and felt the despair settle in his gut, ruinous and putrid.
“The padlock, dumbass, it’s the only new-looking thing in this room,” said Oscar. “God, you suck shit at this game. Ok, your turn.”
“Ugh… mungh…”
“Ok, whatever. I spy with my little eye something…”
August’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. He flopped in the opposite direction, away from Oscar. Oscar laid a hand on his waist.
“Don’t…” August heaved, “don’t touch me…”
“You look sleepy,” Oscar smiled.
August could hardly lift his hand to bat Oscar away.
“I have too much to lose,” he said quietly. “I’m not gonna be the one that dies here with you, August. Not me. Not this time and not for you.”
He held August’s chin so that his head would not flop to the side as he faded out of lucidity. And he leaned in closer, his nose growing cold with the ill, sweet-smelling sweat on August’s cheek.
He laid August’s head down on the concrete.
And Cain talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass, when they were up in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.
August could not keep himself from descending into unconsciousness. The pain was too great.
All of the dreamworld spun. It was a downward spiral, a constant sensation of falling, an eternal hell of plummeting into nothing. He woke only once, drunk with semi-consciousness, to vomit a flood of water onto the cold, mildewy floor. And then back into the spiral he went, hurled into the darkness like a stone into a bottomless pit. He lay there in a puddle of his own vomit. Oscar did not dare move his head away from it.
Suddenly the plummeting stopped. August did not land upon anything solid. He simply stopped falling. He was suspended in space and time and matter. And before him was Oscar, clothed in darkness, his face downturned and his hair stringy, bloodsoaked. He was limp, suspended in space, damp with sweat and heaving wetly with moldy lungs. August touched the suffocating Oscar with his toe like he was a piece of roadkill.
You’ll come to forgive him. You’ll have to.
The voice sounded in every direction. It echoed against nothing.
“...What?”
Everything with which you thought you knew about death rests upon his shoulders now. ‘Tis not his design. But he works within it. He knows nothing else.
Oscar coughed. A spatter of blood sprayed from his throat and sprinkled the ground.
You know not how the animal operates. Sometimes it loves, yes, when it needs warmth. And sometimes it is ugly and depraved. Sometimes it only cares about itself.
August opened his eyes. The light hit him like a cold shower.
Oscar was on the far side of the room, leaning up against the wall, staring at the ceiling.
“You’re still conflicted, aren’t you?” August asked.
Oscar turned slowly toward him.
“About what?”
“Hey,” August gritted his teeth. “Don’t fuck with me like I don’t know what you’re thinking. I get it. I do. You’re gonna be a hot-shot doctor or surgeon with a big fucking house working seventy hour weeks making bank cutting people open while I’m… I don’t know. Wasting away. Doing whatever you think I’m gonna be doing in ten years.”
“I don’t see you wasting away anywhere.”
“No. Shush. I see what you see. You’re thinking about breaking me open for whatever fucked up reason that you won’t share with me because you want to live. But I want to live too.”
“You’re already assuming that I’m planning on killing you.”
“Maybe not. But I don’t think I have much longer until you start sticking your hands in me and feeling around for shit that’s not there.”
Oscar stood up. He slowly made his way toward August.
“Listen to me Oscar.”
“I’m listening.”
“Your life is not worth more than mine,” he panted. “It’s not.”
Oscar squatted down over August. The overhead light shone down on the top of his head and on his upper back and shoulders but not on his face. His figure blocked any light that might have shone from the ceiling and cast a shadow upon August’s chest. August was staring dead into a human-shaped void.
“You’re thinking like an animal,” he whispered with the last of his strength. “You’re thinking about the near future instead of the far future and it’s driving you nuts.”
“There might not be a far future for me to think about.”
August laid his head back onto the ground once more. Oscar laid down beside him and wrapped an arm around his shoulders. It did not take long for him to succumb to the darkness and fall back into the endless unconscious plight.
Where is Abel thy brother?
It was the pain that jolted him back into consciousness this time. It had reached its searing, screeching peak. Oscar had removed his shirt. He was straddling August and pressing his cold hands into the wound. The sutures were starting to stretch and pop, and long stripes of blood were spilling down his waist.
August screamed.
“I want to get out of here!” Oscar screamed back. “OUT!”
“THINK! THINK, OSCAR! THERE’S GONNA BE NOTHING INSIDE ME AND YOU WOULD HAVE KILLED YOUR ONLY FRIEND FOR NOTHING! NOTHING! NOTH—”
Oscar slid his fingers in between the stitches and ripped them apart. The two flaps of flesh keeping August’s entrails from spilling onto the concrete now revealed a dark red ocean of twitching flesh and pain, and a deluge of blood filtered out of the sides of the wound like two black waterfalls. So the seed was sown.
The symphony of the stitches tearing and the flesh ripping was like leaves crunching underneath one’s tennis shoe, mud beneath huge raked piles of them. It was like the rustling of the wind through the trees, the same cool, clean October air that blew through one’s hair and cooled the sweat from their chest. It was the sound of crumpling the rough draft for a final exam that just wouldn’t do, and then the lick of one\'s lips. A box of a case of beer being broken down to be put in the recycling bin on a rainy day. The subtle, dry crunch of the crusty blood and cartilaginous scar tissue which had tried to form along the wound finally severing again, and then the smacking of the wetness beneath.
And under that was the sound of August gurgling.
And He said, What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.
Oscar broke free from his awe. The grief could wait. There was no time for grief. August was not yet dead but quickly dying when Oscar began to sift through his guts. Blood spilled out of the gaping abdominal hole and made a puddle on the ground beneath both of them. Oscar pulled out the small intestine and began to squeeze it from the duodenum to the cecum. The guts were slippery and glossy like earthworms, slimy and stretchy like toy snakes. The miracle of the organism, the wires and the coils of the living, breathing mammal.
And then he found it.
It was a large bowel obstruction about the size of a baseball. Coiled around it were massive black veins and the yellow, insidious blush of internal bleeding. At the base of the obstruction was a line of stitches, from which brown chime leaked. Oscar squeezed, and inside the obstruction right where the stitches began, he felt something hard and small and thin.
“You smart bastard,” he said. “You smart, sick bastard.”
He yanked at the stitches until they popped and clamped down on the intestine with his index and thumb. He tore the spot where the stitches had broken with his fingernail and started to peel it, until there was a hole big enough for him to stick his fingers into. He sifted through the diluted contents of August’s gut until his fingertips hit something solid and toothed. He pinched it.
It was a key.
He observed it in the palm of his blood-soaked hand. Even covered in chime and blood he could see that it was made of brass, gold-colored brass whose glimmer lit the way toward the path of life like the bleating of an angel’s trumpet or a ray of heavenly light. He smiled, then he sighed with elation. He pulled the key to his chest and hugged it tightly.
He began to laugh, at first, in the first half of his hysteria. It started off as a cheerful giggle and mutated into a howl. He fell over onto his back and started to kick his feet.
He coughed, only because he couldn’t hold it in. A gag followed. Then a tear fell from his eye, and he was choking on sobs.
And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
August was long gone. He was motionless and empty besides the occasional unconscious twitch of his dissected corpse. When he had taken his final breath, Oscar had no idea. But he did have a key in his hand. And he staggered to the padlock to open it.
There was a sound like a sheet of aluminum going through a paper shredder. Then three hard bangs.
“Police!” Oscar heard behind the door, muffled.
The metal roared again. Another bang followed it, like the robotic cannon-fire sound of a car crash. Oscar took several steps back. He stepped behind August’s corpse, still warm.
At the sound of the last bang, the door swung open. The padlock fell from the hasp. The hasp itself was mangled, a clean slice in the middle of it, cut through like it were a stick of softened butter.
Behind the useless door looking in from the orifice were two police officers and a firefighter, the jaws of life clasped within her hands. Their eyes widened at the grisly sight before them. The officers put their hands on their weapons and took a careful step inside.
Oscar fell to his knees. The key fell to the floor beside him with a deafening clink.
And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.