Next of Kin by Elton Skelter

Author:Elton Skelter [Skelter, Elton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0CP6CM5FK
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2024-02-13T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE WOUND IN THE BIG guy’s neck pisses blood, some of which sprays on my face and into my mouth, and I watch as he falls back into the dirt, his eyes wide in the grand cavernous overgrowth of the trees. And I watch as Nathan strikes down again and again with the stolen cheese knife, making slashes and stabs that permeate through the thick muscle, through the white cotton of his undershirt, that stain his jacket in iridescent gore.

My head steadies, but my heart is leaping in my chest, and Nathan keeps arcing the blade down and down again. The guy is long dead, but he keeps stabbing, lost in the violence.

I say: “Nathan,” but he doesn’t stop, and my voice is weak and defeated in the darkness. So, I shout to him: “Nathan!” and he stops.

When he looks at me, blood runs rivers down his face, coating the already gory red hoody that I took from him the previous night. His hair is slick with sinew and sludge and his eyes are wide and wild.

Then just like a photo flash, he looks down at the body beneath him, and his shoulders hunch forward and he wretches, threatening to throw whatever is still in his stomach up all over the corpse.

I fight against every aching bone and muscle in my body, wipe the tears from my eyes and the blood from my nose and I go to him.

Slowly, like a spooked animal, I peel my trophy from his hand, unzip the inner pocket in the lining of my jacket and drop the knife in there where it clanks against my cellphone, not bothering to liberate it of the blood and ichor that clings there.

Nathan sits on top of the cooling body, watching the blood trickle from the multitude of small but ragged puncture wounds he’s inflicted, and he is as still as the night.

I lay my hands on his shoulders. We don’t have time to fuck around here, we need to move, and we need to do it now. I use the red cotton of his sweater to lift him to his feet, and the motion causes a shock of pain to run up my right arm and into my neck. I wince silently, but he notices anyway, and the concern for me snaps him into action.

He says: “We should get you back home,” and the way he says home, like its ours, like he’s not going to leave me, fills the part of me still able to feel with this intense sense of calm. It helps me formulate an exit, one that only minutes before seemed so unclear.

I peel off my jacket over the screaming protest from my hand and arm and then the shirt beneath it. And I use the shirt to clean the blood from his face and hair as best I can. He is sodden with the dead guy’s insides but when I’m done, in the dark, he can pass for normal. I try

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