Chapter Nine - The Last Lullaby #2
By then, the tea was making its way through his system, and he began to stumble, the room starting to spin. He passed out before he could fully grasp the situation he found himself in.
Belinda hauled Antonio upstairs. Her arms and legs grew sore, and she wondered why she hadn’t stayed downstairs. Putting all thoughts aside, she continued to pull and drag the limp man up the stairs until she reached the top.
“Wake up, motherfuckers,” Belinda’s loud voice and firm tone startled Camille and Antonio as they began to wake up from their drug-induced sleep. Their eyelids fluttered slowly, and their heads lifted as if rising from a fog, their eyes still heavy.
“What the hell, Belinda? What are you doing?!” Antonio cried out.
“Actually, Pin wanted to say that,” Belinda said, ignoring her father’s cry as she repeated more slowly now, “Mother…fuckers.”
Both Antonio’s and Camille’s skin tugged and ached deeply, realizing moments later that they had been sown together, back-to-back.
“What have you done? We are your parents. We love you. What have we done to you?” Camille begged.
“You love me? Excuse me, Mom, but your love doesn’t extend past your precious pills.”
“I am sorry, honey. Forgive me,” she sobbed.
“You are only sorry because you are forced to see it, but never have before. I tried to make you happy, mom. I thought that getting rid of Jenny would make you happy. While it did for a little while, you still choose your pills over me.”
“I am sorry. Please, honey, we can talk about this. I promise we can get through this. Just let us go,” Camille cried.
“You killed Jenny?” Antonio asked.
“Enough talking,” Belinda snapped.
Both Camille and Antonio tried to pull apart, but couldn’t. The wires tying their backs and arms together were made of thin but strong metal. As they pulled, their skin stretched and tore, causing them to bleed more.
“Quit that! It fucking hurts!” Camille shouted.
“I’m trying to free us, you junkie bitch.”
“Here I was, thinking you guys had lost the spark,” Belinda mocked.
Camille’s coughs grew more frequent, her stomach aching in ways she hadn’t experienced before. With each harsh cough, the soreness in her throat intensified, becoming sharper and more painful.
Her mouth tasted bitter, but it wasn’t until she detected a metallic flavor that she realized she was coughing up blood. Belinda watched closely as her mother’s choking worsened, blood splattering down her chest and onto her lap.
“Why am I bleeding?” she asked, coughing up more blood.
“Remember the pills you took with your tea? I might have changed those,” Belinda mused.
“What do you mean?” her lips trembled as blood stained her teeth and dripped from her mouth like drool.
“I replaced its contents with glass. Don’t worry, that won’t kill you,” Belinda answered.
Belinda dug through the drawers of her parents’ bedroom, looking for something, anything, that might appease her. Both parents were sewn together on the top of the bed, legs flat facing opposite sides of the bed, a pose similar to the one they had slept in for years.
The doll has been propped up at the corner of the room, giving her front row viewing. After looking through the random stuff in the drawer; cords, and batteries, she picked a pair of pliers before heading back to Antonio.
“What are you doing with those?” he asked.
Without saying a word, Belinda grabbed his face. With one hand, she pried his mouth, and with the other, she began to fracture his teeth. He tried to pull away and close his mouth, but he was still slightly sedated, which allowed Belinda to overpower him.
One after another, she broke his front top and bottom teeth. Blood from each severed nerve dripped down Antonio’s chin and down his chest. He cried out and screamed, but his cries felt muffled.
Antonio nearly passed out from the intense throbbing pain that radiated both in his mouth and throughout his body. Belinda stepped away from the room for a moment. As much as he wanted to talk to Camille about escaping, he was too weak and his mouth hurt too badly.
Just then, Belinda returned with a sandwich bag of ice, pressing it into his mouth to cause even more pain on the exposed nerves.
The ache was so severe that it burned and stung terribly.
Biting into ice and freezing his teeth felt nothing like this salvaging pain.
Each tooth seemed as if a red-hot sewing needle was being stabbed in and out, sending lighting-like static across his mandible and plunging him into deep agony.
“What is it like? Going through life knowing that you both hurt a girl so badly that she couldn’t live a normal life after the tracks?” Belinda questioned as she removed the bag of ice wanting to hear what lies Antonio would spew.
“Has Savannah been speaking to you? That woman is a liar. Don’t believe anything she has told you.
She just wants to hurt our family. Can’t you see?
Honey, both your mom and I love you very much.
We have given you the world. From the day you came into our lives, we have done nothing but love you and adore you,” Antonio slurred, his voice thick and uneven.
His fractured teeth made it hard to form words properly, forcing him to speak through clenched jaws and shallow breaths.
Blood and saliva pooled at the corners of his mouth, dribbling down his chin.
“YOU RAPED HER! ADMIT IT!” Belinda screamed.
Camille’s eyes were bloodshot, and she did not want to hear another word. She had had enough.
“That bitch ass cunt deserved everything that happened to her, and that wasn’t enough. The way she dressed, the way she tried to hide how much she loved fucking her brother,” Camile coughed up more blood before continuing.
“She asked for it. She should have died back on the tracks, with that bastard baby!”
Belinda had heard enough. She pulled out a hammer from a black duffle bag that sat next to Pin.
She walked toward her parents and, with one hit, Camille’s spine split into two just below the seventh cervical vertebra and before her first thoracic vertebra.
Camille’s screams were loud and distressed, but wet.
She tried to scream out of pain but kept choking on blood and vile matter.
Turning to her dad, she did the same below the back of his neck. Now both parents were paralyzed and could only see what was happening around them without the ability to move any of their limbs. Death couldn’t come soon enough.
Camille passed out briefly, while Belinda’s attention shifted to her father.
“Honey, you know it’s not too late. You can still call an ambulance; we can say that someone broke in. Maybe the same people who killed Miss Nancy. I’m sure they’ll believe it.” Antonio choked out.
“Daddy, I killed that old hag, too.” Belinda stated.
“What happened with Savannah happened many years ago, long before you were born. It’s nothing but bygones by now.”
“IT MEANT SOMETHING TO HER!” Her shriek was like that of a demon, deep and distorted, her eyes turning as black as space.
Belinda walked back towards the duffle bag, pulling out a long hunting knife.
A gruesome smile stretched across her face.
She then approached Antonio, lifting his shirt, she sliced his abdomen, slowly cutting through the layers of flesh that held his organs in place, already putrid, just as Savannah had rotted away all these years.
After cutting through the visceral peritoneum, his moist, glistening intestines began to slowly snake out onto his lap.
All were beautifully pink and slimy coils and loops of flesh, slipping down gradually.
Antonio could barely breathe now but felt nothing due to his severed spinal cord, making his own pool of organs a disturbingly movie-like spectacle.
The air tasted metallic and mildly acidic, less sweet than plain blood.
Back to the bag, Belinda grabbed one more item destined for Antonio. After glancing at Pin for approval, she began to sing their lullaby.
“Pin Pon es un muneco,
Macabro y pálido.
Se lava su carita,
Con sangre y ácido.
Pin Pon se desgarra el pelo,
Invocando un gran llanto,
Aunque se lo arranque todo,
él no para aquí.”
As she continued to sing, she tugged and probed around her father’s abdominal cavity with her hands, feeling his intestines like giant, involuntary earthworms. There, she placed the final item destined for him. A matted, glassy-eyed, stiff squirrel, one that had already been dead for days.
One that hadn’t yet rotted, likely because it has been stored in the far back, bottom of the refrigerator. Camille must have moved it several times without thinking about opening the white grocery bag. “How can someone both exist and not exist at the same time?” she thought.
She placed the cold, dead animal above her father’s emptiness, almost too tenderly.
The animal isn’t the squirrel; she’s just part of our ecosystem.
A gentle living organism that keeps this world functioning, unlike humans, unlike Antonio and Camille.
The real animals who only know how to consume without giving anything back.
Belinda continued to pose the small rodent with the intestines wrapped around it, curling them like vines around a nest, tangling them until the little desiccated pet sat upright as if perched.
By now, her dad was taking his last breaths. Eyes closed, not wanting to see his child turn into an artist. Blood dripping out of his mouth. Belinda adjusted the squirrel’s head so it “looks” at him, at his heart. Antonio’s warm body brought some heat to the cold animal, making it look more alive.
Taking a few steps back, Belinda looked at Pin and said, “What do you think? Beautiful, huh?”
From the end of the room, Belinda watched as her father sputtered his last bloody breath, making it look like mist in the forest, like grotesque woodlands turned into an artistic display of humanity.
“A living trunk sheltering real-world deserving inhabitants,” she thought.
Turning back to the bag, she grabbed the same pair of bent-nose pliers she used on her father, then walked around the bed to where her mother sat, still attached to Antonio.
“I should have drowned you when I had the chance, ungrateful little shit,” Camille growled out.
Pulling her head back, Belinda reached into her mouth and began to pull out teeth. The immense pain weakened Camille, she wanted to fight back, but like Antonio, she was paralyzed.
Belinda paid no attention to her mother’s words, her eyes still in that dark trance.
After pulling several teeth out of their sockets, leaving deep holes inside, Belinda grabbed a pill bottle where some small, soft gel capsules were kept.
With one hand, Belinda opened her mother’s mouth again, but this time, she inserted the pills into each empty socket of Camille’s gums.
Camille can only howl now, and some muffled words came out of her throat, nothing pleasant or worth listening to anymore.
Her smile, adorned with tiny colorful soft gels, resembled her lifelong commitment to her addiction.
Drool and blood spilled out of each corner of Camille’s mouth, and Belinda felt nothing but repugnance at the sight.
With the same knife she used to de-gut Antonio, she buried it into Camille’s stomach. Slowly sliding the knife to the side, just enough to protrude the whole stomach sack. After holding the organ with one hand, she used the knife in her other hand to slit it open.
The organ bag opened and spilled pills in full display, along with stomach acid, blood, and glass.
Like an avalanche of grotesque pharmaceuticals, the mixture pooled around Camille’s lap and onto the bed.
With disgust, Belinda scooped as much of its contents as she could into her palms and quickly shoved it all back into her Camille’s mouth.
Belinda took a step back as she watched the woman choke on her own vomit, her gagging gradually coming to an end. Camille’s head tilted forward, betrayed by her own vice and resentment.
Now, with both parents dead on their shared bed, still attached to each other in death. Belinda gently scooped her doll into her arms and walked out the door, closing it softly behind her. Already feeling the emptiness of the house, cold and desolate, she headed downstairs.