Chapter 7 Blink and You’ll Miss It
Blink and You’ll Miss It
PREACHER
BABYLON, SASKATCHEWAN
The music is pounding, and my heart sings along with its sweet melody.
Dissection is meditative, and oddly soothing. It calms the most restless parts of my mind, so where many killers find corpse disposal to be the most stressful part of murder, I actually enjoy it.
I strip off the pieces of meat the clients asked for, and carve out his heart, placing both into vacuum sealed bags that will be kept on ice until we’re ready to make the delivery. I never ship one thing at a time, it’s always in bulk.
Butchering a human isn’t that much different than an animal.
I just needed to brush up on my anatomy before I started killing.
A few textbooks will tell you everything you need to know.
The head comes off first, and then each limb.
You want to get everything broken down into manageable pieces. It’s less stressful that way.
I work with a bone saw, which ensures all my cuts are clean. Good clean cuts make a world of difference, after all. That was one of the few things my daddy actually taught me.
I wrap Chad’s right leg up in plastic, setting it off to the side while I work on severing the other at the hip joint, working back and forth and taking extra care not to tear up the meat.
Some of this is going to be mine. I might make a stew out of these cuts and freeze it for the winter, but what I don’t keep, I have to incinerate.
Luckily, it didn’t take long in this business for me to realize that once the hide is tanned, human skin doesn’t look a hell of a lot different from leather.
These days I make wallets, belts, and even collars for the dogs.
Very little goes to waste.
That’s another thing the old man taught me about butchering: you have to respect the animal, and use as much of it as you can.
With one final slice his bone snaps, and I’m able to pull the leg away; I can’t help but whistle at the quality of the cut.
“That is pristine, Chadwick! I feel like we’re close enough that I can call you Chadwick, right?”
I poke his plastic-wrapped head with the tip of my knife, lazily knocking it on its side.
“No comment? I’d have thought you’d have better manners than this. A guest in another man’s barn and you’re giving him the silent treatment?”
I slice off a few key pieces of flesh, marking them as my own before I load the rest up and get to wiping things down. Tomorrow this place’ll get a deep clean, all the prep necessary for the next victim, but for now, a little sponge bath will be just fine.
It’s dawn by the time I make it out of the barn, and I find myself stopped dead in my tracks mid-way to the house, gazing up at the golden skies that stretch out as far as the eye can see. After a few moments I glance down at Chad’s severed head in the plastic bag.
“You know bud, you’re really quite lucky… if you blink, you really do miss the good shit.”
If you only looked at the sky, it’d be hard to believe that just a few hours ago a tornado was tearing through the fields, threatening to unearth all of my dirty little secrets.
The moment your eyes touch the ground, however, things become a lot clearer.
There’s little bits of debris and damage all over the place, things where they shouldn’t be, and things missing where they should.
Hell, it feels like half the trees got knocked over, one of them right onto my goddamn fence.
Honestly though, I don’t mind. Checking the property for damage might be busywork, but it reminds me of the days when this place actually functioned as more than a black market slaughterhouse.
I walk the length of the property, looking for broken windows or other major damage that would need to be dealt with quickly, but luckily the search reveals nothing worth worrying about.
That’s what’s running through my head, at least, until I see it a few feet from the storm cellar: the very conspicuous padlock, sitting open on the ground.
I bristle, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end as I reach into my jeans and pull out my pistol.
When I was driving up to the ranch, I spotted a car in the ditch.
I figured the twister had just tossed it aside like an abandoned toy, but maybe...
I open the doors, slowly aiming my gun down into the darkness, half expecting someone to come racing toward me, but after a few heartbeats I’m only met with silence. Maybe staying up all night has made me paranoid. Maybe I left it unlocked before I left for Saskatoon.
Or maybe someone’s in my fucking cellar.
Slowly, I start the descent, but really that’s being a bit dramatic. It’s only a few steps into the abyss before I reach the bottom, and by then I can smell it: the clear stench of a body.
A live one.