32 #3
Except I hadn’t. Not yet. Not really. Because despite what I’d told Nicola, I’d never bought into Plan B. It was a nice idea. It was the right idea. It was broadcast safe. It was justice . . . but it wasn’t vengeance.
It wasn’t what I wanted.
It never had been.
The mixer wasn’t a big machine. It would take several loads to make enough concrete to fully submerge a human body.
But that was OK. Kyle was pinned to the bottom of his hole.
He wasn’t going anywhere. The construction workers wouldn’t show up on-site until morning.
The full moon was providing more than enough light . . .
I grabbed the bag of cement.
Whenever I’d imagined killing Kyle, I’d imagined something quick, gory, and dramatic.
A knife, a combine harvester, a car rigged to blow.
This wasn’t that. It was slow, and exhausting.
So exhausting that I felt my bolts shred in my joints and my remaining spider legs bend and twist. The mixer was heavy, very heavy, and the bags of cement were even heavier.
But slowly, inch by inch, I dragged the mixer over to Kyle’s hole, loaded up the cement, and hosed it until it looked the way I imagined cement should look.
The first load of cement just splattered him, making him cough and scream.
The second load of cement clumped lumpy and badly mixed onto his lap.
The third was waterier and more left him sitting in a puddle of wet gray as deep as his ankles.
“Stop!” he screamed as I began mixing the fourth load. “I’ll go to the police! Please!”
I pulled the camera off my front, claws tearing through the duct tape, and tossed it into the hole with him.
It plopped into the wet cement, red recording light vanishing a moment later as it sank.
That silenced Kyle. He stopped begging and screaming and just stared, stared at the puddle of cement around him, at the rebar sticking through his thigh, pinning him to the bottom of the hole.
When I tipped in the next load, he began to cry, great, loud, heaving sobs. I didn’t care. Which wasn’t right. I should’ve cared. I should’ve felt triumphant, victorious. Instead, I just felt tired.
I dumped another load of cement down on top of him.
Time swayed, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but every time it started to rush forward, I held it back, clenching my claws until they felt like they were going to snap.
My exhaustion felt like a black hole, sucking me down, relentless and overwhelming.
And yet I couldn’t stop. I knew I’d only have one shot at this, one chance.
So I kept working, scooping gritty powder into the churning machine, pouring in water, and then dumping it over him, load after load, even as the moon rolled by overhead.
It wasn’t quick. It wasn’t easy. It was cutting down a tree one splinter at a time. But I needed that tree down. I needed him dead. I needed this, more than anything else, to be over.
“I don’t understand,” he croaked, waist deep, tears trekking lines through the dirt and blood smeared across his face. “I don’t understand. I did what you wanted me to do. I told you I killed Lucy. I said what you wanted me to say. I don’t understand.”
“I know.”
Kyle would never understand. Not until it happened to him. Not until he felt the life crushed out of him. Not until he tried to scream and found he couldn’t. Or maybe he wouldn’t ever understand. Maybe he just wasn’t capable of that. I didn’t suppose it really mattered in the end.
I tipped another load into the hole.
He coughed, tight and weak, like he couldn’t suck in a full breath of air. I wondered, briefly, if he’d apologize. Now that there was no camera, now that it was obvious I wasn’t going to change my mind, now that he must know there was no rescue coming . . . would he apologize?
I waited for those words as the cement rose from his chest to his shoulders to his neck.
I thought perhaps he was going to utter them as he tipped his head back, straining, uselessly, to keep his face in the air for a few minutes more.
But he never did.
The only thing he said, moments before his mouth was submerged, was . . . “I can’t breathe. It hurts. It’s too heavy. It hurts.”
“Yeah,” I said, voice echoing from both his phone and mine. “I know that too.” Then I tipped the mixer over his head.
I kept mixing cement until every part of him was buried, until the last strand of his coppery-brown hair was gone.
I dropped his phone and blazer in too, watching them sink slowly beneath the lumpy gray surface.
Then I sat at the edge of the hole and watched the still flat surface as it slowly dried.
I’d thought it might bubble, or buckle, or break.
It didn’t. It stayed flat and perfect, as if nothing was beneath it at all.
It didn’t even look that different from how it had before, a hole with a lump of heaped cement at the bottom, propping up the rebar.
If no one looked closely, they might not even notice one hole had slightly more concrete in it than the others.
It was as if Kyle had never been there, never fallen, never existed at all.