It Was Like Run Over Putty



It was like run over putty. Up from the neck was the chin, a jaw, teeth, then nothing. The middle of the head was clean gone, only a thin layer of meat with tire marks, then the rest of the head, brain visible, eye sockets hollow and half-moon, and golden hair. It wasn't the worst Rose had seen. This one wasn't even intentional, some dickshit was drunk and cleaved someone's nasal passages out with his tires. Wasn't the first time it had happened. Maybe the most grisly, but not the first.

The worst Rose had seen was intentional, horrific, and any sight of blood or ground meat would recall it, and she'd have to clamp her eyes shut and shoot it into the recesses of her mind. Ever since that's all she aimed at whenever her gun fired.

It happened above a convenience store. After hours a crook had slid in -- he was the one who called. He was emptying the cash register and heard screams from above. The owner's living quarters were up a flight of stairs, a male, but the sounds were decidedly female.

When Rose opened his door the first thing she saw were corpses. Several, lining the walls like living wallpaper, tied like hams and stapled, faces carved out and hair pulled upward and pasted onto the stomach above. Half the room was covered, he was working on more. A girl, a live one, was tied at the wrists and ankles, put in the corner, eyes wide. She was staring at a spot on the floor with dried blood and mashed meat, flies hovering, forming an outline of a body that'd seen it's end.

The girl and the smooth curves of the wall were illuminated by flickering candle light. Rose cocked her gun. Over his opened trunk in the middle of the room, hair greasy and hanging in tendrils, He turned around. Eyes wild, face dripping in some sort of black jelly, fingernails yellow and caked on the underside with skin. He blew the candle and dropped the room into darkness.

Rose searched the walls, hands sliding over cold skin, but she never found a switch, and when she brought a flash-light back up he was gone. The girl had died. Nothing as messy as the rest of the room, a simple knife wound that had been bleeding the entire time. That place was shut down. It's a starbuck's now. Every time Rose drives past it, her foot presses down on the pedal just a centimeter more.