“Okaaaay,” I said, standing and gently handing the baby over to Winky, giving her crazy bug-eyes, trying to ask her silently how she was going to show this wackadoodle a baby head without actually showing her a baby head.
Winky took the axe in her other hand, balancing the baby in her opposite arm. “Okay, Bryn.” She nodded her head at the looneybird. “Brittney. I’m gonna go chop off this demon’s head now. You guys go ahead and start talking. I’ll just be a few minutes. And then I’ll be back. With a baby head.” Winky’s head was shaking in disbelief as she disappeared up the stairs, leaving me alone with the Charles Manson of mothers.
Brittney swung her top leg up and down, her gaze roving around the room as we waited.
“So,” I said, breaking the freaky silence, “tell me how you know about Bodo.”
She stopped bouncing her leg and looked at me through narrowed eyes. “I’m not going to tell you how to find him until the deed is done.”
“No, I know. I’m not asking where he is. I’m just wondering how you know about him since you’ve been up here in this room the whole time.”
“I saw things. I hear things. People tell me things.”
“What people.”
“Sean. The minions.” Her voice took on an edge of pride that was more than a little disturbing.
“The minions?”
“That’s what Loco called them. The minions. They were the ones who had to do my bidding, since I was, well, you know…”
“I’m not sure I do,” I said, hoping I was wrong about my suspicions.
Brittney smiled in a ghastly sort of way, her face with a far-expression as she spoke. “I was the Queen. I was repopulating the earth.”
“And Loco was the King?”
“That’s what he liked to say. But I was going to pick another King. One I liked better. He just didn’t know it.”
“Why did he let you keep all those weapons? Wasn’t he worried you’d … pick another king or whatever?”
“He never saw this place. He thought I lived in the bathroom.”
I frowned. “He’d be pretty stupid to fall for that. The toilets don’t work up there and neither does the water.”
She shrugged, smiling to herself. “I threw some poo out the window now and again. He fell for it. He brought me stuff to eat and water to drink. I always gave it to the dogs. They stood below my window every day waiting for their meals.” She giggled, obviously proud of herself for outwitting her suitor.
I had to nod and give her the respect she deserved. She’d taken a more than crappy situation and found a way to survive. Maybe that’s why she’d left her mind too. Survival. Could I have stayed present and sane after being raped and wooed by a cannibal named Loco? I felt a little sorry for her, then. I still didn’t think I would have the same urge to kill my baby as she did, but at least I understood where it might be coming from.
“You’re a very strong person, to have gone through all of that.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. My brother helped.”
“Where is he?” I had seen no signs of the kid in the family photo, but the faces downstairs were hard to picture as they had been. The death mask was too different.
“He’s gone. He left.”
“Where’d he go?” I couldn’t believe a sibling would leave like that in the middle of all this.
“He went to the barbecue.”
I instantly felt sick to my stomach again. Oh, please don’t let this mean what I think it means.
“You’re not saying … that Loco ate your brother, are you?”
“No. Not just Loco. Everyone.” She turned her head slowly and looked at me, dead in the eye, and said, “Everyone ate my brother. Eh. Vry. One.” Her mouth thinned into a line. Then she took a deep breath through her nose, opened her mouth, and screamed with all her might, right in my face. “EVERYONE!”
My hand rocketed out automatically, and slapped her hard. Twice.
Her face slashed first left and then right with the force of it. She recovered quickly and was crying and screaming at the same time as she leaped at me, her jagged nails poised to rip my eyes out.
I jumped to my feet, dancing out of reach. I wanted to lay her out on her funeral bed with my bare hands, but her story was the only thing standing between Bodo and me, so I couldn’t kill her, much as she might have liked me to.
She rushed me with zero finesse, rage against the world her only guidance. It was pretty effective, since I had to focus so much on not hurting her. I let her hit me with her body, using the backward force to bring us to the wall. I tensed myself for the impact and used the couple seconds she needed to recover to put her in a bear hug.
I slammed her face with a head butt, earning myself an instant headache in the process. Blood poured out of her nose and ran down the front of her face to her neck. The stains spread across the white of her dress, hideously gruesome. She looked like she’d just stepped out of a low-budget horror movie.
She was snarling and screaming and moaning, trying to get away from me, spitting at me and even trying to bite me. I bent us both over the side and released her just enough to slam my elbow into the side of her head, dropping her to the floor.
I took a few seconds to wipe her saliva and blood off my face, disgusted that I’d let her get into a position to do that. I hated having to fight and hold back at the same time.
“I’m going to kill you!” she yelled from the floor. “You’ve ruined my dress.”
I shook my head. “And here I thought you were going to kill me because I beat your ass.”
“Why don’t you just finish it?” she said, now sounding depressed instead of angry. “Take one of those guns in there and blow my head off. I don’t care anymore.”
“You can blow your own head off when I leave. I want to know where my boyfriend is, first.” I nudged her with my foot. “Get up and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
She whipped her head up, grabbing my ankle. “Feeling sorry for myself? Sorry for myself?!” She got up on her hands and knees, using my legs and then wrists to get to her feet and steady herself. She was facing me again, her head and shoulders stooped, bodily fluids dripping off her face. “What do you not understand about my life?”
I shrugged. “I understand everything. You were raped by a canner. He made you eat your brother. You gave birth to his demon child. You’ve been stuck here in this hole for almost a year. You have the worst life of anyone I’ve ever met.”
“And? So?”
“And so what? Now you want to be a baby murderer? You want to kill me too? You want to commit suicide? So do it. No one’s gonna blame you. Give up. The world sucks, anyway. What do you care?”
She looked at me aghast. “I thought you were a nice person, the way you came in here and looked at my baby …”
I pointed at her. “Ha! Gotcha.”
She looked at me, confused. “You got me, what?”
“You just called him your baby.”
“No, I didn’t,” she said, frowning, looking mutinous.
“Yeah, you did. And if you wanted to die so bad, you have about eighty ways to get that done hanging on the walls in the next room. Same for the baby-killing part. Regardless of what’s happened, you still want to live.”
She shuffled backwards until her legs hit the cot. She dropped down to sit on it, never letting her gaze leave me. “This is a shit life and I don’t want it.”
“Then leave your hole. Go out and talk to some other kids. You’re taking good care of your baby down here, so keep doing that.”
“I can’t. I can’t, don’t you see?” she said, now weeping with actual tears. “I did horrible, evil things. I … I ignored all those kids … all those kids!”
I shook my head, frustrated with the world how it was now, feeling sad for a girl I also hated. “Whatever you did, you did to survive. I’m not saying eating kids is an okay way to survive. But you did it to save yourself from being murdered probably by your … child’s father or whatever. No one’s going to hold that against you. Or maybe they will and you just have to move on from it.”
“Do you have a brother? Or a sister?” she asked through her tears.
“No.”
“Then you cannot possibly understand what I’ve gone through. My soul has been destroyed. I have no life to take. Don’t you think I would have killed myself already if I thought it would do any good?”
“Uhhh, yes?”
“No. If I do that, I’ll just have an eternity of the same torture to look forward to. At least here, I can pretend for a little while that I’m not damned.” She dropped her head and stared at the floor, looking like a robot that’d had its power turned off.
“You’re not damned. There’s forgiveness for people who are forced to do bad things.”
“Nobody is forced to do anything,” she said in a monotone, still staring at the floor. “We always have a choice. I made the wrong ones, and now I have to live with that.”
I sighed, giving up finally on the idea that I could make her suddenly sane or able to live with the things she’d done and suffered through. Some things in this world were going to remain damaged, irretrievably broken and tortured until death came to take them away or time wore all traces of them from this earth.
“Brittney … will you please tell me about Bodo? You said I don’t have a lot of time. He’s a really good person and he doesn’t deserve to be hurt.”
“Maybe he’s not as good a person as you think,” she said, looking up at me blankly.
“I think he is. Maybe he’s made hard choices, too, but I believe that he’s good no matter what.”
“Then you’re a naive idiot who deserves what she gets.” Brittney stood, anger back on her face.
I wasn’t sure if I were relieved by it or happier with the zombie look. Both were disconcerting. “So? What is it? Where is he?”
Before Brittney could answer, we heard Winky’s voice from up above.
“Okay, guys. Dead baby head, coming down!”
Bile rose into my throat as Winky’s moccasins made their way down into the room. She held a blood-stained bundle in her arms, now much smaller than the original.
My mouth dropped open and stayed there. I was in complete shock that she’d actually done it. My attention was drawn from the horror by Brittney’s reaction.
She was jumping up and down with glee, clapping her hands in front of her chest rapidly. “Oh, I’m so excited you actually did it. I was afraid you wouldn’t, but I should have trusted you. I could tell you were a good person as soon as I saw you. I’m sorry I made fun of your name,” she said, nearly simpering in her admiration of Winky.
I shook my head slowly, from side to side. This one was a complete surprise for me. I wasn’t even sure I could hang out with Winky-the-baby-murderer anymore. What am I going to do? Tell her to go back to the swamp? Will she listen to me? Will she try to axe me, too?
My heart was racing again, and now I felt outnumbered. It was two lunatics and a baby head against me in a tiny, enclosed space. I opened my stance a little and twisted my head a little to limber it up, never letting my eyes leave Winky.
“Yeah. It was pretty easy, actually. That neck was tiny. But here’s the head. There’s, you know, junk coming out of it though, so I’d keep it wrapped up in the blanket if I were you.”
Brittney cringed a little. “Ew. I’m not keeping it. I just want to be sure it’s real.” She blinked a couple times. “You could be trying to trick me.”
Please, God, let Winky be trying to trick her. I hadn’t considered that because I’d seen enough blood in my life to know what the real thing looked like - and this was it.