“Look, we don’t have time for me to explain everything right now. Henry’s right that people will be looking for the ambulance driver. Probably have been for several hours.”
Milo said to Henry, “OK, she says no time to get in to it, will explain later… So, body disposal. How do we get rid of it? We need to make it disappear, clean up the blood and… other bits, then figure out how to disappear ourselves. With people watching our every move. No sweat.”
Just then, Henry had a horrible idea. But, like his arm flashing out and pulping Steve’s head, this idea came from that same raw place of instinct. “I have an idea,” he said, tentatively.
“Spill,” Milo said.
“I could… pulp the body with my fists. Turn it to mush. Like baby food.” He let that visual hang in the room for a moment, then said, “Or not.”
Faye had only been privy to certain parts of the conversation as it was and, given her state of mind, a lot of it just went in one ear and out the other, but this last bit stuck. “You’re going to do what to Steve’s body?”
“Nah, nah, it’s a great idea,” Milo said, his eyes lighting up. “I know it’s disgusting, but it’ll work. And we need something that will work right now.”
Henry turned to Faye, focused on her, tried to keep her eyes locked to his so that she would understand. “You should leave the room, Faye. This is going to be awful.”
“You can’t just fucking pulp my friend’s body to baby food!”
“We have to.”
She took a deep breath. “That’s insane.”
“I know, but it’ll remove all identification from his corpse and will make it easy to… further dispose of.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’ll be easier to dispose of,” Milo said, “as a liquid than as a solid.”
Good thing Faye can’t hear him, Henry thought, but said, “We don’t need to go into more detail than that, Faye. You can leave it up to us; we’ll take care of it, OK?”
“Jesus, can’t we just hide the body, like normal murderers?”
“Shit idea,” Milo said. “For countless reasons.”
Henry agreed. “This is the only way to be sure the body’s gone, Faye. Just let me do this.” He wanted to reach a hand out to touch her face, but he knew she’d push him away. After what he’d done, after everything she’d been through, he imagined his touch now would just feel cold and monstrous.
Faye looked down at Steve’s body, back up to Henry. “Where are you gonna go, Henry? How do you think you’re gonna get out of here without being noticed?”
“No idea. One step a time, though, OK?”
Faye looked around the room – at her shattered belongings strewn about, the blood-spattered dead body of her friend and colleague splayed out on the floor, the giant metal man towering above her, and the two invisible people apparently standing somewhere nearby – and thought, Fuck it. It’s not like it can get much weirder, or much worse.
“Go ahead,” she said. “But use the fucking bathtub.”
* * *
In the process of dealing with Steve’s body, Milo discovered he could grasp and hold onto things fairly well now – not just sweep them from shelves and destroy them. When they were finished in the living room, they’d been so thorough that it would’ve passed a black-light inspection. They even replaced the smashed china with various knickknacks from other rooms in the apartment so that, if the cops did come looking, they wouldn’t see anything obviously out of the ordinary. The busted hall mirror was just taken entirely off the wall, and a picture from one of Faye’s closets hung in its place.
Once they were satisfied that the living room would pass a thorough inspection, Milo helped Henry pick up Steve’s body and move it into the bathtub. To an outside observer, it would have seemed like Henry was somehow levitating the body, the head and shoulders supported by his giant metal arms, while the legs and feet were supported by nothing more than thin air.
The mostly headless body safely in the tub and the drain plugged, Henry – kneeling at the side of the tub – began pulping it. He started at the feet and legs and worked his way up, basically just grasping onto a given body part and crushing it through his enormous steel fingers until it squished out the sides. He repeated this motion until the body part – bone, muscle, flesh – was nothing more than mush. Skin was a little harder to render drain-ready, though, so they used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut up whatever might cause problems going down. Milo’s job was to watch closely where any blood-spray went and immediately wipe it down.
Henry felt the urge to throw up several times before the job was done, but – somewhat disturbingly, Henry thought – Milo suffered no such affliction; he just looked fascinated by it all.
At one point, his hands, chest, and arms covered in grue, Henry turned to Milo and said, “You know there’s something seriously wrong with you, right? No way you should be enjoying this like you are.”