“Dad’s dead,” Hazel continued.
“Yes,” Jasper said. Liver realized he’d been perched atop the man and scooted back, lifting the blanket up over the corpse’s face. Hazel turned and looked at Liver, then turned and looked at Jasper. He cleared his throat. “Hazel, you don’t know me but I’m here to stop the downloads. I just gave you an injection that should disable the chip in your brain.”
Hazel let out a giggle, then made a sad noise. “Byron is going to kill you,” she said.
“Well, we should get moving,” Jasper agreed. “The rabbit woman, she’s who sent me, said we should disappear before your next download.”
Hazel looked down at the blanketed shape of her father’s body, put a hand on its chest. “Rabbit woman? But we can’t leave Dad here,” she said. “Byron’s insane. If we leave him, Byron will get his corpse to use as cryogenic blackmail. We’ve got to take him with us.”
Liver turned away from them for a moment and briefly hunched over. Jasper scowled. Was he snorting something? “Fine by me,” he said, standing back up and thumbing his nostril. “Not my first rodeo transporting a body. But we should ice him down somehow. It is a sunny day and there are people in society who know the smell of death.”
“We’ve got to take him with us,” Hazel repeated. Jasper worried that she’d had some type of chemical concussion, or maybe was going into shock, until she added, “How can we keep him cold?”
“I do have a cooler in my car,” Jasper offered. “It’s big enough to hold an adult human.” Hazel and Liver turned to look at him. “It’s, like, dolphin size.”
“Sounds like we’re good then,” Liver said.
“Wait.” Hazel grabbed Jasper’s arm. “Your car,” she said. “How many can it seat?”
18
MORE THAN HER OWN FUTURE—IT WAS EXCITING TO THINK THE downloads might be over, but she doubted it—Hazel found herself thinking about her father’s wishes in terms of a funeral. Her mother had asked to be cremated for two reasons: the first, because the cancer drugs had made her look so horrible (Cremation, her mother liked to quip near the end, the best diet ever! Think of the weight I’m about to lose); the second, because she wanted revenge (This body has put me through hell. Light it up, Bert). Her dad probably wanted the regular: a hole in the ground, a wake with visiting hours, and a notice in the paper. It wouldn’t be possible. Even if Hazel were able to task someone else with its oversight, or drop the body off at a funeral parlor with a wad of cash, Byron couldn’t be counted on not to find it and have it dug up. It had to be destroyed. She wasn’t sure how, and she knew it would be a disappointment for her pops, so she’d decided to give him a consolation prize. He could exit pharaoh style: he could take the dolls with him.
But for the moment, it was Liver who was king. They’d tried to arrange Di and Roxy in the back of Jasper’s station wagon, surrounding the cooler, but this looked like a suspicious tangle of realistic body parts. It was easier to put aviator sunglasses and baseball caps on the dolls and strap them into the backseat properly. Liver sat between them, one arm around each, a happy grin on his face. “Road trips aren’t my thing,” he said. “But this is a wonderful morning. Your deceased dad and your near-suicide excluded.”
Jasper was all work and no leisure. Hazel noted his clockwise observation schedule of rearview mirror, right-side mirror, left-side mirror, road in front. He was very worried about cops. “Not to pressure you,” Jasper stated to Hazel about forty minutes into the drive. It was the first time he’d spoken since they’d left her father’s house, when he’d turned down Liver’s suggestion that they save themselves all a lot of hassle, douse the home and body with kerosene, and make her father’s double-wide a funeral pyre. Hazel had vetoed it due to the flames’ likely spread to other trailers, most of whose residents had mobility issues. Jasper’s rejection stemmed from a healthy desire to avoid police intervention.
“I just think, on the off chance we get pulled over, that it behooves us to . . . send the body to rest . . . as soon as possible.” Jasper’s eyes were locked into a cold stare with Liver’s in the rearview. “Especially since this guy refuses to wear a shirt.” Before they left, Jasper had tried talking Liver into wearing one of Hazel’s father’s button-up polos and some khaki shorts with tiny lobsters embroidered all over them. Liver declined.
“I know,” Hazel said. “I’m just not sure about the best way.”
Jasper fidgeted in his seat. “What do you mean? Isn’t burying him somewhere unmarked okay? I grabbed a shovel from the garage.”
“No, we can’t just bury it. The body has to be completely gone by noon tomorrow. Otherwise, if the deactivation didn’t work, he’ll know right where the body is. And if it does work, Byron will pull out his best tech for a treasure hunt of anything about me he can find, including my father’s corpse.”
“So what do we do with it?”
At this, one of Liver’s jerky-textured fingers rose into the air. “If I may,” he began. “I fear we’re short the time and equipment to destroy all this man’s DNA via fire. You’ve got to go hotter and longer than you’d think. Even if we were lucky enough to find an empty metal Dumpster, without an oven the burn will take a while, accelerant or no.”
Jasper’s disbelief now directed itself not at Liver but at Hazel—she could see him giving her a horrified stare, asking her how and why she’d coupled with this man. “Compared to Byron,” Hazel said, “Liver is an archangel of virtue.” She turned to him. “What do you recommend?”
Liver didn’t miss a beat. “Consumption.”
Jasper jumped. The car swerved and was reprimanded by the heavy air horn of a bread company’s semitruck; Hazel turned to see its oversize slogan written across the truck’s body in cursive and felt her stomach lurch as well. GO AHEAD—it instructed—ENJOY A SLICE! Suddenly the air in the car seemed very hot, like she was breathing her own recycled breaths in and out of a plastic bag.
“By animals,” Liver clarified. “Birds. Hogs. Gators.” Hazel looked back at Liver as he spoke—when had he placed Di’s legs across his lap?
“No way,” Hazel said. She had ruined her life, and because of her choices, her father’s corpse was going to have a messed-up farewell. Sure there were various hostilities between them that would remain eternally unforgiven, but doing whatever she could to make his funeral the least messed up as possible seemed fair. “I don’t want to feel like I’m disposing of him. It’s not like he’s someone I killed and I’m trying not to get caught.”
Jasper smiled. “So you didn’t kill him? That’s awesome.”
“No. He died. I know we don’t have a lot of time, but we should make this as nice as we can. I want to at least.” If the injection didn’t work, it might be the last thing she got to do.