The memories dimmed, held together by connecting threads of thought that started coming apart like wet tissue.
The last visions—leaving a stolen car over a mile away and walking through fields and woods to reach her house, coming inside, seeing her asleep by the light of a small flashlight, and finally the sensation of falling from the cliff—faded away until they were unrecognizable snatches of thoughts.
It all finally ended with a dull pulse of white light, and then there was nothing. Everything was gone.
Angela knew that she had just been inside a human mind as its thoughts died away, as the spark of life left the cells and synapses, as brain tissue transformed into dead, meaningless matter.
She had just felt a soul pass out of existence.
She was amazed at how long those threads of thought and memory had persisted after the body was clearly dead.
Angela sat there in the moonlight for a long time, the dead brain in her hands, reliving over and over those frantic streams of visions. They were not visions of him killing anyone. These visions were completely different. It was like seeing the world through his eyes, through his thoughts, in little snippets of fading memories of recent events.
It left her stunned and wondering at what kind of freak of nature she must be to be able to do such a thing.
It was the craziest, creepiest thing she had ever experienced. And, it was positively exhilarating. She reveled in having killed this man with her bare hands and of the experience of seeing his last, desperate, dying thoughts, knowing she was the one who had brought them to an end.
The monster was dead. She was alive.
After sitting on his dead body for a time, savoring the realization that she had carried out her promise to herself to kill the man who had murdered her grandparents, after she had cried for a time in grief, rage, and relief, her chest no longer heaving with the emotion of it, she finally got up. She was drenched in blood. The blood of the man who had killed Vito and Gabriella.
She was drenched in victory, in glory.
Angela opened her arms, blood dripping from her fingers, as she leaned back to look up at the full moon and howl in triumph.
Angela finally hiked back home and got dressed in some old clothes even though she was still covered in blood.
Then, she put on the boots her grandfather had bought her that day in the thrift store. They were too tight to wear comfortably, but she could wear them. For this, she could wear them.
She retrieved her knife from her boot in the bedroom and collected a bunch of heavy-duty black plastic garbage bags from the kitchen. She picked up a small hatchet her grandfather had used to split kindling. With everything she needed in hand, she went back to the site where Cassiel lay dead.
The monster was far too big and heavy for her to carry him back to the hell hole. So, Angela worked to cut off his arms and legs by disjointing them at his shoulders and hips with her knife. She used the hatchet to chop through tough sinew. She cut the legs into two sections to make them short enough to fit in a plastic bag.
She carried the limbs inside black plastic bags back to her house. The arms were surprisingly heavy, but she found she could carry both in one bag. She unceremoniously tossed it down through the open hatch into the hell hole.
The legs were heavier. She had to take the legs one at a time, each in two pieces to fit in a plastic bag, and threw them down the abyss. The bags contained the blood and kept it from dripping all over her house until she could throw them down the hell hole.
The torso was too heavy to carry, so she gutted it like a deer. Once she had scooped out his intestines and dumped them to the side, she reached in and tore all the organs out of his chest cavity. The guts and organs would be gone within a day, carried away in the stomachs of coyotes and scavenger birds. Bugs would consume any scraps.
She cut off what was left of his head and put it in one black plastic bag, then put the torso in another. She found that she could sling the bag with the torso over her shoulder. It wasn’t easy, but it was satisfying work carrying it back.
The most satisfying part, though, was looking at his crushed face as she stood over the hell hole. The jaw was only attached at one side. Everything was largely unrecognizable, except to her, of course, because she knew what she was looking at.
She gripped the remainder of the head by the hair. She held it out over the hell hole for a long, satisfying moment and then let it drop. The black plastic bag she’d carried it in had a couple of large fragments of the skull and various other unrecognizable, gooey bits. She tossed the whole thing down the hole.
After she was finished, she threw every stitch of her clothes down the hole.
It felt like closure to toss in the beloved boots her grandparents had bought her. It seemed only fitting. She had used them to avenge their murder. They were covered in Cassiel’s blood.
Once finished, she hosed down the basement and herself, then went upstairs and took a shower.
When she had finished, she got dressed, then called Jack.
Then she sat down on the living room floor to wait.
SIXTY-ONE
The cable was still hooked across the driveway up to Angela’s house. Jack had helped her put it up only a few hours earlier. Since it was locked on, he simply parked by the side of the road and got out to walk.
He didn’t know why she had called him. All she’d said was “Can you come over to my place?” He had only been asleep himself for a few hours. “Now?” he’d asked. She said, “Yes.” Something in her voice made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
While he didn’t know what was going on, he realized that there had to be some kind of trouble. The trouble should be over. They had found the nuke, called in help, and prevented the terrorists from detonating it. Angela had been taken into custody by people wanting to use her for their own political ends, but he had put a stop to that.
Everything seemed to be in order. Now, for some reason, it wasn’t.
The walk up the road to her house crossed a beautiful meadow. Up ahead, lit by the light of the full moon high overhead, he could see twin mountains. He hadn’t seen it before, but he knew that Angela’s house was somewhere in the woods at the base of those mountains. They weren’t enormous mountains, like out West. Rather, they were the typical, smaller, rounded mountains of the Northeast.
As he left the meadow, he entered a forest of virgin wood. The pine, spruce, and balsams smelled wonderful. He could also see the leaves of maples and an enormous oak gently moving in the light breeze as if welcoming him into an inner sanctum. Those leaves would soon be turning color. He imagined fall would be beautiful in these mountains.
Jack found Angela’s house nestled among towering fir trees, right at the base of those twin mountains. It was as idyllic a setting as he could imagine.
He stepped up on the porch of the brick home and knocked on the door. Angela called out for him to come in.
The living room wasn’t big, but it looked cozy and inviting. One light in the hall to the left was on but the living room was mostly lit by scented candles.
Despite the comfortable-looking couch and chairs, Angela was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor. She had on shorts and was barefooted. Her nails and makeup were freshly done. Her hair was perfect. Her lipstick looked like she was ready for a night on the town.
Jack didn’t know what was going on, but she looked to be in an eerie mood. Rather than question, he simply sat on the floor in front of her and crossed his legs.
After a moment of staring into her own thoughts, she finally looked him in the eye, as if finally noting his arrival.
“Cassiel Aykhan Corekan came here a while ago—while I was asleep.”
Jack was instantly on high alert. He wanted to pull out a knife, but she didn’t act like there was any imminent danger.
“My god, Angela, what happened?”
“I killed him.”