🩸 Beautifully Macabre
All in less than two seconds, he thought.
Blood soaked into the fibers, coating the carpet as if painted by the lovely red hair now spilling across the apartment entrance. He stood still, mesmerized by the macabre beauty of what he had created. The cries of a baby next door shattered his reverie.
Right, he thought, there are bodies in my doorway. Focus! Damn. I didn’t consider cleanup. Nothing quite like learning-by-doing.
Jordan rage-leaped out of his chair, sending it rolling back against his bookcase.
This is absolute crap! he thought.
As much as he hated crowds, he longed for the lonely company of his local coffee shop. Being locked up in quarantine was torturous, and it was wreaking havoc on his writing.
Jordan grabbed his coffee cup and stormed into his kitchen. He went about the ritual of making another cup of coffee while thinking through his predicament, and his character’s.
He’d been drinking too much coffee since the quarantine started, but the ritual helped unblock his thinking. He started by dumping the old grounds into a garbage bag.
Ok Jordan, he asked himself, how can we fix this? What if he drags the bodies inside and wraps them in a garbage bag? Seems simple. Might work.
He walked to his laptop and typed into the search bar, “how many garbage bags do you need to wrap a body?”
Scanning the results, he thought, No, not quite. Bags are sized by gallons. What about:
“How many gallons is a human body?”
Interesting. Humans have 1.5 gallons of blood in their body. Maybe that fact will be useful later. But I need to know the volume of the entire body.
He scooped coffee into his Aeropress.
“What size garbage bag fits an adult body?”
Ah. This again. A news article about people using the dark web to plan murders.
. . . why not?
“Dark websites for planning murder.”
Ahh. So, this is a thing? But how do I get there? Where is this “dark web”?
“How do I connect to dark websites about planning murder?”
Aaaaaand nothing. Although these search queries sure trigger ads for VPNs. What’s a VPN? Another question for another day.
He filled his Aeropress with hot water, ruminating as he stirred.
Four minutes later, the sweet citrusy-chocolate scent of his favorite light-roast coffee was rising from his cup. He closed his eyes and took in the smell. An odd thought drifted into his consciousness, can the smell of coffee mask dead bodies? Yet another thread to follow up on later.
Midway through his first sip there was a pounding on the door.
“Jordan Crenshaw, open up! This is the FBI.”
No way!, he thought. That’s precisely how I wrote it in my book! What should I do?
Shivering with excitement, he did the first thing that came to mind. He opened the door. Exactly like his character in his book. Which he instantly regretted. Just as his character had. He was face to face with two guns leveled straight at his forehead.
He backed up slightly and stammered, “this is, I mean, what do you, oh, this is so real . . .”
“Jordan, lie on the ground with your hands on your head.”
Ha! That’s what I wrote! That is my character’s line!
He felt vindicated, as this confirmed his research. He originally wrote his character being shoved against the wall, but online forums had convinced him it was only an old movie trope to be avoided.
Dear reader, it’s at this point in the story when you’re probably thinking that Jordan should be afraid. Perhaps you see his error? Yes, be careful what you search for on the internet.
But Jordan has been quarantined by the COVID-19 crisis for two months. He’s had nothing but time. Which, for a mind like Jordan’s, isn’t a safe thing to have in excess.
At this exact moment, with his first human contact in months, and a unique and dangerous problem confronting his character, he wasn’t thinking like you or me. We see danger. He saw opportunity.
He chose his place to lie down carefully. Slowly kneeling, he placed his head within one foot of his couch, facing it. He was staring at his handgun, stashed under the couch, which he had been using as a prop to act out possible scenes for his character. In his latest draft, the character stashes the gun under the couch such that it was nearly centered in the main room, for quick access from any position.
One agent stayed in the doorway, the other entered the room to stand over Jordan. It was upon entering, when the agent walking into the apartment crossed in front of the other, that Jordan made his move. He swept his arm under the couch, grabbed the loaded gun, and continued the arc until it was pointed straight at the approaching agent.
Easy kill.
The agent in the doorway couldn’t react since she was blocked by the now falling body. Jordan simply continued his rolling move and shot at the doorway.
All in less than two seconds, he thought.
Blood soaked into the fibers, coating the carpet as if painted by the lovely red hair now spilling across the apartment entrance. He stood still, mesmerized by the macabre beauty of what he had created. The cries of a baby next door shattered his reverie.
Right, he thought, there are bodies in my doorway. Focus! Damn. I didn’t consider cleanup. Nothing quite like learning-by-doing.
Backstory
I wanted to explore a circular story — one that starts where it ends and ends where it starts. At the time I was also processing the chaos of the pandemic. And this was the result, which I found quite surprising. I had no idea there was a story like this in me.