It's up to Me to Make You Bleed

It was hard to do anything but cry after hearing the gun shot from downstairs. Sure, by some miracle it could’ve been one of those assholes that had gotten shot, but I think we all know the chances of that being the case are highly unlikely. My body quivered, causing the chains to clink against each other. If my own mom couldn’t make it out alive, then how the hell will I survive?

My tear-filled eyes instantly squeezed shut as bright light entered the dark closet. Brian had returned. “Now that that problem’s been taken care of, we can return all of our attention to you,” he smiled. He unlocked the chains and ripped off the strip of duct tape. I glared at him as he dragged me out of the closet and led me downstairs.

The first thing I noticed was the disgusting smell in the air…it smelled like rusted iron and a dumpster filled with decaying dead animals. The next thing that I noticed was the color red. It was everywhere. Blood covered the walls and dripped from the ceiling. I immediately recoiled my foot when I heard the splash of stepping into a formed puddle of the thick liquid.

My eyes followed the trail of blood leading up to my mother’s corpse. Tears fell heavier than ever before as I fell to me knees spewing vomit everywhere, adding a nice touch to the blood soup, so to speak. With a trembling hand I reached up for something to pull myself back up to my feet. I took a closer look at the body. Most of the blood was leaking out of the large, clearly evident hole in her chest…where her heart should’ve been.

The hole was more like a jagged circle, about the size of a fist. Loose strands of flesh, muscle, bone, and ligament hung limply from the locations of severed skin. Sliced veins and arteries were still flying around slowly, spraying blood all over like wild hoses. Beyond her heart’s former location, I could see a part of her spinal cord, still in tact.

It was like I was looking at some sort of model that you could find in a biology classroom to display the insides of a body. I only wish that’s what I was looking at right now. Lastly, the other source of blood output was from the bullet hole…the one that I heard from upstairs.

I just couldn’t wrap my mind around all of this. Just last week we were having fun exploring those caves, eating barbeque and playing basketball. How the hell can people become so fucked up overnight? How could my stepbrother and friends turn into evil psychopaths so easily?

Brian suddenly wrapped one of his arms around me as Matt and Jimmy walked over to my mom’s body. Jimmy, who had been holding my mom’s heart, placed it down on the table like it was nothing. The heart was still very faintly beating, making a thud noise each time it hit the table. “Let’s get rid of the body, I guess. It smells disgusting in here,” Matt suggested.

Jimmy nodded in agreement and grabbed some of the extra knives that my mom had tried to use against them. Together, they ripped her body off the wall, leaving behind a body-shaped shadow made with blood. They each took a side and begin sawing her limbs off, slowly.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted, outraged that they would even try to torment her further.

Jimmy sighed in annoyance as he glanced up at me, his face smeared with blood. “We need to make her body parts smaller so that we can put them in the garbage disposal.”

My jaw dropped completely down to the ground as I began shouting obscenities and threats in their direction. “Brian, dude, will you shut her up,” Matt complained after withstanding a few minutes of my screaming.

Brian gladly tightened his grip with one arm and reached the other upward so that his hand was wrapped tightly around my face, silencing my remarks. I kept my eyes shut for the remainder of the experience. I couldn’t bear to watch them rip apart her body like that, slicing it up as if it were a cut of meat.

About half an hour later, Brian removed his hand from my face and I opened my eyes to see bits of bloody flesh and bone scattered across the table like pieces of sushi. My mother’s body was no longer there, almost like there never was a body present in the first place. It was completely disgusting. Jimmy grabbed a plastic bag out of the pantry to gather the small pieces so that it would be easier to carry them over to the sink.

The minute the disposal was turned on, I spun around so that I was facing Brian’s chest. The sink began making horrible, gut wrenching noises as it devoured my mother’s remains. Much to my surprise, Brian didn’t force me to turn around and watch. He just held onto me like a hug, which seemed so misplaced in this situation. Did he still have any amount of humanity left inside him? I glanced over my shoulder to find that the camera was focused on the area by the sink. Maybe that’s why he didn’t really bother living up to this act.

Apparently there were some parts of my mom’s body that I hadn’t seen under the table, which were too big to be cut. “Would you guys mind carrying these outside and finding a good place to bury them?” Jimmy asked, as he wiped a smudge of blood off the camera lens. Brian gave me a slight glance before breaking our “embrace” and leaving with Matt to take out my mom’s head and legs. I felt the urge to throw up again at the sight of the severed body parts, but I swallowed it down.

Jimmy and I were left alone, and I knew for a fact that he was nowhere near as tough, physically, as Brian or Matt were. Although, I will say Jimmy was sick in the head, which was his strength in this case. After he finished cleaning off the lens he turned the camera back toward me, still resting on its tripod. I glared at him as hard as I could without giving myself a headache. I knew I didn’t have much time, so I had to make this quick.

“I’m going to fucking kill you,” I growled.

His eyebrows arched in interest as he gave me an amused smile. “That’s a good one, sis, but keep dreaming.”

Angrily, I grabbed a vase displayed in the center of the table and chucked it at him. He was caught slightly off guard, which allowed the vase to explode against his chest, covering him in glass pieces and dirty water. “Don’t you dare call me sis,” I venomously spat.

He didn’t have much time to get a word in because I went totally ape shit. I picked up one of the kitchen table chairs and broke it against the wall, giving me the top half of a broken chair, complete with sharp, jagged edges of broken wood. I charged at him with it, slamming it into his torso. He cried out as he dropped to his knees and felt the wind being knocked directly out of him.

His face was at the perfect range to be met with my fists. Tears filled my eyes and blurred my vision as I lifted my arm backwards before shoving a knuckled fist into his face, or more specifically his nose. I cringed hearing the cracking of broken cartilage and watching the blood trail from his nostrils. I bit my lip and forced myself to continue. One more punch to the temple knocked his down to the ground with the piece of chair still protruding from his body. He passed out cold on the floor.

My heart nearly leaped out of my chest as the phone rang shrilly throughout the house. This was my chance…I can be saved still! My shaky legs leaped for the phone, but my body tripped over Jimmy’s body causing me to ram my jaw into the edge of the counter. I tried my best to ignore the throbbing pain pulsing through my face and steadied myself against the countertop. I reached for the phone and managed to pick it up off the receiver right near one of the last rings.

“H-hello?” I asked.

“Courtney, is that you? My goodness you’re alright? I can’t believe your mother didn’t tell me! So, I couldn’t help but notice that my son seems to have gone missing and I’m willing to bet that he’s at your house. Would you mind getting him for me?” Mrs. Haner asked.

I swallowed the lump in the back of my throat and tried to steady my voice so she could understand what I needed to say. “M-Mrs. Haner, my mother is d-dead. Y-you have to call the…call the police before they kill me too–.”

Brian’s hand slammed down on the phone, ripping it right out of the wall and throwing it down onto the ground. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Matt angrily demanded, noting that I had done a number to Jimmy in addition to talking to Brian’s mom.

Brian and Matt exchanged worried looks. “You know what this means, don’t you?” Matt asked.

Brian glanced down at the ground as he sighed before responding. “We’re going to need to finish this off sooner than Jimmy probably wants to. Once it’s done, we’ll need to start spending more times at our own homes. And we’ll need an excuse for discovering the bodies of Joe, Julianne, and Courtney.”

My eyes widened as I listened to their conversation. I need to get out of here now. I made an immediate dash for the foyer, but cried out when I felt Matt pull me back by my hair.

“You’re not going anywhere, baby. We’ve got a job to finish,” he whispered in my ear. “And you only have yourself to blame for advancing the date that’ll appear on your death certificate.”