Blood Money

We’re flying across bayous and deserts for one last final business transaction before we leave for good. Jasper’s gone and there’s nothing stopping us from going to India and basking in all the kidneys we can find. After that, we’re meeting with someone in Iran and battening down the hatches.

No one will find us. No one will suspect a thing.

That is, until we receive an anonymous call about Jonesy, our hospital friend, being arrested and convicted of stealing the car crash victims’ bodies.

I wonder what the police would think if they were to find out I’m alive.

“It’s fine,” Ruby shakes her head, “He won’t talk. Jonesy’s loyal.”

She tries to reassure me, but I don’t believe it. Something tells me this it; we’re done for.

I’m already delirious from lack of sleep. An excruciating migraine has started to make my vision fuzzy, and it’s taking all my willpower to stay awake. I can’t die. Not now. Not when we’re so close.

“You know, I grew up in Texas,” Ruby tells me as we land to a screeching halt on the runway of the San Marcos airport. Add this small anecdote to the list of actual facts I know about Ruby Ranson.

As we get driven to our hotel, a familiarity about this place begins to nag at me, and I start thinking that maybe it’s my memory coming back. The trees, the dry earth, everything about it sparks my mind.

Or maybe it’s just the brain hemorrhage.

“Oh, c'est tellement beau…” Valerie comes out to play, “Zee Texas desert is so majestueux, just as I remember…”

This is when Ruby’s personalities start fading in and out of whack.

“Eet reminds me so much of my sister,” she sighs in her convincing French accent, “We would chase each ozer in tall meadows such as zat one,” she points out the window like a little child, “Oh, nostalgie…”

Ruby snaps out of it and receives another call. Anonymous again.

“Chu ratted you out. The police are expecting you. Get out of there now.”

It’s those three simple sentences that instill fear in us both, and for a half second, I almost take them with a grain of salt. It’s just someone trying to psyche us out. We’re getting out now. We’ll be fine.

However, when the hotel comes into view, so do the flashing blue and red lights.

This is no joke. This is our reality.

Ruby screams at the driver to stop, making him panic and step on the brakes just outside the driveway entrance of the hotel. In a split second, Ruby whips out her pistol and shoots him point blank in the head. My eyes widen as she hurriedly dashes out of the back seat in a flash. I can’t even comprehend what’s happening as she pushes the poor unsuspecting man out of the driver’s seat and replaces his body with her own, immediately stepping on the gas and booking it out of there. I swivel in my seat, terrified of the proceedings. The police haven’t caught on yet, but they will.

My breathing is shallow when I turn towards Ruby and grip the leather seat beneath me. My voice sounds scared, like a little child’s.

“Where are we going?”

Her blood splattered face looks up at me through the rearview mirror. She speaks emotionlessly.

“The body farm.”

I don’t know what possesses Ruby to drive in the direction of Texas State University’s own human forensic burial grounds, but I don’t question it. I don’t even think Ruby exists anymore.

The police are tailing us. Blinding lights follow us all the way to our morbid destination before Ruby swerves around some kind of animal in the road, loses control of the car, and violently crashes into a tree. My head bounces off the window, causing instantaneous pain to shoot through my membranes. Glass shatters around us, and for a moment, I wonder if we’re dead. If I’m not, we’re going to be soon.

At least, I will be.

My injury only adds to my already concussed to fuck brain, and I stumble out of the wreckage, ignoring the police sirens in the distance as I ask Ruby if she’s okay.

“Sweet Jesus,” comes Gemma’s trademark accent as she steps out of the car seemingly without a scratch, “Don’t worry about me. Let’s get goin’.”

And so we run. We don’t stop for anything. Not even as the sky darkens and the blood of the sunset sinks past the trees, into the stench of the dilapidating beings scattered across the woods. I let Ruby run where she wants to, because I know what’s going to happen to us.

This body farm will be the last thing we ever see.

Valerie accompanies me again as we approach a hidden lake now enveloped by nightfall. Her soft French accent sings through the dead branches and chirps of bull frogs hidden in the marsh.

“I remember zis lake!” She cries excitedly.

Oh, good lord, what a time for her to start reminiscing.

“My sister and I…we would come down here all ze time, before zis turned into ze body farm…”

Suddenly, despite the temerity of everything happening at the moment, confusion strikes me.

“Wait,” I speak up through my dizziness, “I thought you were from Paris?”

“Oh, oui, mi cherie,” Valerie nods earnestly, “Paris, Texas.”

If the situation were different, I would’ve let out a wry laugh. This is all too funny. I realize then that nothing about Ruby or any of her personalities make any sense.

I think I’m going fucking insane.

Before my amusement takes over, Gemma is ushering me on again, insisting that we have to continue. We need to go deeper into the woods, over the disgusting, rotting bodies. The police won’t find us there. We’ll be safe. India and Iran are just dreams to us now.

Dogs are barking. Men are yelling. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, and Valerie’s back, blabbering about her sister and how one time they were gutting a fish by that same lake.

And it’s funny; I know what she’s talking about.

I stop as this realization overcomes me. My migraine is threatening to split my skull open and I’m about to collapse as Lily comes and steals my heart and tells me to keep up, but I know. I know.

“Eet was so much fun, you see…” Valerie pants as we run and our bones become weary, “We were so proud of zis fish we had caught…”

When she describes to me how slimy the fish was, I can feel it on my fingers. When she’s about to tell me how they caught it, I finish her sentence for her because somehow I know exactly how they did it. It was a fishing rod with leftover salami as bait. I don’t know how I know this, but it’s the only thing I can think about as Lily comes out and I blurt out that I love her.

“You don’t love me,” she almost whispers.

But I do. The kiss we shared means everything to me. I can feel death hovering above me as her handgun catches the moonlight, hanging off her belt. She’s reaching for it, and I’m frozen, not because I know I’m going to die, but because my life is finally flashing before my eyes.

The hot desert summers, running through the wheat grass. Skinny dipping in the creeks and driving up to the lake that now stands in the middle of this makeshift burial ground for forensic observation. Gutting that fish and frying it up in what once was our happy home. My mother ripping apart our family and taking me with her to New Orleans. Moving from foster home to foster home after she’d gone crazy and thought she was a vampire and drank all that blood ‘til she died. My mother. Our mother.

Mine and Ruby’s mother.

As I stare into the barrel of the gun, I face none other than my sister.

“There is no Lily,” Shiva’s haunting voice echoes in my mind.

This discovery hits me harder than the bullet does at a thousand feet per second, crushing my sternum and knocking me off my heels. Shiva stands over me, observing what she’s done. I want to tell her what I’ve discovered in that split second, all the memories uncovered, all the wasted years spent wondering what she’d been doing, yet all that comes out of my mouth, along with the sticky, coppery blood, is:

“You better not take my fucking liver.”

And she blinks. She’s herself again. I think she knows what I mean. At least, that’s what I tell myself as the blood flows out of my chest and the dogs approach us, ending it all.

I was never cut out for the Red Market anyway.