We Should Probably Do It Right Away

The road was uneven and I could feel every tiny bump in my bones; my ass hurt, and not in the fun way. Mind you, Maddie had tried to drive carefully enough in the beginning, but the forest just got to you after a while. All those white birch trees looked like big skeletal hands digging their way out of the dirt and reaching for the pitch black sky. And they moved. Or at least they looked like they were moving, swaying in the wind or maybe animated by some necromantic forces, though really it was probably all just illusionary. At some point, you just needed to move forward quickly.

Maddie pulled over. We hadn’t spoken for the past hour, which was just trees after trees after a whole other hour on the highway. “Bumpy,” she had said when the road became rougher. “It all looks the same,” I said some minutes later to no one in particular. After that, silence. No radio. Not a single cough. At last, she turned off the motor and looked at me. Her eyes were tired, as were mine in all likelihood. I wanted to make a joke, do something to lighten the mood, because I hated serious moments, but I couldn’t, not now, not even I. “What do we do now?” I asked. Maddie only held out her hand and I put mine in hers. They were strong, calloused all over; mine looked so dainty, as if they might be crushed just by her closing her hand over mine, but she did and they held fast, didn’t shatter. “Shouldn’t we do it quick?” I needed her to give me an answer. “Get it over with?” But she only flashed me a smile, roguish, boyish, as always.

I don’t remember what drew me to Maddie initially, whether it was her strength and the feeling of comfort that being near her gave me and that I had so sorely missed or whether it was just the thrill of the whole thing that made me want it so, so badly, but in that moment, seeing her smile like that, I felt that spark ignite in me again that I had felt when we first made out in the bathroom of the worst punk show I had ever been to and I pulled her face closer with my other hand and kissed her like I hadn’t been alive in years or might never be again. She pulled me over to her side, awkwardly, to the driver’s seat, so I sat in her lap and held onto her shoulders as she groped me under my shirt.

Maybe it was the adrenaline that hadn’t fully worn off or just the whole experience of doing that together, but it felt different this time. Freer, yes, of course, more passionate in a way, but also more ferocious. She bit at my lips till I could taste metal and I dug my nails into her arms as deep as I could and she squeezed me so hard I thought I might burst like a ripe tomato. Some thump, a dull metallic thud came from the back of the car and I perked up, though Maddie kept on kissing me. I had to push her back, which wasn’t easy, and fix her eyes on me. “What was that?” I asked as if she would know an answer.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Probably an animal. Like a raccoon or something that jumped on the trunk.” She looked around and out the back of the car, but it was all pitch black; only the lights in the cabin and the headlights were still on, letting us see those old white digital trees beside the road in front of us and the shovel on the backseat.

“We should probably do it right away,” I said. We had bought the shovel right after we did it, just before getting onto the highway, and I had clung to Maddie the whole time we were in the hardware store and the thrill had made me want to beg her to do me right there in the gardening aisle but now it’s worn off and the look of the shining brand new steel made made me just the tiniest bit nauseous.

“Why?” Maddie asked. “She’s not gonna be a bother to us, not anymore.” Her fingers crawled up my back again and I let them, let her pull me closer, my heart beating faster and faster.

“I know,” I said through strained breaths as I tried to keep a clear mind around her for once, “but I have a bad feeling about this, about this— place.” My sweat started to turn cold and instead of being sensible, I let Maddie pull me closer to keep me warm, let her skin rub off some of its vitality onto mine. She put her tongue down my throat so intensely, I thought she was trying to digest me from the inside out like how some insects do it and I gladly would have let her.

She bit me, bit me on the neck and gave me hickeys like I’d told her I wanted now that I didn’t need to hide them from anyone anymore. Her teeth dug into my skin and I felt the blood rushing through my head like leaves rustling on the forest floor and I had to close my eyes or else go insane and my head was suddenly forcefully filled with visions of deer shot dead that walked upright through the forest at night that were out to kill the hunters that blasted their brains out the sides of their heads and the blood kept knocking against my skull and knocking and knocking and knocking on the window of the car and—

my eyes shot open while Maddie’s face was still buried in my neck. Past her bloody and dirty hand now stuck to the driver’s side window was Anna’s face; not the fresh one, the alive one, the happy and joyful one, the one I knew and loved, the one I had taken a million pictures of and hung on the fridge, but the one we killed, whose throat I cut as she lay in bed that morning while Maddie stood next to me ready with her axe, this one, blue and purple and gray with splotches of dark brown blood all over, dripping from the incision in her neck and from the gash that cleaved her skull in two from forehead down to chin, that made her once beautiful face so disfigured and disjointed, all full of brain matter vomiting forth right between her bloodshot hazel eyes. I screamed. I screamed right into Maddie’s ear and she freaked the fuck out and saw her too and screamed back at me and Anna’s hand left a smear of old blood right across the windowpane.

Maddie turned her keys with me still in her lap and floored it. I clung onto her for dear life, because maybe that’s what this would have come down to and maybe it still would because we drove back home or at least in the direction of home and I hoped that nothing bad would come of this, of not burying my dead girlfriend that we killed whose dead body I could still see standing in the red light of the rear window stumbling towards us like something out of a zombie movie and I felt the worst headache of my life hit me like an axe to the face.