The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires - Grady Hendrix Page 0,152

leaving you all a present. Just wait until your friend Slick gets ripe.”

He started to giggle and Mrs. Greene crunched her knife through his windpipe and she and Maryellen gripped him by the hair and pulled off his head with a loud pop.

Then they did what Miss Mary had told Patricia to do all those years ago at the supper table the night she spat at James Harris. Maryellen held his head and Mrs. Greene took a hammer and drove two thick twenty-penny nails into each of his eyes. His mouth finally stopped moving. Then they dropped his head into a bag and tied it shut.

They gutted him and packed his organs and entrails into different bags. She was too tired to saw through his rib cage, so they simply removed as much meat from it as they could and wrapped pound after pound of flesh and muscle in different plastic bags. They double- and triple-bagged them, reducing James Harris to a pile of tightly sealed trash bags that could fit into an ordinary sized garbage can.

When they were finished, the bathroom looked like an abattoir. Mrs. Greene and Maryellen went into the bedroom.

“Finished?” Kitty asked.

“We are,” Mrs. Greene said.

“I need to get the car,” Maryellen said, then sat down heavily on the floor, making sure she stayed off the throw rug. “I just need to sit for a minute.”

They all ached, right down to the bone, but they weren’t even close to finished. Mrs. Greene looked around the bathroom and the bedroom, and Maryellen followed her gaze. Kitty did, too.

“Jesus, Mary, Mother of God,” Kitty said softly.

Blood was everywhere. Despite the tarp, the bathroom was painted red. The countertops, the walls, the door frame, the toilet. There was blood on the dark oak planks in the bedroom, blood on the duvet cover where Patricia lay, bloody handprints on the doors and walls. Seeing how much they had to clean drained them of their spirits, hammered them down to nothing. It was almost ten. The Clemson-Carolina game would be over in less than an hour.

“We don’t have enough time,” Maryellen said.

Something whispered in the bathroom. They looked at each other, then pushed themselves up off the floor and stood in the bathroom door. The pile of black plastic packages containing pieces of James Harris’s body twisted like snakes. Their motion was muscular and angry.

“We put the nails through his eyes,” Mrs. Greene said.

“He’s not stopping,” Kitty wailed. “It didn’t work. He’s still alive.”

The doorbell rang.

CHAPTER 40

“They’ll go away,” Maryellen whispered.

It rang again, twice in a row.

Mrs. Greene’s hands and feet went cold. Maryellen felt a headache start at the base of her skull. Kitty whimpered.

“Please go away,” she whispered. “Please go away…please go away…please go away…”

The black plastic packages crackled in the bathroom. One of them rolled off the pile and hit the floor with a THUMP. It began to squirm towards the door.

“The lights are on,” Maryellen said. “We forgot to turn out the lights. You can see them through the shutters. They’ll know he’s home.”

The doorbell rang, three times in a row.

“Who’s the least of a mess?” Maryellen asked. They looked at each other. She and Mrs. Greene were encrusted in blood. Kitty only had some bruises.

“Oh, merciful Jesus,” Kitty moaned.

“It’s probably one of the Johnsons,” Maryellen said. “They must’ve run out of beer.”

Kitty took three deep breaths, on the verge of hyperventilating, then walked out into the hall, down the stairs, and over to the front door. Everything was silent. Maybe they’d gone away.

The doorbell rang, so loudly that she squeaked. She grabbed the handle, flipped the deadbolt, and opened it a crack.

“Am I too late?” Grace asked.

“Grace!” Kitty shouted, dragging her inside by the arm.

They heard her all the way up in the bedroom and came running downstairs. Grace’s face went slack when a blood-splattered Maryellen and Mrs. Greene appeared. She looked at them in horror.

“That’s a white carpet,” she said.