The Sinners of Saint Amos - Logan Fox Page 0,244

herd me away from the bed. My back slams into a wall.

The sound of police sirens and ambulances want my attention, but I don’t give it to them.

Cass clasps my head in his hands, wiping my face, forcing me to look at him. “Hey, bud. Hey. Over here.”

We lock eyes.

“I did everything I could, okay? I tried to save her, but she’s gone. She’s gone. You read me?”

My heart stops beating. “CPR,” I croak.

“Got no blood left,” Cass says. He’s grinning, but it’s the kind of smile you see on a corpse where the fleshy bits of the face have been picked clean by scavengers. “It just kept oozing out. Can’t put it back in, can I? So that’s that. But listen, buddy, listen to me, okay?”

There’s a heavy drone in my ears, which makes complying difficult, but I nod anyway. My eyes dart to the side as I try to look past him, but he tightens his grip on my face and sinks his fingertips into my scalp.

“Look, the police are going to be here in like…fucking seconds. All right? Now we need to do something very important. And we gonna have to do it really fast.”

He steps back. Points.

A dark-haired man lays sprawled on the carpet. There’s a gun near his right hand.

“We got to take this motherfucker downstairs. There’s this big hole outside—”

“The grave.”

Talking is good. Not looking at the bed, that’s good too. Doing something that gets me out of this room? Even better.

“Yeah, the grave.” Cass pats my chest. “Good. So, you grab his legs, yeah?”

Cass backs up, still grinning like a fucking Jack-O-Lantern, and grabs the guy’s wrists.

“Come on, Zach. Stay with me.”

I keep my eyes down. When my vision blurs, I blink them clear.

“We can do this.”

I nod, not trusting myself to speak. But as soon as Cass breaks eye contact, my gaze flies to the bed.

She looks so serene.

So pale.

So fucking dead.

I blink again. My chest feels like it’s caving in. Tighter and tighter and tighter. I try and breathe, try to clamp my mouth shut, but then another set of hot tears races down my cheeks. The salt in my mouth triggers a sob.

“No, n-no,” Cass says, voice wobbling. “Fuck you, Zachary. You’re grabbing his fucking legs, and we’re putting him in that fucking grave!”

I choke, wipe my face on my shoulder, and lift the guy’s feet.

He groans.

Maybe a normal guy would have dropped him. I don’t. I hold on even fucking tighter. Because he undoubtedly had something to do with the dead girl on the bed, and that means I owe him a world of hurt.

A spasm goes through the guy’s body, and then he lifts his head. He looks at me, dazed, unfocused.

There’s something wrong with his eye.

Outside, in the hall, someone starts sobbing. Big, heavy, ragged sobs.

It takes me a few seconds to work it out.

Time where I’m holding back the ephemeral agony gouging out my lungs and stomach. Time where I’m moving back, dragging the guy’s stomach over the pale blue carpet. Time where I’m staring at that fucked up eye so I won’t look up again and see Trinity on the bed and lose my shit.

The man twists in our grip. His strength is coming back. There’s a wet slick on the back of his head. Splinters in his hair.

That’s where the broken chair comes from.

“Doorway,” Cass warns. “Take a left, bud.”

I angle out the door.

Apollo’s head is on Rube’s chest. His blond hair shifts with every sob wracking his lean body. He’s hugging Rube with his elbows, hands fisted in Rube’s shirt.

The guy we’re dragging begins fighting us. Cass’s grin turns into a grimace. My arms are starting to burn from the weight, from keeping his ankles clasped when he tries to kick his legs.

He keeps bucking off the floor, forcing us to take his full weight instead of letting us drag him over the tiles. He sends a loathing glare at me over his shoulder, mouth twisted with frustration and fury.

And then I get what’s wrong with his eye.

It happened a few times to Rube, and would always freak me out.

His contact has slipped. Like an eclipse, the dark lens creates a crescent from the lighter iris below.

I almost drop his legs.

But then I think he recognizes me too. And his face loses all color.

I don’t blame him.

He knows what happened to my parents. Fuck, maybe he was even the one who found them.

Were they still in those chairs? No, wait…the chairs must have