Alive

Chapter 9: Different Circumstances

I'd cleaned up 10 murder scenes and disposed of 10 bodies, but all I could do as I stood over Charlie's body was stare. Frozen. I couldn't move. My mind was too preoccupied with instilling fear in itself. What if somebody had heard me screaming at her? What if someone had seen her going into my apartment, never to walk back out again? What if she'd told Sam that she was coming over to mine during their argument? Think. How do I fix this? Think!

This was not supposed to happen. I planned my murders, making sure everything was taken care of so that I would never get caught. I didn't spontaneously kill someone just because they had pissed me off. And yet, I had. The body lying on my floor was proof of that.

I sat back down in the chair, staring straight forward blankly. When I snapped out of my almost catatonic state I looked at the clock on my wall, I'd been there for 40 minutes. Charlie's body was still on my floor. Fuck. Okay stay calm. It's fine. It's fine, just cover it up, no one will know.

What the fuck was I supposed to do with her body? It was the middle of the day, I couldn't exactly haul it down the street, into my car and then drive off without raising suspicion. I needed somewhere to put her on a temporary basis until it was clear to move her. The attic would definitely keep her out of sight but it would cause too much noise, lifting her body up there and dumping it. Why couldn't I think straight? This wasn't exactly new territory, just different circumstances.

I emptied the contents of my bag onto the sofa and grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulling one out and lighting it. I rarely smoked, but occasionally I needed one. Just to calm me down. I noticed my hands where shaking. Why the hell were my hands shaking? It wasn't really fear; sure I was worried, because I had fucked up big time, but I wasn't exactly scared. I was definitely not cold, my forehead was covered in a light layer of sweat as I panicked in my living room. I took a final drag of the cigarette and stubbed it into the ashtray on my table. It helped a little, I felt my nerves begin to come down and I started thinking more logically.

I grabbed my cellphone off of the arm of the chair I'd been sitting in and I called Charlie's number. I tried to keep my breathing even as I listened to the muddle of the ringing on my phone and the ringtone going off on hers in her pocket. It went to voicemail and I closed my eyes as I began to speak in the most casual voice that I could.

"Hey it's Rosie, you still coming over or what? Let me know when you're almost here. And can you do me a favour and grab a bag nachos from the store? I'll give you the money when you get here. Thanks. See ya."

That was a start. If the police ever recovered her phone they'd find the voicemail from me indicating that she'd never made it to my place. Maybe something happened to her on her way over, or maybe Sam lost his temper while they were fighting and she was lying dead in his apartment instead of mine. I asked for the nachos because who kills someone in a rage and then calmly asks for nachos? It was random, but it was tactical. I had to make it seem as though she was never here and I had never beaten the shit out of her.

I dragged her body into my bathroom and threw it into the bathtub. I turned the shower head making sure the water hit her face, where my blood was and walked over to the sink to wash hers off of my hands. I stared as the crimson red swirled around the plughole and I thought back to the moment it happened, the moment I snapped. It reminded me of the movies when there's a high speed car chase and one of them crashes. Like the wheel hits a rock in the road and the car flips sideways onto two wheels, and there's a moment when you're not sure what'll happen. You hold your breath as you wait to see. Wait to see if it slams back down onto all four and carries on driving, or if it flips over and crashes into the tarmac, spinning over and over until there's almost nothing left. In that moment you either make it or you don't.

Unfortunately, I didn't regain balance, I flipped, and it was fatal. No unrealistic movie plot was going to save Charlie or me now. We weren't going to get dragged out of the wreckage. She was dead, and I had a feeling that my life was about to get pretty fucking complicated.