The Road to Nowhere

Burial | Jacques

I was kind of relieved to see Jimmy walk away. Of course I didn't want him to go back alone, and apparently Noah had the same thought--He ran after the little boy, his boots shuffling and making deep scraping noises that echoed throughout the warehouse. I could hardly contain my sobs and vomit as the image of Ricky's body crossed my mind again.

It was disgusting. His throat was completely exposed, torn open, and his tendons were hanging everywhere. His hair was essentially soaking in a pool of his own blood. I didn't want to be the one who had to bury him, because just being near the stench of his body made me nauseous.

I couldn't stand being near the corpse for much longer. I was already growing lightheaded, and as much as I didn't want to disrespect Ricky, I couldn't take it for much longer. I grabbed Marcus's wrist and dragged him away from the body, out into the fresh air. As soon as we stepped out, I gulped as much clean air into my lungs as I could.

Even with the fresh air, I couldn't get the image of Ricky out of my mind. He was hardly even recognizable with his eyes rolled into the back of his head like that. All the muscles on his face had gone slack and his mouth was hanging open, his head nearly separated from the rest of his body. It was like his neck was only hanging on by a thread.

The thought made tears spark up in my eyes. I covered my face from Marcus, gritting my teeth as I tried not to break into complete sobs. "What are we going to do?" he asked me, twisting his wrist out of my grasp. I turned to him, composing myself. "I don't think I can pick that thing up," I murmured, casting a quick glance towards where the body was lying. He nodded. "I nearly puked just looking at it. I-It's... It's really terrible that that happened to him. I couldn't even imagine. I thought he just tripped over a cliff or something... I had no idea..."

He wiped his eyes, his bottom lip trembling. A single tear rolled down his face and I lifted my hand up to his cheek, swiping it away before it could get very far. "Don't lose hope. Everything is going to be okay. We're going to put a stop to everything that's happening here. We're going to avenge Ricky with everything we've got," I told him.

"Do you promise?" he asked, looking up at me with big eyes. I nodded slowly. Silently, I pulled my little switchblade out of my back pocket, and pulled my glove off. I held my glove in between my teeth as I raised my index finger into the air and cut into it with the switchblade. Not deep enough to scar, but deep enough to leave blood running down my finger. I watched as he took his own glove off and held out his finger for me to prick.

We were both bleeding now. I smiled. "A blood pact, Jacques? What are we in, freshman year?" My grin grew wider and I cocked an eyebrow. "Might as well take a blast to the past." We both held up our fingers simultaneously and pressed them together. We cringed in pain as we each ground our fingers against the other's, but I managed to force out a chuckle and a smirk. He did the same.

It felt good, grounding, to do something that I hadn't done in a while. It brought me back to reality, that we were just a bunch of kids lost in this world. A bunch of teenagers just trying to figure everything out. And we had no idea what we were doing but it felt great to know that I was still a kid, and that the fate of the world didn't rest on my shoulders.

I exhaled gently as we pulled our fingers away from each other. Blood mixed with metal where our fingers dripped onto the concrete, and I stared down at it. The color it made reminded me of the color of jelly. Ricky never wanted peanut butter on his sandwiches, only jelly. Several years of packing his lunches for school had taught me that. He was so picky that if he got one with peanut butter, he just flat out refused to eat it.

I chuckled quietly to myself. It was a sad thought that all of the memories I had made with him amounted to nothing now. He was like a little brother to me and everything that we had gone through was just thrown out the door. His dreams and every opportunity he would have had in his life, they were all gone now. Scattered to the wind like dandelion seeds. The little ones that he loved to blow around when he was little.

He'd make wishes every time he plucked one up. Then he'd gently blow on it until each little seed drifted away in the wind. I never really believed in the magic of it, but Ricky claimed that every one of his wishes had come true. One day I asked him what he wished for, and he just gave me a little smile and said, "For everyone I love to be happy." The thought got me a little choked up and I wiped my eyes like I was trying to prevent tears from even beginning to flow.

"Are we just going to leave him here?" Marcus asked, sending a dodgy look towards where the crumpled body was. I sighed. "I really want to give him a proper burial, but it's going to be hard to carry him out of here, let alone bring him up the cliffs. I don't want to damage him or anything..." It felt strange referring to a dead body as him, but I knew that if I called him anything else, it would be disrespectful to him. At least that was what it felt like.

"It doesn't feel right to just leave him here..." Marcus murmured, looking down at his feet as he shuffled uncomfortably. "I want him to be properly buried, you know? It'd be an injustice if we left him here to rot."

I nodded. I agreed with what he was saying, but I really didn't know what we were going to do about it. I wanted to help Ricky but I knew that I could hardly get near the corpse without hurling, let alone carry it for long distances. "Honestly? Maybe we should just go grab his blanket and his pillow... And just wrap him up and leave him outside. I don't know... I know it sounds pretty dreadful but..." I struggled to explain what I wanted to do. It's not that I didn't want him to be honored the right way, I just didn't think I could handle carrying him.

His body really was filthy, as much as I hated admitting it. And there were so many unanswered questions. Who did this to him, what they did it for. Who they were sacrificing him to. The past few days had been such a blur that I didn't even remember how long we had been out here. It felt like an eternity had passed since I last had a good night's sleep. It was kind of saddening.

It was difficult to comprehend the fact that Ricky was gone now. He was gone forever, and there was no way to bring him back. Marcus glanced at me, an unreadable emotion on his face. "If we're going to go through all that effort, shouldn't we just leave him here? At least if we leave him behind, we get to keep his blanket and pillow as a memory of him," he offered. As much as it felt wrong to leave Ricky here, Marcus had a point.

It would be difficult to carry him and despite all the work we would put into it, we wouldn't even be able to properly bury him without a shovel or two. Still, I wanted to try.

So I convinced him to let us go back to camp. We caught up with Noah and Jimmy and drove back to the trailer with them, picking up one of the shovels that we had stored in the back room. It took awhile to get back to the warehouse but before long, we were gently lifting his body and wrapping it with his blanket. The purple, fluffy blanket that he loved to cuddle and had had since he was a kid. It was nice to know that he was going to be buried with something that he had found solace in when he was alive.

It took us at least 30 minutes to lug him up and over the cliffs and back onto the flat, clear sand above the canyon. It was a disgusting experience, swinging the little body around in the blanket, trying our hardest not to scrape it against the floor or the cliff walls. We all stayed silent the entire time, which I assumed was our best attempt at honoring his memory.

Finally, we laid him down in the sand, trying our best not to look at him as we all started to dig his grave. While Jimmy went to look for a chunk of wood that we could carve with my switchblade, we all dug into the sand with our sands. Marcus was using the shovel and we alternated between me and him. Before long, we had a wide hole about 5 feet deep.

Noah needed help climbing out from where he had been digging. I dropped the shovel and pulled him out, just as Noah returned with the wood. The chunk of wood could have worked as good firewood--It was wide and flat, yet looked sturdy enough to stand up in the sand.

We softly lowered Ricky into the hole we had dug, and began to cover him with the dirt and sand that had piled up on the sides. At first it felt disgusting and disrespectful but soon I began to accept the fact that it was far more respectful than just leaving him there to rot.