“There,” she said, as if she’d just finished planting a garden or something, mission accomplished. His breath moved in and out slowly. He held his hands pressed to his stomach, and blood poured over them. Every now and then he would cough, a wet, bubbling sound.
I didn’t like the feeling. I didn’t like standing here covered in my own vomit, watching him die. It was too sunny for a scene like this, too peaceful, with the wind and the silence of the graves around us. I didn’t like the way it was making me feel about Fern. I squashed that feeling, crushed it, buried it. This was not Fern’s fault.
I was jarred from my thoughts by the pressure of a hard object on my hand. Fern was giving me the knife, pushing the handle into my palm. “Do it,” she breathed. “I can’t watch him bleed to death.”
I felt like I was in a trance. Do it. Do what? I knelt down beside him, holding the knife. This was different from smashing a dark blur with a dark brick. Thankfully he was lying on his side, facing away from me, so I didn’t have to see his eyes again. I saw his neck shaking, trembling as he breathed in and out, in and out, faster than he should’ve been breathing.
“Kill him, do it,” Fern’s voice came from behind me. I turned the knife so that the blade faced downwards. I didn’t know how to kill him.
“This isn’t our fault,” I said to no one. I began to cry. It was better than laughing. I stabbed the blade down into the side of his neck, yanked it out, then shoved it in again.
xXx
It was very rare that I would allow myself to visualize Balthazar Seizure. Since it had happened I barely allowed myself to think of his band’s name, let alone the image of his horrible face, because I was afraid that if I did, something inside me would cave in and all the pain and the tears and the fucking fury would come out and I would collapse in some way, just collapse into something that I couldn’t come back from. But that night, in my bunk, I let that face materialize behind my eyelids. That skinny face, that leering horrible smile . . . Because it was his fault. It was his fault that that guy died. Maybe he had attacked Fern. Maybe he hadn’t. Fern needed to kill him. She needed it to heal. And we both needed it to prepare ourselves for what we now knew we would be absolutely, definitely capable of doing. This shit was his fault. Him, and his horrible friends.
I could hear laughter coming from the front lounge. Everyone was drunk. Even Fern was drunk. I could hear her laughter mingling with theirs. I just lay in my bunk staring into the darkness. I needed to think.
I’d killed two people. I mean, I guess it was me. Fern might’ve bashed the one guy’s skull and stabbed the second guy in the stomach, and both of them might have died from that. Who knows? But I was the one responsible for the end result. The finishing touches. It was me: I’d killed those guys.
I wondered how many people in the world have killed someone and never gotten caught. How many people go on to have families and careers and get elected to important government positions and they’re secretly murderers. I mean, no one on this bus, or on the tour, knew that they were travelling with two girls who’d killed people. Maybe it was a super common thing. I thought of Chris, I thought of my stupid fantasy life with him, and I wondered if it was possible to just take this with me, just compartmentalize it, or whatever melodramatic psychological term could be used to describe keeping this to myself forever and having a nice normal life.