Victor wasn’t sure if he fell asleep, passed out, or went into shock, but when he sat up he felt like some time had passed. Stanley still lay dead about a dozen feet from him so Victor knew it wasn’t all a bad dream. He’d hoped it was.
His head felt different and he touched it, finding his hair gone and a crust of blood on one side. Yet another reminder this was all real. He needed to do something with Stanley. He was just lucky someone hadn’t come by during the time he couldn’t account for.
He got to his feet and started toward Stanley. Then he realized he probably needed to find a location for the body before he moved it. No use dragging the thing all over the yard with him like a kid with his favorite toy. Unlike the movies, he saw no conveniently located well or pre-dug hole in which to dispose of the body. There were woods behind the house but he didn’t know how long it would take him to dig a hole, nor was he even certain he had the stamina to do so.
There was an old garage behind the house. While it had a modern twist handle for unlocking it, the door was not segmented like a newer door. When Victor raised it, the entire door swung up in a single piece and retracted overhead. The garage held an old Snapper riding mower and an assortment of tools.
The whir of an electric motor kicking in got Victor’s attention. He spotted a rusty chest freezer against a far wall. He threw open the lid and found it about half-full of home-packed venison and discounted trays of ground beef. There was a yellow wheelbarrow in the garage and Victor moved it closer to the freezer. The gathered armfuls of the meat and dumped it into the wheelbarrow. The packages were cold against his arms and chest but Victor was so focused he barely noticed.
When he had the freezer emptied, he moved the wheelbarrow out of the way and returned to the patio. Stanley’s squashed head was surrounded by thickening blood, the edges crusting. It might have looked like Stanley passed out drunk in a puddle of merlot were it not for the condition of his cranium. The hatchet blow, while not a killing strike in itself, had introduced a fault into an otherwise perfectly strong and serviceable skull, a normally resilient structure. Under the pressure introduced by the dropped concrete planter, the area weakened by the hatchet blow became a port through which some of the contents of the skull had been forced out.
Thus the merlot-colored halo.
Thus the oozing brain matter extruded from the jagged hole.
Victor forced himself to look at the man. He had killed thousands of people over years of online gameplay. He had seen the gruesome pixilated images of dead, dying, and disfigured players. He could see now that it was different in real life. There was an emotional quality associated with viewing the dead that was not present in a video game. On some level, he understood that his desire to look away from this real death was a weakness on his part. He needed to take it in. He needed look it straight in the eye. The DeathMerchant would have.
The DeathMerchant would relish it because it was the fruit of his victory.
Indeed, this was a new moment for Victor. He had entered into the martial arena and won. He had killed what was obviously a lesser man.
“Stanley, you are one hideous son-of-a-bitch,” Victor said. He didn’t find it natural talking so brazenly to a corpse but he thought it sounded appropriate in his new role. His new reality.
Deciding he couldn’t move the man without covering himself in gore, Victor went back to the garage and found a blue tarp precisely folded and stored on a shelf. He took it to the patio, laid it out beside Stanley’s body, and slipped a pair of the dead man’s work gloves on his hands. He tipped the body onto the tarp, surprised at how easily the stout little man moved.
Carefully stepping to avoid the puddle of fluids, Victor grabbed the corners of the tarp and tugged Stanley off the patio.
“Oops. Bump,” Victor said with a smile when Stanley dropped the foot in height from the patio to the ground level, his head rebounding wetly from a paving stone.
Victor backed up, dragging the tarp. The back of his thighs began to twitch in exhaustion, unused to the motion of pulling a weight backward. He was also breathing hard from the exertion, which in itself was not part of his usual routine. When they reached the freezer, Victor took a break, allowing his breathing to slow down. While he was recovering, he scanned the garage for duct tape, feeling like he should tape the body and the tarp up in a neat package. Like the venison he’d removed.
When he didn’t find any tape he decided to heave the body into the freezer. It was not as easy as he imagined. With the body being a little longer than the freezer, Victor had to twist Stanley into some semblance of a yoga position to make him fit. When the work was complete, Victor tried to think of some final verbal jab to throw at the man but words failed him. He shut the lid with a thump and closed the garage door as he left.
The surge and decline of adrenaline had left him tired and shaky. He was intent on sitting on the back patio for a moment and getting his head together but as soon as he saw the condition of the flagstones he knew he had work to do first. He had not spent a lot of time cleaning in his life but common sense told him he needed to get all the spilled Stanley off the patio before it dried or he would be on his hands and knees scrubbing it off.
He found the water hose Stanley had blasted him with and used it to wash away the bodily fluids. Even the blood that was beginning to thicken and crust over had not adhered to the porch enough that it could resist the hose. In just a few minutes, all traces of what had transpired here were erased.
Except for the bloody hatchet.
His first thought was to bury it or throw it in a river somewhere but he decided it was pointless. Anyone who searched this property right now would find Stanley’s body and he would be the only suspect so there was no need to take any great pains hiding the weapon. He went back to the garage and tossed it into the freezer with the body. He would deal with them later.
When he got back to the patio this time Victor made sure he hosed all traces of blood off his own body and clothing. He would have preferred to change clothes but he didn’t have any and there was no way he was squeezing into one of Stanley’s spare jumpsuits. The sun was hot enough now it might dry his clothing if he took it off and spread it out on the patio furniture. He did so, removing every stitch until he was standing naked on Stanley’s patio.
It felt a little strange and he prayed there would be no unexpected visitors. He only knew Stanley in terms of his own mother and their relationship. He didn’t know what kind of other visitors the old man might have during the course of a normal day. There had been a refrigerator in the garage holding several dozen cans of Budweiser beer. Victor didn’t imagine all of the beer was just for Stanley’s consumption. The old man looked like the kind of guy who people stopped by to have a beer with.
That very idea, the concern that someone may stop to visit, made Victor realize he needed to take charge of this situation. He needed to move Stanley’s truck into the garage so it appeared he wasn’t home. Perhaps it would discourage anyone from stopping by. Doing so required a truck key and Victor hoped to God he wasn’t going to have to get back in the freezer and root around through Stanley’s pockets. Maybe the old man had put his stuff down in the house.
Victor looked at the patio door, knowing it was open because he’d seen Stanley come and go through it, but to him that door represented an almost impenetrable barricade. Going through it meant entering Stanley’s world.
It wasn’t Stanley’s world anymore though. Stanley was dead.
Victor had killed him.
Had conquered him.
Just as in his computer games, to the Victor went the spoils. The house was his now for as long as he needed it and for as long as he could keep it. He walked to the glass slider as boldly as a four hundred pound naked man could and slid the door open. He smelled cigarette smoke, old man, and the stale air of a house where the windows were not opened often enough.
The floor was covered in thick olive green carpet, the walls original 1960s paneling covered in pictures of what must have been Stanley’s life up to this point. Victor tried not to look at them closely, not wanting the eyes to accuse him of what he was already fully aware he had done. In his tentative glances at them, he saw several black and white photographs of a sailor in uniform on the deck of a ship. It had to be Stanley since the word Navy came out in every sentence the old man said. Used to say.
There were other pictures of a friendly smiling woman with poufy gray hair. Other pictures showed her with a smiling Stanley. It must have been his wife. There were no pictures of any children or grandchildren, which was a relief. There were a few pictures of a Jack Russell terrier which made Victor scan the room looking for evidence of a dog but he found none. No dog beds and no dog toys.
Separating the den from the nearby kitchen was a low countertop of woodgrain Formica. On the countertop sat a set of truck keys and Stanley’s phone. Victor rushed over and picked up the phone. It was not the same operating system as the phone Stanley chopped up, but it was a late model smart phone that was capable of doing all of the things his old phone had done.
He pushed a button and stared expectantly at the screen. A message came up instructing him to put in his pass code or touch his thumb to the biometric sensor integrated into the button he’d pushed.
“Shit!” Victor said, ready to smash the phone against the wall.
He caught himself. He could fix this. Stanley’s thumb would still unlock this phone. Then it was just a matter of turning the security features off so Stanley’s information wouldn’t be needed anymore. On a morbid note, he also realized there was a limited window of opportunity in which to do this. Should the thumb become bloated, desiccated or otherwise misshapen, it would not work.
With the keys and phone in hand, Victor returned to the back porch and put his wet clothes back on. He went to the garage and shifted everything out of the way that would prevent him from pulling the small truck inside. He went back around the house, making sure no traffic was coming and trying to be as inconspicuous as someone of his size could be while skulking around in swishing wet clothes.
After adjusting the seat back as far as it would go, he pulled the truck around the house and carefully eased it into the garage. He decided to leave the keys in the truck for now in case he needed to make a quick escape. He had to start thinking that way since he was now an outlaw.
At the freezer, Victor borrowed Stanley’s cool thumb and was thrilled to see it unlock the phone. Standing in the garage, Victor turned off the phone’s lock screens and security features just in case he needed more thumb scans to accomplish this. He briefly considered locating some pruning shears and taking the thumb with him but that was a level to which he was reluctant to advance right now.
He was clearly a murderer, a video game thief, an inciter of mayhem and rioting, and a disturber of the peace, but he was not a desecrator of corpses.
Yet.