When he had her back in the cellar, he laid her on the floor, pulling her arms behind her, and cinching her wrists with a zip tie behind a pitched support worn smooth by time. He did not bother to bind her feet or to tape her mouth.
As soon as Dwayne caught her, he’d wanted desperately to rip that knife back and forth across her neck till he hit bone. There was a feeling of betrayal, a feeling he couldn’t reconcile because he’d had no reason to trust her in the first place. What stopped him from killing her was that she was the last chip he had and the final hand had not been dealt. At any moment the law could show and she’d be his ticket out of there. The time had come to run. This was the hour to gather his brother and leave this place forever.
Standing over Sissy’s body, Dwayne studied what was left of him. Carol’s eyes were empty sockets, his mouth open in a wide, peculiar smile just as perfect as ever, white teeth so even and straight they looked like they’d been filed and polished. Scarecrow clothes fit loosely over a body shriveled down into nothing. Lime-dusted skin almost black in such light, the hide of his arms draping his bones like wet fabric. Studying his brother’s face, Dwayne felt a mourning and regret that filled him with a revelatory desolation. He reached down and traced his fingers against the side of Carol’s head and his brother’s hair floated away from his scalp like stirred dust. Leaning down, Dwayne closed his eyes and kissed his brother’s forehead.
“We’re going to get out of here, now,” he said. “Me and you, Sissy. Just like it’s always been. Just me and you.”
Dwayne shoveled his arms under his brother’s body, one arm under his legs and one arm under his back. There was no weight to him now, and as he lifted, Carol’s skin ripped apart like paper, the stained yellow bones of his arms finding light as they dangled under him. There was something wet and waxy against Dwayne’s skin and he glowered in deep contemplation at what he held and how it crumbled. Carol’s head was rocked back at an unnatural angle. His mouth drooped open, teeth startling white against black skin. The weight of Carol’s boots were too heavy for what was left of him and his right foot broke away from his body, the boot landing on its side in the dust. The sight of this was the straw that broke him.
Carefully, he lowered his brother back to the ground. There was no way to carry Carol’s body from this place without loading the pieces of him into some other vessel. He knelt there with his hands on his thighs, rocking back and forth, his eyes wide and empty. All that he loved had dissolved in his arms and the world was now void.
“‘Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?’” Dwayne whispered, the words little more than breath. “All my life,” he said. “All my life You have forsaken me.”