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A day later Bass stopped kicking.
He might have slept for a while but he wasn’t certain. He might have kicked while he was sleeping.
He had kicked so long that his feet didn’t know anything else.
Finally, he shit himself.
Not just a little pucker of fear but an honest-to-god fill-your-pants buttload full of crap.
Shit.
He had already pissed himself several hours before that.
There was something about lying in your body’s own shit and piss and stink that really brought things right down to earth.
Bass figured that he was fucked in every sense of the word.
Here he was – lying in his own shit – on top of the dead body of the very first woman that he had ever cared about, being tasted by her very own private funeral service of maggots.
“Grimes?”
He had been calling for Grimes off and on throughout the entire morning with no answer at all. He figured the bastard had left him somewhere out in the desert to die.
He had given up on the kicking some time ago. Whatever this coffin was made out of it was too hard to kick through. He might have tried shooting his way through if Grimes had only left him with his pistol.
He might even have shot himself.
He could have.
Hell, what would it matter now?
Once you’ve bedded down with maggots there was really no way on earth you could ever hope to make any sort of comeback.
Shit.
No such luck.
“Grimes?”
He kept on calling.
He could not stop.
You never know, he told himself.
You never know.
Shit.
You never know when you might wind up burying yourself in your own crap.
“Grimes?”
Another day crawled on by and the maggots began to sing.