“Drink more water, honey. Please. You need to stay hydrated.”
The three of us lay flat on our backs across the bathroom floor, staring at the ceiling, holding our stomachs. We look like shit. We smell like shit. We feel like shit. We are nothing but shit.
Then Dad says the unthinkable:
“We have to eat him.”
Another long silence passes before Mom responds. “Go back to sleep.”
“Either we eat him or we die.”
“Then we die.”
More nothingness.
Then Dad says, “I think I’m blind.”
“What do you mean?” Mom asks.
“I can’t fucking see anything anymore.”
“What do you see?”
“Nothing. Fucking nothing.”
“Oh.” Mom sighs, half-awake. “It’s probably those alcohol wipes. They can make you go blind if you ingest them.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“Would you have cared?”
Dad struggles to sit up. Mom and I remain on our backs. He stands and approaches the tub, unwrapping the top of the blanket and grimacing as the scent intensifies. I start gagging but I’m too weak to do anything about it. He reaches down and feels around the body, although it’s hard to decipher what exactly he’s touching. Then he’s gagging harder than I am and he backs away, hand over his mouth and nose.
Somehow Mom’s already standing. “Leave him alone.”
“It’s our only choice,” Dad says, eyes watery, voice cracking.
“Like hell it is.”
“We have to.”
He approaches the sink and touches the various items scattered along the sink counter, but it’s obvious he can’t see anything, not really. “Goddammit, where is it?”
“What are you doing?” Mom asks.
“We need something… something to cut open the flesh. The razor. What did you do with it?”
“Don’t you fucking touch him.”
Dad pauses and side-glances toward her, clearly annoyed. A thin stream of blood leaks out of his left eyeball. “Oh, will you stop acting so hysterical?”
He resumes his search awhile longer while Mom stares at him from across the bathroom, baffled. Finally, he gives up and takes off his shirt, at this point drenched with sweat and various other fluids. He wraps it around his fist and punches the mirror. Glass shatters into the sink basin and along the countertop. He cautiously feels around the glass, taking his time but also anxious, then wraps the T-shirt around the handle of a particularly long, thick shard.
He turns back toward the tub and Mom attempts to block his path but quickly retreats against the wall the moment he threatens her with his new weapon. Despite being blind, he can still sense her presence. He side-steps into the tub and crouches over the body, gripping the glass shard in one hand, holding it out, unsure how to proceed. He snarls at both of us like a cornered animal.
“If any of you… fucking witches… try to stop me… I won’t… I don’t know… we need to eat. Okay? We need to eat… we need to eat.”
Dad cuts into Bobby’s stomach and starts ripping out unrecognizable organs and eating them raw, taking huge animalistic bites and gagging as he chews. Mom and I remain on the opposite side of the bathroom, witnessing this atrocity and feeling totally helpless. I keep glancing at Bobby’s face waiting for him to react.
But, of course, he doesn’t react.
He can’t.
And for that, I’m grateful.
Half a minute later, Dad’s gagging gets out of control and he leaps out of the tub, landing in the center of the bathroom on all fours and vomits all over the floor. Blood and gore masks his face and finally we see his true form. He tries standing but slips in his own puke. More sickness projectiles out of his mouth as he screams. He gets up again and tackles the door, bounces off, lands in the puke again. Starts acting fully fucking crazy by standing, jumping at the door, falling, and doing it all over again for a long time, all the while spraying blood and vomit from his mouth. After several unsuccessful tackles, he crawls back to the door, pressing his face against the crack.
“Help! Heelllp! I’m being held prisoner by a coven of witches! A coven of witches has killed my boy! They’ve murdered my son in cold blood and I am next! Please! Pleeaase!”
He continues screaming nonsense for several minutes before going limp against the door and passing out. Mom and I don’t dare move or make a sound. Neither of us are in much of a hurry to find out what happens next time he wakes up.
Noise explodes on the other side of the door. Dad jolts awake, snapping his head around the room, screaming. “I can’t see anything! I can’t fucking see! What’s that fucking noise? What the fuck?”
“I don’t know,” Mom says. “Music, I think.” She glances down at me, confused.
Of course I recognize the sound.
It’s my phone.
Someone’s calling me.
Amy.
You’re alive.
Dad reaches through the door opening and feels around the carpet in their bedroom. “Oh, shit, I think I got it,” he says, excited, and pulls my cell phone back into the bathroom with him.
Somehow it’s survived through the rain.
Somehow the battery isn’t dead.
I remain paralyzed across the room, unconvinced I’m not hallucinating again. This can’t be real.
Can it?
Dad answers my phone and presses it against his ear, listening for a moment, and says, “Yes. Of course. Yes. No. I understand. Yes. Of course.”
Then he snaps the phone and tosses the separated halves back through the door.
“What the fuck, Robert?” Mom says.
He starts slowly crawling across the bathroom, through vomit and blood and shit and piss, a lunatic smile carved across his face. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Robert. Stop. Who did you talk to? Who called?”
He nods at me, somehow seeing me despite his recent loss of sight. “She’s the one who caused this, which means she’s the only one who can end it.”
“Wh-what?” I whisper.
“Robert…”
He springs forward, wrapping his hands around my throat and slamming the back of my skull against the wall, screaming.
“KILL THE WITCH KILL THE WITCH KILL THE WITCH!”
Mom shouts somewhere nearby and tackles him off me. He rolls over on his back next to the toilet and Mom straddles his stomach, slapping his face with one hand after the other.
“LEAVE HER ALONE LEAVE HER ALONE LEAVE HER ALONE!”
The whole time she’s hitting him, he’s laughing loud and insane.
She leans to the side and knocks the toilet lid off the trash can, then flips over the container.
Only a second passes before the rattlesnake strikes out, somehow still alive, starving just like the rest of us, and latches its fangs onto Dad’s left cheek.
He screams, this time in legitimate pain, and throws Mom off him like she weighs nothing.
He sits up. The snake remains hanging from his face. He won’t stop screaming.
No, not screaming.
Laughing.
He’s fucking laughing.
He rips the snake from his cheek and opens his mouth real wide and bites the creature’s head clean off, then spits it toward Mom.
“…kill the witch kill the witch kill the witch kill the witch…”
He stands, holding the decapitated snake’s body, twirling it around like a lasso. Mom tries backpedaling while still on the floor but where the hell is she going to go?
“…kill the witch kill the witch…”
He whips her with the snake, over and over, enjoying the sound of her screams.
Behind them, somehow, I manage to make it to my feet. In one hand I hold the glass shard he used to cut open Bobby’s body, part of Dad’s shirt still wrapped around the handle. The weapon’s covered in blood and other things I can’t dare to speculate on.