Page 119 of Property of Necro
Chapter
Thirty-Four
Standing in Rot’s office,I watch Necro through the camera feeds. They’re live-streaming again and have been for days now. If I thought Coffin looked like hell before, Necro takes the cake. He’s lost so much weight. You can see every rib. His collarbones are soup bowls, and his abs are cut from glass. The gutters of his hips, where his camo pants hang loosely, are usually a place I’d love to lick, but he looks like a walking corpse—pale skin, covered in blood. The dark smudges around his eyes and down his neck have long worn off. According to the brothers, he hasn’t showered in days, and Creature is going out of his mind with worry.
“He signs sometimes, when he doesn’t think we’re watching,” the scarred face brother says from beside us as we observe Necro meticulously paint with a bucket of blood.
“What does he say?” I ask.
Creature sighs like the weight of the world is bearing down on his shoulders, and he’s ready to let it crush him. “He says he wants to die. I tried to take his knife so he can’t use it on himself—the one we all keep in our boots—but he won’t let me. I can’t get close enough to slip it out, and he’s hyper-aware of everything. The music stopped once, and he raged ‘til it was turned back on.”
“How long has this been going on?”
“The painting. A little over a week,” Creature explains. “The murder spree? A month or so. We can’t keep our cells filled. Mama had to call in a bunch of favors to keep the shipments coming. Rot can’t keep up with the influx of parts. We had to take a load of parts to a friend’s crematorium to make space.”
“What do you usually do with all the bodies? I know the women are buried… But…”
“Rot didn’t show you?” Creature glances over to the man in question.
“Nope,” I reply. “I assume this has something to do with the lab I’ve heard about but not seen.”
“The skulls throughout the church, Rot preserved those.”
Wow. Okay.
“Really?” My voice jumps a dozen octaves as I swing my gaze to the man in question.
Rocking back on his heels, Rot shrugs like a shy little boy. “It’s kinda my thing.”
“Are you going to show me?” It would be nice to see. It can’t be any worse than Coffin’s trophy room, or what Necro does for funsies.
Rot’s nose wrinkles. “Fuck no. It smells horrible in the lab. I’m the only one allowed in there. There’s an intake freezer for the brothers to put parts, but it’s all me.”
“You process full bodies?” See? I learn something new every day.
Rot flashes me one of those aw-you’re-adorable grins. “How do you think I make money for the club, Red?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I figured doing the video stuff was how you got a cut. You know, from the live streams.” He is the man behind the cameras. It makes sense that he’d get a portion of the money they make, as would Creature, who helps facilitate everything.
“Nope. I get money from the bodies,” he explains, shocking the hell out of me.
We’ve spent months fucking like bunnies, and somehow this topic never came up when we were post-orgasm chatting in bed.
“How?” I ask, genuinely curious.
“Are you sure you really want to know?” Rot tests, and when I nod, he carries on. “Okay. Suit yourself. I have a vat of beetles that eat flesh from bone. I preserve organs in specimen jars and sell them online. There’s a huge market for it.”
“For preserved organs?”
“Yeah. People love jars of eyeballs. Or, if I can get a complete set of teeth and eyeballs from the same person, people go crazy for that shit. Plus, some of the old fuckers still have gold fillings. I pop ‘em out and melt ‘em down. Gold is worth a mint.” Rot rubs his fingers together like he’s collecting all that dough, while I’m stuck on what he does. People want body parts? Science labs, sure. Museums? Of course. But every day people, displayed in your house? Gross. Then again, it’s not all that different from what a taxidermist does to animals.Humans are animals. There’s a market for everything, I guess.
“And what do you do with the rest of the byproducts?” I ask.
“Compost.”
Excuse me? I can’t be hearing this right.
“You compost humans?” I squeak, staring at Rot wide-eyed. Why would you compost humans? Just burn them. Bury them. Something.
