Page 60 of Caution Tape

There’s about a foot of greenish-blue fluid in the barrel. I stare at it for a moment; it reminds me of the bottom of a well. I imagine tumbling into it. Sloshing around at the bottom as it expands and becomes inconceivably large. My fingers sliding off the smooth walls as I try to climb out.

“Michael is in one of these?” she asks.

I nod. “Third one back. On the right.” I smile. “Jerri’s in here too.”

She doesn’t say anything. A lot has gone on between us since I took her friend’s life; I wonder if she’s still sore about it.

We haul Ryan in, delicately climbing into the train car like he’s a grand piano we’re trying not to scratch. His knuckles drag on the floor in a way that my mind latches onto and keeps replaying.

His legs go in the barrel first. He slumps, his hips catching the side and he threatens to fall over, the comforter slipping off his face, revealing the anguished expression he died with.

I place both hands on his shoulders and shove down, his legs folding against the barrel sides. He’s taller than Michael and Jerald; he won’t fit in the barrel as easily. I push his head down and an arm pops out, drooping over the edge of the barrel.

I hold it with both hands and lean my entire weight against it. The elbow is flush against the metal rim. It takes three tries, but on third, the arm snaps. There’s a loud, lightcrick, like when you crack your knuckles, and I’m able to bend it and squeeze it into the barrel.

I hear another barrel open behind me. A suffocating waft fills the train car.

Once, the power went out for a few days in the middle of the summer, and I had to help my dad empty it. The rotting eggs and spoiled lunchmeat were one thing; a sour, acrid smell that seemed to work its way into our nostrils underneath the face masks.

But the salad; a huge container of it from a fourth of July party, had turned black and gooey.Thatvegetable rot smell, that smell of decay, was what seemed to seep into the walls of the fridge and made us choke back vomit as we hurried to toss it into black garbage bags.

Now, Jerald smells like that.

While Cora is busy, I remove the small knife from my pocket and quickly hold up Ryan’s hand. There, under the middle and ring fingers. A ragged bit of blood and skin. Cora’s. I scrape his fingernails a bit, getting some of it on the blade, before carefully enclosing the knife in a bit of paper towel.

I will have to come back and take his jawbone out. Michaels too.

I’ve just beensobusy.

I put the lid on, having to press it on the back of Ryan’s head to get it to fit. Like when the garbage can is full, but you don’t want to take it out, so you push everything down as hard as you can. The lid goes back on, and I stretch, feeling the soreness in my shoulders and back.

Cora is staring at her dead friend.

I go to her side and look in at him too.

His face is tilted up at us. The eyes are open—soupy, blank, and white. They remind me of poached eggs. I can see the nail still stuck in the mole and I suppress a laugh. There’s a blackened slew of blood that coats the entire front of his body.

The bottom half of his face is gone.

Getting the jawbone out was difficult. It took a lot of cutting, a lot of prying. He died… well, I don’t know exactly when. Sometime when I was playing with his body. He passed out after the nail to his balls.

Cora shoves the lid over him and storms out.

Quickly, I go to each barrel and open them, steeling myself against the stench of the rotting corpses. With careful precision, I take the knife out of my pocket and use the tip to press the bits of Cora’s skin under Michael’s fingernails.

I do the same to Jerald’s, although his fingernails have taken on a waxy, flimsy texture.

Ryan, Michael, Jerald. All connected to Cora. All have her DNA on them. All have been seen with her recently.

There will be inconsistencies and issues with framing her. A shrewd detective will see through it.

But…

Almost half of all homicides are unsolved.

And they’ll have a salacious, pretty young girl as a suspect.

Oh, the headlines.

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