Page 101 of Decimation

Konstantine is on top of me, his face a mask of feral grief. He’s not a fighter, never was but madness has given him a desperate, wiry strength. He lands a punch to my jaw that makes my teeth clack together and fills my mouth with the copper taste of blood.

“You can’t have her!” he sobs, spittle flying from his lips. “She’s mine! You never understood! You never understood our love!”

Another punch, this one to my cheekbone, and my vision explodes in a supernova of pain. I see stars, and behind the stars, I see her face. Not this crumbling husk, but Ines as she was in life. The way she would look at me over the dinner table, a slow, predatory smile playing on her lips as her hand found Konstantine’s thigh under the table, her eyes never leaving mine.

“…You tried to steal her before. You tried to steal her love, but she always wanted me more. She always desired me more.” His words come out jumbled. A tirade of delusion that reveals the true madness consuming him. “She might have enjoyed fucking you, but it was me she truly loved. Me she truly wanted…”

The rage that floods me now is not hot. It is a glacial, clarifying fury that burns away the pain and the shock. Even now, he cannot admit what she did, what he did, what they did. After all these years, he still refuses to see his abuses for what they were.

I hate her for what she did to him, I hate her for what she made me do. I hate her for this final, grotesque embrace. For the way her crumbling bones are digging into my flesh, for the way her dust is filling my nostrils, for the way she is still, still, the centre of his entire fucking universe.

With a roar that comes from the deepest pit of my soul, I buck my hips and throw Konstantine off balance. He topples sideways, his grip on the corpse loosening. The body rolls away with a dry, rustling sound, coming to rest a few feet from us, its empty eye sockets staring at the ceiling. For a split second, Konstantine’s attention follows it, a look of pure, unadulterated panic on his face.

It’s the opening I need. I scramble on top of him, my knees pinning his arms to the floor. He thrashes beneath me, screaming her name, his body arching with a strength I have to use all my weight to contain.

He is crying now, great, heaving sobs that wrack his frame. “Please, Lazarus! Please! Don’t take her from me! She’s all I have!”

My hands find his throat. The skin is clammy and slick with sweat and the greasy residue of decay.

I squeeze.

I don’t look at his face,

I can’t. If I look at his face, at the brother I loved, I might falter.

I fix my eyes on her.

And I squeeze and I squeeze.

Ines’s skull lies just beyond his shoulder, dislodged from the rest of the body during our struggle. The flickering fluorescent light plays over its contours, making the empty sockets seem to shift and watch.

Even now, even as a detached, fleshless thing, it mocks me.

My hands tighten. Konstantine’s struggles become more frantic, his legs kicking uselessly against the stone floor. A gurgling sound escapes his throat. The dust of her is in my lungs, the grit of her bones is ground into my clothes, into the cuts on my knuckles. We are all becoming one thing down here, a single, composite creature of violence and rot.

“She… is… nothing,” I hiss through gritted teeth, the words a mantra against the grinning bone. “She was a parasite. A leech, and she deserved everything she got.”

His eyes, bloodshot and bulging, are still fixed on the skull, not on me. Even as I choke the life from him, his last conscious thought is for her.

Finally, his body goes slack. His eyelids flutter and close. The gurgling stops, replaced by a shallow, rasping breath. I hold on for a few seconds longer, feeling the frantic pulse in his carotid artery slow to a dull, thudding rhythm under my thumbs. Then, I release him.

I let his head fall. It hits the stone floor with a dull, wet thud, his face turned towards the dirt, towards the scattered, powdery remains of his damned beloved. He lies there, face down in the filth, a broken man at the feet of his broken god.

I look down at the skull. It sits there, pristine and whole amidst the scattered debris of her body, the last intact monument to her existence. The grin is still there. Of course it is. It’s carved into the bone.

But it seems different now. Fading. Powerless.

I take a step towards it. My boot hovering over it.

I think of all the nights I spent in this place, bound, drugged, used and abused by this bitch.

“You are not his,” I whisper down to the skull, my voice a raw, torn thing. “You are not anyone’s. You are just dead.”

I bring my boot down.

The sound is not a crack, but a crunch. It doesn’t break into a few clean pieces. It implodes, folding in on itself, the fragments grinding together into a gritty paste of bone shards and dried matter.

And that perfect, mocking grin is gone, replaced by a concave ruin.