Author's Note:
Things are happening! This chapter has some grossness but you should honestly expect that by now. How did you like the mushroom man? By the way. I just found out I can do a line divider! Check out the new divider below. Though if you aren't caught up you might have seen this by now because I going to go back can add this on every chapter. I like... Out of ten. Okay. Chapter time. Enjoy!
⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘₊ ⊹ Soul 𓉸 Rejected ⊹ ₊⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘
12Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡgufTT3Ex2e
Zeph sprinted tirelessly in the direction the mushroom man pointed. He didn’t grow weary; he barely broke a sweat. He ran the entire span until the first buildings were in sight. He slowed to a fast paced walk, then to an inconspicuous power stroll when he realized how strange it would be to see a bare-foot man sprint in from the middle of nowhere.
He found the impacted dirt of an unpaved road leading into town and aligned his trajectory to it. He figured it would be normal to come in from a road more travelled, but wondered why the pavement was. There was no asphalt or concrete, not even a brick road. Just dirt.
As more buildings came into view, he found it even more strange that they were made of wood planks, not very different from the wood shack he’d just left. It appeared that the architecture of the buildings weren’t of this century at all.
Now that he thought of it, he hadn’t seen a car or any modern technology yet since returning to the mortal plane. Upon entering the town, he looked a little closer. The wood was old but not more than a few years old, with horse tacks and trough on the side or a few of them, like the set of a movie.
“I won’t forget you!” A woman marched out of one of the houses, adjusting her dress to cover her shoulder. She shouted after a man who straightened a black cowboy hat over his smirk. Zeph couldn’t get a good look at his face but it was clearly dressed like a villain from a spaghetti western with twice the devilish charm.
“I know, darling,” he hooked pristine black leather boots into the stirrups of a tall black horse with a clink. With practiced ease, he mounted his steed without another word, picturesque in the backdrop of an American period piece.
It was a cowboy. Sure, Zeph knew there were country towns like these but there were no familiar signs of his modern life. There were no colorful clothing, no telephone poles and not a single person absorbed in their cell phone screen. Bewildered, he stumbled down the dirt road wondering when in the hell was he.
A man barged out through the front door of another home and onto the street, vomiting violently on the ground directly in front of Zeph. He backed up in disgust, careful not to step into the bile.
“Christ, almighty, Benny,” another man followed the first one, named Benny, he guessed, through the same door.
“Sorry, Georgie. But I ain’t never seen nothin’ like that unholy hell up there.” Benny pointed at the house’s second floor window.
“Hey! What’s goin’ on, Georgie? D’you get that mess cleaned up?” A third man shouted from down the street. He wore slightly more formal clothes and a dark brown cowboy hat.
“He ain’t got the stomach for it, Mikey. Frankly, I ain’t neither.”
“Well, got-dammit, Georgie. Sheriff got enough on his plate, don’t you think? Now, you told me you can get that shit cleaned up for a day’s wage. Either get that house cleaned up or find me a man that can.”
“Aye, Deputy.” Georgie shook his head at Benny who was still retching into the street. He noticed Zeph and took in his appearance; his ragged clothes were still thin enough to show dense muscle beneath it. “Hey, boy. Tryna earn five dollars?”
Zephaniah looked at his bare feet and then to Benny. He wondered if five dollars was a lot here and simply shrugged.
Georgia seemed to be satisfied enough with that as an answer and beckoned him up the steps onto the porch in through the door.
Georgie led him through the old-timey house. It was well built and had an air of quality, maybe even wealth to it. The first floor was decorated with Victorian-era, walnut furniture, including a massive grandfather clock. Zeph hadn’t seen a grandfather clock outside of antique shops and old westerns.
“Wow.” Zeph muttered under his breath, thinking he’d stepped into something like a museum.
“Nice ain’t it? This belonged to the Crocks. Bankers. Keep your sticky fingers to yourself, understand?” Georgie kept Zeph in front of him as they approached the stairs. “These were nice folk. Wouldn’t want no Mexican pocketing their trinkets, ye ’ear?”
Zephaniah hadn’t been called Mexican to his face so bluntly before. He was a Rios but he certainly wasn’t Mexican. Maybe it was his dark curly hair, or dark brown eyes that gave him away as being of Hispanic descent, but being half whatever-brand-of-Tennessee his mom was, he figured he blended in pretty well as ethnically ambiguous. Whatever blending he thought he had, it didn’t fool Georgie. It appeared that Georgie knew a ‘Mexican’ when he saw one.
He decided that now was probably not the time to speak up with how little information he had. It was best to play along, keep his cards close to his chest at least until he could see this so-called “mess” upstairs.
Zeph was used to picking up odd jobs and tasks off a mobile app before he died. He was no stranger to a clogged toilet or the occasional dead animal in the attic. He was sure he could handle this and maybe earn a little information for his troubles. If nothing else, it would get him in some good graces to ask more about Dylan and vouch for his character as not being a murderer.
They crested the stairs and there were burlap bags and a stretcher laid on the floor before the master bedroom.
“Right through there. Come get me when you’re done.” Georgie pointed to a bedroom door before taking a strategic retreat back down the stairs.
Zeph felt some hesitation in his bones. Something told him not to push on that door. He buried that feeling somewhere under “Do it for Dylan” and “How bad could it be?” The door creaked precariously from the one remaining hinge. The other two had been broken free, dangling from loose nails and splinters of wood. He stepped on more chips of the door that littered the floor as he entered the room.
The smell was what struck him first. He had been looking at the debris on the floor so as not to step on the sharpest pieces when the pungent stench of putrid meat filled both nostrils and tried to climb down his throat.
The smell turned his focus upward to the rest of the room.
He couldn’t believe his eyes.
A woman’s body sat up in the bed, decapitated, but the head was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the wall behind her was painted with blood, long strands black hair and sticky chunks of something he couldn’t discern. She was holding something in a hand that rested in her lap. As he took another step into the room, he could just barely make out what she was holding.
Two eyeballs and the wiry nerves behind them rest between limp fingers on her palm.
Zephaniah gagged when he noticed her husband near the window.
The man’s body would be indistinguishable as human if it weren’t for the hands and feet that stuck out from the wooden wall. It was like the man dove head first into it at such a speed that turned him into a human-accordion.
Bone jutted from the wall and Zeph wouldn’t know he was staring at what remained of the man’s head if a wet mound of brown hair didn’t sag from the hole.
His stomach turned and he clasped his mouth. Something was deeply wrong here. More than the eyeballs. More than splattered heads and crushed bodies. There was something wrong in the air. It wreaked of blood, and rot certainly begun already from the blazing sun overhead but there was something else.
There was something that stuck out. It didn’t belong. He didn’t want to smell anything and he certainly wanted to dismiss this wrongness as an error, but he couldn’t ignore it. He choked his senses even after he closed his nose.
It smelled burnt.
“What on earth could have done this?”
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