Depths: Southern Watch #2

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Authors: Robert J. Crane
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the air. She just watched, though, not a word, not a sound, her brothers getting restless behind her. She watched her daddy crank the body into the air and she looked at that empty stomach cavity, saw the ribs from the inside.
    And she never made a sound. Just watched while he cut it to pieces, reducing that hog to individual cuts of meat over the course of the next hours.
    Erin looked into the kitchen of Corey Hughes’s house. There was a carcass on the table, something that had been opened up. The ribs were cracked at the sternum and pulled back, and she could see that the heart and damned near all else had been removed. She took a step forward and peered in. The chest cavity was empty all the way to the spine. She took a sniff, and it was damned rancid, but it didn’t bother her stomach. She heard Reeve catch his breath from the stench, a few paces behind her.
    Just like slaughtering a hog all over again.
    “I ain’t never seen anything like this shit,” Reeve said from behind her.
    Erin didn’t answer him. She looked into the open cavity, that empty space where life had mysteriously once existed. The thighs of the corpse were laid open, large chunks of meat removed by something. It was uneven, whatever had done this, not smooth like a knife. It was like teeth had come in and ground their way through one of the legs, even breaking the femur, which she knew wasn’t a picnic. Which the rest of the corpse looked like, come to think of it.
    A picnic for something.
    Or someone .
    “This place is a goddamned slaughterhouse,” Reeve said behind her.
    “Yeah,” she breathed and tried to tear her eyes away. She couldn’t, though.
     
    * * *
     
    Hendricks’s long-ass walk was just about nearing its end. He was crossing the interstate bridge, the sky above was making noise like it might start dropping water on him again, and he was hustling to make sure he missed that. His stomach was rumbling but he had some snacks back at the motel. He wasn’t in the mood for a greasy breakfast anyway, not even after walking for the last hour and a half, and that was just about all the diner across the interstate offered. Grease fried in grease, with some eggs possibly somewhere under the oil.
    He wasn’t really pissed at Erin anymore, not now. He’d walked it out of himself. Now he was just sullen and irritated. It’s not like he knew her all that well, either. He’d never even asked if she was on the pill, just assumed it. Probably been too carried away with having sex for the first time in five damned years to even care. Like he forgot it could have consequences.
    He’d got a little drunk on her, if he was being honest with himself. She was damned pretty, had a youthful cuteness about her that hadn’t been part of his life over the last few years. She was cheery, that was it. Hendricks hadn’t been cheery in a long damned time. Rueful, more often than not. Sarcastic, all the time.
    Also, she had a body that didn’t look like it had gotten any mileage on it since high school, and he liked that. She was a thin slip of a girl, and there wasn’t any problem at all with that in his mind. She was proportioned just right for it, too, not comically exaggerated like she’d had surgery on her busts, as some did. No, her chest was pretty close to flat and for some reason it worked just fine for him.
    He crossed into the parking lot of the Sinbad motel, bearing toward his room at little more than a saunter. It was about all he could manage, and it had taken him a while to get from Midian to out here. His hip was aching, and he figured he’d go in and sit in that ugly ass chair in the corner of his room, put his feet up for a spell. He might even need some more sleep, and he knew for a fact he needed a hot shower after the walk. Things were sticking together on him from the faint sweat generated by his activity.
    He looked up in time to see a guy coming out of the room next to his. Kind of a middle-aged fellow, medium height, medium

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