ANOTHER
- by Jon Rollins
(originally published October 2017 in Abyss & Apex Magazine)
Part 2 <<jump to Part 1>>
The second day of my secret exile was much easier. They took the Bronco into town together for various errands, an hour drive one way, which gave me at least two hours to make all the necessary arrangements.
First, I’d need to arrange for body disposal. But the old army tarp I expected to find in our “clutter corner” of the garage was missing. This world might be similar to the one on the other side of my jump at Coyote Point, but it wasn’t exactly the same. In this world, it seemed the thing didn’t exist, or maybe it had been recently used and could be found elsewhere. But the tarp wasn’t a critical part of my plan, so I made a mental note to keep my eyes open for it and moved on.
Next, I decided to check the tool shed out back--ever watchful for more rattlers--and confirmed our wheelbarrow was there and ready for action. Then I went back inside to orchestrate the murder of my other self, my doppelganger, or whatever he was.
Like most pot farmers, Nikki and I kept things as natural as possible, beyond the artificial lighting and fertilizers. We certainly didn’t taint our product with high-enhancing additives or dilutants in order to increase earnings. We kept our production clean and simple. But a former contact once inquired about hybrid product, so I had experimented out of curiosity. The results weren’t worthwhile, so the experiment had been abandoned, but there was still a sampling of those additive components in a tin box under the bathroom sink. I now retrieved that box and opened it up. Among the various contents was a small glass vial half-full of white powder.
Gamma Hydroxybutyrate, or GHB, is a neural inhibitor targeting a variety of brain and sensory functions. Some of the more popular effects include severe drowsiness, hallucinations, and short-term memory loss. It also increases the libido and decreases inhibition. It was suggested that lacing it in our product would produce a more stimulating high, which turned out to be a bogus claim.
I had something entirely different in mind, tapping out a portion of the powder into a half-empty wine bottle on our dining room table. Nikki and me, we were creatures of habit, and that spelled opportunity.
#
They didn’t sit on the patio that night, but it didn’t matter. My plan could play out on the patio or at the dining room table. Or in the bedroom, as it turned out. And as usual, they brought along the wine. I stood listening outside the bedroom window with equal parts disgust, intrigue, and pity, as my wife made love once more to that other man who also happened to be me.
A half-hour into their interlude, they were both lost in a drug-induced half-sleep, under the paralyzing spell of a hazy blur of altered semi-awareness at best. They may or may not see me as I did my thing, but it didn’t matter. Even if they saw me as more than a hallucination, neither would be able to react in any meaningful way, and what’s more, Nikki wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning.
After a quick peek to confirm they were both out, I hurried around to the patio door. The effects of GHB vary from person to person, but I figured I would have between two and six hours to get the job done. If everything went smoothly, that would be enough.
Originally, I had planned to simply strangle the other me with my bare hands. But, as the moment drew near, I couldn’t stomach the thought of squeezing the life out of myself. The other guy really didn’t deserve this, but I would not share my wife. I would not do that, so he had to go.
Inspired at the last minute, I grabbed two more plastic grocery bags in passing through the kitchen, the sturdiest and most intact ones I could find, along with a half-roll of duct tape from the junk drawer. Then I made way back to the bedroom.
They were both laid out atop the sheets, on their sides facing each other. It was obvious they--we--were in love. For a moment, I was overwhelmed by the sight of my wife alive again there on the bed. I reached out to touch her … then drew back my trembling hand. First, this ugly deed must be done.
They both stirred a little as I rolled my other self onto his back. He actually opened his eyes briefly and smiled up at me before drifting off again. It wasn’t until I lifted his head to tightly tape the double-bagged opening air-tight around his neck that the other me began to struggle. He had no control of motor skills, so his effort was feeble, more a series of spasms than an actual struggle.
Thirty minutes later, a violent shiver ran down my spine as I stared at my own corpse.
I couldn’t bring myself to pull the bags off his head.
Thirty minutes after that, I was frantically plowing our wheelbarrow through the dark, trying hard to avoid wild cacti and sagebrush along what I believed was a route back to the cabin ruins. More specifically, we were headed toward the well.
The opening was not so wide as it had seemed, or else my corpse was wider than expected. And God, how that old well stunk. It was wretched stuffing him in, and at one point, a wave of nausea overtook me and I stopped to puke. Then, when returning back to task, I regarded the half-exposed body illuminated by my nearby strategically positioned flashlight. It protruded limply from the well mouth, right arm and head submerged from view, but its left arm was wedged alongside the torso and arched upward into the night so that the wedding band glinted bright.
My wedding band.
In that moment of heartfelt kinship to a man who had obviously loved Nikki just as much, I was inclined to retrieve the ring and slip it in my pocket for safe-keeping. This felt somehow important, and I knew I’d want the same if our roles were reversed.
Then I resumed pushing and twisting and wrenching the body into that foul-smelling hole in the New Mexico desert. Once stuffed hip-deep inside, gravity finally did its thing and that other me slid free to drop with a series of thumps, scrapes, and thuds to the very bottom. Those sickening sounds--or more specifically, what caused them--produced another series of heaves, purging whatever my earlier puking had missed.
Then it was over. I repositioned the pile of old boards over the well, then collected the wheelbarrow and searched with my flashlight beam for snakes or other nasty New Mexico wildlife while following our solar lights back home, to the Oasis Inn Deluxe.
Where my sleeping beauty lay waiting.
After two days hiding out in camping mode, along with a murder and corpse disposal, my first order of business was to shower and shave. After that, I flushed the remaining GHB-laced wine and the drug vial down the drain, then buried the emptied vial at the bottom of the kitchen trash. I then returned to the bedroom, placed the empty wine bottle on my nightstand to complete the illusion, and at long last, finally collapsed into our bed and fell asleep holding my sleeping wife’s hand.
Nikki was alive. She was all mine, and I had both died and killed over the last two days to keep it that way.
Because I could not live without her.
Because she was mine and I refused to share.
#
She was watching me sleep. I woke to find her laying there, staring at me, studying me. Sparkling green eyes surveyed my face from beneath her delicately furrowed brow. Nikki was so intent in this examination, she apparently hadn’t noticed I was awake and looking right back at her. Being so recently burdened by the guilt of murder, I was terrified of what she might see.
Did she know?
But also, I was lost in the depth and brilliance of those eyes. If it’s true the eyes are a window to the soul, then Nikki’s soul must be as vast and complex as the whole universe. If I had to do it again, I knew I could kill a thousand times over if necessary, just to lay there next to her. But wouldn’t she hate me for it?
Did she know?
Lacking the eloquence to produce an appropriately profound greeting for my long lost wife, I ended the silence with a simple “Hi.”
The sound broke her concentration, and when she looked into my eyes, she actually saw me. And smiled nervously.
Did she know?
“Hi yourself.”
“I love you,” I said.
And she started to cry. I didn’t know why Nikki was crying, but it broke me, and I started to cry too.
I reached for her, pulling her over on top of me, and squeezing her tight. I kissed her lips and her eyes and the tears on her cheeks, and I kissed her neck, marveling at how she always smelled faintly and inexplicably of cinnamon. Nikki’s long, feathery soft hair fell in a veil around our faces as we kissed, cocooning us in a tiny black sphere which contained everything I needed in a universe.
We made love that morning, engaging in a fierce carnal exchange so intense I thought our flesh might not endure it. I attacked her body like a wild animal, and Nikki matched my ferocity. We were savages, lost in a volatile chemical reaction that might kill us both. Still, we indulged like this for hours, then slept through the afternoon. Having finally recovered, we next succumbed to a growing hunger and clambered from our wrecked bed to clean up and drive into town for a nice Italian dinner.
With red wine.
So, we went and ate our dinner, made small talk about the other restaurant patrons, and we drank our wine.
And there was a dead body in the well.
The brutality of what I had done came to me in brief clips, like sucker punches, throughout the evening.
That one big step off the top of Coyote Point.
My own smiling face looking up at me in a drug-induced daze.
His wedding band glinting in the beam of my flashlight …
Oh God. The ring!
I’d forgotten about the ring. It was still in my pocket, where Nikki could accidentally find it and this whole nightmarish affair become completely unraveled so I might lose her forever.
She could never ever see that ring, and I obsessed about it on our drive back home, to our home, where we might just live out our lives together happily ever after. If I played it cool. If I played it smart.
#
At the house, I brushed my teeth in the bathroom while she hangered her evening dress and straightened up the bed--we’d nearly destroyed it that morning. With the water running to drown out any revealing sounds, and knowing there was little time, I quickly retrieved that same tin box tucked away beneath our sink from the previous night, and fished the second wedding band from my pants pocket, carefully setting it on the edge of the basin. The box was long forgotten and held nothing of value or interest for Nikki, so I figured it was the perfect hiding place.
I tipped back the lid on its tiny hinges and then paused briefly to consider an alternative to leaving something so valuable loose at the bottom. Inside the box, there were a few rolled up Ziplock baggies and a few unlabeled prescription pill bottles, along with a dropper, some glass test tubes, and a syringe. That was the inventory I recollected from my brief experiment long ago and had long since abandoned.
But then I noticed something new in the box, something I had never put there and had missed in my haste the night before. A small aspirin bottle was buried in a corner of the box under the rolled-up baggies, barely visible amidst their contents. And as fate would have it, this was the perfect container for a wedding band.
Surprised and curious, I dug out the bottle to investigate.
A slight rattling as I moved it told me something was inside, something I very much doubted to be aspirin. Running my thumb alongside, I popped the childproof top and peeked at its contents.
For a split second, my mind couldn’t comprehend what I saw. Mind reeling and knees weak, I sat down the bottle, grabbing the basin with both hands to steady myself. And I closed my eyes tight.
Then her voice came from behind. It was calm, calculating, each word spoken with careful deliberation.
“You’re mine, and I will not share.”
#
Where does the nightmare end? Hell, where did it even begin? At first I thought it started with the rattlers out in the tool shed, but now I’m not so sure. Nikki is a smart girl. She’s clever, with a better eye for detail than me. Odds are, it started long before the rattlers, but I’ll never know the whole truth.
Do I even want to?
Our love is a villainous thing that has twisted us into murderers. If only we had shared, things would be so, so different now and maybe this story would have its happy ending. Maybe. For reasons unknown, we’ve been granted a rare opportunity to learn how far we both would go to stay together. Too far, it turns out, which is why we would have to leave, and immediately.
If only we had shared.
By midnight, the Bronco was loaded and speeding from our Oasis Inn Deluxe forever, while Nikki and I sat quietly in its cab. Our eyes scanned the countryside around Coyote Point, watching for any sign of things to come, watching for … another.
But as we sped past that rocky landmark, enchanted or cursed though it was, nothing happened whatsoever. No one clambered up out of the ditch at its base and into the road to stop us.
Thank God.
Nikki sighed and relaxed a little after that, reaching to hold my hand. Things had changed for us, but not our love. Never our love. It was a bad drug, and we were both hooked till death did we part … and apparently beyond.
But I wasn’t quite so relieved just yet. Coyote Point was some kind of door, and soon it might open to usher in another Nikki or another me, either one hell-bent on a reunion at any cost. Still, we wouldn’t make it easy for them. We would leave Coyote Point behind and find ourselves a random new home far, far away. We would get tattoos and invent code phrases to help detect another incident, but that wouldn’t really stop anything in the end. So, we’d try to change our nature, the nature of us all, by putting up signs along the way, figuring out some way of communicating to any who should follow, explaining the nightmare they might perpetuate or else prevent if only they--if we--could somehow learn to share.
But deep down, even knowing as much as I knew then, I wondered if I would ever be able to share Nikki with another man, even if that other man was me. And if we couldn’t change after everything that happened, then what could we expect from the newcomers?
Oh, and there was just one other concern at that particular moment, something more urgent which made me push that old Bronco to its limits as we raced through the night. When we had rushed to grab our essentials, including both rings taken from the two bodies--were there more than two bodies at the bottom of that stinking well?--and get the hell out of New Mexico …
The revolver and the Winchester were missing.
End <<jump to Part 1>>
Bio: Jon Rollins is a writer hobbyist, short story enthusiast, and editor for Wicked Works Magazine. His written works have appeared in Down In The Dirt Magazine, DailyScienceFiction.com, Abyss & Apex Magazine, and a book of spooky road trip tales called Bumps In The Road, among others. He resides in Colorado, but occasionally hops on his motorcycle and rides off in search of the highway’s end. He also vacations in the Twilight Zone, where he one day hopes to retire. Look for him there and in future publications.
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