Chuck Wendig and the hiding of corpses.

This piece of flash fiction is borne from Chuck Wendig’s excellent blog, Terrible Minds. The brief was simple; write some flash fiction about the hiding of a corpse, in less than 1,000 words, and post a link to it from his blog. You can see his post and submissions here.

Here’s mine, knocked up in an hour or so;

~

Dead Weight

Bryony was thankful Cliff had insisted on keeping all that old plastic sheeting in the garage. ‘You never know…’ he always said.

Most of the crap he kept in there was just that; crap. But the big sheets of plastic from new kitchen appliances and household furniture had been perfect for wrapping up Cliff’s battered corpse.  A cheap and recycled burial shroud. He’d probably approve in fact, if he wasn’t dead, his skull caved in and his eyes glassy and unseeing.

Bryony now knew the meaning of dead-weight. Cliff was not a tall man and his strict vegan diet kept him thin. But dead, he’d tripled in density. She’d dragged him onto the plastic tarp and laid his arms alongside his body, the last act of dignity bestowed upon the man she’d battered to death from behind with a tire iron. The life insurance money would be worth all the effort, she told herself. The body was covered over with the excess plastic material and then bound tight with duct tape until he looked like a cheap-ass Egyptian mummy.

Cliff’s lovingly maintained SUV sped south to Florida so that Bryony could lend a hand in the storm relief effort that was starting to take shape after the area was battered by a recent hurricane. Cliff accompanied her, laid out on the bed of the truck and covered over with blankets, tinned food, bottled drinking water, and basic first aid supplies. She smiled at the irony of a dead man lying beneath piles of equipment destined to save lives. Cliff would die in the rubble of a stranger’s house, searching for victims but paying the ultimate price himself when a loose beam or rubble crashed down on him and crushed his skull. Bryony would escape injury but be devastated by her husband’s death, unable to save him as he lay trapped.

Bryony smiled at the simplicity of it. All she needed was a badly hit and already evacuated neighborhood amongst the swathe of devastation and she could pick her spot. The drive would take the best part of six hours, but it would be worth it. She’d be rid of the man she’d never really loved and would eventually pick up a cheque for almost a quarter of a million dollars.

The closer she got to the affected area, the worse the weather became. Rain lashed the windshield and she felt the wind tug at the vehicle as she drove along exposed and largely empty highways. The body of the hurricane had moved out to sea, but its tail still swept the coastal areas as it went. As she joined the county roads the occasional roadblock started to pop up, manned by exhausted-looking FEMA agents, but they waved her on when she explained she was making relief supply drop-offs at the designated disaster centers. Of course, she ignored the temporary signs to the centers and headed off to inspect the storm-wracked little towns along the route. Some already had clean-up crews working in them, groups of volunteers and property owners sectioning up fallen trees and sweeping broken glass. She drove on.

On a stretch of road between two towns she found the perfect location for Cliff’s second death. An old gas station, long since abandoned and vacated by its owners, stood slightly back from the tarmacadam highway. With no one to maintain and weather-proof it against the storm, it had suffered particularly badly. The roof covering the gas pumps had been completely torn from their pillars and scattered across the fallow grasslands beyond. The small mini-mart store had fared no better. The flat roof had collapsed in on itself, exposing skeletal steel girders and rain-soaked wooden planks.

Bryony pulled the SUV in behind the shell of the building so it couldn’t be seen from the road and took a closer look at the interior of the store. Cinderblocks were scattered across the floor like giant discarded teeth, water dripped from everything, and strands of vegetation lay like garlands from what remained of the roof. When the storm wrecked the building, it had knocked down a large part of the gable-end of the structure, creating an easy access point given that the  doors and windows were still blocked by steel sheeting, no doubt riveted in place when the business foreclosed. Perfect.

She opted to leave Cliff in his protective plastic shroud until she was ready to deposit his body into its final resting place. He still weighed a ton, and moving it off the back of the truck and into the ruined interior of the gas station was like trying to drag a ship’s mast over an obstacle course, but eventually Bryony got it where she wanted it. She cut Cliff free from the plastic wrappings and laid him out. Rainwater splattered his face as it dripped from the wrecked roof, mingling with the congealed blood in his hair.

Bryony selected a steel girder hanging from the roof at a forty-five degree angle and with superhuman effort managed to lift it at the bottom and drop the end onto Cliff’s already concaved skull. The perfect cover for the fatal injury she’d dealt the night before. Pleased with herself, she stood looking down at the body. Cliff was lying slightly on his side, shifted by the impact. He rolled over with the extra weight, trapping Bryony’s feet beneath his body and knocking her down. She screamed in shock, his face now turned toward her. At the exact point her eyes met his glassy, dead pupils, the wall at the end of the building groaned and shifted. Bryony tried to free her feet from under Cliff’s body, but she was stuck. She glanced up at the wall, just in time to see it come crashing down, entombing her and her husband beneath a ton of bricks and concrete, where they lay together in death.

~

Thanks to Missy for helping to ‘Americanize’ my work.

See, I wrote Americanize and not Americanise!