VII.
The next day Rex approaches Brendan and tells him they need to speak in private, so they head to the boys’ washroom.
“What’s up?” Brendan asks.
“You were right,” Rex whispers, even though he’s sure they’re the only people in the restroom.
Brendan smiles, “Whatta you mean?”
Rex checks again for any legs hanging off toilet seats under every stall door before continuing, “Bank, bro; I wanna make it.”
And so the two children concocted a plan. The deal was Rex would head home right after school and start to thaw out the body while Brendan tried to find any possible customers while keeping the situation on the downlow. The thing about their situation is that it’s so fucked up that if someone were to say no, Brendan could pretty easily brush it off as a joke. Just another couple of dudes joking around about fucking Rex’s mom, silly. But nothing is funny about how many kids ended up at Rex’s house. It must’ve been every single kid Brendan talked to, and they must’ve told two of their closest friends each. There were some older kids, some younger ones; hell, even some of the adults would’ve shown up had they been asked, married men for fuck’s sake.
When almost half the male student body showed up at his front door, Rex was shocked. To him, they looked almost like an impoverished community, or a village. All of them sick, their eyes seemed feverish, and all of them believing that Rex offered the cure.
The body hadn’t frozen as much as he had expected overnight and so she had thawed quickly; they would have to act fast to avoid rigor mortis and decomposition.
Now Rex finds himself staring out into a sea of eager faces, all positioned on his front lawn. He grabs Brendan and pulls him out of view. “What is this, dude? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit? What, I mean, the world’s biggest fucking gangbang? Are you joking?”
Brendan tries to back away, almost as if he’s offended, “Dude, why the fuck not? Let them go at the same time; we’re in a rush, right? We don’t want her stinking up the place.”
Rex looks down at the body, the body that brought him into this world. “No way, dude, fuck this. I’m calling the cops; get these idiots off the fucking lawn.”
Rex reaches for his phone and Brendan grabs his arm. “Rex, there are thousands of potential dollars standing on your lawn right now, more money than either of us have ever seen. I mean, do what you gotta do, and whatever that is, I’ll do it, too, because I’m your friend. But we could be fuckin’ rich.”
Rex’s brain works a lot faster than the average human being; his multitasking would make the rest of us look like a bunch of fucking mongoloids. By the time Brendan had finished his sentence, Rex had anticipated all potential outcomes, and he was quite sure by now that he was a few steps past completely and infinitely fucked. And so he decided to run with it.
“Get them in the backyard, keep it quiet, no more than six inside at a time, take the money up front, there is no base fee, we want all of it, and if they don’t have enough on them, then tell them to fuck off until they do. You’re in charge; I’ll be upstairs.” Rex shuts his eyes as he passes the body.
Brendan gives him a military salute. “The fucking king.”
“And put a fucking tarp down or something,” Rex tells him.
Three hours pass and it’s almost like the house is moving by itself. Rex is staring at his bedroom ceiling with noise-cancelling headphones wrapped around his skull. Brendan opens the door and Rex looks over at him; his eyes are bloodshot with bags hanging underneath.
Rex pulls off his headphones, “Is it over?”
Brendan sits down at the foot of the bed, “I can’t do that anymore, man. I cleaned her up as best I could; it still smells pretty fucked up down there, though. You might wanna air it our, maybe Febreze the bitch.” Brendan sighs and buries his face in his palms. “I can’t do that anymore…you could keep going, there’s still a lot of money to be made, but I’m done. Everybody’s gone home, but I’m sure there will be more tomorrow.”
Up until this point, Rex had never seen Brendan act like this; he had never seen his friend so morose.
Brendan takes out a wad of cash too big to fit in any wallet and hands it to Rex.
“What about your cut?” Rex asks.
“I don’t want that money anymore, dude, I just want to go home.” Brendan stands up and walks out the bedroom door, down the stairs and Rex hears the screen door shut behind him.
He wasn’t kidding; the smell downstairs is a real deep funky odor. Something gangrenous is filling up the place. Rex grabs the body and pulls it to the basement, same as last night, except he notices she’s heavier tonight. As quickly as he can, he tries to forget that fact and lays her down in the meat locker again before heading back upstairs. For the next twelve hours, he watches TV with all the windows open. In the morning, he eats breakfast and then heads off to school.
VII.
Rex can’t find Brendan at school, so he decides he’ll leave at lunch seeing as no one’s at home to get angry at him, then he wonders why he’s come to school for the last two days anyway. In the hallways, kids keep coming up to him and asking what he’s doing later, to which he replies, “Keep your voice down, money up front, all of it.”
A fraction of the amount of kids from yesterday are back, but still enough to make a pretty hefty sum. Rex figures they must’ve all got that feeling right after they came, that what the fuck am I doing feeling; maybe you’d call it, buyer’s remorse.
Rex lays down the tarp, puts an N95 mask over his mouth and nose, and tells them, “I’ll be in the other room; I’d hurry if I were you.”
Today, it only takes about 90 minutes, then Rex cleans up, puts the body away, and falls asleep on the couch for a couple hours. Day three goes a lot like day two; Brendan’s still not at school, so neither is Rex. The amount of guys that show up is about the same, except most bring some kind of nose plugs. One guy who’s a couple years older than Rex is giving him some spiel about how he stole all this money from his parents, how he could get caught real easy.
Rex just looks at him. “Watch out for flies.”
Everyone goes home, Rex cleans up. The smell is worse tonight, the body is heavier.
IX.
Day four: Rex wakes up at about noon and there’s already a kid sitting on the wooden bench in his front yard. Rex puts on his mask, and dishwashing gloves, and an apron that used to say “Kiss the Cook” until his dad scribbled out “cook” and replaced it with “Super Chef.”
Rex slides on his gumboots and opens the door. “It’ll take a minute for her to thaw out; wait in the kitchen.” He trudges down the steps to the basement and drags her back upstairs. Rex extends his left hand with his palm open. The kid is almost a head taller than Rex; he looks down at his hand, up at Rex, and back at the hand before placing a roll of twenties in it.
Rex is counting the money and he thinks that he can hear the kid going, “How can you handle this?” and maybe something else that sounds like, “Your own mother?”
Rex is practically asleep; under his breath and beneath the mask, he mumbles, “Shut up, shut the fuck up.”
“Is she ready?” the kid asks.
“Only one way to find out,” Rex tells him and rests his head on the kitchen counter.
He hears the kid ask, “You just gonna sit right there?” and when Rex doesn’t move, the kid gets going.
First there’s a sound, Rex imagines a fist being made in a jar of honey, followed by dripping.
The kid stands up. “This is fucking disgusting,” he gags. “Gimme back my money, you little shit.”
Slowly but surely, Rex raises his head. “Huh?”
“I said gimme back my money, asshole.” The kid’s almost yelling.
Rex grabs a meat mallet off the counter. He takes a couple steps towards the kid, who’s already backing off.
“How ‘bout I bash your skull in, you fat fuck. How ‘bout I carve a hole in your skull and fill it with cum,” Rex asks the kid.
Before he can answer, Rex is already taking a swing with the mallet. The spiked edge just misses the kid’s nose and he makes a mad dash for the front door. As his feet pound down the steps, Rex can hear him say, “Get the fuck outta my way.”
Rex can barely stand; he falls to the kitchen floor out of exhaustion, dropping the mallet as he tries to catch himself. With what little energy he has left, he starts to crawl along the floor.
The front door slides open.
“Go away,” Rex says without looking back. He grabs his mother’s hand in his own, holds it to his cheek. “Mom…Mom, I need help.” He rests his forehead on hers. “Please. Please, please, please.”
The figure in the doorway speaks, “Rex?”
Rex’s eyes shoot open; he feels all five of his senses sharpen at once. Any sense of fatigue is gone; this is do or die.
“What is that smell?” the figure continues.
From where he’s standing, he should only be able to see Rex; the body is hidden behind the countertop. Rex’s eyes are still fixed on his mother’s; sweat beads create trails down his temples. He knows he has to choose his first word carefully, more precisely than any other word he’s spoken in his short life. But he can’t even bring himself to breathe, let alone speak. For the life of him, Rex cannot muster a single word. In the tense moments that follow, Rex accepts his inability; he knows that even if he could say something, speaking at this point would be trivial, like trying to skip stones the size of boulders.
His father makes his way around the corner and he sees everything.
“Rex, what did you do?” he asks almost conservatively; he’s still got his famous voice on, his public face. Then he gets real close and he picks Rex up by his collar. “Rex, what the fuck did you DO?”
Faced with what he believes to be his ultimate and indefensible loss, Rex decides to go all in. He is absolutely sure that he has nowhere to go now but down.
“Fuck you, dad, FUCK YOU!” Rex drives his forehead into the bridge of his father’s nose before winding up and soccer-kicking the old man twice in the balls.
His father keels over, but the adrenaline pumping through his veins stops him from falling to the ground. He lifts Rex up and hurls him through the kitchen table. Two screws stick into Rex’s left arm and he starts to crawl away.
His dad tries to yell, but what comes out is almost a whimper, “You killed her, you little prick!”
Rex tries to stand up; he’s left a trail of blood from the impact in the kitchen, “No I didn’t, you stupid fuck!” He throws a sharp fragment of the wooden table at his father and it sticks into his chest.
There is a rage now surfaced in his father that Rex had only known in small moments prior to this. His father’s anger is at the forefront of his emotional spectrum, lighting his face up blood-red. His dad grabs his ankle before Rex can stand up and pulls him back; Rex is kicking and screaming the whole way, catching his father once more in the genitals with his gumboots. The old man’s strength is too much, and he lands blow after blow to Rex’s head, crushing his childlike skull into the ground beneath them.
His father is screaming “What did you do?” so loudly and so often that Rex can’t manage a response. Blood starts leaking out of Rex’s left ear; he sticks his thumbs into his dad’s eyes only to have his arms thrown aside. His father wraps his hands around Rex’s neck, “Why did you kill her?”
Rex chokes up blood; his dad hits him again, cracking the bone surrounding his right eye. He forces himself to speak through an almost crushed trachea, “Dad…wait, Dad…” Tears flood down his cheeks; his eyes throb in their sockets.
As Rex begins to feel the lights fade out, he finds divine comfort in the fact that he will never have to explain the events of the past four days to his father. As a final, strained gasp escapes him, he finds himself at peace.
His dad’s grip loosens, he face becomes struck with fear, he shrinks away. “Oh God, Rex…oh my God, I didn’t mean to—“
The business end of the meat mallet connects hard with his dad’s face; once he’s on his back, it lands again and again and again. What remains could barely be recognized as a human skull and more as a puddle of ground calcium and gray matter.
If I had to guess, this is around the time the call goes into the precinct.
Rex sits back exhausted; he tries to breathe through a broken nose and a very nearly collapsed esophagus. He looks to his left and sees the remains of his father; to his right, the corpse of his mother. One big happy family. Then something comes over him. Rex gets up on his knees and leans over her body. His eyes are so swollen he can barely see, so he feels around her with his hands. Frantically, he slides off her jeans and puts himself inside her; he feels something pungent fill the air as thick, gummy, day-old gobs of ropey man-milk spill all over his member. He can’t smell through his broken nose, so he just keeps going; he starts fucking her like a man possessed. He flips her onto her back; as he does, her stomach makes a gruesome sound. He closes his eyes, and when he does, he imagines Donald Duck choking on yogurt. Through all this, he keeps piling himself into her over and over until he’s completely out of energy, and then right at his finest moment, right at his climax, her stomach swells up and bursts all over him. Her insides leave him spackled with pus and mucus; whatever cold love-butter was still left flowing around leaks out onto his thighs; her innards drape down over his shoulders and her blood runs down his chest.
All that air getting stuffed into her with nowhere to go, like pumping a bike tire to full mass, except this tire’s filled with stomach acid. The smell’s so bad now it doesn’t matter if the kid’s nose is broken; he smells everything. His skin sticks to itself; the pus feels thicker than humus in some spots and it clings to whatever it touches.
This is about when the police cruiser shows up at the curb.
By now, the kid’s eyes are so swollen shut he can’t see an inch in front of his face. He walks out his front door using the counter as a guide. With his pants around his ankles and his “Kiss the Super Chef” apron hanging heavy with bodily fluids, he slowly waddles down the front steps of the house.
His face covered in tears, covered in blood, covered in bile, covered in mucus, covered in pus, blind as a fucking bat. He smells so bad that from 15 feet away, I plug my nose. I ask him his name and he doesn’t answer, I look at my partner and I ask again. As Rex opens his mouth, one of his front teeth falls out and lands on the pavement, followed moments later by the rest of him.
X.
He was in intensive care for a while, but I finally got to talk to him. He asked to speak to me specifically; I’m not sure why, maybe because he had heard my voice before anyone else’s. He told this whole story, didn’t leave any of it out. Both of his retinas were badly damaged in the confrontation with his father; most likely he’ll never see again.
He told me to just put him in an asylum. “I don’t wanna walk around out there anymore,” he said.
I told him I figured he’d be going somewhere similar, and then I asked him just how much money it was that he made.
“A lot,” he told me.
So I asked again.
“A little over 200 grand,” he said.
I couldn’t believe it.
I told him I wished I was making that much in a four-day time period.
To which he responded, “Two things. One, what’s your mom on a scale of one to ten. And two, how’s her health?”
***
For all installments of “The King,” click here.
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Vaughan Hull was born in Vancouver, Canada, in 1997. He has been writing since he was 17.
