Moonlit Retribution

Chapter Nineteen

I want to shush them because of the audio systems wired throughout the area, but as I turn to look at what they are talking about, I can’t keep my thoughts barricaded inside my head. “Where’s Dev?” I ask stupidly, bending down as if the closer proximity will yield his melted body.

Neither of them answers.

Panic threatens to steal my breath and sanity. My muscles tense up as I await an arrow to come whistling out of the trees and lodge itself through my brain, or someone to shove me into the pit that’s still filled with the clear liquid. Whatever it is has eaten about a couple more feet into the soil, so it’s still active.

Maybe that’s Rigs’s strategy: kill one, get more to come help, and finish off those who arrive. It seems a bit sadistic. Maybe something Andy would have tried.

Ríjez whistles through his teeth again, contemplating. “What now?”

I turn to Mella, whose expression is dark with thought, the inner cogs of her brain trying to fit together and turn the mechanism properly. “Mel?” I ask cautiously.

She turns to me, her gray eyes roving between me and Ríjez, calculating. “We can’t go back,” she says stiffly.

I scrunch my brow at this, but Ríjez beats me at verbalization. “We’ve deduced that,” he says irritably. “I meant with…this.”

Mella fixes her gaze back on the empty bottom of the pit and shrugs dismissively. “Something obviously got here before we did. You two know more about what’s in these woods than I do. Maybe even Rigs got him. Andy always said that they barely ever come out of their establishment. They may have taken your companion for sustenance.”

My face pulls into a frown of disgust. And there goes my appetite…

“I doubt that,” Ríjez counters. “They’re more likely to burn him at the stake than eat him. Real big on religion and salvation and all the jazz. They wouldn’t want to ‘taint their souls’ with such an act. And there’s no natural carnivore that still exists in these woods that would have taken him for food.”

“That we know of” is the unspoken remainder of his statement.

The reduction of the culprits makes my body tighten in apprehension. “So…what? Did this stuff completely dissolve him?” I ask, hoping that this is the case. The alternatives are too terrifying to think of.

“Of course not,” Mella scoffs. “This isn’t even an acid. It’s a base. Probably sodium hydroxide.” She catches my look of bafflement, then continues slowly, as if explaining to a child that their doggy just ran away. “And while bases are good for dissolving organic material, it wouldn’t completely break down a whole body in the amount of time you’re alluding to. And his clothing would still be down there, or at least the metal parts.”

“That’s nice…” I squirm uncomfortably, fighting the fierce urge to back out of the clearing, into the woods where it feels ten times safer. Which is rather ridiculous considering that just yesterday I was terrified of the woods’ foreboding presence. Funny how these feelings can change when subjected to new, more frightening events.

“Alright, so Dev’s body isn’t here. We’re still dumping Andy, right?” I ask nervously, wringing my hands in the loose folds of my jacket.

Ríjez eyes me skeptically, then nods once. “Yes. There isn’t much else we can do about him. And whatever took Dev might still be in the area, so we need to make this quick.”

So it can just take Andy, too?

Refusing to stay any longer than necessary, though my conscience nags me with the moral repercussions on my psyche, we head back to the edge of the clearing, leaving Mella to ooh and ahh over the acid/base/whatever the hell it is. Pulling the trailer over, we carefully dump Andy’s stiff, bloody body into the pit while Mella keeps the girl’s body from falling in. The corpse hit’s the bottom with a wet smack, face first, arms and legs splayed out haphazardly. I almost expect to hear the body start to sizzle away, but that doesn’t happen. Exposed areas on his neck begin to turn bright pink, and as the liquid eats away at the flesh, it darkens to the red of exposed muscle. I turn away before I can see what becomes of the rest of the corpse, even though I kind of want to see if it really can dissolve an entire body. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity. Or a deep need to see that it was possible that Dev was just eaten up by the acid (base, whatever!) and wasn’t taken away by something else with more malicious intent.