Mutilate My Heart

Chapter 14

Carli's shoes hit hard as she runs up the stairs. She's probably in a panic, and she doesn't even know why yet. Wait until she finds out her unofficial official boyfriend really is a corpse.

"What's going on?" she asks, closing my bedroom door behind her.

I can't say anything. How do you explain something like this to your best friend? There are not any words to explain that our favorite band is actually made of corpses, so I hand her the record cover.

"What?" she asks with her eyebrows raised. "You called me in a panic to come over because of some band?"

"Carli," I say, pushing myself up onto my knees. I point to the guy on the middle of the cover. "That's Brian Hawkins. The guy Mom made out with twenty years ago."

"Okay?" She looks even more confused.

"Look at him!" I shout.

She does. I know she's analyzing every detail of him because her mouth scrunches up to the side like it always does when she's thinking really hard about something.

"Ya know, he kind of looks like Nightmare," she says.

She lets out a small laugh. The kind of laugh that's like 'Oh wow. How ironic.'

"Carli! That is Nightmare!"

She sits down beside me on my bed and looks at me like I'm crazy. I mean, to be honest, I'd think someone was crazy if they told me that a guy I saw less than an hour ago is actually the dead lead singer of an old rock band.

"Becca, this band died twenty years ago in a plane crash," she says. "There's no way it can be Nightmare."

"I'm not crazy, Carli." Curse my voice for breaking. "Look at this."

I open my laptop back up and hand it to her. It's on the last article I viewed. The brown haired Sketch looks at Carli from my screen. She doesn't say anything. She just scrunches her mouth up and stares.

"So this guy sort of favors Sketch," she says, leaning in closer to my computer. "There's a woman in Bear Creek who looks freakishly like she could be your Aunt Danita's twin. It happens."

I slam my head back against my wall. How can I get her to believe me?

"Search for images of Craig Bennett. But make sure you type in Death of Darkness with his name," I tell her.

She does. And she stays frozen.

"That's not Craig Bennett!" she says, furiously. "That's Corpse."

"He's both Carli," I say. "Mutilated Arteries and Death of Darkness are the same band. They're all dead."

Carli searches through every link and picture there is of both bands, but nothing disproves my accusation. If anything, the facts that the guys have the same birthdays of the members of Death of Darkness and that five dead bodies were stolen not far from the crash site prove my point even more, but Carli doesn't stop searching. She's determined it's not them.

"Maybe they got plastic surgery to look like this band?" she suggests. "Or maybe they are Death of Darkness. Maybe they missed their flight or actually survived? Obviously it wasn't their charred bodies found at the crash site."

"They'd be in their forties now," I remind her. "And Sketch told Mom his name was Zane. That missing body is him!"

I meet the perfect guy for me, and he's been dead for six months. My life sucks.

"Becca..." Carli says. Her voice squeaks when she talks. "Sit up and look at this."

When I look at my computer, there's a video on the screen. It's paused on the mortician at Lakeside Funeral Home. Nadia Knight. Banshee's girlfriend.