"Whatever you do comes back to you three times."

~ The Law of Three

HITCH:

DID YOU EVER SEE a rose open?

     And I don't mean at the speed of life, all slow and dragging like waiting for Christmas morning. When the petals uncurl one finger at a time with the dexterity of an old woman's fist—I mean in lapse-time. When a rosebud trembles and changes shape, fanning in a breath. Opening every lip in the same amount of seconds that it took to write this sentence.

    Oh, you have?

    Good.

     People rot the same way.

REMY:

THE MOTEL ROOM WAS cold on one side and hot on the other. Coke hung a sheet from the doorframe, separating the bathroom and the walk-in closet from where we slept, capturing and keeping the air from the AC unit where it mattered.

     It lowered our fevers. Without the window unit rumbling at full-blast, we wouldn't manage to be in bed together. Not that I wanted to be in bed with Coke anyway. I'd much rather be in bed with Hitch. But Hitch would much rather be in bed with Coke and since Coke had no interest in silver-blondes who smelled like candy and rubber—Hitch slept by herself in the next motel room.

     There was an adjoining door, but she locked it on her side. I know.

      Her room had an old, rheumaticky oscillating fan on the dresser (the AC was busted). I imagined her lying atop her sheets, sweating—Not because her body temperature roasted her bones like me, but because August was a brutal time of year—and in my imagination, I could see her skin prickle whenever that geezer-fan exhaled across her bare arms and legs.

     And more than anything I wanted to taste her.

     The sheet kept the cold air captive, and passing through into the bathroom was like entering the Sahara from a backdoor in the Artic. But I did it in my sleep. I must have been asleep because one moment I was dreaming about salt and the soft ridges a dozen multicolored rubberbands raised on Hitch's arm where she wore them, and the next—

      Coke had me by the neck, shoving my face into the tile floor. And all I could see was the toilet base and a ring of mold and when I looked up, the cracked sill on the partially open window I'd been trying to crawl out of.

COKE:

SKULLS AND BONES AND blood and bones and skulls and blood and blood and blood. That's what we left behind. Stuck in our boot treads, salt on our tongues.

    My little brother was too eager, that's the problem.

     I saw it again the day we pulled in for gas at a crapped-out station off the highway. A Montana Texaco—dustier than my knuckles from cruising with the windows rolled down and older than the balding tires on my ancient Cadillac. Remy slept in the backseat, sprawled as much as the cramped quarters allowed his lanky ends. His pale face was serene. Angelic. Rose-blush eyelids shut against the sun and life in general.

     His texture and form—Sandpaper and denim. We coulda run the carburetor off the grease in his hair. Remy had the kind of sleaze-handsome mug that teased girls in their private places and set parents' teeth on edge. How many mommas and paps had looked at his hands, his long, sticky fingers, and gone queasy at the thought of where he'd put them?

     Remy hadn't a lick of sense. We were opposites. I didn't care about girls and their nethers (unlike him). I cared about living. I cared about me (unlike him). I ate to live. I didn't live to eat (unlike him).

     Remy's breath startled as my foot tapped the brake. He woke when the engine cut, sleepy and hungry.

     We were both oozing in the heat. The Caddy's aeration had passed on in Medora, and when you lived on the east side of a hundred and four degrees Fahrenheit every day, the sight of a neon motel sign across the highway—AIR CONDITIONING. POOL. TV—was a dream.

     Until I saw Trouble. She leaned against the station building, chewing gum, a duffle bag flopped at her feet. I knew when Remy saw her too because the car's carriage shook as he kicked the back door open and shimmied out.

     He paused, his forearms grating on the flaking, roof paint. "Hey, um, get me a pop," he said while I started the gas pump, sweating under the cement canopy.

     Remy snuck a peek at the girl and rat-a-tapped the roof with his sly fingers. "Two pops."

     His smile stretched his face. Too many teeth. Too much intention. I could smell that girl. Even under the gasoline and methane and the hint of old blood staining the concrete under my shoes (someone at some time had taken a beating) and I didn't like the taste.

     He was too eager. Bounding over like a whip-hound to harass a baby rabbit.

     Watching the bloodbath in shorts and a knit halter turn in just the right way—it infuriated me. She was dead already. I could see it in my brother's posture: Hunter and prey.

      Hitch. That's what she called herself. She was hitchhiking from Salina. It fit. Like she did in the front passenger's seat of my car. Fringed boots resting on the glovebox, giving me a good view of everything her shorts couldn't stretch to cover.

     Remy panted in the backseat, but it wasn't him she wanted.

     I could smell that on her too, the moment she shook my hand, a dozen rubber bands dancing on her wrist.

     Her desire smelled like sage.

HITCH:

PEOPLE SMELLED LIKE CHICKEN when they're put to boil, did you know?

     My daddy had an interesting trade horseshoein' and Mommy sold trick bags when the church wasn't looking. And somehow, those two trades met in the middle since Daddy was good at swinging hammers and Mommy was good at tricking things that needed tricking.

     Subtle—That was me.

     I watched them and I learned how to trick and hammer too.

     Once, when I was six, I had a grey pony that died. Keeled dead in the field behind our house. Daddy took a chainsaw and cut off its stiff legs just above the knee. Blood in the snow and on his jeans—We had a high-time cleaning that, Mommy and I. Liftin' the red out of the blue-dyed weave.

     Mommy boiled the pony's legs in a black-belly pot until the gummy-grey skin sloughed away and the meat flaked tender. It made the house smell like Sunday dinner, or a winter's night when I had a wicked fever. It smelled good.

    We didn't eat the soup.

    We never ate the soup. But horse bones could be ground into a powder and sprinkled on food and in water. Powder that filled the trick bags Mommy sold on the roadside, fannin' her flushed face with an old, sermon bulletin I'd bent into accordion folds. Daddy pitched an army-green tent for her to sit under, her wicker chair surrounded by baskets of plump, beef tomatoes, and a glass lemonade container on a rusty cardtable.

      Certain people want certain things. There's no stronger magick than a living body. Mommy told me: bones tied us together. Every useful creature had a skeleton, inside or out. Bones helped make things happen: gave you love and vision and health.

     Some of the gushy parts even made you live forever.

     People smelled like chicken when they're put to boil, did you know? 

     I heard the younger brother at my door.

     It was locked. My window wasn't.

COKE:

I KNOCKED REMY UNCONSCIOUS—cracking tile and teeth—and dumped him back into bed before returning to the bathroom. I couldn't stand to look at his skanky face without wanting to carve his eyeballs out.

     I was tired of keeping him out of trouble.

     I was tired of pretty things that smelled like sage and rubber and honey-candies. One minute alive, the next—ffip—dead in a dumpster.

    I didn't care that they died hellaciously. I cared when the leftovers got me in trouble, too.

     The fluorescent bulb above the bathroom sink sizzled. On-off, on-off, at the rate of hummingbird wings—too fast to leave me in actual darkness.  It was oppressive in the small room because of the sheet. The tiles were mint green (except for the rust-smear from Remy's dented forehead), same as the fixings: the toilet, the sink, the shower basin. Even the mildewed curtain was puss-green.

     The faucet squeaked as I wrung the handle to cold. It gurgled down the drain and I splashed my face once, twice, trying to cool my fever.

     I shut it off and hunched, gripping the ceramic. My rifle was in the closet where I'd stowed it for the evening, I wanted to pull it out now and put a bullet in our hitchhiker's head to teach my brother a lesson.

     Drip.

    But what lesson? Drip. Cops find dead bodies; it doesn't matter if they're shot in the head or bled to death.

    Drip.

    Drip.

    I checked the faucet was off. It was. Stepping back, my stocking foot settled in a puddle.

    The floor was flooded. What I thought had been coming from the sink, was dripping from the toilet instead. The shut lid didn't stop the waterfall seeping out under the seat and pouring in curtains onto the cracked tile.

    The fluorescents fluttered. I lifted the toilet lid. I don't know why. Maybe I thought I could fix whatever was wrong. Maybe I wanted to see—

    Hair. That's was the problem. A whole fist—two fists, three—of hair floated in the pinkish water like lake weed.

    But it wasn't just hair. It was ears and a stubby neck and when the head bobbed and rolled, it was Remy's face that looked up at me, framed by the oval green ceramic.

     The lid cracked and the seat broke when I dropped it. By the time it smacked together, I was in the next room.

    "Remy!"

    Remy groaned, sprawled on his back. Bare feet and jeans. White t-shirt glowing in the dark. Kerouac wrote memoirs about people like him. But most importantly...

    He still had his head.

    My blood raced; whispers, laughter in my ears.

    Someone else was in the room with us.

    I grabbed my rifle from the closet.

HITCH:

GNATS DRIFTED IN AND out of my bullet wounds like dry wood caught on the breakers.

     It didn't hurt much. It didn't even tickle—Tiny bodies on speed crawled, nosed, darted inside me. Flocking to any warm cavity they could find. I imagined them inside the hole in my thigh, hair-legs skatin' on my blood, laying eggs in the damp, walkin' on the side of human flesh no one was supposed to see.

     The ruler-straight gash on my calf buzzed. The second bullet had left a graze in its wake and the black flies loved the way it bled. Like a chocolate fountain. Warm and alive and free.

    A cloud of them sawed a chorus in the heat. Running, tapping, feeding. The body at my feet was already a hatchery. Squirming, white maggots tumbled over one another, dangling out of an ear. A nostril.

    The hole in the dead man's chest writhed and wriggled.

     I shifted on the rock.  My jersey shorts were thin, I felt each gritty imperfection under me—strange because I was numb. I didn't feel pain or exhaustion. And I'd run all night without shoes.

     My sock was plenty bloody. Gravity plus exertion squeezed my veins, dragging the blood from the gash in my calf down to my ankle. The heels and toes on both of my cheap socks were parted like Swiss-cheese where they'd slapped road and forest floor. Mud soaked the bottoms of my feet and spattered my knees. I had spatters up to my chin, behind my ears, in my mouth.

     I had other things in my mouth, too. Tastes. Textures.

     A spidery shiver skittered along my spine.

    I shifted on the rock.

     The forest was hot. Humidity smelled like compost, like standing next to a boiling pot of kitchen garbage and the sickly-sweet scent of a fudge store. That part, the fudge part, was how Death smelled.

     The man on the ground was dead.  A shame, because he was pretty, as monsters are. Soapstone and shadow. Cotton and worn jeans. He was the kind of pretty that made girls disappointed in what they saw in their mirrors.

     I liked his eyelashes. But his insides were charcoal. A chain smoker's lungs.

     And his heart—

     I took another bite. I held my food careful. The heat made things slick and hard to handle, but I needed the energy to keep going. The corpse had a brother.

     And he was still out there...

     I met them on the road, right where Mommy said I would. Dusty faces, dustier bones. Braised lips and sore eyelids. Shaggy hair. Burn-outs. Anyone who looked at them would see the signs: the pale skin and the glassy eyes. But it wasn't Mary-Jane that stoked and bruised their skin.

     Blood got these monsters high.

    I haunted a two-bit gas station on an empty mile, waiting for a ride. I looked the part: a runaway. A hitchhiker. I fancied myself an escapee too and they liked that.

     They pulled up in a growling-red, old-man car. Remy was the younger brother. And Coke, the older. And when they told me their names I laughed:

     "That's funny."

     Coke patted the top of my head, "Not half as funny as you are."

     I called myself Hitch. One letter off from what I really was, it seemed to fit.

     Remy liked it.

      But I didn't like Remy. I liked Coke. But Coke don't like me much, which made me like him more. Coke thought I was a kid. He said I smelled funny—"a goddamn, honeycomb"—so I killed him first the way Daddy taught me.

     I pushed a stake through his heart.

REMY:

MY BROTHER COCKED THE rifle and aimed it at me.

     No. Not at me.

     Hitch stood at my side. Her long hair was heavy around her face and even more silver in the moonlight slipping through the crack in the faded pink hotel curtains. She didn't speak. Her hands and her feet were filthy with fresh dirt.

     Where were her shoes?

     "Don't," Coke warned.

     Hitch touched me anyway. Her hands ice on my throat.

     I grabbed her waist and rolled, dragging her onto the mattress. Her fingers bit hard, dirty nails under my heated skin.

     I rested my hips between her legs, my vision blurred by the visual whomp the resonance of her heart made in the thick air around us. I could see it beating in waves behind knit thread and flesh.

     I wanted a taste. I lowered my face, mouth open.

     She wove a fistful of my hair in the finger of her other hand, raking my scalp—

     As my neck snapped I heard Coke pull the trigger: click, pop.

     A lamp shattered.

     Pop!

     Pop.

COKE:

NEWSPAPERS CALLED US THE Hart Brothers because that was our family name. What we left behind in alleys and underpasses caused angels and devils to collide, stunned.

     No one would print the word in black and white, but locals in every town from Maine to Idaho whispered our nature behind locked doors...

     Vampire.

     We were good at being rottin'.

HITCH:

THE RIFLE SURPRISED ME. I ran.

COKE:

HITCH SPRINTED INTO THE parking lot and stopped. The haze from the Motel sign haloed her body in cold blue.

     Her shoulders slumped, her wild hair a retreat she hid behind. She was even smaller somehow. Breaking a man's neck inhumanly possible. I watched her hands, her fingers crooked. Broken bird feet. Slowly, she reached into the back pocket of her shorts and pulled out something long and slim.

     The night air brewed hot. My boots stripped a layer of tar off the ground. I raised the rifle and scoped her:

     She held a wooden stake, but before I could claim a shot, she vanished—a rabbit, scampering the empty highway and into the trees.

     I chased her.

REMY:

MY FEVER WOKE ME. Hunger called me back from the dead. I needed a hit, bad.

     Raising my head from the crumpled sheets, I squinted at the front door, wide open in the morning light.

    "Coke?"

    No answer.

     I was alone. Me and the motel phone, a few lamp fragments, and a fisheye TV set.

    I'd never been alone before.

     Worry carried me outside. The Caddy sat in its designated spot, hemmed in by white lines.

     I found the blood or it found me. Either way, I followed it. A dappled trail, leading to tall pines and empty shadows where the heat bred with the insects.

     No breeze rustled the hanging branches. Nothing moved in the underbrush. I walked on broken limbs and scattered leaves; passed splayed sappling-wick and up-torn moss until Hitch appeared, perched on a lichen-crusted boulder. Her shoulder blades moved against her taut back as she lifted her hands to her mouth, her hair a veil.

     I stopped.

     My mouth fell open at what I saw at her feet:

     A circle in the dirt.

     Coke, gutted at the center.

      A twig snapped under my heel. Hitch startled and turned toward me, blood fresh on her chin.

     My brother's heart in her small hand.

HITCH:

HUMAN SKIN IS TOUGH as plum hide. Blood vessels the size and shape of rigatoni. Vampire hearts don't taste like apples but you eat them the same way. And they smell like chicken when they're put to boil.

     Mommy says: if they can live forever, then so can we.

      Tricks. Tricks are what I showed him. Trapped in my circle. Like Remy's head in the toilet scared him. What he did to others I made him think I was doing it to him. A gun pointed at his head, blam, blam. A sawblade to the knees. In the end, he tore himself to pieces while I dreamed-up rottin' things for him.

      Remy found me. I heard him, beneath the humming flies. I chewed and swallowed and asked:

     "Did you ever see a rose open?"

➤ A/N: This was my entry for the #creaturefeature, fright, and it won first place! Thank you to the wonderful Wattpadians who voted.