The forest smells damp. The ground looks undisturbed in the way nature always does, even when it is hiding rot.
Seth grabs the shovel. I take a flashlight. We walk in together, following a path neither of us ever marked. That night burned itself into my head.
We reach the spot.
We didn’t leave a marker. But we remembered exactly where we put him.
Seth plants the shovel into the earth and starts digging. I kneel beside the hole and help clear dirt as it comes up, hands working fast, breath coming short.
The dirt is heavier than I remember. It resists in stubborn clumps. The cold makes the soil hard, packed tight. Every time the shovel bites down, it sends a jolt up my arms.
Minutes pass, maybe more. My sense of time turns useless.
Then the shovel hits something solid.
Seth stops immediately. He doesn’t speak. He just changes the angle, digs slower, careful now. I crouch and brush loose soil aside with my gloved hands, peeling dirt away in small, shaking motions.
Then we see the crate. Seth hops in and pries it open.
Grant isn’t a man anymore.
He is a ruined thing beneath the earth. His skin is darkened to a sick, mottled gray, split wide in places where it has pulled apart, sagging in others where the tissue has collapsed inward. What is left of his face barely holds its shape. His mouth is stretched open too far, lips torn and peeled back, teeth exposed in a permanent, broken grimace that no longer resembles anything human.
There are holes eaten straight through him where insects burrowed deep and stayed. The flesh around them is soft and caved in, wet with decay. Parts of him look hollowed out, like something worked through him from the inside and left nothing worth keeping behind.
Rot clings to him. The kind that glistens under the dirt, where the body has started to break down into something unrecognizable. The sour, putrid smell hits hard. I breathe through my mouth so I don’t gag, but it barely helps.
I stare anyway. I need my brain to see it. I need the truth to land where the fear kept living.
Seth looks down at what’s left of him. His expression stays cold.
Then Seth unzips his jeans and pisses into the grave.
“Rest in piss, motherfucker,” he says.
I laughed, a real one. Head thrown back. That sharp, dangerous joy that made my chest twist.
Seth glances at me. “Better?”
“Yes,” I reply.
We don’t give Grant more attention than that. We start filling the hole back in. Dirt thuds down. Leaves fall. The ground starts looking ordinary again. The forest takes its secret back.
When we finish, Seth presses the shovel into the dirt once more, firming it down. He wipes his hands on his jeans and turns toward the Jeep.
I follow him through the trees, the flashlight beam bouncing with every step. My chest still aches, but it feels quieter now. It feels manageable.
Seth keeps walking like nothing happened, like we didn't just open the earth and look at something that used to terrorize our lives. He reaches the Jeep first and opens the rear door.
I stop a few feet behind him and cross my arms, watching him dig around in the back like he’s looking for a jacket.
“I think my methods of torture might be better than yours at this point,” I taunt.
Seth pauses and glances over his shoulder. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying. I did a lot of the killing. And torturing. Like… a lot.”
He turns more fully toward me, mouth twitching. “Oh so you think you’re a better killer than me?”
