Seth
Two Years Later
The smell of burnt flesh never leaves.
Doesn’t matter how long I spend in the shower, how much citrus cleaner I use, or how many times I replace the fucking filter on the incinerator. It clings. It gets under the nails, into the fibers of your clothes, into your goddamn bloodstream.
I stand over the steel chute, watching the last chunk of meat curl and blacken under the flames. The incinerator roars beneath my fingers, a low, hungry growl that always sounds too eager.
This is my role now.
Beau pulls the trigger.
I erase the body.
We have a system, one that works because it never changes. Beau likes the action, the kill, the chaos, the gleam of adrenaline in the blood-slicked moment. Me? I handle the aftermath. The cleanup. The parts most people don’t have the stomach for.
I am the ghost who makes the bodies disappear.
The cleaner.
Not glamorous. Not easy. But necessary.
Especially when Beau is the one doing the killing.
I glare at the table, where what is left of the guy’s ribs still steams in a shallow pan of blood.
“Would’ve been done an hour ago,” I mutter, peeling off a glove with my teeth, “if you hadn’t carved him up like you were fucking Picasso.”
Beau leans against the far counter like we are on break from a fucking barbecue, wiping down his blade with a piece of the guy’s shirt. “Art takes time, brother. I was in a groove.”
“Yeah? Well, your groove just cost me another shirt.”
He smirks, like he enjoys pissing me off. “I’ll get you another.”
I don’t bother answering. Just reach for the tongs and start shoveling the last of the bones into the fire.
The heat licks up the edges, curling the flesh, blackening it in waves. It is hypnotic if you look too long, how easy it is to reduce a person to ash. Nothing but heat and smoke and bone dust.
The silence settles in again, broken only by the hiss of the furnace.
It should be disturbing, what we do. But it isn’t. Not anymore. We aren’t butchers. We're erasers. Making the world a little quieter, a little safer, one bastard at a time.
And today’s bastard deserves it.
I watch the last piece collapse into glowing charcoal before I swing the incinerator door shut and twist the dial all the way to max. The machine roars back to life behind the steel panel.
I peel the last glove from my hand and drop it into the burn bin before stepping outside into the cold night air.
The first thing I see is the back of the car.
The taillights catch the light spilling out from the garage behind me, the red lenses reflecting across the polished black paint. Chrome runs along the edge of the bumper and the trunk line, clean and bright against the dark finish.
My ‘67 Impala.
I asked Beau and Travis to go get it for me. The car has been sitting in the underground garage at Travis’s old apartment building ever since we disappeared, tucked away where no one would notice it. Travis looped the security cameras years ago just in case we ever needed to come back for anything important.
I walk closer, the long hood stretching toward the front of the property, the paint polished enough that the faint glow from the street lights slides across the surface.
