A Bonus Excerpt from We Are All Villains Here to celebrate the Halloween release of part 2 in the duet, We Are All Liars Here!
MAY 1991
No one moved.
Not a single one of the five girls that were crammed into the car made so much as a noise, not even a whimper. Muscles hardened, they’d all become statues. Frozen in a beaten-up car with a thick splash of fresh blood running down the windshield.
As though all the liquor and coke had suddenly been sucked out of them, they were rigid and silent in their seats. The sobriety of the body lying limp a few feet ahead on the road hit them all.
They all just… stared.
Drip,
drip,
drip.
The only sound that broke the silence, the silence so thick that it was fast becoming suffocating, and Billie struggled to breathe. Lightheaded, she listened to the drip, drip, drip: Blood, she assumed, falling from the smeared hood onto the road.
Drip,
drip,
drip.
Then, finally, someone moved. And it wasn’t the body ahead on the road with a puddle of blood starting to pool around it.
It was Kate.
The passenger seat creaked as she leaned forward.
Billie flinched, blinking out of her daze. The burn of nausea started its crawl up her throat. She swallowed down the bile-burn and watched her closest friend twist towards her.
Kate’s hand should have been shaking as she reached for the driver’s side, but it somehow was steady, something that Billie noticed even in her stupor.
Billie’s seafoam-blue eyes watched Kate’s delicate brown fingers grip the end of the wiper stick with a pinch of her manicured fingers then tug it down.
Billie flinched.
Behind her, the twins—Gigi and Tonya—gasped in a hushed unison. The faint slap of a hand on a mouth came not a second after; Carmine muffling her own groan of disgust mixed with a burpy-retching sound.
It was… nauseating. The sight of fresh, thick blood hit over and over with a wiper, spreading out into something brownish and streaked.
“I can’t.” Billie’s whisper was so deafening in the car that it might as well have been a shout. “Kate…”
She turned to face her friend next to her. The weak pallor of Billie’s complexion matched with the numbness of her freckled face made her look sicker than if she was on her deathbed. “Please…”
Kate knew.
It was written all over the change in Kate’s angular face. Understanding. The shift from blank numbness, shock, and disgust…
Kate’s hard brown eyes and Billie’s watery blue ones, locked in a stare that seemed to last an eternity. A silent conversation, unspoken communication. Utterly in sync with each other.
Setting her jaw, Kate yanked the doorhandle and booted the door open.
Then a second screech of a door came.
Billie twisted around in the driver’s seat. Her glassy eyes landed on Carmine in the backseat as she clambered out of the wagon, right behind Kate, shaking like a leaf in a storm. She might have just blown away at the slightest gust of wind.
Behind Billie, the twins stayed in place. The three of them stayed planted in their seats, none willing to move, none willing to join the others now treading up the road.
They watched, instead. Watched as Carmine and Kate linked hands, fingers entwined, and treaded their way over to the crimson puddle spilling over the gravel… over to the lump on the road. Each step they took was hesitant and uneasy, like they were forced to trek across a minefield.
Billie felt that was exactly where she was. Planted right in the middle of a minefield. And in just a heartbeat or two, the whole place was gonna blow.
She was waiting for it. Heart hammering in her chest, pumping blood beneath the translucent pallor of her skin, glass-blue eyes empty of everything but fear and tears.
All she could do in her frozen state was… watch as they reached the body.
Kate and Carmine just stood there. Toes of their boots at the edge of the blood puddle—the puddle that had stopped growing.
A pulse seemed to hit Carmine. She jolted forward, head flopping just once before she was ready to sick up her dinner all over the body—
Kate acted fast.
Whatever decisions she’d come to, she kept in her actions only and shared with no one. She snatched Carmine by the head, clamping her hand to her mouth to stop the sick—and she rushed her back to the car.
Billie had not even a moment to jerk back as Kate threw Carmine through the open passenger door. That did it—that was the longest Carmine could hold back the sick. It spewed from her all projectile-like the moment her gut hit the edge of the seat.
Billie braced herself. Arms crossed over her turned head, her face twisted, and she felt it splatter all over her thigh.
Before she could even whine her complaints or fully acknowledge the sympathetic retching bursting into harmony from the twins behind her, Carmine coughed once, twice, then sucked in a sharp inhale.
“It’s him.” The breath had been sucked right out of Carmine, leaving it only a wispy pathetic excuse for a voice.
Kate’s jaw was likened by her tone, harder than stone, “Henry Maxwell.”
Tension whipped around them. It came in the form of silence.
Billie knew her own thoughts. If it had to be anyone, Henry Maxwell was one she wouldn’t miss. But it also spelled a whole lotta trouble for each one of the girls.
Henry Maxwell was rich for this town. Not wealthy for the city where the elites live most of the time. He was a prep. Not among the elite of Dosserport, not a wasp, but so fucking close to them that he might as well be called an untouchable.
Henry Maxwell was a golden boy.
And them? The girls? They were from the other side of town, on the other side of the tracks.
Then came the real hit when Kate confirmed, “He’s dead.”
Billie knew what she meant by that, how to read into Kate’s warning.
All five of the girls knew the words that weren’t spoken:
‘We killed him.’
Bodies hitting an old leather seat should have thudded. Not slapped down with the sound of disturbed sludge. But that was exactly the noise Henry Maxwell made when the girls heaved him into the wagon’s dirt-covered trunk.
Kate twisted her mouth as she looked down at her bloody hands.
Billie glanced over at the crimson puddle they’d pried him up from (it took four of them to lift the fucker), a pool of blood now concealed by the night mist thickening on the road.
At the open trunk, Kate and Billie backed off to allow Carmine and Tonya to fix the tarp over the corpse. Silence had wrapped them all up tight.
The girls didn’t speak. But some feet away in the shadows, she did—
“I’m not doing this.”
The trembling voice came from behind Billie. A shaky whisper strained with restrained tears, frail violin strings pulled too tight.
Billie turned to face the girl who was as small as her voice. Gigi.
It was Kate, though, who turned on her. She made a point of that distinction when she dropped her narrowed eyes on the mouse of the group, a sneer twisting her mouth, and took a single determined, somewhat threatening step closer to Gigi.
Kate hissed through her clenched teeth. “Excuse me?”
Gigi shook her head. Glossy crimson hair—now free from the high bun she’d had fixed atop her head—was as distressed as her grimly twisted face that she shook and shook and shook. Stuck in her denial. “I can’t.”
Kate advanced on her. Two determined, brisk steps.
Paler than usual, Billie’s sickly complexion appeared transparent under the bright moonlight above. She did nothing in her numb daze but fist her blood-slicked hands at her sides and watch as Kate towered over Gigi.
“You’re not doing this?” Kate echoed; a dark edge sharp like a knife in her tone. “You’re not doing what, Gigi?”
Bat outta hell, Tonya came staggering around the bloody hood of the idling car, near slipping onto the crimson Ford badge plastered red at the front. Delirious, maybe, from the murder—or the shit ton of drugs she’d snorted earlier.
Before Tonya could come to her twin’s defense, Carmine came in hot on her heels. She grabbed her by the shoulders, grips like vices, and yanked her back. The silent warning didn’t go unheard.
Tonya needed reminding.
It was the reason Billie stayed quiet.
The reason Carmine stayed quiet.
And the same reason Kate loomed over the shaking girl, a quiet fury whirling beneath the surface of her eerily calm face.
“Tell me, Gigi.” One step closer. Too close.
Gigi shrunk back.
Kate pressed, “What is it that you’re refusing to do?”
Gigi had staggered back so far towards the edge of the road now that she and Kate were practically swallowed whole by the shadows of the night. Darkness danced over their faces, and it was all Billie could do to just… watch.
“Gigi, do you want to call the police? Find the nearest payphone…” Kate, with a suddenly false blank look, turned to Billie, stone-cold in her silence, and blinked. “Where would that be?”
“Closest one is at the bar. In town.”
“Great.” Kate snaked her attention back onto Gigi, her muscles slinking like she was ready to strike. “You want me to drive you there? We could call the cops, tell them that we—all girls from Southside—killed Henry fucking Maxwell.”
“It was an accident!” Gigi’s shout trembled with her own doubts, the same uncertainties found in the shift of her eyes from one to another. “We can’t get in trouble for that. But if we go to Mr. Fix It, that makes this a hit and run. We’ll be fucked.”
“It was an accident. You’re not wrong, Gigi.” Billie’s voice was little more than a croak. But all heads turned to her, even Kate’s. And they listened. “Manslaughter, they call it. I’ll get at least fifteen years, and you know it. Drink driving, whatever that gets me. A few more years?”
Shaky. Unsure. Lying to herself, Gigi whined, “You don’t know that.”
Billie’s crystalline eyes were bloodshot as she lifted them and looked right through Gigi with a stare like the glint of a sword. “And what about you?”
All eyes turned, slowly, on Gigi. The girls might have all been the same age, but if there was a baby in the group, it was her. The mother, undeniably Kate, the one who took the charge they all needed, even if they didn’t want to hear it. She was the brains.
So it was Kate who said, “How much coke have you done tonight? It’s your stash, isn’t it? It’s in your pocket? Or is that your weed?”
“You think the cops won’t search you?” Billie added, threading her fingers through her hair, streaking blood all over herself. But it didn’t matter, since carrying the heavy sonovabitch into the wagon meant his blood now stained her faded-blue jeans and white t-shirt, her arms and chin and fingernails. She might as well have said silent prayers for her white sneakers, too, since they were now ruby red, laces and all.
“Sure, you could toss the drugs.” Kate’s suggestion came with a lift of the hands, a gesture around them at the treelines. “Anywhere here, or elsewhere, I don’t care. But when the cops do get here and interview us, and each one of us is messed the fuck up on drink and drugs, they’ll test us. Could even get a warrant for your house. I wonder what they’ll find in there.”
Gigi paled to the shade of seafoam.
Billie was certain she could see the blood drain right out of her face, leaving only veins and horror.
“We don’t have a choice here, Gi.” Tonya pulled away from Carmine’s grip. She took a cautious step closer to her twin, as if not to spook her, like she was a wild animal to be cornered with caution. “If the cops even suspect that we had anything to do with this… We all go down. It was an accident, yeah, but Carmine has a juvie record, she’ll go away for a long-ass time. Billie, probably for life. You, me and Kate—less time, sure, but add on a few years for the drugs. And what about dad and his… business? Once they find that—and they will—he’ll go away for the rest of his life. You want to send him back there?”
“No.”
Billie lifted her gaze, seeing Gigi through damp lashes. She stood stronger now, the mouse sturdy in the breeze, her chin raised and her voice unwavering. Still, silent tears slicked her cheeks wet.
Billie looked away. “If any one of us…” She paused, shaking her strawberry-tinted hair, once blonde but tinted by the blood all over. “If anyone says what we did—what happened here… We. All. Go. Down. So… I want to make sure we all have a say in this.”
Kate whipped around, as if to bulldoze her best friend, but stopped short when Billie held up her crimson hand to silence her—
“We need this to trust each other. We need a vote. Right here, right now. Two choices. We take our problem to Mr. Fix It, forget it ever happened, and go on living our lives…”
“He was a piece of shit anyway,” Carmine mumbled.
Kate nodded, eyes on Billie. “Second option is, we put the body back on the road, one of us leaves to call from the payphone out front the bar in town—and we are all arrested. We’ll all go away for this—there’s no way out of that reality. Especially now that his blood is all over the trunk, because we already moved the fucking body!” Kate paused for a beat, shutting her eyes and drawing in a deep breath through gritted teeth. “But…” she added, opening her eyes and releasing a breath, “we decide as a group what we do.”
Carmine stepped around Tonya. “Best three outta five. Democracy and all that.”
Raising her hand above her head, like she was about to swear on a bible in court, Kate turned her back on the bloody puddle on the road, facing all the girls. “Those in favor of Mr. Fix It?”
One by one, hands shot up in the air.
Billie’s: Skinny, pasty, and freckled.
Carmine’s: Slender, summer-kissed, and smooth.
Tonya’s: Thick, bronze, and littered with tiny scars.
Four hands in total, raised.
Carmine said, “I never liked him,” as though it added to the reasons for her hand held high.
But all the girls knew why she didn’t like Henry Maxwell. That, when she would stay overnight with his sister sometimes, Henry would ‘accidentally’ walk in on Carmine in the bathroom after a shower or grope her whenever he had the chance. Tried to be sly about it, too. Like, ‘Oh, I just need to squeeze by you here—oops.’
He’d grabbed at Billie a few times, too, at the bar.
Wasn’t a secret with the girls that Henry was a piece of shit.
And—
“We already moved the body,” Tonya said. “We’ll get extra time for that, too.”
Still, one hand was not raised.
All four girls looked to the side, looked to the baby of the group. Tears streaked her face like a glass of water chucked all over her. Her bottom lip quivered, but slowly… Gigi lifted her hand.
Then, to confirm, gave a firm nod.
“So let’s stop fucking about here in the open. We need to get moving, now.” With that, Kate pointed right at Billie. “Hand over the moonshine. And someone get me some water. Towels, your flannels, I don’t care what, just get me what I need to clean up this blood.”
“We can’t get rid of it all,” Carmine whined, running her hands down her blotchy beige-toned face.
“We’ll do most of it. Wash away the evidence. We can do enough that no one will notice when they pass. The rain—” She looked up at the cloudy sky, a promise of rain those in Dosserport were used to in the summer months, that there was no guarantee of sun and clear skies all the time. “—will take care of the rest.”
“C’mon, we’re wastin’ time,” Billie grumbled. “Let’s just fucking move, I wanna get out of here.”
Move is exactly what they did.
Kate—with her arsenal of moonshine and water fished out from the camping gear packed up in the trunk of the wagon—took care in pouring it all out, spreading the crimson pool into more of a red-tinted watery spill.
Carmine helped Tonya with the tarp. They tucked it under the deadweight of Henry’s limbs, wrapped it firm around his head, and under his broken neck.
Billie came up to join Kate. Huddled in her arms was a pile of beach towels. She handed some off to Kate, and together, they laid out the towels and soaked up as much as the fibers could take.
All did something…
All except Gigi, who shimmied herself into the passenger seat—the safest distance from the corpse under the tarp in the back—and lit herself a joint.
The girls wrapped up and, one by one, rushed back to the car still at an angle in the middle of the road.
Billie could only think thank fuck they were so late to the harbor party, otherwise they would have definitely been busted by someone long before they could climb back into the wagon.
Kate didn’t bite at Gigi for taking her spot. She, along with Carmine and Tonya, just… squeezed their way into the back of the wagon—with a corpse right behind their seats, hidden under camping gear. Not like they had much else of a choice. There was nowhere else to put him. And nowhere else for them to sit.
Mist gathered around the gravelly, worn-down tires. The vapors split, disturbed, as Billie jumped into the driver’s seat.
Murder was sobering. Cleaning up the scene was the most sobering.
And yet, she couldn’t kick the moonshine buzz as she yanked the steering wheel and, slowly, turned the wagon to go back the way they came.
Only, instead of going into the heart of Southside, they took a turn-off road so narrow and gravelly and overgrown that, if one didn’t know it was there it would have gone unnoticed.
They took the private dirt road to the Southside’s Mr. Fix It.
Just as Billie slammed her car door shut, the door to the lone trailer kicked open. Its creak was loud, almost louder than the harmony of groans from the wagon as all the girls spilled out into the damp plot of land out in the middle of nowhere.
That’s what it felt like to Billie.
Out in the middle of nowhere. Moonlight didn’t reach the mud squelching around her shoes. The noise from town or even the trailer park didn’t penetrate the thickness of the shrubs and trees surrounding the spot.
Mr. Fix It liked it out here.
The rumors said he came out here without any deed or government right and he just cut down trees, moved his trailer, and parked his swamp boat nearby at some dock he built himself. Around Southside, it’s called the pit.
For Billie, the swamp was so damn close that a gator could just wander its fat ass in here and chomp off her leg.
Turned out, it was worse than that fleeting fear, what happened that night.
Killing Henry Maxwell, cleaning up the blood, sitting with a corpse in the car—all that was nothing compared to what they had to do by the swamp.
Cletus—the resident Mr. Fix It—roped them in to helping him. “Gotta move fast,” he told them. “More hands, faster work.”
That work was as grisly as it should have been—but not what Billie had imagined she’d be physically doing herself. In a dream world, she would have dropped off the body, made payment, and sped the fuck outta there.
Instead, she endured punishment for what she did.
Kate and Billie were the only ones to step up.
Kate, fueled by her icy side she slipped into whenever shit hit the fan, part of her self-preservation.
Billie, on the other hand, was fueled by the drink she polished off from her water bottle. Wasn’t much of it left after cleaning up the blood on the road and all, but she made sure to get every last drop out from the bottle on the ride over.
The others hung back by the bloody station wagon as Cletus bossed Billie and Kate around the pit.
‘Hold the trash bag there.’
‘Grab those rags over there.’
‘Get me that machete.’
By the chopping block, slick with gator flesh and blood, they hacked up the body…
No emotion dared cross Kate’s stony face, a complexion made darker under the night sky, shrouded in the shadows, but the whites of her eyes gleaming.
Billie couldn’t look.
Her eyes creased shut with each whack of the machete, crunch of blood, sputter of blood. She turned her cheek to the dismemberment, face twisted, and forced her mind to focus only on the burn of fresh liquor down her throat all the way to her writhing gut.
“Pack it up.” Cletus gruffed his words before he threw down the machete and, turning his back on the chopping block, stomped his way over to the open door of his trailer.
Kate’s stern gaze bore a hole right into Billie’s turned cheek. “Help me, B.”
An order.
One she obeyed.
Pulling at her now-crimson hair that had dreadlocked and clumped together, Billie tugged at the elastic around her wrist to pull it around and make a limp bun that sagged to the side. Then she lifted her bloodshot gaze to Kate’s and, after a moment, reached out her blood-slicked hand.
Kate shoved a black plastic bag into her grip.
Their fingers touched—and their eyes remained locked.
Billie saw the refined determination in her friend’s familiar brown eyes with just a sprinkle of amber flecks. And she knew that, for Kate looking into her crystal blue eyes, she would see determination too, but it wouldn’t be refined—it would be desperate and raw.
Billie’s hair was red with blood; Kate’s shoulder-length dark wig only wore a few specks of crimson here and there. It was their hands that unified them in this: Billie’s (pale, freckled and coated red) touching Kate’s (a dark, flawless complexion on slender hands, hidden by the layers of blood).
They were in this together. Getting their hands dirty together.
And Billie found comfort in that.
Their hands parted as their gazes tugged away.
And they got to work.
In silence, they both picked up the chunks of Henry Maxwell’s body and stuffed them into the trash bags.
Cletus came back with a jingle of keys in his gloved hand. “You lot,” he barked over at the station wagon, to the three who didn’t leave the side of the car. “Better do your part now. You need an alibi. Fresh clothes you’ll find in them boxes over there—” He pointed to obviously stolen stacks of cases next to his homebrew moonshine. “—and you ain’t gettin’ my help for nothin’. Think up a good payment.”
Kate tied up the last trash bag. “How much?”
Cletus turned to her, his yellow smile sending a shiver down Billie’s spine. “You ain’t got enough cash between all of ya to pay for this. But I like twins.” He looked over at Tonya and Gigi as they recoiled in closer together. And he shot them a wink.
Billie’s eyes widened with the wave of sick that rolled through her gut. She glanced at Kate’s hard face, but she recognized the worry-tell she had with her grip tightening on the trash bag enough to pierce the plastic.
No one said anything.
Because Cletus hoisted up some limb-filled bags from the dirt, then led the way over to the narrow, muddy path—to the dock. To his boat.
Kate and Billie were the only ones to join him. They loaded all the bags into the swamp boat and, together, rode out to gator-infested waters. One by one, they ripped open the bags and tipped the limbs into the muddy waters.
Too dark to see much, but the splashings of water and occasional snaps were enough to let them know, the gators were feeding on the body parts.
Henry Maxwell wouldn’t be found.
And, since the girls cleaned up the hit-scene, there would be no crime scene.
Henry Maxwell… simply vanished that night.
And all traces of him, too.
At the pit, when Cletus brought Billie and Kate back from the swamp, and Gigi was downing the homebrew moonshine in the shadows, everyone else followed Mr. Fix It’s orders. Strip the car down, all the fabric to be ripped clean out, as he scavenged from under the hood whatever he wanted.
Kate chiseled off the VIN. Carmine carried everything with even a whiff of blood on it to the fire that Billie built in the middle of the pit.
And Tonya got the hose, the soap and the fresh stack of stolen clothes.
Cletus went off for a shower in the trailer as the girls hosed off and stripped down to nothing. Not even their underwear. Everything went into the flames that devoured their sin.
But Cletus didn’t leave them out there for privacy. No, he went to clean himself up—
For Tonya and Gigi.
Billie didn’t think Gigi would do it. She expected her to throw a fit and run. Wouldn’t blame her for it, either.
But she did.
She threw back the last of the moonshine in her jar, then tossed it aside. Lifting her chin, she marched for the trailer, eyes wet but staring straight ahead as though staring at nothing at all.
Tonya followed.
And the others waited outside.
If Billie had to pinpoint the absolute worst part of that wretched night, it wouldn’t be the prostitution of the twins, the murder of Henry Maxwell, the butchering of his corpse, or how dirty she had to get her hands.
The worst part of that night—according to Billie—was what came after they left the pit. They walked through the woods, followed the path until they got to the far end of the harbor’s beach.
And, one by one, blended in with the knitted groups of people from all over town.
The worst part of that night was what they had to do for the sake of an alibi. Each one of the five girls had to smile, cheer, laugh.
They partied til dawn.
Quinn Blackbird 