A Perfect Machine(39)

Once they were satisfied that the living room would pass a thorough inspection, Milo helped Henry pick up Steve’s body and move it into the bathtub. To an outside observer, it would have seemed like Henry was somehow levitating the body, the head and shoulders supported by his giant metal arms, while the legs and feet were supported by nothing more than thin air.

The mostly headless body safely in the tub and the drain plugged, Henry – kneeling at the side of the tub – began pulping it. He started at the feet and legs and worked his way up, basically just grasping onto a given body part and crushing it through his enormous steel fingers until it squished out the sides. He repeated this motion until the body part – bone, muscle, flesh – was nothing more than mush. Skin was a little harder to render drain-ready, though, so they used a pair of heavy-duty scissors to cut up whatever might cause problems going down. Milo’s job was to watch closely where any blood-spray went and immediately wipe it down.

Henry felt the urge to throw up several times before the job was done, but – somewhat disturbingly, Henry thought – Milo suffered no such affliction; he just looked fascinated by it all.

At one point, his hands, chest, and arms covered in grue, Henry turned to Milo and said, “You know there’s something seriously wrong with you, right? No way you should be enjoying this like you are.”

“I’m not enjoying it, Henry. I’m just interested in the process. Big difference. Besides, I’m not the one squeezing a body to paste through his fingers like a fucking trash compactor, so you’re not exactly on firm moral ground to be judging anyone, you know?”

Henry had nothing to say to that, so he just got back to work.

Once they were satisfied that Steve was as mashed as he possibly could be, they turned on the hot water, opened the drain, and watched it all go down. Milo then tipped in the entire contents of the three bottles of Drāno Faye had found under the kitchen sink.

“Done,” Milo said, leaning against the edge of the tub.

“Done,” Henry echoed. “Just have to wash the rest of Steve off my chest, and we’re set.” Then he added, “You know we’re going to Hell, right?”

“No such place, Henry. No such place.”

In her bedroom, Faye attempted to make sense of everything that’d happened. She’d put on some heavy music to cover the sounds of crunching coming from the bathroom, but the album she’d chosen, Gojira’s The Way of All Flesh (if she’d been thinking clearly, she wouldn’t have picked such an on-the-nose record), had come to an end. The ensuing silence settled over her, and she felt like she could finally think straight.

When it had all been happening – when shit had been inexplicably flying all over her apartment, crashing everywhere, Henry talking to invisible people – she’d wanted nothing more than to just run out the door and never come back. But now that it was quiet, her affection (or whatever that simple emotion had now morphed into) for Henry had returned. Stronger than ever, it seemed. She felt vaguely as though her emotions were being if not outright controlled, then somehow manipulated. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she felt incredibly protective of Henry, but was uncertain why she should feel so strongly. Especially in light of everything that’d happened. But it was there, and she could not help how she felt. She’d dated other guys longer than a year – who hadn’t turned into giant metal beasts – whom she would have just run the other way from entirely, if even a small portion of tonight’s events had occurred in her presence.

Weirdly, an incredible sense of peace washed over her as she thought these things, so when Henry very tentatively knocked on her door, she said “Come in” with more tenderness and genuine caring than she would’ve thought possible.

Henry opened the door slowly and just stood there for a moment, silent, unsure what to say. Then he spoke, quietly: “It’s done.”

“OK,” she said.

“For what it’s worth, it was horrendously awful, and I’d never do it again, no matter the reason.”

“You did what you had to do, Henry. I understand that.”

Henry just looked at the ground. “I’m not sure that’s true, but I did what I did, and it’s done, so the only thing left to do was deal with it. And I did. Now I just want to get out of here. Figure out what’s going on, why Palermo wants to kill me. And get you someplace safe. You didn’t ask for any of this.”

“But I did, Henry, I did.” Faye got off the bed, walked toward him. “I helped you get to where you are now, so we’re in this together, OK? As awful and confusing as it all is, it’s you and me.” She reached up and touched his face.

“And Milo.”

“Yes,” Faye said, smiled. “And Milo.”

“And Adelina,” Henry added after a moment. “And maybe more people we can’t see, who the fuck knows?”

They both laughed a little. Henry moved forward to hug Faye. She let him. He embraced her as softly as he could, then stepped back again.

When they returned to the living room, Milo said, “Alright, I figure we have till tomorrow morning before we’ll need to leave here. The hospital will be wondering where in fuck Steve went, but they – and subsequently the cops – will have no reason to start looking here, so that’ll give us a bit of breathing room. That said, no reason to hang around till they start piecing it together. We should vamoose ASAP.”