Killing Ways

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Amanda Petrie stopped dead in front of the skeletal wreck of a creature stumbling toward her on legs like knotted spindles. The woman looked to be in her sixties, bruised, wounded and terrified. She was dressed in a faded blue nightgown draped no differently than if it was on a hanger in a store, except that it was caked in filth of all kinds, and it stank like something inhuman. Her matted gray hair grew between bald patches, she was missing teeth, she was hollow-cheeked, she was a shell.

Amanda dropped her cell phone, didn’t even notice how it bounced and cracked and spat out its battery, how the binder she’d been holding struck the ground, broke open, sent loose pages from magazines sliding across the concrete.

From the awful silence that followed, Amanda began to hear something — a soft pit, pit, pit. She looked down. A bright photo of a rainbow-themed garden party had floated from the binder and landed between the old woman’s dirty feet. Maggots were dropping onto it — pit, pit, pit — from under her nightgown.

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