WHO: Tragos WHEN: Monday 21st - the day Marcie killed Apollo WHERE: The best place for prime body dumping real estate WHAT: Body dumping WARNINGS: Body dumping
There wasn't much that could have made Tragos more nervous than driving round a body in the back of his car. He would have thought, anyway.
The body of an apparent god, though, that put a whole new spin on 'nerves'.
He googled Apollo. Space missions. Googled Apollo and God, and found more: just the sun, prophecy, music, healing, disease. Fuck. Tragos, parked in a Walmart carpark with a god in his trunk, couldn't believe it. No way this jerk was a god.
Come on, he told himself, frustrated with his own slowness. He only had to remember the shared look between Marcie and Much to compound that particular feeling into a convincing one of shame. You saw him fight Ares.
He could believe the god status of Ares. It wasn't just belief - whatever belief actually meant - it was terror and awe. Terror that he would fail, fall further out of favour, and awe, awe that he'd been chosen in the first place. Both feelings weren't new when it came to Ares, but they were overwhelming, now. They came in waves that physically stopped him, made him grip the steering wheel and forget how to breathe, made his head bow like his body thought he should be praying. Alright so, he'd figure out how to pray. Ares. My god. My god.
This only made the terror/awe feeling stronger.
If he believed in Ares he had to believe in Apollo. But he did so begrudgingly; Apollo hadn't earned his belief and it didn't come easy.
When the tide of terror/awe receded (momentarily) the nerves rushed back in. He had the body of a god in his trunk and his own body wouldn't let him forgot it.
The body of a god murdered by the woman he loved. Who loved him. Fuck. That wasn't nerves, that feeling, that was something else: a feeling like peering off a balcony at the top of a sky scraper, half expecting it to crumble and half expecting to fly. Elated, excited and terrified.
Fuck.
Get on with it.
Tragos left the murdered body of a god in the car and went into Walmart to buy a tarp and tape. He paid in cash, smiled polite, and left. Marcie's voice echoed round his head as he crossed the carpark he is your god. He is your god. I love you..
Ares was thousands of years ancient, part of the undisputable fabric of the world. Marcie loved him. Both things were a struggle to comprehend. When was the last time anyone said they loved him? His mother, who died when he was eleven?
Tragos chucked the tarp into the trunk with the suitcase and slammed the door down. Maybe he didn't need to understand any of it to know that, without a doubt, he'd do anything for them. Risk his own everything to get rid of this body (his mind kept reverting to the belief that the body would be a corpse forever, that he was dumping it forever, the idea of immortality was a slippery one and had so little to stick to in his mind.)
He went to McDonald's on the way out of Walmart. Between Marcie's and the gym and Marcie's again and now, he hadn't had breakfast yet though it was already well past midday. McDonald's was terrible for him - terrible for any fighter - but he was so hungry he didn't care. Besides, it was goddamn good. (Should he even be thinking 'goddamn' now, knowing what he was starting to know about gods? Ok, it was fucking good. He parked down a side street in East New York as the rain started up again and he ate two burgers and fries and a wrap and it was all fucking good.)
The wait until dark was excruciating, even though dark fell late in the afternoon, even though it fell earlier than usual because the rainclouds, the sleet-clouds, were thick and heavy and low. The cold was also excruciating. The nerves and boredom and incomprehensibility, the terror and awe and love.
But dark came. Tragos drove back to the Hole, because he knew it like the back of his hand, because if neighbours saw him poking around an empty lot they'd assume he was hunting for car parts, because the mob had dumped bodies here and they hadn't been found for ages. Because there were sunken pits where the sodden ground had collapsed, pits like pre-dug graves.
On the side of one of the streets he killed the engine, but left the handbrake off so the car wouldn't resist when he started pushing it into a vacant lot. He doubted anyone would be paying attention, but he didn't want anyone wondering about a car engine in the middle of what was supposed to be an empty property. Slipping occasionally (swearing often) on the muddy ground, Tragos pushed the car as deep as he could get it, then climbed onto the roof and looked around. Reeds hid him from anyone walking past on the street, the curtains were pulled in all the nearby houses he could see, and no one was out and about.
The freezing rain soaked him through - only his feet in his boots were still dry, the cost of them paying off - but the workout of pushing a car stopped him from getting too cold. He just had to keep moving. Tragos slipped down off the car and into the house - a half burned and long abandoned shell of a building, the floors buckled with damp, the walls that still stood layered in graffiti and punctured with holes - some of them made by his younger self - and every single thing worth any value, including doorknobs, taps, sinks and cupboard doors, long stripped away.
Tragos dragged the suitcase into what had been a bedroom, and unpacked it. The smell of blood hadn't faded any. The dim, dim light - city lights reflecting off the clouds and filtering in through smashed windows - disguised the gruesome tint of Apollo's skin, the frozen look on his face, the mess of his middle. He was just a long, difficult lump in the dark.
Tragos rolled and wrapped him in the tarp and taped it up, looping the tape round and round and round like he was making a mummy. Enough that it'd give any dogs or rats a run for their money, though maybe he should have just left it for the rats.
What about when he comes back? Marcie had asked.
Tragos didn't know. He didn't know. Maybe this was stupid but it was the only idea he had. Wrap it up, dump it in the hole, chuck some stuff down there to make it impossible to see if anyone was peering down there (who in their right mind would peer down there?) and never look back.
What about when he comes back?
I! Don't! Know!
Checking again for any movement, for any watching eyes in the dark, Tragos dragged the tarp-wrapped body out the back of the section, through the burned out living room, and through the mud of the yard to the sunken pit out the back. With an unceremonious shove, he rolled the body in, and heard a crack of thin ice and a shallow, gluggy splash. He risked a torch - the tarp was mostly submerged (What happens when he comes back? Well if he just drowned again... Problem solved?) But Tragos dragged in a sheet of rusted, corrugated iron and threw that in too, hiding the tarp entirely from sight, pushing it down a little bit more.
Could he do more?
Come back to me, Marcie's voice beckoned. And he still had to get rid of the car.
He'd thought about driving it out of the city and burning it, or driving it into a river but... They were good tyres. They'd fit the car he was working on at home. He could sell bits of the engine himself and use the rest. There was too much of value to destroy... And the Hole was full of abandoned cars, best place to hide another. He could take what he wanted and strategically leave it in view of some of the other locals and they'd strip it like vultures and then probably burn it too. It wasn't a dumb idea just to leave the car here.
Well, not right here, not on this property, but a couple blocks over, which was conveniently a couple blocks closer to home, less distance to drag that engine...
Yes, that's when he'd do.
Feeling pretty smart, and by now severely cold and hungry again, Tragos set his shoulders back, and started pushing the car again, back out onto the silent, empty street. One text to Ares, then nothing else, as promised: