NeOPulP] Data Dump: Installment Three

She turned around and it was gone. Like flashing moonlight off the waves, she looked at him... at who... no one had been there. Nobody to take it all, and no one to take the fall. It all dissolved. She dropped a toaster in the tub, but it just shut the circuit off. There was barely a hint of smoke but she coughed, and wondered what the fuck was going on, with everything, with everyone. Sometimes she'd rather she had run, than looked at shadows on the wall. Nothing made any sense, and there was no way to slow it down.

Stacy stumbled down the hall. Her feet had blistered, her fingers numb, and no place else to call a home. She reached the phone and smashed it on the floor, then threw the receiver through the back door. The glass shattered.

She dropped to her knees and started to crawl. The glass cut her all over, in some places to the bone. The blood spread out in a glowing pool of despair, but when she looked she wasn't there. It wasn't like she ever knew, and she knew she would never know. The distant sound of crashing surf found it's way through the balcony posts and lulled Stacy into feverish shaking.

It was exactly like she didn't have time. She took a piece of glass and dug it into her right eye, and then into her left eye. The pain wouldn't come, and then she couldn't see. She tried to stop, to make it stop, to figure out what went wrong, and where, and was she? Right before she bled to death she remembered the email. For one shining moment it made perfect sense, but her spirit left her body and God only knows where it got off to.

***

The police weren't sure what to make of the scene they found, or what exactly had caused the death of Stacy Morgan. The homicide detectives saw that she attempted to kill herself by dropping a toaster into the bathtub. They figured out that instead of killing her it had somehow tripped the circuit breaker. That was where they got stumped. They saw her wet footprints leading into the living room, where they stopped next to the telephone stand. From what they could see she had smashed the phone and hurled the receiver through the sliding glass door. Then she had dropped down onto the floor and crawled toward the balcony.

Her bloody eye sockets were hard to look at, even for longtime veterans of the police department. They could see that she bled to death after her carotid artery had been cut. The fact that she jabbed glass into both of her eyes ruined their whole morning. It was ghastly. The older of the two detectives, Detective Steve Bishop, wondered out loud what could make somebody do that.

"I don't know, Steve, but it was definitely some bad shit," Detective Mark Hoskins responded.

"Well, she's not getting any fresher," Bishop motioned to the guys from the Medical Examiners office.

The two M.E. guys had been waiting to put Stacy in a body bag. They zipped it up, put her on the stretcher and took her out the front door before the two homicide detectives stopped dwelling on the grisly scene. The corpse trolley, as some members of the police force called it, was already gone before Bishop and Hoskins made it out the front door.

Once outside the two detectives were reminded how much colder it was by the ocean than in town. Bishop got into the driver's seat of the Crown Victoria and left his partner to finish up. Hoskins told the Crime Scene unit to go ahead with the forensic analysis of the crime scene, and told a uniformed officer to seal it up when everybody was done. He got into the warm car cursing under his breath.

"What's the matter, Mark?"

"I hate days that start off with horrible shit like this."

"It could be worse. It could have been you in the body bag."

"You're right," Mark sighed. "You're right. Hey, did you have breakfast this morning?"

"Nope. I got this call before I could eat."

"Feel like doin' IHOP?"

"Sounds like a plan."