Satan
by C.C. Parker

Bob McCroy found the girl's body in the dumpster behind McDonalds.  He was working the noon time shift.  Engulfed by greasy wrappers and Styrofoam containers, it was sickly avante garde. 

Designs, symbols were carved into the victim's skin; dark patterns of blood winding over arches of paleness.  The girl's red hair glinted in the sun, and her eyes resembled milky marbles.  Bob McCroy was uncertain whether he wanted to puke in disgust, or celebrate the fact that something unusual was occurring at his otherwise mundane job.

Bob looked at the body for a while; looked at it until he was absolutely certain of what he was seeing.  Bob was a Horror movie fanatic, but he'd never seen a mutilated body in real life.  He'd watched his grandma die, but that was all.

Bob picked up a nearby stick and poked the body with it.  It squished underneath the point of the stick.

Once Bob had inspected the body enough to sate his own curious meanderings, he went to get the shift manager, Paul Dexter.

Paul Dexter, overweight and pock marked, took his job very seriously.  He'd just turned twenty and the company was already thinking about making him store manager.  He would get an extra dollar per hour, which would make his mother, who was on disability, very proud.

"Why didn't you come get me sooner?" Said Paul.  "You were out here an awful long time."  Paul Dexter actually used phrases like "awful long" to describe what he was thinking.

Bob, who was two years Paul's junior, couldn't give a fuck less what his boss thought. "I just wanted to make sure," he explained.

"Make sure?"

"Yeah.  I wanted to make sure that the body wasn't going anywhere." 

"You watch too many of those movies," said Paul.

"You gotta admit," said Bob. "It is awfully out of the ordinary."

"That doesn't mean it isn't real."

"I never said it wasn't real."

"I'll go call the cops," said Paul. "You stay here."

"Why should I stay with her?"

Paul was several inches taller than Bob, and it was high noon.  Paul faced Bob, the sun dancing in his eyes.  His oily, McDonalds skin glowed, and he tried his best to be menacing.  He looked like a pillar of wax wearing a paper hat, his pale, freckled arms crossed in front of his sunken in chest. "Who's the shift manager here?"

Fuck you, thought Bob...but he didn't say it.  Sadly, he needed this pathetic, sack-of-shit job. "Whatever."

"Good."

* * *

Bob idled next to the dumpster.  He looked at the body from the corner of one eye.  The sun was beating down hard now, and flies had began to collect. 

How did things like this happen, he wanted to know?  And why?  From the looks of it the girl couldn't have been much older than sixteen.

Who?  Who could do something like this?

Bob could tell that the girl had been attractive, and her body, even though cut up, was fine to look at.  From her perky, rosebud breasts to the tangle of her pubis, the girl was fine.  Bob saw girls like this all the time when skateboarding around town, and he always looked twice (if he stopped looking at all). 

Bob became sad, and very angry.  If he ever found the assholes who did this to her he wouldn't think twice about killing them.  If only he had the power to do such a thing.  The cops couldn't give a fuck less.  They would write one of their little reports, but that's all it would ever amount to.  The girl was just another bizarre causality; another strange page in a vast library of strangeness.  Her body, tattooed with engravings of the sick and depraved, would be eased into the ground and forgotten.

And what about her family?  Were they worried about her?  Were they wondering why she never came home?

Fuck!  Triple fuck!

Bob took off his paper hat and turned toward the girl's body.  He placed the hat over his heart as the sun beat down on the black lanks of his hair.  Examining the pentagram carved into her stomach, Bob discovered he was shaking with fury. 

Where the fuck was Paul?

* * *

The cops showed up before Paul did.  They told Bob to go back inside--"they would take care of things from here.”

"Has anyone reported a missing child?" Bob wanted to know.

"Hundreds of people...everyday."

"Do they ever find them?"

"Sometimes," said the cop, a young black man with a cobra tattoo on his right forearm...faded eyes looked up out of that dark skin. 

"Cool," said Bob.

"You gonna be okay?" asked the cop.

"Sure."

"Maybe you can talk your manager into letting you have the day off."

"Paul?  Yeah right."

"Tell 'im that it's an order...from the law."  The cop’s smile was broad and white.

"Cool."

* * *

Bob went home and took a shower, but he couldn't stop thinking about the girl.  He ate some noodles with Olive Oil and Parmesan while watching a little television, but she was still on his mind.  He rode his skateboard through long summer shadows of dusk, but she was right there with him.  He met some friends to go to a midnight showing of Evil Dead II, and she tagged along.

* * *

Bob told his friends over a late night Denny's breakfast.

"Pretty fucked dude," said Wilhelm, one of Paul's best friends.

Goldie, who had glob of syrup hanging off her chin like an amber pearl, didn't say anything, but Bob could tell that she was creeped out by the whole thing.

Listerine looked through the tangle of his hair and smiled. "Fuckin' A!"

And suddenly, Bob was unhappy that he'd said anything at all.  A gaping ravine had opened up darkly between he and his friends.  There was nothing that he could tell them that would make them view it in the way in which he viewed it.  It was not a movie.  It was very real.  Still, Bob understood that if one of them had found the dead girl then they might of reacted in the same way.

* * *

It was before dawn, and Bob had just gotten to bed.  The girl's ghost sat on the edge of Bob's bed solemnly, her face buried in a fog of hands.  It may have been the light through the shuttered windows and the smoke of night's last cigarette, but Bob was fairly certain that it was her.

Bob didn't say anything, but he knew that he loved her, and he began to imagine all the things that they might of done together in another life.  Maybe she liked horror movies too.  Maybe she liked skateboarding.  Maybe she liked screwing in the park, her pretty face buried in the crook of Bob's neck., the tangles of her hair smelling of clove cigarettes and soap.

Suddenly, Bob felt morbidly alone.

* * *

The clipping said it was "the work of Satanists.”  Bob had cut it out and tacked it to the wall.  There was a picture, too.  The girl's name had been Lydia Jordan.  She'd only been fifteen. 

The photograph was black and white and very grainy, but Bob thought she looked beautiful.  Her eyes stared largely out of the inky frame, but it was her smile that tortured Bob the most.  It was as if nothing at all could happen to her; as if she'd been protected by life.

Her parents said she'd gone out with some friends and had not returned when promised.  When questioned, Lydia's friends said she'd walked to a nearby Seven-Eleven for a Big Gulp with the same results.

Authorities link it to "Satan" (which is how they put it) because of similar, ritual killings in the area.  Mostly, these killings have involved local pets.  The rest have been young girls.  Lydia Jordan was the forth.

Virgins, thought Bob, who knew all there was to know about Satanists from horror movies.

He only wished he could have gotten to her first.