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Warning: Graphic descriptions of injuries, blood.

Thunk.

Ding ding dingaling ding dingaling.

She can't hear the ringtone over the sound of the motorcycle she's on, but she can feel it vibrate in her pocket and she decides to pull over and answer it. There are only two people it's likely to be, as this phone is new and almost no one knows the number. Most likely it's either her renter, Mr. Esperanza, asking her about her request to cancel her lease on his beach house, or Valon, who she left in said beach house while he waits for his soul to return. She didn't technically have to rent a place, as Dartz had been willing to provide lodging for his, ah, employees, if they wanted it, but being around him always left a bad taste in her mouth and she preferred to live as far away from him as possible. Which wasn't very far, as he laid out very specific parameters for where they were allowed to live, and he reserved and made use of the right to monitor everything they did, especially if they lived off company property.

The caller ID shows what she thinks is Valon's number. She doesn't really want to answer it, she convinced herself to leave him behind only an hour ago. But what if he needs something? He was just in a coma. She was fine when she woke up, but her luck may not be everyone else's. Something may have gone wrong, and if it has she should be there to help. She should at least find out if he needs it. So she pushes answer and holds the phone to her ear and asks who it is calling her.

"Mai," Valon's voice says. "Mai, I know you were just here. Come back, I need some help, please."

Just as she suspected, something was wrong. Maybe he's just a bit tired or weak from not moving for a day or two, but she shouldn't have left him alone like that anyway. You don't leave someone, unconscious, without any indication of how he got where he is and how long he can stay there, whether or not Dartz is still alive and relevant, where any of his stuff is or who changed his clothes for him or whether he's allowed to leave without locking up. If he isn't sick he's definitely confused, and though she really wants to just get on with her life without being tied down to anyone or anything and she needs to get away from everybody before she changes her mind again, doing it this way isn't fair. And she hasn't gone very far anyway; her motorcycle doesn't move through sand very well, and for a long time she was pushing it through the beach trying to find the street instead of riding it. Why she didn't take the paved road to begin with she isn't sure; maybe she was subconsciously aware that she was leaving something undone. Whatever, it doesn't matter. She'll go back, help him with whatever he needs help for, and as soon as she's done she'll leave.

It takes her much less time to get back than it did to go, and in only half an hour she's pulling up to the driveway and parking in front of the garage. She pauses in front of the front door to look out at the beach. The sky is orange and pink with sunset, which reflects and distorts in the ocean below. The tide rolls in in small white waves of foam and seaweed. The tide rolls out as nothing but water and leaves the seaweed and white foam and driftwood and seashells behind on a bed of dark sand. The beach is beautiful. She will miss it here. But there will be other beaches, in places that don't remind her of the horrible things she's done, so she won't miss it too much. There were too many seagulls anyway.

Just as she's torn her eyes away from the scenery to focus on opening the door, it opens for her. Standing in the doorway is Valon, smiling profusely and breathing heavily. His shirt has come untucked and his hair is a mess and he's glistening with sweat all over his skin. He has a broken table leg gripped in his hand and his forearms and shirt are splattered all over with red, red blood.

From head to toe, he is covered in bloody little spots. There's blood smeared across his face, blood splashed on his pants. Blood droplets on his feet, blood on the doorknob that he opened with his blood soaked hand, blood absolutely coating the table leg that he holds so tightly it would seem that the blood spilling from it onto the floor was being squeezed out of it. Mai jumps back a step and yelps. "Valon," she says, eyes darting from bloodstain to bloodstain and back again. "What…how did…"

"Mai," Valon says, eyes steady and staring. "Hey, I-" he almost says before interrupting himself to yawn into the back of his hand. When he's done he rubs his mouth and gets blood all over his lips, rubs his eyes and gets blood all over the lids, scratches his head and gets blood in his hair. "Sorry, I'm out of breath." His chest heaves in the effort to catch it but he doesn't and he yawns again.

Mai gapes at him for a long while before she can bring herself to speak a full sentence. When she does it comes out as a croak. "Whose blood is this? What happened?" she asks.

Valon looks down at his feet, takes a deep breath, exhales, then backs up into the house and gestures for her to come inside. "It's not mine, but I'm not sure whose it is. Does somebody live here, though?" he asks.

She can feel his eyes follow her as she walks inside, her own eyes locked on the trail of blood drippings leading from Valon's feet through the hallway and all the way into the living room, the only room she can see through the front door.

"I mean, besides you, because I know you live here," he adds, pushing the door into its frame with enough force that it blocks any view of the outside but not enough that it fully closes. Mai follows the trail slowly and hesitantly. Her heart pounds in her ears and she can barely hear her shoes against the floor.

"I called you because I did something, and I'm not sure what to do now," he says. He moves back to secure the door in its frame before overtaking Mai's incredibly slow pace and disappearing into the living room. "You…you're smart, maybe you know how to, what to do about this."

"Valon," Mai whispers. The closer she gets to the room, the bigger and denser the drops become. She clears her throat and swallows her spit and, finally covering the length of the hallway, freezes in the doorway and hides her eyes in her hands before she sees anything more than the blood splattered fringe of the carpet two feet in front of her. "What did you do?" she asks.

"I can't hear you, you're mumbling," he tells her. His bare feet thud across the uncarpeted part of the floor and his hands grab her wrists and pry them away from her face. The room is a complete mess. The standing lamp is toppled over and the light bulb is busted, the glass coffee table is shattered into a hundred pieces, the wooden side table is dismantled, the book shelf's former contents are vomited all over the floor. The carpet is engulfed in a pool of blood, the immaculate white sofa is splashed with blood, the goddamn ceiling is painted with impossible splotches of blood. The table leg Valon had been holding is now resting against the wall next to a whicker garbage bin. The overhead dimmer light is set to full brightness. The light makes the glass shards shine.

"In the table, look." He points to the glass table frame, which is crushed through by a human body, which is crushed by a television set. Valon guides her by the wrist over to the table and asks her to look at the guys face. What remains of his head is a pulpy broken bag of gore. Brains and blood mix together in a messy liquid that sits still and quivers like gelatin. What must have been a skull is now pulverized into splinters. Any semblance of a face on this man has collapsed into a swamp. "Do you know who this is? Because I don't."

The only person it could be, a man with black hair in this house for any reason, is Mr. Esperanza, and as soon as she thinks of him she knows this is his body. Her mouth falls open and she gasps. Her free hand trembles as she reaches forward, hovering between herself and the wreck like an epileptic bird on a string, wanting to touch it but not wanting to touch it but wanting to touch it but not understanding why she wants to touch it and not wanting to touch it. "Esperanza-san," she says. "He's the guy who owns this place."

Several feet away is an assortment of teeth hidden amongst the glass. Another foot or so beyond that is a baseball cap. Still further is an eyeball.

"You did this? How?" Mai asks. Valon picks flakes of blood off of his cheek and sighs. He seems to be breathing alright again.

"I woke up, and a few minutes later I went downstairs," he explains. "Somebody was opening the door, and he asked me who I was. He asked me if I was a friend of Ms. Kujaku's, and he sounded mad. So I told him I was, and he said he wasn't informed that she would be having visitors. He said it in this really snotty tone, so I kicked him in the chest and he fell onto the coffee table and I yanked the leg off the side table and beat him in the face with it until the top broke off and he stopped moving. Then I took the TV out of the wall and smashed him into the table, just in case."

"Oh," she says, before she starts screaming. She screams and screams and screams until Valon clamps and hand over her mouth and shushes her with an admonishing finger to his face. In lieu of screaming she cries, tears streaming down her face along the length of her nose and onto Valon's hand. Valon shushes her again and uses his other hand to pet her hair.

"Please calm down," he requests. "Before you say anything, I already know I overreacted, so you don't need to tell me. I'm sorry for making you come back, but I really don't know what to do about this and I need you to think for me. You don't have to if you don't want, you can just leave."

But she doesn't leave and she can't calm down, not until she's out of Valon's hands and in the hallway again and not looking at the stinking corpse her landlord left behind. She sinks to the ground and sits against the wall, gulps back the last of her tears and holds her temples in her fingers and stares at her knees. Valon follows her and crouches before her, watching her, waiting for her. She can't speak for fifteen minutes.

"…You can't leave anything here," she says, finally.

"You're still mumbling," Valon says.

"You can't leave anything here," she repeats, louder than before. "You have to gather all your stuff and bring it with you."

"Yeah? Then what?"

"You have to wash the blood off of yourself. You can't wear those clothes anymore, you have to take some of Esperanza-san's. You have to wash yourself in the ocean because we can't leave any more signs of ourselves in the building than we already have."

Valon stands up and walks away, leaving Mai in the dark of the unlit hallway with her knees drawn up to her chin and her arms wrapped around her legs. He comes back with a small bag, a handful of folded clothes, and his boots, and he walks right passed her and out the door. He leaves it wide open this time and Mai can see the sun again. It's mostly gone by now but there's still some fading purple light lingering above the horizon. She takes several deep breaths, stands up, and takes a few shaky steps towards the exit. Her legs feel like rubber and she can barely walk. Her stomach churns with the effort and she almost throws up, but manages to keep it down long enough to get outside. As soon as her shoes hit the sand it surges up her throat, but it's little enough that she can stop it and swallow it before it spews all over and implicates her as a present party when the cops show up and find the dead guy in the table.

On the beach Valon is up to his knees in saltwater and scraping the blood away with his fingernails. He scrapes it off his face and splashes it away with a handful of water. He scrapes it off his arms and submerges them. He rubs his feet against the sand and lets the sediment scrub it away. When he's as clean as he can be he goes back on land, strips off his wet clothes and drops them in a pile. He brushes as much water off his skin as possible and drip dries for a few minutes before putting on the clothes he took from Mr. Esperanza's closet. They're loose on him.

Mai comes over and picks up his wet, sandy clothes, wrings as much water out of them as she can, and shoves them in his bag while he pulls his shoes onto his feet. They leave the beach and go to her motorcycle. She straddles the seat and tells Valon to get on behind her.

"Thank you, Mai," he says. "I never know what to do when this happens."

"Get on behind me," she repeats. He obeys, sinking into the extra space in the back and wrapping his arms around her midsection.

"I'd offer to drive but I'm really tired," he says. He buries his face in her back and sighs into her shirt. "I love you," he says.

Mai looks out at the beach one last time before driving off down the road and onto the highway. The sun is gone. The sky is black.

Thank you for reading, have a nice day. Further interaction with the story (i.e. reviewing and the like) is encouraged.