Derranged

Chapter 7- Cleanup

"This vampire bat
This inhuman beast
She ought to be locked up
And never released"

Carlos awoke in his bedroom, shaking from a nightmare. Cold sweat had formed on his brow and he was breathing heavily. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. How long had he been asleep?

Suddenly, he sat up straight.

Mal!

He rushed out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. The tub was dry and the lights were off. Where was she? He thought to himself, panicking.

"No…no…no!" he cried as he shot up the stairs and threw open the door to his Mother's room.

Mal lay spreadeagle on the ground, blood at the corners of her lips and a dark impressions upon her pale neck. Carlos ran to her and held her close, tears brimming in his eyes.

"Mal! Wake Up!" he sobbed as he checked the pulse on her neck and wrists before placing his ear to her heart.

Nothing. Mal was as cold as ice and her heart ceased to beat. Her right thigh had a puncture wound in it, a trail of blood had flowed out of the wound and stained the bearskin rug at the foot of Mother's bed.

"I told you, boy…" whispered an icy voice from the bed, "I told you not to bring her here. Now look what you did."

Carlos dropped Mal's corpse and stood up to face her, his face getting redder.

"I'll get you for this, Mother. You terrible- you horrible-" he started. He was working hard to keep his hands from shaking, so he clenched them into fists. Mother was not afraid of him.

"Go on, but I suggest you watch your tone, Carlos. This was just an accident. This filthy girl couldn't stand to live as a slut and murderer anymore, so she decided to just end it all here. She killed her mother and then tried to seduce you. I had a conversation with her and you can see the end result here."

Carlos was muttering to himself in the darkness and pulling at his hair.

"What are you whispering, boy?" she asked, an irritated tone in her voice.

"I'm a sickly old woman. I can't hear what you're saying, but I can imagine that it's you trying to figure out how to dispose of the body, which I suggest you do at once. Aurodon's Imperial Guard have been making passes by the place. I can see them outside my window. It would be a shame for them to take you away. After all...you killed Mal."

"No!" shrieked Carlos, "That's a lie!"

"Whom do you think they are going to believe?"

Carlos spent the majority of his evening doing everything in his power to erase all evidence of the crimes. The carpet, regrettably, was rolled up and brought the carpet down to his shack behind the house. To make his situation worse, it began to storm over the area. It was if the Gods were upset at the loss of an innocent life. Mal didn't mean to kill her mother; it was an accident. Cruella meant to kill Mal the moment she stepped over into the DeVil property line. Mal's clothes were packed with the rug, and he had scrubbed the bathroom clean, twice. No trace of her was left here, not one single purple hair.

Disposing of Mal's body was the least difficult part of this whole process. Mal wasn't Cruella's first human victim. Carlos had experience with making bodies disappear, even on such a small island. Carlos was smarter than anyone on the island gave him credit for. That day on the beach, the last day that Carlos, Mal, Evie, and Jay spent together, gave him ideas for the future. When they all left, he began to experiment with the properties of the dome. He found out, after many attempts, that the dome was not impenetrable. Nothing could get in without special permission and nothing could get out, mostly. Their rocks didn't go though, but Carlos experimented with much bigger objects.

When he was 13, he was able to commandeer a rowboat. He pushed himself off the shore and toward the dome. He was not surprised that he didn't get through the dome, but he was surprised that the front of the boat went through the dome. It went halfway until the edge of the dome hit Carlos and stopped the movement. It stood to reason that no living inhabitant of the island could escape, so the next trick was to see if something dead could make it past the dome. When Cruella killed Azula, some cute brunette homeless girl who was an illegitimate child of some nameless exiled villain, Carlos loaded her into his rowboat and deliberately drilled a hole into the bottom. The rowboat glided towards the dome, taking on an increasing amount of water. Carlos chewed his fingernails nervously as the boat grew closer and closer. Upon reaching the dome, the rowboat creeped to a halt. Carlos's eyes grew wide as he prayed and prayed for the boat to continue. After what felt like ages, the rowboat made it completely through the dome before it sunk completely, taking Azula with it. He had weighed her down with rocks to ensure she would stay with the ship. It seemed like Mal would now be taking a similar journey.

He loaded up all evidence of Cruella's latest crime into another rowboat that he stole from the Goblins. Before loading up Mal, who had grown completely pale, Carlos stopped to move a strand of purple hair from her face. He teared up looking down at her. With nothing but the pale moonlight illuminating the dark shores of the island, he was naught but a silhouette against the choppy black waves. He bent down and stole one last kiss upon her frozen lips. He placed her into the boat, adjusting her arms over her a single dead flower that the found along his journey here.

Just like the last time and the time before that, he used Mother's knife to poke a hole into the boat and he pushed it to the edge of the dome. He should have been stronger from all the heavy lifting his Mother sent him, but this boat seemed like the heaviest of all. How long could he keep this up? How long could he keep killing for Mother?

As Carlos saw Mal drift slowly into darkness, he saw the boat descend into the pitch black waves and disappear forever. He looked behind him, a mile away, to the faint orange glow coming from Mother's window. It ends tonight, he said to himself. Mother will be joining Mal very soon.