Robert Creekmore

Sole Survivor

The catkin flowers on the low-hanging branches of a centuries-old pecan tree tickle the back of Hugh Albertson’s neck as he frantically scans the ground underneath them. The old flashlight with a brittle red exterior casts a dim orange glow that flickers erratically every few seconds. It’s already hot in eastern North Carolina even though it’s only early May. Gnats and mosquitos swarm around the faint beam, creating a vortex manufactured with tiny buzzing exoskeletons. Despite this, the way the pecan tree’s frilly, long, green flowers bounce individually across his cheek and scalp transport him back to that day.

***

It was during a family reunion at his great-aunt Bonnie’s farmhouse in the spring of nineteen-eighty-five. A month before, she had deep-pile, harvest-gold-colored carpet installed throughout. To Hugh’s five-year-old self, the softness of the fibers was an invitation to slide across the floor on his chest like a penguin. Even the stairs had been carpeted. He tackled those and kept sliding through the upstairs hallway, then underneath the guest bed.

Great-aunt Bonnie owned a calico cat who, for years, had used the underside of this bed’s boxspring as her secret domain. The feline’s sharp claws had shredded the fabric leaving it hanging in his young face, as the catkin flowers do now. 

The door opened. 

The thick wood concealed by the new carpet groaned with an antique sigh. It was his older cousin Amelia. He could tell by her shoes. They were open-toe, leather sandals. Her toenails had been meticulously painted a pink that was not dissimilar to that of Pepto Bismal. Hugh kept quiet, observing like a spy. 

For a while, she sat on the edge of the bed. Her bare legs dangled over the side, as she kicked them anxiously. Each time one foot came down, her Achilles tendon was mere inches from young Hugh’s face. Intrigued, he kept quiet. 

Minutes later, Hugh recognized the stride of another cousin, Kelvin. He didn’t know their ages, just that they were teenagers, which meant they were not quite adults, but a lot closer than he was. 

For some reason, Kelvin is barefoot. His feet were tan because he wore flip-flops from Saint Patrick’s Day to Halloween. Hugh could see the v-shaped white streaks left over from them, accented by dark toe hair. 

Neither spoke. Whatever was happening had already been agreed upon beforehand. Amelia stood to face Kelvin, who was quite a bit taller. Hugh sees that they’re close enough that her knees are touching his shins. 

Suddenly, Amelia turned around so that her pink toenails were so close that Hugh could see the streaks left over from the tiny brush used to apply the polish. Her feet grew further apart and cousin Kelvin’s shorts were around his ankles. 

Noises came from both of them that Hugh had never heard before. The bed creaked from the weight of Amelia’s torso being moved back and forth as Kelvin bumped into her repeatedly for reasons Hugh didn’t understand.

This excited his brain, sending numbing sparks underneath Hugh’s skin that gave way to a warm sensation in each extremity. Without hesitation, Hugh scooched forward and placed one of his tiny hands onto each of Cousin Amelia’s nearly bare feet. She flinched slightly but didn’t stop. Instead, she slid her sandals off as the peculiar dance continued, letting little Hugh hold her bare feet until both his cousins released moaning sighs. Kelvin left first, leaving Amelia sitting on the bed, putting her sandals back on.

“Hugh, I know it’s you. If you tell anyone what just happened, I’ll kill your mama.”

As she walked away, Hugh sobbed, facedown into the carpet.

***

Hugh didn’t think about what happened much afterward. At thirteen, though, when most of the other boys looked girls up and down, Hugh was only looking down. This realization, ironically occurred in winter. At school, Hugh stared at the girls’ cold-weather shoes, imagining their bare feet. In the spring, he became mesmerized by the appearance of open-toed shoes on the girls in his classes. His yearning was so overwhelming that Hugh’s grades noticeably dropped. They took a sharp upturn when he learned there was a field of medicine just for feet, podiatry. Why not? He had always excelled in biology.  

The years clicked past. Hugh kept his desires a secret, satisfying himself alone with women’s shoe catalogs. After three years at UNC, he’d never been with a woman, let alone even been on a date. But, during his junior year that changed when Hugh met a freshman girl who became unexpectedly infatuated with him. Eventually, Hugh confessed his desires to her. She found the idea repellant but said yes and began allowing him to lick her feet prior to intercourse. 

Around this time, Hugh received a phone call from his mother concerning Cousin, Amelia. She had died at only thirty-four. He hadn’t seen her since he was little, so Hugh was flabbergasted when he found himself sobbing on the other end of the line. The pathologist said in his report that Amelia had died of a heart attack brought on by methamphetamine abuse. 

During his senior year, Hugh began to contemplate what Amelia’s body now looked like inside her coffin. How had she changed in the past year? These thoughts instantly aroused him. Hugh wanted to feel the tepid, dead flesh of her feet between his teeth.

One evening, not long after, when Hugh and his partner were becoming intimate, he began to lick her sweaty, unwashed feet, only to be startled by a horrible, high-pitched scream. It took a few seconds to process that he was the reason. Hugh had sunk his teeth deep into the arch of the unfortunate young woman’s left foot. She hurried back to her dorm, never reporting the incident out of embarrassment. He’d never see her again. 

Hugh graduated with honors and went on to study podiatry at Kent State. 

***

By the time he turned thirty-four, Hugh had been practicing podiatric medicine for four years back home in Raleigh, a forty-minute drive to his great-aunt Bonnie’s house, where it all began.

During the ensuing years, Hugh never had another girlfriend. The realization he was now the same age as his cousin when she died set something off inside of him. An urge grew. He didn’t have to kill them himself, just read the obituary section of small regional newspapers.  

Hugh traded in his Honda Civic for a black Dodge Ram pickup with four-wheel drive, in case he lost traction on the grass backing down to a fresh gravesite. His goal was to find a recently buried young woman located in a remote cemetery. He would dig up his first corpse later that year.

Hugh hadn’t done any kind of physical labor since his teen years, making the excavation take longer than expected. He opened the casket with a crowbar, exposing the body of a young woman of nineteen who died due to an unexplained cardiac arrest.

She was a brunette girl with sharp features, in a stiff white dress. Because the body was only displayed from the waist up, she already had bare feet. As not to make noise, Hugh didn’t bring anything mechanical to excise them. He used a surgical-grade bone saw to make through-cuts directly above the ankles. Yellowish embalming fluid leaked out of her body and onto the lining of the coffin. The vapors burned Hugh’s eyes. He placed each foot in its own freezer bag and put them in a small Igloo cooler filled with ice, storing it on the floorboard of his truck directly behind the driver’s seat. With the casket closed Hugh’s euphoria wained. He began to sense his muscles screaming from the effort he had exerted. But the task of returning the dirt remained. This chore wasn’t optional. Hugh had to cover his tracks.  

At home, when Hugh opened the bag, the gray, dead feet still reeked of a sharp chemical smell. He used a large syringe to push water through the veins of each, flushing the remaining liquid out and down the bathtub drain. 

After thoroughly drying both, Hugh laid them out on a cutting board. The right foot, he stored in a vacuum-sealed freezer bag using a Food Saver his mother gifted him but he rarely used. Once it’s tucked away in the back of the freezer, Hugh held up the girl’s left foot to inspect it with admiration.

“Almost like hers,” he whispered aloud. 

Hugh rummaged around underneath his bathroom sink looking for a bottle of nail polish. It’s the exact same garish pink his cousin Amelia wore on that fateful day. He had purchased it years ago on a lark when it caught his eye in a drug store. Hugh shook the old bottle vigorously. The small BB inside rattled the clumpy mixture back to life. After the initial light coating, he let the paint dry, then applied a second with the precision you’d expect from someone who performed delicate surgeries weekly.

Task completed, Hugh escorted his prize to the bedroom. Unlike the rest of the house, which had bare oak floors, his bedroom was outfitted with deep-pile, harvest-gold carpet. It was reminiscent of his great-aunt Bonnie’s house circa nineteen-eighty-five. The bed was king-size and sat on a custom-made, tall bedframe.  

Naked, he crawled underneath after gently laying the dismembered left foot on the floor next to the edge of the bed. At first, he oriented the foot as Amelia’s were on that day, pink toes toward him. While entranced, Hugh began pleasuring himself. Soon, he found himself picking the dismembered appendage up and sinking his teeth across the inside arch. He gnawed the ragged skin, feeling the delicate bones underneath as they ground between his teeth. Salivating like Pavlov’s dog, Hugh turned to his side and made a deposit onto an already crispy patch of carpet. 

Finished, Hugh stored the left foot in the refrigerator to keep it fresh. Over the next two weeks, he performed the same ritual several times a day, often leaving gaps in his appointment book, which allowed him to return home to do so. 

When the foot began to rot, Hugh put in a call to a friend from Kent State. Carl was a veterinary student at the same time Hugh studied podiatry. Outside of class, one of his hobbies was osteology. Carl collected dead animals. He stripped off their flesh and articulated the remaining skeletons to be displayed and used as teaching models. The process required the use of Dermestid beetles. They slowly pick through each morsel of putrid flesh until only bone remains. Carl shipped a box with about one hundred of these little critters to Hugh’s doorstep.

The setup was easy, a ten-gallon fish tank with wood chips in the bottom. Hugh placed it up in his basement with a heat lamp to keep them warm. The process was slow at first, but once the beetle colony grew, flesh vanished at a clip. When it was finished, Hugh soaked the bones in hydrogen peroxide for a week to whiten them. With tips from his university acquaintance, Hugh was able to perfectly articulate the young woman’s foot using wire, and small springs. 

He flagrantly kept it on his desk at work. Though, being that he’s a podiatrist, it didn’t look out of place. Ethically acquired human bones can legally be purchased in the United States. Usually by universities and garden variety eccentrics. Two months passed before Hugh began feeling the urge again. He defrosted the girl’s right foot overnight in his refrigerator. 

Once he got a whiff of dead flesh, two more weeks of mania set in, which manifested repeatedly under Hugh’s bed. Inevitably, the rot began to take hold. Once the smell shifted from fresh death to putridity, their flesh became useless sexually. Hugh articulated it and the foot joined its twin on his desk. 

He knew that the urge would return, likely within a few months. Hugh was determined to judiciously prepare instead of acting impulsively. In the interim, he joined a gym, in hopes of not wearing out as quickly while digging in the future. 

A month later, Hugh began shopping through the obituary section. Another month passed before he found a suitable candidate, buried in a small graveyard near Castalia. Two days later, Hugh dug up the body of the newly deceased girl and removed his dead quarry. Now that he was physically stronger and more confident, the process took much less time. 

This cycle continued for two years. Every two months, a body meeting the correct requirements appeared. 

***

Today, Hugh has an entire shelf in his office dedicated to eight pairs of articulated feet and counting. He intends for it to grow, but his winning streak inevitably comes to an end.

***

  It’s been six months since Hugh’s last ‘excavation’ as he’s begun calling them. But faced with waning choices, Hugh considers the unthinkable. What if he made the woman dead instead of waiting? Acquiring a pre-deceased specimen of such a young age who isn’t riddled with disease or mangled in an accident is nearly impossible. Perhaps they’d be in larger population areas, but he can’t risk operating outside of very rural graveyards. If fate has stopped giving him what he needs, Hugh will take what he feels owed.

Dating websites would leave a trail. Instead, on weekends, Hugh begins frequenting local bars. The physical transition of his body from the past two years of fitness training has garnered plenty of women’s attention. However, it has to be the right woman. 

For another six months, Hugh populates the same singles bars, biding his time and getting a feel for it. Then, one Saturday night, in stumbles a perfect specimen. The spitting image of his deceased cousin, Amelia. She’s wearing open-toe sandals, toenails painted the same Pepto-pink. Hugh’s heart begins pounding so hard that his carotid arteries visibly pulse on both sides of his neck. This is his opportunity. She’s utterly plastered. 

Hugh begins planning his approach. But there’s no need. She makes uncomfortably long eye contact with him as she clumsily makes her way to his booth, where he’s sitting alone drinking a domestic beer. Without talking, she slides herself onto the bench seat, right next to him, hemming Hugh in between her and the wall. 

“Hey babe,” she says slurring, “Don’t you want to buy me a drink?”

“I reckon I can manage that. Just let me up and I’ll head over to the bar and pick up whatever you want.”

She slides her hand down the inside of Hugh’s thigh, making him jump with nervous energy.

“Thanks, sugar,” she says as she awkwardly moves aside. 

Standing next to the table, Hugh says, “I almost forgot to ask what you’d like?”

“I want a gin and tonic,” she says slurring. 

On his way back from the bar, Hugh empties a white powder he prepared ahead of time into the icy highball glass, mixing it with the tiny straw the bartender left in the drink.

Instead of returning to the same bench seat as her, Hugh sits on the other side of the booth. 

He drinks in tense silence as this intoxicated woman slides off her shoes under the table and begins running her feet up and down his legs. 

Coyly she looks at Hugh and asks, “Do you like that?”

“Yes,” he replies stiffly.

“If you want, I’ll let you suck my toes,” she says, sliding a foot toward his groin.

This goes on for another fifteen minutes, as Hugh finishes his beer. 

“I’m ready to go, if you are, big man,” she says, flirtatiously.

He approaches the bar and cashes out his tab, all the while, thoughts of her blood smeared across his shiny bone saw parade through Hugh’s mind.

Wobbly legs carry the pair out to Hugh’s Dodge Ram. 

“I think I’ve had too much to drink. I don’t know if I can … if I can drive,” Hugh mumbles.

“Don’t worry, baby. I can.”

“Are you sure?” Hugh says disoriented.

“Just give me directions, and I’ll get us there.”

“Okay,” he says staggering even more.

Buckled into the front passenger seat of his truck, the overwhelming urge to sleep presses down upon him.

“I forgot to ask,” Hugh says, “what’s your name?”

“My name is Amelia,” the woman says, seemly far less intoxicated than a few minutes before. 

Those are the last words Hugh hears before darkness envelopes him. 

***

Hugh wakes up, face down in the grass, his nose inches away from the young woman’s pink toenails. 

“Not so alluring now, are they? You’re probably a bit confused at the moment. You downed an entire beer full of Rohypnol.”

“What?”  

You know, roofies. The date rape drug. It’s the same thing you put in my gin and tonic. The one I didn’t touch. But you were too distracted to notice. In fact, I haven’t had a single drink all night.” 

As Hugh orients himself, he realizes his hands are cuffed behind his back and chained to ankle irons. Fear runs through his veins, cold like alcohol evaporating off bare skin.

“What do you want?” Hugh says, tension straining his voice.    

“I’ve been watching you for some time now. Do you think it’s a coincidence that such perfect specimens continued to line up? No, Hugh. The bones of those women you so intricately articulated are my trophies, not yours. Each of them I plied with copious amounts of liquor. After making love, I injected an overdose of insulin beneath one of their large toenails. Each was assumed to have died of unspecified cardiac events brought on by excessive alcohol consumption.”

“Where am I?”

“The old Battleboro cemetery. The place you dug up the fourth girl.”

“Let me go,” Hugh says, “We can work together.”

“Oh, we already have. My mother told me about you. I was conceived that day at great-aunt Bonnie’s back in nineteen-eighty-five. The child of incest. It would seem sociopathy runs thick in our blood, doubly so in mine.”

“Amelia never had a child.”

“That you knew of. The shame of a teenage pregnancy brought on by cousin-fucking was too much for my grandmother to bear. She sent my mom away, and I was adopted after my birth. It wasn’t until I turned eighteen that I tracked down my biological mother. My adoptive parents named me after her. I suppose they felt that I should keep a small piece of Amelia with me.”

“What you do want?” Hugh cries.

“To watch you suffer and take back what’s mine.”

“The feet?”

“All seven sets.”

“There are eight.”

“The first girl wasn’t mine, just happenstance. But, when I saw what you did, digging up that young girl’s body, the thought of possessing what you had taken worked its way into my mind like a sliver of wood jammed under a fingernail. Had I taken my victim’s feet myself, before they were buried, each would have been investigated as murders. No. I let you do the hard work.”

“I have money. I can⸺”

“I don’t care. Not everything is for sale, Hugh.”

“If they arrest me, they’re going to also connect the murders to you.”

“I took the liberty of leaving vials of insulin in your refrigerator, fresh needles, as well as the ones I used on each girl, which contain traces of their DNA. After leaving the bar, we visited your office and I took what was mine. The police have already been tipped off. You are going to be caught.”

“What about the first girl? She belongs to me.”

“The pieces of her feet have been scattered around the graveyard. I’m going to put a key in your hand. Get free and you can go looking. There’s probably less than an hour remaining. I left a note in your handwriting begging the police to stop you. All you can do now is collect your bones and run.”

“Why shouldn’t I just run?”

“Because I know you won’t leave her. These girls were your only company and solace. Believe me, I understand. But every game must have a winner.”

Amelia drops an old, red, plastic flashlight in front of Hugh’s face.

After placing the key in his left hand, she sarcastically says, “Good luck,” and walks off into the night.

Hugh flops around, having a fit trying to work the key into the hole of the right cuff. For several minutes it’s just out of reach but eventually, he gets it to slide into place. Hugh turns it, releasing his right hand. This causes the chain connecting the handcuffs to his legs to fall away. It doesn’t take much effort to free his left hand, and then each ankle. 

Frantically, Hugh examines the ground under the old-growth pecan trees. Piece by piece, he collects the errant bones, keeping track until he’s missing only one, the second metatarsal of the right foot. Scanning erratically, his flashlight beam glances across the trunk of one of the large trees. Leaning up against it is the younger Amelia. 

“It took you long enough. Is this what you’re looking for?” she says, holding the bone between the pointer and middle finger of her right hand.

Hugh’s confidence grows. He’s taller and stronger.

Walking toward Amelia, Hugh shouts, “Give it back, you cunt!”

“Come get it,” she taunts.

Hugh charges, running at her with full force. Amelia turns the bone around, exposing an end that has been cut on the bias and sharpened. Just as Hugh reaches her, she punches him in the face, driving the bone through his left eye, causing him to fall onto his back, screaming in pain. Without hesitation, she stomps the bone further into his skull with her right foot, still clad in open-toe shoes.

Amelia doesn’t stop. Her feet slam onto his face over and over, bloodying him until each of Hugh’s breaths manifests a gurgle. Then there’s quiet.  

A demented grin paints itself across Amelia’s face as she sees herself reflected in the stainless steel blade of Hugh’s bone saw. She gets to work, forcing the blade through the tender skin just above his left ankle, then grinding into bone. The serrated stainless steel makes short work of it. Then she repeats the act, taking his right foot as well. With her prizes in hand, Amelia leaves Hugh where he fell. 

After hoisting herself into his truck, she drives off just as a line of blue lights comes into view through distant foliage. As Amelia accelerates onto Highway Ninety-Five via the Gold Rock exit, she cannot help but pull out Hugh’s left foot and grind it between her sharp teeth.