The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!

Still Warm in the Dirt
by Kathleen McCluskey

They buried her when she stopped making noise.

The men who had beaten her, and gang raped her dragged her lifeless body into the clearing. They had not intended a ceremony or confirmation. They only needed concealment. When her body ceased its weak, reflective struggling and her breath thinned to something they could not hear over their shovels, they decided she was finished. One of them checked her pulse out of habit rather than mercy, pressing his fingers into her neck until he felt nothing. Then he shrugged and callously wiped mud across her cheek with his boot and told the others to dig.

The hole was shallow and poorly cut. Roots jutted through walls like splintered bones. They rolled her into it face down, arms bound behind her back, wrists swollen from the restraint. A ring remained trapped on her finger, a thick band that cut deep into her flesh that had begun to swell long before the first shovel of dirt fell. None of them noticed it. No one ever looked at her long enough to notice.

They covered her quickly.

Soil struck her back and shoulders in dull impacts, then cascaded around her body and head. Loose earth filled the space beneath her cheek, packed into her nostrils and mouth. Weight accumulated steadily, collapsing against her ribs until each shallow breath became a strangulated effort.

Consciousness did not leave her immediately. It thinned, retreated then returned in fragments.

Pressure came first. Pressure and cold. The earth pressed into her spine and the back of her skull, cradling and crushing in the same relentless embrace. Her lungs fought for air that tasted of clay and rot, drawing in what filtered through the packed soil. Each attempt grew weaker than the last, her body trying to conserve oxygen that she did not have.

Her right arm partially lay twisted beneath her chest. Blood pooled there, trapped by gravity and the restraints. Her fingers swelled until the flesh was fat and shiny. Her ring cut deeper as the tissue expanded, its metal edge carving a slow groove that filled with dark, sluggish blood. The trapped pressure had nowhere to go. Her slow pulse beat against the band, each beat forcing her flesh harder into unyielding gold.

Movement eventually found her.

It began as a faint disturbance near her knuckles, subtle enough to be mistaken for settling dirt. Then came the unmistakable sensation of legs. Fine. Numerous and methodical. They criss-crossed the back of her hand. A millipede had surfaced from the loose soil near her wrist, drawn by the warmth that lingered stubbornly in buried flesh. It paused at the base of her finger, antennae working, tasting the salt and damp that seeped from her skin before continuing to the tight metal circle.

It discovered the wound beneath almost immediately. The metal had already broken the skin there, opening in a thin, wet crescent. The creature pressed into that space, exploring with patient insistence. When it began to feed, the sensation registered as a distant, blunt flair. The pain filtered through layers of shock and suffocation. Her body attempted to react. A faint twitch traveled through her finger. The rest of her remained pinned and unresponsive.

The disturbance attracted others.

They emerged slowly from the surrounding earth, not a swarm but a great succession. Each one drawn by the same signals of heat and moisture. They gathered around the trapped finger, slipping beneath the edge of the ring where the blood collected. The confined space offered shelter and sustenance. Soil shifted as they worked. Mandibles and bodies moving with instinctive purpose. Beneath the band, tissue gave way, what had been trapped began to slowly loosen.

Above her, the ground settled into a stretch of dark earth, undisturbed by wind or witness. The clearing returned to an eerie silence.

Below it, long after breath had ceased and the last spark of awareness had dissolved into suffocating darkness, subtle movement continued beneath the soil. Fingers shifted slightly against the packed dirt. The ring, no longer anchored by living tension, slipped gradually along the damaged finger.

And over time, the earth pressed closer, claiming the space inch by inch as her form weakened beneath it. Moisture, pressure and darkness erased the boundaries that had once defined her. What remained settled into the soil that surrounded it, indistinguishable from the ground, leaving no division between body and grave.

Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com 

More from Kathleen McCluskey:

The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror

Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.

Available on Amazon!