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When a sudden grunt came from behind the trees, Hailey was proud of herself for not screaming.
Walking home alone in the dark was never her favorite way to end a long shift at the diner but it was cheaper and faster than the alternatives and after doing it for months now, she'd pretty much gotten over her fear of taking the shadowy path down past the trees alongside the Reynolds house then cutting across the fields to get home. The fields were always safe and quiet -- everyone in town knew not to trespass on Mr Bakerson's land without asking -- and Hailey had convinced herself that the rumors about the Reynolds house were nothing more than urban legends tacked on to a spooky-looking house on the outskirts of town. There was nothing to be afraid of.
Of course, her reassurances didn't do much good when there was something grunting at her in the darkness.
Taking a deep breath, she shifted her bag to her hand so she could use it as a weapon and peered forward through the trees when she caught the sound of more grunts and heavy huffs.
She was on the verge of calling into the trees, horror-movie cliches be damned, when she heard a definitely human-sounding sigh before someone said, "There's gotta be an easier way to do this."
Hailey's relief at the fact that there wasn't actually a giant beast-monster waiting to eat her quickly changed to curiosity about who was lurking on the edge of the Reynolds property in the middle of the night.
She didn't need to wait long for her answer when a second, sarcastic voice filtered through the trees, "Sure, Dean. Because there's so much room for heavy machinery in the backseat."
The name clicked into place and Hailey relaxed a little more at the memory of the two guys she'd seen earlier that evening. She hadn't caught the name of the taller of the two, but they'd spent nearly two hours in the diner during her shift, downing cup after cup of coffee and bickering back and forth over their laptops.
Wondering why the two of them were now lurking out here in the dark, Hailey edged forward through the trees, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on. The ground was soft under her feet and she avoided the branches splayed out in front of her face as she crept closer to the source of the huffed breaths.
"We need to do laundry," one of them muttered. "I'm down to my last pair of clean underwear here."
The other one laughed. "Since when do you wear clean underwear?"
Hailey caught a quiet thunk followed by the fond insult, "Bitch."
There was the rustle of movement and she inched closer until she could see the outline of a big, old-looking car parked close to the trees. It looked kind of like her brother's, except less rusty and without the dozens of tacky bumper stickers littering the back, and she peeked around a tree to see what had happened to the car's occupants.
A very inappropriate part of her hoped to catch them making out. She didn't really want to be the creepy girl who spied on people through the trees in the dark but she did want to know what they were doing out there in the middle of the night. It was totally natural curiosity.
(Also, she kind of wanted to be able to prove Trish wrong. There was no way those two guys were just friends.)
Peering around a tree, she followed the curve of the old car down to where the men from the diner -- Dean and the Tall Unnamed Boyfriend -- were standing by the open trunk.
To Hailey's relief, they weren't actually having sex right then but it was apparently a close run thing. Both of them were stripped down to just t-shirts and jeans and their faces and arms were smudged with sweat and dirt, making them look kind of like Megan Fox in Transformers, except manlier and with less in the way of boobs.
Stalking seriously had its benefits.
Despite Hailey's hopes that they would start making out any second, just to prove once and for all that she was right, they didn't seem to be making any progress towards having sweaty, dirty sex on their car as Dean said, "Okay, let's get this over with." Hailey heard him sigh. "Man, I'm gonna sleep for a week after tonight."
She couldn't see Tall Boyfriend's face but the smile in his voice was audible. "When do you ever sleep for more than six hours?"
"Shut up," Dean said without malice. He pushed up off the back of the car and turned to look at something Hailey couldn't make out. "C'mon, grab the feet."
Hailey barely had time to process what he'd said before Dean and Tall Boyfriend staggered out from behind the car, carrying something between them.
It took Hailey too long to realize it was a dead body.
The fact hit her like a slap and she clapped a hand over her mouth in a failed attempt to stifle a horrified shriek. The men froze, hands still locked around the corpse, and Hailey held her breath, pressing against the tree and praying desperately that she wouldn't be discovered. She would totally start going back to church on Sundays if she got out of this alive.
Tall Guy frowned. "Did you hear something?"
Dean nodded as he scanned the woods but then shrugged. "Guess it was just a bird."
They still looked suspicious but carried on moving the body, and Hailey peered around the tree with a silent sob to see the dark hole of a shallow grave by the treeline, clearly the intended destination for the corpse.
She got a better look as they passed her, seeing that the body was that of a girl who couldn't have been much older than Hailey herself. She was dressed in jeans and a blue shirt and the thick bloodstains on her chest and stomach glinted slickly in the light from the car as the two men hauled her over to the grave. She landed with a horrible thump and Hailey swallowed back her nausea, trying to work out how to get out and call the cops without being seen.
Too scared to move, she watched Dean throw the tall guy some kind of container, which he then shook out over the body. He followed it up with a generous squirt from a bottle of something else and Hailey clamped her hand tighter over her mouth when Dean tossed in a couple of matches, lighting the grave up like a bonfire.
Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched them stand over the grave of the girl they'd presumably just murdered, their faces blank and impassive and terrifying.
Forget Sundays, Hailey was going to spend her whole life in church if she didn't die here tonight.
The guys' vigil over the grave was shortlived and Hailey inched half a step back through the trees when she saw them begin to tip dirt into the hole in the ground. The thud and shift of their shovels masked the sound of her footsteps to some extent but her knees were trembling too hard to let her make that much progress.
They filled in the grave quickly, fast enough that Hailey's stomach rolled at the thought of them doing this enough times to get it down to an art. God, she'd had serial killers in her section at the diner. She'd served them coffee and listened to them bicker about whose feet smelled worse when the whole time they'd been planning to come out to the Reynolds house and murder someone.
Sobbing into her hand, she felt in her bag for anything she could use as a weapon while she kept edging slowly backwards out of the trees. Her best options turned out to be keys and a hairbrush and she took a deep breath, willing herself to be quiet as she lowered her hand from her mouth and gripped one makeshift weapon in each hand.
It would probably have been more reassuring if she wasn't shaking.
The men finished filling in the grave and Dean tossed his shovel to the tall guy with the call, "Sam, heads up."
Pleased that she had another name to include in her description to the police of the two serial killers in town, Hailey paused in her retreat and looked closer, trying to at least get the license plate or model of the car. She wished she'd actually listened when her brother was talking about this stuff.
"How's your head?" Dean asked. He dusted his hands off while Sam put the shovels in the trunk and Hailey's stomach gave another warning flip. What kind of psychos carried shovels in their trunk just in case they needed to bury dead people? "Son of bitch got you pretty hard in there."
Sam slammed the trunk closed and tugged a shirt on over his tee. "I'm fine. It didn't get me that hard."
'It' being the girl they'd just burned and buried. Hailey gritted her teeth.
"You sure?" Dean asked again. He moved in closer, checking out something on Sam's head with the same fluttery concern Hailey remembered getting from her mom as a kid, but Sam batted his hand away.
"Dude, I said I'm fine. Quit touching."
Dean smiled. The grin that had made Hailey's cheeks heat at the diner now just made her grip her keys and hairbrush tighter in anger. They shouldn't be allowed to smile like that when they'd just killed a girl.
Smile still in place, Dean reached up to ruffle Sam's hair and Hailey jumped at the sudden movement of Sam grabbing Dean's wrist and pushing him back up against the car, which shook with the force of the impact.
The thought of witnessing another murder flitted across Hailey's mind in the split-second it took Sam to kiss Dean.
Thirty minutes ago, Hailey would've been triumphant (and hell, maybe even turned on.) She would've gone on her way happily and smugly told Trish at work the next day that she was right, that the guys from table 7 were definitely an item, but the revelation that they were gay was now steamrolled by the revelation that they were serial killers.
She watched Sam pull Dean closer to deepen the kiss, grabbing him by the hips and obviously doing something with his tongue to make Dean groan, and all she felt was anger. How psychotic did they have to be to kiss after they'd just buried a body? What kind of fucked up parents raised kids who could kill people then make out with their boyfriends like it was no big deal?
The tears that stung her eyes were now ones of frustration and Hailey made a promise to the dead girl in the ground that she'd do whatever she had to in order to bring these murderers to justice. She had their names, descriptions, car details, and an eyewitness account of them disposing of a body; with any luck they'd both be in jail by sunrise.
Unaware of her resolution, the two guys broke apart, breathing hard and smiling at each other as Dean teased, "So you're sure you're fine?"
Sam elbowed him in the ribs as he walked around to the passenger side of the car. "Jerk."
"Hey," Dean said, full of fake innocence, "I'm just looking out for my little brother here."
It felt like a punch in the gut.
Sam got in the car with a shake of his head and Dean followed suit while Hailey stood there in the dark, stunned and speechless and sick.
The car engine rumbled like a thunderstorm as they pulled away.
Not wanting to stay there a second longer, Hailey stumbled out of the trees and rested her hands on her knees as she sucked in deep breath after deep breath. She was going to go to the cops. She was going to get justice for that poor girl. She was going to see those two guys, those two brothers rot in jail.
Right after she processed what the fuck she'd just seen.