by Jim Butcher
She grinned and unclasped her jeans. "I think I can persuade him."
In the movies, the psycho killer is a little smarter than to chase the panty-clad teenager into a trap, but ours was a dumb-ass. Misty had just passed the flagpole when he came staggering out from behind the dining hall, chain-saw snarling above his head.
She played her part well, prancing across the quad and stumbling to give him time to catch up. She shrieked a few times to seal the deal, begging for her life and clutching her breasts. She even made a token effort to close the electrical shed door before he zipped through it. She cowered and shielded her eyes as he raised the chainsaw, and she had to be scared. A little, anyway, despite the grin I saw just as I crashed through the split door.
If you've never pushed a guy into a zillion volts of electricity, let me recommend it to you. He stumbles back, stunned look on his face. Then he clatters against the panel, his skin turns black, and he sizzles. He literally sizzles. It rocks.
When the cops arrived the next morning, they were impressed. The medical examiner bagged up Chainsaw Guy's charred skeleton while they all laughed with us and reenacted the scene. We should have gotten a medal or the key to the city, but the camp administrators chose to focus on the one kid we lost instead of the thirty we saved. We preferred to think of the camp as ninety-seven percent full instead of three percent empty, but they didn't see it that way.
At least we had each other. When the Morning After occurs postmurder instead of postcoitus, you skip several levels of dating. Unfortunately, some of those are the fun ones. We jumped straight to the "something missing" stage.
We'd established some weird Pavlovian connection between groping and fighting for our lives, and nothing we could do ever got our hearts racing like they did that night. It was all anticlimax, if you'll pardon the expression.
When I took this job in the fall, managing regional sales representatives for a global e-business outsourcing firm, I discovered that it wasn't just the sex that was anticlimactic. It was everything. It was driving to work all belted in safely. It was drinking coffee from one of those cups with the extra-stable bases. It was sitting at an ergonomically calculated perfect height, distance, and angle from my computer.
It was working for levelheaded, evenhanded, mild-mannered Mr. Wendell. "Good morning, Chet!" he'd say, giving me the thumbs-up or the "OK" gesture or some other corny thing. "Ready to satisfy our customers today?"
Vrrrrrummmmmm! I'd imagine the chainsaw clawing for wood or flesh in the nighttime air and smell the burnt two-stroke engine oil that portended my coming death.
"We surely appreciate all your hard work, Chet," Gerald from Marketing would say, putting a hand on my shoulder that I wished was a hook. "You're an invaluable part of the team."
My veins ached for that rush of adrenaline you can only get on a sweaty summer night when swinging a canoe paddle at a psychopathic assailant.
Why did I have to electrocute the only person who'd ever made me feel alive? Maybe the Chainsaw Guy and I could have come to some kind of agreement: We'd fight a little every night and then go our separate ways. He'd show up whenever Misty and I were on a date, remind us of our Darwinian duty to procreate, and then discreetly leave once Misty and I got our pulses racing.
The Chainsaw Guy couldn't be the only serial killer willing to ply his trade on us, could he?
Despite what the media tells you, there really aren't that many serial killers around. The best ones burn out quickly, and all the others are incompetent. Misty and I waited in every lover's lane within sixty miles for some disgruntled woman hater or sexual sadist to find us, but no dice. We wrote to some of the old Manson family members, but they just wanted to lecture us about saving the Earth. Hell, we even considered writing a controversial and blasphemous book challenging fundamentalist Islam, but, well, neither of us knew enough about it to provoke a good fatwa.
I tried hiring an actor to pretend to murder us, but it just wasn't the same. First of all, you know it's just an act in the back of your mind. Second of all, it's almost impossible to find a person who can convincingly portray a psychopath. The drama program at George Mason had some close candidates, but certainly no Christopher Walkens or Dennis Hoppers to really get the electricity sparkling across my neurons.
I even offered a mental patient some dough to come kill me in the middle of the night, but he got lost on the way and the police found him frozen to death by the Jefferson Memorial. To his credit, he was clutching a scythe in his hand, but I still probably would have taken him.
The truth is that a good psycho is hard to find. Pissing off a biker is too iffy, poking a bum in the eye will just get you panhandled to death, and even calling old high school enemies just shows you how much crazy people mellow with age.
Bungee jumping and race-car school didn't capture the same feeling. The risk was too arbitrary, accidental. I needed the personal touch of another human being going out of his or her way to kill me, not the capricious hand of fate.
Misty felt it, too. We talked about our boring jobs and our boring lives, about the strange void a dead serial killer tends to leave in your life after you kill him. Everyone else at the bar talked about their IRA accounts and their BMWs, but all we wanted to discuss was the best way to knock a murderer through a fiftieth-story plateglass window.
We'd imprinted on each other. The ancient test of survival had proved us a worthy match, if only we could recreate the circumstances. Some couples try to regain their senior year of high school or a magical summer in Paris; we went to Lowe's and looked at the chainsaws.
We finally tried to make love the only way we knew how. She rode atop me, rocking back and forth with the chainsaw held high. I knew we'd never hurt each other, though, and the neighbors banging on the wall to shut it off distracted us anyway.
But the chainsaw itself gave us an idea. Dressed all in black, we snuck out of the apartment complex with it and slinked several blocks down the street to another apartment building. We mounted the emergency stairwell— unwisely left open—and climbed to a random floor. Then we tiptoed to the end of the hall, fired up the chainsaw, and rang the doorbell.
When that ten-year-old boy answered the door, we almost wet ourselves laughing. The expression on a kid's face when faced with the rapture of dismembering doom is something one of those Renaissance painters should have captured to hang in the Louvre. I think his freckles actually fled to the back of his head, that's how pale he was.
Still convulsing from laughter, Misty stumbled forward and just barely nicked the kid's forehead with the chainsaw. It cracked open and his brains sprayed in an arc like a pink Mohawk.
"Oh, shit," she said, still compulsively giggling.
The chainsaw by now had cleaved his skull, and his father shuffled barefoot to the door just in time to see his son collapse to the ground. I'd like to say the look on his face was priceless, too, but all I saw clearly was his .357. Misty and I ran for opposite exits and managed to evade the bullets shattering the drywall around us. His son probably distracted him from having better aim.
We wiped down the chainsaw and tossed it in the Dumpster. Then, making peace with our twitching hearts, we slithered home through the shadows. We didn't talk much. We were both scared and a little guilty about what had happened.
When we got back into her apartment and crawled into bed, though, we tangled beneath the sheets and made love, happy to still be together for just this one night, happy to have survived.
I guess that's how we started creepy-crawling the city. That's what we call it when we sneak into buildings with a chainsaw and scare the shit out of someone. It's best in neighborhoods with a lot of Bush stickers: they tend to be gun owners, and there's nothing as invigorating as a pistol leveled at you by an angry Republican anxious to prove the Second Amendment works.
It's a strange kink, sure. We try not to kill anybody, but sometimes things get out of hand and we have to. There's something primal there, too. Something exciting.
Work isn't so b
ad anymore, especially since Mr. Wendell—poor, friendly, Christian-deacon Mr. Wendell— has been stalked from home to work at least twice by fiends the newspaper likes to call "Mr. and Mrs. Chainsaw."
Silly media. We're only dating.
One of these days, though, we might just tie the knot. The only question is whom we'll invite to the wedding.
And what we'll do to them.
High Kicks and Misdemeanors
Janet Berliner
For Russell Markert, founder of the Rockettes
Most things that happen in Vegas stay in Vegas because no one outside the city would believe them.
Typical of that is the truly tall tale of Willie and Legs Cleveland and the ostrich army. The story begins with two men killed under similar circumstances at Country Club Towers, a high-rise that Legs called home. One man, who lived in the apartment above Legs's, bled out in the elevator as the result of two deep gouges in his stomach. Legs, who discovered the body, noticed that he was wearing a "Say No to Yucca Mountain" T-shirt. Several days later, a handyman in Legs's employ was killed in the identical manner. The cops, only vaguely interested since the men had no particular claim to celebrity, failed to notice that the second man wore the same T-shirt.
Legs tried to point out the coincidence.
Instead of gratitude, they hauled him down to the station and badgered him to tell them what he knew about the dead men.
"You're not pinning this on me," he said. "Everyone knows I'm a lover not a killer." Not that he hadn't caused a few deaths in his time, like that gorgeous chorus girl in Memphis and the Zulu Dancers in Laughlin and ... but that was different. He hadn't meant for anything to happen to them.
When the cops let him go, warning him not to leave town, he felt fear at the pit of his gut. It was not something he'd experienced often. For a few days, he tried focusing on his search for new clients. As a self-styled talent scout with a penchant for long-legged chorines, thus his nickname "Legs," his search took him to Strip shows and stripper shows, to secondary casino acts and bordellos, but for once his heart wasn't in it.
In need of company and sound advice, he went Downtown to find the only person he trusted—his great-granduncle "Way-Out" Willie, so called because he played by his own rules. He was beholden to none and trusted nobody, with two exceptions—himself and his ostrich spirit guide. He took pride in his full-blooded Piute heritage, even though he hadn't set foot on Indian territory since, at the age of twelve, he'd left his family to seek his spirit guide.
Willie loved Las Vegas, mostly because it was a city where the culture of anonymity was God. He shared his innermost thoughts with no one and kept to himself the business he did for Moe Dalitz of the Cleveland Mob. As a private joke between them, Willie—whose Indian name was Nattee-Tohaquetta—took on the name Will Cleveland. He drove for the Mob and learned where the bodies were buried, and was the most trusted and feared loan shark in town. Sometimes he gave loans and washed them away; other times he had bones broken.
Legs found Willie Downtown, playing in a small Texas hold 'em game. After a stint at the back of the Sports Book—Willie's office—he got the old man a complimentary corned beef sandwich from the deli, waited for him to be cashed out, and took him over to the Towers.
The day was November 16, 1999, which Willie swore was his one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. They sat on the balcony, looking at the Stratosphere and the Strip beyond while Willie chomped on his sandwich, washed it down with a bottle of dark beer, and listened to Legs.
"Nothing to worry about," Willie said. "You think?"
Willie belched his confirmation and cleaned his teeth with his nail. When he was done, he took his black book of debtors out of his pocket and tore it into shreds.
"What the hell are you doing?" Legs asked, watching the gathering heap of outstanding markers from God, Satan, and half of the population of Las Vegas.
Willie laughed. "Now you listen to me," he said. "You don't have to worry about anything." He pointed at the shuttle to Area 51's Groom Lake. The pair watched it circle and head toward the Janet Air Terminal. "What you need to know is that my time is done. They're coming to get me. Keep the fifty K you skimmed from me, give the money in my mattress to our people, and stay away from the Road to Rachel." He laughed at Legs's expression.
"What happens to your ostrich?" Legs asked, treating the affair as a joke.
"Probably come to you," Willie said. "Treat him right or he'll get you. He can be mean and stupid. Kick a man to death right easy, run forty miles a' hour—"
"You know I don't believe in spirit guides," Legs said. "What if I don't?"
"You'll be knee-deep in shit," Willie said. "Ostrich shit."
Around midnight, a white Jeep Cherokee stopped in the street down below and let down a rear ramp. A tall, slender woman in camouflage coveralls stepped out of the Jeep and entered the building.
"Let her in," Willie said as the buzzer sounded.
Legs knew better than to argue, even when she wheeled Willie out of the apartment and, within minutes, pushed him up the ramp and into the truck.
As the Cherokee pulled away, the streetlight illuminated a decal of an ostrich on the back bumper.
By noon of the following day, Legs called Downtown to see if the old man had gone directly there, but no one had seen him. He decided that Willie was doing a favor for one of his Mob friends or there was always the possibility that senility had finally done what senility does. Besides, reporting a missing person was not a comfortable idea.
He remained mostly distracted by his own problems until, catching sight of the afternoon Janet Air Shuttle, he remembered what Willie had said when they'd last watched one together: They're coming to get me, adding later, Stay away from the Road to Rachel.
Never one to obey orders, Legs walked the mile or so to the closest car rental company and was soon on his way to Area 51, though what he hoped to do when he got there was anybody's guess.
Radio on full blast, he smoked part of a joint, munched on a candy bar, and enjoyed the winter sunshine. He felt good until he saw what looked like an unmarked cop car closing in on him. Glancing at the speedometer, he slowed down below the speed limit and veered onto Highway 375, which would take him to Groom Lake Road. The road was bumpy; the cop car stayed with him. After about twelve miles, with the cop still behind him, he swerved to the right down a narrow road, unmarked except for a broken-down shack and a sign that read dora's place:
GENTLEMEN WELCOME.
The car behind him made a U-turn. Legs gave a sigh of relief and kept driving until he saw a very large animal lying across the road. He put on his brakes and was about to get out of the car when a white Jeep Cherokee like the one that had taken Willie hurtled toward him.
He sat and watched the Jeep stop on the other side of the big bird.
The same tall woman he'd seen the night of Willie's disappearance stepped from the passenger side, holding a gun in her hand. To Legs, who knew little about guns, the weapon looked real. A man, also dressed in camouflage, stepped out of the driver's side, strode over to the animal, and kicked it. He realized suddenly that they were the Camo Dudes who patrolled Area 51, but since he had neither a camera nor a weapon, they would probably just ream him out and call the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department.
"This one's dead," the man said. "Told you he wouldn't make it to the road after what I shot into him." He looked at Legs. "Dead as you'll be if you don't do what you're told."
The woman pushed Legs toward the passenger side of his car and got behind the wheel. "You were supposed to stun it, not kill it," she said through the open window.
The man laughed. "What's one ostrich, more or less?"
The woman turned to Legs. "As for you, Mr. Cleveland," she said.
"How—"
"Maybe your uncle might have told you a little too much about our business. Know what I mean?" Her laugh was not pleasant.
The man roped together the legs of the dead ostrich and looped it around the bumper o
f the van.
"Hope you're into ostriches, Mr. Cleveland," the woman said. "Dumb creatures. With Willie gone, someone's got to take care of them."
Within twenty minutes, the van pulled up in front of a huge barn, barricaded by a wide iron bar. The man removed the bar and Legs was shepherded inside. Corralled in the middle was a large flock of ostriches.
The smell was gross. He gagged.
"You'll get accustomed to it," the woman said.
Legs prayed silently for the cop who had been following him, vowing to G-d that if he got out of this, he'd give Willie's money to the Piutes, never gamble again or booze,
never-
"All right, Mr. Cleveland," the woman said. "Time to meet our soldiers. They've been restless of late. You'll have to calm them down so that they follow instructions. Who knows, if you're good at your job—if they don't kill you—maybe we'll show you our other brigades. Noah got it right when he saved the animals."
Hoping to control his fear, Legs turned and focused on the troop of birds. The ostriches looked calm enough to him. Most of them had their heads spread flat on the sand. The rest milled around in an almost listless manner, nudging one another occasionally. They were just like Willie had described during his interminable recounting of his misspent youth.
According to Willie, his search for a spirit guide had led him to Walker Lake. While sleeping under a bush, he was awoken from a peyote dream by the poking head of a strange and hideous animal nuzzling him in the armpit. The animal looked like a three-hundred-pound sage hen. Its skinny, long legs and blush pink neck were devoid of plumage, its large body covered by odd grayish-brown feathers, its undersized head marked by beady onyx eyes, which, he was to learn, were larger than its brain.
The bird, for that was what Willie determined it was, stared at him and refused to move. When Willie pushed at it, it skittered to one side, but made no attempt to fly. He would have understood if he'd known anything about ostriches. However, he did not, yet.