by Stanley Gray
He simply drove, compelled by some steel force deep within. He knew it must be done. Alan just couldn’t emotionally handle the fact the was doing it. The world sped by, a rural tableau. His hands remained rooted on the steering wheel, despite the fact they were slick with sweat.
Xenobia wanted him to do the killing this time. How was he supposed to do that? He assumed she wanted proof. She’d probably want to watch him do it.
He shuddered at that thought. Suddenly, violently, without looking, Alan swerved off the road. The car bounced and groaned as it careened into a ditch. The vehicle collided with the stump of a tree. He sat there in the quiet evening, looking at the hills and trees.
Shaking his head to clear the fuzziness created upon impact, Alan opened the glove box. He rifled through it. There, way in the back, his long, effeminate fingers grasped a plastic tube. He extracted it. Opening it, he poured the dozens of large white pills onto the passenger seat. He stared at them. He wanted to take them. To consume them all, and sit here, surrounded by idyllic beauty, simply waiting for his death to come.
But, he did not. He felt afraid.
As it dawned on him that he did not even possess the character or strength to end his own life, he realized he needed to get his fucking car back on the road. He sat there still, dumbly contemplating things, for some time. A single car passed without stopping during this time.
Finally, Alan woke his body back up. He told himself he needed to act. Slowly, as if trapped in an alternate dimension, his body feeling as if it were not his own, he began moving the car out of the ditch. It took around twenty minutes.
The front fender revealed a healthy dent. A number of scratches marred the front and sides of the vehicle. Alan didn’t care. He put the car into drive and proceeded forward.
His only reason for going to Eugene was the fact that someone had told him not long ago there were many homeless people there. Alan couldn’t quite remember who, exactly, had provided this information, but he was using it nonetheless. The alien wanted pariahs. Alan didn’t want to get caught. And, so, he was heading to Eugene to sacrifice some bums.
It took another hour or so for him to arrive. The town seemed quiet. A cold and insistent breeze attacked his windows, and a light drizzle of rain fell down from the heavens. It was almost as if the skies were weeping.
Alan drove. He drove aimlessly through the city , frustrated by the many one-way streets that forced him to think about what he was doing. He didn’t see many people out. Most of the shops were closed, their lights off and their doors locked.
Motion caught his eye. He’d just taken a turn, and was stopping for a red light when he saw a small group of people. Four of them. They all sat on what appeared to be frayed sleeping bags, right on the curb. Bright lights cast a halo around them.
Behind them, Alan realized, was a transit station. A number of benches and signs helped lead his fatigued brain to this conclusion. Even after the light had turned green several times over, Alan still sat there, staring at them.
Finally, one of the group, a thin woman with a lotus tattooed on one shoulder, came bumbling over. She smiled and knocked on the window. Alan rolled it down. “Hi.” He said.
“Hey, man. Want to share some of your dope?” the girl asked. She appeared to be no more than 14. She wore a green beanie and had a ring poking from her lower lip. Her skin looked unwashed and grimy. A string of nascent pimples ran down her jawline of the left side.
He blinked. He wasn’t sure how to respond. He hadn’t been smoking dope. Why would she think that?
He wondered if there were cameras around. He became suspicious. Alan wondered about the girl’s companions. He wanted to drive away. The girl seemed too young, too innocent.
“Yeah. Sure. Bring your boyfriend, and we’ll go to the park.” Alan heard himself saying.
The girl nodded happily and trotted off. She leaned in to speak with what Alan assumed was her boyfriend, and then she and her pal hurried over. The guy tried the back-door handle, to no avail. Alan clicked it open. They got in.
He drove off.
“So, you from around here? Aint seen ya befo’. What’s up, dude? Doesn’t smell like weed.” the teenaged boy said. He smelled like testosterone. He had a greasy mop of black hair that shined from the natural grease. He possessed swarthy skin and a lazy eye.
The girl leaned forward, and saw the pills on the seat next to Alan. She grabbed a fistful. “Yes!” she said. She popped several into her mouth. Alan made no effort to stop her. He just drove. He had no idea how, where, when, or why he was about to do whatever it was he was about to do.
“Hey, man. This seems weird.” the adolescent boy said. His voice had barely broken, and puberty hadn’t quite set in, so the kid sounded funny in that strange way children often do before they become mini-adults.
Alan stopped the car. It jerked everyone inside around, bouncing them forward then backwards. He pulled the small gun he had hiding in the side panel of his door and aimed it at the boy. He fired.
The sound reverberated through the car. It stunned Alan. He closed his eyes. He tried to focus on something else as he waited for the ringing to subside. When he opened his eyes, the girl was leaning over the boy, yelling at him and pressing on his chest. Blood burbled in the kid’s mouth, a dark sort of blood unlike much of the stuff he’d cleaned up in the basement of his house.
He pointed the gun again. He fired. The shot made his hand and arm jerk upwards.
When the girl came for him, he hit her with the butt of the deadly weapon. She crumpled.
Alan resumed driving. He locked the doors and drove. He didn’t know where he was going.
Chapter 20
Two more dead people in his trunk.
He drove towards a bridge. Traffic swirled around him, making things move a crawl. Daylight shimmered on the polluted water below. Alan listened to talk radio as he moved with the flow. Someone ranted about a riot in Portland recently, yelling that it had driven him out of business. Alan could empathize. Sometimes people that you think are good turn out to be terrifying, and they begin to harbor animosity towards you for retaining a scrap of decency. Being human in the face of evil is difficult. You can become a symbol of what evil is not, and evil spends a great deal of time on its PR image. It’s always easier to be evil when people deny evil exists.
Alan knew it was over. He’d gone through the pockets and effects of his victims, before dumping their lifeless bodies into the trunk. He hadn’t wanted to kill the girl, but it seemed she’d taken too many pills. The blow to the head just helped expedite the process. As he’d felt through the pockets of the boy, he’d discovered a wallet. Inside, an ID card.
The boy was Brian Gangle.
Brian fucking Gangle.
His dad owned a tech start-up that had just gone public. Cornelius Gangle was the biggest thing in Oregon beside Phil Knight and Nike. Even a non-Oregonian knew that.
Pulling up onto the bridge, he stopped. A number of cars blared their horns. Alan slowly, deliberately, walked around to the back, and began dragging the bodies out. Throwing a corpse off of a bridge isn’t easy. They seemed to weigh more than the guilt slowly tightening its grip around his chest like some boa constrictor. He saw the first one splash when it hit the water.
He pushed both bodies over the edge, even as people stood and pointed their cameras at him. Alan then got back into the car and drove to the other end of the bridge. He pulled off and sat in a park. He waited for several minutes. He wanted the police to come. He expected it. But, they did not.
Curious after a while, Alan pulled out his phone. He looked online, and, sure enough, people had posted the video of him dumping bodies into the Columbia River, right there in broad daylight, to Facebook before anyone had thought to call the police. No one knew, yet, who the victims were.
Alan wanted a cheeseburger. Deciding he would not be immediately apprehended, he drove around the block until he found a fast food joint. He parked in the needle-strewn parking lo
t of a shabby-looking strip club and ate his greasy sandwich. The police still didn’t come.
Alan began to laugh. He removed his clothes. He felt hot. He got out of the car, naked, and began walking towards the freeway. He had no clear idea of what he was doing, but he thought he might want to jump into oncoming traffic.
Chapter 21
His stalker saved him.
Pretending to be a nurse, she walked into the secure wing of Gangle Hospital’s psychiatric unit and left with her patient. Alan had called her when he’d been given access to a phone. He’d only really called her because hers was the only number he could remember.
Upon intake at the hospital, he’d tried telling the people at the desk. He’d tried telling them what he was. Who he was. But, they didn’t believe him. People came into the hospital all the time claiming to be notorious serial killers.
Here he was, admitting to being the man on camera dumping bodies into the river right in the middle of rush hour. And no one believed him.
Instead, they gave him a gown and a bed. Because Alan was a new admission in on a temporary emergency basis, he didn’t get to leave his room for the first day. He didn’t get a bedspread. The staff assumed (correctly) that he was suicidal, and were giving him no easy opportunity to finally end the pain and ignominy of his helpless and vile existence. He screamed and cried, and no one came.
Finally, after the first day, they allowed him to make one collect call for fifteen minutes on one of the phones bolted to the wall in a small common area. He called Sharon Stone while people drooled, and others laughed at nothing. ESPN played on a t.v. mounted high up on the wall, covered in a thick plastic that had once been clear enough to easily see through. Now, the plastic displayed the myriad markings of the madmen who’d passed through these halls, all on their way to somewhere else.
The first night there, as the silence assailed him, he really did wonder if any drug could even temporarily erase his memories.
Sharon picked up and agreed immediately to help. Alan didn’t know if he wanted the help, but as he allowed some sense to infiltrate his consciousness, he knew that he would soon be a wanted man. Prison couldn’t protect him. The government would want to know his secrets. They would do worse things to him than Xenobia. The various aliens roaming Klamath Falls would want him, too.
The only thing he could do was disappear.