Separate.
So it’s an older crowd, mostly. Retirees eating sunny-side-up eggs and toasted Wonder Bread slicked with pools of melted butter. Guzzling down gallons of sludgy coffee. They eat in slow motion. Too busy flapping their lips with a new list of complaints that sounds an awful lot like the old list of complaints.
It’s uncanny how similar their observations are. Everything they say. Everything they think. It’s like they are all the same shitty person. A many-headed hydra recounting the status of their 401k.
I find a recurring hilarity at the core of their shared philosophy. There are three tenets as far as I can tell:
1. I, the elder, should be able to do whatever I want. Anyone who obstructs my slightest whim is a morally abhorrent monster. Anything that prevents me from fulfilling my every minuscule desire “isn’t fair.”
2. Other people, on the other hand, can’t just do whatever they want. Especially the younger generation. There are rules. Obligations. I would be remiss in my role as a boomer fucktard if I didn’t try to guilt and shame anyone who doesn’t conform absolutely, who dares to not serve me.
3. Other people, in fact, should generally be ashamed of themselves. Whatever they’re doing, how dare they?
They are all convinced — utterly, wholly, absolutely — that the world, the universe, exists to serve them. It all belongs to them and only them. They cast themselves as the masters in their imaginations, see the rest of the earth’s population as their unwitting slaves.
This is the idea that must be smashed, crushed, wiped off the face of the planet. And I will accomplish it by wiping away faces indeed, blowing them to little pieces.
Obliterated. Vaporized.
I stare down at the grimy tabletop in my booth as I listen to them prattle on. I don’t dare make eye contact with the enemy, lest they try to engage me. You look at any of these windbags for even a fraction of a second, and you may as well be wearing a sign that invites them to launch into a humblebrag rant about their grandkid’s academic achievements or some nonsense. Inane. Vacuous.
Not going to fucking happen to me. Believe me. I may be homicidal, but I’m not insane.
As it happens, I have a philosophy of my own. Just one tenet this time.
1. Don’t talk to me.
But I bring all of that up to say this:
It’s hilarious that grown adults act like life isn’t fair. They even say it out loud for Christ’s sake.
It’s not fair! It’s not fair!
All the old men growing red-faced and flustered at the Best Buy help desk, all the Karens filing their furious customer service complaints daily. Guess what? No one gives a fuck about you. You don’t matter. There are a fucking million of you, or ten million of you, or billions of you.
The universe is indifferent. Cold and uncaring. Just empty fucking space stretching out forever. Black seas of infinity.
It. Does. Not. Care.
And you? You are nothing. No one. A bacterium.
Trust me. When you die, the world will go on, the universe will persist. It won’t even blink.
CHAPTER 43
Revenge becomes the only joy, the only hope.
When you really look at what we’ve made of this world, how can you not want to fuck it up? How can you not want to watch it crumble? How can you not gorge on violence, surrender to the appetite for destruction that must well in all of our guts?
Look beneath the surface. Underneath the glossy veneer of that celebrity dream that soothes you with false hopes.
They’ve got you convinced that if you follow orders, you can have a piece of that dream. Like if you work and slave and spend yourself, put something in, you’ll get something in return. An implied transaction. Sleight of hand to make you docile, to keep you from seeing that your life is happening right here and now, ending one second at a time, and you’re fucking wasting it in service of a diseased culture — a machine that mass produces suffering.
There is no peace here. There is no comfort in the crowd. There is no reward for obedience.
We’re just restless animals. A hateful mob. Hungry. Disturbed.
Don’t fight it. Embrace it.
I spend my days hunched over shoeboxes. Tinkering with little mechanical contraptions inside them. Motion-activated triggers. Detonators.
No sleep now. Just stinging eyes poring over opened textbooks, then back to the shoebox. Too excited to sleep ever again, I think.
Need to perfect my craft now. Develop my talent for improvised explosive devices.
Unleash the fury.
Big bang.
Peel faces off skulls. Cave in ribcages. Take heads clean off.
All by way of special delivery.
It will be perfect. Hideous. Profane.
And I will make it with my own hands. Will it into being. Set it loose upon the earth.
My spirit unleashed. Transmitted.
Detonated. Exploding.
I feel like a psychopathic MacGyver. It’s such a blast.
If there is a God, I must be God’s lonely man. Some forgotten boy. I slipped down through the cracks in the sidewalk, the wounded places in the cityscape. Got washed down into the scum of the gutter. Sucked down some grate in the concrete with the piss and blood and rainwater.
Drain you.
In this life, I’ve witnessed rape and murder up close. Heard the whimpers. Watched tears leak down shiny cheeks, swollen and red.
Saw the forearm flex. The trigger squeezed. Watched the muzzle flash. Death dealt through the barrel of a gun.
I’ve been kicked in the ribs. Punched in the mouth. Beaten bloody. Spit on. Abandoned.
I’m nobody. Nothing. An ugly piece of trash.
But the scum always rises to the top, doesn’t it? Eventually. Eventually. A film of bubbles emerges. A froth that drifts to the surface. It floats above all the rest.
Waiting for a sign. Anything to tell me… to tell me… what? That I should do it now. Or that I shouldn’t.
Sometimes I think I could forget all of this. Ditch the mission. Live a normal life somehow. Some way.
Find a place in the world. Find someone to kill the rest of my time with.
A simple life.
Maybe someone could find me. Pull me out of this mindset. Help me see a better way.
But I can’t see it. When I try to picture it… I see the black of the sky again, the gaping dark between the stars.
Black nothing. Black dream.
Waiting for relief, maybe. A releasing of the tension. A ceasing of the restless pounding in my chest, in my skull — the thoughts that circle around and around in my mind like a hamster on a wheel. An end to that throb of energy that animates me, the electrical impulses traveling up and down my limbs.
Relief. Maybe that’s all there is to wait for in a way.
CHAPTER 44
A coldness had come over Darger again as she read. Icy prickles in her fingers and toes.
The previous entry was the first time she sensed true vulnerability in Tyler Huxley’s words. Loneliness and desperation.
Waiting for a sign. Anything to tell me… to tell me… what? That I should do it now. Or that I shouldn’t.
She sighed, wondering how different things might have turned out if he’d gotten that sign from the universe that told him to abandon his plan.
There was one page left. Darger turned to it.
The circle closes. And so the story ends. We go through the motions now once more with feeling.
The human experiment is a failure. We tried and tried to etch order onto the chaos of the universe, but it cannot hold, it cannot win out.
Hitler. Stalin. Pol Pot.
Ted Bundy. John Wayne Gacy. Jeffrey Dahmer.
We keep pretending like this darkness isn’t part of us, isn’t etched into all of our DNA. But rape and murder have persisted throughout human history, and they always will. This is us.
The story is the same. Whether you wrote about it in a scroll sealed with wax 1,000 y
ears ago, or etched the headline in inky newsprint 50 years ago, or post about it on your fuckin’ blog today, the human story is the same.
Hollywood paints this picture of selfless heroes and harmony and the good guy winning, when our true nature is best represented by killers, thieves, liars, whores. The politicians who sell us out over and over for campaign contributions. The insurance company who decides they won’t cover the surgery your grandma needs to survive. All those thousands of Nazis who followed their orders and shoved real live human beings into the ovens and showers. That’s humanity. That’s us. A brutal species. Look closer than what that silver screen shows you, and you can still see the bloodstains on the teeth, the chunks of torn skin trapped under the fingernails.
Me? I want something better. Am willing to sacrifice all for something better.
I’m just a hopeless romantic, I guess.
Look closer still. It’s right in front of you. All around you. Hanging in the air. Written between the lines.
It’s freeing, I think, if you can find it. You realize that nothing binds you. There are no rules. You are free, and you always were.
Darger finished reading and squeezed her eyelids shut. All this reading on no sleep was taking a toll, and it felt like two handfuls of sand had been flung into her eyes.
Her brain tumbled Huxley’s words around. Processing it all.
The last sheet had been different from the rest, both the framing of the message and the thickness of the paper itself. She thought that was significant. It seemed once more that the journal pages were handled separately from the clue, though that delineation was more implied than overt in this final case.
Did it mean anything? Maybe yes. Maybe no. They’d know for sure in about five and a half hours, she supposed.
The circle closes. And so the story ends. We go through the motions now once more with feeling.
Did that mean this was the end? One last clue to solve? One last attack to thwart? She almost didn’t dare to get her hopes up. The constant running around from scene to scene was starting to get to her. She was pissed, tired, and she had a headache.
She’d downed two cups of coffee and three ibuprofen, but it hadn't dulled the throbbing in her temples.
And now the sun was shining directly into the conference room, reflecting off the polished tabletop, trying to stab through her pupils to get at her brain. Intolerable. She dug around in her purse. Found her sunglasses. Slid them over her eyes.
That was a little better. Solved the sun problem, at least. But it did nothing to solve the last clue.
Fucking Huxley and his games.
Beside her, Loshak slurped at another can of Monster. He’d apparently conned three more cans off Fitch. Darger pointed at one of the unopened cans.
“May I?”
He raised an eyebrow but slid it over to her.
The can cracked and hissed as Darger popped it open. She brought the aluminum cylinder to her lips and tilted her head back, letting the tangy concoction slide down her throat. It was sizzling and acidic and insanely sweet, and she did her best not to let any of it touch her tongue.
She chugged over half the can before setting it down. A syrupy tang lingered in her mouth. She grimaced at the aftertaste, but she thought maybe it had helped. A little. Or maybe it was just the adrenaline rush of choking down something so nasty.
Loshak nodded his approval.
“Crisp, right? Like I said.”
CHAPTER 45
After staring at the newest clue for some time, Loshak came up with the idea of looking over the originals, beginning with the note Huxley had left taped to the wall of his basement.
“So he starts right out with the Manson ‘piggies’ reference,” he said. “And then, the note you found tucked inside the DVR at the Driscoll scene had the Son of Sam quotes.”
Darger gestured at one of the evidence bags.
“That led us to the Zodiac cipher, which pointed to Nielsen’s penthouse.”
Loshak tapped a finger on the baggie Darger had fished out from the underside of Nielsen’s car.
“And in the next one, he opens with the Jack the Ripper bit, which was probably just to throw us off.” Loshak scratched his chin. “He got a little tricky with the Mark David Chapman thing since he isn’t technically a serial killer. But he is a famous murderer. Close enough, right?”
“Sure,” Darger said.
“So the key to solving nearly every previous clue was some kind of serial killer or famous crime reference.” Loshak almost smiled. “I think it’s fair to say that if anyone was equipped to solve such a clue, it’d be the two of us.”
Darger picked up the most recent clue. The evidence bag crinkled in her hands.
“He mentioned three killers in the newest one. Six if we count the three genocidal dictators. Maybe there’s some pattern to it.”
Loshak stepped to the whiteboard and wrote down the name of each killer mentioned in the newest clue. They tried a number cipher created by using the number of victims from each killer mentioned in the journal. When that failed, they tried finding a geographic area the killers might have had in common, specifically any connection to New York.
By the end, they were still right where they’d started. Darger stared up at the whiteboard, her eyes jumping from one set of scribbled ideas to the next. They’d made no progress whatsoever.
Still, her mood had improved. Talking it out at least felt like an attempt at moving forward.
Loshak read a passage aloud.
“‘Hollywood paints this picture of selfless heroes and harmony and the good guy winning, when our true nature is best represented by killers, thieves, liars, whores.’”
The agent stopped there and shook his head.
“Hypocritical little pissant,” he grumbled. “He’s so damn offended by the way movies and society put forth these fantasies, like he’s so above it all, and yet he’s doing exactly the same thing. Except his fantasies involve actual violence.”
Fredrick poked her head into the room.
“I just got a call from the documents experts. The forensic linguist and the cryptanalyst have gone over the newest clue a dozen times, but they haven’t found anything of note. No hidden messages. Nothing that enlightens us at all.”
Darger’s shoulders slumped. She’d been hoping the documents lab would find something in the scans they’d forwarded over. Something the rest of them had overlooked.
“We’re missing something,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
Loshak slammed his fist onto the top of the table.
“Well I’ll be damned if I’m going to let this little shit get the better of us. He’s not as smart as he thinks he is, you know? He’s got the mentality of a bitter fourteen-year-old who’s mad because he doesn’t get to sit at the cool kid’s table in the cafeteria during lunchtime. It’s pathetic.”
“Whoa there,” Darger said. “Is this because he called you a ‘boomer fucktard’?”
Loshak squinted at her. He reached for his last can of Monster and cracked it open without breaking eye contact.
“I’ll have you know that I’ve been told, on more than one occasion, that I have very Millennial energy.”
Darger burst out laughing. Hard enough that tears sprang to her eyes.
“It’s not that funny,” Loshak said, still as grumpy as ever.
“Maybe the exhaustion is making me punchy.” She wiped her eyes. “Sorry.”
Darger sighed. Her eyes went from the manic scribbles on the whiteboard to the clock on the wall.
They still had time. They just had to keep working at it. It wasn’t time to panic yet.
That would come later.
CHAPTER 46
Darger bent over the sink in the ladies’ room and splashed a handful of cool water over her face. She blinked at her reflection in the mirror, eyelashes all stuck together in clumps. She’d hoped the shock of cold water would be enough to squeeze a bit more brain juice from her mind, give her the tiniest edge t
o help solve the clue. But so far all she’d really gained was a wet splotch on the front of her blouse from where the runoff had dribbled off her chin.
When she returned to the conference room, all the chairs around the table were empty. She and Loshak had agreed to take a fifteen-minute break, and she was back a little early.
She stepped over to one of the windows and peered outside. The people below went about their day. Work. Meetings. School. Lunch dates. All the while, one of them had been marked for death, and they had no inkling. And up here, 23 floors off the ground, two FBI profilers were going crazy trying to figure out the who, the what, the where.
Look closer still. It’s right in front of you. All around you. Hanging in the air. Written between the lines.
The fucker. Always speaking in riddles. Teasing them. Taunting them from beyond the grave.
Written between the lines.
She tried to force her mind to make some final intuitive leap. To see somehow what he meant for her to see between the lines.
Nothing.
She thought of another turn of phrase that struck her as out of place, a tactic that had helped on earlier clues.
The story is the same. Whether you wrote about it in a scroll sealed with wax 1,000 years ago, or etched the headline in inky newsprint 50 years ago, or post about it on your fuckin’ blog today, the human story is the same.
Taken as a whole, the idea being expressed here made sense. Still, the bit about the scroll stuck out. She wasn’t even sure why, but it did.
Sealed with wax.
She squeezed her eyes tightly shut. Let her mind go blank with just those ideas bobbing around in her head.
Written between the lines.
Sealed with wax.
Still nothing.
Grisly pictures opened in her head. She saw that melted pizza cheese flesh pulling away from Amelia Driscoll’s cheekbone and jaw. Saw Gavin Passmore’s face shattered and strewn about his kitchen — a bloody jelly flecked with cranial bits the size of teeth.
Violet Darger | Book 8 | Countdown To Midnight Page 19