Murderland

by Garrett Cook

  I sit, silently finishing up my coffee. The redhead talks for awhile about things that I don’t really process and I respond with nods and looks of blatantly feigned interest. She doesn’t quite notice. Thinks that she has, in fact, made a real and profound connection of some kind.

  “Can I call you?” she asks.

  “No,” I reply. Then, I go home and have a real conversation. In retrospect, I think the redhead was a robot.

  I Must Be Permissive, Understanding of the Younger Generation

  On Tuesdays, Jeremy works at the pharmacy in the morning so that he can go to the library and read to the children in the afternoon. The reading room is lined with bright pictures of the Cat in the Hat, mythic creatures from the Narnia books, dragons, faeries, the Tin Man, Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow and any number of other images from fairy tales and children’s books of all kinds. In the middle of the room is a rocking chair painted green with little gold letters engraved on it. The little gold letters read “Story Chair” and Jeremy always beams with pride and comfort when he sits down in it and picks a book. The large circle of children stares up eagerly as they observe him making his choice. They know what he’ll choose, but they always like to see him pick it out. Children love rituals and routines and consider them bastions of safety and Jeremy’s picking a book is one of the rituals they observe the closest and feel safest about.

  He silently opens Goodnight Moon and then says hello to all the children before telling them to gather around. He tells the little ones to scoot closer in order to hear and better see the simple, bright but subtle little pictures. Goodnight Moon is completely without flash or pretention. Goodnight Moon is an institution in children’s literature. Not only that, but it is an American institution, period. This is one of the reasons Jeremy likes it so much. And one of the reasons for which Jeremy selects it every time he sits down to read to all of the children.

  If I have children, Jeremy thinks, I’ll read them Goodnight Moon all the time. I think maybe every night. I’ll read them Goodnight Moon and then I’ll tuck them into bed and tell them I love them. Although a child should be exposed to a wide variety of things to expand their fragile little minds in order to avoid potential nanite infections. He hopes and prays (as close as Jeremy comes to praying) that his influence and that of the great patriot Margaret Wise Brown might just be enough to spare their little brains and their little souls. He does not for a minute believe it sufficient. Why? Because I don’t for a minute believe it will be sufficient. Jeremy is wasting his time. Poor Jeremy.

  A little girl, six, round-faced, cute and blonde lays her head gently on his lap and Jeremy fights to avoid crying. So, I take the sad like I often do. I put it where all the other sad goes and it’s gone, like magic. Now Jeremy is all right and I am sad. I am sad that Jeremy knows the Dark Ones will come for her and fill her up with their evil and their venomous ideas. But Jeremy is not sad, no. I am. I tend to keep quiet. Quiet, but sometimes I have things to say. When I have things to say, they are always of the utmost importance.

  Jeremy pats her head and smiles. Some of the littler ones are starting to fidget. Then, he points the book at them, a little like a gun and bang! The bright magic of the sweet little pictures brings them to their knees and they are crawling back to the story. A murder of crows devouring a corpse. Bandits gathering round to loot the treasure trove of stimulation.

  Someday, he thinks again, someday if I have children, I will read them Goodnight Moon. But Cass isn’t into children, Santa, or the Easter Bunny…

  She’s also not conscious of the Dark Ones. Cass may not be the one to send his innocent progeny screaming and clueless into an embattled world. For right now, he’ll just do what he can with these poor ignorant things. Hope is all we have, he says to both of us and even I am uncertain if this is an unusual statement for him. It fits firmly inside and outside of his ethos. He’s just glad for now, that these children are enjoying serene, wholesome children’s literature and not comic books or movies or BLD News. Jeremy hates violence. I however am absolutely crazy about it. Sometimes, I just have to sneak up behind him and shake him hard and remind him. I have so much to do and so little time. Jeremy is at last finishing the book. Good. I myself hate it. Goodnight this, goodnight that. I don’t see the point. I’d like to think he’s smarter than all this shit.

  “More,” says a little brown-haired boy with glasses.

  Jeremy looks around the children’s room. Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Killing. The Chronicles of Narnia. Right-wing Christian propaganda. Alice in Wonderland. Too complex. Maybe too close to home. And there are various other bright loud plastic books about talking insects, bears and bunnies that are lonely and looking for friends, baseball capped dinosaurs munching hamburgers and having a good old time in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The books all beg for attention, howling and caterwauling like a zoo. Jeremy is unsure. A maze of saccharine, juvenile, amoral titles tries to drag him in. He is reminded of the mall and movie theaters and infomercials. He sees the nanites crawling on some of them. Sure, they’re microscopic, but Jeremy sees them. He is painfully aware of their game. He’s too good for them, Jeremy Jenkins ascendant devil will not be tricked into making more robots out of gullible innocents. I stop him from sweating since I am so tired of all of his fucking panic. It’s no good. Another one of those feelings that I occasionally slice out and toss on the big intricate compost heap I’ve built. He finds something at last. Loving, fun, kindhearted.

  “The sun did not shine; it was too wet to play…”

  Crisis averted. I take a short nap, with my eyes open as always. Call me paranoid.

  Jeremy finishes the book and returns home to Cass. Though no domestic prodigy, no more a potential housewife than a potential mother, Cass has made a pound of linguini and keeps a bowl of meatballs separate from the thick and crunchy marinara sauce she has made for Jeremy. He is quiet and reflective. Cass hugs him hard and she shakes him like she usually does when it looks like he’s spacing out. She should know by now that Jeremy is never spacing out. Too smart, too productive, too powerful.

  He looks at her now. He actually looks at her. So often he’s remembering other times with her or trying to see wires under her skin, but now he is really looking at her. The roundness under the sweater, the sweetly predatory amber brown eyes, the maybe-too-pale skin, the tiny smile that sometimes gets enormous and threatens to devour her face, the longshort legs that her black skirt shows so well, the silent laughter and the muted depression and the inaudible footfalls. Jeremy is almost too shy to talk. It feels like back in school when the plaid skirts and forbidden cleavage would reach in and wrench the words from his throat. But, it’s different now, too. He wants to say all the things that he sees and feels, but they might seem fake or not quite sane or like they’re just lines to get what he wants from her. So, he says something that expresses nothing at all. Something that seems genuine, but is empty and weightless to her ears. The real words and the real thoughts are too heavy. I might just have to drag them away.

  “You look nice,” he says, and almost instantly regrets it.

  “I look nice? Don’t you have anything unique or real to say? I think I know that you think I look nice. You fuck me, don’t you? You wouldn’t fuck me if I was hideous or something. Don’t even bother with that you look nice shit, Jeremy.” Cass looks annoyed. She doesn’t look small and sweet anymore, she looks huge and dour, a glowering renaissance statue of her, a desperate and perfect Venus who might as well be a Juno. She’s still too beautiful for him to talk about coherently. He backs off. He gets tense and nervous, that feeling he gets at the ATM when he doesn’t know if his paycheck has cleared yet and the rent is due. Is this it? Is she gone? If she goes, then Jeremy and I are alone. I sort of want her to go; actually, she’s a distraction. I have a hard time getting through to him when she’s around.

  “I was just saying that you look so beautiful. I always think you look nice, and I love you so I felt like telling you. I
love you, Cass.”

  “Okay,” says a mournful, bitter Cass who still manages to plant a kiss on his cheek. I love it when she’s like this. She gets very quiet.

  “I’m sorry,” says Jeremy. I can feel him creeping away, creeping toward me and the things that I pile up in my corridors. He resists walking down that path, somehow. Instead, he thinks what he was about to say before, but doesn’t even consider saying it now. Silent laughter. Glowing melancholy. Light and darkness playing so ably on her sweet face. Chiaroscuro. He dips a piece of garlic bread into the linguini, methodically scooping bits of tomato and pepper onto the bread. He crunches into it hard. It’s a little burnt. Everything’s just a little bit wrong. Everything’s slightly off. Something good must have been on TV. Something repugnant, actually.

  “Poker night?” Cass asks.

  “Mhmm,” Jeremy says with his mouth full. This is his excuse every week and every time it works and manages to arouse no suspicion whatsoever. Nobody ever calls to remind him, and Jeremy hasn’t seen his male friends for ages, but he knows that Cass would never check it out or think of asking to go with him. Jeremy’s male friends are desk job kinds of guys with very little sense of humor and nothing great to talk about. Just the kind of people you pick up without even noticing. The kind of people someone as unassertive as Jeremy finds clinging to him. Completely foolproof. And when those other alternating days arise, Jeremy volunteers at a soup kitchen or goes to book discussion groups. Why not? The work he does is to preserve humanity and to preserve the intellectual integrity of the species as well. Cass is not stupid, but Jeremy knows that she trusts him completely. She might not understand if he explains the situation. I’m not the man they think I am at home, he thinks. Elton John sings in his brain, “No, no, no, I’m the Rocket Man!”

  “You wanna come with? Jeff’s actually bringing his new girlfriend this time. He thinks you two might hit it off.”

  Cass shakes her head as he knows she will every time.

  “No, thanks. Poker is so boring. You just stare and wait and hope nobody knows what you’re hiding. If I wanted that, I’d have dinner with my mother. Besides, Jeff’s really condescending toward me and his last few girlfriends were too boring for most quilting bees. You have fun.”

  “Jeff’s not such a bad guy if you get to know him, and Sheila’s not stupid. Actually, she’s an orthodontist.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure she’s a laugh a minute. I think I’ll just stay home and watch TV, if it’s the same to you.”

  Jeremy shrugs. “I’ll tell Jeff you said ‘hi.’”

  “I just don’t feel welcome most of the time. It sounds like a guy thing. I can’t believe you of all people are involved in such a crazy macho ritual. You’re such a timid, sensitive guy most of the time, although there has to be a dark side somewhere in a guy who fucks like you do.”

  She flips her hair and gives him a seductive glance. I examine the context and I deem an erection completely unnecessary. Got to get going, places to be, people to be rid of. Not the time for dalliance or distractions, Jeremy.

  “I’ve got a very dark secret life, you know. I’m really a spy for some malignant Eastern European country.” He returns the seductive glance. It’s cute, it really is, but I myself am getting exasperated.

  “If you were a spy, you’d have a car, sweetheart.” Cass smiles. Not quite coy. She kisses him once more, this time nibbling on his lip a little bit. She lets her tongue tickle and taunt his before the kiss separates itself. She hugs him tightly, the bitterness disappearing someplace else in her.

  “Don’t forget your case of stuff,” she reminds him, thoroughly unaware that the case is full of razors and other serial killing paraphernalia and even more thoroughly unaware of what all of this serial killing paraphernalia is for. He tells her goodbye and rushes upstairs to grab all of his very important poker stuff.

  Jeremy’s important poker stuff is kept in a highly professional red leather briefcase. This is the second briefcase to bear Jeremy’s important poker stuff. This one was a birthday gift after the other was dropped and badly dented. It is fortunate that the briefcase did not open up as it was dropped, for its contents are of a fairly uncanny nature. Jeremy says it is full of change rolls, poker chips, a couple books and an extra deck of cards, since he occasionally likes to use his own. The contents of Jeremy’s briefcase however are as follows:

  7 straight razors

  1 meat cleaver

  1 pair of two inch shoelifts

  3 pairs of colored contact lenses: blue, hazel and green

  1 fake beard

  1 sanitary mask

  4 pairs sanitized rubber gloves

  1 syringe of liquid valium

  1 bottle vicodin

  1 bottle rohypnol

  1 bottle morphine

  Sometimes, Jeremy is actually glad that he is a pharmacist. On this occasion, Jeremy is also glad that Murderland does not close for another hour and a half. He is also glad that he noticed the waitress’ conversation with her Uncle Stan. He sometimes wonders whether it is a lightning quick brain and excellent judgment that give him such an edge, or whether it has something to do with the fact that what he is doing is the order of things. Just too many coincidences too much falling into place and it’s all so easy. So easy it almost hurts. But no matter what, tonight Jeremy’s kill is going to fall into place and nothing will get in his way. Nothing can get in the way of the triumph of goodness over the Dark Ones. It all feels gnawingly perfect to Jeremy as he slips in his blue contacts, puts on the lifts and walks into the restaurant with a slightly different swagger.

  The Jeremy who walks in is a hulking figure with a beard and sharp blue eyes. Tall, powerful, capable of throwing a woman around the way she likes it. Any woman who works as a waitress at a reapjoint likes to be thrown around. He has on a Yankees hat and a flannel shirt, which in this case are both very Reap. A consummate solitary predator type who lures innocent young things back to his house and slices them open. How ironic that that’s just what this girl and so many others they’re intrigued by. He gets stares from Ripchicks, Kelleys, Bundy girls and all manner of Reapers, even several male Rippers and Gacys.

  “Come sit with me, love…”

  “Come over here and play with Uncle Pogo…”

  “I’m going to a concert tonight and umm…”

  “You look amazing; it’s just so perfect…”

  “’Ave a little fun, boss?”

  He walks through the gauntlet of flirting unscathed, not replying once and sending further shivers down the spines of all the Reapkids around him. All of the mystiques, the danger, and the quiet desperation are too much. Fingernails drum his shoulders from the booth behind him and he has to ignore them. He brushes off a tongue on his neck. This should really be enough for Reapers to know that this is a man here to kill a waitress. Idiots. They might very well lack the requisite presence of mind to kill like Cass always says. What poseurs, sitting there begging for the real thing to work his magic on them. Sitting ducks. Their parents should be even more worried.

  He orders a salad and a coffee and he gives the waitress a big smile. She returns it. I whisper such exciting things to him. Such exciting things. I am not a panderer or a seducer, no. I’m just here to make sure Jeremy gets his job done and gets it done right. I tell him that we need to be rid of her. I remind him of his mother abandoning him. I remind him of just what would have happened as a result of the breeders getting to her. Were it not for me. It really scares me, to be honest. I am glad Jeremy is on mankind’s side and not against them, since he is an unstoppable juggernaut of destruction. They are terrifying beyond words, and they will get this woman. They will get her and they will fill her with their seeds. So, he waits and when he finishes his salad, he tips her a 20. He knows he’ll see it again. That’s when the Reap kids stop harassing him. They know damn well that he’s chosen his date for the evening.

  “What time do you get off?” he asks her with another smile.

  She looks d
own at her watch. “About now, cutie.”

  And then Jeremy gives his winning smile again. It’s reflexive by now. He wants to stop but he knows too much. He knows that he couldn’t even think of letting her get away. He had, at first, wanted immensely to spare her, for some reason that I cannot begin to fathom. That would be completely illogical, though, completely illogical, and a threat to humanity itself. But this stupid had been in his head. Glad to see it exiled. Now he can’t even think of letting a squawking, vicious baby Dark One squeeze out. Warn her? Let her run? Warn her, let her run? No. I have taken the fear and I have put in the usual place where fear belongs. No better place for it. The winning smile pastes itself on. The winning smile has something to win.

  “You wanna go get a drink?”

  Of course she agrees. Tall, nice smile, good tipper, pleasant with sickly sweet predatory pheromones. He can tell how lonely she is from all the times she checks up on her tables. Some of the kids have six refills by the end of the meal. Obvious, so obvious. So, they get in her car, and they head to a bar that Jeremy knows and has taken many women to in various permutations of his disguise. So many permutations that the witnesses couldn’t come up with a description if they wanted to. He’s been here a good seventy times and the bartender doesn’t know him as a regular. She asks about the briefcase and he explains that he just got off work. Computer programmer, sorta boring. You don’t wanna hear about that…

  It’s amazing how quickly he can bore her away from his story with technobabble. So, she accepts it. Never would have thought a real live psychopomp would be making his rounds at the little reapjoint where she works. It would be like a real leprechaun buying Lucky Charms. She’s still in uniform and we laugh together at the irony. On the inside of course. Jeremy would never let a slipup like that happen. They talk. Nothing special, nothing at all worth bringing up. They get drunker and she gets more brazen. He keeps her from noticing that he has been nursing a single rum and coke.