Highways to Hell

by Bryan Smith

  He sat down to write the novel.

  Wrote one page.

  Read it through a dozen times or so.

  And decided it was again time to reevaluate his goals in life.

  Still thinking in terms of groupies and fame and fortune, he toyed with the idea of becoming an actor. He went so far as to take a few acting classes. Three classes, to be exact, each of them a study in awkwardness and boredom.

  By then he was close to accepting he had no ability whatever in any of the creative fields. He could maybe go into politics. He was young and good-looking, and possessed more than enough personal charisma to get by. He could be a congressman. A senator. Hell, he could be president. The job clearly didn’t require brains. If anything, he was overqualified.

  But politics bored him even more than acting, so fuck that.

  The reality that banging bimbos could be something of a potential liability in the political arena was somewhat of a deciding factor, as well.

  And then it happened, the moment that changed his life.

  The goddamn epiphany.

  He could be a serial killer.

  And not just any ordinary dumb bastard of a serial killer. The usual guys in that field were greasy dullards. Ugly bastards who wore over-sized glasses with thick lenses. Sexual predators driven by anger and frustration, who killed because no woman in her right mind would ever voluntarily give up the goods to a guy like that. Those guys, they didn’t exactly stir the imagination. Sure, every once in a while someone more interesting came along, someone like Ted Bundy. Now there was a guy who was legitimately a legend in the annals of serial killing. Some guys had killed more women than Ted, but few had ever done it with the pizazz of the Deliberate Stranger. But even he had botched it all in the end. John decided he would follow in Bundy’s footsteps only to a degree. He would do everything his new hero had done right, avoid his missteps, and elevate the killing game to a whole new level. And by the time he was done, he meant to be the world’s most prolific and creative serial killer ever. Books would be written about him. Movies made. He would finally be a celebrity of a sort. And, hell, some of the more interesting and charismatic serial killers, Ted included, even had their own groupies.

  Yep, on paper it all looked very positive.

  That summer, at the age of twenty-two, he killed three women. He did his homework so well beforehand that he was never a suspect in any of the ensuing investigations. He was never questioned. None of the suspect sketches the police circulated ever looked remotely like him. And yet, the killings had been public and spectacularly gruesome. The corpses were decapitated and mutilated in myriad creative ways. None of this strangling the lass and ditching her body in a remote patch of wilderness never to be discovered jazz. This was to be a very open campaign of shock and awe horror. And it worked. The local media went apoplectic after the first killing. The national press got in on the act after the third victim was discovered. He was dubbed The Little Rock Madman, not a bad serial killer name. All was going very much according to plan.

  Except for one little thing.

  John just wasn’t enjoying the work very much.

  Oh, he’d gotten a real high from successfully pulling off the first job. In those first moments of his new existence as a murderer, he’d been certain he’d found at last his true calling in life. But the high faded faster than he expected and his sleep that night was disrupted by nightmares. He chalked it up to first time pangs of conscience. Not even that, really. This was just social conditioning, a mental and chemical reflex, something that would surely fade as the work became more routine. So he pressed ahead with his plan. But the nightmares and sleep disruptions got exponentially worse after he offed the second and third girls. After the third one, he got blind drunk and woke up in a pool of his own piss and vomit in an alley behind a Little Rock dive bar. He woke up screaming and crying every night for months. Turned out he had a real conscience after all. The faces of the dead women haunted him day and night. His day job suffered. He dropped out of grad school. And his life continued on a grim downward spiral until the night he got down on his knees in yet another backstreet alley and begged God and his victims for forgiveness.

  His life changed after that night. He did everything he could think of to atone, short of turning himself in and signing a confession. He went back to school and graduated with honors. He became a very successful man. A wealthy man. He donated tons of money to victims groups and death penalty advocates. He went to church twice a week and continued to pray every day for forgiveness. Years went by. Decades. Enough time that the killings he’d done that long ago summer began to seem like something he must have imagined, something that couldn’t possibly be real. Except that every once in a while, even all these years later, the local media would dredge the whole thing up again, reminding the public that the Little Rock Madman had never been caught. Even so, the passage of time and his acts of contrition combined to convince him that he had truly transformed himself. He wasn’t really a monster. That bloody summer had ultimately been nothing more than a blip in an otherwise exemplary life, a wrong path he’d been wise enough to quickly abandon.

  An impression that had lasted until roughly one week prior to today.

  John stared at his wife’s severed head and said, “You fucking bitch.”

  He’d come home early from work that day and caught her in bed with a much younger man. A large black man with a bodybuilder’s physique and a model’s chiseled face. Later he learned the man was an expensive male prostitute. Which explained Linda’s reaction upon seeing him in the bedroom doorway. There had been no shame. No quick, startled disengagement of the two sleek, sweaty bodies. Instead she’d yelled at him to get out of the room so she could finish. Turned out she’d just wanted to get her money’s worth. John had retreated to his study down the hall, where he cracked the seal on a bottle of very fine old scotch and settled into his leather executive’s chair to listen to his wife’s orgasmic screams. The screams interested him. They were high and shrill, not entirely dissimilar to the screams made by the victims of the Little Rock Madman. The thought made him frown. Linda never sounded like that when he was putting it to her.

  He started thinking about killing her after that first sip of scotch. The thought seemed to come from nowhere and sent a shudder of revulsion rippling through his whole body. He’d had no conscious, active thoughts about killing anyone in twenty years. The scotch turned sour in his stomach and he felt bile at the back of his throat.

  At some point the screams from the bedroom faded and stopped. A little later he heard muted conversation in the hallway. Then male laughter and feminine giggling. They were laughing at him. The insight did nothing to lighten his thoughts. Then she came into the study, a robe cinched tight around her shapely body, and made several declarations. They were not going to get divorced. Of course not. She enjoyed her position in the community too much. He was never going to breathe a word of this to anyone. She would continue to screw the thousand-dollar-a-pop prostitute twice a week, and she would continue to sample any other strange flesh that caught her fancy, including John’s young lesbian niece, who she’d apparently been corrupting for months. And furthermore, he was never going to have sex with her again, because he was just no good at it. Not only that, but he was not allowed to have affairs of his own. She would not have anyone in town talking about her behind her back. Then she pried the bottle of scotch from his shaking fingers and told him he was not allowed to drink anymore. Still more ultimatums followed, each more galling than the last.

  He was initially defiant. “You realize this is ludicrous, right? What makes you think I’ll be a good little doggie and do everything you say?”

  She smirked and looked down her regal nose at him. “Because you talk in your sleep. Mr. Madman. Why, you’re practically verbose.”

  John just stared at her, suddenly cold and dead inside.

  “There are things you don’t want people to know.”

  He stayed silent, str
uggled to breathe.

  “Nasty things.”

  His fingers dug into his knees, made the bones grind.

  “So, yes, I do think I have the leverage I need here.” Her smirk deepened, became a look of utter, smug certainty. “I own you now, John. You’re my little wind-up toy. Finish up whatever you’re doing in here and come out to the kitchen. I’m going to write up a list of new chores for you.”

  She turned her back on him and sashayed back through the door, making a show of how little she feared the infamous Little Rock Madman.

  John slumped in his chair.

  His thoughts turned to murder again.

  But that sense of revulsion was still there. He’d worked so hard to redeem himself. He just couldn’t let himself succumb to the old demons. Not even at the cost of his own manhood and dignity. The dark thoughts nonetheless stayed with him in the days that followed, though he struggled hard against them, even in the face of so much deep humiliation. And it got worse. She kept doing things to deepen his shame. The worst was yesterday, when she made him watch her fuck the prostitute. They tied him to a chair in the bedroom, and then they did it all. Missionary position. Girl on top. From behind, with both anal and vaginal penetration. Reverse cowgirl and face-sitting. Jesus, but it just went on and fucking on. By the time the prostitute left, John had been reduced to a trembling lump of insensible flesh. Linda didn’t free him from the chair until hours later. She then slapped him out of his stupor and ordered him to take out the trash and wash the dishes.

  John did take out the trash.

  Then he got into his Mercedes and drove far, far away from there. He stayed out for hours, drinking himself senseless in a succession of low-rent dives in the worst part of town. He didn’t remember coming home. Didn’t remember going to bed. But his sleep was tortured with nightmare visions of bloody murder. The images were so vivid and real. His wife dying horribly at his hands, tortured first, then chopped and diced into little pieces.

  Turned out there was a reason the images were so damn vivid.

  They were fucking real, man. Not nightmares at all, but memories.

  John threw the refrigerator door shut.

  He thought, Well, that’s it.

  There was no denying the truth of it. There was no coming back from this. It was the thing he’d told himself he couldn’t live with if it happened again, and John had always been a man true to his word. He would honor this vow.

  But first he would bear witness to the rest of his shame.

  He shuffled out of the kitchen and made his way to the dining room. Here was where most of the action had occurred. John’s knees went weak at the sight of the carnage. There were pieces of Linda on the dinner table. Her breasts on a ceramic plate. One looked to have been partially devoured. He saw fingers protruding from candle holders, each fingernail adorned with the shade of deep scarlet polish Linda favored. The lower half of her body was arranged with its legs spread in the center of the table. He supposed he’d climbed onto the table and defiled it at least once during the evening. What remained of her torso sat in a chair, a large knife protruding from the space between her missing breasts. And of course there was a simply amazing amount of blood splashed all over the room.

  Feeling numb, John drank it all in.

  It was incredible.

  The Little Rock Madman had clearly not lost his gift for creative slaughter during his long period of inactivity. He even felt a strange sort of pride beneath the overwhelming sense of horror and failure.

  The numbness faded.

  A wash of nausea swept through him and he vomited profusely, the force of it sending him to his hands and knees. He heaved and heaved, spewing bile all over a severed big toe that had found its way to the floor. The spasms continued long after his stomach had emptied its contents. His joints and muscles ached with the pain of it, pain so overwhelming he actually welcomed it, because for a time it blocked out the reality of what he had done. But eventually the sickness gripping him faded and he was again forced to face the awful truth.

  He got to his feet and staggered out of the room. His body reeled as he made his way through the big house, pitching side to side, hands held out to his sides in order to bounce off the walls and remain upright. Stumbling through the door to his study, he spied his leather chair and fell toward it with his arms extended, seeking it with the desperation of a shipwreck survivor grasping for the only life-preserver in sight. He made it to the chair, sat there slumped and panting for several minutes.

  Many minutes passed. He began to regain some measure of physical and mental control. Then he set about doing the things he needed to do. He found a pad of paper and a pen, and he began to write the untold story of The Little Rock Madman. The rambling confession had more than enough details about the murders to convince authorities the real killer had at last been unmasked, albeit posthumously. The letter also contained heartfelt apologies to the families of his victims, and proclaimed that he would not ask for their forgiveness because he did not deserve it. Any of them were welcome to come to his grave to piss on it. He concluded by stating that while his wife had undeniably been a heartless bitch of truly epic proportions, she had not deserved to die. He apologized to her family and said that they, too, were welcome to piss on his grave.

  He read the confession through two times, then signed it.

  He reached for the bottle of old scotch Linda had pried from his fingers a week ago, but didn’t pick it up, deciding he didn’t deserve even this one last fleeting pleasure. Instead he opened the bottom drawer of his desk, removed the .44 Magnum from the lock box at the back, put the gun’s barrel in his mouth, and squeezed the trigger. He didn’t hear the gun’s report or even really feel what the large-caliber bullet did to his head. The awesome destructive power of the weapon did its work too fast and too efficiently for that, triggering a brief geyser of blood and brains that splattered shelves of leather-bound books behind his desk.

  The next thing he was aware of was music.

  Crunchy, distorted guitar chords and a thumping drum beat.

  In a moment he recognized the song as “Highway To Hell” by AC/DC. He had loved them as a teenager, but hearing this particular song now was not exactly the most reassuring thing he had ever experienced.

  John opened his eyes and realized at once that he was in Hell.

  At first blush it looked like any large metropolitan city. Buildings, the rumble of traffic, honking horns, and the buzz of nearby voices. He was standing on a sidewalk. A standard issue city sidewalk. This could have been a street in Manhattan. Maybe Greenwich Village. But then there were the obvious big differences. The street vendor selling fried human eyeballs from a cart across the street. The sign on a utility pole which read CITY MUTILATION ZONE. And the many creatures that could only be demons of various sorts in the mix of milling pedestrians. He looked up and saw the roiling red sky and the sickle-shaped black moon that hung there.

  He pinched himself and said, “Ouch.”

  He patted his face and the top of his head, which was somehow intact, and that was quite a remarkable thing indeed, given that he’d just fired a bullet through it. But there was no denying the physical reality. He was alive again. In Hell, but alive.

  He shook his head. “I’ll be damned.”

  A hooker in miniskirt, high heels, and red fishnets paused in the process of strutting past him, turning a face toward him that looked like it had been boiled in acid. “We’re all Damned. You want a blowjob?”

  John decided her face probably had actually been boiled in acid. “Um...no. Thanks anyway.”

  The hooker’s face twisted, forming an expression that might have been a sneer. It was hard to tell through all the scarring. “You sure? You don’t know what you’re missing. Ask anybody, they’ll tell you. I give the best head of any whore in Hell.”

  Against his will, an image of his erect cock wedged in the scary black slit that was the hooker’s mouth formed in John’s head. He grimaced. “No, sorry. I, uh
, no offense or anything, but...”

  The hooker reached into the little handbag slung over her shoulder and removed something. He heard a click of a button and saw a shiny blade pop open. The hooker brandished the switchblade and said, “We’re going into that alley behind you. I’m gonna blow you and then I’m gonna cut your dick off for a trophy.” Her face twisted again, the scarred flesh arranging itself into something that could theoretically have been a smile. “And there ain’t shit you can do about it.”

  John swallowed hard. “Um...”

  Run, he thought. Just run.

  Another second and he might have bolted, but the soft, sultry voice to his right stopped him. “Get lost, whore. This one’s mine.”

  Great.

  The whores of Hell were arguing over him, and he hadn’t been here five minutes yet. Not an auspicious start. He was feeling a bit like a piece of meat. It was not a feeling he enjoyed. “Look—”

  He turned to address the second whore, but the words died in his throat with a gurgle. He went cold inside and again felt the urge to bolt. The second woman was not another cheap streetwalker. She was gorgeous, with long, lustrous blond hair and an exquisite face worthy of the cover of Vogue. The body was just as stunning, sleek and slender but with lush curves and ample breasts. It was the kind of body meant for modeling swimsuits. The dress she wore looked stylish and sexy, not at all like anything a whore would have in her wardrobe. It looked expensive, as if it must have been purchased from one of Hell’s most upscale boutiques. He knew nothing of the current fashion trends in Hell, but instinct told him this woman would always stand at its cutting edge. The backless black dress looked molded to her figure, a supple second skin that would be a pleasure and privilege to peel away from her creamy, unblemished flesh.

  John felt the same instant, reflexive lust he’d felt the first time he’d seen her.

  Which had been at a nightclub in Little Rock twenty years ago, the night before he hacked her into seemingly a million little pieces in that public park.