by Jeff Strand
Single White Psychopath Seeks Same
Jeff Strand
Chapter 1
SOMETIMES you wake up in the morning and you just know it’s going to be the kind of day where you end up tied to a chair in a filthy garage while a pair of tooth-deprived lunatics torment you with a chainsaw. So as I struggled against the ropes, I can’t say I was all that surprised.
This was actually my second time being tied to a chair and threatened with a cutting instrument, which I think is pretty impressive for a guy in his early thirties. Last time I had a burlap sack over my head, and to be honest I really would have appreciated one this time around. I mean, I know it’s what’s inside that counts, but these guys were seriously ugly. And their combined breath could probably be used as a Drano substitute.
The larger lunatic, whose tee shirt was decorated in a fashionable tobacco stain motif, sighed with annoyance as the smaller lunatic gave the chainsaw cord yet another tug. They’d been trying to start it for about five minutes. “Maybe it needs gas,” he suggested.
“I told you, it’s got gas!” his partner snapped.
“Then tug harder.”
“I’m tuggin’ as hard as I can!”
“Here, give it to me,” the lunatic offered, extending his hand.
“You keep your nasty hands off my chainsaw!”
“Then start it!”
“I’m tryin’!”
I guess it reflects poorly on me that I allowed myself to be kidnapped by these gentlemen, but I didn’t get much sleep the night before. I’d been relegated to the couch for breaking the living room lamp. Actually, I didn’t break it, my son Kyle did, but it was while playing basketball in the house, a rule that I was too busy watching television to enforce. Helen was less upset about the lamp than the fact that I encouraged both of our children to lie about the cause of its destruction. I really don’t know what made me think a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old could carry off the ruse (which involved a stray Doberman), but it earned me a sleepless night on the Fold-Out Bed of Misery.
So, anyway, I was pretty much out of it when I stepped out of the house that morning. One chloroform-soaked rag to the mouth later, I awoke to find myself with my hands, feet, and torso tied to a chair in a filthy garage while a pair of tooth-deprived lunatics tormented me with a chainsaw.
“Try this,” said the larger lunatic. “Put it on the ground and brace it with your feet, then yank the cord with both hands.”
“Maybe you should grease the pistons,” I suggested.
“You shut the hell up! Nobody asked you to say anything about greasing any goddamn pistons!” Large Looney was shaking with rage, his mighty beer gut wobbling to and fro like the waves on a beautiful moonlit Caribbean beach.
Small Looney set the chainsaw on the cement floor. “Why don’t you read him the statement?”
“Because, you frickin’ little moron, we agreed to cut off his arms first to get his attention! That’s why I need you to start that worthless chainsaw! You’re making us look like a couple of idiots! That’s how Andrew Mayhem is gonna die, thinking we’re a couple of idiots! Real nice. That’s just super. Makes my day.”
“Actually, I was thinking that you were never Boy Scouts,” I said, holding up my free hands.
Okay, no, I didn’t really say that. Despite their chainsaw-starting inadequacies, these two maniacs knew how to tie a darn good knot. I was struggling as much as I could, but it didn’t appear that I’d get to use my clever Boy Scout comment any time soon. As sweat dripped into my eyes, I hoped I’d at least be able to say something wittier than “AAAHHHH!!! MY ARMS, MY ARMS!!! AAAHHHH!”
Small Looney placed both of his feet on the chainsaw, gripped the cord tightly, gave it a good tug, said an extraordinarily bad word, and landed solidly on his butt. Large Looney was too furious to recognize an example of outright hilarity when he saw it, and proceeded to kick his partner in the side.
He snatched up the chainsaw and tugged on the cord. The motor roared to life, and I found myself making unheroic, borderline feminine noises as he walked toward me. I continued to struggle against the ropes, suddenly realizing that I could turn my left wrist a little further than before. This information still left me totally screwed, but you’ve got to appreciate the tiny victories in life.
He positioned the chainsaw blade inches above my left shoulder, and then said something very dramatic that I couldn’t hear over the motor.
“What?” I asked.
He repeated it, louder, but I still couldn’t hear him. Though I’m pretty good at reading lips, enunciation was not one of his stronger skills, nor was keeping his personal saliva contained within his mouth.
Large Looney shook his head with frustration. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe that he was so sensationally, spectacularly, stupendously stupid that he’d shut off the chainsaw in order to make himself heard. He wasn’t and didn’t. He lowered the blade toward my shoulder.
The roar of the chainsaw abruptly turned into the sputter of a dying chainsaw, followed immediately by the silence of a dead chainsaw. Large Looney stared at it for a long moment, and then touched the blade to my shoulder anyway. Not much happened.
Large Looney screamed out a rather confusing variation on the f-word, and then flung the chainsaw across the garage and against the wall. “You idiot!” shouted his partner, rushing over to retrieve it. “Maggie’s gonna have my butt if I don’t get the firewood cut tonight!”
“Who the hell cuts firewood in Florida?” Large Looney demanded.
“It’s December!”
“It’s seventy degrees out!”
“Maggie likes a warm house!”
“Maggie’s a fat cow!”
“What does that have to do with liking a warm house? Why are you always saying things that have nothing to do with what we’re talking about? You’re always doing that! Always, always, always! I oughta chainsaw your face.”
I realized that I could rotate my left wrist even more. If they continued arguing for the next three or four hours, I’d be home free.
Large Looney closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. “We need to focus,” he said, opening his eyes again. “Let’s just collect our thoughts and reflect upon our purpose. We’re not here to fight with each other; we’re here to kill him. So let’s do it.”
He walked over to a shelf and picked up a very large drill. I’m not really a drill expert, but this one looked more than sufficient to create a hole in my head. I hoped it would go the chainsaw route and refuse to start, but one quick push of a button and the bit began whirring in a menacing, your-skull-is-toast kind of way.
I repeated the variation on the f-word, which actually made perfect sense in a mindset of pure terror. And somehow I’d managed to contort my wrist into a position where I couldn’t move it anymore. My morale was not high.
Small Looney laughed, picked up the chainsaw, and walked over to join his buddy.
“Okay, I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” I said, as Large Looney brought the drill slowly toward my face. He obviously appreciated the fine art of suspense.
“What about the statement?” asked Small Looney.
“Forget the statement. Let’s just kill him.”
“No, no,” I said. “I’m terribly curious about the statement. If you went to all the trouble to write one up, it seems like a waste to—”
“Shut up,” said Large Looney, continuing to move his drill forward. I now had less than six inches separating the very soft flesh of my face from the very unsoft bit of the drill. I wondered if I could bite it off.
Small Looney obviously wanted to help out, so he hoisted the chainsaw to chest-level and gave the cord a tug. Right
after he did so, three things happened very quickly. First, the chainsaw motor started up again. Second, the brain of the lunatic registered surprise that the chainsaw motor had actually started. Third, the hand of the lunatic reacted to this surprise in the unfortunate manner of releasing its grip on the chainsaw.
The running blade bounced off his leg. While it didn’t lop it off or anything like that, it certainly created one doozy of a flesh wound. Small Looney fell to the floor, shrieking and scooting away from the chainsaw as if it were alive and might stampede after him like a wild predator. Large Looney hurriedly lowered the drill and rushed over to him.
Small Looney clutched at his leg and continued screaming. I stupidly wasted a couple of seconds struggling against the ropes, as if I might suddenly turn into Superman and snap them, and then proceeded to lean to the side, successfully tipping the chair over but hitting my head on the cement floor harder than I’d anticipated.
“You’ll be okay, you’ll be okay,” Large Looney said over the screams. “It looks worse than it is!”
The chainsaw was on its side, still running, only inches from my right hand. I frantically worked my legs as hard as I could, trying to scoot toward it. Now, the art of severing ropes with a chainsaw is a delicate one, especially when the ropes are currently binding one’s hands, but I was on a pretty tight schedule.
I managed to scoot another inch forward, half expecting three or four of my fingers to twirl up into the air. But instead, blade met rope...and blade won! It didn’t cut all the way through, but with a Jimmy Olsen-like burst of strength I snapped what remained of the ropes and freed my left hand.
Large Looney looked over from his medical examination and noticed me. Then he picked up the drill.
I grabbed the chainsaw by the handle and quickly touched the blade to the ropes binding my other hand. This time I cut all the way through the rope and the top couple of skin layers of my wrist. Now both of my hands were free. If the rest of my body hadn’t still been tied to an overturned chair and there weren’t a lunatic walking toward me with a power drill, I would have been in a celebratory mood.
Large Looney snarled as he walked out of sight behind me. Well, I couldn’t actually hear him over the chainsaw and the drill, but it really did look like a genuine snarl. I let out a grunt as he kicked the back of my chair, and then promptly set to work trying to cut the ropes on my feet. I saw his hand reach over in an attempt to shove the drill into my side, but an intimidating swing of the chainsaw got him to reconsider.
As the ropes around my left foot fell away, the chainsaw died again. This allowed me to hear that Large Looney was drilling through the back of the chair.
While I’m not a weightlifter type by any means, I’m still in pretty good physical condition, and the adrenaline was pumping freely. I let go of the chainsaw, slammed my hands against the floor, used my free foot to brace myself, and shoved as hard as I could, trying to flip the chair over, thus snapping the drill bit and hopefully crushing Large Looney’s fingers.
That didn’t work. The chair didn’t budge.
I grabbed the chainsaw again, swung it over my shoulder as hard as I could, and bashed Large Looney with it.
That worked.
He let out a yelp and I heard the drill hit the floor. I frantically began clawing at the ropes, trying to get myself free before...
I looked over and saw Small Looney limping toward me, his leg still bleeding.
He was holding a concrete block of the type used for building construction, elegant furniture for college students, and dropping on the heads of people.
Though I had two hands and a foot free, no way was I getting the rest of myself loose before he got in block-dropping range. I tugged on the chainsaw cord. It snapped.
This was certainly bad, but I’d been in a worse situation than this and came out alive. Not very alive, but alive nevertheless. And though chainsaws weren’t known for their aerodynamic qualities, I’d have to give it my best shot.
I flung the chainsaw at him.
It didn’t even come close.
But Small Looney had just been savaged by that very chainsaw, and even though it was a pretty pathetic throw by any standards, he still took a quick step back. Just a small step, but enough to slide his foot along the trail of blood he’d been leaking.
He slipped and fell, much as he did earlier when he’d been trying to start the chainsaw. That time, however, he wasn’t holding a concrete block. He hit the floor, and the block hit him. I’m not going to tell you where. Just cringe on his behalf and be glad you didn’t see it. He shrieked a few times, and then lost consciousness.
I didn’t like Small Looney much, but there were tears in my eyes as I worked to untie the ropes. I could hear Large Looney whimpering softly, but he didn’t seem to be coming after me anymore.
The door to the garage burst open, and two familiar figures entered, guns raised.
It was Sergeants Tony and Bruce Frenkle. They were identical twins, though you could identify Tony by the small mole over his left eyebrow.
“Freeze!” one of them shouted (I was too far away to see the mole). “Nobody...uh, move...” They stepped inside and glanced around the garage.
“Wow, Andrew, you messed them up pretty— oh dear Lord in heaven what happened with that concrete block? ”
“What is it with you guys?” I demanded. “Why can’t you ever show up before the situation is taken care of? What, do you sit and wait outside for everything to be hunky-dory? I almost had a drill go through my back! Have you ever almost had a drill go through your back? I bet you haven’t, have you?”
“Chill, Andrew,” said Tony, crouching down to help untie me while Bruce took out his handcuffs and went to take care of Large Looney. “It wasn’t easy to find you here. We had to follow—”
“I don’t give a sweet shit,” I said. “Just untie me.”
“White people are so rude,” Bruce remarked.
Before long I was free and the bad guys were being loaded into an ambulance. I picked up the statement they’d planned to read me, curious as to their motive.
“ Andrew Mayhem we hate u now your going 2 die .”
Great. Sherlock Holmes got Moriarty; I got these guys.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be long before I was reminiscing about the good old days when all I had to worry about were a couple of lunatics with malfunctioning power tools.
Chapter 2
AFTER THE hospital staff decided I was fine, if a bit obnoxious, Tony drove me home. I was pretty rattled from my experience, and was looking forward to some tender loving care from Helen.
“Oh, what a pleasant surprise!” she said as I opened the front door. “It’s so nice that you were able to come home before noon. I’d hate to think of you being all miserable and actually having to put in the full eight hours at your job. Oh, wait, I almost forgot, you didn’t go! But hey, the temp agency just called and said not to come back, so you don’t have to worry about that inconvenience any more!”
“It wasn’t my—”
“But that’s okay. I’m sure the reason you played hooky was to help care for your children. Oh, no, wait, now that I think of it, it was me who got woken up by a call from Kyle’s teacher to pick him up, not you! But hey, I work night shift, I’d gotten in a good twenty minutes of sleep already...why should I complain? It’s all worth it to know that my dear husband had a good time with his friend.”
“I wasn’t with—”
“Oh, by the way, they shut off our water. I know how difficult it is to remember to write checks when they send those funny-looking pieces of paper in the mail, but some people in this country refer to it as paying bills. I suppose that since you rarely bring any money into this household it’s naturally not going to be in your thoughts, but for five minutes a month even you should be able to handle it.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, well, sorry helps.” She stormed out of the living room and into the kitchen.
Helen hadn’t been
in a sunshiny mood lately. A year and a half ago, I’d gone through a horrible ordeal that eventually involved our children being kidnapped and almost murdered, and me nearly dying from arrow and gunshot wounds. Helen already had a stressful job as a registered nurse, so this didn’t help her ulcer situation. The silver lining to the whole nightmare came when I was offered a substantial amount of money to tell my story, which I then lost when my financial advisor fled the country with all of our money and a pair of lingerie models named Monique and Taffy. The fact that Helen had told me several times not to trust him did not go unobserved.
So I’d figured it was time to become an upstanding, responsible citizen. I’d registered with several temp agencies and gotten a job organizing filing cabinets for a horrible, horrible woman with fangs. I reported to work three unbearable days in a row, but then I decided that somebody who’d rescued his children from a vicious killer and broken up a snuff film production company didn’t need to deal with some ghastly crone whining that McReady came before Madison. So I walked out and went to visit my friend Roger. I probably should have notified the temp agency. Helen was not pleased.
I’ve probably made Helen sound like she walks around in a bathrobe with her hair in curlers and beats the crap out of me with a rolling pin. Physically, she’s not intimidating at all. Actually, she’s a fairly tiny person. Over the past year she’d let her straight brown hair grow well past her shoulders, and before my book money completely vanished she’d traded in her thick glasses for laser eye surgery, yet she somehow retained her owlish appearance, which was kind of weird.
I almost followed her into the kitchen so I could give my side of the story, but I decided to let her simmer down a bit first. Instead I went upstairs into Kyle’s room.
He was sitting on his bed, playing with his Captain Hocker action figures. He looked up at me as I entered. “Mommy’s on the warpath again,” he said.
“Shhhh...I’ve told you not to say that anymore,” I reminded him. “It just makes her madder.”