by L. L. Soares
“And we still have a ways to go.”
“Let’s go downstairs to the bar,” Viv said. “There’s bound to be someone down there. I can’t put it off any longer.”
Grif sighed deeply. “I was hoping you’d say that. It’s getting tougher and tougher to keep away from Colleen. She’s pretty tempting, you know.”
“Just stay away from her.”
“I told you I would, didn’t I?”
“Well, you make sure of it. Here I am worried about protecting her from that monster, and it turns out you’re the one I need to be wary of.”
“I can handle it. I have more willpower than you think.”
“We’re both on edge, Grif. And it’s only going to get worse. We need to do something about it.”
They left.
* * *
Colleen could hear them close the outer door. She got out of bed and slowly made her way to the bedroom door. She didn’t turn on the light. When she felt the knob, she opened the door a crack and looked outside into the suite room that connected the two bedrooms. Nobody was out there.
They’ve gone to find victims, she thought. Sometimes I wish they’d just take me.
She wasn’t sure if she meant that. Did she really want to die? Sometimes she did. But another part of her wanted to believe there was a way she could help them stop Jeremy’s killer. A way she could make a difference.
But, down deep, she felt this was a hopeless cause. They were all going to die. Wouldn’t it be better to die here, in the arms of one of them, than to be torn apart by Sam Wayne?
Viv had told her that, upon death, her victims felt a kind of intense ecstasy. It wasn’t painful at all. They were practically grateful to die for her.
That’s the kind of death I want, Colleen thought. I don’t want to die in pain.
She sat down in front of the television, turned it on and flipped through the channels with the remote control. Some of the stations had gone black. The others were filled with more horror stories. But now, they seemed more like speculation. Nobody was reporting from where things were happening anymore. Word was that troops had been sent in to set things right, but that there was no word from them yet. It was as if they had entered a black hole. No one could contact them.
What chance do we have? Colleen wondered.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Maggie was there, holding him. He was crying and she was kissing his cheek, telling him not to cry anymore. He could feel her arms around him. He could feel her, he could smell her. She was so real. He could smell her hair, and it made him tighten his hold on her.
“I’ve done so many horrible things,” he told her. “It’s all so out of control now. I have no idea how to stop it.”
“Calm down,” Maggie told him. “You’re getting too upset. You’ve got to calm down.”
“I’ve killed people, Maggie,” he said. “I’ve killed so many people. There is blood on my hands, even now. How can you hold me like this after all that I’ve done?”
“There isn’t any blood on your hands,” she told him. “You haven’t hurt anyone. You’re just imagining it all.”
He buried his head in her shoulder. His face was pressed tight against her flesh. He opened his mouth and kissed her, tasted her skin. It tasted just like he remembered. The taste, the smell. She was so real.
“There’s no blood?” he asked her, wanting so badly to believe. “None at all?”
“No, you silly man. There isn’t a drop.”
“And you’re alive again. You’re really here with me?”
“I never left you, Sam. I don’t know why you won’t believe me.”
“I saw you dead, Maggie. I buried you. It was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do in my life, saying goodbye like that. It was then that I realized how important you were to me. How much I needed you in my life to keep me sane.”
She kissed his temple. “I won’t ever say goodbye to you, Sam.”
He tried to hold her harder, so hard that he might crush her, but by then the dream was fading and there was nothing to hold on to anymore. He tried to resist waking up with all his might, but he just couldn’t. In his dream, he had felt so warm and safe. But there was no way it could last. Maggie was long gone now.
Sam woke up on the grass, in the middle of another field. This field was enclosed by a high metal fence. He could see the corpses of slaughtered deer scattered across the grass. Some of them had killed each other. Some had been killed by people, who also were stretched out on the grass, dead.
Sam felt very hungry and ran over to a deer. He picked up a piece of it and started to eat. He was so hungry that the raw meat tasted wonderful.
He closed his eyes and tried to conjure Maggie up again from the dream. Just her face, one more time, but he couldn’t visualize it. She was lost to him again. Everything in his former life was getting harder and harder to picture in his mind’s eye. There were walls going up inside him, separating then from now, and they were getting stronger.
* * *
Colleen could hear noises. People fucking. She lay on her bed, listening. When she’d heard them coming back to the room, she shut off the television and went back into her bedroom, where it was dark.
From what she could tell, one couple was in the suite room, on the couch, probably, and another was on the other side of her wall, in the second bedroom.
She wanted so badly to see what was happening. She wanted to see how they fed. What happened to the people when they died? She got up from her bed and went to the door. She listened.
Slowly, she turned the knob and looked out in the suite room. Grif was out there, on the couch, fucking a woman. She looked older than he was, her hair slightly gray.
Looking at her face, Colleen could tell that she’d been very pretty once.
Grif was on top of her, pumping away. The woman was making odd noises; her eyes were rolled back in her head. Colleen had heard sounds of passion before, but there was another sound that came from her. A kind of rattling from the back of her throat.
Grif’s mouth was stretched in a tight grin. He continued moving, but his eyes were intently on the woman beneath him. She was gurgling now, her arms grabbing at him, pulling him closer, her body spasming beneath him.
She suddenly thrust her head up and kissed him. Colleen had never seen such a forceful kiss. It was as if the woman was trying to force herself into him, the way she grabbed at him with her hands and arms, the way she wrapped her legs around him, making it hard for him to thrust his pelvis.
And then, she spasmed again and stopped moving. She went limp beneath him. Grif wrapped his own arms around her then, and pulled her close, still pumping his lower torso. Colleen closed the door.
She went to the wall that separated her bedroom from the other one. She could hear Viv and her partner in there. There were similar sounds. The sounds of real passion, but the rattling, too. The gurgling. They were ugly sounds that were always on the outer edges of passion, punctuating the moans and hisses. Eventually, some of the sounds on the other side of the wall stopped, too. Colleen had her ear to the wall, and she was sure she could still hear Viv, groaning in ecstasy, riding out her own orgasms as her victim, too, stopped moving. Colleen didn’t know why, but she was certain Viv was on top in there. That she was belly to belly with someone who wasn’t alive anymore.
Something about the sounds scared her and excited her at the same time. To be so close to death, and yet to feel spared, safe. It was strange.
All this passion was contagious. Her hands performed the role of lover as she stretched out on her bed and listened to echoes of those sounds in her mind.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The closer they got to Sam Wayne, the more vivid Viv’s dreams became. Not that they weren’t already vivid enough to wake her most nights. But now, it was as if she were drowning in the imagery, in the flashbacks. Her life was playing out before her while she slept, the way lives passed before the eyes of people about to die.
Doe
s this mean I am going to die soon? she found herself wondering, gasping for air in the darkness, in the bed where she’d taken someone’s soul mere hours before.
Grif and her were so used to this, disposing of the bodies had become second nature. Everything was tidy and done in no time, the dead already forgotten. Well, except when she slept. Then they came back with a vengeance. They all came back eventually, no matter how nameless or faceless they had seemed when she took them. She could see every line of their faces, every nuance of their body language. She could hear their voices clearly, speaking to her. More often than not, asking for their lives back.
There were lots of faces. The first one was her father.
He’d started sneaking into her room when she was twelve. She only wanted it to stop. It was about the third or fourth time (who was she kidding, she knew it inside and out, it was the third time), and he was coming, and she reached out and felt his mind with her own, and even at that young age, she’d been strong enough to envelope his essence, his soul, and make it surrender to her. Sure, back then there was more of a struggle. It was like landing a marlin to her that first time, but she won in the end, and her father was dead, collapsed on top of her in the bed. She was pinned beneath him, helpless in the dark.
She had to cry out for her mother. Something her father forbade her to do when he made his secret visits, and she almost felt guilty breaking that rule, no matter how much she hated him, because she was confused, scared, not sure what she had done, but she knew that she was somehow responsible for why daddy wasn’t moving. Why he was just a heavy, lifeless mound of flesh on top of her.
She didn’t tell her mother what she’d done, because she couldn’t bring herself to believe it herself. That it had been her handiwork. Even though she knew it was. Her mother had simply believed that, in the course of molesting her daughter, her husband had suffered a heart attack. Viv remembered getting dressed and helping her mother move him out into the hallway, because there was just too much shame leaving him on her bed. They somehow got him onto the big oval throw rug that was beside her bed, and dragged the rug, and him out of the room and into the hallway. It was then that her mother called 9-1-1, screaming into the phone about how her husband wasn’t moving and she needed someone to come immediately.
She remembered Grif, who was younger than her and strangely quiet for a little kid, at the corner of the room in his pajamas, watching their mother with the biggest, saddest eyes Viv had ever seen. She went to him and hugged him close. He didn’t ask what had happened to their father, even though he’d seen them drag him out into the hallway. He didn’t make a sound.
After that night, her mother had never again talked to her about what her father had been doing to her. Her mother must have blocked it out of her mind, or pretended to, and Viv did not have the guts to bring it up herself.
Luckily, the hunger didn’t start out strong. There was always a strange itching in the back of her mind, this need that always irritated her, but not strong enough to drive her crazy. She was able to resist it.
But down deep, she knew what it was. And how to satisfy it. Perhaps it was the terror of the memory of what had happened to her father that had given her the willpower to resist satisfying her hunger again for years.
She found herself very attracted to boys, and other girls, early on, in junior high, but she resisted. It took all her resolve to keep from doing what the other kids were doing. High school got worse. But it was in her sophomore year that she just couldn’t resist any longer.
He was a senior and handsome, and he pursued her, a sophomore, and it had been years since her daddy and she was sure that it wouldn’t happen again, couldn’t happen again. That she’d just imagined it. And then some heavy petting in the back of a car led to other things, and this boy ended up dead, the victim of a “heart ailment” that hadn’t been detected before. She’d somehow known enough to keep from getting pinned this time and was able to get away and get help. But everyone knew what they had been doing and not only did she have to live with the fact that she’d been responsible for his death, there was also the shame of being caught “doing it.”
It got worse then. The hunger got stronger each time, and after her boyfriend died, it was harder to resist. But she couldn’t act on it. She couldn’t kill more people. She suffered in silence, doing everything in her power to keep from acting on her impulses.
She’d been able to resist for another six months or so, but then things got ugly. She started seeking out prospective victims, but it couldn’t be anyone she knew, anyone she could feel guilty about or who could be traced back to her. This meant a lot of run-ins with very unsavory types. Perverts, mostly.
She always cried afterwards, even though she told herself that the men deserved it. Even though she felt that she really had no choice.
She didn’t know when Grif found out he was the same way. It must have been later on, after she’d left, but she couldn’t be sure. He didn’t like to talk about it. For some reason, he’d seemed more mature back then, more capable. It almost seemed like he was going backwards sometimes, he was so much more reckless now.
After high school, she’d even joined a convent out of desperation. But it didn’t work out. When another novice died because of her, she had to move on. Temptation was everywhere. She couldn’t escape it no matter where she went.
When she was younger, she thought she was a vampire. Even though she never drank blood. And the succubus thing—the time Colleen mentioned it wasn’t the first time it had crossed her mind. But she couldn’t bring herself to really believe it. Vampires, demons, they were just make believe. And she was real, flesh and blood. She wasn’t some kind of monster.
She just killed whoever she got intimate with.
There were lots of attempts to control it. Alcohol and drugs weren’t any help. They simply made her lose control and increased the frequency of the incidents and some of them got messy. Meditation only seemed to help for a short time, and psychotherapy was out of the question. She couldn’t tell anyone else about her secret. They would lock her away forever if they found out.
Maybe it will all be over soon, she thought, feeling the tension in her muscles. Something was coming, she was sure of that. Something bad.
Viv closed her eyes and tried to get back to sleep, despite her fear of what dreams might bring. As she drifted off again, she just hoped that she wouldn’t see her father’s face this time. It had been a long time, but he still scared her most of all.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
Sam sat on top of an abandoned car; there were a lot of those now. It was dark, but he knew that there was no one alive anywhere near. There were no sounds at all, except for his breathing.
There was still the throbbing in the back of his head. The switch inside of him that had been turned ON wasn’t showing any signs of shutting off anytime soon. He seemed calmer now, but he was not even close to being Sam Wayne again. His arms and legs were still tensed like tightly wound coils. He was a snake always on the verge of striking. He knew that the first sign of anything alive would set him into another rage.
He was actually surprised that his mind was clear enough to have coherent thoughts. It had all seemed so very fuzzy for a long time now.
He felt no guilt over what he had done. He was simply following his nature.
He felt sticky from the blood that covered him. None of the blood was his own.
It is my job to bring death to the world, he thought. It’s as simple as that.
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
Grif woke up on the couch in the middle room of the suite. Someone was shaking him awake. He thought it was Viv. Sometimes when they were kids, she used to sneak into his room and ask if she could stay with him. She used to be scared a lot back then. She sure didn’t seem scared now. In fact, ever since they’d been on their own, she’d been the toughest person he had ever known.
She’d left home when she was eighteen. She just took off, and he didn’t see her for years.
Not even on the holidays. Their mother used to cry a lot about that. Grif didn’t cry, but he was very hurt about it, too. He felt Viv had abandoned him. He wanted so very badly to go away with her.
He knew what their father had done to Viv, even though she never spoke about it. He knew that if he hadn’t died when he did, chances were good Grif would have received late night visits from daddy at some point, too. There were already signs by then that their father was considering it. In that respect, Grif felt lucky.
He always hated his mother for letting that happen. For refusing to acknowledge that their father could have been anything other than a good man. As he got older, he fought with his mother a lot. Maybe being left behind by Viv increased his anger. He started drinking young, and used to come home drunk. Sometimes his arguments with his mother got physical.
Grif wasn’t proud of that.
He’d discovered his malady, the one he shared with Viv, later than she did. He was about sixteen, in juvenile detention after a particularly nasty run-in with Mom. Another, bigger boy had forced himself on Grif, and had ended up dead, and while nobody could prove he was responsible, the other kids stayed away from him after that.
He’d always been a troubled kid, but once he got out of lockup, he was determined never to go back. The first thing he did was leave his mother’s house, intent never to go back there again, either. And, like Viv, he decided to try his luck on the road.
Their paths crossed about five years later. It was complete coincidence. Despite the bond they’d once shared as kids, they hadn’t really known how to find one another again. But, ever since that chance meeting, they’d drifted in and out of each other’s orbits. Never staying together long enough to set up any kind of routine. Just when they started getting close again, one or the other would leave without a word some morning. And they both understood.