SKA: Serial Killers Anonymous

by William Schlichter

  This was to protect her.

  Al breaks from his memory.

  I know people will say it wasn’t about her safety, but it was. If I did love her I would have to kill her. I can’t fall in love, not and keep her.

  He reaches under the chair and breaks the seal on a bottle of water. Gulping down half, it breaks his fevered moment. “How did I get this way? What made me do this to women—a woman?”

  “You explain it to us Al,” Jane offers, restoring her non-judgmental tone.

  VII

  I WAS SIXTEEN. My high school hired a new female teacher. She wasn’t fresh from college, she was a woman. She wasn’t old enough to be my mother, but she was close. I didn’t know if she had kids. Had the term existed, she would have been a MILF.

  She wore conservative dresses, but they couldn’t hide her massive bust. Proper church lady hair buns. Her horn-rimmed glasses, straight from the fifties, down to the chain necklace for them to dangle around her neck when she didn’t need them to read, painted her as a respectable teacher. Only all the boys noticed the twitch in her hips signaling she was not Miss Appropriate all the time.

  I had forgotten a book in her classroom. I snuck in after school to retrieve it and she was in her room grading. We chatted. She praised me for being responsible enough to come back so I didn’t fail tomorrow’s quiz. She asked if she could pay me to move an oak dresser in her house.

  I said she didn’t have to pay me. She insisted, to keep it a proper teacher/student relationship.

  The dresser was in her bedroom. It was nothing like I expected. Just being there next to her four-poster bed, I was filled with dirty thoughts. I moved the dresser. It was heavy. I was strong, but it was a three-person oak mass. She offered to lighten the contents and tossed mounds of lingerie to the floor. I admit it excited me. She noticed. Those red nails pinched my little head through my jeans.

  I had no idea what to do. She unbuttoned her blouse and had on a bra-corset contraption preventing a flood of flesh from bursting.

  She ordered me to the bed.

  I complied.

  I’d kissed a girl, but…

  It was a rough session. She tied each of my limbs to the four posts and assaulted me. It hurt. I had marks. And she never once said anything about not telling anyone. I thought no one would believe such a wild tale of domination. I mean, I didn’t know sex was like that.

  I was a sophomore. I knew what sex was. I might have known a woman would suck it. But I had no idea about anal. I was in gym one day when these boys were bantering about Tracy Pearlman and how they wanted to fuck her in the ass. At first, I thought they meant fucking her from behind. NO. They meant in the poop hole. The basketball boys all agreed her ass was her only attractive feature.

  This teacher grabbed my erection and crammed it in her ass. With a historic gymnast move she turned our bodies allowing her to ride. It was so thrilling, even when I lost my load, I never lost the boner. Sex has never again been like the first time with her. Even though I visited her a few times, I never lasted with such passion until I shoved her down and forced her the way she forced me. It was the first step on the path toward what I do now to satisfy myself. She wasn’t the first I choked to death.

  VIII

  “I DIDN’T MEAN to overstep my turn, I just had to share. I was compelled to explain.” Al glances at Jane, masked in the dark. “As she pinched my cock, she told me the same thing you did when you formed this group. This is a safe place.”

  “It’s a breakthrough for you, Al, not an interruption. She awakened something in you. It was the doorway,” Jane says.

  “Just close the door and he stops killing. Bullshit,” says Robert.

  Jane shifts into her therapist training. “Al’s sharing excites his trust in the group. By releasing his deeper emotions, he has a breakthrough, and if he recognizes his self-destructive behavior then he has potential for recovery.”

  Al notes his erection has abated.

  “You have made a big step. Soak it in,” Jane says.

  “Edgars, I believe you should take the next turn,” The Plagiarist says. “Allow Al to marinate in his moment of self-discovery.”

  IX

  I HAD TO plan what I wanted to explore next. It was after a frequent stop on book signing tours. I had traveled several times in this state. I was no tourist to this place, knowing the secluded locations.

  Don’t think it happened after every signing, but there was always at least one obsessed fan. They fell into a few groups. Those desiring to be writers and wanting to know how to become published. Some believed by meeting me, I could get them published. The next group enjoyed the horror/thriller genre and wanted to thank me for my writing. No one touched them the way I did with my stories. Three, of course, was the fanboys or girls who, instead of chasing Brad Pitt, wanted an author.

  These are the ones who could write the best blogs about your work and increase sales or stalk you.

  These two girls, sisters, got a book signed and stayed after. They met me in the parking lot and were quite fresh. I didn’t have to convince them to take a drive with me, it was their idea. I’d never been with two girls before. My thought was to forgo my carefully laid plans because, face it, without paying for it, when would I get a chance to be with two women at the same time again?

  I had changed my mind about halfway to my scene of the crime.

  The younger of the two knew what to do with her mouth. I never exploded so quick. I hoped I could recover—swiftly. I hated to believe my one shot at three-way was finished because she used her tongue like no other woman.

  She sat back. Her sister, who had been kissing me, glanced at her sister’s puffed cheeks.

  “Did he?”

  She nods, careful not to swallow.

  “Good. Spit,” she commanded.

  The sister opened her mouth so all the white liquid ran down the front of her shirt staining it.

  “Okay, Mr. Edgars. You just got a blow job from a minor. Or rather you forced a minor to suck your dick.”

  FUCK!

  She hadn’t appeared underage. As she was now, disheveled and her make-up smudged, she was done up to appear of age at least.

  Somehow two women desiring me was too much of a fantasy to be true. These girls were here to roll me.

  “What are you girls pulling?” I asked.

  “We want your money, dirty old man.”

  Hell. I wasn’t even thirty yet.

  “You give us ten thousand dollars.”

  “Each,” adds the younger one. She leaned back against the door face, a mess of smudged makeup and semen.

  “Or we go straight to the cops and you go to jail for sex with a minor. She’s covered in the evidence.”

  I had driven with them to my location of choice for privacy. I had considered it an alibi. ‘Yes, officer, I was once with two girls’. They put no thought into the fact they were five miles from BFE. If I abandoned them, the young one had a shirt full of DNA evidence, and if I stole her shirt they could fight and gather more. This situation foiled my escape plan.

  “I don’t have that much on me. I’ll give you my book sales for the day and you give me your shirt.” I wasn’t as desperate as I pretended.

  “No deal. We saw on the news you just signed a book deal for three more books. You’re loaded.” She glanced at my limp manhood, “Your pocketbook is.”

  “It doesn’t work that way. I have to write the books first, before I get the money,” I explained.

  “You’ve got the money.”

  “The money, or you’ll be the one sucking cocks in prison. They like men who touch little girls in there,” the younger one threatened.

  The older one, and mastermind, was still in the backseat behind me. The young one had pushed herself against the passenger side door, her bare feet touching the central console.

  If this goes south, I’d have some scratches to explain. I slipped my left hand into my sport coat pocket. I cupped the handcuffs in my palm so when I
grabbed the young one’s ankle I would clamp them shut around it.

  At the same moment, I jerked the wrist of the older sister to reach the empty cuff, clamping it tight around her.

  Amid the screams of confusion and protests I jumped from the car to avoid an instant, unplanned retaliatory attack.

  They were too upset to figure out how to escape. The way I shackled them together they would not run, even if they could escape the car. One would have to carry the other, or they could try a wheelbarrow configuration, but first they would have to figure out how to get out of the car. They were too animated for rational thought.

  I had only prepared for one test subject this trip, but I would make it work and last.

  I folded my jacket and placed it in the trunk. I removed my kit.

  Opening the passenger side door, I drug the backward little sister out so fast the older one barely had time to hop the seat to keep her arm intact with her shoulder. I heard a pop. Someone broke an ankle or a wrist—doubt it was the shoulder. They both were crying. It was difficult to discern who was hurt.

  I selected this spot because of a tree. It had a low, strong branch and a root system which had been exposed. I looped a rope through, allowing me to suspend a person as if they were on a standing medieval rack.

  I cuffed the older sister to a root. The younger one must have had the ankle pop. She stumbled on it and the pain prevented her from grabbing at me. She was crying too much to even listen to her sister scream a plan of escape.

  They lost their chance. I got her secure and it was over. No amount of her cursing and threatening me would save them now.

  I like those disposable rain ponchos they sell at baseball games. They cover a body, and no TSA agent thinks anything of one being in a travel bag.

  Never again would I desire two women, either. I tied the young one’s arms apart from the branch and then her legs spread eagle. When she did try and kick, I put a vice grip on her wounded ankle. I didn’t detect a broken bone, but she howled when I touched it.

  I cut off her garments to the tone of her older sister telling me what a sick bastard I was. I tied her limbs together, straight as an arrow, leaving her on the ground. I tossed her clothes in a garbage bag, using extra care in disposing of them—too much of me remained on and in them. There was an SVU episode where they typed DNA from a girl’s stomach.

  I noted her body size in my pocket journal. I had a code system for my torture research. Some TSA agent flipping through might find it suspicious, but I always carried on a copy of one of my books. After reading the back-cover notes on a brutal murder, I was waved on through with no body-cavity search.

  I had a wooden bat on this trip.

  Now the trick was not only in the exploration of body trauma, but to get the test subject to express the pain they experienced in more than screams.

  “Please, we take it back. We won’t say anything.” The older sister now realized they had made a mistake.

  There was no going back.

  “Please, mister. She made me do it. I didn’t want to blackmail you,” the younger one’s voice was soft and pleading.

  “And you’ll never speak of this or do it again.” I didn’t ask a question, even if she thought it was.

  “No we—” Her lie was cut short by the bat impacting her thigh.

  I didn’t swing full force. It made a whack, like an extra loud wet towel snap in the boy’s locker room after winning the big game. I did break capillaries.

  She was a whimperer, not much of a howl-in-pain subject. Earlier, my grip on her ankle was for show.

  As she blubbered, I asked her to describe the pain.

  She responded with more tears.

  I used this time to hang the other sister by her wrists. I looped the rope around her ankle to secure it.

  “Please, don’t hurt her, I’ll tell you.” She explained as best she could the shooting throbs, how her eyes saw a flash of lightening at the moment of impact.

  I penned a note. People say they see stars. Lighting was a more forceful description. I patted her head, told her what a good girl she was. Then with all the force I had I cracked her right knee.

  The impact was like a shotgun going off. And I conceived it. Bone didn’t show, but her leg was like a broken stick figure cocked at a thirty-degree slant. The leg angel hurt me, bent opposite from the way God designed. She lost her bladder. No leg was meant to bend at this angle. If I stopped now she would need screws and a rod put in to repair it. When the air pressure rose, she would always have joint pain.

  She blubbered louder—not a screamer, not like the sister. She cursed me, said she’d feed me my balls.

  Once the little sister was calm enough to speak, she described the pain. She was sure it was like being run over by a bus. Upon impact, all air left her. Then she had no control over her body. She didn’t want to pee, but she couldn’t help it. Even though the pain was a thousand times worse than any menstrual cramp she was more embarrassed having to sit in her own urine. She had no control. Even if she tried to pinch it off it didn’t work.

  I noted every word. The fact she had the thought process to try and control her pee was interesting. I would work it into my next story. A story beat creating realism on the page. From all she described the impact and bone shatter lasted minutes for her instead of the quarter of a second it transpired.

  I rammed the end of the bat into her stomach. She vomited.

  I had to guess if I damaged the liver. Chances were I did. It was the second largest body organ and easily tore during abdominal trauma.

  I cleaned her face with some bleach wipes, stinging her eyes. I should have done so right away because she had my DNA evidence on her face and neck. I added them to my bag.

  I knew what I wanted to know about a beating from a bat. Besides head trauma, she may not ever speak if I bashed in her skull. I had a second subject—I swung away.

  Three quick, full-swing shots to the middle of her back. It was with the third hit that I heard the spine crack. Her legs turned to a rag doll, her pee was red. I broke her back. She would forever be confined to a wheelchair.

  Her head drooped. No explanation from pain other than the intensity rendered her unconscious. This gave me time to work over the sister. She wouldn’t share what she felt as she witnessed her family mutilated.

  I felt a need to make her session more torture than educational, hits to hurt, but not maim—not at first. I broke small bones. She wouldn’t cooperate by explaining her pain, I noted sounds, how fast swelling occurred, any bruises.

  When the sister came around, I poked on her lower body with a knife. She felt nothing. She could tell me when she was peeing. She still had some nerves in her sex organs, but none in her toes.

  I found only one action left and I’d get no feedback from the blows. I made a shot to the teeth of the older sister. Fitting. She spits out her expensive orthodontic work, she may have even tried to spit her teeth at me.

  I returned to work on little sister’s skull, making my notes about sounds and what her body did. She spasmed and convulsed after one hit. I think I caused a seizure.

  With little sister dead, I allowed the older one to hang next to her while I used the bleach wipes to sanitize the car. I always chose rental, as they clean them as soon as they are returned. I checked for any revealing evidence. The sun reached the horizon. I didn’t want to leave anything behind in the dark. I ransacked their purses. Both had cell phones and together they only had about forty bucks. I kept the purse to throw off the cops.

  “What was it like witnessing your sister die because of your greed?”

  “Go to hell, fucker!”

  With four blows to the skull before it cracked, I ended her.

  Slipping the bat into a plastic bag and adding my poncho, I left. I drove for a while until I found a nice running river. Good-bye to the bat. I lost her cell phone in a sketchy area of town. I dropped my bundle into a burning trash barrel some homeless people blazed to warm the early fall chi
ll. I waited to make sure the clothes had incinerated beyond useful evidence, and I left one purse, now with a few more twenties in it, near the fire.

  The second phone I tossed a few more blocks away near some street kids.

  Tracing them wasn’t a normal police practice at the time or I would have jerked the battery first. I returned the rental car and got on my plane home.

  X

  “NONE OF US are text book traditional serial killers by our nature,” notes The Plagiarist. “All those childhood norms most killers have—do we have them? I think not.”

  “Does it matter if I like to light fires?” asks Robert.

  “It matters a great deal. We don’t fit standard patterns, true. I believe because we don’t fit into the mold we can save ourselves. No therapist has written books on our personalities.” Jane explains, “Part of the questionnaire you each completed allowing you entry into our group was to determine if you had many of those common issues. If you answered honestly. Part of acceptance of who we are is honesty.”

  “I didn’t bed wet and I’m no drinker. I just snapped,” Jack says.

  “I was a voyeur. Still am, I guess,” Jesse says.

  “It was in my nature—watching people. It brought about my use of the pen,” Edgars says.

  “Writers are isolationists by nature,” Al points out before admitting, “I was abused, even if it was near adulthood. It lead to my auto-erotic adventures.”

  “Did any of you harm animals?” Jane asks.

  “I smashed a few with my truck,” Ed says.

  “Only for food,” says Robert

  “Which is why we are curable. We’re not fitting into the standard mold of the typical repeat offenders,” Jane says. “Do you know how many hundreds of people contacted me through the chat room?”

  She cut it to nine. A stone drops to the pit of Jesse’s stomach. Remove the blinders, kid. Listen. Sister’s killer’s not among this group. I just knew he was. I wanted him to be so badly.