She couldn’t manage to stand back up. She tried to open her eyes as much to orient herself with how many people were in the apartment than to prepare for her break. Walt dragged her out into the middle of the living room amid the lecherous laughing of several men and laid her down on the floor.
Dear God, she thought, it is the Boys.
But Dawn said she had killed them.
Then why were they still here? Why were they here now? Was it even the same group of guys? Was Dawn here? Had Dawn somehow set her up and, if so, what was the point in that? But she didn’t have to think about the latter question very much. What was the reason Walt had for doing anything he did? To amuse himself. And it wasn’t like Erica was innocent in all of this either. The reason to take what she wanted was to, if not amuse herself, at least give herself some very selfish satisfaction.
“She stinks,” one of the men said.
“Looks dead,” another one of the men said. Erica thought about the one Boy who had fucked the dead girl. Maybe they had all fucked the dead girl. Her stomach tightened around the nothing that had blossomed in there a long time ago.
She lay on her side, the idea of confronting the overhead lighting directly too much for her. Someone rolled her onto her back with his foot.
She could open her eyes to slits. There were at least five guys in the room and then she saw someone who she thought was Dawn at first and she thought she might be saved from this but when she was able to focus a little better, she saw that it was the girl from the cafe and she felt even more afraid than she had been. More afraid because she now knew it wasn’t just about Walt and the Boys getting some kind of kick. It was now about the spectacle as well. Not long ago, she’d been the girl from the cafe. She witnessed another girl thrown into an empty pool with venomous snakes. What fate would await her?
“Should we scrub her down?” Walt said. Whatever remnant of self worth she had was quenched. It was the way he said it. She may have hated him for a while but the way he spoke relegated her to merely another one of his conquests. There was no hint or acknowledgement of the time they’d spent together.
“Let me take a crack before you do,” another male voice said.
She heard him move between her legs and get down on his knees. She heard his zipper slide down. She wasn’t going to try and get away. That would be what they wanted. Make things worse for her and better for them. She heard him spit into his hand, the liquid sounds of him wetting his cock. He wiped the excess spit between her legs. Now he was overtop of her and pressing himself into her and she died a million deaths and felt his shadow on the outside of her eyelids and when she opened her eyes it was to look past him. To look up at the lights. To hope the light would bore through her retina and into her brain and she would become one of those fragile gray things she’d seen wandering around. Maybe she hadn’t imagined them at all. Maybe she just started noticing them because her brain knew that’s what she would become.
She would have vomited if there were anything to throw up. Instead she was left to lie on the cold floor while this man thrust against her, grunting.
Now he was back up on his knees, his hands wrapped around the backs of her knobby knees.
Another shadow descended and she opened her eyes to see what kind of horror it was this time.
It was the girl from the cafe, sliding her underwear down her legs. She crouched over Erica’s face and let go with a stream of urine. The guys clapped and laughed.
Erica tried to find the cave.
There was a knock at the door. She probably heard it before Walt or any of the Boys because she was trying to focus on anything except them.
The sound at the door created a near suffocating vacuum in the apartment. Erica didn’t think there was any way in hell they were going to actually answer the door. Amazing how rational her thinking was during a traumatic event. Not just rational. It seemed mundane. The man on top of her stopped his movement and his rough breathing. There was complete silence and she thought she could hear the frosted crackle of the fluorescent lights.
The person at the door knocked again.
Erica thought it could possibly be Dawn and then she had a wild hope that, if someone were to actually open the door, this would be her chance to escape. All she had to do was get out from beneath the guy who weighed twice as much as her and somehow manage the strength to make a run for it. She would try. She also knew it would be impossible. She didn’t want to get her hopes up.
“I’ll get it,” Walt said.
Erica turned her head to look toward the door. After spending so much time around Walt, she was amazed at how much she still expected him to do things the way a normal person would. In this case, that would have been to either not open the door or to open the door just a suspicious crack. Instead, he swung the door open, not even bothering to check who was there, and said, “Come on in!” in a down home kind of voice he used when trying to relate to people.
A beleaguered looking man entered and briefly surveyed the apartment. Erica thought about what he must have seen. Four or five blue-collar looking guys standing around. One very fashionable, attractive, young girl in the middle of them. And one girl, her, naked and looking like she’d just escaped a concentration camp with another man on top of her. The man didn’t seem to be too interested in this.
“Help,” Erica said, not really caring what the consequences were. This, she thought, might be her only chance. Better to say something now while the man stood at the door, while he still had a chance to turn and run, to try and get help.
Maybe she didn’t say it loud enough. He didn’t seem to understand her.
“What can I do you for?” Walt asked.
“I received this,” the man said. He handed the crumpled piece of paper to Walt.
Walt uncrumpled it and looked at it. Erica couldn’t see the front of it, but the bright lights shining down allowed her to see through it. It was one of the MISSING flyers. She wondered which girl it was for. She imagined her own father receiving one of these flyers. What would he have done with it? Probably wadded it up and threw it in the trash. Maybe he would look at it, scratch his head, say, “Huh,” and think about getting to it later.
“Not sure I understand why you’re here,” Walt said. “Do you need someone to talk to or something? We’re a little busy at the moment. Gang bang.” He cocked a thumb back toward Erica.
The man looked toward her and, as if noticing her for the first time, raised his eyebrows.
“I was told she wasn’t just missing but dead. That came in a separate email.”
The man entered the apartment farther and leaned against the wall just inside the door. There still wasn’t any furniture in the apartment. Otherwise, it looked like this man would have been more comfortable sitting.
“I am very sorry to hear that,” Walt said, “but I guess I’m just not seeing how this concerns any of us.”
“Do you go by the name Walt Haha?”
“Yep. That’s me.”
“I was told you were the one who took her and, most probably, the one who killed her.”
Walt let off one of those short barnyard laughs and said, “Well, I’m sure it’s probably not in my best interest to answer that question.”
The man held a placatory hand toward Walt as if steadying some potential emotional swell.
“First of all, it wasn’t a question. Second of all, let me tell you how I felt when I heard my little girl was missing.”
“Sir, again, I’m very sorry to hear this but, as I mentioned, we are kind of in the middle of something.”
“The first thing I felt was an overwhelming sense of . . . relief.” The man almost exhaled this last word like it was a great unburdening.
Erica noticed Walt’s body slacken and she didn’t realize he’d been so rigid and tense, waiting for something to happen.
The man continued. “Megan was . . . Well, first of all, she was an accident. But she created a lot of problems. Burned the neighbor’s cat ali
ve when she was five. Set our first house on fire when she was seven. Was caught in bed with a much older neighbor boy when she was nine. This was pretty much a constant occurrence. Apparently she was charging for it. Stole her mother’s car when she was eleven and ended up crashing it in a joy ride. That’s just a few of the major things. A brief overview. I can assure you every second of every day was complete and absolute hell for me and my wife. So, when Megan never came home, I at first felt a sense of relief. Then I felt a sense of great anxiety. What was she plotting? When would she come back and what consequences would that bring? We put together a small campaign for her, of course, but she had a negative impact on everyone in our town and I’m pretty sure no one really bothered trying to find her. She was the type of person who was infamous in the town when she first started getting into trouble. People would see her and talk about it at work or the grocery store like she was a celebrity. Mentioning that they’d seen her gave them a chance to talk about her history, some of the things she’d done. But then even that got old and people just decided to look away, as though merely seeing her would implicate them in some devious scheme. So, anyway, relief followed by anxiety and suspicion . . . followed by another bout of relief, although met with a certain amount of skepticism when I received the email saying she was dead. Followed by . . .”
The man lowered his head. Everyone in the room now paid attention to him. The guy who had been inside Erica had grown soft and fallen out. Tired of bracing himself on his hands and knees, he stood up and raised his pants. Erica scooted away from him. She couldn’t tell if the others in the room were paying attention to this man because they were interested in what he had to say or if they thought Walt was going to need their help.
“. . . I don’t know what I would call the next thing,” the man said. “It wasn’t anger, exactly, except maybe it was. I was angry that I was now expected to do something.”
Erica noticed Walt stiffen again.
“Isn’t that how these things are supposed to end?” the man said. “We can either do something like accept you, make peace with you, or we can hunt you down and kill you. But, when the killer is revealed, when the killer is found out, we cannot be apathetic anymore. We can’t just say ‘Who cares?’ That looks bad.”
The others in the room now gathered around Walt, staring at the man with predatory eyes.
Surprisingly, the man stared back with equally predatory eyes.
Even more surprising was what Erica saw filling the doorway and extending as far back into the hallway as she could see.
More people.
Parents, she guessed. People like this man. But did they all feel the way this man felt? Relieved that their children had been taken from them. Were they all sociopaths? Did sociopaths just give birth to more sociopaths? What happened when the world was overrun with them?
Erica didn’t think she would be able to push past them. There was a palpable sense of bloodlust and, part of her was afraid she’d been implicated in the girls’ deaths and would be dealt with like Walt.
As the sociopaths began streaming in the door, she retreated, as quickly as she could, to the cell, reaching the inside and slamming it shut. The lock was automatic and when she heard it catch she slumped down onto the floor, leaned against the door, and listened to the sounds of carnage. She felt something wet on her ass and, when she stood up to see what it was, noticed it was blood.
Fresh Start
Consciousness was an in and out kind of thing for Erica. At the first sound of voices that did not sound blood crazed or psychotic, she thought she should pound on the door and make it known to them there was a survivor in here. But then she thought of the cave and the secrets therein and wondered if anyone had made it around to exploring the cave. If so, she would probably find herself in a cell like this for a very long time. Probably the rest of her life. She thought about the MISSING flyers she’d plastered to the wall. The names of girls came back to her and she was able to match them to faces of boys she’d had something to do with. She only had faces. Maybe a few names, mostly first names. The only full name she could think of was her father’s. It had been a while ago. They were all easy prey. Men were such suckers. She wished Walt’s body were still out there, although she doubted it would be. There was an unexplored cave somewhere under the Ozarks where she’d like to take the body, although she couldn’t claim all of the credit. Why hadn’t she cut his dick off and shipped it to the White House like she had so many men before him? Sympathy, she thought. Why sympathy? Because he’d made it all feel new to her again. That night she killed the other girl . . . It was different. She’d never killed a girl before. Her mind reeled and stretched out with the possibilities. And he’d taught her how to be unnoticeable. Before, she’d plastered the makeup on every day, waiting for a horde of law enforcement and television reporters to show up. She’d have to look good. But now she didn’t have to do that. All she had to do was be herself. She thought about Glamor Face and weirdstream and how contrived it all felt. She thought about Dan Banal and how being boring was almost the weirdest thing you could do and people would be totally into it because, if even our celebrities were boring, then it greatly lowered our expectations. Provided you could go unseen, the world was a place of infinite amusement. So she lay huddled on the floor and thought to herself how much she didn’t want to be seen. That was what she wanted. She wanted not to be seen, just like when Walt had the cameras trained on her suffering. Only this time, it wouldn’t be only Walt, it would be the rest of the world. She needed to get out before that happened.
When the door was finally thrown back and the harsh fluorescent light stabbed the room, Erica scrambled away from it, trying to find the darkest shadow she could.
She felt a comforting hand on her shoulder. “Hey, baby, it’s okay.”
It was Dawn.
“We’re going to get out of here, okay?”
Erica nodded her head. Dawn wrapped her in a soft blanket and told her she had brought some clothes. Told her she might want to think about taking a shower. Dawn held out a bottle of water and Erica took a few conservative sips. Dawn went into the bathroom across the hall and ran a bath. Erica spent a long time in the bath and got out and put on the clothes Dawn had brought for her and looked forward to her next meal and felt slightly rejuvenated.
“Where are we going?” Erica asked.
“East, maybe,” Dawn said. “Somewhere where we can start over. What do you think about that?”
Erica wasn’t sure what she thought about anything. It felt like she lived her life in chapters. She didn’t know if she could stop being what she was and she wasn’t sure if that was what Dawn wanted. Wasn’t sure that was what she meant by ‘starting over.’
“As long as we can get out of here,” she said because it expressed some kind of immediacy, some form of gratitude for Dawn coming to get her when she could have just left her to rot.
As they walked out of the apartment, Erica thought the cleanup crew had done a remarkable job although, she was sure, if she were to linger, she could find dried blood in the cracks of the floor and in the corners of the baseboard. She wondered if this was the end of Walt and the Boys or if it had been the end of the parents. Maybe it had been the end of them all. She looked at Dawn’s sweet face and finally realized she was the one who had planned all this. Probably had been planning it ever since leaving the Boys in Missouri. Possibly even before that.
They went out into the sunshine and got into Dawn’s sporty two-seater.
“Why me?” Erica asked. “Why am I the only one left?”
“I told you. I like you. I think you’re different.”
They pulled away from the curb and wound through downtown Dayton until they reached the highway.
Dawn was right, Erica thought. She probably was different. She was probably way worse. And she had survived.
She looked over at Dawn and wondered how long she would last. How long she would be able to take her and what her replacement would be li
ke.
She grabbed Dawn’s pale white hand and said, “I love you.”
Dawn returned the squeeze with even more fervor and Erica wondered if there was genuine emotion, genuine feeling in that grip, and said, “I think I just proved how much I love you.”
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Sociopaths In Love Page 20