by Jeff Strand
Gotta love a little Twilight Zone thrill.
But he didn’t just want to explore these demonic stomping grounds. He also needed to dispose of the dead whore in the trunk. What better place than in the bowels of a devil’s canyon?
He exited unto a side road and then another, winding through the plains, hoping for even further seclusion. He hadn’t seen another car in a while but he wasn’t careless enough to stop on a road that was adjacent to the interstate. He found a fork that had one path leading to a dead end. A rusted cattle gate blocked it off and a bullet-hole riddled road closed sign hung crookedly from one hinge. He pulled up close and got out, leaving the car running.
The dry heat was even more intense outside. He could feel himself baking in the blinding sun the moment he stepped out. It was more than just hot, it was downright blistering; a heat that bordered on otherworldly. He needed to use his bandana to open the trunk. It felt like a damn oven rack.
The comforter had held together fine, tied together using the whore’s nylons. There was a bit of seepage from her head still. He’d drained her in the bathtub and had been meticulous about it, working her arms like pumps. But a few drops always remained.
No such thing as clean.
He hauled her out and let her drop upon the pot-holes with a wet thud. Upon impact the flap covering her face came loose and her lifeless eyes looked up at him, into him, through him. She wore mascara tears like graffiti. She looked even older now in the daylight. Her face bore the scars of many broken dreams and her dyed hair was matted with blood, sticking to the gash he’d made in her forehead.
“Love is a burnin’ thing,” he said, quoting the song that’d been playing when he’d taken her.
•
After a few bourbons in the casino, Jake had come with the whore back to her motel room. It had been several weeks since his last kill—a twenty-something runaway whose guard he’d lowered with fast food and cocaine. He’d felt the old itch burning inside him, the beast within howling and gargling blood. When the lust for murder flushed him it was impossible to ignore for long. Only his sensibility and desire to not return to prison kept him in control. Armed robbery had given him a long enough stint. He sure as Hell didn’t want to go up on a murder rap and spend the rest of his days rotting on death row. He had to be careful, but he also had to give in. There was temptation and then there was need. The act of killing fell under the latter for Jake; it had since he’d strangled his girlfriend when he was nineteen.
In the motel room, Jake could feel the black murk of murder enveloping him as the whore began to do what she’d been paid for. It was like the same sinking feeling he’d always get in his gut when a rollercoaster dropped. It felt like that at first, and then the gooseflesh would hit him as his eyes glazed. It was almost like a meditative state. There were no voices in his head, no split personalities or any of the other horseshit he’d heard about in relation to serial killers. There was just the darkness, warm and sweet like molasses and just as thick. It was a high he’d never been able to top with drugs and booze, exhilaration far greater than sex, beyond religious and beyond transcendence.
He’d heard a weird word once that he felt summed it up right.
Euphoria.
That was the essence of creating death.
When he’d finished getting his money’s worth out of the whore he’d slipped into his jeans and gone to the bathroom to freshen up. He could feel the hard bulk of the folded knife in his front pocket, nudging him more seductively than the whore’s breasts when they’d pressed against his bare back. She had come up behind him. Her lips grazed his ear in a soft nibble.
“Fantastic, baby,” she’d said.
“Yeah, right.”
He hated when women played up how great the sex was, lying to him and every other man they met. They’re all whores, he often told himself, except the ones who say they aren’t; they’re lying whores.
“Is there anything else I can do for you, sugar?” she’d asked.
“No. I’m broke now.”
“Well, maybe after pay day then. Want me to pencil you in for sometime next week?”
“You won’t have time.”
“I can make time for you, baby.”
She’d run her nails across his scalp and through his thinning hair.
That’s when she’d caught his reflection in the mirror.
He had known then what was coming next. It had happened so many times before. Her head had cocked to one side, revealing her puzzlement. She’d peered closer into the stained mirror, looking at Jake’s image.
“I must have had too much to drink,” she said. “You look so different in the mirror.”
He was glad she’d left the old country station going on the radio at such a high volume. It would drown out some of the noise. I fell into a burning ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher.
“You look pretty,” she said and snorted a laugh, “why you almost look like a …”
Her words fell into a gasp as he’d forced her skull into the mirror. It exploded all about them as her head cracked. The sink became an instant blossom of blood. She had still been conscious as he threw her into the bathtub. He’d planned to use the knife, but a large sliver from the mirror felt right as he picked it up. She’d begun to stand on her wobbly legs, hyperventilating in her sudden thrall of fear as she reached out blindly, her own blood obscuring her vision. More of her blood misted the air as he’d plunged the shard into her for the first time, and then again and again in movements just as fluid.
He lived for this.
The frantic look in their eyes when they grasped what was happening, and the even more frantic look when they knew it would soon be over along with everything else they had ever experienced. They had eaten their last bite, had their last screw, spoken to their loved ones for the final time, all without knowing it. Animal-like, they would shudder and writhe against his embrace as he ravaged their torsos with his weapon. Anything that could enter and exit would do. He had evolved from strangulation, to rage killing, to sickly sensuous stabbing. He thought of it as sensuous not because of the penetrating nature of the stab but because he knew he would be their last goodbye, and in that essence he claimed ownership. It was post-mortem husbandry to Jake, and each fresh kill left a notch on his heart like on a gunman’s revolver.
The whore had slammed backward, breaking a tile. Her eyes had dilated with the twist of the shard in her stomach, and that old acidic stench hit Jake’s nostrils making him bray like a horse. He’d let his jaw give in to his trembles, making his teeth chatter closer and closer to her as he inhaled her final breaths, savoring them.
They were always so beautiful in the end. They were open to him, without judgment of him. They were free of anxiety and self-consciousness, limp in their expired carcasses.
The dead never treated you like a creep for looking when they’d been taunting you with high heels and lipstick to begin with.
The dead never talked back.
The dead never said no.
•
With the whore’s body tossed into a gorge of forgotten rock, Jake lit up a cigarette in a small toast and got back into her car. It was midday now, the sun was merciless, and the a/c unit only wheezed out a little whiff. It was about as helpful as someone fanning an ice cream cone at him.
He’s thought he’d taken the fork right back, but he must have made a wrong turn somewhere. Perhaps he was getting snow-blind in the middle of all that red dust. The desert seemed to heave in the haze, the invisible heat lines distorting the alien world around him. He was having trouble finding his way back to the main road. The one he was on seemed endless but he pressed on, delving deeper into the canyon’s heart.
He continued to hum Cash’s Ring of Fire. It had been stuck in his head to the point of annoyance.
A good hour passed before he saw another sign of life.
There’d been nary a vulture in the sky or a lizard baking on the asphalt when the hitc
hhiker appeared. He hadn’t even seen a road sign for the last thirty miles, just endless, unrelenting rock and sand. At first he mistook her for a cactus, the only green in this god-forsaken badland. But the swivel in her hips gave her away.
Well look what we have here.
She may as well have been a mirage out there in the haze. She was a busty brunette in a wife beater and a pair of tight jean shorts. A pair of cowboy boots completed her outfit. She had no backpack or water bottle. She didn’t even have a purse.
This bitch must be out of her mind. He laughed at the sight of her. Maybe someone got sick of her shit and threw her out of the car. Just passing her by and leaving her alone out there would be enough to kill her. It was an interesting death sentence, but not one that satisfied him the way a personal tango of violence would.
She turned around to wave him down and he slowed. There wasn’t a nearby rock that an accomplice could be hiding behind and if she had a gun on her he didn’t know where she could possibly be hiding it, except in one of those boots. Being that he had just come from Vegas, he was still in a gambling mood. He pulled up next to her and got a better ogling. Sweat had made her clothes cling to her and her nipples pushed through her top like she was in a dirty magazine. She leaned down to greet him.
“Thanks for stopping,” she said.
She had smooth features and smoother skin that was flushed in the cheeks. Her good looks were only slightly spoiled by the crazed and frantic look in her eyes. Even her eyelids twitched as if struggling to contain them. She was like a centerfold with a Manson family stare.
“Get in good lookin’,” Jake said, and she did.
He knew the vinyl of the seat must have felt like lava, but it didn’t seem to bother those long, tan legs of hers. She closed the door and they took off.
“What’s a pretty thing like you doing all alone out here?” he asked.
Her stare was locked on the road ahead even as she replied.
“Car broke down.”
He nodded and there was an awkward silence.
“Where you headed?” he asked, not caring.
“Just had to get out of Vegas, I guess.”
He looked at her face more closely now, sizing her up. Her left eye had a hint of a bruise and he wondered if she was running from an abusive boyfriend. He’d been so focused on her body before that he hadn’t looked at her face as much. On top of being beautiful, there was something familiar about her. Something he couldn’t place. But she wasn’t much for conversation, even though she seemed like she had something to get off her chest. She was twitchy and seemed anxious, squirming slightly in her seat. She picked at her cuticles while still staring out at the endless desert.
“I’m headed west,” he said. “Following the sun.”
He was trying to joke based on how hot it was outside, but she didn’t seem amused. Instead she seemed deep in crazed contemplation, as if she was struggling for words that just wouldn’t come.
“What is it?” he finally asked. “What’s going on?”
She looked at him now. Her eyes were not only frantic, he saw, but bloodshot and dilated.
Probably stoned out of her mind. Probably came out here to trip out on the colors of the rocks.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m just not sure what to say to you.”
She turned her head away again and began to make little noises under her breath. At first he thought she was sighing. But as she continued, he realized she was humming a song.
She was humming Ring of Fire.
Something cold moved inside of him despite the heat.
“How about a little music?” he asked, trying to shake off the creeps.
He flicked on the radio, half expecting dead air. He didn’t expect to hear screaming and the sounds of breaking glass. He wondered if it was some sort of radio play like War of the Worlds, but then he recognized the bar whore’s whimpers from the night before, the soft cries of a woman in the throes of dying. He switched the station in a sudden panic and the next one had similar sounds. These screams were of the runaway he’d slain after they shared a night of cocaine and rough sex. Her recognized her repeated cries of “no”. He switched the dial once more and heard another woman, gasping and gagging. It was the girlfriend he’d choked to death all those years ago.
He turned the radio off and looked at the hitchhiker. Her eyes were crazed but they had been that way since he’d picked her up. She seemed unfazed. She was still humming Johnny Cash.
Had she even heard any of that?
He wondered if he was cracking up, starting to hear voices like all those other serial killers he’d read about. He shook his head as if to get the memory of the noise out of his skull. He hoped it was just the heat fucking with him. But if he was going nuts he wasn’t alone. He noticed the hitchhiker wasn’t just picking at her nails. Now she was peeling one off. Blood had pooled around the rim of the nail as she picked it, making a clicking percussion for her humming. He watched her tug with each flick of the nail, seeing the connecting flesh begin to shred.
I’ll be doing this pretty mess a favor.
He didn’t want to admit that he was lost, but when the check engine light popped on he began to worry. He didn’t want to be one hundred miles from the nearest gas station with nothing but this sexy voodoo zombie for help. He figured the car was just overheating, but that didn’t improve his situation. He was getting frustrated; with the car, his own mind, the hitchhiker’s odd behavior, and the whole goddamned desert that just stretched out before him in a horrible infinity.
“Do you know how to get back to the highway from here?” he asked her.
“There’s only one way out.”
He waited for her to go on but she went all crazy mute again.
“Well,” he asked, losing patience, “how the Hell do I get out?”
“That’s what I’ve been having trouble telling you. I’m not sure what to say. I want you to take it right.”
He didn’t understand but tried to act as if he did.
“I’ll take it right,” he told her.
“You didn’t last time.”
“What?” he asked. He wasn’t just losing his patience now. He was losing his temper. “Look, you psycho bitch, do you know the way out or don’t you?”
Her mad eyes left the desert and fell upon him.
“The only way out,” she said, “is to not kill me.”
Jake spun the wheel and rode the brake, sending the car hurtling off the road and into the plains. He was overcome with fury and paranoia, and he vented by riding deeper into the desert, pumping the gas again, shaking the car about to rattle his passenger. He sneered with sadism as her body thrashed about the interior, knocking into the dash and back. He then slammed on the brakes and the hitchhiker went face first into the dashboard. Her nose exploded in a burst of dark blood, broken in an instant.
He put the car in park and got out. He reached in and dragged her out too.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.
He threw her against the car and hit her in the stomach. She flopped about like a wet doll.
“You’ll never believe me,” she said, spitting blood.
He put his hands in her armpits and threw her up on the hood. He could actually hear her exposed flesh sizzle like an egg in a skillet when she touched it. He pushed her all the way down and realized their crotches were grinding together. It excited him and she must have felt it.
“Fuck me if you want,” she said, “just don’t kill me. Otherwise we’ll never get out of this Hell.”
He drew the pocketknife from his jeans and flicked it open.
“You stupid son of a bitch,” she hissed.
He saw that her eyes had dilated further somehow, the blackness taking up more space than the whites. She bore her bloodied teeth like a mad beast, rage flushing her face.
“You moron!” she screamed, “it will never end because of you!”
She lunged at him, punching him in the eye before he got
the knife in her. Even then she kicked and bucked, furious and surprisingly strong. Her madness seemed to give her the strength of a man. He snatched her by the throat and held her up, silhouetting her against the white sun as he slid the blade in and out of her in quick, hot thrusts. Jets of red splashed across his cheeks in little gore geysers. He could feel her shudder into dying. He could smell the gutting and taste the kill sweat bubbling on his upper lip. But there was no euphoria in it, hardly even a thrill. It felt filthy to him somehow, off kilter and unnatural, unlike all of the others. It was suddenly alien and repulsive, something about it feeling like a form of incest.
He let her bleed out.
Disgusted, he pushed her limp body off of him and let it fall into the sand.
The car quaked as it stalled out. In his rage he’d just left it running and now it had finally farted out one last puff of exhaust before croaking. He turned to it grimacing.
Ah, man, I am screwed.
He took his bandana out of his pocket and wiped off his knife. He held it in the light to make sure he’d gotten all of the blood off and he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the blade.