by Terry Yates
Simon continued down the streets, oblivious to what street he was on. Getting darker, he thought to himself. Moon’s gonna be bright soon. He felt a sharp spasm in his stomach, this one the most painful yet. He stopped and doubled over from the pain.
“Are you okay, Sir?” a male voice asked.
“I’m okay, thank you,” Simon answered back, still stooped over.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he began as he looked up at his good Samaritan, “thank you…eh…Sir?”
The man that stood above him didn’t look like a man at all. Since the man had spoken from behind him, Simon couldn’t have noticed that the man’s legs were completely shaven and covered with pantyhose and open-toed pumps, size ten, he was guessing. He/she had long, black hair that almost cascaded into Simon’s eyes. His/her long hair was blocking the sun so that Simon could only see a shadow across his/her face. He saw red lipstick and a ton of pancake make-up. He couldn’t see his/her eyes, but he could see that her/his eyebrows had been plucked and a pencil thin, black line had been drawn in their place. Why was that? Simon, like probably most men, always wondered why women pulled every little hair out only to replace it with a pencil mark. His/her miniskirt was snot green and well above her knees. She had something that could pass for cleavage, he supposed. It wasn’t much, but to the untrained eye, it might seem ample.
“Would you like me to call a doctor?” she asked, reaching into her/his purse to retrieve her phone.
“No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay then,” he/she answered, putting her phone back into her purse. “If you’re sure.”
Simon watched him/her as he/she moved briskly down the sidewalk. He had to admit, although not that hot a face or bod for a dude who’s trying to be a girl, he/she had the walk down as if he/she had been practicing it all of his/her life. This little bastard had definitely walked around in high heels for quite some time. There you go, he thought. Just another turd in the cesspool. Well, the cesspool was about to get flushed very soon.
Simon stood up and touched his stomach. Most of the pain was gone now. He arched his back and stretched in an attempt to determine whether he was pain free or not. Good, no pain. He stretched his neck to the side until he heard the inevitable crack.
“Yeah, Baby!” he exclaimed loudly, noticing that a half-dozen or more people were looking at him like he’d eked one out in an elevator.
Simon stood on the corner and looked around. Across the street and to his right, he saw several black youth, all dressed in the same colors walking out of a small liquor store. All but one of them were laughing and high-fiving and bumping shoulders. The one not laughing was looking around cautiously and tucking something into his pockets. All of them were carrying at least one bottle of liquor. The one not laughing stopped for a moment and looked back at Simon. The young man was an inch or two shorter than Simon, but was more muscular. He wore a black tank-top shirt making it easy for anyone to see his large biceps. He also wore some sort of black stocking on his head, with a long black tail that went down the back of his head all the way to the his third or fourth vertebrae. Simon also noticed that the young man’s jeans were halfway down his ass exposing his yellow, green, and white striped boxer shorts.
He continued to look over his shoulder for another few seconds before turning around and following his friends down an alleyway. Simon trotted across the street, not caring if the light was green or not. He heard two cars honking at him by the time he hit the middle of the street. He kept trotting, but not before looking at both cars and smiling. The setting sun was causing a bright, yellow glare to bounce off of the cars windshields, blinding him for a moment, so he couldn’t see the drivers’ faces. Too bad. He loved to see the faces of annoyed and appalled people. They always cracked him up. How dare he, their faces said. How dare he do what everyone else wishes they could do.
Simon stepped onto the curb, and faced the red brick side of the corner building where he’d seen the gang exit. He moved slowly around to the front of the building. He took a few steps back on the sidewalk and looked up at the front of the building. The sign read “Cho’s Liquors” in big red letters. There was Chinese writing down under “Cho’s Liquors”. Probably the Chinese symbols, he thought dropping his gaze from the sign to the front of the store. He saw his reflection, hands shielding his eyes from the sun as it bounced off the glass. There were several burglar bars covering the window, which made the reflection look like he was in jail.
Simon walked to the front door and opened it. A small bell above the door tinkled as he walked inside. A cold blast of air hit him square in the face as he closed the door behind him. There was an eerie stillness inside the place. Simon let his eyes adjust to the low light. His pupils had grown overly large in the last two days making it take longer for them to adjust from dark to light and vice versa.
As his eyesight returned, Simon saw that the store was quite tiny, barely a more than a shop. There were only three tiny aisles, with shelves no more than twenty feet long, and each covered with different liquors. Jack Daniels, Wild Turkey, Old Charter, Jim Beam, and a few other spirits he’d never heard of lined the shelves. He saw several different types of wine, from the most expensive, to the cheapest rotgut that could probably also double as furniture varnish.
There didn’t seem to be anyone in the store. The store was small enough for Simon to have noticed anyone moving about. He looked toward the counter. No one there either. Like all liquor stores, the place was freezing cold. It felt good against Simon’s face and hands.
After a moment of enjoying the cool, Simon walked to the counter. The front of the counter was littered with different alcohols, gin-sing, candles, incenses, and a number of other products with Chinese writing on them. There was a small area cut out in the center where the clerk and the customer did their business. Simon walked to the little cubbyhole area.
“Hello?” Simon asked aloud, looking around. He didn’t want to appear to be stealing something when someone walked out of the restroom or the freezer.
He spun slowly around the room once looking for any sign of life. Simon leaned over the counter. Cartons and individual packs of cigarettes littered the floor…and so did its proprietors. A middle aged Asian couple were lying across each other, both wearing white smocks with the logo of the store on them. The man was lying on his side, his hand over his face. The woman was on her back but lying on top of her husband, her lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling, a large, bloodstained hole in the center of her forehead. One large pool of blood that had at one time been two smaller pools of blood flowed from underneath them. Simon saw that the till drawer was open. There was nothing but a few coins in their appropriate slots still inside.
“Those little shits,” he said softly.
Simon was, and knew, that he was a psychopath. Most psychos don’t know it or refuse to believe that they are, because it’s a tag no one wants to be labeled with, but Simon had no illusions as to what he was. He’d known as a child that he wasn’t too normal. Once two bullies had picked on him, calling him “faggot” and trying to make him eat a dog turd. Several days later, he saw their tens-speeds parked on the side of one of their houses, found his father’s wire cutters, and clipped both of their brake lines. Neither one of them noticed until they tried to stop at the first cross street where they both sailed through the stop sign. As a car sped through the intersection, one of the boys went right into its path and was knocked off of his bike, and then summarily run over by the car, killing him instantly. The other boy…the leader of the two, and the one that Simon hated most, sailed over the side of the hood, snapping his spine. The newspaper article said that the two boys probably didn’t see the car. Jerry Garner, 11, was killed instantly. His friend and neighbor, Mark Collier, also 11, rolled over the car and was believed to have severe spinal damage and would probably be paralyzed from the waist down for the rest of his life. Other than Helen Morgan, aged 48, the driver of the car, the only other witness wa
s a neighborhood child Simon Shoals…aged 7.
Simon had thoroughly enjoyed watching the two boys receive their comeuppance. His parents had forced him to go to the Garner boy’s funeral. He quite enjoyed seeing the boy’s lifeless body in the casket. He remembered wondering if it would rot in the muggy Texas heat that was burning down on them that day.
Mark Collier lived the rest of his life…the rest of his life so far…in a wheelchair. As Simon grew, he watched Mr. and Mrs. Collier build a wheelchair ramp, get a van, and literally cart their son’s miserable ass around for the rest of their lives. Simon moved away when he was twelve, but he ran into people from his old neighborhood from time to time. He was in a bar several years ago, when he saw a man in a wheelchair that was the spitting image of Mark Collier’s father when he was in his mid-thirties. The man was fat and wore a baseball cap, and had several empty beer bottles in front of him. He sat at a table, surrounded by a half dozen or more men and women who were obviously bar regulars and had become, if not friends, then at least acquaintances with the man.
Simon had sat at the bar and watched the group, waiting to hear someone call the drunken man by name. After a few minutes, he heard the waitress ask him if he needed another drink. When he nodded his head, she said “right away, Mark”. Bam! It was the worthless piece of shit.
It was a Monday and the bar was a dive. There were only eighteen to twenty people in the whole place, so Simon had no trouble hearing the conversation coming from the table. The drunker the man became, the more belligerent he became. He was one of those chip-on-the-shoulder guys when he got drunk. That guy who slams the table and gives murderous glares to people who say things that he doesn’t like. Mark Collier was one of those drunks whose friends tried to placate him when he got nasty.
Simon had smirked and turned back to the bar, wondering if he would meet anyone that night who might become his next nocturnal plaything. The waitress was okay looking, but she didn’t really fuel his fire that much.
He was about to ask for another beer, when he heard Mark’s loud, obnoxious voice over the jukebox. Simon reveled in the man’s misery.
“Hey Mark,” he heard a man’s voice say timidly. “Tell us again how you saved that kid.”
Simon’s ears had pricked up upon hearing this. Collier saved a kid? Ha! Bullshit! He listened as the fat drunken slob told the group how he had been just a young boy when he’d seen a little black girl, no more than three years old, wander out into the street, and into the path of an oncoming car. He told them how he had run into the street, picked up the little girl and thrown her clear of the accident, but hadn’t gotten himself clear, and rolled completely over the car from front to back, landing in the middle of the road, dragging himself across the street to make sure that the little girl was out of harm’s way. Then and only then, did he collapse to the ground, crippled for life for saving a little black girl. But you know, he told them, it was worth it. He would gladly give his legs for the life of a little black girl. The guy told the story like he had told it a thousand times before. The brave little boy gave up his legs for the life of a little black girl. After all of these years, the guy had probably come to believe it himself.
Before he left the bar that night, he stopped by the table where Mark Collier sat alone, his friends having left some time before. Without asking permission, Simon pulled up the closest chair to the man.
“Who are you?” Collier asked, before turning up his Budweiser bottle and getting the very last drop out of it.
“I heard you telling those people about how you lost the use of your legs,” Simon said, feigning sincerity. “That’s a real heartwarming, and might I add, heart breaking story.”
“Yeah, well, that’s how it goes,” Mark shot back, now barely able to keep his head up. “You win some. You lose some.”
The man’s speech was slurred now worse than it had been just minutes before.
“That was really brave of you,” Simon said softly, looking the drunk in the eye and nodding his head.
Mark Collier shrugged his shoulders, his head rolling to the side.
“Yeah, well…” he started, but Simon cut him off.
“See, I remember something exactly like that happening in my neighborhood when I was just a little sprout, except there was no little black girl involved.”
“Oh yeah,” Mark slurred.
“Yeah. You see, there were these two older boys who used to pick on all the kids in the neighborhood, till one little seven year old boy got sick of it.”
Mark Collier slowly straightened up and began to focus his eyes on Simon.
“Yeah,” Simon continued, seeing a glimmer of memory in Mark’s eyes. “The boy got sick of it, and…you know what he did?”
Mark Collier’s drunken stare seemed to be disappearing before Simon’s eyes. Simon knew that he was still extremely inebriated. The guy had downed six or seven beers and two Crown and Cokes, and was as drunk as George Jones on a Saturday night, but his eyes were no longer in the back of his head, but looking right at him, completely focused now.
“No…” he answered softly.
Simon had to bite his tongue to keep from grinning.
“The little boy got his old man’s wire cutters and snipped the brake lines on the boys’ bikes and waited for almost two hours for them to get on ‘em. When the boys finally came outside and got on their bikes, one of them threw a dog turd at the little boy, and the two of them laughed and called him names that he was too small to understand. But the little boy knew he would get the last laugh, but he didn’t know how big that laugh would be until the boys went through that intersection. You know, the looks on their faces was priceless. Priceless!”
By this time, Mark Collier’s eyes were large and completely focused on the now grinning man in front of him who literally had a captive audience. One of them got greased by the car, but the other one…” he paused, “the other one flew over the car and…oh…it was so pretty. It was almost like slow motion, watching his body flying through the air, a look of complete terror on his face knowing, not knowing what lay ahead of him, that in a few seconds, he was going to be in a world of pain.”
Simon watched as Mark Collier’s eyes began to bulge out from his head and his face became almost crimson in color. This was the little shit that had changed his life and the life of his entire family…and he was smiling.
“The boy moved away after a few years, but heard through the grapevine that the boy’s family had to alter their entire lives, and even went broke taking care of that kid…and all because that kid was just so mean.” He paused. “I wonder if that boy thinks about that when he’s trying to sleep at nights.”
With this, Simon laughed, stood up and clapped the man on his shoulder, which didn’t seem as hard and straight as it had been before he had sat down. As he started to remove his hand, Mark Collier slammed his hand on top of Simon’s and gripped it hard. Simon looked down to see the man’s face was almost purple now.
“You!” he hissed, his spit spraying Simon’s wrist.
The man’s eyes were now huge and filled with both anger and sudden realization. Simon saw three ugly, purple veins sticking straight out of his forehead.
“You!” he gasped again.
His hand was gripping Simon’s hard now, but it didn’t hurt Simon. If it did, he didn’t feel it. He was filled with that light that always filled him up after a particularly great killing. He supposed this was just as good as a killing. Seeing the cripple come to the sudden realization that the man in front of him had been the cause of a lifetime full of woes, was a thing of beauty to Simon, plus there wasn’t a single thing that the man could do about it. He’d spent all those years telling people how he became a cripple, and he couldn’t go back on it now…not after all this time. And this bastard knew it, too.
Simon removed his hand, patted Mark Collier on the shoulder, and walked out of the bar, leaving the cripple to mull over all the ways his life would’ve been different if he hadn’t fucked w
ith one seven year old boy.
Now here he was looking at a dead couple who probably couldn’t even speak English and worked nonstop to take care of their kids, their parents, and whatever other relatives that might live with them.
As he watched them, he felt something stirring inside him. He didn’t think it was sympathy…he wasn’t sure he could feel sympathy…but it was something. He’d always get a bit annoyed when he heard cops and psychiatrists talk about psychopaths and sociopaths as if they would kill anyone and everyone that they were alone with. That just wasn’t true…well, for him anyway. He didn’t know about the likes of Dahmer, Bundy, or Gacy, but as for himself, he would never have harmed a family member or a friend…or the people lying dead in front of him. It was all more complicated than that. He had to feel the bright light that took him over and told him that this little slut or that little whore should die a slow and grisly death. He didn’t just kill anyone. Sure, he killed mostly young girls, but he wasn’t averse to killing the occasional older woman or guy who really pissed him off…like Mark Collier, Jerry Garner, or the recently deceased Scott Cargile from Lampasas, Texas town, but he just didn’t kill for killing’s sake. Most wackos…and he knew he was one…there was no denying that, know that they are a-one fruit bat crackers with a twist. That’s what made him so different. He had known that he was psychotic at a young age…seven to be exact. It was the day that he cut those brake lines, and he hadn’t looked back since. Sure, the light didn’t hit him every day, but more often than not, especially since he was turning, that the urges really hit him…and now was one of those times. Seeing those little peckerheads kill this couple for what…a hundred dollars, maybe…gave him the urge.