by Ryan Schow
“That you’re weak,” she whispered aloud. She was in her bedroom, laying in bed, the blankets dragged up around her, barely awake.
Pain shot through her. She woke instantly, doubled over. Then it passed.
Ever since the attack, which she didn’t tell her mother about, pain flared off and on. Mostly on. Her mother kept asking what was wrong and all she could say was she had the stomach flu, or maybe it was gas. The baby was already miscarried out of her, so why the persistent pain?
Her mother said, “Well fart then, if that’s all it is.”
“I’ve been farting all morning,” Netty cried.
“Then maybe it isn’t gas.”
No, she thought, lying in bed. It’s not gas. But it’s something.
That morning, she stayed in bed until that fateful moment when the fist of her guts turned and tightened into the worst cramping she had ever felt. The pain in her lower belly, it was excruciating. Netty heaved and pulled herself out of bed, standing on wobbly legs, dizziness sweeping through her. Heading to the toilet, feeling the damp, squish of slop in her underwear, she pulled down her panties, plopped on the toilet and pissed out blood and muscle tissue. Had there been more of the baby? Or a twin?
Before she knew it, the cramping and bleeding rolled over and through her. Whimpering became crying which became full out sobbing. Then came howling because her emotions surpassed the physical pain and she couldn’t hold it in any longer.
She didn’t know when her mother came in the bathroom, or how she got in through the locked door so quietly. But she was there, brushing back Netty’s hair, looking at her underwear pulled down to her ankles and the crime scene contained within.
“You miscarried,” her mother said in a voice rich with emotion. Sadness crept into her eyes no matter how hard the woman fought to contain it.
“The blood,” Netty said. It was all she could say as she drew her ankles together and leaned into her mother. She hadn’t told her mother she miscarried a few days ago after the attack. But this felt a lot like that. Like part two of the miscarriage. She wondered, was I having twins?
She’d never know.
In a way, as she sat there on the toilet—hers and Brayden’s shat out child sinking like a battered turd in the toilet bowl—the oddest wave of relief moved through her. She wasn’t ready to be a mother. Not yet. Not with a boy who wasn’t interested in her. Not with a boy who wasn’t even present. Netty wouldn’t have to raise the baby alone, face her father’s disappointment, or deal with everyone wanting to make Brayden pay for the Luciferian work his penis did by leaving its seed behind.
Yes, as she sat there on the toilet, her shame sitting like torn meat on the bottom of the toilet bowl, she cried with relief. The pain had finally passed.
She survived.
A Life of Courage, Goodwill and Distinction
1
A few blocks from where he squashed Anetka’s fetus inside her young womb, ousted the old man and his dog from space and time and smoked the eyes of an innocent jogger, The Assassin had “borrowed” a navy blue BMW. The owner was still it in. He put her in the back seat, broken in half and stuffed into the foot well. A brittle, older woman even before he used his mind to fold her over backwards—he considered his act of kindness a mercy killing before anything.
From a comprehensive database accessible via linkage implants inside of his head—a linkage connecting him to The Source back in the twenty-ninth century, a massive database of every piece of survivable history from the dark ages on—he downloaded the application on how to drive a car, then waited less than a minute for the application to integrate into his consciousness. When the uploading sequence was complete, he turned the key, slapped the beamer into gear and zoomed into traffic.
On the BMW’s sound system was a lovely symphony: Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor,” a symphony that had him practically sobbing inside of five minutes. It had been so long since he heard music. Right then, he felt like he had never heard something so beautiful as to hear music like that with human ears! He’d pulled over to the side of the road and listened. When the orchestra ended, he heaved a great sigh, wiped his watery eyes, then fought to still his rambunctious heart.
Then the next symphony started: Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture.” He sat through that as well, feeling the constant push and pull of emotions coursing through him. He heard music before, hundreds of years ago, but nothing as simple or deeply complex as an orchestra of this enormity. Each and every chord drew from him something cherished: a memory, an emotion, the softer sides of him. Then, when “Symphony #5” began to play, something once constricted inside him unfurled and he said, “This I can work with.”
Already things inside the organic matter he thought of as a brain began putting the details of a plan together. Then his head said, Eat, and so he stopped at a restaurant and he ate. After that his head said, Sleep, so he found a nearby hotel and he slept. When he woke, he showered, relishing the heat and pressure of the water, craving the physical experience so much so he thought it might be time to Inhabit a Body. Not just for another contract, but for a full human lifetime. It had been so long…
Perhaps he would be someone important again: a President, a general, a humanitarian. Or he could go the opposite route and be entirely notorious. If The Patriarch would let him, he would most certainly live the infamous sort of life.
The Patriarch once allowed him such an opportunity, so The Operator traveled back in time and lived his slice-of-life as the ravenous beast known as Jack the Ripper. He ached to play rough, and the sordid Whitechapel District in London in the late eighteen hundreds was the quintessential playground.
The Operator, then The Ripper, he hunted in the slums, went after prostitutes, used the cover of night to slay a handful of downtrodden nobodies. The reason he was never caught was because he was never a local man. Never a citizen of that time. He brought a body through the wormhole, into 1888 from nearly a thousand years away. He had no need for a job, no family, not even a name or residence. He simply came and went from his time to The Ripper’s time.
Once he began his killing spree, the press dubbed him “The Whitechapel Murderer,” which he’d found blasé and tasteless. Anyone could pick up a knife and kill someone. Anyone could shoot a pistol or break a woman’s neck. Did that mean they were talented? Special?
No.
To be a murderer was easy. To be a serial killer scandalous enough to be honored for centuries? Now that required artistry! But the name. Oh, how he needed a more telling name!
So the press gave him one: Leather Apron.
That moniker sent him into fits! The man they were calling Leather Apron was a local scumbag named John Pizer who loved terrorizing prostitutes. The Operator didn’t terrorize. He killed. That the press should steal his glory and give it to a shit heel as unworthy as Pizer was preposterous!
He had written a letter to the police in September of 1888, the twenty-fifth if his memory served right. He wrote in red ink, symbolic of blood and his reign of terror. From his latest victim, he’d filled a ginger beer bottle with blood to use as ink. The blood coagulated, though, rending it impossible to write with. He was livid. Eventually he decided it didn’t much matter. The message itself was reprehensible enough without having to be penned in his victim’s blood.
In the letter, he told the police they got the wrong man. That he’d kill again. He said to look for an ear. The point of the letter was not only to taunt the press and police, but to make sure they referred to him from that moment on as Jack the Ripper. He signed the letter with that name. A name he’d come to love deeply. It inferred the kind of sick brutality he was going for.
In order to become The Ripper, The Operator had to devolve. He couldn’t just strangle a person. Or stab them to death. Forget merely slitting a throat or shooting someone with a gun, or even running them over with a horse and carriage. No, he needed to do something more shocking and more degrading if he was to leave his mark. To take a knif
e and gut someone so thoroughly as to leave their abdominal region looking mutilated by a psychotic surgeon rather than the work of a single blade required aptitude. To forever ruin the lives of those first investigators on the scene was a thing of legend. To mail George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee half of a human kidney with what would later come to be known as the famous “From Hell” letter was his way of putting the cherry on top of the cake.
That letter, “From Hell,” was The Operator saying: I deserve my place in history, you goddamn schmucks.
Even now he knew his victims’ names. He held them in his awareness like a memento, living and reliving memories of the kills whenever he needed them most.
Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Sitting in his hotel room in 2015, looking at the flat thing called a TV, sitting on an uncomfortable bed with a come-stained bedspread, The Operator, now The Assassin, accessed his Whitechapel memories. They came up the same as a data file would come up.
They were just there.
On August 31, 1888, he went to Buck’s Row where he found Mary Ann Nichols drunk. He had slashed her throat twice, watched her fall to the street. It was cold outside, the air too heavy in his lungs for comfort. But to watch someone die like that was thrilling! When she was done thrashing and dying, he stabbed and tore at her abdomen where she lay ruined, then he jerked up her skirt and left her where she was later discovered by a cart driver named Charles Cross.
Annie Chapman was next. Short like Mary Ann, Annie—nicknamed “Dark Annie” by those of them who knew her—she had issues with alcohol and engaged in casual prostitution to make ends meet. He slit her throat and gutted her in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street on September 8, 1888. He wore a deer-stalker cap and a dark cape that night, and he’d been seen by a woman named Elizabeth Long. She thought of him as foreign, which he wasn’t, and described him to officials as shabby-genteel—whatever that meant. Either way, he crafted his mysterious look then stuck with it.
Elizabeth Stride was his third prostitute, a woman purported to be a liar, a drunk, and of course, a street whore. On September 30, 1888, he took her across the street from a predominantly Jewish social club to Dutfield’s Yard. It was dreadfully dark when he slashed apart her throat, but he was both seen and interrupted. She hadn’t even stopped bleeding out when he was forced to flee. His morning suit, a bowler hat and a dark mustache—along with his insubstantial height—was reported to police. Not that it mattered. What mattered was that he had been rudely interrupted! That’s why less than an hour later, just up the street, he found and took Catherine Eddowes.
Catherine Eddowes was also a prostitute as a result of her falling on hard times. Like the others, she turned to alcohol to dull the pain. She had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly earlier that night and released, having given her name first as “Nobody,” then as Mary Ann Kelly. Stinking to all hell of alcohol and failure, Ms. Eddowes was razed with the sort of brutality that screamed out Capital Crime! He opened the throat first, then he sliced up her face and ears. It wasn’t enough, though, so he shoveled her intestines out in great quantity, tossing them over her shoulder, then smearing them with shit and leaving the bottom half of her body exposed for all to see.
It wasn’t the first time he lost control, and it wouldn’t be the last. Back in his time, The Patriarch warned him to remain somewhat civilized in his murderous endeavors, but how could he? Was murder ever civil? He assured The Patriarch he was in perfect control, that his behavior was grotesque, not for the joy of the matter, but to assure him that such horror would prevent future horrors from occurring. In essence, he was keeping serial killers of the future more tame than they would normally be.
Really, he explained, he was doing society a service.
To The Patriarch, he stood by his word, unwavering, completely serious about the explanation. It was in the murder of Mary Jane Kelly that he realized he had a definite problem, that killing was no longer a hobby, but a morbid obsession he didn’t want to shake.
Mary Jane Kelly was not short or brunette, like three of the other women. Rather she was a woman of considerable beauty for the times, a redhead erring more on the side of a blonde than a fiery orange. As with the other victims, her husband was gone—dead in a mining accident in this case—so she turned to the street as a means of survival. Mary Kelly was his grand masterpiece. His big good-bye. The atrocities he committed upon that poor woman on November 9, 1888 left him with delightful nightmares for decades. While she was in her bed, he skinned her thighs, removed her organs, cut off her breasts. He hacked up her arms with jagged cuts while slashing and stabbing at her face with such homicidal frenzy she was nearly unrecognizable as human.
He placed the long, cut-away thigh flaps on the room’s table; the uterus, kidneys and one breast were all stuffed and positioned beneath her head; he placed the other breast by the right foot, positioned the liver in between her feet, heaped the intestines by the right side of her body and set the spleen by the left side.
Yes, he had problems. No, he wasn’t anxious to repeat them.
That’s why when he went to the dojo in 2015, he would be civilized, as The Patriarch had once asked. No more jerking out people’s guts in fits. No more hacking up their faces and leaving them in immodest form for discovery. The Patriarch insisted The Operator—if he should want to continue his homicidal escapades—dispose of the bodies into The Void, a resting place designed for The Patriarch specifically by The Operator. It was The Patriarch’s version of tightening the reigns, and keeping the past relatively in tact.
But what good was doing the task if one were unable to witness the horror of bystanders?
It was a question that plagued him often.
2
The Operator nearly lost his status within The Hive, and was threatened with banishment from The Nest by The Patriarch for his Jack The Ripper mischiefs. In return for his transgressions, The Operator was made by The Patriarch to live a full and meaningful life, a grueling life worthy of a more storied place in history.
His life with Harriet Tubman was such a distinct life. Made to suffer the horrors of slavery as a child of the early 1820’s and ’30’s, The Operator, living his life as a confidant to Harriet Tubman, tore loose the bonds of slavery with the sole determination of freeing others. The Operator saved hundreds of slaves by working alongside Tubman. They ushered countless men, women and children from the South to the North by way of a secret network of safe houses, which eventually became known as the “Underground Railroad.” The Operator’s childhood was worse than awful, a punishment The Operator bore for his brutality in Whitechapel, but he turned it into that which The Patriarch demanded: a life of courage, goodwill and distinction.
Harriet Tubman ached to help her brothers and sisters from the chains of slavery into the arms of freedom, at any cost, no matter her own personal outcome. The Operator shared Tubman’s resolve. The Operator was not a beast, not a slayer of downtrodden women, not a butcher on a joyride through a time not meant to handle the kind of cruelty he was all too pleased to wield. No. The Operator, working next to Tubman, was a confidant, a liberator, a freed man working in the support of one of the finest, gutsiest women ever to walk the planet.
Now that he was here in 2015 on his own, however, he ached to play dirty again. Not the way Jack the Ripper played dirty, but close.
Two days after taking the BMW, he went to the location Anetka described. Outside the dojo (a building which bore the sign: KARATE, in big block lettering), he parked the stolen car, then walked to the front door. In large white letters, hand-painted on the glass storefront were the words: $99/MONTH; below that it said: NO TESTING FEES.
The Assassin cupped his hands around his eyes, pressed his hands and face to the glass, took a cursory look inside.
Within the open building were two rows of chairs facing a large padded, red mat that occupied three quarters of the two thousand square foot space. Of the twenty-fiv
e or so visitors’ chairs, most were full. Amongst them were mainly the students’ parents. The rest were either husbands or wives, brothers or sisters, even a few significant others. All he saw were future victims.
A black belt had the training floor filled with students of middle rank. He looked to be in his late twenties, thirty tops. Not a sensei. Maybe a senpai, but not a sensei.
The Assassin opened the door and stepped inside the dojo. Not a single visitor noticed. Their focus was elsewhere: on the students, on their cell phones, on a paperback book with a shirtless man on front. He wanted to laugh at the sorry group of people here, but he didn’t. The body’s heart was racing too hard for that.
Up front, on the padded mat, two sets of teenagers were mock fighting. The rest lined up against the wall waiting to spar each other, waiting to spar the winners of the two matches taking place.
The black belt hovered between the two fights, presumably the match referee.
Out of The Void, from the place where The Assassin sent his victims, he called for his weapon: a Samurai sword. Materializing in thin air, the sword appeared in his right hand. Stealing his last calming breath—a deep one—The Assassin relished this moment. The peace before the storm. A crooked smile bent his face, made him feel whole. Human. This is why he took the body, he reminded himself. Why he inhabited the flesh. For this feeling.
It would not be Whitechapel, but it would be something!
Inside his head, he activated the music function and played Beethoven’s “Symphony #5,” the same one he heard in the BMW. Standing tall behind the parents, timing his attack to the symphony’s cues, The Assassin raised the blade, waited for the right moment, then went to work. All the students started screaming when the second lopped-off head hit the floor.
He silenced them, directed their noisy cries into The Void. He wasn’t sure which was more terrifying for them, watching their friends and loved ones being slaughtered at will, or screaming their lungs out and producing only silence. Within a minute, every last visitor was dead. One decapitation, one righteous cut up the middle. Strewn about the dismembered parts were innards, and fallen torsos. The air became choked with the coppery stink of death.