by Bryan Smith
Formerly attractive, Zeb thought, and smiled.
The rest of her body was staked to the ground on a patch of pushed-down grass directly in front of Zeb. She’d been stripped of her clothes at the outset of the evening’s festivities. And though she’d endured a lot, her body remained a work of natural art—from the proud jut of her large breasts to the sweet swell of her hips and the tender slope of her flat but soft belly, and down to the sculpted length of her long, elegant legs. Zeb supposed the ragged and bloody neck stump would’ve robbed her of any inherent eroticism for most people. But he was not most people. For Zeb, it was just another means of ingress.
In other words, he’d fucked it.
This was not normal, of course. Even he knew that. It was the kind of thing crazy people did. He was crazy. Hence, stump-fucking. Fuck that politically correct BS the docs were forced to spew. Some had attempted to link his “erratic” behavior with the onset of puberty, and hormones gone haywire. Others had looked for a root cause in the ferocious abuse he’d endured at the hands of his father. All a crock, far as Zeb was concerned. He’d been stone-cold cuckoo from the beginning. He could recall watching Mr. Rogers on PBS as a toddler and thinking how he’d like to pull the man’s eyes out and eat them raw.
So, yeah, Zeb knew the truth. He was crazy, like the regular folks said, and had probably had been born that way. When you looked at it that way, you could almost see all these killings as being the work of the Lord. Kind of. But not really.
God was the creator, and He had made him this way.
Crazy.
But God didn’t make him kill.
That was all on Lulu.
And Lulu had always been there, whispering naughty things to him during his childhood. Things that had disturbed and excited him at the same time. Ideas about interesting things to do with knives and bricks. He would sit in a classroom and smile at a cute girl, who would maybe smile back, never imagining his thoughts. She would think he had a crush on her, but instead he would be thinking about smashing her head in with a rock. The things Lulu suggested had ignited an obsession so feverish, it was inevitable he would follow the typical path of the young serial-killer-to-be and experiment on animals. It taught him some valuable things, like how hard living things will fight against you to avoid pain or death. By the time he was ready to move on to his first human victim—shortly after his sixteenth birthday—he knew to always be sure to have the upper hand in any situation. Mostly that meant selecting weaker victims. Like that first one, the fourteen-year-old neighbor girl he’d lured into the woods.
Priscilla.
So pretty.
My, what a mess he’d made of her.
Later, as he grew taller and stronger, the field of potential victims widened to include just about anyone. He could go toe-to-toe against any man out there, even the kind of musclebound behemoths you’d see in a wrestling ring or shoring up an NFL team’s offensive line. And he would come out the victor every time. But he preferred female victims. He enjoyed them on an aesthetic level, that simple appreciation of beauty, but he loved to defile beauty even more. For Zeb, there were few joys in life equal to carving up a bit of lovely flesh with a sharp knife. He loved how the flesh parted so easily, the fresh wound spilling forth that sweet torrent of precious life blood.
Mmm…He liked to drink their blood.
It was wrong that he’d gone so long without knowing that pleasure. The memory of those long years of confinement still made him throb with anger. But now he was free again. And crazier than ever.
With a head full of new ideas he was eager to road test.
Clyde ceased his impression of a doomed whirlybird and staggered toward Zeb. He came to a woozy stop several feet short of his seated friend and flashed a fiendish grin. Though there were some gaps, his teeth were still mostly there. This Zeb attributed to good genes. Hell, even crazy hobos could spring from otherwise-sturdy stock. And Zeb’s friend was proof that even the sturdiest of family trees can sometimes sprout a diseased limb.
All of Clyde’s worldly possessions were contained in a canvas knapsack he carried everywhere. Zeb had poked through its contents a time or two. There were three dog-eared paperback westerns, decades old. There was a lot of assorted junk. Lighters with no fluid in them. A jar filled with dirt. Sets of keys he’d saved as souvenirs from various murders. But most revealing was a stack of old photographs bound together with several thick rubber bands. The pictures showed various members of an obviously healthy and prosperous family over a period of maybe ten years. Some were vacation photos, shots of men in khakis and sunglasses relaxing with drinks, and attractive women in string bikinis stretched out on beach blankets. Others images were from birthday and graduation ceremonies. Clyde was in many of the photos, but the Clyde from that vanished time bore little resemblance to the man Zeb knew today. Somewhere along the way, obviously, something had gone very wrong for him. Clyde Weatherbottom wasn’t even his real name. Various clues from the photos made this clear.
Not that Zeb cared, really.
Clyde wasn’t that person anymore. Hadn’t been for many years.
Clyde held the severed head close to his face and pressed his chapped lips to the dead girl’s blood-caked mouth. Zeb watched him push his tongue between the dead lips and felt another little twitch at his groin. He glanced at the headless corpse and thought about spreading her legs for another go. But the exaggerated slurping, smacking sounds Clyde was making distracted him.
“Come on, baby. Gimme some lovin’.” Clyde kissed the dead lips again, made the same absurdly exaggerated smacking sounds. He glanced at Zeb and grinned, turning the head’s slack features toward him. “Ain’t she the sexiest bitch you ever seen, Zebbo? I think I’m gonna marry her. What do you think?”
“You have my blessings.”
“Superb! You’ll be my best man.”
Clyde did a wobbly half spin away from Zeb and cupped his free hand around his mouth. “Hey, asshole. I’m engaged to your bitch now. What do you think about that?”
A longish moment passed.
The only sounds were the sigh of the wind and the hiss of tires on the nearby interstate, which was obscured by a stand of tall trees.
Then a muffled whimper drifted across the field.
Zeb grinned.
Clyde whooped and waved the head again. “Yeah! I knew you were faking being unconscious, motherfucker! Check out the blushing bride!”
Another wild wave of the head.
Another hopeless whimper.
“She’s mine now, ya fuckin’ punk! All miiiiiiiiiiiiinnnne!”
The whimpering briefly gave way to an outburst of impotent bravado. “I’ll kill you! Both of you. What you did…both of you…”
The voice cracked again and the whimpering resumed.
Zeb snorted. “Typical.”
Clyde shot him a wild, gleeful grin. “Well, shit, I guess we’re gonna have to take some reasonable steps to defend ourselves, Zebbo. I do think I heard that boy threaten to kill us. Did I hear right?”
“You heard right.”
Zeb got to his feet and started across the field, stepping on the dead girl’s stomach en route to where her handsome boyfriend hung upside down from the sturdiest low-hanging branch of a tall tree. When Zeb and Clyde reached the tree, they could see the headlights of cars zipping by on the interstate.
Zeb held out a hand. “Your knife.”
The Buck knife was embedded in one of the dead girl’s ears. Clyde extracted it and passed it to his friend. Zeb approached the dangling boyfriend, savoring the fear evident in the way he thrashed and screamed. The thick branch creaked, but showed no signs of breaking.
Zeb stared down at him. “I spent a lot of years in a nuthouse, boy. I got out. Obviously.”
Clyde snickered.
“One time I heard an orderly talking. He was saying how there’s different kinds of crazy. There’s your regular, everyday crazy. Folks take pills for it and they’re mostly okay. Mostly they’re
only dangerous to themselves. Then there’s a middle-ground kind of crazy. People who are mostly just a threat to themselves but might snap one day and hurt somebody else. But this would just be an isolated incident. These people can still be treated, and maybe there’s even some hope for them. And then this orderly talked about me. According to him that day, I’m the worst kind of crazy. The hopeless kind. The killing kind. You see, I don’t struggle with my feelings or any of that shit. I like to hurt people. You might say it’s my main interest in life. My calling.”
Clyde said, “Your raison d’être.”
The boyfriend looked up at Zeb and sniffled. “Fuck you, man.”
Zeb’s expression didn’t change, nor did his tone. “That orderly was right. And I told him that right before I slit his belly open. Which, by the way, is what I’m about to do to you.”
Clyde laughed. “Gut him!”
Zeb plunged the knife into the man’s flesh at a spot just below the waistline and drew it downward in a single vicious slash. He tossed the knife aside and gripped the edges of the wound with both hands, tugging at the gash and ripping it open as far as he could. Blood and loops of viscera spilled through the opening. The man wasn’t dead yet. He thrashed some more, but Zeb easily held him in place, pinning him against the tree. Then he pushed a hand all the way through the gash, groped around until he found a soft, squishy organ…and squeezed.
The man screamed one last time.
Clyde kept laughing.
Later, as they sat around their campfire roasting bits of human flesh on sticks, Clyde took a swig from a flask filled with cheap whiskey and sighed. “Beautiful night.”
Zeb pulled the stick away from the fire and eased the bit of flesh off the end. He popped it into his mouth and chewed, savoring the taste for several moments before the delightful morsel slid slowly down his gullet. He smiled. “Indeed.”
Clyde cleared his throat. “You, uh…you talk to Lulu lately?”
Zeb affixed another piece of meat to the stick and held it over the fire. “Indeed.”
“She tell you where we should go next?”
“Yes.”
A long moment passed. A big semi’s horn blatted out on the interstate. “Well, don’t keep a man in suspense, Zebbo. Where we headed?”
Zeb was still smiling. “Myrtle Beach.”
CHAPTER FOUR
March 22
“You can back off now.”
Rob flinched. “Huh?”
It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d merged with the interstate traffic. Some twenty minutes of tense silence. The girl had spent most of that time sitting forward in her seat, her eyes intent on the back of the rental van. Rob knew it was a rental from the Enterprise sticker on the rear bumper. There were all sorts of questions he wanted to ask her. For instance, who were the people in the van and why was it necessary to abduct a stranger to follow them? What did she intend to do once she caught up with them? But he kept his mouth shut. Her generally hostile demeanor made it clear this was for the best. She scared the hell out of him, so much so it was almost possible to ignore how hot she was.
Almost.
She sat back in her seat now, folded her hands almost primly in her lap. “I said you can back off. Are you fucking deaf?”
They were maybe two car lengths behind the van. Rob eased off the gas and the distance quickly increased to three car lengths, then four. A blue Dodge Neon with flaking paint and stickers all over the back window changed lanes, moving into the space between the van and the Galaxie. Rob hit the clicker and started to change lanes.
“Don’t.”
Rob turned the clicker off and looked at her. “What’s the deal here? I thought you didn’t want me to lose them.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I know where they’re going.”
Rob couldn’t help it—he laughed. “Oh, yeah? That’s funny. Because for a while there I thought it was critically important that I stay right on their fucking ass and not lose sight of them if I wanted to live.”
The girl kicked off her shoes and scooted farther down in her seat. She raised her legs and propped her feet on the dashboard. She set the gun in her lap and examined the fingernails of her right hand. The black nail polish was chipping away in places. “It was. But I’ve calmed down some. I’ll kill them later, after they get where they’re going.”
Rob looked at her feet. The socks were the kind with toes. She wiggled the toes as he stared at them. It sent a strange little tingle through him. He glanced at the road. The blue Neon was still between them and the van. “Well, thanks for not killing me. Or them. Yet.” He jerked his left hand, rattling the handcuff bracelets. “So tell me something. Say we get pulled over for some reason. Obviously any cop with more than one or two functioning brain cells would want to know why I’m cuffed to the wheel. What’s your explanation?”
She smirked. “That’s easy. It’s a sex thing.”
“Say what?”
Her smirk deepened. “A sex thing. Bondage. The cop will accept it because cops are worldly people and they know people are into all kinds of kinky shit. And you’ll play along because your only other alternative is a fucking bullet in the brain.”
Fuck, he thought.
She was right. He’d been thinking he might try a bit of subtle erratic driving to hopefully draw the attention of the police. It wouldn’t have been too difficult. During their brief time on the highway, he’d already spied several cop cruisers. A part of him had even become cautiously optimistic as he’d thought about it, but now he regretfully scratched the idea from his too-short list of potentially ass-saving schemes.
Fuck!
He sighed. “So…uh…what now?”
“We stay on the road until dark. Then we find a little motel somewhere and get a room with your credit card.”
Rob thought about that. It seemed to indicate she had no intention of killing him for at least the next several hours. Still, hot babe or not, the notion of being alone in a motel room with this girl scared the shit out of him. Christ, she’d come up to him with a gun in a public place in broad daylight. What might a girl crazy enough to do that do with him with a little bit of privacy and some time to kill? Rob tightened his grip around the steering wheel to quell the sudden tremors in his fingers, which had been triggered by the sudden conviction that he wouldn’t leave that room alive.
She looked at him. Her eyes were cold, pitiless. “You need to stop being such a nervous bitch.”
Rob grunted. “Oh. Right. Okay. I’ll work on that, but I can’t guarantee anything. I mean, go figure, right? Some crazy chick with a gun kidnaps and threatens me. Why should I be nervous?”
The girl stared at him for a long moment, her features fixed, expressionless. Rob couldn’t bear the scrutiny and decided to stare at the road instead.
“Look at me.”
It was a tone that would brook no disobedience. Icy, and carrying an unspoken promise of pain if ignored. He looked at her. “Okay. I’m looking at you. Now what?”
The girl smiled. Just a little one, a slight dimpling of the corners of her mouth. But her eyes stayed cold. “I haven’t decided about killing you yet. That’s gonna depend on a lot of things. There are some things you can do to better your odds. One of them is to do everything I tell you without question or hesitation. It’ll make things a lot easier for both of us.”
Rob nodded. “Right. Because there’s no reason a friendly little kidnapping-slash-carjacking should be anything other than a thoroughly pleasant experience for all involved.”
“The other thing you can do, the main thing at this point, is to cut the sarcasm. It’s making me want to shoot you right now and be done with it.”
Rob frowned. “You’d shoot me right now? Seriously? Doing seventy-five on the interstate, with me behind the wheel?”
The girl’s gaze didn’t waver. “That’s right.”
“You’re crazy. Fuck, you are really fucking crazy.”
“Maybe.” Her smile d
eepened a little. “But you should take what I’m telling you seriously.”
Rob shrugged. “Okay. Whatever.”
They continued in silence for another several minutes. The Neon stayed in front of them, but Rob soon realized he’d lost sight of the van. The girl was sitting up straight and staring straight ahead now. She had to have noticed, too. Rob briefly considered shifting lanes again and putting the pedal down in an effort to catch up to their quarry, but the girl didn’t seem concerned about this development, so he did nothing.
Unable to bear the silence any longer, he glanced at her and asked, “So where are they going?”
“Myrtle Beach. Same place we’re going.”
“Okay. Well…” Rob had turned his attention back to the road, but now he looked fully at her, astonishment evident in the twist of his features. “Myrtle Beach? That’s…”
He trailed off and glanced at the road again. The Neon swerved and nearly struck a pickup truck in the far left lane. A horn blared and the Neon jerked back into its proper lane. Then it swerved slightly again. Rob began to suspect the driver was impaired in some way. He eased off the gas pedal a bit more and put another car length between the Galaxie and the Neon.
He looked at the girl. “So if I behave, I’ll live to see Myrtle Beach? Is that what you’re saying? Because we won’t be there by sundown.”
She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. One way or another, you’ll find out.”
Rob didn’t press the issue any further, deciding he had no choice but to accept the answer he’d been given, which was at least vaguely hopeful. But he had some other questions. “So I guess you know these people?”
“No.”
Rob’s brow creased. “Huh. But you know where they’re going?”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
“Heard them talking about it at Starbucks. Heard everything I needed to know, down to the street address for the beach house one of their rich daddies rented for them.”