by C. T. Phipps
“I’m sure you can,” I replied, regretting us looting Dad’s old storage locker. There were far too many things that there should have been left behind.
“Well, let’s get this show on the road,” Nancy said. “I feel like I need to sleep for a week. Which would kill all my friends so wherever you two are holed up, I need to go there and get like an hour’s sleep.”
I was pleased with the amount of trust she was showing us.
That’s my influence, the Spirit of the Hunt said. It’s interesting what sort of sparks may fly between natural enemies.
Stay out of my life, I snapped.
No, the Spirit of the Hunt said.
“I think you’ll like our house!” Carrie said. “It’s the kind of house you can imagine people being murdered in.”
I felt my face and shook my head. “Thanks, Carrie.”
“You’re welcome, bro!”
That was when another voice joined our group. “What the hell have you guys done to my backyard!”
It was Marge.
Chapter Five
“I can’t believe you resolved that by buying twenty pounds of murder ribs,” Carrie muttered as she sat behind me in our 1991 Buick Roadmaster. It was an old car, albeit not as old as some we’d driven around, but perfectly capable of hauling the cargo trailer behind us. We were driving down the highway to our new house and very little sign of civilization among the surrounding cornfields.
Nancy was sitting beside me, buckled in, as she kept her arms crossed. She had a Burger King bag at the bottom of her feet along with an empty drink container as we’d been forced to drive thirty minutes out of our way in order to get food that probably didn’t contain human remains. The entire car still smelled of meat and there were dozens of white paper bags sitting beside Carrie in the back.
I’d changed out of my blood-splattered jacket, jeans, and shirt to my Sunday suit. It was a cheap off-the-rack number I kept in my suitcase in my backseat. I worried it might trigger something with Nancy, but it didn’t seem to be something that reminded her of her captors. I owned approximately three pairs of clothes right now and this had been meant for my meeting any local clients I might find in Wounded Buffalo. Having met some of the locals, I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to happen now. Marge didn’t strike me as the kind of person who needed help with her business management or income tax.
“It seemed the easiest way to resolve the situation,” I said, dryly. “What would you have had me do?”
“I dunno, kill her?” Carrie said. “I mean, she is a slasher too, right?”
“Probably. She’s likely also a cannibal,” I said, sighing. “I mean, the trace evidence inside her garage was pretty big but nothing conclusive.”
“Your prey sense didn’t go ping?” Carrie asked. “Mine works like sonar. I used to think I had the soul of a dolphin back at the asylum, but that turned out to just be some really good drugs they had me on.”
“No it didn’t,” I said, frowning. “However, it’s never gone off around you either.”
“I’m a relative and immune,” Carrie said. “I mean, our cousins in Texas are a bunch of human-skinning hillbillies but—”
She was probably right. I didn’t understand how slasher powers worked but from what little I’d seen of my own and a lot of what I’d observed, it didn’t work with supernaturals. I hadn’t felt any urge to kill the zombie animated by father’s spirit or any other slasher I’d met over the years. My power seemed to only affect normal humans—probably why I was able to go almost thirty years without it ever triggering.
Am I right, Spirit of the Hunt? I asked.
I received no answer. Evidently, she talked on her own time.
“Guys, could you stop?” Nancy asked, looking at me. “I really don’t like knowing that I just left a murderer back there to prey on future people.”
I kept my eye on the road but blinked, contemplating that. “So, you’re saying we should have killed her?”
Nancy blinked. “You act surprised.”
“I’ve been trying to convince myself that killing people is wrong for the past ten years,” I said. “I learned self-hypnosis, meditation, and half a dozen other techniques to try to prevent it. Turns out none of it was worth a damned bit of good when actually confronted with a slasher’s urge to kill.”
“You always were the white sheep of our family,” Carrie said, pulling out her newly acquired cellphone to fiddle with it. “It’s like that old TV show The Munsters. They were a family of vampires and the Frankenstein’s Monster or something but one of them looked like an ordinary human. I used to think that meant she was better at blending in order to feed on regular humans but maybe she was like Will and a self-hating slasher.”
“I am not a self-hating slasher,” I said, confused at where she even got that analogy. “I don’t even know what that is.”
Nancy looked interested now. “Wait, you agreed to help me kill all of these people despite the fact you have a rule against killing?”
“It’s not a rule,” I replied. “Just a guideline. I’ve got no idea how a good person is supposed to act. It’s not like my father was a particularly good role model. Wait, scratch that, he was an incredibly good role-model. I’ve managed to get by through the process of trying to do the exact opposite of whatever he would do in a given situation.”
“You want to be a good person?” Nancy asked. “That’s surprising.”
“If it pisses off Dad, he’s down for it,” Carrie said. “Personally, I don’t think Dad was wrong about everything. Just women, children, the government, blacks, homosexuals, Hispanics, immigration, drug use, premarital sex, Artemises, and my brother. He was against all of those, by the way.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Nancy said, smirking. Clearly, she was finding our heart-wrenching life story entertaining. I liked that.
“I think I wanted to prove myself to be sane for the first five or six years of my incarceration,” I said, remembering my experience there. “But I couldn’t. Nothing I said or did made any difference in convincing them that I wasn’t a danger to other people. Truth be told, maybe they were right. Not only did I decide to murder that man that afternoon on instinct, but I’ve never been able to figure out what a good person does. There’s a lot of lore on the subject, but it’s all inherently contradictory.”
I’d tried taking up religion once but that had been an enormous disaster. It seemed that every major one seemed to have exceptions to the rules about treating people with respect and kindness. Secular humanism wasn’t an option either since something answered the invocations in Grandpa’s old magic books. As such, I was between moralities and willing to hear pitches from sincere believers.
“I’d say trust your instincts, but that doesn’t seem to be an option for people like us,” Nancy said, frowning. “Particularly when voices are telling us to kill people.”
“Did yours ping?” Carrie asked, leaning forward between the seats. “Or was yours more a ‘Kill her, mommy’? What was yours like, Will?”
“I’m not ready to share that yet,” I replied. It was impossible to describe how I’d felt, and I didn’t want to discuss it casually. It was like nothing I’d experienced.
“Spoilsport,” Carrie said.
“I could see the blood on their hands,” Nancy said, disgusted. “I knew who they’d hurt and that they needed to pay for it.”
“That’s similar to the way I experienced it,” I said, releasing a breath I hadn’t even known I’d been holding.
Carrie frowned. “Oh, so you’ll share it with her but not me, huh?”
I sighed.
Nancy looked out the window. “My mother and grandmother instilled in me a moral code: there are monsters in the world who deserve to die. Kill them. Protect the innocent. There’s a lot the movies made about them left out. Grandma worked as a private detective in Los Angeles, specializing in brutal crimes. She eventually tracked down the Black Dhalia murderer and the Zodiac Killer before putting them down
. Mom? Mom never shared her business, but she’d often come back with human-sized sacks in the back of her pickup truck. She buried those in the apple orchard. I think they were all slashers.”
“I bet the apples were a lovely shade of red,” Carrie said.
“So murderers deserve to die,” I said, taking that into advisement. “I see.”
“It’s not that simple,” Nancy said, sounding frustrated. “Or maybe it is.”
“You sound unsure,” I said, seeing the dirt road under a windmill that I made a turn at. The instructions from the realtor had been very specific. The cornfields around it were wild, overgrown, and untended as befit a place where the owners apparently had just been using it as a cover.
Nancy sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, I still plan on killing every one of those Fraternity jackasses. Preferably in the bloodiest, most violent ways possible.”
“Ooo,” Carrie said, sitting back.
“But I’m not sure my mother or grandmother actually accomplished anything but terrorizing me,” Nancy said, frowning. “I was a little hellraiser, trying to rebel against every rule they made just for the hell of it.”
“Did you have a puzzle box?” I asked.
“Huh?” Nancy asked.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said.
Nancy smirked at the Hellraiser reference then shook her head. “The first time I ever felt happy in my life was when I got to college and met my sisters. It’s also where I met my boyfriend, Kyle—”
I tensed up and frowned, feeling an emotion I’d never felt before: envy. No, wait, jealousy, that was it. “Interesting.”
If Nancy noticed, she didn’t comment. “Kyle was a New Age hippie and tried to convert me to pacifism.”
“Pacifism is a poor evolutionary survival strategy,” I replied. “It also seems primarily observed when it’s not you or your loved ones being threatened.”
Nancy didn’t disagree. “Yeah, but Kyle was right in that killing didn’t make my family feel safer and sure as hell didn’t make the world a safer place overall. It ate into my family’s soul and changed them. I remember he said something that stuck with me: when you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world doesn’t go down.”
“Then you should kill two,” I replied.
Nancy did a double take.
“What? It’s basic math,” I said.
“Maybe you’re right,” Nancy muttered. “Or maybe we’re all just trying to find excuses for doing what we wanted to do anyway.”
“I find you shouldn’t need an excuse to do what you want,” Carrie said, displaying her life philosophy in a nutshell. “What happened to Kyle?”
“Why do you think anything happened to Kyle?” Nancy asked, suddenly suspicious.
“You said was. Was he horribly murdered too?” Carrie asked, enthusiastically. “Please say it involved castration.”
I struggled not to burst out laughing, making my face look like a pufferfish. It was a reminder of why my sister was also my best friend. That and my only other friend in recent years had been a paranoid schizophrenic named Wilson.
“Worse,” Nancy said. “He switched majors, started dating a hotdog heiress, and went to work for Governor Bush in Texas.”
“You know he’s a cousin of ours,” Carrie said. “They’re the branch of the family that can look human during the day.”
Nancy looked like she wasn’t sure if Carrie if was joking or not. I decided not to enlighten her.
“So, what about your father?” I asked.
“My what?” Nancy asked, as if I asked about the alien in her attic. We never had one of those. I was pretty sure aliens weren’t real, or hadn’t visited Earth yet, so at least some things weren’t true.
“You’ve mentioned your mother and grandmother but no father or grandfather,” I said.
“Oh,” Nancy said, blinking. “Well, I never knew my father. He was just some half-Japanese guy my mother hooked up with.”
“Yet another reason our father hates you,” Carrie said. “And another reason for us to like you.”
“It mostly means I’m lactose intolerant but sure,” Nancy said. “As for my grandfather, I don’t know for certain, but he’s probably Alfred Hitchcock. Apparently, he visited my grandmother looking for stories to spice up his Ed Gein biopic and they became close.”
“Wow,” Carrie said, awed. “That’s almost as awesome as Stephen King being your dad. I tried to write him and claim I was his illegitimate daughter conceived during a drug binge, but the hospital staff confiscated my letters.”
“What about your mother?” Nancy asked. “I mean, unless it’s some horrifying torture-rape dungeon story.”
“That’s where your mind went?” I asked.
“Kind of hard not to,” Nancy said, picking up her soft drink and slurping the bottom. “Err, is it?”
“No,” I replied. “Our mother was in charge of the household.”
“What was her name?” Nancy asked.
“I forget,” I said, lying. I didn’t want to open that can of worms right now.
Nancy blinked. “Huh.”
“She was always just Mom to us,” Carrie said, backing me up. “Mistress to Dad and Dark Lady to Grandpa Jeremiah. Then one day she just vanished. No note or anything. I wonder if it was because she realized she was married to a spree killer.”
“I somehow doubt she missed the corpses in the basement and black altar in the attic,” I replied. “Or Dad constantly bragging about the good ol’ days.”
“Maybe,” Carrie said.
“You’re an interesting bunch, I’ve got to tell you,” Nancy said, looking forward. “Oh, wow, is that it?”
Our car arrived at the end of the dirt road through the cornfields at a house that, as my sister described it, looked like you could imagine being murdered in. It was a two-story wooden farmhouse with peeling red paint, a barn, and a shed in the back that I half-imagined the smell of meth radiating from—mostly because the previous owners had been meth dealers. There were a couple of bear traps in the front lawn as well a rusted metal swing that was moving by itself. That was when creepy organ music started to play as well as thunderclaps.
I looked back and saw Carrie fiddling with her phone. “Carrie!”
“What?” Carrie asked. “It’s the theme from The Deadly Fog.”
“I’ve seen worse than this place,” Nancy said, sounding completely sincere.
“Really?” I asked. “Because I give five to one odds that we’re going to find the previous owners in the basement or our BBQ.”
“At least they didn’t go to waste,” Carrie said, opening one of the white bags.
“No,” I said.
“Oh come on!” Carrie said. “I didn’t get to eat back there!”
“No!” I snapped.
Carrie rolled her eyes.
That was when a dog barked in the back of the house. It sounded sickly and weak.
“Oh no they didn’t!” Carrie said, furious. She kept a tight hold of her bag of human remains edibles and ran as fast as she could around the house. “They better not have left a dog tied up here! If they did, I’ll do worse than kill them! I know how to do that too!”
Nancy watched her go and shook her head. “Your sister is adorable.”
“Adorable and terrifying,” I replied.
“You know, you don’t have to do this,” Nancy said, turning to me.
“Do what?” I asked.
“Help,” Nancy said. “We just met today, and you’ve already saved me from your zombie dad.”
“I owed you for saving my life,” I replied, uncertain how to talk to a woman. Actually, I was pretty uncertain how to talk to anyone male or female. I could talk to doctors, mental patients, and the people I’d fooled into believing I’d gone to college, but this was a new experience. “So, I guess we’re even, but I still want to help.”
“Why?” Nancy asked, confused. “I mean, you don’t know me. Is it just because it’s an opportunity to kill?”
I looked at her sideways. “It’s the right thing to do.”
Nancy raised an eyebrow.
“Okay, it’s because we don’t have anything better to do with our lives,” I said, putting the car into park. “You’re also an interesting person.”
Nancy smiled. “Thanks. My mom and grams would have liked you.”
Past tense. Apparently, they’d passed away. “Really?”
Nancy unbuckled her seatbelt and stepped out of the car. “Oh heck no. You’d both be dead the moment you talked about your dad.”
“That’s fair.”
Chapter Six
I picked up a flashlight from the glove compartment of the car and headed to the front door of the abandoned house. The door was unlocked and opened with an exaggerated creek. The interior was covered in white sheets, dust, and there was no sign of habitation. There were, however, footprints in the dust. It didn’t look like the previous owners had made much use of the main house.
There was a large stone fireplace with a stuffed buck’s head over the mantle. Something about the thing made me unsettled and I was not a person who was easily scared. Maybe it was the fact that I had a closer relationship with animals than I did with people. It was the same with Carrie. The first time I’d tried to kill my father was when he’d brought us a pair of puppies to ‘practice’ on.
I flipped the switch to the lights and found them not working. There were logs by the fireplace, though, and several old-fashioned lamps I believed I could make use of.
“Does this place have power?” Nancy asked.
“There’s a generator outside,” I replied. “I don’t know if the power lines extend out here.”
“What a wonderful place you’ve selected,” Nancy said.
“Slashers can’t be choosers,” I said, frowning. “The entire house and the farm cost about five thousand dollars.”
“You got robbed,” Nancy said, stumbling in and having to steady herself against the wall.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Just back from the dead tremors, I’m fine,” Nancy said. “I mean, those are natural right?”