by Greg Curtis
“But -”
“No! I know love. You’ve done everything. You believe your precautions are unbreakable. But it’s not enough. It never is. You’re just making the same stupid mistakes we’ve already made over and over again.” Deep inside David wanted to scream and rage with his need to make her understand and there were tears of frustration leaking down his cheeks. “Mistakes we must never make again.”
“It’s not enough. Whatever you do it will never be enough. No one and nothing has ever been enough to hold him before, though again and again and again people have sworn on stacks of bibles it was. And that’s from his infancy. Nothing except death will stop him and sometimes I wonder about even that.”
“Exiled on an alien world? He’ll escape, sooner or later. He’ll build a space ship with his bare hands, some unfortunate will crash land on the planet and he’ll steal their ship, or someone will come and rescue him. Probably the latter. It’s always the same. I don’t know how he’ll escape, but I know he will. And then he’ll bring damnation with him.”
“You’re –.” She wanted to tell him he was being unreasonable. That he was letting his paranoia run away with him, which he was. But he would not back down on it.
“No, I’m not. I’m speaking from certain knowledge. Repeated experience, and an awful lot of pain. It's happened too many times before.”
“It’s like a law of the universe. Dimock always survives. He always gets stronger. He always hates, he always comes back, and he always kills.” She tried to stop him, worrying no doubt that he was going truly insane, but he wouldn’t let her. Her logic couldn’t be allowed to overcome the truth.
“I’m sorry. I’ll give you the records. Everything you need to understand the walking nightmare that calls himself Dimock. It breaks all my oaths of service, and I have to betray my country and my duty as I would never have imagined doing, but there is no choice. I have to, if only so you can defend yourselves when he returns. If you can, and despite the fact that you overcame him once, that is by no means certain.”
“Next time he'll be stronger, he’ll know about you so you won’t be able to surprise him. He'll have your technology, and he will target you. To fight him you will have to make unbearable sacrifices as he will use hostages against you, and I don’t know if you’re strong enough to do that. Strong enough to consider the hostages as already dead. Strong enough to watch as he tortures and mutilates them while you have to hold fast and not give in to his demands. To never listen to him.”
“It’s a terrible thing. But if you aren’t able to, you will all die. He will not keep his side of any deal, no matter how much you want him to. Remember that. He does not fear you, he will not be reasoned with though he will let you think he can be. He will not stop hurting you, and he will take every concession you give him and give you nothing but blood and suffering in return. Then he will come back stronger and more powerful every single time, and sooner or later you simply won’t be able to defend yourselves at all if you don’t kill him the first time.” It sounded even to him as though he was pronouncing their doom, and in a terrible way David knew he actually was. No plague, no pestilence, no invading army, just one man, and yet that one man was the next worst thing to an actual demon walking the Earth, or actually now, among the stars. He carried on, knowing he had to.
“Before you judge me, hear me out first. Then, if you still can, call me paranoid.” It must have been enough as Cyrea nodded slightly and stopped her objections. She wasn’t happy with him, in fact looking at her wide eyes she was desperately worried, but she would listen.
“The evil began from his very birth. It was a miracle he was born at all, a dark miracle. Dimock was born to an alcoholic, drug addicted mother and a psychopathic, schizophrenic father who died of congenital heart defects not long after. He should never have reached term, but he did.”
“He was born with severe problems, three months premature, massive deformities, kidney and heart problems and an extra Y chromosome. He was a crack baby with foetal alcohol syndrome and probably neonatal syphilis although somehow his eyesight and intelligence weren’t impaired. In hindsight maybe his survival was a very dark day for mankind. They say the devil looks after his own. If so Dimock is that proof.” Of course the Leinians didn’t believe in such things, but he guessed they’d understand.
“He was born a psychopath. He didn’t learn it and the drugs and the treatments didn’t make him one. He was born it. The records are easy enough to find. I have copies of the journals the local doctor’s office kept of him. How as a baby he repeatedly bit his mother, drawing blood as well as milk. He liked the taste from birth. Probably even then he liked causing pain though no one could have believed that at the time. Not of an infant.”
“He was a hunter too, a born predator. His mother kept a diary of his attacks, in between her bouts of drug fuelled mania and black outs, and she told of how he stalked the pets, of how he bit them. Bit them and kept biting, never letting go, even as they tore into him. The cats, the dogs, they were all stronger and faster than him, but they had no concept of his intent before he struck, and no wish to harm him. They saw him as family; he saw them as food, as creatures to hurt. When they should have fought or fled they tried to submit, thinking he wanted dominance. They had more humanity in their paws then he did and they paid for it with their lives.”
“His true nature became more obvious when Dimock turned three and the doctors began the surgeries and medications to make him better. Every single one of them, no matter how small its chance of success or how great the risk, worked on him. Worked even better than they expected. Far better. Skin and bone grafts took immediately, organ donations were never rejected and he didn’t seem to need the drugs to stop rejection either. Reconstructive surgery always went without a hitch and never needed to be repaired. It’s like Satan himself conspired to let this one live. And after each operation, not before since he knew he needed the operations, he attacked the hospital staff.”
“At first it was simple violence, all that a three or four year old could do, although even then he was surprisingly quick and strong, especially considering his enfeebled condition. But later, he grew cunning. He learned to lie well, so that he wasn’t restrained, or else so that others would release him thinking he was in pain. And he had an angel’s face, and the devil’s own tongue, so that time after time, people believed him. They always believed him and it was always a mistake.”
“By the time he was five he’d learned to hide scalpels, and to attack from behind, and he was already getting stronger. There were some terrible injuries, and but for the fact that they were in a hospital, there would have been deaths. The doctors restrained him of course, building a straitjacket just for him, chaining him to his bed, locking the doors to his room, believing like you that he was safe. But of course he wasn’t. Time and time again, no matter the precautions they took, that five year old child escaped to cause more injury and suffering. By six, he’d discovered that injecting people with syringes was a good method of hurting them. Especially when he broke into the anaesthetic supply one day.”
“He got three nurses on that day. Injecting them with unknown drugs, rendering them unable to defend themselves, and then cutting them up with broken glass or anything sharp he could find. He drugged, mutilated and tried to kill the people who were only trying to help him. It was only due to good luck that they didn’t die as he cut them very deeply. And though they didn’t want to accept the possibility from a six year old, he was also showing signs of sexual perversion and cannibalism even then. He cut the nipples off one of the woman, and slashed other women in the genital region and then drank their blood. One of them said he licked and bit at her wounds like a ghoul while she lay there, unable to move. None of them were ever able to work again.”
“After that every surgery, every procedure he had done, was done while he was under total anaesthesia and he was fully restrained, chained as a criminal and guarded for his entire stay in the hospital. Even
then many of the hospital staff didn’t want to perform the operations. They called him the demon child. Too many had suffered at his hands. Some wanted to kill him even then and most said he didn’t deserve to be treated, but the law said different. He was a child, he had to be treated. So doctors and nurses had to be flown in from outside the region to work with him. Again it’s all on record, and there’s paper after paper written about him.”
“In the end though even what they considered their over the top precautions didn’t prove enough against Dimock’s unique evil. They didn’t realize that even once it was all over, he would still never forgive them for laying their hands on him. He would never forget either, just as he will not forgive nor forget what you’ve done today. Regardless of whether he believes I’m alive or dead, he will hunt you. Next week, next month or next century, it doesn’t matter which, he will come for you as he came for them.”
“Years later, he returned to the town, and hunted down every single doctor and nurse who’d treated him. Even the ones who’d been called in from outside. The ones he’d never seen, never spoken to. The only way he could even find them was by hunting out the records of each and every operation, breaking into classified medical databases and torturing the systems analysts until he had a list, and he did just that. He surely didn’t even remember anything about those surgeries, he was never hurt by any of them, only helped, but simply the knowledge that someone, anyone had worked on him while he was unconscious was too much for him to allow. Remember that. He will not stop coming for you. There can be no appeasing him. No reasoning with him.”
“They’re all dead now. Their families too. And the ways they died were too awful to believe. Rape, torture, mutilation. Those are normal acts for him, even pleasures. Two hundred or more people, murdered for their good deeds. Again that’s all on record, but locked away from the public. The CIA’s investigators didn’t think it would be good for people to know that such a monster ever existed, especially after their involvement in letting him survive, and they made up elaborate cover stories and smoke screens.”
“But that’s barely the beginning of his evil, and far from the first of his crimes. He killed his first person when he was eleven. Or at least that’s the first we can prove. Many of his mother’s men friends vanished without trace long before that, and many of their body parts were found stashed in his room. Souvenirs of his crimes, and just maybe food as well. But it was his mother who was the first homicide we can confirm, and it was ugly. He stabbed her hundreds of times, but always only just enough to cause her more suffering. Once he’d crippled her, once he had her at his mercy, he played with her. A lot.”
“She lasted many hours according to the coroner, before death finally claimed her. She was repeatedly raped, horribly mutilated and tortured so badly that she actually ruptured her vocal cords screaming. There was even some evidence that he ate her, though no one’s ever proved it. No one wanted to. Instead they couldn’t believe an eleven year old boy could have done something like that. To his own mother. So the authorities let him go, looking for some out of town crazy who never existed. It was a mistake of course. One of far too many.”
“He lived alone after that. His half-brother was put in foster care, and he was just as mad. Dimock was supposed to be taken into care as well. But somehow every time social services came to pick him up, he talked his way out of it. For years. They could never explain it.”
“He killed dozens more over the next couple of years, or at least dozens that we know of. So many more just disappeared in the area, probably due to him, that we have no true idea of the extent of his early homicides. Strangers, tramps, prominent citizens. People he didn’t know and people who’d been kind to him. Everyone was a waiting victim for him. The murder and missing persons rates in that county rose 10,000 percent over those years and no-one even guessed who was responsible. No one could believe it was him. He was just a kid. Small, weak, a sickly child with an angel’s face and innocent looking too. But finally they had to.”
“The Sheriff flung him in jail one day, after a lucky break. He was seen butchering some hikers with a cut throat, and for once some of the witnesses were able to get away. Even then they didn’t want to arrest a scrawny little teenager, but the evidence against him was simply so strong. The forensics especially.”
“Then they watched him kill three hardened cell mates for fun. It’s all on video. Between one prisoner check and the next he murdered them in cold blood. He crippled them, and then one by one he slaughtered them like sheep. They were bigger and stronger than him. Toughened by years in jail, violent and dangerous men all of them. He was just a slip of a kid still with underdeveloped lungs. But they never stood a chance.”
“It was brutal, perfectly planned, perfectly executed, and pure evil. Without warning he gouged out the eyes of one of them with his fingers, stabbed a second from behind with a knife he’d smuggled in in his shoe, and then threw the knife at the third even as he was screaming for the guards, slicing his neck wide open. The whole attack took less than five seconds.”
“Then, when he had them at his mercy, he spent the next fifteen minutes playing with them, while they screamed their heads off. Slicing them up, chopping off body parts, raping them, all men, and all directly under the view of the video camera. He even waved and smiled at the camera while he worked, somehow knowing that no one was watching. You see he knew he’d been caught, and he knew he was going to be tried and sentenced to death no matter what he did, and so he decided to have a little fun while he had the chance. What he did to those people was simply a pleasant diversion for him.”
“That was when the authorities first understood what he was. A psychopath. The first bonafide one seen in many years. The others play at it, but he is truly the real deal. Genius IQ, completely amoral, and totally devoted to sating his every degenerate whim. In his world other people are put there purely for his pleasure. And his dinner. All other people. Family, friends everybody. The most any of them are to him is sport. To add to that he has a god complex. One backed up by experience. He hates it when people don’t obey him. To the point where he takes revenge on a biblical scale if possible.”
“It was only then that the authorities started putting him together with the large numbers of unsolved homicides and missing people in the area. They found many of their remains buried in his back yard, along with his dead mother’s ex-boyfriends, and his house even now is a crime scene as they continually find new bodies, or pieces of them.”
“Having been found guilty of killing at least twenty people by then, though the true figure is thought to be well over one hundred and fifty and maybe as many as five hundred, he was due to be executed at fifteen. He would have been the youngest ever person executed, and they actually had to rewrite the law to let them do it. He would also have been the first man in the state to be executed for a decade. It would have been younger still, but civil rights lawyers, not stupid enough to get into a cage with him, held up the execution for at least eighteen months. During that time he killed seven more prisoners and mutilated a guard all from solitary confinement. He also started several riots, and convinced three more prisoners and another guard to commit suicide.”
“Each time it was considered impossible for him to do it. He was moved from max to super-max prisons. He was locked up in a single cell by himself, usually chained for weeks at a time. Food was pushed through slots under the door and no one was supposed to have any contact with him. But each time the precautions failed. He got out of the cells. Chemical restraints failed repeatedly. Shock collars didn’t work. Chains seemed to magically open regularly by themselves, and of course guards repeatedly let him out as they listened to his pleas. He has the words of the devil in his mouth and the face of an angel. People will do incredibly stupid things for him. And then he went for the nearest victims he could find. Mostly the other prisoners.”
He was shot three times during that period, and each time he recovered fully, the bullets apparently
missing anything vital, and any surgeries he needed done worked perfectly, while the doctors who removed them all died at his hands in due course.
“In the end each of the judges in turn finally ruled that he was just as dangerous in prison as outside, and that even prisoners deserved protection. His death was their only protection. A good lawyer at the start might have got him life instead, but he didn’t have one. Not after he killed the first one the state supplied.”
“In the glass conference room, chained heavily, in front of the guards, he took his lawyer’s pen and stabbed him through the eye, killing him instantly. But at least his death was quick. It was what he needed it to be to draw in his other victims. The first guard through the door, he got with a chair, and then when he got his gun, three more went down in a hail of bullets. But none of them were lucky enough to die quickly. During the three hour stand-off that followed he played with the four of them as only he could, all the while lying to the negotiator. Pretending he wanted a helicopter and would trade hostages. It was only when he had no bullets left that he was retaken and the true horror of what he’d been doing was discovered. The hostages were all dead, but for every second of the negotiations they’d suffered as no one ever should.”