by Bryan Smith
“Wow.” Kayla slouched down in her seat and stared up at the Corolla’s cloth-covered ceiling, where she spied an old cigarette burn in the fabric. She had an urge to push a finger through the hole. Instead she turned her head and looked at Lee. “Sorry, I’m just sort of blown away. I guess I never really expected you to believe me. When I tried to picture how this might go, I never made it past the point of telling you everything. I guess I just figured you’d call my crazy and tell me to fuck off.”
“But that didn’t happen. So I’ll ask you again, do you think you can do it?”
Kayla glanced up and poked a finger through the burn hole just to resolve the urge. It was kind of anticlimactic. She pulled her finger out and stared at the hole some more. “Who would do that? What’s the point? It’s just random, pointless destruction. Unless maybe a long time ago someone riding in the back was pissed at whoever used to own your car and did it out of spite.”
“Sounds plausible. Now…stop avoiding the question.”
Kayla sighed. “I don’t know. That’s the real answer, Lee. When it comes down to it, faced with a future as a total outcast if I don’t do it, I just fucking don’t know. I guess that makes me a bad person, right? A truly moral person would say hell no without having to think about it.”
“I don’t know if that’s true. And, anyway, I don’t think that answer makes you a bad person. It just makes you human. Anyone in your situation would feel the same kind of conflict, I think. Now for a related question. Can you do it? Being totally honest with yourself--and bearing in mind that I will not judge you whatever your answer is--do you have it within yourself, somewhere, to kill another human being? An innocent human being?”
Kayla didn’t say anything for a few moments. The question upset her on a fundamental level, primarily because she already knew what her answer--or, rather, her non-answer--was. She punched the back of the seat in front of her, venting some of her frustration. “The answer’s the same, Lee. I don’t know. I just fucking don’t know.”
Lee didn’t respond immediately.
Kayla curled her hands into tight, trembling fists. “I really am a bad person.”
“You’re not.”
She gave her head an emphatic shake. “You’re just saying that because I fucked you. That’s why you’re acting like this. You think maybe if you humor me long enough I’ll fuck you again.”
“That’s not true.”
His calm tone was the only thing that kept her from flying into an uncontrollable rage. He wasn’t lying. Or at least she detected no obvious signs of deception. She closed her eyes and counted slowly to ten, forcing herself to relax.
She opened her eyes and looked at him again. “Fine. I believe you. That doesn’t mean I’m not a bad person.”
“Would you feel better if I told you I might have a solution to your problem?”
She squinted at him. “You better not be fucking with me. I mean it, Lee. I know I’m one to talk when it comes to fucking with people, but I am dead serious. Don’t tell me you might have a solution and just be messing with me. I’d have to kick your ass for that.”
“I’m not messing with you.”
“Okay. Fine. But I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure some way out of this shit since yesterday. And after just hearing all about it, you’ve already come up with an answer. How can that be?”
“It’s only a possible solution, Kayla. And far from a perfect one. But based on what you’ve told me, I do think there’s a chance it could work.”
“So let’s hear it.”
She folded her arms and smirked at him, daring him to convince her.
But her combative demeanor didn’t appear to faze him. “I know this guy. Grew up with him in Memphis. Brett Adams. He was a good friend for a long time, but he has a lot of emotional issues. Tried to kill himself last year. Couple of weeks ago I talked to him for the first time since then.”
He fell silent and stared out the back window for a while. He had a faraway look in his eyes. Kayla guessed he was thinking about things from the past. Memories that weren’t happy ones. She already had an inkling where Lee was going with this, and it horrified her even as the most desperate part of her was suddenly alert and intrigued. She hated that some part of her felt that way, but she could no more help it than she could help breathing. She needed some reason to hope.
Even if the reason itself was as dark as the devil’s own soul.
Lee looked at her. “It was a long talk. More than an hour. Long story short, he hasn’t gotten any better. He sounded as down as he’s ever been. I told him he sounded like he was already dead. He said that was exactly how he felt and that he meant to make it happen for real before the end of the year.”
“But that’s only a month away.”
“Yeah. So anyway…after that, I called his mother. I was worried, you know, so I was thinking I’d try to alert someone close to him, let them know he’s in a dangerous place again.” A bit of that faraway aspect stole back into his gaze for a moment. “But I wasn’t telling her anything she didn’t know. I told her maybe she should think about having him put away somewhere for his own safety for a while. She started talking about insurance issues and got all worked up. That was the only time I heard any real emotion from her. As fucked up as it sounds, it seemed like she was resigned to Brett dying.”
“You’re right. That is fucked up.”
They both fell silent for a while. Kayla wasn’t ready to verbalize the next part and she imagined Lee felt the same. It was a hard thing. A cold thing. And a hell of a moral quandary.
She sighed. “So…you brought this up for a reason.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Look, this guy is my friend. For a while I probably thought of him as my best friend. It’s important you know that because it speaks to how convinced I am that he’s checking out of this world early one way or another.”
“And what difference does it make whether it’s by his own hands or if I do it, right?”
“I guess that’s what it boils down to, yeah.”
Kayla grunted. “Awesome. So your solution doesn’t get me out of having to kill someone. I’ll just be killing someone who wants to die. Maybe that does make it a little less evil, but it doesn’t necessarily make what I’d have to do any easier.”
“I did tell you it wasn’t a perfect solution.”
She laughed. “About that, you were not kidding, Lee. Goddamn.” Her expression darkened some. “And I can’t believe you’d just offer your friend up like that. That is cold-blooded, no matter how convinced you are about his intentions.”
“Not really. What I have in mind isn’t as simple as just pointing you in his direction and telling you to have at him.”
“It’s not?”
Lee shook his head. “Here’s the deal. Tomorrow’s Saturday. You and I could drive out to Jackson, that’s where he lives now, and tell him the whole story. He’ll believe it because he knows I’d never try to con him with some crazy made-up bullshit.” He frowned. “Or at least I hope so. Hard to know what goes on in his head these days.”
Kayla had it figured out now. “Either way, it’s up to him.”
“Right. If he says he’ll let you kill him, then you either kill him or decide you can’t do it. That part will be up to you, of course. But if he says he wants to go on living for a while, well, we just say goodbye and head back home.”
Kayla stared up at the burn hole again. She wondered again if she truly had it in her to kill a person. If the answer to that question was yes, she probably deserved the future awaiting her in hell. And if the human soul had a physical form, maybe hers looked something like that black-edged circle up there. Like something diseased or corrupted.
Pleasant thoughts.
She looked at Lee. “I guess we’ve got nothing to lose by talking to him.”
He nodded. “Exactly. It’s possible he’ll have had a change of heart or you’ll decide you can’t do it. But at least you’ll have had a chance to explor
e the opportunity. Which has to be better than freaking out here without accomplishing anything.”
Kayla snorted. “No shit. So when do you want to leave?”
28.
They agreed to leave early but not too damn early. They were college students, after all, and Saturday was traditionally a sleep-in day. Jackson was an easy two hour drive from Nashville, virtually a straight shot down I-40 toward Memphis. Kayla’s typical weekend wakeup time was around noon. But there was important business afoot on this Saturday, perhaps life-altering and ass-saving business, so she rolled out of bed at 10 a.m., showered, and called Lee, who confirmed he’d pick her up at noon, per the plan they’d devised the previous evening.
Sheila peeked over the top of her desk after she hung up with Lee.
Still swathed in the towel she’d wrapped herself after her shower, Kayla tensed immediately.
Here we go with the come-ons, she thought. Can’t I ever get a break?
But this time her roommate didn’t leer. “You going somewhere?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Just heard you talking to whoever that was. No big deal. It’s just I’ve got a big paper due and it’d be nice to have the room to myself for a while so I can concentrate.”
Kayla couldn’t resist pointing out the obvious: “You could go to the library.”
Sheila shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But when I’m really up against the wall with something like this, total privacy is better. You don’t get that at the library.”
“Whatever. I’ll be gone most of the day, maybe until tonight.”
Sheila smiled. “Cool. Well, back to work.”
She dropped out of sight again.
Kayla’s expression turned thoughtful.
That was interesting.
Bathory’s team had done their work well. Her roommate was no longer being the least bit lecherous or inappropriate. She also didn’t seem to be suffering any aftereffects from that nasty knock on the head. Emergency technicians in the employ of the devil were evidently skilled in areas ranging from first-aid to the manipulation of occult powers. Not the kind of people you’d ever want to cross, in other words. Duh. You didn’t get a job like that unless you were someone scary. A sobering thought, considering all the hints being thrown around that she was being groomed for some kind of position with Team Satan.
Kayla didn’t think she was a scary person.
Not totally, anyway.
And she definitely didn’t want to ever work for the fucking devil. Well. Not unless every other option had been exhausted or dismissed. Based on what she knew, however, it didn’t seem like the worst possible gig. Bathory clearly had some kind of very cushy position. She had a secretary and servants, just as she’d had in her mortal life, not to mention a probably endless supply of young virgins. The Ripper was the creepiest sick fuck she’d ever met, but even he was let out of Hell now and then and allowed to do what he enjoyed most. And those technicians had been kind of cool in a sleek, dangerous, and evil way. The only obvious drawback was that little hurdle of deciding to dedicate your existence to the propagation of suffering and evil.
Anyway, she wasn’t yet at the point of having to fully embrace or reject the dark side. Thanks to Lee, she at last had some flimsy semblance of a plan.
Oh my God, Lee. I can’t believe I fucked that dork.
Kayla smacked her forehead as she finished dressing. Somehow she’d managed to avoid thinking about their brief copulation until now. It was as if her mind had blanked it out, like the way accident victims were sometimes said to not recall whatever trauma they had endured.
“You okay over there?”
Kayla coughed. “Yeah. I just, uh…remembered something I forgot to do.”
More like I remembered something I shouldn’t have done at all, but whatever.
Sheila laughed. “Hate when that happens.”
“Yeah. Me, too.”
The change in Sheila’s attitude was refreshing. The hyper-eroticism had been dialed back, thankfully, but she also hadn’t reverted to shunning her. It was nice to be treated in a normal way by someone other than Lee. Although her opinion of him had changed some last night, he still was not her kind of people. It wasn’t just about superficial shit like his looks. Their values were just too different. Ditto for their goals. He was like some kind of alien life form. The idea of spending hours on the road with him was not thrilling. She’d rather hang out here and talk to Sheila, now that she wasn’t acting like a sex-obsessed freak. They could chat about girl stuff. Which was something she hadn’t been able to do since last summer.
Summer…
Noon was still well over an hour away. She could head down to Summer Henderson’s room on the eighth floor and see if her new friend wanted to grab a quick breakfast in the café downstairs. Galvanized by the idea, she grabbed her purse and keys, bid adieu to Sheila, and headed out.
This being the weekend, she didn’t have to wait long for an elevator. In just a couple of minutes she was standing outside room 815 on the eighth floor, with her right hand poised to knock.
Hearing voices from inside, she hesitated a moment.
A television was on. Someone was watching a cartoon, from the sound of it. Then she heard the voices again, both feminine, but she couldn’t make them out clearly above the sound of the television. It occurred to her that she might be intruding. Summer still didn’t know her really well. She might not be happy about being disturbed so early by someone who was still, for all practical purposes, a stranger.
Screw it.
She rapped twice on the door and smiled brightly in anticipation of greeting her new friend.
The door opened a crack a few seconds later and a small girl with short dark hair and an elfin face peeked out at her through the narrow space. “Hello?”
Kayla kept her smile in place. “Hey. I’m here to see Summer.”
The girl frowned. “Summer?”
Now the smile slipped some. “Yeah. Isn’t Summer Henderson your roommate?”
The door came open the rest of the way and another girl appeared. She was about the same height as the girl who’d opened the door, but the resemblance ended there. She was vastly overweight and had un-styled limp brown hair that hung to her shoulders.
The big girl lifted her chin. “Who are you looking for?”
“Summer. Summer Henderson.”
“No one here by that name.”
Kayla frowned. “But--”
“Pretty sure there’s no one on this floor by that name.”
An uneasy feeling wormed its way deep into Kayla’s guts. There were implications in what she was being told that she didn’t want to think about. Bad things. Dark, mysterious, worrying things. “Are you sure? The person I’m looking for is a pretty goth girl about my height with long black hair. Wears a lot of goth-type jewelry. You couldn’t miss her.”
The smaller girl spoke up now. “I think I’ve seen her.”
Kayla’s relief was immense. Probably there’d just been some misunderstanding. She’d misheard what Summer had said in the elevator and the girl’s room was actually on another floor. She felt sort of silly now. It was a ridiculously paranoid to think everything else in the world was somehow tangled up in her current problems.
Except…hold on.
Dammit.
She had seen her get off at this floor. That she remembered quite clearly.
“Where did you see her?”
The girl shrugged. “It was outside last night. Out front by the bike rack. But I think maybe I need to quit getting high so much.”
“What?”
She shrugged again. “I like psychedelics. Acid. And shrooms, sometimes. And, like, sometimes I’ll see things I know aren’t real. Like how your friend just sort of disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she vanished, man. Like…poof. One second she was there, the next she was gone. Like some kind of magic trick, only real.” She smiled. “Or not, I guess.”
The bigger girl rolled her eyes. “I keep telling her she needs to quit that crap. How the hell your grades stay so good, I don’t know, but if you keep…”
But that was the last Kayla heard of the big girl’s anti-drugs speech.
By then she was already running back down the hallway toward the elevators.
29.
“So what are you saying? You think this Summer person works for the devil?”
Kayla groaned through her fingers, which were splayed across the bottom half of her face as she rocked back and forth in her seat. She then slapped her hands against her thighs and thumped the back of her head against the headrest behind her. Hard. “What the fuck else am I supposed to think, Lee?”
It was fair to say she was somewhat freaked out by recent developments.
They were on the road now, just outside of Nashville on I-40. In two hours they’d be in Jackson, where Lee’s clinically depressed friend lived. The way Kayla was feeling right now, though, the guy might not be living much longer. She was sick of the devil’s games. Tired of feeling like some new danger or awful revelation was lying in wait around every corner. But there was no mystery to the one sure way out of it. She just had to work up the nerve to do it, as well as forge the inner steel to bypass any lingering moral qualms. Killing a guy who likely was in good physical health but just happened to no longer be interested in living was a shitty thing to do. No question. But as the hours and minutes continued to tick away, her fears about what might become of her if she didn’t do it began to make what once was unimaginable seem possible, perhaps even inevitable.