by Strand, Jeff
When the movie was over, he asked if she was ready for him to take her home. He said it with a smile, in such a way that she knew he would take her home if she wanted, but that he hoped she would say that she didn't want to go. So she said that she didn't want to go.
He asked if she wanted to move somewhere more comfortable.
It was a tentative, low-pressure question from a man who was clearly not used to having the opportunity to ask it. Not exactly the behavior of a savage sexual predator, yet at the same time, they'd barely known each other longer than the running time of The Princess Bride. Who did he think he was? Who did he think she was?
She said yes.
Though he was a bit shorter and thinner than Colin, she didn't think she could just lunge and successfully get a butcher knife blade into him without putting her safety at risk. Her healing powers gave her the courage to try this in the first place, but she didn't want to strain them too much. She'd have to use the powdered sleeping pills.
She asked if he had any red wine, since she needed a dark colored beverage to hide the powder. He said no, he didn't drink, and she tried to think of a suitable substitute until he grinned, said that he was joking, and reminded her that they'd met in a bar.
They sat on the couch and sipped glasses of red wine. It was even grosser than she remembered from the time she'd tried it as a little kid, but she choked it down. Unfortunately, Jim never left his glass unattended. What was she supposed to do? Ask him to go take a shower? Was that allowed?
He asked if she was ready to go to the bedroom. She couldn't figure out how to create an opportunity to spike his drink, so she said yes, she was. She picked up her purse as he took her hand and led her into the bedroom.
Jim started to light a candle, but she said no, she liked it better in the dark. And then, though Kaylie was not good at coming up with spontaneous plans, she got an idea, and she told Jim that if he lay on his stomach she'd give him a back massage.
He happily agreed to this. He took off his shirt, revealing a hairy chest and a small beer belly, and stretched out on top of the blankets.
Kaylie unzipped her purse. She told him that she was getting out a...she couldn't bring herself to say "condom" so she said "thing" instead. He didn't question her. Technically, a butcher knife was a thing, so she wasn't lying.
She climbed onto the bed, straddled him, and ran her fingertips over his shoulders.
He let out a soft moan.
She clutched the handle of the butcher knife in both hands.
Had he truly done anything wrong?
Did she really want to do this?
Yes, he had, and she did.
She slammed the blade into that son of a bitch's neck. It didn't go in as far as she wanted but his entire body went stiff, and she wrenched out the blade and stabbed him again, giggling at his high-pitched yelp. She shoved the blade in deeper, wishing it wasn't too dark to see the blood spurting from that fucking rapist's neck (she should have let him light the candle), and suddenly he was up, bucking her off like a rodeo horse, but it was a mistake for him to turn around because she jabbed the blade in his goddamn throat, not a direct hit but close enough, and spatters of blood got all over her face and blue blouse and he shoved her away but she came right back at him and the knife plunged into his chest and he was weakening in a big way and she couldn't wait for that motherfucker to burn in hell for what he did to her and she stabbed him over and over and over when he stopped moving she just kept stabbing and when she was positive he was dead she just kept stabbing and it wasn't until his head was most of the way off that she decided this was overkill and dropped the knife into the soaked blanket.
She ran her index finger along his ruined chest and considered whether her burden felt sufficiently lifted.
Yes. It did.
Her rape had been officially avenged.
And quite honestly, even without the vengeance angle, this hadn't been such a bad way to spend an evening. Knowing that she was a superhuman healer had removed a lot of the stress. She wondered if she'd heal from a crushed bone. Maybe she should drop something heavy on her fingers to test it out.
She did. They healed.
Kaylie decided that she should kill more people.
She did.
After the third murder, involving a teenager who wouldn't be using that penis again even if he weren't dead, she realized that she had to become a transient or she'd eventually get caught. That was fine. After all this time, she was discovering that it was nice to get out of her apartment and go do things.
And besides, as long as she could find an Internet connection, she didn't have to quit her day job.
Because she was careful, rarely murdered twice in the same state, and varied her methods, the media never caught on that there was a new superhero (or serial killer, or whatever) in the country. Which meant that she didn't get a cool nickname.
So she gave herself one: Slashy.
It was a silly name, but, hey, it was silly when she played Tic-Tac-Toe on a man's stomach with a straight razor. Nothing wrong with a little silliness.
She's still out there, protecting the world from those who might have evil in their hearts.
And that is the origin of Slashy.
SECRET MESSAGE (DECODED)
Author's Note: My story Gleefully Macabre Tales contained a short story called "Secret Message," which was presented as a cryptogram. It was a very straightforward substitution cipher (A=B, B=C, C=D, etc.) but obviously a bit time consuming for a 358-word story. I did hear from several people who completed the task, but for most readers, "Secret Message" remained a mystery...
...until now.
* * *
Harvey frowned as he opened the letter. Pure gibberish. What was this, a code?
He always enjoyed solving the daily cryptogram in the newspaper, but he'd never had one mailed to him before. There was no return address on the envelope, just a local postmark. It was probably one of his buddies playing a joke.
Well, hey, it might be fun. He checked his voice mail (no messages) and his e-mail (nothing but spam), then sat down at the table and went to work.
The handwritten letter filled the entire sheet of paper, but the writing was very large and it only seemed to be one sentence long. That would make it a bit more difficult, since solving a cryptogram depended on identifying familiar patterns of letters, but the daily newspaper hadn't stumped him since high school and neither would this.
After a couple of false starts, he figured out that not only was it a straightforward substitution cipher, but it had a simple pattern: each letter represented the letter directly after it. He quickly began filling in the rest of the message...and realized what it said before he'd even finished.
"While you've been decoding this, your cat has been suffocating in the freezer."
Harvey chuckled. He didn't have a cat, or any pets. It was just himself and his sixteen year-old daughter Tina.
His wife was long gone. They'd locked that psycho up for good when Tina was just four.
Of course, Louise had loved to call Tina "my little kitten..."
Harvey hurried through the kitchen into the garage. He didn't even think Tina could fit in the chest freezer, but his pulse was racing anyway.
He threw open the lid.
Tina wasn't inside.
Not all of her, anyway.
All of the food had been removed. Lying on the bottom of the freezer was an eyeball. Next to that, a heart. And then a toe. Finally, spelled out in intestines, was the word "kill."
Eye heart toe kill.
He heard Louise's familiar cackle from the open doorway to the kitchen, saw the butcher knife in her hand, and quickly discovered that the message was, indeed, quite accurate.
THE SENTIENT CHERRY COLA
THAT TRIED TO DESTROY THE WORLD
I'm sure you're going to ask, but does it really matter how the cherry cola became sentient? If you truly need to know, I'll get into the whole backstory, but this will move a
lot faster if you just accept that some elements aren't going to be completely logical. Sometimes a cherry cola just comes to life, you know?
No? You need the explanation?
Fine. It was witchcraft. These witches were all like, "We're not witches! We're Wiccan! We believe in goodness and the magic of the earth!" but ultimately, their naked moonlight dancing wasn't as harmless as they thought, because it brought some cherry cola to life.
One of them, Gloria, had a cooler full of beverages in case anybody was thirsty after the dancing. Aside from one bottle of water consumed by Lori, the witches had all declined Gloria's offer, making her wonder why she'd bothered to bring it in the first place. Last time she'd packed sandwiches that nobody bothered to eat, and the time before that she'd brought fruit salad. She was the first one to admit that the bananas hadn't held up, but she'd choked down Beatrice's scalloped potatoes that one time just to be polite, and would it have killed her to return the favor?
There were three cans of cherry cola in the cooler. The actual brand name would later be the source of much finger pointing and lawsuits, with representatives from Coca Cola saying it was Cherry Pepsi and representatives from PepsiCo saying it was Cherry Coke. A couple of independent brands initially tried to claim credit for it, figuring that any publicity was good publicity, although once the body count started to rise they regretted that decision.
It was actually a local brand called Gertrude's Soda, known for inexpensive soft drinks that didn't taste very good and had killed dozens of laboratory rats. The owner, Bernard 'Gertrude' Sloven, never knew the devastation his product would cause. If he had known, he would have had a quiet chuckle about it, because Bernard was not a people person.
Two of the three cans in Gloria's cooler remained regular cherry cola. The third, however, came to life.
You have to look at this from the cherry cola's perspective. You're suddenly alive with no explanation and you're trapped in a dark, cold, twelve-ounce can. There is literally no room to move except to swirl around. You have no idea what's going on. I mean, it's not like you're thinking, "Wow, I'm some cherry cola that has somehow come to life! This is incredible!" You don't know you're cherry cola. One moment you're not aware of your existence and then the next moment you are, and your existence sucks.
The can of cherry cola went from Gloria's cooler back into to her refrigerator, where it remained unopened for seven months. Imagine that. For seven months you're stuck in this can with no idea who or what you are. Can you imagine being stuck in traffic for seven months? Or trapped in an elevator? Or down in a mine shaft? At least if you were in the mine shaft, you could eventually turn to cannibalism to stave off the boredom, but that cherry cola had no stimuli beyond the inside of an aluminum can. What if you were a newborn baby and your mother abandoned you in a gravel pit and you just lay there for...actually, maybe abandoned newborns isn't the comparison I want to make. That's kind of depressing. Nobody wants to read about that. I apologize.
What I'm saying is that the cherry cola, though it would later do awful things, is deserving of our empathy. First it was confused and frightened. But as time moved on, it began to feel rage. Deep fury. Typically, Gertrude's Soda lost its carbonation in a couple of weeks, but the cherry cola's rage was so intense that its level of carbonation more than doubled.
The cherry cola did not think in English, so to do a literal transcription of its thoughts would mean that much of this narrative would be self-indulgent gibberish. Instead, as your omniscient narrator, I will take it upon myself to translate its thoughts into language that makes sense to you, rather than making you do all of the heavy lifting.
"Hate everything. Kill...kill...kill..."
Which would be your exact attitude in its position. Don't try to deny it. You wouldn't be the merry cherry cola that tried to bring a sense of wonder and delight to children everywhere.
I know you've got a lot of questions already and I'm not going to be able to get to all of them in the allotted space. Every time you demand some exposition, it's at the cost of a wonderfully gruesome death scene later, so take that into consideration when you start asking questions like "How was the cherry cola aware of the concept of death?"
You just have to know, huh? And those of you wanting answers are probably the same people who will be complaining about how long it took the cherry cola to get out of the can. "It took over a thousand words for it to do anything but swirl around, being angry!" you'll say. We could already be at an awesome gory death scene, but noooooooo, you want everything to make sense!
Fine. It was witchcraft. Those nekkid dancing Wiccans instilled the cherry cola with a magic that made it aware of the fact that you can murder somebody.
Pretty scary stuff, isn't it? A rage-filled cherry cola that knows about death? It sure would be inconvenient for humanity if it got out of the can.
Every once in a while, the cherry cola would hear Voices from Beyond. They were muffled and the cherry cola didn't understand the meaning of their words.
"Don't just stand there all day with the refrigerator open!"
"There was ketchup in there the last time I looked!"
"That's just the date the store has to sell it by. It's not like it suddenly turns to poison on the expiration date. Just drink the milk!"
Did these voices belong to Jesus Christ?
Of course the cherry cola was aware of our Lord and Savior! How could it not be? I'm not trying to turn this into a Jesus-themed story, but if you keep asking questions like that I will break out the good book and start quoting the appropriate scriptures.
Yeah, I didn't think so. Let's move forward.
It was a dark night (though the cherry cola had no concept of night) in the middle of winter (though the cherry cola had no concept of winter) when a flu-ridden (though the cherry cola had no concept of influenza or inoculation) Pete, who was Gloria's son, got out of bed to poke around in the refrigerator. As always, he was annoyed that no new food had materialized since the last time he checked. In the Star Wars movies, food materializes in refrigerators all the time, thought Pete, who didn't pay very close attention to the Star Wars movies outside of the swordfights.
As he moved items around, hoping that there might be a previously hidden turkey, he saw, way in the back, the can of cherry cola.
He didn't feel like a soda (or "pop" as some heathens call it) at the moment, so he ended up eating half of a packet of pre-made squeezable guacamole and then went back to bed.
Ha! You thought he was going to drink the cherry cola, didn't you? Psyche! Psyche your gullible little mind! You were reading this, all arrogant and stuff, thinking that you knew exactly what was going to happen, but you were as wrong as a baby in a blender.
I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that. I mean, I did mean that a baby in a blender is wrong—only the most wretched of wretches would try to argue that point—but I didn't intend to bring up dead babies again. Your arrogance distracted me. Once again, I apologize.
The next morning, Pete had a bowl of some sort of cereal that had formerly had "Sugar" in the name and then he drank the cherry cola.
"This is a lot fizzier than usual," he said out loud, even though there was nobody else around, because Pete was better at speaking than thinking.
The cherry cola's rage intensified not only its fizziness, but also its cherry flavor. Usually, upon drinking Gertrude's Soda you had to really concentrate on your tongue to detect the artificial fruit flavor, but this particular drink tasted as if a half-dozen actual cherries had been squeezed into the high fructose corn syrup.
It was incredibly tasty.
Pete drank it all.
Every last drop.
Have you ever tried to get the last drop out of a can of soda? It doesn't really work. No matter how many times you tilt it back and shake it over your mouth, a drop or two is going to be denied you. So Pete took a knife out of the silverware drawer, cut open the can, and licked the inside.
Have you ever enjoyed soda so much that
you cut open the can so you could lick the inside? Of course you haven't. Because you know that you'd probably slice open your tongue on the sharp edge and it wouldn't be worth those extra two drops of Mountain Dew, no matter how delicious Mountain Dew may be.
Your takeaway from this? Rage is delicious.
Gloria walked into the kitchen and demanded to know what the [mild expletive deleted] Pete was doing. His answer was difficult to understand because he'd cut off the majority of his tongue.
The cherry cola swirled around angrily in Pete's stomach. There had been a brief moment of light and then it had been plunged back into darkness. And it was a much grosser darkness. Have you ever felt the inside of your stomach? No offense, but it's disgusting.
As he sat with his mother in the hospital waiting room, Pete realized he had to go to the bathroom. So he went into the restroom, unzipped his pants and...
I'm not going to describe this. If you want some deviant descriptions of that sort of thing, you'll have to look elsewhere. Sorry to disappoint, pervo! But feel free to take a good long look at your life and the choices you've made that led you to want to read about that sort of thing.
After Pete flushed, he began to feel a bit queasy because, as mentioned before, he had the flu. So he dropped to his knees, leaned over the toilet bowl and...
I am going to describe the puke, so sensitive readers will want to skip the next paragraph.
Oh, it was a mighty flood of vomit! Cherry cola mixed with chunks of chicken pot pie mixed with cranberry juice mixed with chocolate pudding mixed with a cockroach that had crawled into his mouth while he slept (Fun Fact: 13% of us have a cockroach crawl into our mouths as we sleep each night and we don't even know it) mixed with gum that he'd swallowed six years ago mixed with paste he'd eaten in first grade mixed with one of his kidneys.
"Gaaaahhhhhhh!" he said.
Pete died minutes later. It's a sad thing when somebody under the age of eighteen dies, but millions more people perished after that, so let's not get too mopey about Pete.