by David Beers
“Because I’ve built my life around them. Around my mother. If they leave, what will I have left?”
He didn’t look at her, but stared out the window behind her as he always did.
“One day you’ll die too, Christian, and you’ll leave people that have built their life around you.”
“No one has built their life around me.”
“No?” Melissa said. “What about your mother? She’s spent her entire existence serving you, helping you become someone courageous, someone she can be proud of.”
“I won’t leave her. She’s going to leave me. She’s going to die!” He shouted the last word and immediately fell silent.
“Tommy said that no one was taking another job right now, correct?”
He nodded.
“Then you’re worrying about something that will happen in the future. You could worry about any number of things that will happen, but it’s not going to change anything.”
“You’re useless,” he said. “You’re just trying to logic away what I’m feeling.”
“I’m not. I’m trying to make you see that thinking like this isn’t healthy. Have you talked to either of them about this? Or your mom?”
“A little today, but I just couldn’t … I couldn’t believe it.”
“Don’t you feel that’s a bit naive, Christian?”
“Is our time up yet?” he asked.
“It is.”
“Good. This has been less than helpful.”
Christian stood and left the room without saying anything else. As soon as Melissa’s office door closed, guilt set in. He shouldn’t have acted like that. Not to her. She was as much a part of him as the other three, and he had just treated her like nothing, all because she wouldn’t simply agree with him. Christian wanted to turn around and go back in, but felt too embarrassed.
He left the office and headed home. It was Saturday, yet another reason he should feel bad for how he treated Melissa. She often set up special times for him, and she had this morning.
His Uber pulled up to his house and Christian handed the driver a five dollar bill. He had watched an exposé on ride-share drivers a few months back, seeing how much their wages had been cut. So now, he tried to tip, and he kept telling Tommy to do the same.
“You don’t quit, do you?” Tommy had said last week. “You will literally keep pestering me until I sign my goddamn 401k over to these Uber drivers, won’t you?”
“Five dollars would be a start,” Christian said.
You treat your drivers better than your therapist, he thought as he stepped from the car.
He didn’t walk forward, though, not even as the car pulled away.
A box sat in front of his house. He’d bought the house three months ago; his mom told him that he was burning money living in the apartment, and a home was a smart investment. He knew she was right, so he found one that fit comfortably within his budget — and Mom had been right on another note, too. It felt like home. He was in love with it. However, he rarely received much mail.
And he hadn’t ordered anything, that was for sure. Christian spent most of his disposable income at Subway, with the rest going to Netflix, movies he rented, and Uber.
Still, the box sat there, and Christian stood thirty feet off, just staring at it.
He walked up his driveway to the front door and stood above the cardboard box. Tape was wrapped around the top, securing whatever was inside. Christian didn’t see any postage anywhere, though. No UPS stickers or anything else.
“I don’t like this.”
He squatted down, scared to touch it. This felt wrong and Christian always trusted his mind. It was capable of fearsome quantitative feats, but what separated him from many other highly functioning autistics was his emotional ability. He couldn’t express his own emotions well — or rather, expressed them with no filter, but he understood the world around him on levels that others could only grasp at.
And this didn’t feel right.
He wasn’t bringing the box inside his house, that was for sure.
Christian unlocked the front door, went to the kitchen and grabbed a knife. He brought it back out to the front stoop and carefully cut the box open. The flaps lay in front of him, still hiding the package.
Don’t open this, he thought. Call Tommy.
He called Tommy when he was scared. He called Luke when he needed a sounding board.
Damn it, don’t start psychoanalyzing your relationships.
Using the knife, he pulled the flaps back.
A head stared up at him. Black holes sat where eyes should have been. The face, or what was left of it, was unmistakable. Christian knew it well, had dreamed of it for months after Bradley Brown’s death. This was Brown’s mother, decapitated.
A large cross had been carved on her flesh. Deep. The skin rose off the skull in jagged tears, revealing white bone beneath. The slash traveled from the top of her forehead through her nose and lips, leaving her mouth open in a gruesome smile that wanted to stretch for miles.
The horizontal piece of the cross ran across where her eyes should have been. Cuts on either side, and dark sockets separating the line.
Christian stared at it for a second, then fell down on his ass.
He pulled his cell phone out and called Tommy.
“Hello?” Tommy answered the phone.
“Ineedyoutocometomyhousenow.”
“What? Christian, calm down.”
“GET OVER HERE, TOMMY!”
Tommy heard a click. “Hello? Christian, are you there?”
“Is everything okay?” Alice asked from the kitchen.
Tommy put the phone on his lap and stared at it, ignoring the television in front of him. “I don’t know. I think I have to go to Christian’s house.”
“Why? What did he say?” Alice stepped into the living room.
Tommy had been sitting here watching television and smelling the chili cooking, growing hungrier by the second. He had finally grown a pair, and asked Alice to move in late last year, bringing her into what had once only been his domain. Even going so far as to introduce her to his two genius—but weird—partners.
“He screamed that I had to get over there.”
Alice chuckled. “Well, you better go. Should I set the table for three?”
“I guess.” Tommy sighed and stood from the couch. He loved the kid, no doubt about it. His idiosyncrasies and inability to hold his tongue included. Yet, it was still taxing, being Christian’s adopted father-figure/friend.
He grabbed his keys and left the house.
It took him ten minutes to drive over. He found Christian standing in the yard, facing the street.
His hands were shaking, and his face was as white as an English Bulldog.
Tommy slammed on the breaks and hopped out of the car.
“Christian, what’s wrong?” he trotted from the driveway to where Christian stood. He was still looking forward, not even glancing over at Tommy’s voice.
“There’s a box. It’s on the doorstep.” His voice was calm, though his hand still shook like he had Parkinson’s.
Tommy looked behind him and saw the box. The flaps were open but he couldn’t see in it from this distance.
“You want me to go look at it?”
Christian nodded.
Tommy walked across the lawn and squatted next to the box. Using his keys, he carefully lifted the corner of a flap, pulling it back.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered. His eyes squinted at the head, the empty eye sockets giving away who it once belonged to. He looked back over his shoulder at Christian, still standing and staring at the road.
Tommy stood up, letting the flap hide the grotesquery again. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone.
“Nine-one-one dispatch. What’s your emergency?”
“This is FBI Special Agent Thomas Phillips. I need police sent to 3164 Oaklawn Rd.”
He answered a few more questions and then ended the call, putting the
phone back in his pocket. He went across the lawn and stood next to Christian.
“What are you thinking?”
“Why someone would do that?” Christian said.
“Do you have an answer?”
“No.”
Luke stared at the decapitated head. Tommy and Christian stood next to him, the three in the FBI’s autopsy room.
Roger Linson, the pathologist stood above the head, holding the tools of his trade.
“Anyone told Waverly yet?” Luke asked. He wouldn’t call the FBI Director, but one of his partners might feel it necessary.
“No,” Tommy said.
Christian wasn’t looking at the head, or even the table it sat on. He leaned against Roger’s office window, his hands on the glass and facing the office’s interior.
“Do you think he’ll want to know?” Luke asked.
“About this? Yeah, because it has to do with Brown, and one of his agents.”
Luke nodded and watched as Roger pulled a piece of ravaged skin back a bit further from the bone. “They did this while she was still alive.”
“How do you know?” Christian asked from across the room.
“The raggedness in the cuts. The person wasn’t sedated, but twisting and turning while the perpetrator sliced her.”
Luke heard Christian sigh.
“The cross?” Tommy said. “Do you think that’s Christianity in origin, or just a torture method?”
“If it’s a torture method, it’s an awfully difficult one. The way they cut across the eyes … It’s just not necessary to torture someone. They could have done a circle around the outside of her face much easier, without having to deal with the starting and stopping because of the eyeholes. Hell, they could have peeled her face off a lot easier than this.”
“Why would they leave it at your door?” Luke asked, wanting to hear the boy’s response.
“I don’t know,” Christian said, surprising Luke a bit. If Luke had his own thoughts, then surely Christian had some as well. Was he not already forming those intuitive videos about what this meant?
“You’ve got nothing?” Tommy asked, looking over his shoulder at their partner.
“No.”
“I checked with the home she was living in,” Tommy said. “She went missing two days ago. They alerted the police immediately, but it doesn’t appear much was done. They put out a silver alert, but given that Brown’s mother couldn’t drive, they thought they’d find her wandering around somewhere close by.”
“How far away is my house from the home?”
“A two hour drive,” Luke added.
Christian straightened up from the window he was leaning against and walked out of the room.
“He’s taking it hard,” Tommy said.
“Does he think it’s his fault she died?” Roger asked.
“I’m not sure. He hasn’t really said anything since I got to his house. He shouldn’t give a shit, the woman was awful. Just because her son pulled her eyes out of her head doesn’t grant her penance for what she did or allowed to happen.”
Tommy was right. The woman was a horrible mother and person. Luke didn’t care at all about that, though. “Is the fact that she’s Brown’s mother important?”
“I don’t see how it couldn’t be,” Tommy answered.
“Then why wouldn’t they have dropped the head at my place? I’m the one who killed her son.”
Tommy only shook his head.
“You think this is a one and done?” Luke said.
“For Christian’s sake, I sure hope so.”
“Mom, I want to put some police around you.”
“Nope.”
Christian stared at his refrigerator, the phone to his ear.
“Mom, listen to me. It’s important. I think someone might be targeting me.”
“Well, maybe you need police around you then. I don’t think anyone is targeting me,” she said.
Christian closed his eyes and took in a deep breath.
“I don’t know what this person wants, but they’re dangerous. I told you what I found. Isn’t that enough to make you think you might need some protection?”
“No. You gave me protection two years ago and no one even came looking for me. All they did was crowd up our neighborhood and make me drive recklessly because I kept looking in my rearview mirror every five minutes.”
“Mom! Don’t look in the rearview! You know they’re there.”
“Can’t help it,” his mother said. “But no, I’m not going through that again. If someone comes for me, I guess I’ll have to deal with it. I’m going to keep living my life as I have, though.”
Christian said nothing. He never felt anger at his mother, and he probably wouldn’t classify this emotion as directed at her, but her stubbornness instead.
“You’re acting like me,” he said.
“Who do you think you got it from?”
“I’ve got to go,” Christian said, his hand squeezing his cell phone so hard his knuckles were white.
“Call me when your temper tantrum is done. I love you.”
The call went dead and Christian dropped the phone onto his kitchen counter. He had thought the call would go this way. He remembered how much she had hated having the police follow her around while they were hunting for Bradley Brown.
This was different, though. Then, Brown had killed a former FBI agent, and Waverly got nervous that he might target others with relationships to Tommy, Luke, or Christian. Now, a decapitated head had been laid at Christian’s doorstep.
He spent the rest of the day at home, thinking. After being downstairs in Roger’s lair, Christian had simply left the office without telling anyone or even taking his computer.
It made no sense, why someone would kill the old woman, and even less why they’d drop it off at his house.
His name and address weren’t publicly published, but it didn’t mean that people couldn’t find out where he lived if they wanted. Online tracking was incredible at this point—virtually no one could live completely off the grid.
Which meant his mother was in danger, too. He wasn’t going to let that happen, losing her wasn’t an option.
Christian picked up his cell phone and called Tommy.
“Hey, you doing okay?”
“I’m fine. Listen, can we put some of our people on my mother? I don’t want her to see them.”
“You’ve been here two years. How do you not know the answer to this?”
“I don’t feel like bullshitting with you,” Christian said. “Can we?”
“Yes, under these circumstances, of course,” Tommy answered.
“Will you set it up?”
“Sure,” Tommy said.
“Thanks.” Christian hung up the phone. He didn’t know why he felt so angry, but he couldn’t stop himself. Tommy had done nothing to him, yet Christian nearly hung up on him, after he agreed to help Christian’s mother.
He sighed again but didn’t place the phone down. He wanted to speak with Luke. Maybe he could connect the pieces Christian couldn’t. He found Luke’s number.
“You didn’t answer any of our calls.”
“I know,” Christian said. “I’m just … I’m not myself.”
“Understandable, given what you found.”
“You mind if I come over?”
“No, not at all,” Luke said. “When will you be here?”
“Thirty minutes or so.”
“See you then.”
The line clicked off and Christian let guilt find him again. He had good friends, both Tommy and Luke; he could call them at any time and they’d answer. Each would do whatever they could to help him, and yet …
“You’ve got to get control of yourself,” Christian said aloud.
Luke watched the familiar lights flash across his living room. He and Christian had done this many times, the boy coming over whenever he needed an intellectual presence in his life. Luke didn’t mind his visits; in fact, they helped Luke considerably
as well. They allowed him to understand Christian better.
Luke was certain these visits would prove valuable later.
He buzzed the car in and Christian got out of the back. The car pulled off and Luke watched as the young man approached the front door. Brown, shaggy hair, his body thin. He wore a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, what he always felt most comfortable in. He was wearing flip-flops, though Luke knew he hated having even those on. Christian hated shoes on general purpose—feeling his feet were evolutionarily adapted to deal with the problems of Earth.
He was a unique person, to be sure.
Luke opened the door after the first knock. “You’re lucky I don’t need a lot of sleep.”
“You’re lucky I do, or else I’d probably be over here a lot more.”
“Did you drop in on Tommy?” Luke asked.
“No. I don’t think Alice likes it much when I do. Not this late. Maybe not ever, actually.”
“Can’t blame her,” Luke said, smiling.
Christian didn’t wait on him to lead the way, but walked from the foyer to the living room, pacing in front of the fireplace as he always did whenever something bothered him.
“Should I tell you to sit down or just let you continue wearing out my floors?”
“Put carpet in, then you won’t hear me,” Christian said without looking up from his march.
Luke shook his head and sat on the couch. “You want to talk about what you found, or are you having women problems?”
“None of this is funny, Luke.”
“It depends on how you look at it.”
“That supposed to be a pun?”
Luke nodded.
“Not a good one.” Christian was silent for a second as he reached the opposite wall and turned around. “I can’t figure out why someone would give it to me. You killed Brown. Why wouldn’t they send it to you?”
“It depends on what they want to achieve with the head’s delivery. Tommy would probably say the why doesn’t matter too much, but I think we’d both disagree. It depends on whether they’re angry or not.”
“What do you mean?”
“Are they angry that Bradley Brown is dead?”