by Hadena James
There was a feel to the city. It hung in the air, cloying at the invisible senses that caused one’s hair to stand up on the back of the neck. It felt sinister. Perhaps it was because I had a good grasp on the history, or because everywhere I went for work had a sinister feel. I would not be able to articulate the feeling and it had nothing to do with the aphasia I had experienced.
As we moved from block to block, the intensity of the feeling grew. It was similar to the feeling I’d had in the slums of Detroit. Similar, but not the same. Detroit had felt abandoned and desperate. There was less a sense of abandonment here, but the desperation was still there.
Of course, it might have been because we were near a major university too. I found campuses to be places of desperation. Overly stressed students determined to grind their way to a better future through education created despair. Worse, when they blew off steam, they were more likely to take part in high-risk opportunities, which might land them in the hands of any number of monsters that preyed upon the weak or impaired. All students knew the risk, but all thought the same thing; it couldn’t happen to them. When it did, it was always shocking, as if the monster had appeared from thin air. It was the reason slasher films like A Nightmare on Elm Street were still making money. Serial killers were the boogeymen of normal society.
Fiona pulled into a taco joint that I had never heard of before. We ordered two dozen tacos. I would eat two, maybe three, if they were exceptionally good and my stomach could handle the food input. That left twenty-one tacos to be divvied out between the four other members of the SCTU. I wondered if that was enough. Lucas could easily down seven of them. Xavier the same. That left just seven tacos for Fiona and Gabriel. Could they split seven tacos?
“Are you okay back there?” Xavier asked.
“Fine, why?” I asked.
“You’re mumbling about Tasering tacos.”
“I do not believe both of those words were in the same sentence,” I told him.
“Yeah, Ace, they were,” Fiona chirped from her position at the wheel.
“You found nothing wrong with my head?” I asked Xavier.
“Not anything out of the ordinary.”
I didn’t really think. I leaned forward, grabbed the Taser from his holster, ejected the cartridge, put the prongs against my left forearm, and pulled the trigger, all in less time than it took to light a cigarette. The surge of electricity made my muscles contract. My jaws snapped shut with an audible clacking noise. A tooth in the bottom denture cracked under the pressure. My toes curled in my shoes and a sharp stabbing pain raced through the arch of my left foot. My face muscles twitched. A secondary spasm caused my leg to kick Xavier’s seat as I slumped over. I was aware of my body and unable to control it. The cues from my brain to my muscles were lost in a sea of electrical current. The Taser turned stun gun fell to the floor of the van.
“Holy shit!” Fiona jerked the wheel, hit the curb, and abruptly stopped. My body moved with the momentum of the car. My arms didn’t react to my brain telling them to protect my face and I hit the back of Xavier’s seat a second time. Warm fluid oozed from my lip.
“Jesus Christ,” Xavier was already moving. He was out of the van, yanking on the door, even before I finished slamming into the seat. My eyelid twitched. Another spasm jerked my hand into a fist and then extended the fingers until it felt like they would break.
“I swear to God; she is suicidal when she has a migraine.” Fiona was getting out of the van too. Xavier was trying to put me back on the seat. I was back to being mute. The communications system that controlled me went down.
The migraine that had been building inside my skull for a week was gone. There was no pain. The throbbing had completely disappeared. My vision was fine, except the eye twitch and spasms in my cheeks. Most importantly, I felt normal. My head was no longer attempting to swim through my own thoughts and make sense of them.
Xavier dug out his stupid penlight and blinded each eye individually. My pupils responded, but my eyelids didn’t. It was an interesting sensation to feel your eyes contract against a bright light, but not have the eyelids block it out.
“Huh,” Xavier put down the light. “Her eyes show no traces of her migraine.”
“You can’t Taser away a migraine,” Fiona told him.
“Most people can’t, I agree.” Xavier made a strange noise in his throat.
“But this is Ace and she isn’t most people.” Fiona moved into my field of vision. “You are a whack job. Stop doing shit like this, it freaks me out.” I gurgled at her. Xavier’s Taser was not kicking out the standard voltage. There was no way, because regular Tasers had hit me in the past and my muscles would still spasm. My organs would feel a little weird, but they didn’t scramble my brains.
“I broke a tooth,” I finally said after a few minutes of just listening to myself breathe. “What are you carrying?” I motioned towards Xavier.
“300,000 volts,” Xavier answered. “I had them ramp it up a little after dealing with Alejandro.”
“Alejandro came quietly,” I reminded him.
“Good thing too, because that big ass man as a psychopath would have been problematic.” Xavier looked at me. “Don’t get me wrong, I trust you and Lucas to handle these monsters, but just in case one gets loose, I want to know I can stop them before they can drop me.”
“When Malachi is healed, you need to test it on him,” I told the doctor. “That would be a better test subject than me.”
“I didn’t Taser you. You did,” Xavier reminded me.
“I know. I felt that my brain needed to be kick started. I did not realize you had supercharged your equipment or I would have used my own.”
“Did it work?” Fiona asked.
“I no longer feel this strange oppression hanging in the air, nor do I feel a need to Taser anyone and I can talk, so I would say it was successful.”
“Next time you decide to Taser yourself or put a gun to your head, please give me a little warning,” Fiona let out a breath that I was sure she hadn’t realized she was holding. Despite our differences, we were learning to get along and maybe even care for one another.
“It was a rash decision. Even I did not think about it too much. However, knowing that I was talking out loud about two different things that I was thinking about, made me realize that something was not right. A good jolt was an acceptable solution.” I looked at her. “Sorry, I will try to be better prepared next time so that I can warn you.”
“When you say sorry, it sounds creepy,” Fiona told me.
“What would you prefer I say?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but not sorry.” She stared at me a moment longer. Her lip was bleeding from where she had chewed on it. Her hands were crossed over her chest. I wasn’t an expert at body language, far from it, but even I realized she was pissed at me.
“Okay, well, hopefully, I can go some serious time before I have to Taser myself again,” I offered. She nodded.
“You’re bleeding.” Xavier put something against my mouth. I hoped it was sterile. My teeth had hit my lip when I hit the seat. My dentures were loose, meaning I had separated them from their implant studs. I was expecting to get new ones soon anyway. I moved the teeth with my tongue as Xavier held the cloth to my lip. After about a minute, he removed the cloth and looked at my lip again. The warm ooze had stopped. His fingers slipped in quickly and snapped the dentures back in place. I wanted to protest, but didn’t. I was going to require a lot of mouthwash to make this situation okay and it was going to burn like hell on my cut lip.
Six
Lucas was eating a taco. His jaws tore into the shell as if it was stone and he was a titan determined to eat it. He chewed loudly, his teeth gnashing together with the motion. His stack of tacos was dwindling and he showed no signs of stopping. My fears about having enough tacos might have been justified.
Gabriel was eating slower, as if it were a herculean task to eat the taco. He didn’t slam his teeth together with the fier
ceness that Lucas was; instead, it was as if every movement was calculated. Obviously, neither of them was happy. I wasn’t sure if it was because of Brady Wilchek or the incident with the Taser.
Neither had spoken to us since they joined us in the hospital parking lot to eat a late dinner amongst the light polluted sky. I busied myself by reexamining the photos I had seen on the plane. They made more sense now.
The pattern, which appeared random, really wasn’t. The wounds tore through the best features of the males that bore them. Brady Wilchek’s best feature was his incredibly white smile. The attacker had widened it by slicing the corners of his mouth. These gashes were straight. The others went with the curve of bone or tissue changes. They were hurried, frenzied, but widening his smile had been slow and purposeful. The others had similar marks in different places. One victim had a gash that went from his cheekbone to above his eyebrow. It sliced across his eyelid. Yet, it hadn’t been deep enough to damage the eye. That took skill.
With the tacos devoured, Lucas turned his attention to the group. His jaw was set firmly, making the hinge of his mandible visible. He was going to yell at me and I prepared myself for the onslaught.
“Wilchek is a dead end,” Lucas said. I frowned. “Not only does he not remember much, I couldn’t stimulate his memories and he’s…” Lucas made a gesture with his hands that made no sense to me, rolling one of them to the side.
“He’s an idiot,” Gabriel explained. “He’s convinced himself that his life is ruined and he’s more worried about that than catching his attacker. He actually asked me how he was supposed to have children now.”
“I didn’t think his genitals were injured,” Xavier said.
“They weren’t,” Lucas answered. “Carly Simon’s song about vanity fits him to a tee. I have never met anyone that was more self-absorbed. The level of narcissism is astounding and might be higher than any psychopath on the planet.”
“So, he’s a psychopath?” I asked.
“No, he’s a straight up narcissist,” Lucas stated. “He’s a spoiled, entitled, rich kid with delusions of his own importance. He has the personality of a wet sock.”
“Interesting,” I said. “Do you want me to don a short sleeve shirt and shorts and go have a talk with him?”
“It wouldn’t help,” Gabriel answered. “As you would put it, he’s a waste of good carbon. His only role in this universe is as fertilizer. We’d have more luck talking to a turtle about the case.”
“I think we are going to try to talk to the other victims in the morning. One is from New Orleans and another from a small town nearby,” Lucas said.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Stop Tasering yourself,” Lucas suggested.
“It worked,” I answered. “My migraine is gone and my head feels fine.”
“I want you and Xavier to walk the area tomorrow. Start at the bar and go from there. Fiona can map possible routes from where he was found to the bar. Let’s get a couple hours of sleep,” Gabriel announced, climbing behind the wheel of the van.
Our hotel was not one of the traditional chain hotels, rather a large, hulking building that overlooked the French Quarter. Each room had a large balcony that looked down upon the streets below. I wasn’t tired, most likely the result of the Tasering. Instead of going to bed, I stood on the balcony and chain-smoked. Dawn was still a few hours away. The streets were as deserted as I imagined they got. A few drunks staggered along the sidewalks, looking for their hotels or homes or whatever they had lost during the night. One group of revelers passed below me, their voices echoing in the quiet as they made boisterous conversation that wasn’t completely coherent.
Despite it being night, the air was still muggy. It hung around me, thick enough to feel. A moistness to it made droplets of water bead up on my skin. My mind told me we had dropped in temperature enough to hit the dew point, which was why water was mysteriously appearing on me, but a more primal side told me that wasn’t entirely the reason.
I wasn’t afraid of voodoo dolls or evil eyes. However, I wasn’t entirely sure that some forms of magic didn’t exist. Everyone had some sort of experience that couldn’t be explained and mine had involved Haitian voodoo. I reminded myself that I was not in Haiti and that Cajun voodoo wasn’t the same, but it did nothing to ease the tension in my shoulders.
As a student at the University of Michigan, I had a roommate who was from Haiti. She’d been a wonderful girl. However, she came from a long line of Haitian voodoo priests and priestesses. Her uncle disagreed with her decision to get an education rather than work in the family business. During winter break, he came for a visit. He was only in town a few days, but by the time he left, she had lost nearly twenty pounds. Before the start of the next semester, she had died from an unknown illness. She was convinced her uncle had poisoned her, but there were no indications or traces of the poison in her system. Girl code dictated that I hide anything she wouldn’t want her family to see. I deleted her browsing history, threw away all her adult toys and movies, and searched for anything else that might be a disappointment. During the search, I found a beautiful necklace under her bed. I hung it in the living room and I became sick.
By the time, her mother showed up to collect her things, I was a wreck of my former self. I had lost weight, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, and was fidgeting all the time. The campus doctor thought it was part of the grieving process and prescribed antidepressants. They didn’t help. I’d been on them for almost a week and was getting worse, not better, when her mother showed up. She walked into the apartment we had shared and screamed, not a yelp of surprise, but a scream of pure terror. She had marched over to the amulet and she began grilling me about it. Where had we gotten it? Why was it hanging in the living room? I told her what I knew; that I had found it under her daughter’s bed. She took it away with her and promised I’d get better once it was removed.
She was right. The day after the amulet left the apartment, my appetite improved and I could sleep again. I received a letter about a month later, explaining that the girl’s uncle had confessed to leaving the amulet there. Her mother hoped I had recovered and was very sorry that he had tried to kill both of us. I wrote back telling her that I had recovered just fine. I never heard from her again.
I had nearly been killed by a hex; a hex I knew nothing about. It wasn’t a matter of the power of suggestion. I hadn’t been physically ill, as far as bacterial or viral infections. I hadn’t been mentally ill, like the doctor thought. There was absolutely no reason for the symptoms and effects I had felt while that amulet had hung in the living room or the miraculous recovery the moment it was removed. Needless to say, being in New Orleans had an effect on me as a result.
Of course, it was ridiculous. Cajun voodoo had become more of a tourist attraction. Shops sold gris gris bags and offered to cast love spells down here. People went into the shops for souvenirs and asked for spells with a healthy dose of skepticism. I was far more likely to get food poisoning than hexed in New Orleans, but I still knew it existed. Some primal part of my brain refused to turn off and let go of the thought that I didn’t want to be in a city filled with voodoo practitioners.
The same part kept insisting that the cuts had to be related to black magic. The idea was preposterous to say the least. Magic was about attacking the soul and killing the flesh through mystical ways, not slicing and dicing people’s faces. Also, contrary to popular opinion, most voodoo priests and priestesses avoided black magic. They felt it stained their own souls to use it.
Black magic was more likely to involve Palo Mayombe than any other religion, and its closest relative was Santeria, not voodoo, Cajun or otherwise. However, in Palo Mayombe, the victim was likely to be sacrificed, not cut up. This meant we had a run of the mill, garden variety serial killer in the making. We were being called in for the maturing phase, which was unusual for us. Normally, we were only called in for the aftermath. I worked on compartmentalizing my feelings about magic and vood
oo from the fledgling killer. Once upon a time, I had been exceptionally good at this. Lately, not so much. I knew the cause, but not the solution. Having Patterson killed seemed extreme, even to me, and would not help my crisis of identity. If anything, it would prove how close mine and Patterson’s mental makeup was. I was trying to separate us, not find ways in which we were similar.
Unfortunately, the more I looked, the more I was struck with the reality that the only thing separating Patterson and me was my life experiences. It was hard to believe that being kidnapped at eight or attacked by a serial killer at sixteen, or even being hexed with a voodoo curse could be good things. Yet, they were. They had kept me focused on not giving in to my killer instincts and to keep an open mind to life, anything could happen, even the fantastic. Everything else, including my DNA was shared with Patterson, The Butcher. I flicked another cigarette butt off the balcony and watched the pinprick of light disappear below me. There was a monster running around New Orleans and once they got a taste for blood, they were going to crave it. Pondering about my life in comparison to that of serial killers wasn’t healthy anyway. One day, I would just have to suck it up and admit that I was one stressor away from being no different than the monsters I chased, but today wasn’t that day.
Seven
Most of the people were tourists, even in August. They smelled of sweat, fried foods, and incense. The French Quarter was a tourist trap, regardless of the time of day. There were museums dedicated to voodoo and black magic as well as the history of the area. Restaurants ranged for the exquisite and expensive to pub food on the cheap. Shop doors released exotic smells when they opened. Snippets of music floated along the street from the plethora of outdoor eating areas. Ironically, the voodoo capital of the US was smoke free.