Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  She jumped, but he only smiled and turned around, seeming to forget her immediately.

  Jack walked slowly, the chains on his boots jingling merrily, over to Beaumont, and stood over him.

  He doesn’t look so tough now, Jack thought. Where was his bulletproof vest? Any fool sheriff should know to wear one of those new-fangled things.

  Beaumont groaned weakly and moved one arm, tentatively, towards the gaping red hole in his chest. Jack, surprised, stepped back quickly and raised his gun, but he soon saw that the good sheriff was not going to be a threat to anybody any time soon.

  Something shiny on the front of Beaumont’s bloodied uniform caught Jack’s eye and he walked back up to the fallen sheriff and stooped casually over him, picking it off. He stood straight and held it up to the sparse moonlight to regard it more carefully. The sheriff’s once-shiny badge was now smeared with blood, and Jack bent again and carefully wiped it clean on Beaumont’s single pant leg before standing and pinning the gold Sheriff’s badge to his own dusty leather jacket.

  Jack smiled. The badge, with its five-pointed star, looked good there, as if it had always belonged there. LIBERTY POLICE DEPARTMENT, it read in dull gold letters.

  He looked back down at Beaumont, just laying there, bleeding.

  “Having a bad day, Beaumont?” Jack smiled, the expression reflected in the tone in his voice. “You look like crap.”

  One eye eased open and locked onto the fuzzy image. There was a man standing there in front of him, the man from the picture. It was the man, come to kill him.

  And he wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, except die. Couldn’t help his family, couldn’t help his little boy - everything hurt so much, but still he could think of nothing but his family. The thoughts raced through his mind, the regret and the anger and the silent screams for help. Couldn’t anyone help him, or change this crazy course of events?

  His focus changed for a moment, and Beaumont saw that just behind the man, crazily, there was a huge black bird sitting on the roof of Beaumont’s’ squad car. Beaumont’s clouded, fading mind was racing, thinking about his family and trying to answer distress calls screaming from everywhere in his ruined body. At the same time trying to react to this man before him. But through the deafening static of pain and emotion, he saw one more thing before he died that chilled him.

  The man standing over him was smiling, but Beaumont didn't look at him. Beaumont concentrated on the black bird on his squad car. Something so simple, so free--

  Jack raised the gun once more and pointed its shiny barrel at Beaumont’s eyes. “Say goodnight, Sheriff.” The gunshot echoed loudly, coldly in the still night.

  Deputy Jenkins lay motionless until she heard the Killer climb into the Sheriff’s patrol cruiser, start the car up, and drive slowly away. Jenkins was hit in the leg and had gone down in the first volley of shots. She had been looking in the right direction and had seen Beaumont fall first, toppling over like a clothing store mannequin, except this mannequin was dressed in a police uniform and sporting a full leg cast.

  And she had just lain there. She had done nothing as that man had walked over and pretended to shoot her, and she had just lain there as he had walked up and shot Sheriff Beaumont directly in the face.

  Something moved in her stomach, an angry roiling of acids. A coiled serpent, a restless entity made up of guilt and pain and anger, began to writhe in her stomach.

  Norma crawled painfully over to Beaumont, lying by himself in the middle of the road, his car now gone. He lay motionless, face up, his eye wide and blank and pointless. She saw that a quickly spreading pool of what looked like rainwater surrounded his head, but as she got closer, she saw that the pool was too dark to be water.

  She tried to lift his head with her hands, praying for some sign of life in his vacant eyes, but she suddenly realized that not all of his head was there. She knew he was dead, as surely as she knew that her name was Norma Jenkins and that she lived at 433 Kraven Road and that she had been one of Beaumont’s deputies for over three years.

  It was at that moment that she realized how much she had loved him, admired him, respected him, almost like a father. The newly born snake twisted in her gut and painfully moved again, as it would for many years to come.

  She glanced up at the road heading south and could just barely make out the retreating twin taillights of the patrol car, piercing through the night and gloom like a pair of red eyes, eyes of a demon reflected in the damp surface of the road, mocking her and her useless anguish.

  Off to one side of the road, the small clutch of birds turned and flapped into the night sky, following the lights into the dark.

  Deputy Norma Jenkins, sitting in the middle of a dark highway and cradling the head of her fallen hero, began to cry.

  Jack Terrington’s murderous trek began soon after he dropped out of High School in 1973. He had never been a good student, and the thoughts of finishing high school or attending college seemed irrelevant to him. He had remained in Bangor, Maine for over a year after dropping out of school, working as an auto mechanic, but soon he decided to leave for good - the memories were just too painful for him to stay. He had no family, no real friends, no reason to stay.

  He left his hometown and drifted around the state of Maine and eventually out of it, moving on to trace out a rough circle around the continental United States in his many years on the road.

  In the early years, he traveled slowly south, mostly by hitchhiking or on rare occasions by stealing a car, through New England and parts of the northern Atlantic Seaboard. He had discovered his rare instinct or talent at a young age, and had indulged it. He had killed a couple of people in Bangor, exercising his newfound talent, but adding another important reason for his departure. He found that he enjoyed doing it, and that meant he had to stay mobile.

  As he traveled, he only killed on rare occasions, but after the incident in Liberty, Jack felt a sudden and undeniable urge to move west. He felt the urge to kill more and more often, as if the narrow escape in Liberty had somehow awakened something even more terrible inside him. The voice became more insistent, more commanding, and came with more frequency.

  As the 1980’s approached, he drifted through most of the Midwestern states, killing occasionally as he went. He visited Knoxville, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, and a host of smaller towns, towns that were more exciting for his purposes. He continued his haphazard ways, moving on whenever the heat came down or people started asking too many pointed, curious questions, and the ‘taking’, or killing, became more regular, more often.

  He became very good at covering his tracks. Jack purchased a vehicle and various weapons under assumed names in a dozen different states. He moved constantly, like a traveling missionary of evil, visiting his own particular gospel upon his victims. As he amassed more and more victims, his contempt for them grew. He began to see those other people, those victims, as creatures that were something less than people: like cattle, or something else even lower, and he felt no pity or compassion for them, even as he took their lives. He knew, and had proved it to himself on too many occasions, that he was truly more than any of them. When he realized that he could take any of them at random and extinguish their pitiful lives, he began to wonder deep down in the most private areas of his soul if maybe he had somehow become something more. Something like a god.

  He had read a lot about the theory of evolution and its various component parts. Darwin had theorized that mankind was still evolving and would in some murky future appear very different than the mankind of today. What if Jack was that next step in human evolution? Could it be - did his power make him something more than human? He felt nothing for these huddled squalid masses, moving through them and cutting them down like a gardener with a huge black scythe, weeding out the sick and weak. Maybe that’s what he was: Darwin’s Gardener, moving through the world and pruning out those who were frail or useless. Maybe he was a crucial part of evolution, weeding out the weak and the helpless t
o breed a better, stronger mankind. A mankind more like himself. And couldn’t the next generation of mankind appear almost godlike to this one? If he wasn’t a god, why did he possess this power to take and take and take, and never get caught?

  He wasn’t sure which it was, but it didn’t really matter why he did what he did - all he knew was that he liked it, and he was good at it. Very good.

  Jack Terrington eventually made it to the Seattle, Washington area in the early eighties, coming to the city like an unstoppable storm that first darkens the horizon and then overwhelms anything in its path. And he killed.

  Jack managed to elude the police for several long, terrible years, years that would never pass from the memory of those who had lived in the area, those who had lived through it. He used those years to learn a great many things, teaching himself the finer parts of the black art of killing, and he learned something else about himself. He learned that the greatest pleasure he could obtain for himself was the pleasure of inflicting pain on others, feeding off their fear. He learned how to cultivate that fear, to nurture it, to help it grow and bloom and expand.

  He began to keep his victims alive longer, toying with them, teasing them with their own mortality. He tortured, he frightened, he degraded. He learned what methods worked best on different types of people. And during all of that terrible time, no one ever even managed to obtain a good description of the killer. Jack’s talent for the dealing of death and the art of disappearance grew. As did his ego.

  The Black Diamond Killer, as Jack would become known because of a small town near the location of some of his dumpsites, soon began to tire of the Seattle area. Even involving the Maybe it was the realization that if he continued to kill in the same location for many years it was statistically impossible for them not to eventually catch him.

  Or maybe it was because some type of terrible instinct had grown up inside this monster, a kind of dark, killer instinct, and that instinct was telling him to move on. Not exactly telling him, but more like commanding him to leave, to flee and move on and kill more, but somewhere else.

  But he did know that he felt an unstoppable urge and left, taking years to drift slowly down the coast. He spent several happy years in Los Angeles, a town that seemed to have been invented just for him. Millions of angry, distant, helpless souls. His time in Los Angeles was one of joyous release, taking and taking and taking and never even coming close to being caught. The people of Los Angeles seemed to take anything and everything in stride, even horrifying and repulsive deaths in their midst, and few even seemed to take notice of his work.

  Jack Terrington killed 33 people in Los Angeles in just under four years, and only fourteen of those ever even made it into the papers. Evidently, crimes in Los Angeles had to be particularly gruesome to make the papers.

  Or maybe it was something else. Maybe nobody cared.

  He got restless and moved on again in 1993, moving east, looping back towards the east coast. Arizona. Texas. The Deep South, which he had found to be anything but deep. The Sheriffs in these sleepy towns were not as stupid as he had imagined (and hoped) them to be, and he was forced to severely curtail his habits, moving on often. He didn’t like it.

  Soon, a comfortable new thought also drifted into his mind in those lean years after Los Angeles: retirement. He couldn’t stop killing; that much was obvious. It was like a sickness, he sometimes thought, for when he had, on occasion, began to feel a little guilty about his life’s work and had tried to stop, he could not. It was almost like a fever that roared through his mind, DEMANDING that he take his next one, no matter what the consequences. Sometimes he tried to fight it, but he had long since given up on the idea of defeating his Instinct - and part of him, most of him, didn’t want to fight it. He liked what he did, what he was.

  He couldn’t stop, but he could try and find a place that would allow him to continue his work without fear of punishment. Someplace where he could take as few as possible, only when the urge became unbearable. Wouldn’t it be great to just kick back and relax, settling down in one place and living out the rest of his years without ever having to move again? He was getting older, and Jack liked the idea that nagged at his mind for several months. And where else could he take and never get caught? Los Angeles had been like a dream come true for him, and he longed for the day when he could return. He had not known how good he’d had it until he’d left there and traveled through the south, forced to cut his habit back drastically.

  Jack soon decided that Florida would be his last killing ground, and then he would return to California and settle down. He had enjoyed his times in California. He had many fond memories of that place.

  But another memory also drifted, unseen, in the back of his mind, a memory that had driven him for many years, even though he did not know it. A fleeting memory of defeat at the hands of a most intelligent opponent, of the elusive fact that it had taken a bizarre combination of good timing and coincidence and pure dumb luck that had allowed Jack to avoid capture. A memory of running away, of running through the rainy woods and the ground was wet and he was being chased. A memory, clear and undeniable, of being afraid.

  His ego rebelled at the memory, trying to convince him that he hadn’t been truly afraid then, or ever. Nobody scared Jack any more, he knew that. Nobody. He’d killed enough over the past 20 years to know that. But the memory still plagued him, upsetting him in his dreams and also, to a lesser degree, in his waking moments. It reminded him, every time Jack started to feel good about himself, that he had once been beaten, badly, and it hadn’t been his skill or brains that had gotten him out - he had tripped and fallen.

  He had been running across the wet pavement and he had tripped and fallen and landed on his face in the mud, and that had saved him. He had lucked out. Every time his ego tried to swell and sing his praises, his memory reminded him of his failure, and of Liberty and a Sheriff William T. Beaumont.

  Lucky, some rebellious part of his mind told him. You were just lucky. He beat you, fair and square, and you got away because of an accident. He beat you.

  he was better than you

  Part Two:

  A Coalescing Formation

  Chapter 1 - Saturday,

  September 10, 1996

  He was floating in the middle of the ocean. He was on a big wooden raft, floating and bobbing on the water’s surface, and it scared the hell out of him. He’d always hated the water, hated the idea of being on the open water, hated the idea of trying to swim because he knew he couldn’t.

  The sun was hot and bright and blinding, and David could easily hear the sounds of the waves as they lapped noisily at the edges of the raft. Flat and glassy, the blue water stretched off endlessly in every direction.

  The raft was fashioned of wooden logs, lashed together with some type of thin brown rope or leather cord. It looked sturdy and the logs moved in unison, but David didn’t feel any better about it.

  He looked around nervously and saw that the water looked very deep and very blue. He dipped one hand into it. Cold, very cold, and when David tasted it, bitter and salty. The ocean, then. He was floating on a wooden raft in the middle of the ocean, with no land in sight, and it scared the hell out him. He couldn’t swim, and eyed the water nervously.

  He turned around and saw that on the raft with him was his girlfriend. Or she had been up until three weeks ago. She was face down in what looked like a very uncomfortable position, sleeping or unconscious or dead, he could not tell. One of her arms was curled up underneath her in a way that made it look broken.

  David Beaumont moved over to her and felt for a pulse, but there was none. The skin on her back and shoulders was pink, almost red, and covered with hundreds of sores that blanketed every exposed part of her skin, skin that he had once caressed. Some of the sores appeared to be blisters of some sort, and a few had broken open, spilling a whitish, pus-like substance on her pink, tender skin. David thought they might be sun sores or some other type of blistering, brought on by exposure
to the elements and the unkind sun that blazed in the sky over them.

  Something rumbled off in the distance, but he ignored it.

  “Bethany? Can you hear me?” He gingerly lifted her head up and tried to revive her by splashing handfuls of cold salty water onto her face, but he got no response. He laid her head back down gently and took off his shirt to cover her face and chest and arms, shading them. The sun was hot on his bare back.

  The rumble again. He looked up and saw that on the horizon there had appeared a huge, black mass of clouds, boiling and writhing and constantly turning in on itself. It wasn’t really on the horizon; more like it was the horizon. It looked like a huge mass of hurricanes; not just one, but a dozen, writhing together, sliding in and out of each other’s eyes, fighting for control. He watched, fascinated, as the black masses fought for position. Lightning arced back and forth between the clouds, distant and forbidding.

  The clouds were moving closer.

  With only the sky and the expanse of water around him, he watched, hypnotized. In a matter of moments, the black mass of roiling clouds had settled down into one huge boiling storm, a hurricane, its outer fringes hazy and indistinct, somehow big enough to appear to curve around him on both sides.

  A drop of water hit David square in the eye, making him jump and paw at his eye. The water burned, feeling gritty, like someone had thrown sand into his eye instead of a drop of clear rainwater. He rubbed at his eye with one fist, trying to watch the clouds at the same time. The clouds were closer when he looked up again, one eye red and bleary.

  He looked around in the other directions, away from the moving clouds, but he saw no refuge, no islands or anything, and his gaze was soon drawn back to the hypnotic movements of the growing mass, lit from within by blue lightening. The seas around him began to roughen, the waves beginning to move and churn with more authority, more force, and he grabbed the logs around him, trying to find a handhold or something to grab hold of.