Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  It was like an animal that needed feeding. And it was

  very hungry

  He was just south of Clearwater, South Carolina, a smallish town near the middle of the state. And although it wasn’t in the forefront of his mind, on some level Jack was hunting again.

  The town was small, even smaller than Carrabelle in Florida, where he had taken his last. The town sat on the southern bank of a wide river that traced a long, winding line from a large lake near the state capitol of Columbia to the Atlantic Coast at a point near Charleston. The river ran through a series of very shallow rapids just upstream from Clearwater that churned the dark water into a sky blue froth, but by the time the water reached the town, the water calmed and was crystal clear, shallow and beautiful. Only barges and other boats with very shallow keels could negotiate the river up to the rapids and past them to continue upstream to Columbia, so deep water ships brought their wares and supplies to several large wharves on the riverbanks at Clearwater and offloaded, where the goods could be transferred to barges to continue their journey upstream. The town had grown up around the wharves, but it still managed to retain the small-town atmosphere that made it such a lovely place to live.

  Jack couldn’t care less about the town or its interesting history (one story related that pirates used to use the town as an embarkation point, even though historians had scoffed at that idea, considering the town was over 200 miles inland and therefore useless to the ocean-traveling pirates) or the unique nature of the waterway that the town was built around. Jack didn’t care - Jack was far too busy driving and trying to ignore the Urge that pounded in his mind. And ignoring that Urge was about as easy as holding back the ocean’s tide.

  As much as Jack liked to tell himself that he could stop killing any time that he wanted to, that was a lie - his killing frenzy was now an integral part of his mind, a dark and cobwebbed corner of his mind, full of anger and hatred and yes, even fear, of others. He would never admit, of course, that fear played any role in his killing, but it was, in fact, a central character in his motivation. He was driven by a combination of anger and self-hatred and fear, and those factors had grown and changed and become something else, something grim and horrible, inside his mind. The instinct was now not just a facet of his mind - it had become the driving force behind EVERYTHING that he did. He would follow that instinct wherever it led him, no questions asked.

  It wasn’t like before. Jack didn’t just like to kill.

  Now, he HAD to.

  The van rolled into the small town late in the evening, when the sun was just dipping behind the low hills to the west of Clearwater. Jack was tired, tired of looking in his mirrors as he had done every few minutes since he had left Florida, now a memory. No cops had shown much interest in him - hell, there were a thousand white vans on the roads of Georgia and South Carolina, so he had passed through with no problems. He figured that communication between state police agencies was as slow and inefficient as always, and by the time the other surrounding states had been informed of Jack’s actions by the Florida State Police, he would be well on his way out of the region.

  He’d screwed up. That killing back there on the road in Florida, that had been way too public, way too sloppy. He had not been thinking straight, and now he was running across several states to find a place where the heat was off him, trying to get to a place where he could lay low for a day or so. Liberty still called to him, like a lighthouse on a foggy, raging sea, but he needed to have his wits about him before he showed up in his old stomping grounds. The last thing he needed was to get to Liberty and then lose his cool.

  The Urge.

  Sometimes it began as a low background murmur, a quiet buzzing that grew slowly louder, increasing maddeningly in urgency until it became a wailing call, unbearable in intensity. When that happened, Jack felt as if his head was just going to split down the middle, separated by a thick red line of blood and tissue and, underneath, the naked starkness of white bone, and then he could imagine just grabbing each half and tearing his head apart, opening his brain up to free the demons and voices that ran riot inside the prison of his mind. Only after the killing would the buzzing, like huge bugs in his head, only then would it back off, if only for a while.

  Other times, he would be driving along and the itch, the Urge, would spring upon him, full blown and undeniable, a voice that could not be denied or ignored or reasoned with. It was like someone had suddenly slapped him and he went from being relatively happy to incredibly angry and violent, all within the space of seconds. Once when he was driving, the Urge had come upon him so fast and so full of power that he had swerved the van over onto the shoulder and had had to stop the van to catch his breath. His heart had been pounding in his chest like a runaway train.

  It had been nothing that bad today, but it had come upon him quickly, as undeniable as ever. Jack had hoped that maybe all of that killing back in Florida, with two dead bodies on the road and then that thing with the cop car only a little while later, maybe it had driven the Urge underground for a little while. Jack had hoped that he would be able to control it for at least a little while - he didn’t think it was gone for good - because he didn’t dare kill again, not for a while. The Florida killings had already made quite a splash in the national papers, and publicity was not something Jack was used to, or enjoyed at all. The paper Jack had seen had said that two people had been ambushed and killed in Northern Florida, but most of the speculation in the case pointed towards yet another tourist murder, much like those that plagued the lower half of Florida. Even though the incident had involved a policeman and a student for nearby Florida State University, the police had theorized that the killer or killers had mistaken Sally Townsend, the FSU student, for a visiting out-of-towner and had killed her. They had further speculated that the policeman had interrupted the killers and there had been some type of struggle for the cop’s gun, which was not found at the scene. Several “unusual” marks had been found on the policeman’s body, indicating some type of struggle had occurred.

  Unusual marks, to say the least.

  Jack, upon reading this information, had gotten a laugh out of that. Of course the marks were unusual - it wasn’t everyday that they found a dead cop with his heart cut out. The “unusual marks” were code to Jack, plainly telling him that the cops were clueless as to the killer’s identity. They were obviously holding back most or all of their information from the press, waiting to use that information on informants, potential witnesses, and possibly even suspects. Only people who were truly connected to the crime scene in some way would be able to provide them with the correct, and gruesome, details, thereby allowing the cops to weed out any kooks or weirdoes trying to claim some connection to the case.

  All of this told Jack that the cops were no closer to catching him than before.

  Of course, there was the little matter about the missing gun, which was now carefully stowed in one of the cabinets in the back of his van. Should he get rid of it? If they ever somehow managed to catch him with the gun in his possession, it would be like a huge blue neon sign pointing down at him that shouted to the world HE DID IT! THIS GUY RIGHT HERE DID IT! The gun was dangerous to keep, but Jack decided that it was even more dangerous to get rid of. What if someone found the gun after he ditched it? They’d contact the police who’d contact the Florida State Police and that would be like sending up a signal flare, all but telling them where he was heading.

  No, he’d kept the gun. No one was going to find out where he was going - his appointment in Liberty was too important. He’d never been caught before, and the cops certainly weren’t going to catch him now - no, he wasn’t going to screw this one up. The gun remained safely stowed in the cabinet back there, out of harm’s way. And it was a memento of his time in Florida, a reminder of his exploits, just as the contents of his jars were there to remind him.

  But now he was two states away and starting to think that the heat was fading and the Urge was almost too much to control. He ye
lled at it, he ignored it, but nothing happened - the fever, the urge to kill was speaking to him again, whispering from that shadowy back corner of his mind (that corner that was filled with stringy cobwebs and the dust of a thousand broken bones and the smell of death) that it was time to kill again.

  To get away and not get caught, that was scary enough. But kill again? Now? The red tide was hard to ignore.

  He’d spent Tuesday night sleeping in his van parked on the gravel shoulder of a country road south of town, but his sleep was fitful and uneasy. He dreamed dark, angry dreams, full of killing and death and destruction, the kind of dreams that he experienced only when fully in the throes of the Urge. Only in his dreams did he ever experience anything that approached sympathy for his victims, and even his tenuous identification with the pain of his victims was shallow and short lived. He wasn’t really feeling anything for his victims, but it was the closest sensation that his mind could come up, an approximation of sympathy. It was almost as if someone had described the emotion called “sympathy” to Jack’s mind, and it did everything it could to simulate that feeling.

  It had never felt it, so it had nothing real to compare with.

  He’d awakened on Wednesday morning very, very hungry, but it was not food that his body and soul craved. It wanted to be fed, all right, but it wanted only to taste loss, to savor the heady flavors of humiliation and torment and torture.

  The sound buzzed loudly in his aching head, and even the simple act of driving became a huge, Herculean chore. He drove on, thought, through the buzzing static, passing through Clearwater, South Carolina. He never even saw the sign - he was far too busy trying to rummage through his cluttered glove compartment, digging for aspirin or alcohol or maybe both.

  we should stop and feed

  He didn’t dare stop. Dinner in this town was out of the question. Too many people around, too many potential victims. He needed to get away from people.

  And Jack almost made it all of the way out of town before the dam of resolve in his mind broke and the Urge flooded his mind, overwhelming his defenses and inundating his conscious. He fought, but it was useless. When he rounded a corner a couple miles north of Clearwater and he saw the hitchhiker

  there you go that’s good

  standing there by the side of the road dressed in old jeans and a plaid shirt, one thumb out, Jack pulled the van over to the shoulder. It was not a conscious decision, but long ago he had lost the ability to control his own mind.

  The man on the side of the road was really just a boy, but the deep lines on his dark, tanned face made the boy appear much older at first glance. He was wearing a dusty pair of old jeans with one knee worn away to nothing, an old checkered flannel shirt that stood open to reveal a tanned, hairless chest. The bottoms of the jeans hung over a tattered pair of old tennis shoes that looked like they had walked all the way around the world. Over his shoulder the boy had slung an old green duffel bag, decorated in several places with water stains. The bag beat a tympanic rhythm against the boy’s thigh

  that’s good he’s perfect

  as he loped slowly over to the idling van.

  His face appeared in the open passenger window. “Goin’ north?”

  Jack was pleased to see that the boy was probably only 18 or 19 at most, not the 27 or 28 as Jack had first thought. Jack was very weary, and he didn’t want to pick up anyone that might have the slightest chance of overpowering him. Jack was no slouch in a fight, but he had also learned that the most valuable weapon a person has to fight with is his mind.

  Jack also had learned not to underestimate people, like he had done with Beaumont all those years back. People could have a nasty way of surprising you, if you weren’t careful.

  “Yeah,” he said, his lips curling up on the ends to approximate a smile. “Goin’ north.”

  The kid thanked him and climbed in and the van pulled smoothly away.

  It hadn’t taken the kid long at all to figure out that something was wrong with this guy. Bad wrong.

  First, this guy was creepy. The kid had hitchhiked his way around most of the south and southeast since he had left the Vashtar Complex and he had never had a problem, other than the occasional occurrence of getting hit on by some old guy. It seemed that a lot of the older men that offered him rides were closet homosexuals and they were looking for more than just a driving companion, but he had handled those few occasions easily, politely declining their offers and gratefully disembarking at the next convenient stopping point.

  But this guy, he was different. He wasn’t looking for company, or anything as harmless as that. The more he talked to this guy, the more he glanced around the dusty, dark interior of the van, the more the boy felt something awaken in his mind.

  Fear.

  The guy had seemed nice enough at first, but the kid got the distinct impression that somewhere below the friendly outward appearance, there lurked someone else, a shadowy other-self. Something like a monster, hiding back in the darker parts of a closet, patiently waiting for the sun to set so that he could emerge. The guy was older and his face was lined and aged like a man who had seen a lot of things, and the beard and mustache and unkempt hair did nothing to absolve that initial impression of a wizened old hermit. But the eyes…

  Once, many years before, the kid had been sitting and watching TV. He had moved on in the years since that hot summer day, but now, in his memory, the day was alive again, vibrant and real. The kid, who was truly a kid back then, was spending a carefree afternoon watching TV, and a program had come on about the ocean and ocean animals. The kid had been instantly fascinated by the beautiful fish that swam and drifted on the currents of that alien, watery world. It was so different from anything else that he had ever experienced or even heard of that it made a distinct, lasting impression, and he sat there, engrossed, unable to tear his eyes from the screen until the show had gone off. His mind had balked at believing the reality of it all, but the soothing voice of the narrator assured him that yes, it was all real.

  At one point in the show, the voice had been talking about the food chain beneath the waves and the careful balance between predator and prey. They showed a little crab, one with a shiny blue shell and a set of stubby little legs, making its way across the sandy bottom of the ocean, crawling with all of its might through the murky water. As it approached a rough rocky outcropping, waddling along the bottom, the rock had suddenly sprung to life and pounced onto the helpless little crab. The kid remembered that he had almost screamed when the simple rock had come to life and eaten the little guy that the kid had just started rooting for. The narrator’s voice, as soothing as ever, went on to explain that the rock was in fact some type of ocean predator that lived its entire life along the bottom of the sea, preying on the smaller animals that lived there.

  The animal had only been pretending to be a rock to trick the little crab.

  As the little kid had watched, wide eyes taking in everything on the TV screen, the rock-thing moved around for a little while longer, but the thing that truly startled and frightened the kid was when the rock-thing stopped moving, kneeling down among another group of similarly-colored rocks. It stopped, and then the kid couldn’t see it anymore! It was gone, disappeared, and yet, it was still there right in front of him. It was that rock right there, but now that it had stopped moving and was disguising itself as a rock again, the kid was starting to wonder if that rock had ever moved at all - maybe he had just imagined it. Or maybe it was one of the other rocks. Or maybe he had glanced away from the TV screen for a second (a second that he couldn’t remember) and now all that he was seeing on the screen was a group of real rocks.

  Or maybe none of the rocks were rocks.

  As he talked to this man, the large man with the dark eyes and the odd, ragged scar on his palm, the kid thought about the rock-thing, and about a word that the soothing voice of the narrator had used to describe the rock-thing: camouflage. It was as if a person, a different person altogether, somehow lurked below th
e smiles and the laughs of this man. It was hidden and it looked harmless, but the kid couldn’t help but think that maybe, if they could have somehow communicated, that the little blue crab would’ve understood.

  This impression came to the kid after only minutes in the van. It was only a few minutes later that the man crushed the kid’s skull.

  They rounded a corner and Jack knew that he HAD TO soon and a fine sheen of sweat had sprung up and glistened on his thin upper lip. His hands were constantly gripping and rewrapping his fingers around the steering wheel, and the urge was growing, GROWING, and he couldn’t do anything about it.

  now now gotta do it now

  Well, there was one thing he could do.

  The kid was a talker, and Jack really wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He kept glancing at the side mirrors and no part of his mind noticed the beauty of the darkening blue sky that arched over the road or the tall, wisteria-draped live oaks on either side of the road. He was far too busy looking for other cars, other traffic anywhere in sight.

  shut up kid, seriously shut up

  There was none, finally, and as they rounded a corner of the roadway Jack shifted his feet and suddenly reached over and grabbed that back of the kid’s head, pushing forward. At the same time he kicked out violently with both feet hard onto the brake, stomping on it. The van lurched forward and the nose dipped as it slammed to a halt, and the forward momentum, aided by Jack’s hand guiding it, threw the kid’s forehead into the metal and plastic hardness of the dashboard. Jacks’ seat belt caught but he still felt a flare of pain as his chest and legs connected with the steering wheel.

  The kid didn’t feel a thing.

  Jack pulled the kid’s body back up, and the kid’s head lolled lifelessly on his neck. The eyes were glazed and dead and partially obscured by the blood that welled from his forehead and flowed freely down his face to drip off of the point of his chin. The eyes bothered Jack, the way they were looking at him, so he grabbed the head and turned it away, and the neck made a loud crack as Jack turned it away.