by Greg Enslen
better much better
He put the van back in gear and started it up again, checking his mirrors, his eyes now searching for a side road to pull off onto. A turnoff came up in a mile or so and he turned the van off of the main road, hoping it was a country road or forest road that wound its’ way in and out of the trees on either side of the highway. Before he had not noticed the trees flanking the road, but now he saw them for their value to him - they would serve to shield his actions from prying eyes.
The road wound back into the woods a ways and came out into a parking area that bordered on a large picnic area, but the rows of picnic tables and the covered shelter did not appear to have been used in a long time. Perfect.
He got out and opened the passenger’s side door and grabbed the kid’s body, lowering him to the ground. He did not notice the birds as they collected in the trees around him, an enormous flock of many different species, all flying together before settling onto the high branches of the live oaks and pines around the rest area. Jack was just finished setting the kid down when he heard what sounded like splashing sounds, back in the trees to the south of the parking area, behind him. He turned and saw that a large, wide river flowed just past the recreation area, leading away from the highway, flowing towards the ocean. Perfect place to dump the body.
He was done with one-ninety-seven in under a half-hour.
Over the years he had gotten good at killing and disposing of people, but every time he killed someone, the victim was new and a little bit different. This time, the kid surprised him.
The kid had a fake leg.
The leg was a plastic and metal construction that moved and flexed just like a real leg, only it was painted a sickly flesh tone that did a poor job of simulating a real skin color. The ball and socket joint’s of the knee and ankle were made of gleaming, shiny metal, well-oiled and carefully maintained with the help of a small maintenance kit that Jack had found stowed away in the kid’s dingy green knapsack.
The very top of the leg simulated what would’ve been the kid’s thigh, the strange mass ending in a deep bowl-like impression in which sat the kid’s stump, which ended about a foot above where the knee would have been. Several belts and buckles held the stump into the impression, allowing the stump and prosthetic piece to move together in concert, moving as one single unit. It seemed that by swinging his stump back and forth, the kid was able to control the fake leg, causing it to swing back and forth and simulate a real walk.
But between the pale, scarred skin at the end of the stump and the plastic bowl impression of the prosthetic Jack had found several layers of dirty cloth, folded over each other and creating an inch-thick cushion between them. It looked as if the kid had grown a lot since the leg had been made for him, and for some reason or other, the kid had never gotten a new fitting. Surely the doctors that fitted him with the original piece could have resized the thigh area to make it longer and more comfortable. Instead, the kid had simply added layer upon layer of stuffing between his leg and the plastic bowl, adding height and reducing any discomfort, and then strapping the belts over them to hold the whole thing in place. It was either that, or walk around with one leg that was at least an inch longer than the other - he had grown that much since the last fitting, Jack knew, because he had lined up the legs to see for sure. The kid would’ve walked with one hell of a limp, had he not stuffed all of that padding in there.
But still, it couldn’t have been very comfortable.
Why hadn’t Jack seen the kid limping, even just a little bit, when he’d come up to the van? Even with the cloth stuffed in there, he must’ve still limped a little, even if it was just from the chaffing and rubbing of the cloth on the pink and sensitive skin that curved around the bottom of his stump. Had Jack just missed it, or was the kid just good at hiding it?
“I was probably too preoccupied to even notice,” Jack said out loud, his voice sounding strange and hollow as it drifted across the empty parking lot.
Even though Jack had only planned to stun the kid when he had grabbed the kid’s head and bashed it against the headboard, the blow had evidently killed him instantly. Jack knew from experience that skulls and skull thickness’ varied wildly in different people and that he had been taking a chance by knocking the kid like that, but at the time, it had seemed like the quickest, easiest thing to do. Jack remembered clearly that he had not been in the mood for nuance, or having to bother with luring the kid out of the van with some bullshit story and then knocking him out with his trusty Slugger; Jack hadn’t been in the mood. He’d only wanted to knock him out and drag him back into the dark woods and work on him for a while before he killed him. He needed an outlet, somewhere to express his anger at this whole Beaumont thing, and killing the kid slowly would’ve relaxed him, centered him in on what he needed to do to get through this whole thing and get on with the real business at hand.
But the kid was dead.
After Jack was finished doing to the kid what needed to be done, he dressed the kid back in his old, dingy clothes, trying to get everything back in the right place.
While he had been working, he was also turning a question over and over in his mind: keep the leg? It would make a great souvenir, one of his best. Of course it could not fit into any of the glass jars that lined the interior of his van, but he was sure he could find some place of importance to display it.
But would a body missing a leg draw any more attention to itself than any other dead body? If the body were to be found, the stump would be examined and the coroner would assume that the prosthetic had simply been lost in the water sometime after the body was dumped - Jack knew that coroners most often placed their faith in the answers that looked most obvious and easiest to explain. The report would probably say that someday a fake leg would be found in the river by some backpacker or hiker, and the case would be shelved.
Not that the body was ever going to be found. Jack had pulled out his maps and saw that the river that passed by this recreation area moved quickly out to sea, and the body would never be spotted. The chances of the body being found in such a fast-moving river were slim and none.
But just to be sure, Jack, before redressing the kid, had frayed the ends of some of the straps that hung from the boys waist belt. He’d ripped off most of the empty pant leg and left the frayed belts and a few buckles hanging from the ragged opening, hopefully convincing anybody that the leg had been ripped completely from the body, taking some of the straps and buckles and the pants leg with it.
He would keep the leg - the kid didn’t need it.
a prize
After he loaded the body into the back of the van, he drove around in a wide circle and backed over close to the edge of the cliff that overlooked the river. It was dark and he felt completely safe in simply dumping the body into the river. No moon shone down to light him or his activities, but he could easily see the puddles of rainwater that had fallen last night. The ground was muddy, so he didn’t back too close to the edge - he didn’t want to risk getting stuck in the mud.
“Oh yeah, officer, I need a tow out of the mud. Body? There’s a body in the back of my van? Oh, don’t worry about that, sir. I was just getting ready to dump him in the river. Why did I kill him - well, isn’t that obvious? See the leg? He’s got no life anyway. I’m just weeding out those that aren’t strong or smart. Have you read Darwin?”
Too tired from driving all night and with too many things competing for attention in his mind, Jack pulled the body out onto a plastic tarp that he had laid down on the ground under the back of the van and used that as a sled, dragging the body with its one missing pant leg over to the edge. He didn’t notice the tracks he left, or the boot prints. He didn’t notice the long gouge the dragged body dug into the mud.
He also didn’t notice the great numbers of birds that sat perched in the trees around the parking area. They quietly watched him as he worked on the boy and wrapped him up in plastic to dump him. As he dragged the kid across the mud, one of the
birds stepped off its branch and flapped away into the night.
The river here flowed slow and deep, black in the moonless night. It was not very wide, and the only noise it made as it flowed past the little riverside picnic area was the constant lapping of water at the sandy banks. Here, there was a rocky outcropping that the rushing water had eroded away beneath, leaving a shelf of gray stone jutting out over the water. Directly below the rock, the river moved silently.
Jack dragged the plastic over the rocks and was dismayed to hear the plastic snag and tear in several places, but it did not overly concern him - he was simply too tired to worry about such things. He wanted to get this finished and get out of here quickly.
It was cheap plastic and it was expected to rip, right?
no matter the body will float right out to sea no problemo.
“One express ticket to the Atlantic coming right up, sir,” Jack told himself.
No one was going to find him and even if they did, Jack would be in Liberty by then and no one would ever catch him because he was the greatest killer that had ever lived.
When the kid floated out into the Atlantic, the cops, if they found the body, wouldn’t even know WHICH river it had come down, much less where the body had been dumped.
Jack tugged and pulled and finally managed to maneuver the plastic tarp over to the edge. He stood up and looked around, but there was nobody watching, nobody out for a midnight swim, nobody out trying to catch some fish in the middle of the wide river. He leaned over and grabbed one edge of the plastic and tugged up on it, hard, and the body rolled effortlessly off the tarp and over the edge, spinning lazily once, twice before it splashed into the dark water and immediately sunk from sight.
Jack smiled as he walked back over to the van, balling up the tarp and tossing it into the open doors before closing them. He was happy, too happy to notice that his boots were too caked with the thick brown mud to allow the little chains there to sound their normal jingle.
He didn’t care.
Tracker Randy Kovacs watched the storm as it moved, wondering where it would go. Miami was being lashed by the hurricane force winds, and there was some spotty beach flooding being reported all the way north to Cape Kennedy. The storm was huge, the colored bands of clouds on his false-image computer representation looking bigger than before, superimposed across Florida. The storms always looked bigger when they made landfall, as Mandy had done at 10:32 p.m. Wednesday night - a full ten hours later than expected. The best Trackers and scientists the Center had on staff were baffled by the seemingly random speed course, but Randy knew what was going on here.
Mandy was just getting stronger.
She had hung out in the Caribbean for an extra few hours, sucking up as much warm water as she could carry before marching on Miami. She was moving so slow because she was picking up power and strength, feeding off the warm waters off Miami. Even as protected as they were inside the underground concrete bunker of the National Hurricane Center, Randy could hear the wind and rain howling outside - and they were a full 20 miles south of the landfall point.
She had come ashore near Pompano Beach, north of Miami, and CNN was carrying it live on one of the big screens in the Control Room. There were the typical scenes of wind-lashed trees and uprooted plants, video of the boarded-up buildings and the inevitable deranged people who stayed behind to brave the storm. Randy always wondered about the sanity of those people, but wasn’t he one of them now, staying when all the numbers said to get out, and quick?
But he was needed here, and that was more important. Mandy was easily the biggest storm of the year, and coming so late in the season actually made it worse - people were prepared for storms in July and August, historically the height of the Hurricane Season. But by September and October, people’s thoughts turned to fall and the coming cooler temperatures of winter, and hurricanes and sandbags and torrential flooding were rare. And now the biggest storm of the Season was upon them, and the Center had little idea where it would go.
The Track now took Mandy across Florida and into the Gulf, but after that it was anybody’s guess. Most of the Trackers predicted she would swing west and north towards New Orleans, and watches had been issued from Apalachicola, in the Florida Panhandle, to Galveston on the Texas Gulf Coast. They hadn’t had a late-season storm of this strength since Camille in ‘69, and there was little concrete wind and water temperature data from those days, making prediction of Mandy’s course difficult. And how the lower water temperatures in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico would affect the Track was unclear. There was also a big high pressure front stalled over Texas now, extending out from the coast for hundred miles or so, and when Mandy bumped into that, there was no telling where she would go. Or, knowing this storm, maybe she would just take up residence in the Gulf and spin herself out there, dying down to a Tropical Storm and then, finally, dissipating completely. But Randy didn’t believe it - for some reason he felt that there was a lot more to this storm, and that he would be tracking it for a long time.
He punched up some weather charts and wind pattern graphs of the southern U.S., trying to guess where Mandy would go. Technically he had been assigned the task of determining the max strength of the storm, but he didn’t feel like that was as important as guessing where she would go.
Chapter 6 - Thursday,
September 15
David finished up most of his packing, listening to “Presto” as he piled items into boxes before he went in for his noon shift on Thursday. It was one of Rush’s better CDs, introspective and almost sad, the CD was about magic and illusion. His favorite song was “The Pass,” about making the best with what you’ve got in life. It was about facing your problems, then doing something about them. That was what he was trying to do, getting on with his life. He would never need to hear the Story again, and that would be fine.
Rush had a new CD out, "Test for Echo," which he needed to remember to pick up before he took off for California. He'd heard it was good but different, something Rush was good at. They were always mixing it up.
Almost everything he had, he wasn’t taking with him – it all had to fit into the few boxes that he would be storing at his Aunt’s house. She said she would put them into storage along with her extra things or store them in with her stuff, depending on how big her new place was. He figured she’d eventually decide on a smallish, one-bedroom place, but surely there would be room for extra storage - there were a lot of things in the house that needed to be kept and kept track of, and his few small boxes could go right in there with the rest. All of his old papers from high school and college and other stuff that he didn’t need or even really want, but he couldn’t bring himself to give them away or throw them out.
Bernie, his roommate, had taken the news well and declined the offer when David had tried to pay for October’s rent, also. David was paid up through the end of September, but that was only a couple of weeks away and he didn’t see how Bernie could find another roomie so quickly, but Bernie was a very laid-back individual. Or maybe he liked the idea of having the place to himself for a while.
David planned to work his last two shifts, Thursday afternoon and Saturday night, and then he would leave Sunday morning, the 18th. He had spent a couple of hours doing the calculations and that put him into Los Angeles on Saturday morning, the 24th. He could push himself and get there a lot faster, but he wanted to see some of the sights along his planned route, and he wasn’t in any particular hurry to get to LA. It would still be there, waiting for him, and getting out of Liberty would be exciting enough. Plus, he would be visiting places he had only heard of before, seeing sights that he had been looking forward to seeing for several years. No, no need to kill himself trying to get there really fast.
The planned route would take him south through Richmond and then west, through West Virginia and then up into Ohio and Illinois and Missouri, where he wanted to see the Gateway Arch. He had always thought that it sounded like an architectural miracle, and he wanted
to see it for himself. Maybe it reminded him of those days when he wanted to be an architect, but he had wondered how they built the graceful arch of steel, and had to see it.
After St. Louis came the Midwest, and David would go through Kansas and Nebraska, then up into Colorado to see the mountains. He had seen pictures of those towering peaks dusted with snow, and he found that route sounded much more interesting than going south through the desert. Tall, snow covered peaks were much more interesting than that big hole in the ground, the Grand Canyon, and he had no interest in seeing it. No, he would go through Colorado and Utah, then cross Nevada and come into California at Lake Tahoe, supposedly a beautiful sight.
From there he would cross California at Sacramento and hit the coast at San Francisco, home of the Golden Gate Bridge, that Pyramid building, and several other interesting buildings and landmarks. Many times over the past few years he had remembered seeing something in a magazine or on TV, a landmark or something else, and he remembered promising to himself that if and when he ever got out of this miserable town, he would see that landmark.
And now he was on his way, practically.
The connections were almost all severed - he could really leave today if he wanted to, but he’d promised Mel he’d work out the posted schedule when he’d quit on Tuesday. David had told his Aunt, and she had cried and argued and pleaded before he had seen the expression creep across her face - resignation. He had made up his mind and, amazingly, stuck to his guns, and she had evidently seen that.
He still hadn’t told Bethany yet, and didn’t know when he would get up the courage to do it. It wasn’t fair, not telling her himself, but if he didn’t do it soon, she would find out from someone else, and that would be worse.