The Complete John Wayne Cleaver Series: I Am Not a Serial Killer, Mr. Monster, I Don't Want to Kill You, Devil's Only Friend, Over Your Dead Body, Nothing Left to Lose

by Dan Wells

  How did anyone ever talk to anyone else?

  She spoke. “How you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  Silence again.

  She bent back down to grab the starter cord, but I stopped her.

  “Do you think…” I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask her.

  “John,” she said, “I’m … sorry for what I said. But it’s still true. You’re … I mean I … I don’t know what I mean.” She sighed. “We talked about this already, right? I can’t just forget everything. I can’t just look at your eyes and see the person I used to see. I’ve seen…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I’ve seen. More than I wanted to.” She braced herself to pull, hand on the cord, but I stopped her again.

  “Wait.”

  She closed her eyes. “Did Marci ask you out?” she asked.

  I nodded. “How’d you know?”

  “She asked me if she could. Like I had any say in it—you’re not my … anything. I mean, we only went on two dates, right?”

  “You told her to ask me out?”

  She let go of the cord and straightened up. “I didn’t tell her not to.”

  “I thought you were scared of me. Seems like you would’ve warned her or something.”

  She shook her head. “Please don’t think I hate you, John. You’re a good friend. You saved my life, maybe more than once. But now every time I see you, I see him, and I see the smoke, and then I see the way you…” She stopped, and from the way her voice cracked I could tell she was trying not to cry. She kept her eyes down, avoiding mine. “I see the way you looked at me. The way you looked when you asked him for the knife. I’m not scared anymore, I just…” She looked up at the sky. “I don’t know. I think it’s because I saw someone else, someone behind your face, like you’d taken off a mask. It was still you, but it wasn’t. And I don’t think that person is going to hurt me, or Marci, or anybody else, but … I guess the thing is that I don’t know anything about that person. At all. And that’s what scares me more than anything—that there could be two people, so different, and one of them so secret.”

  I looked at her—bright blue eyes, clearer than the sky, cheeks wet with tears like drops of rain. I wanted to wipe away those tears, I wanted to run, I wanted to hold her and hit her and scream and disappear. I wanted to melt into a puddle of sludge, like Crowley and Forman before me—gone forever, like a drop of nothing. I wanted to deny it all, tell her she was crazy, act as normal as possible and convince her I was just like everybody else. I should have stayed in my car. I should have stayed in my house.

  She bent back to the starter cord, but I stepped forward, my hand held out desperately.

  “Can we talk?”

  “About what?”

  “About…” About what? I had nothing to talk about. I had no hobbies, I had no interests, I had no life but the one I could never share with anyone. The only thing I ever thought about. “I think Forman was a demon.”

  “A what?”

  “I know he was,” I said, taking another step forward. “So was the Clayton Killer.” Nobody knew it was Mr. Crowley. “And I think the new one is too.”

  “A demon?” said Brooke. “Like, a literal demon, like with horns and a tail and all that?”

  “I think that’s a devil,” I said. “I think demons just look like us.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That’s not the point—I mean it’s not a real demon, not technically, but it’s some kind of … like a monster, like a real monster. Like in a movie or something.”

  She was staring at me, her mouth wide open and her brow furrowed in concern. “John, are you okay?”

  I shouldn’t have said anything—I was usually so much smarter, so much more careful. Why did I think she would have any idea what I was talking about?

  “Did you see anything when we were in the house with Forman?” I asked. “Did you notice anything weird about him?” Why did I keep talking?

  “Monsters aren’t real, John,” she said. She looked worried. “Do you need to sit down?”

  “No, I’m fine—listen, I’m fine, just forget it, okay?” I felt like I was drowning. “Listen, that was just a crazy story, you know? Just a … just a joke.” I took a step back. “I’ll see you around.” I turned and walked quickly toward my house.

  “John, wait.”

  I ignored her, never turning or slowing or breathing until I made it home, got inside, and locked the door behind me.

  6

  The mayor’s body arrived in the mortuary on the first day of school, early in the morning, as I was getting ready to leave. Dead bodies keep to their own schedule: they decay at the same rate every time, no matter who it is, no matter how important it is, no matter how long the FBI studies it for evidence. The mayor had been dead for a week now, and there wasn’t much time left to embalm the body if the family wanted a viewing. When the body showed up early in the morning like this it meant that the coroners had stayed up all night finishing their autopsy—running final checks, performing a final cleaning, and dotting all the i’s on their paperwork. The funeral was only one day away. We had very little time.

  I stayed in the kitchen, wolfing down my breakfast until finally the coroner left and I was downstairs like a shot. Mom was getting washed up, and I walked over casually to join her.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

  “Helping.”

  “Not during school hours,” she said, shaking her head. “You’ve got to leave in just a few minutes.”

  “Then I have a few minutes,” I said. “Let me help get you started.”

  Mom paused, watching me, then sighed. “Did you eat your cereal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you washed your bowl?”

  “Yes,” I lied. I hadn’t really, but she wouldn’t know that until it was too late.

  “Wash your hands, then,” she said, turning back to the sink. “The last thing Mayor Robinson needs is Raisin Bran in his chest cavity.”

  I crowded up next to her and washed eagerly, then pulled on an apron, a mask, and a pair of sterile rubber gloves. We unzipped the body bag and pulled it off, catching a powerful whiff of cleansers and disinfectants from the autopsied corpse.

  “Let’s hope the fan doesn’t give out,” I said.

  “Margaret’s on her way,” said Mom.

  “I can stay until she gets here,” I offered, but Mom shook her head and looked at the clock.

  “You can stay for four more minutes, then it’s off to school.”

  “Smelling like a corpse.”

  Mom sniffed the air and laughed. “You’ll smell like detergent, and most people don’t connect that smell to corpses. Just tell everyone you cleaned the bathroom this morning.”

  “That’s sure to impress them.”

  “Only the ones who appreciate a hardworking man,” said Mom. “Girls will love it.”

  I unwrapped the bandages on the wrists, then reached for a bottle of Dis-Spray and froze, my hand suspended in midair. Something on the wrist had caught my eye.

  I stepped back to the table and bent down to peer at the wrist more closely. On the first corpse, the wrists had been severed cleanly—no saw marks or serrations, no major tissue trauma—but the mayor’s left wrist was different. Instead of ending in a clean, indecipherable wall of meat and bone, this wrist was messy. There was a straight cut, yes, but behind it was a smaller cut, coming down through the flesh and glancing diagonally off the big knob of bone on the outside of the wrist. It looked like the demon had tried to sever the hand, missed, then hit home with a second swing.

  What did it mean?

  I had assumed that the demon used claws, like Mr. Crowley’s, and his claws had never been stopped by a bone—they’d been able to cut through anything. I’d seen him dig into the asphalt like it was clay. Did this demon have duller claws, or a weaker swing, or was she doing something else entirely? What if it wasn’t a claw at all, but an axe? But that didn
’t make sense—an axe should have been able to slice through a wrist without any problem, and it couldn’t possibly have made the stab wounds on the back.

  “Time to go,” said Mom.

  “Yeah,” I said absently, grabbing the body’s shoulder to roll it over. “I need to look at something.”

  “You need to go to school,” she said, pushing the shoulder gently back down. “That was the deal.”

  “But look at this wrist,” I said, pointing at it.

  “That was mentioned in Ron’s report,” she said calmly, steering me away from the table.

  “Does it say what made it?”

  “Go to school,” she repeated.

  “But I need to know!” I shouted, shrugging her violently off of my arm. I was breathing heavily, my teeth clenched. She stepped back, eyes wide, and I stepped back the other way, as if backing away from an electric shock. Where had that come from?

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry.” I hadn’t had any kind of angry outbursts, physical or otherwise, in weeks. “I’ll go now.”

  Mom regained her composure and nodded. “What do we say?”

  I paused. It had been a while since we’d bothered with this, but it was another little ritual we had—a mantra we used to say whenever I left the house, to help me remember my rules. I didn’t want to start it again.

  But it was better than the alternative.

  “Today I will smile all day, and think good thoughts about everyone I meet.” Mom said it with me. It scared me, and I think it scared her, to know how quickly we both went back to the same preventative measure.

  I took off my apron and mask, threw away my gloves, and washed my hands in the restroom on the way out.

  * * *

  In hindsight, it was stupid of me to stop at Brooke’s house on the way to school. Ever since I got my license last year, I’d driven her to and from school every day; I got to see her, talk to her, and smell the clean, soft scent that followed her everywhere. I cherished those car rides, and now, through force of habit and a powerful self-delusion, I was right back at it on the first day of the new school year. Of course, she wasn’t speaking to me, but she still needed to get to school, right? We’d never officially cut off the driving arrangement, so technically it was still on. And even if I drove her to school it didn’t mean she had to talk to me. But over time we were sure to start talking again anyway—meaningless small talk at first, then more and more, until everything would be just like it had always been.

  I waited by her curb for three minutes, trying to get up the nerve to go knock on her door—she’d always come out on her own before—but it was stupid. I knew it was stupid even to come here, I knew it before I did it, it’s just … well, it was worth a try, anyway. I put the car in gear and drove away.

  I passed Brooke two blocks later, waiting at the bus stop. She didn’t wave, and I drove by without slowing.

  I’d never really liked school—I liked learning, but I liked a very specific learning environment. Noisy classrooms with yellowed floor tiles, fluorescent lights, and a few hundred kids who thought I was a freak were, unsurprisingly, not a part of the environment I preferred. Give me a good library, an Internet connection, and some educational TV, and I could sit and “learn” for hours, as long as I enjoyed the subject. I’d venture to say that I knew more about serial killers and criminal profiling than almost anybody in town, up to and including the FBI team that had come to investigate the Handyman killings. But I was also a realist, and I recognized organized education as a necessary evil. I wanted to become a real mortician when I grew up, and that meant I needed college, and that meant I needed high school. If I could sit through just two more years of broken desks, social cliques, and school spirit, I’d be in the clear.

  I parked in the back lot and made my way toward school. It was still the last of August, and the weather was warm, but cooling rapidly. Scattered groups of kids were shouting to each other cheerfully, leaning on their cars or wandering slowly toward the various buildings. Our school had three—the main building, the tech building (which was fairly low tech, despite its name), and the gym. I saw a couple of sophomores wandering in a daze, still daunted by their first day in a real high school. They probably couldn’t read their class schedules.

  “Hey, John,” said Marci, leaning against one of the flower boxes in the side lawn. Her best friend, Rachel, was with her. “How’s it going?”

  I stopped. After our bike-riding date I hadn’t heard from her, and I’d assumed she’d lost interest. Yet here she was, on the first day of school, ignoring everyone else on the lawn and talking to me.

  “Not bad,” I said. “Nothing like the first day of school to get you going in the morning.”

  “Ug,” said Marci, “it’s like a Monday.”

  “It is a Monday.”

  “No, I mean like the Monday to end all Mondays,” said Marci. “It’s that same depressing ‘oh no the weekend is really over’ feeling, magnified a thousand times.” She grinned mischievously. “I’m taking bets on the first person to ditch class.”

  “Counting the whole school?” I asked. “I bet there’s some people that don’t even show up.”

  “That’s what I told her,” said Rachel.

  “What’s your first period?” asked Marci.

  I looked at my schedule, though I had it memorized. “Social studies with Verner.”

  Marci smiled. “Sweet, us too. Then here’s the rules: check out everyone in our first-period class, make your pick, and then we’ll watch them for the rest of the day. First one to ditch is the winner.”

  “You mean whoever bets on the first ditcher is the winner,” said Rachel.

  “That’s debatable,” said Marci, standing up. “Let’s go grab some seats in the back, so we can get a good view of all our contestants.”

  Rachel stood as well, and together they walked toward the nearest door to the main building. After a second of hesitation, I followed them. I’d never walked into school with anybody before, except Max, but that barely counted. He was only my friend because I didn’t have anyone else, and I was only his friend for the same reason. Besides, I hadn’t seen him in weeks, and I was with two very cute girls.

  Marci and Rachel waved and smiled and chattered with a dozen or so people on our way through the halls, and I hung behind them like a shadow—not hiding, but not inserting myself into their conversations, either. It seemed like everyone knew them, and they knew just about everyone. I suppose that’s what “popular” means, and it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did—I could go a whole week without talking to anyone at school, sometimes anyone at all. Marci was the exact opposite, to a degree that I hadn’t even imagined was possible. It was a little annoying, but more than that it was exhausting. It was so much easier to be an outcast.

  Mr. Verner’s room was the same as always; I don’t think he’d put up any new posters since the nineties, if that, which seemed weird for a social studies teacher. Shouldn’t he have been more on top of current events? The door was in the back of the room, and Marci went straight to the far wall to claim the back corner seat. Rachel sat in front of her, so I hesitantly took the seat next to Marci on the back row. It’s hard to explain why I felt so strange—it wasn’t because Marci was popular or pretty, though she certainly was. It was more because I’d just never really hung out with anybody before. I felt like I was forgetting something, like I was supposed to do or say something and didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t think of anything, so I just sat down.

  “My next class is with Mr. Coleman,” said Marci. “Gag. Do you know how many times he’s tried to look down my shirt?”

  “So wear something else,” said Rachel. “With a shirt like that, I feel like I should be ogling you, too.”

  “He’s a teacher,” said Marci. “It’s completely disgusting.”

  “You should report him,” I said, glancing at her chest and then quickly looking away. I’d given up my rules against girl watching, but they were still so
ingrained that I hadn’t even noticed her shirt yet—I’d been subconsciously avoiding it. It was a tight black tank top, the same color as her hair, with a curly-green-leaf pattern that showed off her curves to perfection. She really was gorgeous.…

  And then I found myself thinking about Brooke. That’s the weirdest thing.

  “I almost did report him last year,” Marci went on, but when I got to the counselor’s office he checked me out, too. I gave up. Obviously I enjoy a little attention, but it amazes me how brazen some people are about it.”

  Two more girls wandered into the room, talking and ignoring us. I looked at Marci, keeping my eyes firmly on her face; her eyes were the same green as the vines.

  “You shouldn’t just give up,” I said. “We have a…” I didn’t know what to say, or how to say it: we have a responsibility to stop people from doing bad things. Why was that so hard to say? Everyone I talked to was so complacent. Had people always been like this, and I was just noticing it now?

  “What do we have?” asked Marci.

  “We have…” Did they really want to talk about this? Most people didn’t care about any of the things I did, and I usually didn’t realize it until I’d already said something insulting, boring, or controversial. I looked around at the classroom. Think, John, I told myself. Find something to talk about. Talking is easy. People do it every day. I saw the two people who’d come in earlier, Kristen and Ashley, and I pointed at them. “We have our first two contestants,” I said. “Do you think either of them will be the first ditcher of the day?”

  Marci was looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, ignoring my question. What was she thinking?

  Rachel laughed and shook her head. “There’s no way Kristen goes first,” she said. “Straight A students don’t ditch.”

  “They ditch all the time,” said Marci. “I got straight A’s in ninth grade, if you’ll remember, and I ditched my math class about once a week.” She grinned. “That’s a twenty percent ditch rate.”

  “Kristen is not just any straight A student,” said Rachel. “She’s a straight A student taking every college credit class the school has, and she’s the editor of the school paper. She’s not going to ditch the first day of school.”