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

  “But you’re one of them.”

  “No I’m not!” she rasped, as loud as her weakened voice would let her. “I am not one of Kanta’s gods, or angels, or whatever he wants to call them. I am Brooke Watson. I am a regular, beautiful, perfect human girl.”

  Kanta. It was Forman’s other name, the one he used with his fellow demons. No one else knew it. If there was any doubt left that Brooke was Nobody, she’d abolished it with that single word.

  “Don’t you see how perfect this is?” she pleaded. “I can help you, and we can stay together and destroy them all. We can wipe them out, get rid of them for good. You can have the girl you’ve always wanted, and I can have you. Forever.”

  Someone to hunt with, I thought. Someone to talk with. It hit me like a brick, more tempting than I’d ever imagined: someone to be with forever, who would never leave me, who would always stay with me and always do the things I wanted to do. To know that no matter what I did, no matter where I went, Brooke would always be there, always watching, always helping, always smiling and happy to see me.…

  … always trapped inside her own body, helpless and afraid. Every time I looked in her eyes I’d know it was a demon looking back, studying me, waiting for …

  I’d always know, and so would Brooke.

  And so would Nobody.

  “It will never last,” I said. “You’ll just kill her.”

  “Never.”

  “That’s what you thought with Marci, too, and look what happened! How many times has it happened?”

  Silence.

  “How many?” I demanded. “How many times have you killed an innocent girl because she was too short, or too tall, or her teeth were too crooked? How many times have you killed yourself, and some poor girl got in the way?”

  “It’s not me.…”

  “Yes it is! You hate the demons, but that’s what you are so you hate yourself. No matter how perfect these girls are, they will always be tainted because you will always be there.”

  “No!” Her voice was a roar, its weakness gone, its rawness terrifying. I’m putting Brooke in danger, I realized. I have to calm her down—I have to keep her happy while I figure out what to do.

  “You don’t know what it’s like!” she shouted. “You don’t know what I have to go through every day, just being one of them!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, searching for a plan. “You were right. It will be different this time, because … you have me.”

  She paused. “I love you, John.”

  I closed my eyes. Just don’t kill Brooke. “You’re sick now because you’re still settling into the body, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “When will you be better?”

  “Tomorrow sometime. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll go somewhere and talk.”

  “A date?”

  I breathed deep. “Yes, a date. Does that sound good?”

  “It sounds wonderful.”

  “Okay then, I’ll see you tomorrow. I…” I can’t say it. “I’ll see you.”

  23

  I have to kill her. It’s my only option. I paced back and forth in the hallway, head down, fingers clenched into tight, bloodless fists. She’s going to kill herself anyway, sooner or later, so Brooke’s already as good as dead. But if I kill her first, and find a way to kill Nobody too, then the chain will be broken and no one else will have to die. I can’t save Brooke, but I can make her the last.

  I stopped, feeling my stomach roil and my throat grow ice cold. I stumbled to the bathroom and threw up in the toilet. I threw up again, vomiting until my gut was empty and each heave was dry and painful. I can’t do it. I can’t kill Brooke. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and leaned back against the wall, my strength drained and my body powerless. I felt like a husk, ready to crumple and blow away.

  It lives in her blood. Anything I do to kill her will free the demon, and she’ll spill out and live while Brooke’s body dies behind her. I heaved again. Maybe I could strangle her—there are plenty of ways to kill without blood. I could choke her to death, or club her in the head, or tie her up and drop her in the lake.—

  I beat my hands against the floor, crying. Stop thinking about it! But I couldn’t stop—my mind kept going and going, filled with thoughts and images, imagining Brooke’s dead body lurching back to life, forced into motion by the demon in her blood. It’s not enough to kill the host—I have to kill the demon inside.

  I curled up on the floor, squeezing my eyes shut and covering my ears, but the thoughts were inside my head and I couldn’t block them out. Fire would do it. Drop her in a big enough fire and the demon will burn to death before she can escape.

  Maybe there’s a way to save her. A dialysis machine could pump the blood out, and the demon with it, and filter it all and put it back in. Or maybe not—the sludge is thick, and the pressure of pumping it out against its will would probably kill the host. And how could I possibly get access to a dialysis machine?

  The front door opened, and footsteps came in—my heart sped up, irrationally certain it was the demon come to talk to me with Brooke’s voice and face. But the cadence of the steps was my mom’s; I let my muscles go slack, put my head on the cold tile floor, and tried to calm my breathing. The footsteps walked into the kitchen; the faucet turned on, then off. The footsteps wandered back into the hallway, disappearing with a creak into the softness of the carpet, and then Mom was gasping in the bathroom doorway.

  “John!” She dropped her bag and knelt down, touching my shoulders, feeling my forehead, feeling my pulse. I saw her glance into the toilet and grit her teeth, then she grabbed me under the arms and hauled me up. “Come on,” she said softly. “It’s okay, come on up.” I grabbed her arm with one hand, the wall with the other, and let her help me to my feet. Together we staggered into the living room, where she laid me down on the couch. She sat next to me, pulling my head onto her lap, and smoothed my hair with her hand.

  “I’m so sorry, John. I’m so sorry about Marci.”

  Had that really only been this morning? Not even seven hours had gone by since my call to Marci, and already she’d been dead so long it seemed like ages ago. I felt old and tired, like a weathered tire cracking in the sun.

  “I heard you come home after you ran out,” said Mom. “I thought I’d just let you be alone for a while. I should have come up.”

  “It’s not just Marci,” I said. “You saw the demon sludge, right?”

  Pause. “Yes.”

  I closed my eyes. “It’s been moving through them all, all the suicides, and now it’s moved to … someone else.”

  She paused again. “What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know.” I’m going to kill Brooke. “I don’t know. I used to think I was trying to kill demons, and then I realized that killing wasn’t enough and I needed to save people, and now … Now I can’t do either one.” But I knew it wasn’t true—I knew I could still find the strength to kill the demon. Saving Brooke wasn’t an option anymore, but I could always kill. Sometimes that seemed like the only thing I was ever good at. “I don’t want to be a killer.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, then Mom spoke again. “Lauren told me about last night. That you told her to get me out of the house.”

  I pressed my fingertips against my forehead, rubbing away the beginning of a headache. It didn’t work. “She didn’t know why. It’s not her fault.”

  “No she didn’t, but that’s not making it any better. It’s tearing her apart, thinking what could have happened to you.”

  “That’s a poor choice of words, given the circumstances.”

  Mom sighed. “Please, John. You can’t just hide behind jokes and technicalities.” Pause. “Did you kill that man?”

  “No.”

  “Were you planning to?”

  “Yes.”

  She sighed again, and I felt her arm tense on my shoulder; her leg tense beneath my head. I closed my eyes
, bracing myself for a fight. Her next question was soft and quiet. “Why didn’t you?”

  Not what I expected. “I didn’t want to. He was a … just a normal guy. Screwed up, but not a demon or anything.”

  “He was a sociopath,” said Mom.

  “He was me, twenty years from now; he was exactly what I was turning into. I decided I didn’t want to.”

  Her arm and leg relaxed, and I felt a drop of water on my head: a tear. “So,” she said, “what are you going to do now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know who the … demon … is in?”

  “Yes.”

  She stifled a small sob. “Who?”

  “No one.” But she’s already guessed, I thought. “It’s no one you know.” I pulled away from her, sitting up and facing the wall. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I just want to…”

  The phone rang. I felt cold again, dreading the call like it was my own death. Mom stood up, grabbed the phone, and answered.

  “Hello?” Pause. “Oh, hello Brooke, it’s nice to hear from you. I was … oh yes, he’s right here, but…” She looked at me, frowned, and turned back to the phone. “I’m afraid he’s really not—”

  “Wait!” I said, jumping up. “I’ll take it. I’ll talk.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She paused, holding the phone.

  “Please,” I begged.

  Mom lifted the phone to her face. “Here he is.” She handed me the phone, and I held it to my ear, closing my eyes.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey, John.” Brooke’s voice, Brooke’s mouth, Brooke’s body. It made me sick. “I was thinking about tomorrow, trying to decide on a good place to go. Do you have any specific plans?”

  I took a deep breath, forcing myself to sound normal. Just keep her happy—just one more day, maybe two. I’ll figure something out but I’ve got to keep her happy.

  Mom frowned. “Are you sure you’ll be okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, walking slowly down the hall to my room. “Don’t worry about me.” I’m not the one who’s going to die.

  * * *

  Fire was the only way—it was the only thing that could trap the demon and kill it for sure, with no mistakes and no chance for escape. I have to do it—I have to stop Nobody from killing girl after girl after girl. Brooke would die too, but she would be the last. Nobody would never be able to sacrifice another girl’s body to fuel her own impossible quest for perfection.

  Fire would work. It was destruction embodied, and even if Nobody could regenerate, like Crowley, a good fire could keep up with her regeneration, and even surpass it. It would kill her before she could get clear of the body. All I had to do was find a good fire, or a good place to set one, and then get Brooke near enough to push her in. How could I do it without making her suspicious? Where could I do it without anyone seeing us and trying to rescue her?

  Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, living with Nobody. She might actually be happy—I could keep her happy forever, keep her in that body, and we could hunt the demons together just like she said. If I weighed the worth of lives in a pure, objective scale, Nobody and I could save hundreds, maybe thousands, if we killed just a handful of demons. The Formans of the world, the leaders of this hell community, were the biggest prize—Nobody might kill herself a few more times, but what was that compared to thousands of people, thousands of families? I had no idea how many other demons were out there, how many of the deaths and murders and attacks that I heard about every day were the work of this tiny, sinister subset of the population. They never aged—they’d keep killing forever if we didn’t stop them. I was willing to spend my life stopping them—wouldn’t Nobody’s host feel the same way? Wasn’t it worth one girl’s life, or two or five or even ten, to save millions?

  I feel that way because I’ve made a choice, I thought. The girls Nobody kills don’t get that choice. Brooke never made that choice and she never would. She’d talked about saving people, not killing them; she’d said that the world needed more people who helped each other. But how could I make that choice when helping one person required me to kill someone else?

  Brooke didn’t get to choose, but what would she choose if she could? She wouldn’t choose to be a killer. Certainly she wouldn’t choose to be burned alive. I squeezed my palms against my eyes, pressing them until they hurt. I thought about Marci, dead and cold. I thought about Brooke, trapped and mute while a demon moved her body like a puppet; in a few weeks she’d be dead too. I thought about Forman and Crowley, dying on the ground; I thought about their victims, their families, about Max’s lifeless eyes reflecting the dull blue light of a TV screen. I thought about my dad, gone more than half my life—perfectly alive and perfectly gone.

  Why do people leave?

  I’d spent a year hunting serial killers, getting into their heads and seeing what and how they thought; I’d entertained nearly ever question imaginable, no matter how grisly, no matter how horrifying, and they had passed over me like harmless air. Yet this question was almost too much to think about.

  Why do people leave?

  The suicides had bothered me so much because they were voluntary—or so we’d all thought. Now that I knew the girls were being taken from us, instead of leaving on their own, it was easier to accept. It made sense, even if it still bothered me, and I could at least find a place for it in my head. It heartened me, in some strange way, to know that Marci had died fighting for her life—it made that life seem stronger, more worth living. If you could throw it away so easily, what good was it?

  I looked at the phone, blessedly quiet. Brooke hadn’t called in nearly an hour. I picked it up, stared at the numbers a moment, and dialed zero.

  “What party would you like to reach?”

  “Can I get a number in New York?” The last we’d heard from Dad was nearly a year ago, when he sent presents for Christmas. There was no return address, but the postmark was New York City.

  “Please hold.” The line went dead, then music started—something brainless and peppy. I stared at the wall, ignoring the music, until a different voice cut it off.

  “What party would you like to reach?”

  “New York, please.”

  “New York City?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Name?”

  “Sam Cleaver,” I said, “or maybe Samuel.”

  Pause. “I’m afraid I don’t have anyone by that name.”

  “No one.”

  “No, sir.”

  “No Sam Cleaver in the entire city of New York? There’s like eight million people there.”

  “None of them by that name, sir.”

  Silence.

  “Would you like to try another name, sir?”

  “How about S. Cleaver?”

  “I have a Sharon, that’s it. Does your party have a middle name he might be listed under?”

  “No.” I stared at the wall. “Thanks.”

  “Thank you for calling information—”

  I hung up the phone and dropped it on the bed next to me. I looked around, seeing the walls and windows and doors without comprehending any of them. My eyes fell on the phone and I picked it up and hurled it at my closet door, bouncing it off the wood. The phone fell to the floor and I jumped up, grabbed it, and slammed it into the door again and again until the wood splintered and caved in. Shards stung my hand, and I hit the door one more time before throwing the phone against the opposite wall. My hand ached, speckled with drops of blood. I touched one of the drops with my hand, lightly, then smeared my whole hand across the wall. It left a faint bloody streak.

  Fire. It was the only way.

  24

  The phone rang twice before I picked it up.

  “Good morning, John.”

  “Hey … Brooke.” I winced at the name and put down my spoon.

  “What’s up?” She sounds so cheerful, as if nothing’s wrong at all.

  “Nothing
,” I said. “Are you feeling better?”

  “A little bit. A few more hours and we can go do something fun.”

  “Yeah,” I said, running through my plan one last time. “I thought it might be fun to head out to the lake and go fishing. Brooke always loved to go fishing.”

  “I know,” she said coldly. “I’m Brooke.”

  “You’re Brooke. I know. So anyway, does that sound fun?”

  “It sounds great!” she said. “You want to go after school?”

  “Sounds great.” I paused, trying to sound as natural as possible, and pretended to remember something. “Oh, crap, I forgot I have to pick up a bunch of stuff for Mom. She’s freaked out it’s gonna snow soon and wants me to get some gas for the snowblower and salt for the walks and that kind of stuff. It shouldn’t take me long, but…”

  “Oh no,” said Brooke. “But I really wanted to do something today!”

  “Well…” I let her wait a bit, building suspense. “I suppose I could meet you there. I’ll come straight from the gas station. That could save us a lot of time if you bike out there and pick a good spot.”

  “A good spot, huh?”

  “Yeah. Someplace secluded.”

  “John Cleaver,” she said, feigning shock. “Whatever do you intend to do with me in a secluded spot by the lake?” I struggled to read her voice, though the general feeling was clear: she was eager and thought I was planning something romantic.

  “I’ll see you there,” I said. And you won’t be the least bit suspicious when I show up with several cans of gas.

  “Awesome,” she said. “I love you, John.”

  “See ya.” I hung up the phone just as Mom stepped into the kitchen.

  “Who was that?”

  “Brooke.” There was no use hiding it; she could look it up in the caller ID history if she wanted to.

  “You going somewhere with Brooke today?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like, a date?” She was more suspicious than normal. What is she thinking?

  “I guess so. Sort of.” She liked Brooke; she shouldn’t have a problem with that, right?