She moved under the shop’s overhang with me and pulled a lighter out from her soaked jacket.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody gives anything away for free. Especially not to girls and especially not to girls like me. If you want me to suck your dick for oxy you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’d rather just get pneumonia.”
“I don’t have any oxy,” I said flatly.
“Well we’ve got that in common, at least.”
She took a long drag and eyed me up and down.
“What’s your problem?” she asked.
I pulled out the little purple baggie containing the ‘synthetic weed’ I’d purchased from the shop.
“Are you retarded?” she scoffed. “That shit is toxic.”
“More toxic than pneumonia?”
She clicked her tongue.
“You want some better shit?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I’m up for it,” I replied.
“Good,” she said. “You’re buying, and I get twenty percent for introducing you.”
I shrugged again.
“You can drive,” she said. “I don’t have a car.”
After we got the heroin, Annie insisted on following me back to my place to make sure I didn’t, in her words, “nod out and die like a bitch.” She also invited a friend, Darren, to come along with one of his ‘girlfriends.’ We had a good time that night, and soon, I was part of a smoke circle. They were the closest thing I’d ever had to real friends. We were fully disillusioned; it was us against the normal people.
But any group is only as stable as its foundation, and we were on one hell of an unstable foundation.
The first clue that something wrong was happening was when we all started waking up with cuts and bruises. Every night Darren, Annie and I would black out, and the next morning we’d be beat to shit.
After a week we looked like a museum exhibit on the life cycle of bruises. First there’s purple, then a sickly yellow, and finally they fade away into nothing, but not before three or four more have cropped up in their place.
Of course, we didn’t stop using. A couple of times I tried to cut back, but nobody else seemed to care, so I just let it slide. We looked worse and worse day by day, gram by gram.
If I didn’t stop when the bruises started, then I should have stopped when Darren’s ‘girlfriends’ started to disappear. But I didn’t.
Every night we’d pass out as four and wake up as three. I told myself they were just prostitutes bailing out on three wasters that they couldn’t squeeze any more money out of. I’m not sure I ever really believed it though.
I soon found out the truth.
It was one of those shitty Saturday mornings that aren’t good for anything except getting high. I rolled up to the head shop to find my regular brand of synthetic weed had gone, and in its place was something called Rainbow Road. The cashier assured me that it was just as good, but later that night I’d find out it was way weaker—weak enough for me to keep my wits about me.
I was slumped down in the smoke circle with my eyes barely open when Annie slithered up to me.
“Ok, he’s out,” she said to someone behind her. She pulled a pill bottle out and rattled a single white pill into her palm with one hand, before slipping it between my lips. She tilted my head up and slid her hand over my mouth, gripping my throat with the other hand and massaging it. I felt a powerful urge to swallow, but I managed to slip the pill under my tongue before I did.
“It’s down,” Annie said. “Is the bitch out?”
“Yep,” Darren answered. “Let’s get her naked.”
Darren and Annie began stripping the clothes from the unconscious woman like dogs stripping meat from a bone.
When they had finished, Darren reached into his pants and began to fondle himself.
“Damn,” he said, “this one looks too good to waste. Think she’s got AIDS?”
Annie clicked her tongue.
“You never learn, do you?” she said. “You really want your DNA all over that bitch?”
“Naw, I guess not,” he said. “We’re gonna clean her anyway, though, what’s the harm?”
“Just keep it in your pants,” Annie replied. “You’ll have plenty of money to buy yourself a whore later.”
“Yeah, but whores fight back,” said Darren.
“Whatever,” Annie said. “Just help me pep him up.”
Darren withdrew his crack pipe from one of the deep pockets in his tattered jeans. He loaded it up and held the lighter underneath, taking in a deep draw. But he didn’t inhale—instead he blew it directly into my face. I tried not to cough as the acrid smoke filled my nose and throat. It didn’t smell like just crack in the pipe though—it smelled like PCP.
“Hit him again,” Annie said.
Darren hit my face with the smoke again, and I couldn’t help but inhale some. My face began to experience a familiar numbing sensation as Darren hit me three more times.
“Good, now get him up,” Annie said.
Darren seized me by the armpits and yanked me to my feet. I thought about running for a flash of a second, but a mixture of morbid curiosity and fear kept me rooted to the spot.
“I still don’t get how this works,” Darren said.
“I told you,” Annie said. “It’s scopo-something. The zombie drug. They use it on people in Africa all the time.”
“Whatever,” Darren replied. “I wasn’t really asking.”
He walked over and reached inside his bag, pulling out a surprisingly new-looking computer. He opened it up and fidgeted around for a moment before stepping away to reveal a shining green light above the monitor, which was pointed at the naked girl whose name I’d forgotten. The camera was on.
“You’re out of frame,” he said to Annie. “We’re live on the site now.”
Annie slid up to me again, standing on her tiptoes and whispering in my ear.
“You see that girl, Danny?” she said. “That’s a bad, bad, girl. You remember what we do to bad, bad, girls, right? We beat them, Danny. We beat them until there’s nothing left. Beat the bitch, Danny. Beat her to death.”
My heart was yammering wildly in my ears. My mind was screaming at my feet to run, but they would not cooperate.
My hesitation was noted. Soon Annie was hissing in my ear again, flicking spit with every word.
“What the fuck are you doing, Danny?” she said. “That girl’s a BAD GIRL. You need to KILL HER, Danny.”
I still couldn’t move.
Darren crossed over to the two of us, striding in a great arc to make sure he stayed out of frame of the camera.
“What the fuck’s wrong with him?” he whispered in Annie’s ear.
“Maybe he needs another dose,” Annie said, rummaging in her pockets for the bottle. As she did so I became aware of something. The pill I had been hiding under my tongue had crumbled into powder, and while I had been concerned with what was going on with Annie and Darren, it was being absorbed into my bloodstream.
Any pillhead will tell you that sublingual administration is much faster than oral. I began to feel my consciousness slipping away, dissolving into nothingness. I slipped the remains of the pill into my cheek, but it was too late.
I was dimly aware of a blind rage as I started towards the naked woman.
I awoke the next morning to find that there was once again only three of us. I didn’t say anything about it to Annie and Darren. Instead, I mixed rat poison in with their heroin and left after they nodded out and died.
I never said shit to the police, either. I took the laptop, which wasn’t even password protected, and deleted the videos, all twenty-six of them, before throwing it in the lake. It’s been a long time since that night, and I’ve managed to clean myself up and hold down a day job. Even so, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, wondering if there’s still copies of those videos floating around on the internet somewhere.
<
br /> I hope I never find out.
30
The Abandoned Diary
A couple of days ago I was riding the bus to work when I noticed that somebody had left their notebook behind. By the time I saw it on the seat, the guy was gone and the bus was moving, so I grabbed it in the hopes of seeing him again on the bus and giving it back. After I read what was inside, however, I stopped taking the bus to work. I sincerely hope what I’ve read is fiction.
I’ve typed out the first entry below:
***
There is a limit to human happiness, but not to human misery.
I realized that last week when I saw a homeless man picking food out of the trash. I was returning from the coffee shop, and the irony struck me like a hammer. Here this man was, digging scraps out of the dumpster just to stay alive, and here I was, having just spent four dollars on a cup of tea-flavored sugar.
I handed him a twenty and told him to get a real meal, but my guilt was not assuaged. I could tell myself that I was a better person than all the people who saw him and did nothing, but the truth is that it didn’t matter how good of a person I was—after that twenty dollars was gone he’d be right back to digging around in dumpsters. And what if I hadn’t had a twenty? Would I have gone to the ATM and gotten him one?
The truth was that I had only helped him because it was easy, and nobody else would help him because doing nothing is easier, if only by a little.
I promised myself that the next time I saw him I’d do something about it. And I did.
It was two days later, and he was digging through the trash again.
I walked up to him and got his attention.
“Hey,” I said. “Remember me?”
The man turned and squinted his eyes at me, but didn’t say anything.
“What do you say to a real meal?” I asked him. “I’m cooking spaghetti tonight.”
I thought from the look he gave me that he was going to say no, but then he looked at the old takeout container in his hand, sighed, and nodded.
That night I made spaghetti and meatballs, my mother’s recipe. The homeless man, Abe, inhaled it like he hadn’t had a proper meal in years. He probably hadn’t.
I uncorked a bottle of wine, and we sat across the dinner room table in silence as the bottle got emptier and we got drunker. Abe’s face had gotten red by the time he uttered his first words of the night.
“I killed people,” he said.
“You did?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” he replied, staring into his glass. “Lots of ‘em.”
“Why?”
“It was the war,” he said. He raised his bloodshot eyes to mine. “You know what war is for?” he asked.
“What?”
“It’s for turning young men into corpses, and old men into drunks.”
Abe downed the glass, and before long he was asleep, and my eyes were growing heavy. As I stared at him sitting slumped in his chair, dribble running down his chin, I had an idea. I knew how I could make a difference for Abe, and all those others like him.
I picked the knife up from the table and shoved it into his throat. Abe awoke with a jolt, and his eyes went wide as he saw the knife protruding from his windpipe. His hands closed tightly around my own, but they soon went slack as he began to gurgle blood.
Finally, they closed, and Abe rattled out his last breath.
I hung his body from a telephone pole that night, and waited for the news the next day. But there was no front page story for Abe. In fact, he never got a mention at all. Nobody cared.
What he did get was a single policeman questioning the entire neighborhood. When he came to my door I couldn’t help myself, I had to ask him about the news.
“I just don’t get it,” I said. “Abe has been a fixture of this neighborhood for years. Now he’s dead, and no one cares? I expected there to be an outcry…an outpouring of love for the people on the streets with no one to protect them.”
The policeman shrugged.
“That’s just the way the world works,” he said. “Abe was a homeless old drunk. It may not be right, but it’s hard to sympathize with a person like that. Just look at the news. Maybe if he was an attractive blonde girl there’d be an outcry, but it’s just not gonna happen for him.”
After he was finished with his questions he thanked me for my time and left. Society had let me down. There would be no outcry, nobody would come to the aid of those that had fallen through the cracks. I had killed Abe for nothing.
But I promised myself that I would make the next kill count.
And I always keep my promises.
31
Scream in a Box
“I’m afraid I have some terrible news.”
“What is it, honey?” Dean looked over at me worriedly from the driver’s seat.
I paused dramatically.
“I have to pee.”
“Now? You’re joking, right?”
“Yeah, I’m joking. Because ‘I have to pee’ is such a great punchline.”
Dean half chuckled and half groaned.
“Remember the last road sign? The next town isn’t for sixty miles.”
“Then turn around.”
“I’m not going to turn around and drive twenty miles in the wrong direction. Look, I’ll pull over here and you can go on the side of the road.”
“Sorry to break it to you Dean, but I can’t pee standing up like you can. If I could I don’t think we’d be married.”
Dean laughed.
“You think that I’d stop loving you just because you had a penis?” he said. “You really think I’m that shallow? Here.”
He handed me an empty water bottle. I raised an eyebrow.
“What is this for?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t going to say what I thought he was.
“You know, to go in.”
I stared at him silently.
“What?” he said, the ghost of a smirk creeping across his handsome features.
“Oh nothing,” I replied. “I’m just wondering whether if I could concentrate hard enough to make your head explode.”
Dean laughed again, this time a little louder.
“Maybe you should try concentrating on finding a place to pee, and then one might appear magically on the side of the road,” he said.
“Maybe I will.”
I closed my eyes and held out my hands in mock meditation.
“Oh spirits of the great full bladder,” I began in a mystical sort of voice. “We pray to you in these dark and troubled times, that you may show us the path to true righteousness. That you might provide us a place to relieve our souls of their wearisome burdens, and our bladders of their wearisome fullness.”
Dean laughed so hard that he swerved a little. When he was done wiping the tears from his eyes he pointed to a spot on the horizon.
“Looks like your prayer’s been heard, honey,” he said.
Sure enough, I looked to where he was pointing and saw a building ahead. Dean took the exit, but as we got closer I could see it looked like the kind of place where you have to hover six inches above the seat to pee. If somebody had magically enlarged a run-down wooden shack to the size of a small warehouse and then sprinkled it with cobwebs and garbage for good measure, then it would look like this place. There was a crooked wooden sign on the front that read ‘Oddments and Curiosities’ in peeling white paint. Once we pulled into the lot and saw the garbage up close we could make out that it was mostly rusted out appliances. By the front door sat a pile of dirty doll heads.
“What the fuck?” I mouthed to Dean.
But he was already unbuckling his seatbelt excitedly. He loves places like this; says they ‘keep the spirit of the road alive,’ which is his poetic way of saying that he has a morbid fascination for weird and creepy shit. We got out and went inside.
***
If the outside of the place was dirty, the inside looked like someone had set off a garbage bomb. Most of the stuff was old, rusted or broken, and the signs a
bove each item were coated in a thick black grime that made them impossible to read. There were long wooden canes that were topped with little replicas of shrunken heads, keychains with bits of animal bone on them, and little glass orbs that looked a bit too much like real eyeballs—all kinds of horrible looking stuff. Dean looked like a kid in a candy store, so I left him to wander the aisles while I found the bathroom.
I had just finished up when I heard a terrible, visceral wail that sounded more animal than human. I yanked up my pants and ran outside to find Dean standing next to a large display of what looked like black shoeboxes, grinning like a big kid who’d just found a new toy.
“Honey look,” he said, pointing to the yellow plastic sign that hung over the display. I could barely make out the words through the grime.
“Scream in a box,” I read.
Dean nodded. “I’m gonna wrap it up and give it to my brother when we get there,” he said, beaming. “He’s gonna hate it.”
“Okay,” I said. “But let’s buy it quick and get out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”
Dean took one last wistful look at the items around him before agreeing.
“Yeah alright,” he said, somewhat sadly. We made our way up to the counter but there was no one there, not even when Dean called out for someone.
“Did you see a price tag?” he asked.
I shook my head, so Dean shrugged, pulled out a twenty dollar bill and set it on the counter.
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s go.”
***
When we got into the car Dean handed me the box and I was surprised to find it was no heavier than an ordinary shoebox.
“How does this thing work then?” I asked. “Does it take batteries?”
“No clue.”
I held the box up to my ear and shook it lightly. I could hear something rattling inside.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
“Nothing,” he said, pulling out of the lot and getting us back onto the road.
I shook the box a little harder and a chill went down my spine. It sounded like the box was… crying?
“There’s something not right about this box, Dean.”
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