(There’s a long pause. Then a sigh.)
You are, of course, asking about the women.
Go on.
There were lots of women. Two or three a night. Sometimes more. I’d pick them up in bars, on the Internet, in singles groups. I would have sex with them for days, sometimes weeks, even months, keeping track of their menstrual cycles so I knew when they were most fertile, until I was certain I had impregnated them and then I’d move on to the next one, but I kept tabs on them.
Kept tabs? Why?
To protect my children. To make sure they didn’t abort them. One woman got away from me. She had the fetus aborted. I made her pay for that.
Can you tell me more about that?
No.
How did you make her pay?
It’s not relevant.
Readers will want to know.
I did not kill her. Not at first. I kept her. I took her to my house. I tied her up. And I made certain she conceived again. Then I kept her until she was at full term. I delivered the baby myself.
And then?
I took the baby to the fire station. Did you know you could take unwanted babies to the fire station and they will make sure the baby gets to foster care? Wonderful system.
And what about the mother?
I’m sure she is little more than bones now. Dissolved in lye.
Oh my God.That’s—that’s horrible. Why would you do something like that?
You are editorializing again. You are supposed to be objective. Impartial. Is that not the soul of good journalism? Now, any more questions or are we done?
Yes. Yes. A few more questions. Who else have you killed? I know there are more. There’s always more.
As you deduced, I did more than I confessed to earlier. See, like the lion, most predators are territorial. I was spreading my seed far and wide but I felt no satisfaction in that. So I began to narrow my scope, concentrating on one city, one neighborhood.
And what did you do?
I began the same way I did at that fertility clinic long ago, by eliminating competition. I scoped out the best breeding stock through a meticulous process of first setting the boundaries of what was to be my territory and then calculating the number of females in that area. From there I cross-referenced DMV records with medical and birth records to find the number of females of breeding age, which I calculated to be sixteen to thirty-five years old, eliminating the disabled and chronically ill. In no time, I had the number reduced to fewer than seven thousand. Then I began disqualifying them based on things like obesity, poor eyesight, low IQ, poor education, low vocational achievement. In the end, I had narrowed it down to three hundred. Three hundred in a six-mile radius that encompassed more than sixty thousand people. Pathetic.
Then what?
I got to know them. I found out who was married and who was single. Who had children and who was expecting.
And then?
I followed the lion’s plan. I eliminated competition.
And how did you do that?
First I made their husbands and boyfriends disappear. Most of the girls were single, so that left a little more than a hundred men. Many of them were dating multiple women in my circle of three hundred. Unbeknown to the women of course. But I didn’t have time to break them up. Besides, how would I have known whether causing dissent in one relationship wouldn’t have strengthened another or caused the men to court other women in my circle? No, I had no choice but to resort to the old shovel and bag of lye. In one month, I had cleared the field.
What about the police? That many men couldn’t go missing in such a short amount of time without someone noticing.
They noticed. They investigated in many cases. In some they assumed the men had simply moved on, in others they suspected foul play. They investigated their spouses and girlfriends, which made things more difficult for me, but it couldn’t be helped. That’s why I did it so quickly. I didn’t give the police time to figure it out. Kill one guy every month or so, and the cops have time to discover bodies, notice patterns, interview witnesses, put together a taskforce. But I overwhelmed their system by killing three, four, five a day. They had no time to react. Then I stopped. It is hard to catch a killer who murders random strangers. Did you know that? It’s very hard. And I left them nothing to go on. No fingerprints. No DNA. No signs of struggle. No bodies. They were all just gone.
How did you do it? How’d you kill them and dispose of the bodies so effectively?
I am afraid that is not relevant. It is my secret.
You’re in prison. It’s over for you. What does it matter?
My secret. Mine alone.
Okay. So tell me more about the women.
The pregnant ones lost their babies. Did you know there is a tea you can drink that produces a spontaneous abortion? There is even a blackberry tea, for women who are in their last trimester, that causes premature labor. The babies that survived their early births I took care of. I went to the hospital and quietly smothered them in their beds. The women who resisted my subtler methods to induce abortions were dealt with a bit more crudely. I chloroformed one and then shot her up with ketamine. Then, using a medical textbook, performed an in-home abortion on her. It was quite a mess.
For Christ’s sake!
What? Did something I say bother you?
No. I’m fine.
You forget, I can read your thoughts. I am bothering you. In fact, right now, I can tell that you want to leap over this table and beat me to a pulp. You’re expecting a child. Nice. Well, we can stop if you’d like. If you don’t want to hear the rest of the story, I’m sure there’s another reporter somewhere who would.
I said I’m fine. Continue.
We’ll see. Did you know ketamine has hallucinogenic effects? I’m no anesthesiologist so I just guessed the dosage. She woke up halfway through the procedure and mistook me for her lover. “Brendan, how could you? It’s your baby! Why don’t you love your baby?” Her voice was so pitiful. Then she cried herself back to sleep with my cannula—you know what that is, right? A little tube—still five inches deep. Could you imagine that? Aborting your own baby? That wasn’t rhetorical.
I . . . I can’t.
Are you holding up all right?
I’m fine.
You’re holding back tears. Don’t worry; unlike my father, I don’t mind seeing a grown man cry. I rather enjoy it, in fact.
Well, I’m not going to cry. Sorry to disappoint. Continue.
From there I proceeded to suck the amniotic fluid, the placenta, and of course, the fetus into the collection jar. I used what was essentially a vacuum for babies. I’d stolen it from an abortion clinic. Smash and grab. It was all over the news. They blamed it on some pro-life organization. The fetus was about the size of the little baby feet pro-lifers wear. Are you pro-life?
Am now. Just finish your story.
I removed the cannula and then inserted a curette to scrape anything from her uterus I might have missed. The smell was something I think I’ll never forget. Did you know the blood from inside a woman’s uterus has a different odor than the blood say, from when you slit someone’s throat? It is a heavier, meatier smell. Pleasant in a way. Suffice it to say I was careful not to damage anything that would prevent her from successfully carrying my seed to term. After that, I visited the women one by one and inseminated them.
You mean you raped them?
No. Nothing so crude.I would have loved to, but that would have taken too much time. Too inefficient, you understand. My method was more systematic. I had been storing my sperm for weeks. I had bottles of it completely filling my little freezer from top to bottom. I drugged the women, without their knowledge of course, and then I artificially inseminated them using a three-dollar turkey baster I bought from the grocery store. I would do ten a day. Systematically. The same way I found them. The same way I got rid of their boyfriends and husbands. It became like a job to me. Eight hours a day with my little bottle of Rohypnol, chloroform as a back-up preca
ution, and my turkey baster. Then, when I got to the last one, I would start over to make sure it took. In the not-too-distant future, you are going to see a large upswing in the number of births in a certain neighborhood. My territory.
And what neighborhood is that, exactly?
Wouldn’t you like to know.
(Recording ends.)
***
Thanks for agreeing to speak with me, Professor Horrowitz. I can imagine how terrible all of this must be for you.
Yes, well, this is not the destiny I had in mind for my son. He was meant for greater things, to be a leader of men, not a common criminal.
Whatever Adam is, he is certainly not common, Professor Horrowitz. The experiments you did on your son have made him something else entirely.
The experiments? You mean the DNA injections?
Yes. Adam believes those injections made him into something greater than he was. Something greater than any of us. Beyond humanity. He believes you advanced him further along the evolutionary scale.
(Victor laughs.)
Yes. That was my hope. It didn’t work though. I knew that after the first round of injections.
Wait. I don’t understand.
The DNA injections did nothing. My hope was that the new DNA would bind itself to his genes and change the DNA patterns, altering his physiology on a genetic level. I knew it was ambitious. But I’d had some success with rats and even chimpanzees, so I was confident. At the very least, I figured it was harmless.
So what happened?
Nothing. There were no changes at all. He got stronger but that was just from the workouts he was doing. He was no stronger than any other human being would have been after a similar strength regimen. He looked no different. His IQ was always high. After the injections began, he studied harder, his knowledge increased by leaps and bounds, but intelligence is not about erudition. It is how we process that information, and his IQ remained the same.
If they didn’t work, then why did you continue?
Adam’s confidence improved after the first round of injections. I didn’t see any changes, but he thought he did. He thought he had become more handsome. He had been painfully shy, and suddenly he was talking to girls, going out on dates. I gave him injections of genes meant to make him stronger and faster. That’s when he began strength training. He had never been interested in sports before, but suddenly he was taking gymnastics, running track, even taking martial arts, so I continued the injections. Then he came to me, claiming he could read minds. He even claimed his consciousness could travel outside his body.
Astral projection?
Yes. That’s what he claimed. We did a few tests, and the results were interesting but inconclusive.
Inconclusive?
We needed a more controlled environment for testing. We were doing the tests in the house and in my private laboratory. He knew those places too well. If I placed him in one room and I picked up an object in another room, it was hard to tell if he was just using his knowledge of the environment and of me, to deduce the objects I was most likely to select. That was the same problem with our tests of his telepathic abilities. It was hard to tell if he was reading my thoughts or just reading me.
How accurate was he?
About 80 percent.
Eighty percent!
Yes. It dropped to around 50 or 60 whenever I introduced new objects he’d never seen before. That’s why I am reluctant to say he has telepathic powers. I would just call him highly perceptive and observant. Extraordinarily so, perhaps.
Perhaps? Eighty percent is beyond extraordinary. It’s unprecedented! Even if he was just relying on his intimate knowledge of you, that would require an uncanny degree of perceptiveness.
Adam has always been a remarkable boy.
He didn’t think so.
What do you mean?
He interpreted your attempts to “fix” him as confirmation that he was flawed in some way, that he wasn’t good enough. He believed you were ashamed of him and that’s why you were doing everything you could to improve him.
But that’s ridiculous. I loved Adam. He knew that. I just wanted him to be better. I wanted him to be the best. Isn’t that what every father wants for their son? Isn’t it every father’s responsibility—
To make sure his son grows up to be a better man than him? Adam told me about that. He also said you believed yourself to be flawed and that you took out your own frustration at not being able to live up to your own idealized standard of perfection on him.
That may be true. I’ll accept that. But Adam was happy. The experiments were making him better. Yes, it was a placebo, but the psychological effects were undeniable.
And after he started killing people?
I felt bad about that, but he was my son. I thought I could control him. I guess, ultimately, whether I realized it or not, I started believing in the injections as much as he did. I thought I could isolate the genes that were causing his aggressive behavior and correct them. It was worth a shot.
Dr. Horrowitz, what if the injections really did work? What if he really is what he says he is?
Then he is correct and his genes will become dominant. Humanity as we know it will be forced into extinction by this smarter, stronger, more aggressive species. But I don’t think we have to worry about that. It didn’t work, and even if it did, that’s a process that takes hundreds of years.
In this age? With today’s technology? Imagine what happens when all his children come of age. We don’t even know how many there are. But let’s say, for the sake of argument, fifty. Those fifty kids make fifty more, who make fifty more, so on and so on. An exponential increase. Assuming they are as aggressive, intelligent, and attractive as Adam, they could wind up in politics, high military positions, CEOs of major companies, areas where they would have a tremendous impact on the world. I don’t think we’re looking at hundreds of years here, Professor Horrowitz. I don’t think we’d have that much time at all.
(End recording.)
SAMSARA
Sultan Z. White
“When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.”―Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Chapter 1
Tender white hands caress his dark skin. His muscles relax by desire of the feminine whispers, “Let us do all the work.” He closes his eyes and feels the nude women around him sucking his nipples, licking his testicles. More women crouch over him, taking turns swallowing his length. More women. Some nibble at his toes, others kiss his chapped lips, drying out the more he sweats. They draw soft silk over his arms and then across his wrists, wrapping it around a polished ivory post; he lets himself be tied down. He looks down at his feet; two pairs of gentle hands delicately tie down his ankles. As he begins to resist, a beautiful woman stoops before him, severing the sight of his bound feet. She wears a silver necklace with a lamb pendant, the only article on her otherwise naked body. Her proportions are faultless. She lingers over him, brown eyes so seductive, and then wraps her lips around his shaft. She keeps eye contact as she takes all of him in, slowly, slowly. He can look nowhere else. She stops at his head, and swirls her tongue, tickling his nerves. With her free hand she strokes his penis with honey, rubbing it through his pubic hair, over his balls, into his ass. He can look nowhere but at her. All around him, the cushions, the blankets, the sheets fall away. The nude women carry away the bedding, yet still he can focus on nothing but the beautiful woman with the silver lamb necklace.
As the covers disappear, the man, tied to a raised cross, is revealed. The beautiful woman ceases tending to his manly parts just prior to his orgasm. He begs for her to finish. Instead, she draws a whip from somewhere beneath him, raises it above her head, and lashes
his bare skin. The meat on his thigh quivers as the whip strikes.
“Leave. And never return,” she says.
On all sides, naked women incessantly whip his defenseless body. His fists curl up, pulling at the silk; his toes curl, and tears hang at the corners of his eyes. Lines of red appear in flashes across his body. With every thrash, his body convulses. He screams his throat raw until he passes out.
He wakes to honey dripping down his chin. He lifts his head, though a raging ache in his skull protests. He sees the tops of trees, the clouds, the blue sky, and it takes him a while to realize he is suspended upside down. Attempting to move his hands, he is met with a sharp pain. The silk bindings have been replaced with iron stakes. He turns his head toward his hand, bolted to the wood; the bloody wound has attracted insects. They feast at his flesh in a ring around the iron stake. He looks to his left. His other hand is worse. A ring of skin is missing, eaten away by the bugs.
As he returns to his senses, the pain in his hands intensifies. Then he feels pain elsewhere. Another drip from his chin. He looks up to where the honey had fallen from, and his stomach heaves. If his stomach wasn’t empty he would have thrown up all over his own face. Flies buzz around his crotch, stopping occasionally for the sugary honey. His penis is blotchy; parts of his skin seem to rise and fall as various insects burrow. A dark-yellow pus, darker than the honey, covers the skin around his pubes. It had begun to fester. He feels a writhing sensation in his asshole and an excruciating itching like he has never felt before. Only after his sphincter stretches open, revealing a torrent of maggots spilling down his back and crotch, does he realize what foreign creature had made a home of his intestines. He watches the insects devour his genitals. He begins to scream. He yanks at the stakes in vain. The inverted cross rocks back and forth as he struggles.
***
He sat up in bed, the white sheet coming up with him, clinging to his back by his own sweat.
“What the hell are you doing?” Jennifer rolled on to her side so she was looking at Kenneth.
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