DOA III

by Bentley Little

  Then I watched him do that decomposition thing like last time, and I couldn’t stop trembling. He’d come back...

  I promised myself the next time I wouldn’t be caught unprepared. I took R&R the following year so I could be alone should Ritchie make his anniversary return.

  Which he did.

  I waited for him far off the grid, in the middle of a desert wasteland with a clear line of sight in all directions. A Beretta M9 pistol and a Ka-Bar knife were holstered at opposite hips. Good ol’ bullets and steel, effective at killing Iraqis and, apparently, at killing haunts. Mid-afternoon and Ritchie just sort of materialized about twenty feet away, looking busted to hell and with an added pair of bullet holes in his forehead to top off the damage I’d done from previous years.

  “Jack Off...” he said, his voice strained and wispy. “Jack Off, I’ll get you back… someday, I swear…”

  “It was an accident, Ritchie. You ran out in front of my car.” “Bullshit. You drove over me on purpose...”

  Man, regret is a heavy load, a knapsack on your back that someone keeps dropping bricks into when you’re not paying attention, until all of a sudden you stagger under its weight.

  “I wish I could take it back,” I said. “I swear on everything holy, I wish I could.”

  “Prince Jack Off… always thought you was better’n me, better grades, more money, more friends.”

  “Hell with that! I didn’t have any of those things, Ritchie. I was the same as you, a nobody.”

  “No... you got what I wanted, all I ever fuckin’ wanted was to leave that shithole town and start over, somewhere no one knew me... I was stuck there, trapped at Eagle Crest, trapped in east Texas, everyone despised me for years…” Ritchie’s wrecked face quivered like he was going to cry, his pale, lopsided eyes bulging, than narrowing, unsure whether to let the tears flow or not. “Nothing worse... knowing every single person around you has cut you somehow, and you got to see them day after day, the jeers echoing on each face... and here you come, someone with a fresh slate... should’ve been me... should’ve been me…”

  “I was only a kid, I didn’t have any say in the matter!” I felt shocked, beyond overwhelmed at what he’d said, the asininity of what people lay on you for fault. “My old man lost his job, we had to move so he could start work again. I hated moving, I had friends I left behind—”

  “Oh play me a fuckin’ fiddle, you had friends. I never had a friend!”

  And when Ritchie shrieked, I saw those broken teeth inside his mouth, all ivory razors with stains on them from drinking too much cola or chewin’ bubble gum or maybe it was dried blood from being run over, I don’t know.

  He raised his arms at me again, fingers outstretched like how he did in the flophouse kitchen, like he was going to gouge out my eyes, rip out my tongue, tear my face the way a raptor rends its prey with talons.

  I pulled my Beretta. “This is how it’s gonna go, Ritchie. This haunting business is done. Go back to whatever pit of Hell you crawled out from, or I’m going to pop you again, first in the knees, then the elbows. I know you still feel pain.”

  “I do,” Ritchie said. “Pain and loneliness…” and he started blubbering. Fat tears poured down his smashed face, rolling over zits, falling into gaping wounds. He sunk to the ground, crying and crying.

  “Oh God, man, I’m sorry,” I said. I holstered the gun and took a step tentatively to him.

  Ritchie looked up to me and bawled like a baby. “I’m sorry too..”

  He held his arms up wide, offering a hug, one of those arms jangling around from all the busted bones. I suddenly felt he was just this broken doll-child I wanted to comfort, wanted to relieve of all his hurt, all his torment. I moved to Ritchie and accepted his embrace.

  …and he grabbed the back of my head and bit into my throat with those shattered teeth. I screamed, not from fear, but from rage: Even in death, Ritchie the Turd had laid a trap for me.

  I wrenched backward, a geyser of blood freed at my throat. Next came those fingers slashing for my eyes, as I’d expected all along. I twisted away in time, but as his hand trailed past my face, he caught my ear. Those talons trenched into my temple ripping my left ear half off my head. If I would have backed from him anymore, I’d have completed the dismemberment myself.

  Instead I drove forward with my head, smashing it into the bridge of Ritchie’s nose. He yelped, and let go of my ear and his hand went to his face. For a moment we were kids again, trading punches that didn’t amount to much. This time though, it’d be brawling to the death.

  Ritchie laughed, a horrible twang coming from his busted nose, his ruined mouth, his chest full of holes. “How’s that taste, Jack Off?”

  I already felt weaker, blood flowing from my neck, wondering if he’d chewed out an artery. But I wasn’t done yet. “Tastes like this, douchebag!”

  I pulled my gun but didn’t shoot—naw, that’d be too easy. I held it by the barrel and started pummeling his face. He went to screaming and crying and beggin’ for mercy, but I remembered those crocodile tears from earlier, and by then it was too late anyway. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. Ritchie’s head was a jack-o’-lantern that’d been left on the porch a month after Halloween’s passed, just all rotten and pulpy inside. The Beretta went up and down, up and down into him, crushing it all, what was left of his face, his skull, ’til nothing remained but how a candle looks on its holder after it’s melted out: a bit of wick and a puddle of red wax splashed all around.

  I let Ritchie fall, and his body started withering and fading as it’d done before. I felt about to faint, but my heart was pounding, and adrenaline alone got me moving. I managed to get to my jeep and make for help.

  When I came to, I had thirteen stitches in my neck and the top of my left ear was missing. I told the doctors I’d been attacked by enemy insurgents and fought them off, and saved a kidnapped boy in the process.

  Of course, no one could find that boy or any of the four soldiers I’d claimed to have killed. My story didn’t make sense, but it’d be even less sense should I tell the truth. I was called a War Hero and returned to active duty.

  Besides that one fib, I was a good soldier, but six months later the war ended, so I was discharged. Went home to Texas and became a deputy sheriff in the very same town I’d first killed Ritchie Turdamczyk. People didn’t call me The Classmate Killer anymore; I was now War Hero, I was Sir.

  And as a deputy, I protected others and I served as obliged, but all the while thinking about March 15... dreading March 15...

  It came, inexorably and dreadfully, just like Ritchie himself. No one else would have known it was Ritchie but me, that lardass wobbling toward me on shattered limbs, blood and guts smeared everywhere, his head gone. Above his neck was just a broken jaw; everything higher than that mashed away to oblivion.

  “Anything to say to me this time, Ritchie? Any parting jabs, any more taunts?” I asked. “You got anything, Turd?”

  Ritchie didn’t reply as he staggered toward me, just nodded the remnants of his jaw up and down the way a chicken waggles its gullet.

  “Here’s an egg for you, Ritchie, a big shiny egg,” I said and showed what I’d brought for his fourth unholy visit: a felling axe with a five-pound head on a thirty-two-inch hickory shaft.

  “This is for my car.” I swung that axe into his leg, right at mid-thigh. The blow knocked Ritchie over, and he fell like a sack of potatoes, all lumpy with things rolling around inside. I chopped again, severing off the leg entirely. Crimson poured out, regardless that I’d killed him four times already.

  I sank the axe into his chest, shattering whatever ribs remained. “Let’s see you come back next year on one leg.”

  And he did.

  The fucker came hopping for me while I was on an emergency call. I told my partner, Deputy Reaves, that I was going to circle around an alley to flush out a burglary suspect. Instead, when I was alone, I used my taser gun to incapacitate Ritchie, then my baton to beat the shit out of him un
til he dissipated for another year, all the while wishing I’d chopped off the other leg and both his arms last year when I had the axe.

  Are all men somehow haunted by those they’ve slain? I never spoke to any of the other soldiers about it, and I didn’t know any killers—accidental or otherwise. Guessin’ everyone deals in their own way, not like there’s a support group for vengeful ghost murderers. But why did only Ritchie come back? I’d killed a dozen or more in the army, and put down a rapist with a knife while on the police force. But only Ritchie…

  Like I said before, I never was the brightest bulb. I do know it’s considered unlucky to be killed on the Ides of March, so maybe that was it, the day Caesar got murdered by the people he was closest to... only had Ritchie been closest to me, the one who paid him most attention?

  And that got me thinking about old MAD magazines. There was a comic strip in each issue, a recurring gag called Spy vs. Spy, in which two beak-nosed characters were always fighting each other, tricking the other until one got killed.

  You never knew why they were at odds against the other, just took for granted they were mirror images of themselves, but that one was colored white and one was colored black, so that made them enemies, always at each other’s throats, like me and Ritchie. Every month one of them would die by a new means, a new trick or taunt: gun, bomb, pit of sharks.

  Next year I’m gonna dissolve Ritchie in a tank of acid…

  And I would have, but would even acid have ended it?

  See, as the next March 15 approached, something snapped in me. I’d been having a shitty few weeks: A man who beat dogs got freed in court over a technicality I loused up. A girl I was dating left me, because I screamed Ritchie’s name every night in dreams. I was sick and miserable with politics and foul weather and heavy debt.

  When the Turd next came hopping for me, I’d cleared out the garage and welcomed him in. I handcuffed him to a chair bolted to the floor and took out all my angst and aggression and despair that had bottled up over recent events. A pair of his fingers went off with gardening shears; salt was poured over the stump of his head; I used an electric drill in the small of his back, then a welding torch, then a stapler. Ritchie writhed and spasmed but didn’t make a sound. Man, I had more planned, using him as the outlet for my unhappiness, but then he gave that final shudder and rotted away from the chair. I guess that was all his undead body could take for the year.

  Next time, I’ll draw it out even longer.

  And I did. Years passed in that way, and it became easier, more thrilling, something I grew to look forward to, the way a child might look forward to the adventure of opening gifts come Christmas time. Oh, March 15 in my garage came a time to cherish, just cleansing and renewing me for a new year.

  For a decade that went on, and Ritchie kept coming back for more, what was left of him anyway, crawling to me like a great rotten worm. I’d find new ways to torture him, new ways to kill him, and still he’d return. And maybe that was me in school, in Ritchie’s eyes: Thinking I’d just go away if he tormented me, yet I came back day after day, ’cause that’s what a kid in school does, isn’t it? That’s what a cursed soul does, the terribleness of having to repeat that which we loathe, which we fear, which causes us pain.

  And I thought: I beat you, Ritchie. I killed you, and I’m still living. I kill you every year, and I love it. I’m a war hero, an officer of the law, people respect me, I make good money... I am better than you!

  But then he got me back, like he always did. I had a good run toppin’ him, though like Spy vs. Spy, the adversary keeps returning until he gets his revenge, and then the battle wages on another day, and there ain’t any end in sight.

  Truth be told, I’d taken to doing some crazy shit, and my sanity probably would have soon snapped anyway. I’d amputated his good arm and taken his other leg, jammed bottle rockets up his ass, flayed him, and worse. Only limb he had left was the arm that’d snapped in a dozen places when I ran over him, the one that swung loose like a chain of iron links when he lifted it. Only two fingers remained in its hand, one of those missing the knuckles and held in place with a twist tie. Really, he was half a skeleton by then. I could lift him same as a baby, and I did, dressing him in doll clothes and carrying him around the house.

  I’d prop him up on the couch, watch football on TV together, use him for a dartboard. I’d pour beer down his throat, try and make Ritchie’s remains get drunk, and then masturbate in his lap. Jack Off, I’d imagine him whispering, and that’d make me smile.

  See, lording it over a monster makes you feel invulnerable. I’d grown lax, taken for granted his scheming ways.

  That day I had to take a piss, and I left him unattended in the living room. I mean, what could he do, right? But when I returned, the room was in shambles. Tables upended, a crack in the TV screen, books, cushions flung everywhere, the telephone knocked over, the beer knocked over, plates thrown, everything broken, spilled, trashed. And there was Ritchie just lying in the middle of it all, his chest thumping like he’d exerted himself too much, one of those last two fingers upraised to flip me the bird.

  “Oh, Ritchie, you done it now. You fuckin’ turd, I’m going to hurt you. I’m gonna rape your stumps, rip out your bowels and strangle you with them. You’re a screwed pooch when you suffocate by your own intestines, huh? The last smell by your own crap, even if your nose is gone, ha ha! I’m gonna boil you in vinegar, piss on your bones…”

  I grabbed his hand and dragged him into the garage and went to work on him.

  That sneaky bastard... little did I know, when Ritchie wrecked the living room, he’d dialed 9-1-1 with the last good finger of his shattered arm. The rest of the destruction was just camouflage so I wouldn’t notice the phone’s receiver had been knocked off the cradle. Seems the 9-1-1 operator heard my rant and dispatched an emergency alert to the police right away.

  Ironic thing, they were my own department that showed up, officers I’d been working alongside for ten years tipped to the fact that someone was being tortured and killed in my house.

  Ritchie’s final trap. They kicked down the door right when I had a scalpel inside the Turd’s lungs, all covered in his blood. I still don’t know where his blood came from, but it was everywhere. My partner, Deputy Reaves, was among the responders, and his face paled white as Ritchie’s exposed thighbone.

  “Jackson, drop the knife!”

  “No, no, he started it!” I cried out defensively, pulling the scalpel free.

  Ritchie started convulsing and his hand jerked up, like he was trying to jab me.

  “Not this time, Turd,” I said, and slid the blade through his shattered ribs into the black lump that was his heart.

  To their credit, my brothers in blue used rubber bullets. Better though, they’d have used live rounds.

  One of the first shots spun me, and another round smashed the fourth vertebrae of my spine. It was a fluke, doctors told me afterward, a freak accident that turned me into a quadriplegic.

  But I’d gotten Ritchie again, at least for another year. He withered and vanished so fast that the officers—my friends and partners—saw nothing more than one of their own, lying perfectly still on the floor and raving half-mad.

  So here I wait, as another year’s passed, all the while thinking ’bout the ghost that’s coming and not knowing what it’s going to do when it gets here, only that it’ll be bad, real fuckin’ bad, a whole lifetime of bad that it thinks it owes.

  And maybe I do owe it to him, whatever’s coming, maybe I owe him a whole lifetime that he didn’t get. Maybe if I don’t suffer it now, I’ll pay more the dearer in Hell. Or maybe Ritchie’ll have learned mercy, finally give it up, let bygones be bygones, though that’s as likely as me walking again. Like it or not, I’ll wish I was dead as him, and if there was a way to kill myself I would.

  So here I sit in this wheelchair, frozen from the neck down, waiting for tomorrow to come. He’s got no head, no legs, one busted arm, only one good finger. I don’t kno
w how he’ll get his vengeance, but he’ll come up with something.

  After all, it’s Ritchie.

  Eric J. Guignard is a writer and editor of dark and speculative fiction, operating from the shadowy outskirts of Los Angeles. His works have appeared in publications such as Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, Shock Totem, Buzzy Magazine, and Dark Discoveries Magazine. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award, been a finalist for the International Thriller Writers Award, and a multi-nominee of the Pushcart Prize. Outside the glamorous and jet- setting world of indie fiction, Eric’s a technical writer and college professor, and he stumbles home each day to a wife, children, cats, and a terrarium filled with mischievous beetles. Visit Eric at www.ericjguignard.com,

  his blog: ericjguignard.blogspot.com, or Twitter: @ericjguignard.

  I’D GIVE ANYTHING FOR YOU by Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee

  JACK KETCHUM AND EDWARD LEE

  “Please, please don’t do this to us, Clare!” Roderic pleaded from the imported flagstone steps of the great house.

  Us, Clare thought. Thirty years old and still living with his mother. Jesus!

  His voice called out nasal and forlorn behind her. “I’d give anything for you!”

  How many times had she heard that in the last nine months? Big deal! She wanted to shout. Can’t you take a hint? There’s nothing I want from you! Instead, she turned.

  “Look. It’s not working out,” she said. He looked befuddled.

  “What are you taking about? Things are great! You said you’d marry me!”

  “Oh Roderic, I did not,” she lied.

  Early on, eight long months ago, that was exactly what she’d said. At thirty-one, she wasn’t getting any younger. And Roderic had millions. Or, rather, his mother did.