Robert Walker - Killer Instinct

His work was near done. He securely placed each jar atop the other with a little glass clink, unloading the cooler labeled Specimens. He had brought it in from the van. He'd waved at Jonstone down the street as he carried in the stuff. Jonstone was an insomniac, and it wasn't unusual to find him walking his dog even at three in the morning.

From the bottom of the cooler, he now lifted a small vial with a cork top. This he placed in the sink to be sterilized and reused later. Staring at the vial, it reflected the light over the sink, and he mused on its having been heated earlier by him, using his Bic lighter. He had stared through the flame at the dangling carcass. Alongside the slender tube resting in suds in his sink, he now placed an array of sullied items: a thermometer, a surgeon's scalpel, a pair of probes, a clamp, and a device he had only recently given a name to: the spigot.

Now he went to the case of fine steel knives and instruments gleaming in the weak light. He hadn't remembered wiping them clean, but he had. He now closed the cooler and the case, and he began to feel a little fatigued. He had driven a long way to get home. He went into the bathroom, peeling away his shirt, revealing a broad, hairy chest and a stomach that spilled over his pants top, the navel buried within flesh, unseen. He'd been dieting, watching the fried and fatty foods whenever he was on the road, but it seemed to be doing nothing for the midsection where all his extra weight appeared one day when he woke up and examined himself closely and critically. He wasn't terribly obese, just enough to cause a bulge all around him and to strain the buttons of his shirts. He'd taken to wearing oversized ties to business meetings to cover the area at his navel, but there was only so much that could be covered.

His face, too, was overlarge, the cheeks ballooning out, his jowls inflated to the point of hiding his better features, the distinct, dark crystal-blue eyes. He'd never had so large a head before. Why now? What was he to do about it? The only parts of his anatomy that seemed untouched by his sudden weight gain were his sinewy, taut limbs. The weights he lifted helped out here. And the blood diet was helping curb his appetite, he believed.

The years had taken their toll on his complexion as well. He was ashen, the graying hair making him even more ashen in appearance. It made doing business harder, both in the daylight hours and at night. He was a colorless man, had always been a colorless man, with a low opinion of himself on account of how lowly he was regarded by just about everyone he came into contact with. Most people treated him as if he were a filing cabinet, and an empty one at that. All his life. But he was a great deal more interesting than anyone suspected.

Still, he must face the fact that he was at a crucial point in his life. He had read a lot about patterns and phases of growth, stages that a man went through. This was one of them, contracting the fat tummy and the fat jowls. He vowed not to let it get the best of him, and so, as tired as he was, he did his push-ups and sit-ups before showering and lying back on the bed. In the shower, his mind had wandered back to the scene of the murder. The hot shower water was like her blood in its warmth.

In bed, his mind wandered back again to the details of the killing. He returned to survey the crumbling, filthy, odor-ridden old place in the woods miles from the main roads. He then methodically found the precise instruments that he required in the briefcase he had on hand, in order to open a vein and drain Candy of what he wanted from her. He dwelled on this, allowing the moment to cradle him to sleep. His rest was deep and peaceful, stirred only by the unpleasant flashes regarding the need for the imprecise, heavy-duty equipment he'd used on Candy.

He had had to return to the van, placing the murder weapons in a secret compartment, putting the camera filled with the negatives of the killing on the seat. From the rear now he pulled forth his battery-operated hacksaw, a nice toy. He then returned to stand before the body, deciding what touches would be best.

The hum of the hacksaw was welcome in the deafening silence of the place; he carefully sliced away the breasts before mutilating the vagina. There was next to no wasted blood. He counted on the horror of the mutilation to confound local police, send them scouring the countryside for a lunatic escaped from an asylum perhaps, or the town weirdo, or a recluse of the woods. Certainly, no one would be looking for a man like him.

When he'd done with his final cuts, he stepped back to look at the result, casting a roving, critical eye over the corpse. He started away, but at the door he stopped and returned.

“ What the hell,” he said aloud, touching the hacksaw almost gently to where her shoulder and arm met, severing the ligaments on all sides. With a gentle tug of his gloved hand, the bone separated neatly from its socket, and with a final flourish, he threw the arm across the room.

He was about to leave when he remembered one of his scalpels in the kitchen. He had left it in the basin. As he passed the corpse again, he also recalled the hospital tourniquet tied tightly about her neck, and the pink ribbon in her hair which he had placed there. He snatched this away, too. He didn't want to leave any clues save those that would befuddle and misguide the authorities, like her severed arm and the mutilated genitals.

Earlier, he had fished out the vial of semen from the cooler in his van. The semen belonged to another man, someone he didn't even know. He had warmed it to room temperature, then poured some into the dead woman's vagina and the remainder in her mouth. He was then careful to put the vial and its top back into the cooler to be taken away with him.

He'd sent the authorities on the trail of a sex pervert. They'd find just what he wanted them to and nothing more, like the little surprise in her mouth and vagina.

Satisfied, the killer left. Home was far away and waiting, and yet he was home and in bed, his needs fulfilled, dreaming that he was coming and becoming… Could life be any richer? He rather doubted it.

And his dreams proved him right now… as before… and always.

He kneels on all fours like a panting animal, below her neck where she is dangling. In a frenzied, altered state of consciousness and being, he doesn't remember tying her long, loose hair back in order to have a clear path to the spigot of her throat from which her blood is about to flow, now that he has tapped into it. He has everything in place. He loosens the tourniquet with his hand held over her eyes. The blood is coming through to him in a controlled, measured flow, just as he had imagined it a thousand times. His inventiveness and imagination have not failed him.

He is in orgy at this point, and while not a religious man by anyone's standard, he knows now what fervent emotions strike like paralyzing electricity through the brain and heart of a zealot. Down on all fours, he catches the blood of her life in his mouth, swallows it warm and experiences the ethereal soul of her pass into his bowels, relinquishing to him her complete essence. Blood sacrifices… as old as time and man.

She does not bleed profusely or carelessly. He has taken careful steps not to squander the precious red fluid. He has covered the wound he has inflicted on her white throat with the spigot and surgical tape, turning the tourniquet, applying just enough pressure to slow the bleeding so as to catch it calmly in the mason jars he has brought with him. As each is filled, he sets it aside on the table, working by the light of an old oil lamp and a lantern flashlight he has set up on end. He doesn't want the light to draw any attention, although it is miles to the main road.

He knows his lust is insatiable and that the supply he's taken from Candy will not long last him. He knows even before he arrives home this night that he will crave the drink he craves for the rest of his life, not only because he likes the taste of blood-has liked it from childhood-but also because he likes the good feeling of the slaughter itself. He finds comfort in it; he finds reason and balance and beauty in his relationship with the body he feeds on, the woman that feeds him.