Bryan Smith - The Killing Kind

But he did hear the boom of the gun.

He screamed and opened his eyes in time to see Greg’s body toppling toward him. He screamed again and scrambled out of the way. Greg hit the ground and didn’t move. He was dead, with a ragged hole in the center of his forehead and a much bigger one at the back of his head. Rob whined and scooted away from the body, twisting around to stare up at Roxie through eyes wide with terror. His heart felt close to bursting, it was beating so hard and fast. He tried to speak, but couldn’t catch his breath.

Roxie was smirking and shaking her head. “Oh, come on, Rob. It was just a game. I was never really gonna shoot you. You lost, remember?”

Rob stayed there on his knees for several more moments, panting hard and struggling not to hyperventilate. By the time he at last found his voice, the terror was surging inside him again. “I wish you had killed me. Oh fuck. Fuck. Holy fuck. I can’t take any more of this. I can’t. I swear.”

Roxie leaned toward him, holding out her free hand. “Oh, stop being such a pussy.” She fixed him with a steely, unyielding glare. “I’m not gonna kill you, Rob. Not unless you put me in a position where I have to, and I don’t think you’re gonna do that. Are you?”

Rob took her hand and let her haul him to his feet. He looked her in the eye and said, “You’re crazy. You are fucking crazy.”

She opened his hand and pressed the gun into it, forced his fingers to wrap around the butt. She smiled and moved his hand so that the gun barrel was pressed against her belly. “There. Now you’re the one with the power. You can kill me. Be done with me. Go on. What are you waiting for?”

Rob’s hand started to shake.

Tears spilled from his eyes.

Roxie wiped some of the tears away with the ball of a thumb. “It’s loaded, Rob. I’m not setting you up and this isn’t another game. You can kill me if you want. You really can.”

His shaking became more pronounced.

He let go of the gun and it hit the ground with a thud.

Roxie sighed. “It’s funny. I should feel relieved, but a little part of me is disappointed. Isn’t that funny?”

Rob swallowed thickly. “No. It’s not funny at all.”

“Sometimes I kind of want to die.”

Rob’s eyes filled with tears again. “Roxie…”

A small laugh. “Oh, relax. You’re not getting rid of me anytime soon.”

Rob kept shaking. This was all too much. He needed a tall bottle of liquor and a fistful of pills. He needed to make this all go away for a while. But he knew he was a long way from even that brand of empty solace.

Roxie retrieved the gun and tucked it in a rear pocket. “Come on, baby.” She clasped hands with him and steered him back in the general direction of the road. “Time’s a-wastin’.”

Roxie had a few last things to attend to when they finally reached the road. She retrieved her overflowing tote bag from the Galaxie and stowed it in the Tercel. She switched out the Tercel’s plates with plates stolen from yet another car. Those things accomplished, they got in the Tercel and drove away from there.

Roxie was driving and that was fine with Rob.

He’d done enough of it for a while.

He glanced at the rearview mirror and caught a last glimpse of the Galaxie’s bright red finish before the road twisted and the deep woods swallowed the old car. He felt a pang at the loss of his grandfather’s treasured antique, but it was a numb pain. Too much had happened. Maybe there would be time for sentimentality later. Time to grieve that lost link with his family’s past.

He looked at Roxie.

Saw her watching him, face devoid of even a hint of a smile.

No.

Probably not.

He closed his eyes and tried-without much success-to make his mind blank. But he couldn’t stop thinking. About all of it. The terror. The disconnection from his own life. All those dead bodies. So he opened his eyes again and watched the road ahead. Because he knew the truth.

There would never be any escaping the horror surrounding him.

It was too late to turn away.

Too late to run or make a different choice.

Too fucking late all around.

March 20

Zeb tied the girl to the motel-room bed and went into the bathroom. He shut the door, went over to the toilet, and flipped the seat up. Moments later he had his cock out and was pumping the engorged organ furiously with his fist. He closed his eyes and imagined it was the girl’s mouth on him. The vivid image made him groan and inside of a minute he was shooting thick ropes of come into the toilet water. He stood there panting for a time and stared at the floating discharge. The ejaculate looked like strands of cheap pearls drifting in water. He groaned again and a feeling of intense relief flooded through him.

Never in his adult life had he experienced a level of frustration even close to what he had been dealing with the past few days, not even during his years in the institution, locked up for so long in that little room. That had been easy compared to the effort required to keep his hands off the girl.

He flipped the toilet seat down, letting it bang shut, and pushed the flush handle. A gurgle of rushing water carried his spilled seed away. He shuffled over to the sink and stared at his reflection in the mirror mounted above it. His long hair was gone. The girl had cut it for him last night, after they’d cut her hair into that bob style and dyed it an unnatural shade of bright red. He had been wary of trusting the task to her, but Lulu had insisted. The scissors were long and sharp, a potentially very effective weapon. He had felt vulnerable, another unfamiliar and unpleasant experience. But he wasn’t in the habit of disobeying Lulu, and, as usual, she had been right. The girl did not attack him. And that was a hard thing to figure out. She could easily have inflicted a very severe wound, perhaps even killed him. So why hadn’t she?

“I told you, Zeb. She’s like you. Deep down, she knows it.”

There was a new image in the mirror. Lulu had materialized and was standing a few feet directly behind him. He turned and faced her, folding his arms across his chest and leaning his butt against the edge of the sink. “Yeah, you keep saying that. But so far I haven’t seen any proof.”

Lulu smiled. “You will, soon enough.”

This was another thing he was having some trouble accepting. Until yesterday, Lulu had always been a disembodied voice in his head. Completely real, he knew, but there had never been any hint of a physical component to her existence. Until she appeared out of thin air last night, after the girl had drifted off to sleep. That had spooked him. Zeb had never been genuinely scared of anything in his entire adult life, but that had done it. One moment he was sitting on the edge of the bed, smoking a cigarette and just thinking, and then-poof!-there she was.

Lulu was a dead ringer for Adrienne Barbeau, an actress he remembered from low-budget movies he’d seen on cable when he was young. She wore a tiny blue bikini and a necklace of withered human ears. The attire was bizarre, but it was her uncanny resemblance to the actress that initially made him think she was a hallucination. So, acting on the theory that no hallucination would have physical substance, he’d grabbed one of her large breasts. It had felt real enough-and pleasingly pliable-beneath his probing fingers. The subsequent stinging slap across his face had felt just as real.

She looked exactly the same as she had last night, except now she wore a red bikini instead of a blue one.

“You really think she wants to kill?”

“She killed Clyde, didn’t she?”

Zeb’s expression darkened. “Yeah. In self-defense. Ain’t the same thing as what you’re sayin’. I gave her a chance to prove herself and she couldn’t do it.”