Bryan Smith: The Killing Kind

Zoe glanced up from the copy of Entertainment Weekly open in her lap and saw Emily struggling to hold back a smile. She gave up and shook her head, hiding the smile by twisting it into a smirk. “Whatever. He will have to beg for it, though, I guarantee that.”

Joe shrugged and laughed again. “I’ll beg all you want, baby. Hell, you can tie me up and spank me for being such a bad boy, too.”

Emily’s smirk deepened. “Yeah. And maybe even make you wear a dress again.”

“Again!” Chuck looked like he wanted to puke. “Oh, man. My best friend’s a fucking cross-dressing perv. Gross, dude.”

Emily chuckled. “Perfectly harmless fetish.”

Joe knocked back some more beer and laughed. “Dude, you’d do it too if it meant you got to hook up with that every night.” He jerked a thumb in the direction of his girlfriend. “No shit, man, and I’m not just saying this because I’m already half-buzzed and it’s barely noon, but Em is the greatest fuck of all fucking time. I’d shoot a man in Reno for just one taste of her sweet, sweet pussy.”

Zoe made a face. “You’re disgusting.”

Joe grinned. “Disgusting, but adorable.”

Emily rolled her eyes and heaved the sigh of the long-suffering. “Joe, because you worship the ground I walk on, I can cut you some slack for the stupid things that come out of your mouth. But your friend up there is a fucking douche bag.”

Zoe slapped the magazine shut and gaped at her. “Emily!”

Chuck laughed. “Oh, you’re gonna get it now. My girl won’t take that kind of talk about her man. Will ya, honey?”

Sean Hewitt chimed in from the back. “Catfight! Hot lesbian catfight!”

The comment elicited a boisterous round of laughter and hooting. Joe started looking for his camera and making comments about putting up a video on YouTube.

Emily looked at Zoe. She was still smiling, and there was a disquieting knowing quality in the cast of her features. Zoe stared back at her and, as always, was struck by her friend’s classic, elegant beauty. She looked like a film star of the 1940s. Refined, assured, oozing intelligence and sexuality, with a slender neck, kissable lips, and the cheekbones of a silver-screen goddess. The kissable part Zoe could attest to, having made out with Emily a time or two. That radiant face was framed by dark hair cut in a choppy style. Looking at her now, Zoe realized her friend bore a passing resemblance to the goth girl Chuck and Sean had treated with such obnoxious derision. The resemblance was pretty close, actually, with Emily as a less garish and more sophisticated version of the younger girl. And maybe that was a little part of why Emily was so pissed at Chuck.

The larger part being that she simply hated his guts.

Emily’s eyes flicked toward Chuck. “Oh, please. She’s no more your girl than I am. And I’d rather be flayed alive and fed to rabid weasels than touch you.”

The van’s interior went deathly silent. Zoe’s heart began to race. Emily couldn’t know about her plans to break up with Chuck. Right? Or had she gotten too drunk one night and told Emily something she couldn’t remember? It was vaguely possible, but she hadn’t done a lot in the way of excessive drinking since making her decision. Nonetheless, paranoia took root inside her and made her want to scream.

It was too soon for this.

And pretty much the worst possible time for it.

Chuck glanced at the rearview mirror. “You’re full of shit, Emily.”

An amused grin played at the corners of Emily’s mouth. She looked at Zoe again. “Am I, Zoe?”

Zoe seethed inwardly. There was only one way to defuse the situation and prevent the vacation from turning into a total disaster before it was barely under way. Shit. “I’m your girl, Chuck. Em’s just fucking with you, but she does have a point. You shouldn’t have been such a dick to that girl.”

Chuck slapped a palm against the steering wheel. “But she was a freak! Christ, you saw her!” His voice took on the thick, warbly tone Zoe thought of as his Retard Voice. “Oooh, look at me, I’m all fucking alternative. I’m all goth as fuck. Look how different I am. Look at all my piercings and tattoos and my freaky fucking clothes. Oh, I’m just so much cooler and with it than all you square preppy fags. Oooohhh…” He cleared his throat again and shifted back to his normal tone. “And fuck it, I’m not apologizing for anything. I hate that shit. People like that are the biggest posers of all. Maybe she learned herself a good fucking lesson today.”

Joe barked laughter. “The one and only Chuck Kirby, ladies and gentlemen. The man, the myth, the legend…”

“The fucking asshole,” Emily added, but this time she was ignored.

Joe opened another beer and slurped foam from the top of the can as it burbled out of the opening. He wiped his lips and leaned between the seats to show Emily a foamy grin. “Can’t let any go to waste. That’d be alcohol abuse.”

Emily sighed again and glanced at Zoe. “Boys. How I hate them.”

Zoe shrugged, a what-can-you-do? gesture. “Yeah.”

Joe gasped. “How dare you! We’re not ‘boys.’ We’re men. We’re…we’re…”

“Barbarians?” Chuck suggested.

“Yeah!” Joe swigged more beer. At this rate he’d be passing out later in the afternoon. “We’re barbarians! We’re fucking cavemen!”

He held his hand up for a high five and Chuck obliged him.

Zoe listened to them trade beery inanities back and forth and felt the beginnings of a fresh headache. Every stupid thing out of Chuck’s mouth just made it worse. She snared some Tylenol from her purse and washed the pills down with a gulp of Coke.

She picked up her magazine and again tried to concentrate on it.

But it wasn’t easy.

She could feel Emily staring at her. It made her anxious and paranoid. She had the uneasy sense that her friend could see her every thought. Eventually she turned away from Emily and closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep.

But the feeling didn’t go away.

March 15

The days were getting warmer, but it wasn’t quite full spring yet, and the nights in Tennessee still possessed enough of a chill to set teeth to chattering, especially this close to the border with Kentucky. The breeze didn’t slice through your flesh quite the way it did up north when the weather was cold. But any sane person would find the conditions nippy enough to at least wear a light jacket or sweatshirt.

However, the man sitting cross-legged in a grassy field adjacent to a stretch of I-40 was not sane. At all. The earth beneath him was still slightly damp from last week’s rains. With his eyes closed and his head tilted upward, he appeared to be in a meditative trance. He sat perfectly still and outwardly looked as peaceful as a Buddhist monk.

However.

He wore only a ragged and dirty piece of clothing that had once been-in its former life as a young woman’s halter top-as brilliantly white as a mound of uncut cocaine. The bit of flimsy fabric was tied in a knot around his waist and the little flaps in front and back just managed to cover his genitals and ass cheeks.

The doctors who had cared for this man up until a month earlier would not have referred to him as “insane” in any official documentation. That word long ago fell out of vogue in the medical community, mostly because it has come to be seen as too limiting a term, or too inflammatory or insensitive, a relic of a less enlightened time. The man’s doctors instead said that he exhibited a number of symptoms typical of various abnormal brain syndromes. Schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, psychosis, etc. His chart back at the facility, where he’d spent the bulk of the last fifteen years, contained reams of notes detailing what was described as hallucinations and an elaborate but clearly delusional belief system, including reports of his frequent consultations with a “spirit guide” he called Lulu.