Bryan Smith - The Killing Kind

She frowned.

Emily was smiling, but her eyes looked hard, malevolent.

Weird.

She started up the stairs and heard the slap of Emily’s sandals on the stairs beneath her. The first little flutter of alarm hit her as she glanced down and again saw that same vaguely evil expression. But that was forgotten as they reached the balcony and Zoe saw the broken shards of glass sprayed across the wooden beams. An accident, she assumed. But why hadn’t someone cleaned it up? This could be dangerous. She wasn’t wearing shoes or sandals and would have to-

“zoe! run!”

Zoe frowned again.

Chuck?

She heard pain in that voice. And terror. Something was horribly wrong here. She heard something else in the house. A whimper. A female sound. More evidence of something very bad happening. Then terrible, gleeful laughter. The laughter of a sadist. Followed by a scream.

Zoe moved back a step.

And she felt a hand at the small of her back.

The hand shoved her forward. She cried out as broken glass slashed at the soles of her bare feet. Emily grabbed her by an arm and wrenched her toward the space formerly occupied by a large pane of glass.

A glimpse of hell made her weak in the knees.

Emily shoved her again. Shards of glass still embedded in the door frame ripped at her flesh as she flew through the empty space and crashed to the hardwood floor. She rolled onto her side and stared straight up at Chuck. His face was streaked with tears. His mouth moved as he tried to speak, but he couldn’t force the words out.

Oh, Chuck…

She felt a foot on her shoulder. It pressed down, forcing her to lie flat on her back again. She looked up and saw a familiar face above her. Familiar, but not the face of someone she knew. It was her. She looked different, but it was definitely her. The girl Chuck had picked on at the coffee shop.

The killer.

Missy Wallace grinned. “Glad you could join us, Zoe. Now we can finally get this party started.”

March 27

Julie held her hand a few inches over the burner. Heat warmed her palm as the metal coil began to glow a bright red. The kitchen was spacious and modern, with an island and lots of gleaming fixtures. To the left of the stove was a counter crowded with various snack foods. Bags of chips and boxes of cookies, among other things. She reached into an open bag of tortilla chips and plucked one out, popping it in her mouth and savoring the salty taste. She was tempted to gobble down the whole bag. There hadn’t been a lot of opportunities to eat since yesterday. The pantry and fridge in that old guy’s home had been pretty bare. She’d been kind of irritated about that and hadn’t felt at all bad about sawing his ear off.

Her palm was hot now.

The big hunting knife was on the counter. She picked it up and placed the blade across the glowing burner coil. Someone screamed in the living room. A sound of unimaginable agony. Missy was probably doing something pretty interesting to one of the college kids. It wouldn’t be Rob. He never participated. She turned away from the stove and saw him standing several feet away from the action.

He sure looked nervous.

Maybe she could calm him down.

Leaving the knife on the burner, she walked into the living room. “Hey, uh…Missy?”

Missy paused in the act of torturing the one called Joe with a pair of pliers and looked at her. “Yeah?”

“Can I borrow Rob for a few minutes?”

Rob stopped staring at the floor long enough to look up and frown.

Missy clamped the pliers around one of Joe’s fingers again. “Sure.”

Julie took Rob by the hand and began to drag him out of the living room and down the hallway toward the master bedroom. Once they were in the room, she removed her clothes and stretched her naked body across the luxuriant bed.

“Fuck me, Rob.”

Rob glanced at the open door. Julie could see the backs of the people tied to the chairs from her vantage point. Rob wiped his mouth with a trembling hand and looked at her. “Shouldn’t we close that?”

“No.”

Rob sighed.

“I want to hear the screams clear as a bell. It’ll make it hotter.”

The look on Rob’s face was priceless. She saw horror and disgust. And fear. He was afraid of her. But not too afraid, apparently.

He began to unbutton his shirt.

The orgasmic screams emerging from the master bedroom disturbed Annalisa almost as much as anything else that had happened so far. How could anyone sane pause in the midst of committing atrocities to screw?

The answer to that was obvious.

These people weren’t sane. They were vicious and cruel. They derived great pleasure from acts of sadism. Well, the two girls did. Their behavior bothered the guy, she could tell. But his presence made him equally complicit. And maybe he wasn’t a sadist, but he was clearly twisted in his own way. He was screwing a young girl’s brains out while listening to people out here scream and cry. He was just as sick as his female companions. The only real difference was his apparent cowardice.

These people meant to kill them all. She had no illusions about that. This was the last night of her life. It scared her. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to hurt like Joe was hurting now. Her only comfort now was her firm belief in an afterlife. She was smarter than the average person. Her grades and IQ scores confirmed that. A lot of smart people didn’t believe there was anything beyond this life, but her faith in something bigger was strong and came from a place of calm, even in the face of all this horror. She would exist somewhere else in some form after her life here was over. She only hoped Sean would be there with her.

She looked at Emily.

Zoe was still lying flat on the floor, but now she was on her stomach. Emily sat on her back, pinning her there. She looked totally enthralled as she watched Missy torture Joe. All five fingers of Joe’s right hand were mangled wrecks. The digits were twisted in different directions. In more than one place a bit of broken bone poked through torn flesh. Joe was shaking and sobbing in his chair. This was the man Emily supposedly loved. She hadn’t actually loved him, of course. It was just another of her many deceptions. She didn’t know or understand the connection between Emily and these psychos, but it didn’t matter. Knowing wouldn’t change anything.

She heard footsteps from the hallway and glanced that way to see the bald duo returning from their bedroom romp. The guy wouldn’t look at them. He shuffled off out of view again while the girl went back into the kitchen. She returned to the living room a few seconds later, the big knife she’d threatened them with earlier in her hand again. Annalisa felt a pit open up in her stomach as the girl came right up to her.

“Look at me.”

Annalisa raised her head and looked the girl in the eye.

The girl smiled. “You’re pretty.”

Then she grabbed a handful of Annalisa’s hair and wound it in a tight knot to hold her head steady. Annalisa’s eyes jittered in their sockets as she watched the girl’s other hand slowly bring the big blade toward her face. She felt the heat of it as it closed to within inches of her flesh. She cried and started breathing faster.

Someone was saying, “Nonononononono…”

She realized it was her own voice.

The girl placed the blade flat across one of her cheeks. Annalisa screamed as she felt her flesh blister and sizzle. The girl tightened her grip on her hair and managed to keep her head relatively still while continuing to press the blade into her flesh. Her cheek melted and a scent of cooked meat filled her nostrils. She sucked in a deep breath and unleashed another ear-shredding scream. Her lungs felt ragged, but she didn’t care. She wasn’t about to stop screaming. Maybe if they all screamed loud enough someone who could help would hear.