Bryan Smith: The Killing Kind

Not that Zeb cared, really.

Clyde wasn’t that person anymore. Hadn’t been for many years.

Clyde held the severed head close to his face and pressed his chapped lips to the dead girl’s blood-caked mouth. Zeb watched him push his tongue between the dead lips and felt another little twitch at his groin. He glanced at the headless corpse and thought about spreading her legs for another go. But the exaggerated slurping, smacking sounds Clyde was making distracted him.

“Come on, baby. Gimme some lovin’.” Clyde kissed the dead lips again, made the same absurdly exaggerated smacking sounds. He glanced at Zeb and grinned, turning the head’s slack features toward him. “Ain’t she the sexiest bitch you ever seen, Zebbo? I think I’m gonna marry her. What do you think?”

“You have my blessings.”

“Superb! You’ll be my best man.”

Clyde did a wobbly half spin away from Zeb and cupped his free hand around his mouth. “Hey, asshole. I’m engaged to your bitch now. What do you think about that?”

A longish moment passed.

The only sounds were the sigh of the wind and the hiss of tires on the nearby interstate, which was obscured by a stand of tall trees.

Then a muffled whimper drifted across the field.

Zeb grinned.

Clyde whooped and waved the head again. “Yeah! I knew you were faking being unconscious, motherfucker! Check out the blushing bride!”

Another wild wave of the head.

Another hopeless whimper.

“She’s mine now, ya fuckin’ punk! All miiiiiiiiiiiiinnnne!”

The whimpering briefly gave way to an outburst of impotent bravado. “I’ll kill you! Both of you. What you did…both of you…”

The voice cracked again and the whimpering resumed.

Zeb snorted. “Typical.”

Clyde shot him a wild, gleeful grin. “Well, shit, I guess we’re gonna have to take some reasonable steps to defend ourselves, Zebbo. I do think I heard that boy threaten to kill us. Did I hear right?”

“You heard right.”

Zeb got to his feet and started across the field, stepping on the dead girl’s stomach en route to where her handsome boyfriend hung upside down from the sturdiest low-hanging branch of a tall tree. When Zeb and Clyde reached the tree, they could see the headlights of cars zipping by on the interstate.

Zeb held out a hand. “Your knife.”

The Buck knife was embedded in one of the dead girl’s ears. Clyde extracted it and passed it to his friend. Zeb approached the dangling boyfriend, savoring the fear evident in the way he thrashed and screamed. The thick branch creaked, but showed no signs of breaking.

Zeb stared down at him. “I spent a lot of years in a nuthouse, boy. I got out. Obviously.”

Clyde snickered.

“One time I heard an orderly talking. He was saying how there’s different kinds of crazy. There’s your regular, everyday crazy. Folks take pills for it and they’re mostly okay. Mostly they’re only dangerous to themselves. Then there’s a middle-ground kind of crazy. People who are mostly just a threat to themselves but might snap one day and hurt somebody else. But this would just be an isolated incident. These people can still be treated, and maybe there’s even some hope for them. And then this orderly talked about me. According to him that day, I’m the worst kind of crazy. The hopeless kind. The killing kind. You see, I don’t struggle with my feelings or any of that shit. I like to hurt people. You might say it’s my main interest in life. My calling.”

Clyde said, “Your raison d’être.”

The boyfriend looked up at Zeb and sniffled. “Fuck you, man.”

Zeb’s expression didn’t change, nor did his tone. “That orderly was right. And I told him that right before I slit his belly open. Which, by the way, is what I’m about to do to you.”

Clyde laughed. “Gut him!”

Zeb plunged the knife into the man’s flesh at a spot just below the waistline and drew it downward in a single vicious slash. He tossed the knife aside and gripped the edges of the wound with both hands, tugging at the gash and ripping it open as far as he could. Blood and loops of viscera spilled through the opening. The man wasn’t dead yet. He thrashed some more, but Zeb easily held him in place, pinning him against the tree. Then he pushed a hand all the way through the gash, groped around until he found a soft, squishy organ…and squeezed.

The man screamed one last time.

Clyde kept laughing.

Later, as they sat around their campfire roasting bits of human flesh on sticks, Clyde took a swig from a flask filled with cheap whiskey and sighed. “Beautiful night.”

Zeb pulled the stick away from the fire and eased the bit of flesh off the end. He popped it into his mouth and chewed, savoring the taste for several moments before the delightful morsel slid slowly down his gullet. He smiled. “Indeed.”

Clyde cleared his throat. “You, uh…you talk to Lulu lately?”

Zeb affixed another piece of meat to the stick and held it over the fire. “Indeed.”

“She tell you where we should go next?”

“Yes.”

A long moment passed. A big semi’s horn blatted out on the interstate. “Well, don’t keep a man in suspense, Zebbo. Where we headed?”

Zeb was still smiling. “Myrtle Beach.”

March 22

“You can back off now.”

Rob flinched. “Huh?”

It was the first time she’d spoken since they’d merged with the interstate traffic. Some twenty minutes of tense silence. The girl had spent most of that time sitting forward in her seat, her eyes intent on the back of the rental van. Rob knew it was a rental from the Enterprise sticker on the rear bumper. There were all sorts of questions he wanted to ask her. For instance, who were the people in the van and why was it necessary to abduct a stranger to follow them? What did she intend to do once she caught up with them? But he kept his mouth shut. Her generally hostile demeanor made it clear this was for the best. She scared the hell out of him, so much so it was almost possible to ignore how hot she was.

Almost.

She sat back in her seat now, folded her hands almost primly in her lap. “I said you can back off. Are you fucking deaf?”

They were maybe two car lengths behind the van. Rob eased off the gas and the distance quickly increased to three car lengths, then four. A blue Dodge Neon with flaking paint and stickers all over the back window changed lanes, moving into the space between the van and the Galaxie. Rob hit the clicker and started to change lanes.

“Don’t.”

Rob turned the clicker off and looked at her. “What’s the deal here? I thought you didn’t want me to lose them.”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I know where they’re going.”

Rob couldn’t help it-he laughed. “Oh, yeah? That’s funny. Because for a while there I thought it was critically important that I stay right on their fucking ass and not lose sight of them if I wanted to live.”

The girl kicked off her shoes and scooted farther down in her seat. She raised her legs and propped her feet on the dashboard. She set the gun in her lap and examined the fingernails of her right hand. The black nail polish was chipping away in places. “It was. But I’ve calmed down some. I’ll kill them later, after they get where they’re going.”

Rob looked at her feet. The socks were the kind with toes. She wiggled the toes as he stared at them. It sent a strange little tingle through him. He glanced at the road. The blue Neon was still between them and the van. “Well, thanks for not killing me. Or them. Yet.” He jerked his left hand, rattling the handcuff bracelets. “So tell me something. Say we get pulled over for some reason. Obviously any cop with more than one or two functioning brain cells would want to know why I’m cuffed to the wheel. What’s your explanation?”