Wrath White - The Resurrectionist

Josh deflated, collapsing on the couch.

“Look, I’m sorry. I just don’t know what to think. This is just so fucking confusing and scary as hell…either way. I mean, if this guy has been drugging both of us and then breaking in and raping you, that’s fucking terrifying. And if you’re, you know, losing it, that’s almost worst. You-you’re my rock. You’re supposed to keep me from losing it.”

There was a hitch in Josh’s voice. When he looked up at her there were tears in his eyes. It broke Sarah’s heart. She felt like she had let him down, as if she had failed him in some way.

Sarah hadn’t thought much about how this must have been impacting Josh. She knew that Josh was not built for stress or surprises. He was a middle-of-the-road business-as-usual type of guy and this was as far from that as could be. This was the other side of the moon.

A silence fell between them, heavy and uncomfortable. Sarah walked over and plopped down beside Josh. She leaned over and put her head in his lap.

“I’m not crazy, Josh. But I can’t expect you to believe that. I mean, crazy people don’t know they’re crazy right? If I’m sleepwalking or something, I guess I wouldn’t really know. Let’s just get away for a few days. It might make things a little clearer We could both probably use a little break from all this.”

Once again, in the midst of her own trauma, it was her taking care of Josh. Sarah didn’t mind. It felt normal. She hated that she had been leaning on Josh so much lately.

“Let’s just grab a few things and go. We’ll treat it like a honeymoon.”

Josh nodded and slowly rose from the couch. He still looked shaken, scared, uncertain. Sarah cupped his face in her hands and forced him to look her in the eyes.

“I’m not crazy, Josh. Don’t worry. I’m not crazy.”

Josh smiled weakly and hugged her. She could tell that he was still not certain. Neither was she. She would have to change that.

Once she had settled into the hotel room, the first thing Sarah did was plug in her laptop and get online. She looked up The Spy Store and began scouring through their surveillance equipment. Most of it was prohibitively expensive. She settled on the nanny-cam teddy bear. Both attacks had taken place in her bedroom. If she could catch it on film, then she could prove to Josh and herself that she wasn’t crazy. Then she’d have that fucker arrested and her life would go back to normal…after a few years of therapy.

Sarah wrote down the model number and the address to the store. Then she opened her documents and began working on her dissertation. She had no desire to surf through porn sites. She’d already seen enough violent and deviant sex acts to support her theory that human sexuality on a whole was growing more nihilistic as overpopulation increased. She didn’t need to see any more pictures of women being brutally fist-fucked and gang-raped. Her sex drive had already crashed and burned. She wasn’t certain she’d ever have the desire for sex again. That alone made her want to murder Dale.

Sarah took a digital voice recorder out of her overnight bag and slipped it under her pillow. If anything happened tonight, she would at least have a recording of it. She began to write about the increased popularity of what she called “nonreproductive sex” such as sadomasochism, anal and oral sex, the use of sex toys, and ejaculation outside the vagina, on the face, breast, buttocks, etc., following the start of the AIDS epidemic.

Human sexuality had been a major focus of her study ever since she was an undergraduate. She had grown up in a very religious household where sexuality was never discussed. Sexually explicit books, movies, or TV shows were not allowed in her home when she was young. Even music with explicit lyrics was banned. She had first learned about sex from her friends in high school. It was a wonder she hadn’t gotten pregnant at fifteen like most of them had.

In college she’d finally had the freedom to explore her sexuality and divide the facts from the fiction. She had become fascinated with both the lore and the science of sexuality and had switched her major from psychology to social anthropology. She was hoping to someday write a groundbreaking book that would shed new light on human sexuality and show the necessary social function of so-called deviancy. She believed that the evolution of sexuality followed a Darwinian trajectory where acts like sexual violence would have long been eliminated from the human gene pool if they did not serve some purpose. In this case, she theorized, that the purpose was to harness sexual energy into nonreproductive activities that would not further contribute to overpopulation or exposure to disease.

Of course, by that logic, she should have found greater sexual diversity in the more overpopulated cities and countries than her research had so far uncovered. There should, in fact, have been an exponential increase in sexual deviancy in cities with populations over five million as compared to those of a million or less. But she could not find any significant differences.

Sarah closed the laptop in frustration and picked up the room service menu. She was beginning to doubt if she would ever finish her dissertation and was starting to lose her drive. She kept finding new holes in her theory that needed to be filled and each time she plugged one hole it created another. She was also worried that all of this research might be the cause of her violent sexual dreams. And if they were real than she didn’t want to rationalize the things that monster had done to her, which is what it felt like she was doing with her research.

Sarah scanned down the menu straight to the deserts. She needed some comfort food. She found some chocolate cake and vanilla fudge ice cream. It was just what she needed. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. She pushed the menu button and clicked on pay-per-view movies. She needed a good romantic comedy, something silly with Ben Affleck or Hugh Grant. That, along with the ice cream and the cake, was guaranteed to take her mind off her troubles. And if that didn’t work there was always the hotel gym, though she hated running on treadmills. The wind in her face and watching the scenery rush by were part of the thrill of running. But she didn’t feel like battling crowds trying to jog up the Las Vegas strip. Even with the decrease in tourism due to the recession, the strip was still packed like a nightclub on Saturday night.

There were no movies on that Sarah either hadn’t seen or could stomach. As much as she wanted to feel girly and feminine and lose herself in something mindless, she just could not stomach another girl-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks-meets-perfect-rich-gentleman movie. She had her limits. Finally, she settled on a nature documentary about the migration of gray whales. Not what she had in mind but the sound of the ocean and the whale calls were strangely soothing.

She had almost fallen asleep when there was a knock at the door. Sarah’s pulse rate shot up and it suddenly became difficult to breath. She scrambled off the bed, groping for her purse and the loaded.40-caliber pistol inside it.

Sarah’s hands shook as she removed the semiautomatic pistol from her bag, jacked a round into the chamber, cocking it as she walked toward the door.

“Who is it?”

“Room service.”

“Just leave it outside the door.”

“Um…I need you to sign for it.”

Sarah let out a low moan. There was no peephole in the door. She would have to open it to see who was on the other side. She put the chain on the door and put the barrel of the gun against the door as she slid it open, prepared to pull the trigger if it was Dale. She could hear her own heart hammering in her ears.