by mike Evans
“Ramsey, fucking come get me! Come get me!”
Matt said, “That’s cute, you still think you’re going to be alive when they make their way here.”
Schmidt started punching at his arm, trying to get him to let go. Matt caught his wounded hand and took hold of his wrist, holding up his hand to look through the hole made by the arrow. He stuffed his index finger into it, letting Schmidt’s screams echo in the night.
Matt could see Schmidt’s cold sweat glistening in the moonlight. Schmidt kept bucking against him, trying to get free, knowing he wouldn’t be able to run, but unable to think of anything else he could do to try to help himself. Matt held him by the back of his neck, holding the knife up near his spine, and dug it in slowly until he went limp and the only thing holding him up was Matt. He lay Schmidt on the ground and flipped his knife around in his hand, bringing it down into his shoulder. Schmidt could not move, he was very aware of that, but he was able to feel every ounce of pain.
Schmidt tried to scream, but he could not get any sound out. Only spittle flew from his mouth. He realized as he was attempting it that he was unable to swallow. Matt noticed this mid-incision and turned his head for him, patting him on the side of the head. “We wouldn’t want you choking to death, now, would we?”
Schmidt’s eyes looked terrified as he had a perfect view of the knife in his arm. Matt took hold of it tight, bringing it in and out as quickly as he could until it separated from his shoulder. Matt held it up in his hand, weighing it, and said, “Now, let's check the other.”
He tossed the arm. The ligaments were gangly, hanging from it. Schmidt wanted to scream no, and to ask him to kill him, but after another two minutes of pain that felt like it had no equal, Matt held up the second arm. By the time that he was finished, tears were streaming down Schmidt’s face and mixing with the blood on the leaves, which he was confident would be his final resting place.
Matt showed him the second arm, and five minutes later came up heaving for his own breath and showing Schmidt the second leg he’d cut off. Schmidt looked at the bloody stumps each one with it’s own tourniquet neatly applied. Matt looked down at his already dull, white shirt, seeing that he could not have been more soaked in blood had he bathed in it.
“Did that hurt? Did you like it? Does fucking with the old man seem like such a good idea now?”
Schmidt wanted death like he’d never wanted anything else so badly before this evening. The lights began to grow bright and his eyes went into the back of his head. He did not fight to keep control. Death was something he welcomed, and Matt when felt his pulse, could just barely feel a beat.
He whispered into Schmidt’s ear, “You don’t seem like you are going to make it. I don’t know if you’ll still be alive by the time we make it back to the truck, but if you are, I’m going to use you for a kill trophy to pull behind the truck. I don’t think that you are going to look very pretty by the time that we make it there. I can only imagine the road rash and loss of skin that you are going to experience. I guess that I should have asked you if there was anyone I could pass on the news of your passing to? Maybe I could go visit them. Ramsey seems to think that I should go see his mother. Is there someone special to you? A special little lady holding down the fort while you are out dealing drugs and passing your own little disease around the world, one bag at a time? You think that they’d like to see me? I could take an entire night and devote it to them. If I have time, that is when I do my absolute best work.”
Matt shushed him, running the knife in front of his face, letting his pupils try to focus on it. But Schmidt was just on the verge of passing out. He tried to scream, but had nothing left to do it with. Matt watched his dying eyes, brushed his face with the knife, cutting one inch gashes from his temple to his cheek bones. “You’ll just have to wait to see if she joins you in hell—unless she’s going to heaven. I am sure the Devil will go out of his way to let you know what happened to her, or he’ll taunt you for eternity with it. Wouldn't that be fucked up? I guess you’ll be able to fill me in once I make it down there. However, I assure you, you and your friends have unleashed a beast in me that I thought I had under control. I was wrong. Oh my God and Savior, was I wrong. I want to see so much blood that the Earth will be painted in it. Actually, I’d like to see the Earth bleed.”
Schmidt tried to look at him, but Matt took the knife, slowly inserting it into his neck until the blade was at the hilt. Matt whispered, “I wish I had more time to be creative with how I put you out of your misery, but I’ve still got two men to kill tonight, and if Ramsey has any intelligence at all, I do believe that there is a strong chance he won’t be alone. I’m pretty sure your entire crew is going to be there. But that’s okay, because I’m going to release some pent-up aggression this evening, I can promise you that much.”
Matt left his hand under his neck, letting the blood pool around his skin and into his palm, he smiled satisfactorily as he felt the last beats in Schmidt’s neck before there were no more. Matt dipped a single finger into it, drawing a smiley face on his cheek and forehead and licked the blood off his hand. He realized that it wasn't a taste he hated. He’d spilled it across his flesh more times than they could count, but the time he’d been kept away from it in the woods had given him a quite literal thirst for it, and he wanted more. But first, he wanted to deal with the issues still present in the city.
Matt took a chain from the four-wheeler he’d found earlier and wrapped it around Schmidt’s neck. Unlike the two men he’d murdered tonight, he did not need help to find the path out of the woods. He could walk out in the moonlight or with the sun on his back and always know where he was. He’d spent the last five years learning the woods, and he was actually a bit hesitant about leaving them. He wondered if he murdered these men, whether he would be able to come back to them and be uninterrupted with his life, or if there would be a constant battle between himself and visitors attempting to ruin what he had.
He almost felt like he owed it to his father to come back and attempt to set things right. To stay out of society unless there was a reason that he needed to leave. But he could think of nothing that had changed. He knew that society would definitely be better off if he kept himself away from town. The ledge that was his addiction might be one he could not talk himself back down off of once he got a taste for blood again. He was breaking his own rules about taking his time, but he could still hear his father telling him that torturing the people was not needed, and the kill itself should be the thing that was satisfying him.
It took less than an hour to walk out of the woods and Matt marched with a determination that very soon would mean hell on Earth for Ramsey, James, and the rest of the men. Matt tied Schmidt to the trailer hitch by the chain and dragged him behind the truck the entire ride there. Cars in the small, sleepy town were almost nonexistent. Matt had never actually driven into the city five years ago, when he made his way to the woods. He smiled, thinking how many people there were that he could kill before anyone would know that it was him, or that he was out killing. He could go door to door for an entire night, maybe two, before people started coming in as missing and reports came out that there was a serial killer on the loose.
He followed the directions Moon had given him and that had been reconfirmed by the ogre of a man, whose head sat staring aimlessly into the woods behind him.
Chapter 16
The men had stopped packing the second that Ramsey had gotten off the phone. James had been watching the facial expressions of Ramsey for the entire call, and except for a few times that he had been worried about his own personal matters, had never seen the man look so worried in his life, and that made him worried.
Ramsey set the phone down slowly, looking like someone had shot his puppy with a shotgun, and then spun out their tires on its face afterwards.
James said, “So… is Schmidt all right out there, Ramsey?”
Ramsey looked up pulling a pistol out of nowhere, and James took a step back. “No,
I don’t think that we are going to be seeing Schmidt anytime soon—alive at least.”
“Well, are you going to call Laughlin now, and let him know what is happening and that there’s something wrong in the North Woods?”
“I’m not so worried about the North Woods now, James.”
“Because… why?” James asked nervously.
“The man we killed earlier… it might not have been the right guy.”
James, who hadn’t been different from anyone else, had felt like they had done a justice for the rest of the country, taking the man out and saving people from him. In hindsight, he had felt bad about torturing the man, but figured that it was karma coming back ten fold. The man was lucky that Ramsey had only had a few of the things come to mind, and had no internet connection when they were figuring out who they thought it was. James was well aware that the man had so many nicknames given by different papers, and that the list of torture he’d administered had been nearly impossible to keep track of.
“So the guy that we thought was the serial killer ended up being the wrong guy? Is that what you are saying? Because that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Who were you talking to?”
“Apparently, we killed the wrong guy. I got a feeling that there was a decent reason why we saw two bunks in that house. It wasn’t because he wanted to switch back and forth between the two. The mask was brought there, but it wasn’t by him. That house had been there for too long, and if I’d have taken a minute to think about that, we probably would have waited around.”
“I believe it is probably a little too late for that now, don’t you think, Ramsey?”
Ramsey raised the pistol, holding it steady on James. “Did you want this psycho to kill you, or did you want me to? Choice is yours!”
“Can I get an option C, Ramsey? How bout we wait for him to come in here and we blow his ass away? Say that he came here after we clean everything out, and we take him somewhere away from here, then we take the bounty, get a couple weeks of attention, and get all the seed money we would ever need to make that shop we set up legit. I mean it, we could set up a lab like no other and we wouldn’t need to worry about Laughlin’s protection. We could say, ‘fuck him,’ and build somewhere else. We would be able to make like, an underground bunker and shit,” James fantasized.
“We need to kill the son of a bitch before we decide to try to collect a reward for him. I don’t even know if they still have one outstanding for him or not,” Ramsey reasoned.
“Oh, they do. I Googled the hell out of this guy earlier, and he sure as shit does. It was a half a million originally, but it looks like each year, it gets a little smaller.”
“How small?” Ramsey started to bite.
“It’s down to a quarter million. If Moon and James are gone that leaves the two of us.”
“We got an entire crew outside, James. You don’t think they are going to want to be able to spend some of that money?”
“In all honesty, I don’t think that there will be too many of them alive if we put them on the outside. What I mean is, we sit tight, wait for him to come, and when he walks through that door, we put a bullet in his fucking head,” James said holding his hands up, waiting for Ramsey to put his pistol down.
Ramsey did finally release the hammer back and set it down. He nodded his head. “How many more guys are there here and ready?”
“We got three in here right now, another two in town we could call in if we give them enough money,” James said.
Ramsey smiled conspiratorially. “Can we pay them afterwards? Probably going to be a lot cheaper, don’t you think?”
“Take their money off their dead bodies, or get it afterwards, I don’t care. Just let me go make the calls, would you?” James pleaded.
Ramsey gave a thumbs up, checking his body and seeing how many magazines he had on him. He felt a defeat already, only having one holding eight, with one in the chamber. They weren’t mercenaries and had never pretended to be. They had operated with the police on their side—at least dirty police, which was better than none at all. When Ramsey had married his sister, it’d been like a best friend marrying into the mob, and making that connection you’ve always prayed would happen if you were a criminal.
He looked at his phone, completely unsure what he should do about calling his brother-in-law or not. His wife would give him no small amount of shit if—by some chance—his drug dealings led to her brother's death, but he’d like to think that she’d be sad if he was gone as well. He picked up the phone, getting ready to speed dial it, and slammed it back down, content that he would take care of the mess that they—or rather he—had started. He was beginning to wonder what was happening to Schmidt out in the woods, and the pain that Moon had been forced to endure. The things he was able to imagine made him sick to his stomach.
James sat by the phone, looking like he was talking a mile a minute. Ramsey made his way over near him, looking around the abandoned building, realizing this was not the place that he wanted to spend any time with a killer in. The cabinet company that had gone bankrupt years ago had not even bothered to liquefy their assets. When the bank closed the doors, everything stayed as it had been when it had been a thriving business in the small community.
He could still smell the wood in the air, given it was mixed with meth now, but all the same, there were still some pleasing things from that time. He walked over by James, who was shaking his head. “Well, I don’t know how often you get deals like this. I mean it, you are passing up on money, are you that fucking busy? I hope you have a wonderful fucking night.”
James punched the end button, ready to throw the phone against the wall. He looked over to Ramsey. “The three guys we got is all we are going to have. No one else is coming in.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’ve been a cheap ass as long as you’ve known them, and if you’re going to call them in this time of night with no notice and are ready to pay hand-over-fist, then they said they don’t want nothing at all to do with it; not a damn thing at all. They figure whatever it is that you are trying to pay them for isn’t going to be worth the blood that could be theirs or someone else's to bleed over,” James said.
“Since when did our guys get so damn smart?” Ramsey asked.
James shrugged, heading outside. “I’m going to go tell the three we have outside to keep an eye out. I don’t know what kind of firepower they are packing, but I'm going to find out. I’ve got a good idea that it isn’t a great arsenal packing out there. That might be something we consider in our little expansion venture, moving forward—oh, that, and no more torturing fucking people in the woods. That has, and probably always will, lead to bad things happening in return.”
Ramsey opened the door to the small factory, pushing him out the door and locking it behind him. “You want to move up in the line, you best give me a reason to consider doing it.”
James checked the door, already knowing that he wasn’t going to open it for anything until tonight was over, or reinforcements in the form of police came here to help. He didn’t want to go over his head, but knew that not calling in Laughlin was a monumental mistake they were making. But from how freaked out Ramsey was and the fact this guy was able to take out three men at least, meant the regret he felt probably would last long, unless it followed him to hell.
James yelled, “How you guys doing out here?”
Williams, Harry, and Statham made their way over, each of them looking cold and annoyed that they were outside when they knew there was still packing which needed to be done. Harry finished what was left of his smoke and tossed it, slinging a hunting shotgun. “Is there a reason why the three of us are freezing our balls off tonight?”
“The four of us now. Apparently, Ramsey wished for me to take a more hands-on role in management. He just wants us to keep an eye out for something tonight. He had a bad feeling.”
“I call bullshit on that,” Williams said. “You think that we are that fucking stupid t
hat we don’t know something’s up? He looks like he’s in there tweaking on the shit he cooks, and he’s made it clearer than ever that if we test the product, we lose our testicles. I, for one, love mine so I have no problems with not having a sample—more than happy to stick to the green, sticky shit. Besides, I like my teeth and the best deterrent is selling the shit and seeing how fucked up those people are.”
“You can call bullshit, or you can just be happy that you’re getting an extra grand. Now, do you all have any other toys in your cars that you can bring out, or is this the entire arsenal we are looking at?” James asked hopefully.
James looked at one shotgun between the three of them, and each of them had a handgun. He did not feel at ease whatsoever and was wondering what good a booming empire was going to be if he was not alive to collect on it.
