Hush

by Anne Malcom

  It was half true. Half of her did want him. The half that put on the human mask and sat at Italian restaurants drinking wine and eating tiramisu.

  The dark half of her, the monster underneath the mask didn’t want him. No, that monster needed him.

  “No.” He yanked the word out of his very soul. It might as well have been dripping with blood and marrow.

  Orion narrowed her eyes, holding his icy stare for a moment. Then she stepped back. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll just find it somewhere else.”

  She turned to leave, but his hand darted out to encircle her wrist. It was a violent grip. Painful. The very first time Maddox had ever touched her so forcefully.

  Her dark side reveled in it.

  “No, you fucking won’t,” he growled at her. A warning more than an order.

  She looked down at her wrist, so small, almost birdlike compared to his meaty hand. “Let go of me, Maddox.”

  Orion expected the immediate release of her hand. Maddox was the good, honorable man after all. He didn’t hurt women. He’d hear the way she’d made her voice small, vulnerable, and he’d release her.

  But he didn’t.

  He squeezed tighter. “No, you won’t, Orion.”

  She met his eyes. She should’ve been afraid, disgusted at his touch. But she was almost impressed.

  He had a little bit of monster in him too. That might prove useful.

  She yanked her arm away, forcefully releasing his grip.

  And then she turned and walked away.

  Eighteen

  Two Months Later

  Orion had taken great care with the details.

  From what she could understand—after her extensive research—it was the details that got people caught. Little things. Rogue hairs, traffic cams. The kind of stuff that through sheer luck, she had not been caught by. It had been months now. The case was all but officially closed. The news coverage had stopped. The world had forgotten about the good doctor. Plenty more murders were happening around the city.

  Orion felt safe enough to continue with her planning. She knew that she wouldn’t get lucky again. That was the singular time in her entire life she’d get a break from fate. The rest was up to her.

  So, no hairs, DNA, no stupid shit like that.

  Then there was the body.

  No body, no crime.

  And disposing of a body wasn’t easy. It wasn’t meant to be, of course. Kidnapping young girls and keeping them captive for years wasn’t easy either, but these monsters managed it.

  She’d started by buying property. A nice little plot of five acres—an old farmhouse with the paint chipping, a big red barn out back that was one stiff breeze from falling over, and thick woods surrounding them both—near the bootheel of Missouri. No neighbors, and it was bought by the shell corporation she’d learned how to create. It had been easy, especially now that she was sort of a whiz on the computer. The property could not trace back to her unless the law enforcement in southern Missouri had some computer hacker extraordinaire. She highly doubted they had the budget for that.

  The house was exactly the kind of place where she’d imagined she was all those years. It fit perfectly for her needs. No one to hear the screams. No one to watch her get rid of the bodies. Plenty of land to bury them in. A backhoe stored in the rickety barn to do the digging. It wasn’t hard for her to learn how to use it. With enough time and patience, coupled with the power of the internet, anyone could learn just about anything they pleased.

  In an ideal world, she’d stumble upon someone else from The Cell. But seeing the doctor was a one-off thing, just like getting away with his murder. And from what Eric had told her—she did not have any contact with Maddox anymore—they didn’t have any leads on the other men she, Jaclyn, and Shelby had described.

  It was disappointing, but it didn’t mean she was going to stop. Killing was a craving. And the state government did most of the work finding victims for her.

  Orion was proud of herself.

  Finding someone who deserved this wasn’t hard.

  Although Orion hated a lot of things about this world reliant on technology and social media, she loved the sex offender registry website. Loved that the government posted their faces and their crimes for all to see.

  Well, she didn’t love that there were so many of them that the website needed to exist at all, but she understood it. This was never going to be a world devoid of monsters. But she was going to do her best to make sure there were a few less.

  Obviously, Orion would’ve loved to get her revenge on the ones who abused her. Who treated her like an object they had bought and paid for. If she’d been smart, she would’ve interrogated the doctor to find out how he got involved. Who he contacted. Then she could’ve tried to bring the entire place down.

  But she hadn’t been smart.

  She’d been impulsive and stupid.

  The world had forgotten about it when new, fresh horrors took over their headlines.

  Orion told herself that’s why she had waited this long, until the dust had settled, until she could be sure that no one was going to arrest her. To ensure no one was monitoring her movements.That was an important part of it, sure. But it wasn’t the main reason.

  It had shaken her, what happened with the doctor. What had come out of her. The monster that looked too much like the man she killed. There was no control, only a need for blood.

  It took a lot to be at peace with the fact she really was a monster. That it was all she was going to be. That she would always have to wear a mask with everyone else in her life. She was split into two people.

  Hence the sex offender registry and her meticulous searching.

  She learned to read the different statutes, learning the differentiation between crimes. She searched for the most vile and heinous.

  She had come to understand that some men on the list were convicted of statutory rape—sixteen-year-old girls with eighteen-year-old boyfriends and angry fathers. She ignored those names.

  Then there were the drunk idiots who pissed in parks or playgrounds. And the flashers and child porn cases who deserved their own form of punishment, but she ignored those too. She couldn’t go after them all. An army battalion couldn’t. There were thousands and thousands of offenders in the state of Missouri alone. So, she searched for the worst of the worst: rape 1st degree, child molestation 2nd degree, sodomy. And she searched for men no larger than she was. Men she could throw into the back of her vehicle. Men who couldn’t get the upper hand.

  Their addresses were listed just below their crimes.

  So, she chose one. Far from St. Louis, Grandview, and Monroeville—all the places tied to the doctor’s killing. She looked in southwest Missouri, three hours away from what she had dubbed her “kill farm.”

  Brecken Anderson was a Boy Scout troop leader for twenty years, a Baptist minister, a married father of four, and a monster. Fourteen boys came forward, sodomized and tortured for years at the hands of Mr. Anderson. He was convicted on seven counts of sodomy in the 2nd degree, along with child pornography charges for the videos he took and dispersed of the abuse. He got out after three years for good behavior. After a divorce and his pathetic excuse for a prison sentence, Brecken moved to the small town of Henderson, Missouri and worked at the local grocery store.

  He was small—weighed only one hundred thirty pounds—and in his sixties.

  She stalked him for a week, watched his every move. She told April and Shelby she was going to spend some time at a lake house to think and decompress. Little did they know the kind of decompressing she was doing.

  She tased him when he got off work one evening, right outside of his trailer, at the end of a quiet street. He writhed and then hit the dirt road with a thud. She stuck him again with the taser, and he wriggled like a fish out of water before passing out, drool puddling near his lips. She dragged his body toward her SUV, and then opened the back, lugged him up and into it, and cuffed his hands behind his back. He was harde
r to maneuver than she expected, but she was thankful to have spent so much time getting into shape before deciding to hunt monsters.

  She drove a short distance away to a wooded area concealed from the road and any homes, and she went to the back to do her business. He was beginning to come to when she opened the back hatch, so she hit him again with the taser, before cuffing his ankles and hog-tying him with the two cuffs. She then duct taped his mouth, filled him full of drugs, put a tarp over him, and drove the three hours back to the farmhouse.

  He was naked with duct tape wrapped around his legs and his entire arms and midsection. His hands were still cuffed behind his back, and he laid in a forty-gallon metal stock tank. The tank was filled with water, covering everything but his face. The basement smelled of mildew and mothballs, a fluorescent light flickering overhead. From every electrical outlet, in all directions, long extension cords stretched toward the tank.

  Orion knew, logically, that this specific monster wasn’t one of the men that did things to her. She had a sneaking suspicion that her monsters were disguised as doctors, lawyers, fathers. That they would not be on any lists. But he was close enough. His past was why she chose him as her first victim—her debut. He had been in a position of respect and authority, and he had used that position to sate his own sick hunger while destroying so many little boys’ lives in the process. He was the perfect candidate.

  She hadn’t given up on finding the ones who had broken her, but for now, she was happy with providing revenge for those who were unable or unwilling.

  That didn’t mean she wasn’t structuring this like she had planned on doing with the doctor, everything detailed, everything on her terms. She was aware it was unhinged to plan such a horrific way to kill a man, to torture him. That it didn’t exactly denote sanity.

  Orion should’ve felt something. Scared. Nervous. Sick. Angry. But she felt nothing.

  Calm had settled over her, a kind of emptiness. Not even hot hatred at this man and what he’d done. This was just a task. Something she had to do.

  She’d also taken great care with her appearance. All of those makeup tutorials hadn’t gone to waste. Her skin was flawless. Her lips were full, painted blood red. Her eyes were rimmed with black and edged with a strong wing.

  She was wearing all black leather. It made her look great and it was just practical. Leather gloves too.

  His eyes clouded with confusion at first. He tried to move his arms as he observed the water surrounding him, the darkness, and then he looked at her with fluttering eyelids.

  “Wh-what th-the . . . what the fuck? What are you doing?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Good evening, Mr. Anderson. How are you feeling?”

  He splashed around in the water, spilling some over the edges of the tank, and it funneled toward the drain at its base. Some also went up his nose and he coughed and spluttered in reaction to it, his head sinking underneath the water.

  She moved to him quickly, pulling his head up and out of the water by his hair. “Now, now . . . we don’t want you dying just yet, do we? That would defeat the whole purpose.”

  “What do you want?” he cried out. “Money? I’ve got some. I’ll give it to you. Everything I have!” His voice cracked with desperation.

  Orion chuckled. “It’s not money I want from you, Mr. Anderson.” She let go of his hair and began pacing around the tank.

  He fought to keep his head above the water, gasping for air.

  Orion paced as she continued. “We’re always so sure that moments in our childhood are pivotal. That we’ll carry them with us.” She trailed her hand along the rim of the tank, staring at the man as his petrified eyes followed her. “That we’ll remember those moments, take them into adulthood where we can take them out and leaf through them like they’re a photo album.” She met his eyes. “Problem is, that doesn’t happen. I don’t remember any of them. No detail. But the parts I would do anything to forget, the parts I was sure would fade with time because no human could survive with that much horror crammed into their skulls with such clarity . . . they won’t go away. I remember every part I wished to forget, and anything I would want to remember is nothing but scraps.”

  “P-please, I don’t even know who you are! What have I done to you?” He began to weep then, and it sickened her.

  “To me? You didn’t do anything to me. But what about Tommy Edleman? Griffin Bellmore? Hank Jones?”

  His face read understanding then, embarrassment and fear.

  “Need I go on?” She met the eyes of the helpless man.

  “I’ve served my time. I’ve paid my dues,” he said breathlessly. “Please.”

  She leaned in, whispered, “You’ve paid no dues. But you will.” She smiled, and abruptly moved to a large case at the other end of the room.

  “Why are you doing this?” he called out after her, and it echoed off the dirty concrete walls. “Why?!”

  She pulled a handful of portable immersion heaters from the case and walked back toward the tank, setting them on the floor. “I’m doing this for the children you abused, the lives you’ve ruined, the innocence you’ve stolen. For every child who trusted a dirty prick like you.”

  She grabbed one of the immersion heaters and walked to one of the extension cords, plugging it in. She then turned on the heater and dumped it into the tank, the coils dipping into the water with the monster.

  He started to thrash as soon as she put it in and moved on to the next one. Or he tried to. She’d made sure to inject him with a healthy dose of muscle relaxants, and to bind him as tight as she possibly could. Not very sporting, really, but it wasn’t very sporting to prey on children either.

  Turnabout was fair play.

  She continued the routine with the immersion heaters and the extension cords as she spoke, ten in total. He wiggled and writhed, and then yelped as the hot coils brushed against his skin.

  “Me, personally, my monsters had an affinity for medieval torture. They used it to control us. To tear us down. To break us.” He really thrashed then, spilling water over the edges, but not the heaters. They remained where they were, floating in the water around him, searing his skin. She spotted some water hitting the extension cord connections, sparks too, so she grabbed some tarps from the front room and covered the cords as best she could.

  She then stood before the tank with her hands on her hips, watching him squirm like a salted slug. “I researched a lot about medieval torture after we escaped. Fascinating stuff, really.”

  “Please . . .” He wept loudly. “Please let me go!”

  She put a hand up. Scowled at him. “Mr. Anderson, please. I’m trying to teach you something here. Don’t be rude.” She shot him a saccharine smile. “Now, this particular form of medieval torture, they didn’t give it some fancy name. They just called it boiling. Creative, huh?”

  He started to tremble, frantically looking around, as if he wanted out of his own skin.

  “Back in the sixteenth century, good old Henry VIII made it a legal form of capital punishment. But they used oil. Can you believe that?” she asked rhetorically with a playful tone. “Back then, they had these special iron cauldrons. Those fuckers were massive. And they’d build fires underneath them to heat it. To cook the condemned.” She eyed the immersion heaters, at full glow now, the numerous extension cords, and she shrugged. “Sorry, this was the best I could do. And I’m not sure how long these heaters will take, they’re kind of small. This could be a long—”

  “Arghhh.” The sound he made was guttural and inhuman. He thrashed more, searched desperately for help.

  Orion smiled wider then. “Well, well . . . it seems I may have spoken too soon, huh, Mr. Anderson?” She hesitated a moment as the man screamed and thrashed and cried out. “Can I call you, Brecken, by the way?” she asked slyly. “I feel like we’re on that level now. Friends, even.”

  Brecken Anderson responded with another wretched scream, the water around him starting to bubble.

  Orion clapped her ha
nds together. “Great! I really appreciate you being so easy to work with, Brecken.” She took a few steps closer, watching as his skin peeled and blistered and bled, and hissed, “Now, die for me, motherfucker.”

  Nineteen

  One Month Later

  Orion had taken to killing rather well. She had managed to pick up three more men, all of them bagged as easily as Brecken had been. She chose them wisely. One a week, each of them from different parts of Missouri so as not to indicate a pattern.

  She made it a little easier on herself those times—not so many extension cords, and water, less chance of electrocution.

  She wasn’t even sure Brecken was dead yet when the water was cool enough to remove his body, to bury him in the grave she had already prepared. She thought she saw him twitch when the dirt poured over his blister-ridden body from the backhoe’s bucket, but she wasn’t sure. It didn’t bother her that she potentially buried him alive after boiling him, though it probably should have. It was the mess left behind that really made her change things up. The way his skin slid from his muscles like sludge onto her jacket, and the floor, and her boots. No, she decided to make her job easier, the torture less . . . messy. And she burned those boots and that jacket. A shame too, since they had been her second favorite pair. Good thing she had enough money to replace the jacket and the boots with a couple of clicks. A shame it wasn’t easy to replace her soul though.

  Orion’s second victim, Bobby O’Callahan, raped his girlfriend’s daughters, five and three. He served four years and was released on probation.

  Orion buried him up to his neck behind the farmhouse. He woke up that way, and she’d never forget the laughter it brought her, as if they had just been transported into a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing Saturday morning about what she did to him.

  She duct taped his mouth, poured milk and honey over his head, and left him there. Scaphism, she had read, translated to “anything hollowed out” in Greek, and she learned why when she returned after a few days. The bugs and the birds and whatever else wished to feast upon him, had taken Bobby’s eyes, and his lips, and his nose. She had almost vomited upon seeing the remnants of his face, and she hurriedly covered him completely with the backhoe.