Anyone But You

by Brien Michaels

  “One moment, please.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. Sweat dribbled onto his hand and he wiped at his forehead. What the fuck had happened? It was taking the detective forever to pick up the line, but Jack knew where he could find out.

  He turned on the television again. He’d flipped it on and off a dozen times already.

  He wasn’t surprised to see the red Breaking News banner flashing across the bottom of the screen, but that didn’t stop his heart from plummeting into his stomach.

  Please, God. Please no.

  He felt the tears before he even realized he was crying. It took everything in him not to let sobs overtake him.

  “Police are still working to identify the victim,” the man on the TV said. “But we can report that the deceased is another drag performer, which means it’s likely that the Sapphire Bay Slasher has struck again.”

  Jack was shaking his head; his bottom lip quivered and he heaved a loud sob that radiated from his soul. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t have lost Ryan. It wasn’t fair! He was about to hang up the phone and go to the fucking club himself when a voice came on.

  “This is Detective Hart.”

  “My name is Jack Kieza.” Jack wanted to sound composed, but that wasn’t happening, so the best he could go for was semiprofessional. If he faked that, maybe he could at least sound normal until he knew Ryan’s fate for sure. “My boyfriend was one of the performers at the event at the Reputation Room tonight.” His voice cracked. “I’m seeing on the news now that they found another body.” Another crack. He didn’t want to believe it. And, what was worse, despite everything that had happened, in that moment, he wished his mother was there. “Your dispatcher said that they were going to send a unit here, and that you would tell me what you could.”

  The detective was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry to have to ask you this, Mr. Kieza, but can you meet us at the morgue to possibly make an identification?” Morgue. That word dropped into Jack’s belly, right next to his heart and sat there. Poisoned him from the inside out. “There were a lot of entertainers there tonight, and if you could make a positive identification, it would help us with other loved ones.”

  Other loved ones? What about him? What about the one he loved? But Jack stifled his outrage. Hopefully the officer hadn’t intended to come across as cold as he had. “Yes, of course,” he said instead.

  A moment later, Jack hung up the phone and sat there. He didn’t have any more tears. Not yet, anyway. Instead, numbness had spread over him. He stared at the ground, replaying every moment he’d ever made Ryan unhappy. They’d lost so much time because he hadn’t been able to get his shit together. And now, they might not have any more at all.

  He was only vaguely aware of the knock at the door a few minutes later. He didn’t remember getting up, or walking over. The two uniformed officers standing there when he opened the door looked grim, which only drove the point home further. He was about to see Ryan for the final time. And it wouldn’t even be him. Not really. Instead it would just be a shell of the former man.

  Jack followed the officers. It was like he was moving through some kind of haze. He didn’t remember shutting the door, but even if he hadn’t, he wasn’t about to turn back to do it. Without Ryan, everything in that house was useless.

  They rode the twenty minutes (or maybe two hours, Jack wasn’t sure, anymore) to the hospital, and the officers escorted him to the elevator, down to the basement. He knew they were talking to him, but only caught snatches of what they were saying. Something about not being sure who had performed tonight and being grateful about him coming forward. When the doors slid open, the hallway stretched for what looked like miles ahead of him. There were no doors except the double ones at the other end. Dim lighting gave the hall a depressingly final look. Which made sense, he guessed. His feet carried him forward, though he certainly didn’t know how to move them. Not anymore. He felt like he was walking to his own death. In a way, that was exactly what he was doing. With every step, his heart grew heavier and heavier. Without Ryan, the best part of his life was over, and they might as well bury him too.

  He pushed his way into a much smaller room with a rectangle of glass set against the opposite wall and a door to the right of it. The blinds on the other side of the window were drawn, hiding whatever was in that other room from his view. The smell of disinfectant assaulted him from every side. A man stood next to the window in a plain black suit and red tie. Of course it would be the color of blood.

  “Mr. Kieza?” the man asked.

  “Yes.” Jack kept his eyes trained on that window. He didn’t want to be here anymore. He didn’t want to see Ryan’s body on the other side. But he had to. He would never be able to live with himself if he didn’t. So he had to suck it up, and let this be the last memory he had of the man he loved.

  “I’m Detective Hart,” the man said, holding out a hand. Jack shook it absently. “I’m sorry to meet under these circumstances.”

  “I want to see him.” Jack’s voice was thin, barely more than a whisper. He couldn’t put it off any longer. This was a bandage he was just going to have to rip away.

  “Of course.” The detective knocked on the glass and, a moment later, the blinds went up.

  Jack stepped forward until he was staring right into the other room. A body lay on the table, covered by a sheet. A pair of hands appeared, pulled the sheet down to the chest. Jack let out another watery sob. His hand flew to his mouth and he stared at the detective, though he could hardly see him through his tears.

  “Mr. Kieza.” The detective sounded much more sympathetic now than he had on the phone. “Can you identify this man?”

  “No,” Jack said, smiling wildly. He must have looked insane. It was a shitty reaction, but he couldn’t help it. “That’s not Ryan. I’ve never seen that man before.”

  The back of Ryan’s head throbbed, a symphony of pain that made him wish he was dead. But when he tried to put a hand to the aching area and couldn’t move it past his shoulder, the last few hours came back to him, piece by piece. The show. Justine. Running away. Justine hitting him and knocking him out.

  He opened his eyes at last and saw that he was tied to a chair. He jumped as a silky wave of hair whispered over his shoulder. He was still in drag. And tied up. With a fucking killer on the loose. Oh God. He took it all back. He didn’t wish he was dead. This pain was nothing he couldn’t deal with. A few Advil and he’d be good as new. He looked around the room he found himself in, vision swimming in and out of focus. It was dark, except for a single dome light above him, which cast an illuminated circle a few feet around him, but that was it. Outside of that, he was totally blind.

  How long had he been unconscious? Jack had to be worried sick, and despite his predicament and his terror, Ryan was overwhelmed with guilt at leaving him like this.

  “It’s about time you woke up,” a voice came from the shadows. Ryan’s head snapped in that direction and he squinted, trying to force the room to stop dancing around him. He was sure he recognized the voice, but it didn’t sound like Justine. Too deep. So who the fuck was it?

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. When he opened them again, he felt a little more focused. His vision was still shaky around the edges, but the entire room wasn’t doing the hokey-pokey anymore. At least for now. “Who’s there?”

  “Oh come on, bitch. You know the answer to that.” Ryan definitely knew that voice. But he was still too foggy to place it. “You just spent all night performing for me. Because you wanted me to see. Wanted me to know that you’re brave, right? And then you made that speech. Fuck me, right? Isn’t that what you said?”

  He stepped out of the shadows then, and Ryan felt like he’d been clubbed in the head all over again.

  Mike stood in front of him, inspecting him through entirely too calm eyes. This couldn’t be right. He had to be hallucinating. No way had his brother murdered five people—five of his friends—in cold blood. He’d gotten
hit pretty hard. Concussions made you see things that weren’t really there, right?

  His brother’s name was on the tip of his tongue, he meant to say it, but instead what came out was, “Where’s Justine?”

  “Who’s Justine? The bitch who followed you out?” Ryan didn’t want to know the answer anymore. But he didn’t seem to have a choice. Mike shrugged. “You were the only one who was supposed to die tonight, but he saw me hit you. So I gutted him and cut his throat open.” Mike chuckled. “I recognized him; though, he didn’t look like that when he came in. I saw him go into the bathroom before you went on stage and when he came out . . .” Mike shook his head. “He begged for his life. Said he had cancer, or something. Made it so much better when I took it away from him.”

  Ryan’s gut twisted with shame. He’d suspected Justine, and she was dead because of it.

  That upped the count to six. Mike had killed six people and he was standing there talking about it like it was something normal people did every day. Ryan was going to be sick. He never would have guessed this. Not in a million years. Mike’s words from that night Ryan and Jack had run into him floated back to him.

  “You’ll never know what hit you.”

  Truer words had never been spoken.

  “You know what’s funny, though?” Mike knelt in front of Ryan. “Tonight wasn’t the first time I saw you. I’ve been watching you for a while now. And as spunky as you are, I thought I was gonna have to hit you a few times to knock you out. But you went down easy.”

  Ryan realized with a shock that in his brother’s mind, he was talking to Sheila. That he didn’t recognize him at all.

  “Because you hit me with a fucking brick.”

  Mike’s eye twitched, almost as though he’d recognized Ryan’s voice, but a second later any sign of possible realization was gone. “It wasn’t a brick. It was a metal pipe. I thought a brick might have killed you too fast, and I wanted to savor this. You wanted to fuck with me, so now I want to make you suffer.”

  Tears stung Ryan’s eyes. “Suffer?” He scoffed. “You’ve spent the last four months killing my friends. Don’t you think you’ve made me suffer enough?”

  “No,” Mike said simply. He stood upright, and then Ryan was staring up into his brother’s face. Mike’s face would be the last one he ever saw. “It’s not enough until I say it’s enough. And after tonight? It’s not going to be enough for a long time.” He snarled. “I might keep you here. Bring them all back so you can see what I do to them. Save you for last.”

  Ryan’s bottom lip quivered. There was only one question left. It didn’t matter at this point, but he had to know. “Why them? Why us? What did we ever do to you?”

  The corners of Mike’s mouth turned up in a smile. “Why not?” Ryan felt the air drain out of the room. What kind of answer was that? He squatted again. “Truth be told I didn’t care who it was. I just felt like killing someone that night. And your little friend was in the alley. I was only trying to tell him that it wasn’t safe to walk in dark alleys at night, and he started mouthing off. So I made sure he couldn’t anymore.” He shrugged. “Because I could.” A dreamy look passed over his face, like he was reliving it. “And I liked the way he bled, so I went after another. And another. Guess you could say I have a type.”

  Ryan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. What kind of psycho shit was this? To think that people woke up and decided that they wanted to kill, then picked a person at random and took them out, all because they could? He wished he hadn’t asked.

  Mike stood up again.

  “I got so hard when the light left their eyes . . . God, I wanted to fuck their corpses. Only reason I didn’t was because leaving DNA behind is what gets people caught.” Ryan could practically see the idea click into his brain. “I might just fuck you while I tell you exactly what I did to all of them. At least you can put up more of a fight than they would have.” He smiled, and Ryan had never seen anything so demented. “I just . . . I fell in love with killing and they were such easy targets.”

  “God, Mike, I don’t want to hear anymore!” He hadn’t meant to call him by his name. It had slipped out and now that it had, there was nothing he could do to take it back.

  Mike cocked his head to the side and studied Ryan a moment. “How do you know my name?”

  Part of Ryan wished that telling his brother who he really was would save him, but the other rational part reminded him that he knew too much. There was no way he was walking out of this room alive. But if he was going to go out, he might as well go out as the real him, right? “Because, Mikey . . . it’s me. It’s Ryan.”

  There was that eye twitch again and Mike’s eyes searched his face. “Bullshit. Ryan would never . . .”

  “I swear, man. Take off the wig. Wipe away the makeup and you’ll see that it really is me. Rainey…”

  Mike didn’t look like he trusted it. He stuck out a hesitant hand, paused just shy of touching the hair. Ryan’s heart hammered in his chest. This was a terrible idea, but what other option did he have? Mike snatched the wig away, pulling half a dozen bobby pins and the stocking cap away with it. And there was that exposed feeling he always felt when Sheila started to turn back into Ryan. Only this time, the stakes were way higher than a little depression at the end of the night. Mike still didn’t look convinced. He pulled a bloody rag from his pocket, and Ryan realized with a jolt of revulsion that the blood of every queen Mike had murdered was probably hovering mere inches away from his face.

  Then it was on his face, the scratchy cloth wiping away his makeup. God, it smelled like piss and who the fuck knew what else. Ryan couldn’t hold his dinner in. He gagged and puked down the front of his dress. But something as simple as his brother almost tossing his cookies all over him didn’t seem to deter Mike in the slightest. And now the smell of vomit and vodka mingled with the others, and Ryan retched again, trying like hell to keep the rest of whatever was in his stomach down.

  After a minute, Mike pulled the rag away and Sheila with it. Ryan’s face burned in spots it had been scrubbed harder than others, but he looked up and saw Mike backing away, the facts finally staring right at him. His face was a mask of repulsion, and he looked like he was about to be sick himself.

  “You . . .” he said. “You . . . you . . .”

  Ryan didn’t know what he was trying to say, but he seized the opportunity to try to save his own life. “Look, I’m sorry I never told you I did drag. It’s just the way Dad reacted the first time he saw me in heels, I was afraid everyone else would be the same, so I kept it to myself. But we’re brothers, and you can trust me because I would never turn—” Mike’s fist to his jaw put a stop to the words tumbling from Ryan’s mouth in that continuous rush. Ryan’s head snapped to the side and he stayed like that, fighting back tears. This couldn’t be happening.

  But it was. He was about to be murdered by his brother, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  “You lying fucking tranny.” Punches started raining down on Ryan as he dared look back at Mike. His eye. His nose. His cheek. His lip. His throat. Every inch of Ryan’s face that Mike could reach he was punching over and over again. The chair slid with the force of each blow, and Ryan felt his skin splitting, saw droplets of blood flying in every direction. He tilted backward and Mike followed him down. When he hit the ground, the chair gave a little more as the ropes slid up to a thinner part of the back. Mike seemed to realize it too, because he wrenched the chair from beneath Ryan.

  Ryan only had a second to think about trying to run before the chair came down against his midsection, again and again. It had to be made of wood, because it splintered with every blow. Every time Mike shouted, the phrase was punctuated by the chair’s wide arch reaching its end against Ryan’s body.

  “Fucking tranny!” Wack. “Always trying to trick people!” Wack. “Why can’t you just be a man?” Wack. This time the chair broke against Ryan, and there was a clatter as Mike threw it aside. Ryan tried to open his eyes, but coul
dn’t see a thing. They were swollen shut. The only sound in the now-silent room was his own sobbing and his brother’s harsh breathing. “You’re fucking dead,” Mike said, every word dripping with disgust. “Say hi to your little fucking friends.”

  Mike was coming at him again. Ryan’s entire body screamed in agony, but somehow he managed get his knees up toward his chest. Mike’s fleshy stomach collided with his heels. His brother grunted in pain, and Ryan kicked as hard as he could. He heard Mike stumble backward, lose his balance, and go down. But something seemed to break his fall. Mike let out a surprised-sounding yelp, groaned, and fell silent. Had he fallen on a piece of the chair?

  Ryan listened frantically in case Mike was about to launch another attack, but there was nothing. Something that might have been water hit the ground a few inches away from him in a steady dribble. He wanted to move.

  Drip.

  But he couldn’t. There wasn’t a single part of him that didn’t ache. How many broken bones did he have?

  Drop.

  He tried to speak, to call for his phone so it could call the police for him. They could trace the call and figure out where he was. But no sound came out, just a thin, rasping breath and a pain that made fresh tears explode in his eyes.

  Drip.

  So how was anybody supposed to find him? He could only assume that his brother had hit his head and knocked himself out when he fell, because there was still near-total silence around him. Almost deafening. How had he maybe survived all that just to die because no one would come to his rescue before Mike woke up to finish the job?

  Drop.

  Ryan couldn’t think anymore. It hurt to even breathe. But a semicomforting daze was spreading over him. He just wanted to rest for a minute, and he could try to figure out a way to escape when he woke up again.