Murderland

by Garrett Cook

  Then he answers the door. I think back to Kevin and Neil and Michael and that goddamn girl who took my coat. The smile is a knowing one. I know what I am capable of. I was capable of almost killing somebody when I was five years old. I have the rage and the power and I’m not going to let this man end things. I’m not going to make me die a victim. He’s not too tough looking, a little doughy actually. He has kind of a belly that he’s sucking in a little and he’s not all that well developed in his arms and legs. So what am I afraid of?

  Then I remember that as a five year old girl I certainly didn’t look like I was capable of anything, so I shouldn’t underestimate this guy with his humble brown hair and his lack of upper body strength and his surprisingly cheap cologne. I am walking into a horror movie. He could tear this face off at any moment and anything could be beneath it. He could have a full grown Alaskan timber wolf in that apartment ready to tear my guts out. It’s hard to see when he’s blocking the door. Peeking in would be suspicious and rude and could get me killed. Do not peek in. Just say hi. I take a little long with the hi. I think he suspects me immediately.

  “Are you alright? Can I get you a glass of water? You seem nervous. Don’t worry, I don’t bite. Unless of course, that’s what you’re into.”

  God, the women who stay in this apartment for any reason besides killing him are absolutely pathetic. Are all the legends this small and fragile? The Cabana Boy could be poisoned. Wayne Pfenniger went down with a shot. This guy is no Mr. Right. He’s not charming or trustworthy. But there’s a bulge in his pocket. Is he just happy to see me maybe? I do look pretty good. Pretty funny. Good thing when I laughed to myself, it seemed like it was in regard to his joke. As if I could have been that easily impressed. It’s sad, it really is. All of our villains and all of our heroes are nothing in person. No matter what’s attached to them and what kind of importance you place on them, they always end up as something kinda disappointing. They always end up human. Kevin could beat up any boy in the neighborhood, but he couldn’t beat up a plane crash. When will the time come for Jeremy when he has to fight a plane crash or his old age? How many shots will it take to kill cancer? This man is so far from cancer. I can’t believe I have a Mr. Right t-shirt.

  “What are we standing out here in the hallway for?” he asks. He smiles, and it’s actually a nice smile. He opens the door, leads me in. He doesn’t lock it behind him. I wonder why he doesn’t lock it behind him. There’s something funny about the walls in his living room. It dawns on me when I spot the computer and the amp and the guitar. Acoustical foam. Nobody could hear me scream. It’s the good stuff, if it can keep people from hearing an electric guitar in the next apartment, then it could keep people from hearing anything. But then it dawns on me that maybe nobody is in the next apartment. A couple documents, a friend occasionally coming and going and he could fake a tenant next door. With all the dough he has, he could repeat the process. That’s why he doesn’t lock the door. This whole floor is his. He has a fixed address in the Safe Zone and women keep coming here. Jesus Christ. He feels invincible again. When we sit down on the couch, he doesn’t make any kind of sleazy move or touch me. He doesn’t offer me a drink or expect me to talk. He just lets me get comfortable. I slide my shoes off and I move a little closer.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to him, “I’m not used to being in a building this expensive and big and imposing. It’s such a lovely place, I’ve always been nervous in very lovely places.”

  It feels to me like something Audrey Hepburn would say. A kind of humble downplayed sophistication. It feels like it might hold him for awhile, kill his suspicion. If he’s not suspicious anymore, this will be a whole lot easier. But maybe he’s one of those people who are always suspicious. I have to wonder what’s in his pocket and there’s no way of determining what it is without blowing my cover and implying that I suspect him of something. He smiles quietly and doesn’t immediately respond to my comment. He does inch toward me because I inched towards him. He places his hand on my thigh all of a sudden and then it moves up. I move to slap him, and like lightning he’s reached into his pocket and taken out the contents. Like lightning he’s grabbed it. And it is lightning. I feel the voltage enter me, swim through my bloodstream, arcing with every drop of the seventy-five percent water that I’m made of. I look up in shock as I go limp. I’m stunned momentarily, planning what I’ll do when I recover. He says nothing. He doesn’t make a move for me again. He goes for my purse instead, taking the gun and the syringe out of it.

  “You know what I’m not going to do to you, you filthy whore. You traitorous little bitch, you know what I’m not going to do to you?”

  My mouth is numb. I can’t move it to say that I don’t know what he’s going to do to me or to tell him to fry in hell, or to say anything at all to him. I don’t know what he’s not going to do to me, because I have no clue what he will. He wasn’t cancer, but the electricity in his hands was lightning, like Jeremy calls himself. Lightning from God. Men make themselves forces of nature by taking them into their hands. With the poison from the syringe, I could have made myself a vine of curare or a living sprig of nightshade, but he beat me to the punch.

  “You’re not answering,” he says, “Why don’t you answer, Cassandra? It’s not Natalie at all. Now that’s just rude. Sure, I give fake names, and I do what you’re doing, but you don’t need to give a fake name. You have such a pretty one. Do you know how I know your beautiful name, the name of the prophetess nobody would listen to? Do you? I haven’t emptied out your wallet, yet. You didn’t call from your home phone. So how should I know who you are?”

  The feeling in my mouth at least returns. I could lean over and bite him if I wanted to get myself shot. “No, I don’t know…”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t answer my first question. I am not going to poison you, Cassandra. I am not going to poison you or shoot you. I’m not going to do that because then I’d be no better than that asshole Mr.400, the asshole that killed my dear old friend Tom. I think I’ll send your tits to Tom’s grave. He would have wanted them. You’re a whore for Mr.400, ain’t ya? Tempting me like that, making me want to kill you, so you could go and kill me?”

  “I’m not a whore,” I choke out. The longer I keep my dignity, the longer it will take him to kill me. I have to wait for the feeling to return to my body. Then I realize I won’t let on when it does, so he won’t give me another shock. I also don’t want him to rape me. Even if I die, I don’t want him to rape me, and I think he won’t unless I say that I’m a whore and act like I want it. I won’t act like I want it, even if I’m begging to live. I think about Kevin again. Kevin would have never begged the plane crash to let him live. Do not bargain with the agency of your destruction. Do not beg it for anything. Act like he doesn’t have your life to give you.

  “You’re a whore. You tried to use sex to get what you wanted. But then, I guess you can call me a whore. I can lure them with my charm, and then I can go ahead and kill them. You decided you were going to be a better whore than me. There is no better seducer than me. I lured you here to kill me. I knew who you were and I invited you here, so that you could come here to kill me and I could kill you. God, you sure are gullible. I know Mr. 400 can take care of himself, but Jack and I agreed that we wanted to catch him all alone. I would love to have made him watch me fucking you til you bleed to death, but I’m not used to taking on men. I admit that they’re too strong for me. We are, after all the stronger sex.”

  Jack knows. Jack knows who Mr.400 is. Jack knows who I am. Jack has come for Jeremy. Do I want to kill this guy or let him kill me? I wish I could give up and it would mean he didn’t win. Jeremy had better be alive when I get home. I had better get home. I have to let him talk. I have to let him torture me with his words, so he won’t use that taser.

  “He’s killed anyone you’ve sent against him,” I tell him, “anybody you sent to that apartment is dead.”

  “You’re trying to stall me,” he says, “I know women.”<
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  He grabs the taser and turns it on. He tries to shock me again, but I roll out of the way. It hurts like hell and my joints feel numb, but I stand up. I don’t think I could do anything more complicated than standing up, so standing up will have to do. He looks concerned, oddly concerned for somebody wielding a taser against a woman so much smaller than himself. Think of him as the small one. Underestimate him now. I stumble toward the kitchen and he follows with the taser. He begins to run, and that’s when I know what to do again.

  I let him get close, close enough to lunge with the taser, and that’s when I trip him. He doesn’t fall but he’s momentarily off balance. I elbow him the chest and he instinctually clutches it, leaving the hand with the taser open. I get closer, perhaps too close, but it’s what I need to do in order to bite his wrist, which sure enough causes him to let go of the taser, which I grab. The second I take to turn it on is too long. He goes low with the hand that clutched his chest and it hits me hard in the stomach. He reaches and he grabs for my hand, which now holds his taser. We tussle and I fall backward into the kitchen.

  I’m glad I took off my heels, but it still doesn’t help on account of the many ball bearings that he’s laid out on his floor. I roll briefly and then I go down. I hit my head hard, and my vision starts to blur a little. I’m relieved that I feel the weight of the taser in my hand. I still have it and he’s not going to shock me. He moves to his kitchen counter and takes out a big knife. I’m surprised that he’s stupid enough to bend down and stab me. When he does, he gets a big shock and he hits his kitchen floor. I reach for his zipper. He tries to stop me and cuts me in the arm with the knife, but I do it. With my other hand, I bring down the taser and he begins to twitch violently. The knife drops and I’m back in control. I should be beyond being a sadist, but I know I don’t want him to get up, so I shock him until the taser runs out of juice.

  Then, when my vision begins to return, I lose myself to sadism. I know what he would do if I let him live too long, so I make sure to do something like it first. I pin his hand to the floor with the knife he had, trying to ignore the cut in my own hand. I reach for another knife for his other hand and I plunge it in deep to make sure he can’t move. I head to the living room, grab some extension cord from his amp and I tie his legs together. Then, I bend down and pick up all the ball bearings. That’s when I force his mouth open, and drop them one at a time down his throat.

  His eyes regrettably open before he chokes to death and he begins to cough up all the ball bearings. He tries to move his hands and pull the knives out of them, but he can’t. He struggles with his legs to try and free them from the cords, but he can’t. He tries so hard to make himself stand to be in a position of dignity, but he can’t. Down there on the floor, he might as well be dead, but he isn’t. I can finish him any time I want to, though. Any time I want to. In the living room, I slide on my heels and on my way into the kitchen, I walk across him, and then up and down his body. He gasps for breath, but what comes out is a little moaning noise. I let him catch his breath and then I watch him. I find myself fascinated by this, by his descent into victimhood, by my knowledge that I can kill him whenever I choose. I pull up a chair and I look him over, wondering what’s wrong with me and why I can’t let this poor specimen die.

  “I know why you’re not killing me,” he says, suddenly seeming big and important, “I can tell you exactly why. You’re not killing me because you don’t want to go home and find him dead. As long as you let me live, you don’t have to go home and see that what I told you is true.”

  I can’t honestly say if he was bluffing, there’s no way at all to tell and that’s what bothers me most. If he’s had this kind of encounter, he’s unhooked the phone. If I kill Mr. Right and leave, then I’ll be certain what he said was true, if it was true. There is no telling how many Jack sent or just how good they are. This guy knows that. He expects me to give him some kind of edge by letting him torture me psychologically even though he’s the one pinned down to his kitchen floor by two knives.

  “Shut up!” I yell at him and I know this was a bad move. He knows now that he’s made me upset and I could make a mistake. Never mind that he’s as good as dead, I could still make a mistake. There’s a lot a person can survive and maybe God doesn’t have the mercy to just let a piece of shit like this die of the hemorrhaging. It dawns on me after that that he knows where Jack got the information from. I, sadly enough, need him to talk again, even though every time he talks I feel weaker.

  “How did Jack find out that Jeremy was Mr. 400?”

  He laughs, he laughs and laughs, and in spite of the knives in his hands and the ball bearings I almost made him swallow and the heavy duty extension cord around his legs. He laughs at me. This little man on the ground who should be begging me for mercy is laughing at me. Now I am the force of nature. Now I am the thing you don’t bargain with, the inescapable fate. But how, then is he escaping it? I give him a kick to the head, a good hard one. It makes him stop laughing, but it doesn’t get me the information.

  “Tell me, you piece of shit! How does Jack know?”

  “Maybe he reads tarot cards. Maybe the devil told him. Jack and the devil are old friends.”

  I kick him again, harder. Then I kick him the sides.

  “How the fuck does Jack know?” I scream, and the laughter continues, louder and louder. I kick him, over and over and over and I can see the laughter is starting to fade out and weaken. I realize then that I’m not getting this information, and that even if I knew where Jack had gotten the information, it wouldn’t mean anything, because it wouldn’t help me hide. Godless Jack knows who I am and who Jeremy is. The man on the floor is almost dead, but he remains arrogant because he knows that I might very well be almost dead, too and it gives him no end of edge, no end of arrogance. I’m never going to seem big to him, because I’m a woman. He can do this because women seem small to him. I feel even more like killing him, but it doesn’t come, I just find myself, kicking and kicking, leaving marks and bruises and indentations on the side of a thick and infuriating skull. This is my weakness, I realize, I’m not going for the kill because I like the pain, I like to feel big, I’m so scared of being a victim that I’m a bully in this circumstance. If I keep on torturing him, he’ll survive and I’ll be that much further from knowing how Jeremy is, which I’m actually in fact scared about.

  I walk very slowly to the counter. It’s like the drive over, but I know I’m the one stalling. I take a moment and flash it in front of his blurry eyes. He gives a sound somewhat like a laugh, a tiny tiny laugh that longs to be but doesn’t make it. Then, I drive it home. It takes me a little too long to do it, I guess because it’s scary to kill. I didn’t think it would be so scary. The torture and the rage came so easily but the mercy and the courage didn’t. I stare for too long at my first kill and then I search his apartment for anything valuable or any clues.

  Under his bed, there’s a suitcase with a couple thousand in cash. Excellent. This could buy the nuclear weapon we’re gonna need from Jones. Also under the bed is a young woman’s head. It’s a recent kill, one that looks very shocked. She doesn’t look at all satisfied that he’s gone, she doesn’t look like what I did actually mattered. It dawns on me that in a real fight, a guy like this wouldn’t be an asset at all to Jack. A guy like this could only get in the way. Except for the fact that he owns a 44 magnum. I guess that’s not nothing. I root around in his dresser drawers, finding all kinds of pornography, all kinds of nude photos from female fans with little slashmarks drawn on them and cumstains all over. I linger over these, wondering just what it was that would make a guy feel that way about women. I feel suddenly empowered when I realize that I don’t care. He’s dead.

  The real find is in the bottom drawer of the dresser, the real find is the gun. He wasn’t lying. He wasn’t going to shoot me. I have no clue what he would have done to me, except for his promise that he would have cut my breasts off and given them to the Cabana Boy’s grave. His apartmen
t feels like a shrine, a tomb, a haunted house. I feel like the guy in the kitchen that I just killed probably isn’t dead. It’s an awful feeling, feeling that somebody you just actively sought to kill probably isn’t dead. Very disturbing. Nothing here but porn and a big gun. Nothing special at all.

  I go out to the car, thinking I should be proud of the big gun I took off of this guy, of the people I’d shoot with it. But I end up thinking about my weakness, my sadism. He wanted to see me suffer and he did. He watched as I struggled to force myself to stop torturing him. He delighted in the fact that I was too much of a sadist to let him die. He felt like this would be an advantage, like it would be something Jack could use against us. I feel sick to my stomach instead of proud. Nothing I did mattered, because he wasn’t a threat. He was only a stranger with candy that stupid children went with. He might have killed a lot of women, and then a woman killed him, but I let him die slowly, I drew it out and turned it into a personal triumph when there was really nothing to exalt in.

  When I get home, I think about Kevin, Michael and Neil and how much they actually hurt me. They made me scared to be vulnerable, they made me ashamed of being part of a weak sex and they did everything Mister Right did. They taught me how to hurt myself, and how to spread pain. I walk in and Jeremy is sitting in the living room with seven bodies. I don’t take any time to ask him what happened, because I know. I know that he must have been recorded killing off those girls who were torturing Ian, who were delighting in spreading pain. Those girls, those girls like me and Mr. Right. He’s silent and looks as if he’s been wondering what to do forever.

  I show him the magnum and the suitcase full of cash. “I think we need to find Jones,” I tell him, “I think we need to go to Jones and get a nuclear weapon or something.”

  He takes the gun because he sees in my eyes that I don’t deserve it.