Alphabet Soup for the Tormented Soul

by Tobias Wade

  25. Remember that cell phone? Good girl! Take it out and go through your prey’s latest messages. Usually, there is at least one friend he has been texting, unless he is some sort of loser. But you don’t choose losers, do you?

  Shoot off a text that looks something like this: “Met this guy named Paul O’Connor at the bar. Dude said he had this sick TV for sale! Hoping to buy it off of him tonight. I’ll send pics!”

  If the police ever find the phone, Paul looks mighty guilty. Serves him right for calling you “sweetie” at the company meeting.

  Clean the phone. Turn it off. Throw it in the woods. Give Paul’s window the middle finger. Leave.

  26. Time to pick your next prey ;)

  Q is for Quota

  Kelly Childress

  The following letter was left on the counter of Penny’s Diner in Dunsmuir, California:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Maniaci,

  I’m sorry to do this so suddenly, and through a letter, but I have no choice. I have to quit. By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. Something happened and I don’t think it’s safe for me here anymore. Don’t worry, I’ll be OK, and all of you will be OK too, as long as you aren’t around me.

  Something I didn’t put on my resume was that I was a cop in my previous life. My real name is Sarah Verborden. Another thing I left out was that I’ve killed 26 people. Not in the line of duty, and not to protect anyone (although, you could argue it was a form of self-preservation).

  I’ve done some awful things. I’ve done things that keep me awake at night. Sometimes it’s the only consolation I have for my crimes, that I continue to suffer because of them.

  I haven’t been a cop or a murderer for over ten years. I left my last job, moved across the country, and changed my identity (the same night that I killed my 26th). But now I have to run again. When I came home from my jog this morning, there was an envelope on my front stoop containing a flash drive. The drive contained a single thirty-minute video. The first fifteen minutes was footage of my final murder, but it’s the last ten minutes that is motivating me to leave.

  I know it’s corny and I’m sorry, but you guys are the closest thing I’ve had to real family in a long, long time. Thank you for treating me so well. I wanted to write you this letter because, first and foremost, I think you’re some of the few people who deserve a full explanation. The other reason is an egotistical one. My entire life has been a secret, which means when I’m gone, what all happened to me and my family will be forgotten. Even though my life is littered with death, dishonesty, and selfishness, I can’t stand the thought of that simply vanishing….like a cloud of black smoke.

  It’s hard to make friends when you never put roots down. My dad was the only one who really understood, and he’s been gone for years. I just….I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but it’s bigger than I thought. And I’m sure that it’s bad.

  Take care of yourselves. Don’t trust outsiders. If you meet a man wearing a clergy shirt with a black collar, get away from him. Don’t answer his questions. Don’t talk to him any more than you have to. Downplay that you knew me. Trust me, you don’t want to be a part of it, whatever it is.

  Again, I’m sorry for all of this. I wish you both the best. My keys and uniform are in my cubbyhole in the break room. You can keep my last paycheck. Thank you for hiring me.

  Sincerely,

  Sarah Verborden

  Every time I moved to a new town or city, people always asked the same general thing: “Just need a change?” And I’d smile and say yes.

  The cynical thing that I never tell people is that, really --very little changes, no matter how much you move around. Work as a cop long enough, and all the things you see and the stories you hear blend together in a tapestry of life at its most violent and mundane. Old ladies dying alone in their apartments. A group of teenagers drowned at a lake. A young man, disappeared into thin air from his college campus. Drug addicts dying in droves—heroin, meth, a weird new one called Scopo-something.

  And then there’s all the human monsters. Myself, for example.

  But I digress. For this to make sense, I have to start in grade school and tell you about the time I caught my father with a dead body in our garage.

  I was waiting up, pissed and hungry, because he was late again and there wasn’t any food in the house (the short version: my dad skipped out on my mom while she was pregnant with me. My mom raised me until I was twelve, when she died. My dad re-emerged and took custody). When I heard the humming of the garage door opening, followed by all the familiar thuds of doors opening and closing, I marched my fourteen-year-old self down the stairs, arms crossed, ready to emulate my dead mother’s sternness.

  Ever have the wind completely taken out of your sails? That’s what happened to me when I opened the garage door and saw my father hauling the limp form of Mr. Lakeland, our elderly neighbor, out of his trunk.

  I remember running upstairs while he ran after me, yelling “Sarah, wait!”. I remember locking the door. Crying a little. Partially out of fear and partially because I was so sure that my anger and his tardiness was going to be the Big Event of the night, and I was wrong, so deeply fucking wrong.

  I was a stupid, stupid, stupid little girl.

  Eventually, though, I had to come out. My father planted himself outside my room and wouldn’t stop cajoling and reassuring me that everything was OK; there was no need to be afraid. And the emptiness in my belly roared, demanding to be filled.

  He took me to the backyard, where he laid Mr. Lakeland’s frail little body in the small bonfire pit we had - the kind that was dug into the ground and lined with flat stones. I flinched and clutched at my sweater when he swung a shovel up and brought it down on Mr. Lakeland’s skull. He stepped back, and said into the night air, “Seventeen. Take him.”

  And the sound of whispers came, and the whispering tendrils came, and they surrounded Mr. Lakeland, and even though I was furious at (and, now, terrified of) my father, I still clung to him and buried my face in his side as the body was ravaged.

  Ten minutes later, all that was left of Mr. Lakeland was a dark stain on the rock. My father got out the hose.

  After the rocks were mostly clean of carnage, my father took us inside. There was a pointed moment of uncertainty, and then he sat me at the table and gave me a Twinkie. He went to heat up some water. The water turned into hot chocolate, also for me. It was a little infantilizing, but I didn’t mind. It was the most tender he’d been towards me since the day I moved in.

  He talked, more earnestly than we’d ever talked. He talked about his eighteenth birthday when his mother (my Grandmother Sylvia) died, when he’d been sat down and told about the family curse. One person from every generation in their family must make 26 sacrifices to the beast. He didn’t believe it at first. Then he turned eighteen. He started having sudden and unexplainable pains - pains that incapacitated him to the point that he dropped out of school and had to start taking painkillers daily just to function. He ate his pills and suffered until he couldn’t anymore, and then one night he strangled his coworker as they were closing up the restaurant where they worked. He sat on the ground and waited, and after some time passed...black smoke consumed the body, leaving just a stain. And his pains went away. For the first time in months, relief.

  I asked what the thing’s name was. He said it didn’t have one, they just called it ‘the black smoke’ or ‘the curse’. I asked him how they knew it was 26 sacrifices. He said he couldn’t talk for previous family members, but that was how many people grandma had killed before the pains went away for good.

  I asked him why you couldn’t just dig up a dead body and then summon the thing. He said it didn’t work. He’d tried it.

  I asked why he killed Mr. Lakeland. He said he’d stopped by his house to check in, and found him unresponsive but alive—the victim of a stroke, or a heart attack, or something. His phone was off the hook and my dad said he could hear someone yelling for Mr
. Lakeland on the other end.

  He said he knew it seemed wrong, but Mr. Lakeland was old and if he was going to die anyway, he might as well make him an offering - it would save someone else from the same fate. But that meant he had to get the body out of there, immediately, before someone called the police, and he couldn’t risk doing it there and leaving evidence behind.

  I’ve often thought about whether or not he was telling me the truth about Mr. Lakeland. Dad was a kind guy, don’t get me wrong, but he wasn’t the Good Samaritan type to just drop in on a neighbor for a home check. I want to believe that was how it really happened, but when I weigh the totality of the circumstances...I think my dad probably lied about what happened that night.

  That night marked the start of Dad teaching me how to kill within the parameters of the curse. He taught me to mercy kill whenever possible. If I really had to, I could kill someone and transport them somewhere else, but if I had the time it was best to just do the sacrifice immediately. Mostly, though, he just taught me to hunt. I learned I should swap out my license plates with fakes when hunting. To try and give my sacrifices in abandoned buildings, basements, or the woods. How and where to look for security or trail cameras.

  He taught me to target the vulnerable, the forgotten, the powerless, saying it was one of the easiest ways to avoid detection. I’m telling you this because I don’t want to sugar-coat the morality of what we were doing. I won’t make arguments that our killings were somehow justified, or any of that “taking out the trash of the world” or “watching the watchmen” nonsense. I made peace with my choices - and his - long ago. We killed people. Usually innocents. Because in the end it was either them or us.

  Fast forward to one night in the August of 2007 when I was—coincidentally—unloading a body from my trunk. I had the drifter halfway out of the trunk before a spasm struck my gut, so painful that I shrieked into my dark, empty garage.

  It felt like something alive was writhing in my belly, trying to break out of my body’s fleshy prison. I gulped air. I screamed every obscenity I knew and a few I made up. My words echoed through the house, caustic with volume. I waited for the agony to recede, but it burned on as strong as ever. Eventually, I collapsed next to the rear tire, gasping.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually the burning started to dissipate. I gritted my teeth and got back to my feet. The corpse wasn’t going to move itself, after all.

  I’d stopped the drifter earlier in the night while on patrol, and, feigning sympathy, told him about a spot under an overpass a few miles to the south. “It’s not much, but there aren’t too many critters and it keeps off the worst of the weather,” I’d said. “You can stay there as long as you move on in the morning.” The gratitude in his eyes almost made me feel bad. Later that night, I’d come by and bashed his head in with a rock while he slept. I’d wanted to get rid of him right there, but some teenagers wandered dangerously close to the spot, and I didn’t want to risk attracting attention. So into the trunk he went.

  I had dragged the body to the top of the basement stairs when another spasm wracked my midsection. It rippled through my muscles and into my bones, all the way down to my heels. The pain brought me to my knees. My hands made involuntary clawing motions for a few seconds. I tried my best to breathe through it, to ignore it.

  I abandoned any plans I had of handling him gently. I kicked the body down the stairs. It took almost a minute to get all the way down, the lifeless arms and legs getting tangled in the narrow space.

  Stupid family. Stupid father. Stupid curse that keeps my demons lingering much, much longer than they should. I leaned against the door frame at the top of the stairs, panting.

  Clutching my aching belly, I shouted, “Take him! Take him, goddammit! 24! 24!”

  Hushed whispers emanated from the dark. I saw little tendrils of black curl around the drifter, still lying prone at the bottom of the stairs. The tendrils slowly circled around him until his body was almost completely obscured by the smoke. Then the crunching started.

  The drifter’s body jerked back and forth as the tendrils played with it. The sounds of twisting, cracking, and churning wet gristle filled the space. Sometimes the whirling lump of black smoke was punctuated with little bright white bits of bone. The muscles in my stomach seized, causing me to keel over onto the kitchen’s linoleum floor with my back arched. When the drifter’s skull popped, it was so loud it felt like a sonic boom. I jumped, even though I’ve heard that sound many times before. But when I see his head start to lose that familiar structure—lower jaw now perpendicular to the top one, one gleaming white eye shifted to the dead center of a face now horribly concave, before being pulverized into chunky jelly—I couldn’t help it, I started to dry heave.

  All that was left of that drifter, whoever he was, was a wet red smear on the concrete.

  Only two more.

  Two months after the drifter, the pains returned. I knew they’d been coming on sooner and sooner the more people I killed, but I wasn’t expecting them that soon. I was forced to scramble and find a new target much earlier than I normally would. This is how I ended up in a bank parking lot on a Wednesday night, talking to my supervising sergeant, and trying to remain casual while there was an unconscious woman in my trunk.

  I had - irrationally, I admit—driven three towns over to one of my old beats and visited their equivalent of Skid Row. I only had to circle around a few times before I spotted a small figure hunched up next to a building. It wasn’t difficult to persuade her to come over, and even easier to knock her out and toss her in the trunk. So you can imagine that I was less than thrilled when I passed by the bank - just a few miles from home - and saw a familiar police cruiser flash its hazards at me.

  Heart sinking, I turned into the parking lot and pulled up to see Sergeant Belden’s face, blue-lit by the glow of his monitor.

  “You all right there, Verborden? You look a little pale.”

  I rubbed my forehead bashfully. “Felt a little crappy last night, but better now. Still getting used to midnights. Haven't done them since I was a rookie up in Pinewood.”

  We shot the shit for a few more minutes. Work, holidays, the weather...

  Sergeant Belden was a good man.

  What I did to him wasn’t fair.

  Sometimes when I’m lying awake at night I revisit that moment. I was shaking. I was hesitating. Ten years later, I’m still surprised that I managed to pull the trigger. The fact that the sergeant and I had always gotten along was probably the only thing that stopped him from shooting me first.

  My decision happened so fast, so clinically and quick, that sometimes late at night I wonder if it was really me. It felt like someone else; like Soldier Sarah came out brandishing all her training from murder school, ready to get the job done.

  I never intended to kill Sergeant Belden, but we all know plans change sometimes. And in the middle of our conversation, the woman I kidnapped woke up and started screaming at the top of her lungs.

  The sergeant jumped, startled, and all the years of learning from Dad, and of hunting in my private time, and of moving and never getting attached took over. I drew my gun and shot him twice in the temple.

  I whispered, “25. Take him.”

  I got out of my car, already crying. I opened the trunk and did the same to the screaming woman. I tipped her dead weight onto the asphalt, and said in a low voice, “26. Take her.”

  The smoke that was consuming Sergeant Belden split into two, and one of its cyclones descended on the woman. I walked over to the driver’s side of my car and sat on the ground, and let the tears fall down my face.

  You have to believe me when I say I didn’t want that to happen. But it was the only way. And that, coincidentally, has been a curse of its own. It hasn’t been the jubilant release that I dreamed it would be. It’s been like emerging from a terminal illness, the kind of perpetual darkness that tests your soul and your being as much as it tests your body.

&nb
sp; After the smoke took Belden and the woman, I got in my car and sped home. I had long prepared for the day when this trail of death would be over, and I didn’t care if anybody could link me to the murders. I was leaving the Midwest for good. I would be in the wind. I had everything I needed to disappear, and I did.

  And I thought I’d stay disappeared, here, in Dunsmuir. Until this morning.

  The flash drive that someone put on my doorstep contained Sergeant Belden’s dash camera footage from the night of the murders. There isn’t much to see, since most of it happened off-camera, and at times the video completely disintegrates into static. But after that clears, you can see a cloud of smoke edging in the frame. After a few minutes of that, you see my car speed away.

  Then, a funnel of smoke can be seen descending from the lower left corner. It whirls and churns, condensing ever downward. When it eventually clears, a small, spindly figure is left lying on the ground. Curled up in the fetal position, it looks like it could be an emaciated person. The picture quality isn’t good, but it looks almost mummified - long, bony and shriveled.

  A man wearing a black priest’s cassock and collar enters from the right frame. He stops short of the creature, and kneels. He kneels for a few moments without moving at all. He brings his hands to his mouth, as if in awe or fear. Then, he reaches a trembling finger out to the figure.

  It reaches a withered hand back to him.

  R is for Romance

  Mikey Knutson

  It all started at a bar.

  That's where I met the woman that changed my life. Typical, right?

  Average looking guy in his 20s goes out drinking with his buddies and picks up some strange. Almost every bro-movie and frat party story has been based off of that premise. It's not factual, of course. It doesn't actually happen that way. The fact of the matter is most women don't want to be hit on when they go out. One could go so far as to say they even despise when arrogant men swing their dicks around all night trying to see who can throw theirs the hardest. Have you ever wondered why ladies enjoy going to gay bars? That's why.