Go Kill Crazy!

by Bryan Smith

  She glanced to her right again, an eyebrow raised.

  The unseen female spoke again. “You’re doing great so far. Go on.”

  When Keely resumed speaking, her expression was grim. “For the first time in my life, I’m in a place where I feel like I belong. I’m surrounded by caring, nurturing people who only want the best for me. They are my soul mates, my real sisters and brothers, and together we have embarked on a path of spiritual awakening and enlightenment. My eyes are finally open and at last I see the world as it really is. I see the reality behind the lies society has taught us to accept as truth. And I won’t allow you or anyone else to take that from me.”

  A sense of dread crept through Casey as he listened to his sister’s recorded voice. There was a harsh edge to it he didn’t recognize, a wisp of wrongness that saddened him even as it made his skin crawl. Not helping at all was the way Boyd and Marzetti continued to creep closer to him from either side. Though he knew the effort would almost certainly prove futile, the time had clearly come to make a break for it. Maybe take a roundhouse swing at the goons with a chair, then dash for the door and hope for the best. He would likely be shot down long before he could get there, but what other choice did he have? He wasn’t about to just sit here and take whatever brand of brutal punishment they had in mind.

  He had to act and act now.

  But something in his sister’s voice helplessly compelled him, made it impossible to do anything other than sit and listen as long as she continued to speak. “You are done interfering in my life, Casey. I have a rendezvous with destiny…” Something about that phrase struck a nerve within Casey and further fueled his already redlining sense of anxiety. “All of us do. And you’ve made your last attempt to block it. But I know how stubborn you are. I know you won’t just do the sensible thing and go away. So we’ve come up with a special way of dealing with you. After this, you won’t want anything else to do with me. But that’s okay. I no longer consider you my brother. Any pain you are about to suffer you brought on yourself.”

  Boyd and Marzetti were too close now. The chair gambit was no longer a viable option. Every elapsing second brought him irrevocably closer to something horrible. The perverse anticipation of the goons pinning him in was a palpable thing. And yet still he couldn’t move.

  Keely’s image smiled again. “Your life is about to change forever, Casey. All the simple, everyday things you take for granted are about to become very hard for you.” There was a vicious twist to her mouth now. The sight of it stabbed at his heart. “And it’s all your fault.”

  The video ended.

  Casey braced his feet on the floor and tried to propel himself out of the chair, but Boyd and Marzetti were there to grab him and slam him facedown onto the table. Boyd, being the substantially bigger man, held him down while Marzetti stretched out his right arm and held it against the table’s surface.

  Casey’s eyes rolled upward to stare at Jones, who was now standing. From this vantage point, he looked almost impossibly huge, more like a mountain than a man. And clutched in his right hand was a shiny stainless steel meat cleaver. Casey was willing to bet it was brand new, purchased especially for the occasion. He had also donned a long rubber apron at some point while Casey had been transfixed by the video.

  Every remaining ounce of bravado drained away from Casey as his gaze locked on the gleaming edge of the blade. In its place was nothing but gut-twisting fear. He was pretty sure he’d never seen anything quite as sharp as that blade.

  “You don’t have to do this. I’ll leave you motherfuckers alone from now on, I swear.” Casey hated hearing the pitiable whine creeping into his voice, but he couldn’t help it. Stoicism was impossible in a situation like this. “Come on. I fucking swear to God, I won’t ever bother you again.”

  Jones chuckled. “Oh, we already know that, Casey. According to your sister, you’re right-handed. Well, you used to be, as of a few seconds from now.”

  This remark elicited belly laughs from the goons holding him down.

  Jones looked like a grinning ghoul as he raised the blade high above his head. “Ready to bleed, Casey?”

  Casey couldn’t stop shaking. Tears stung his eyes. “No. Please.”

  Jones’ right bicep expanded perceptibly as he prepared to slam the blade down, but before that could happen something in the kitchen exploded. Screams filled the room as Jones staggered backward. Casey glanced up and saw that a chunk of the man’s head was missing. He belatedly understood that the explosion he’d heard had actually been the close-range report of a gun. The cleaver slid from Jones’ fingers and clattered on the tiled floor an instant before the big man toppled dead to the floor. The goons let go of Casey and went for their weapons, but it was already too late for them. Two more loud reports rang out. Two more big bodies hit the floor. Casey remained where he was a few moments longer, his ears ringing while he waited, fully expecting to meet the same fate as the other men. Then the ringing began to subside and he realized someone was talking to him. The voice was vaguely familiar.

  It was a woman’s voice.

  It was telling him to…to…

  “…get up off the goddamn table, Casey.”

  He decided obeying the voice was probably wise. And anyway, it wasn’t like there was anything else he could do.

  So, still trembling, he pushed himself away from the table and turned around to face the person who had maybe saved his life. The “maybe” qualifier was definitely necessary, because the person pointing a 9mm at him now had once vowed to kill him if she ever saw him again.

  He held his hands up, a look of profound confusion twisting his features.

  “Echo? What the hell are you doing here?”

  Chapter Six

  One year ago

  The scene is an idyllic middle-class neighborhood on a warm day in early spring. It’s a newer development and all the prefabricated homes look much alike. This lack of outward personality is offset by the clean streets and immaculate lawns. The residents are all hard-working people who are justifiably proud of the small slice of the American Dream they’ve carved out for themselves. The people here look out for each other and strive to be good neighbors. There are no gangbangers dealing drugs on the corners and no drive-by shootings. All that sort of thing happens in an alien world removed far from this place. Crime of any sort is rare.

  So when twenty-two-year-old Echo Vaughn emerged scantily-clad and screaming from one of the prefab homes early that sunshine-soaked afternoon, it made for a pretty unusual sight. Ninety-year-old Vera Brooks happened to be out walking her elderly Pomeranian when this occurred. She stopped dead in her tracks and gawked in open-mouthed wonder as the enraged young woman swung a golf club and smashed in one of the headlights of a late-model Lexus. Puddles the Pomeranian started barking his little head off while Vera stared at Echo and felt faint stirrings of the forbidden lust she had last indulged decades ago. Nowadays people were more open-minded about such things, but in her time Sapphic love had not been socially acceptable.

  Vera was just a visitor to this neighborhood, the reluctant guest of one of her grandsons, a patronizing young man she secretly couldn’t stand. At the moment, however, she was very glad she had accepted this latest invitation to visit. Never in her life had she beheld a sight as glorious as the one before her now. Her heart was beating almost painfully fast as she watched the young beauty swing the golf club again and smash out another headlight. The woman’s assault on the car continued as she commenced striking the windshield. After the third swing of the club, the glass began to splinter. She continued with her screaming the entire time. It was a profanity-laden tirade that was only intermittently intelligible, but it seemed most of her ire was directed against someone named Casey.

  But Vera didn’t care much about the source of the woman’s anger. She didn’t know the young lady, nor would she ever know her. The gulf of years between them was unfortunately far too wide for that. Therefore the cause of this drama was irrelevant. All
that really mattered was that it was happening and for that she was grateful. The woman’s hair was a shade of midnight black so perfectly dark it had to come from a bottle. Vera loved her razor-sharp bangs and the way the glossy locks brushed her narrow, alabaster-pale bare shoulders. A lot of bare flesh was visible thanks to a wardrobe so skimpy it was hardly there at all. She wore a tiny black halter top, tight denim cutoffs barely larger than a bikini bottom, flip-flops and nothing else. Her large breasts jiggled pleasingly every time she swung the golf club. And then there was the proliferation of colorful tattoos. This was another thing that would have scandalized the prudes in her time. Until today Vera had never had much of an opinion regarding illustrated flesh one way or the other, but that had now changed. The tattoos enhanced the woman’s beauty and contrasted her ghostly pallor in a way that was quite striking.

  Soon a well-built young man clad only in boxer shorts emerged from the house and attempted to placate the tattooed beauty. He had long blond hair Vera judged too pretty for a man. She realized this was unfair given her own preferences, but she couldn’t help how she felt. The woman screamed at him. It seemed this man was the mysterious Casey. It was clear he had been the woman’s lover, but he had done something to bring their relationship to the brink of ruin. The nature of that something became obvious as another young woman—this one a shapely blonde wearing a man’s dress shirt and nothing else—came out of the house and started screaming at both of them. The blonde lady seemed more upset about the damage to the Lexus than anything else.

  The tattooed woman screamed again and charged at the blonde lady. The man intervened, putting himself between the women. He managed to wrest the golf club away from the tattooed woman. By then a male neighbor had emerged from the house next door and was threatening to call the police. The blond man displayed some venom of his own, telling the neighbor he had things under control and that he should mind his own fucking business. At that point the tattooed woman broke off her attempted assault on the blonde woman and headed for a truck parked at the curb. She got in the truck and started it up, apparently having left her keys in the ignition prior to entering the house. She did a three-point turn in the middle of the street, got the truck positioned so that the driver’s side was facing the driveway, and screamed a final threat at Casey and his blonde floozy.

  “You stay the fuck away from me, asshole! I ever see your face again, I’ll fucking kill you, and that’s a promise.”

  Then she hit the gas and peeled away from there. The black-haired beauty was so consumed with rage she took no note of either Vera or her dog as she drove away. Only a desperate, last-second tug on his leash saved the life of Puddles the Pomeranian.

  Vera lingered a couple moments longer as Casey and the blonde woman exchanged a few heated words before going back inside. Once this last bit of drama was over, Vera turned away from the house and headed back in the direction of her grandson’s home. The grandson remarked on how subdued she seemed upon returning, but Vera did not mention the fabulously exciting things she had witnessed that afternoon. She spent the rest of the day thinking of little else, though, and only became sociable again later that night when she made tea for the grandson.

  She dosed the condescending asshole’s cup with rat poison.

  It was a satisfying end to one of the most remarkable and enjoyable days of her long life.

  She was so consumed with rage and incipient hatred she nearly crashed the truck several times on her way out of the whore’s neighborhood. The truck swerved wildly every time she let go of the steering wheel and slammed her palms against it. With just one exception, she was able to right the vehicle in time to avoid colliding with cars parked at the curb. But that one time she was a touch too slow correcting her course and wound up clipping the fender of a big old Buick. There was a thump followed by a loud rending of metal.

  Echo Vaughn never considered stopping. The way she felt right now, she was likely to kill anyone who got aggro with her, which the Buick’s owner was certain to do if she stopped to talk with him or her. So she put the accelerator to the floor and Casey’s F-150 tore away from the Buick with an even louder sound of rending metal. A glance at the rearview mirror as she sped away revealed significant damage to the other vehicle. Its fender was badly shredded. Any other time she might have felt bad for what her negligence had caused, but right now she didn’t give a damn.

  She couldn’t believe Casey had cheated on her. She had been convinced he was the total opposite of all the other losers she’d dated, who by and large had been a bunch of conniving jackasses who took advantage of her generous nature. And too many of them had been a little too happy about her being a stripper. The worst was when they’d bring a gang of their equally brain dead friends to the club to see her dance. That was some creepy shit. It happened often enough she had to wonder if all guys were natural degenerates.

  But Casey had never been like that. He often tried to talk her into quitting the world of adult entertainment. There was no way she could do that. It was far too lucrative and she didn’t have the skills to do anything else. Casey countered this by saying she could go back to school. He told her she wouldn’t have to work at all if she enrolled at one of the local universities, promising to take care of her and provide for her until she got a degree. Which sounded great in theory, but somehow Echo had never quite been able to buy into it. Getting a degree would take years and would require a level of commitment she couldn’t imagine any guy—even one as seemingly true-blue as Casey—ever being able to manage.

  Turned out she had been right about that. The bastard had the same commitment issues every guy had. A gossipy neighbor tipped her off to Casey’s fling with Ella Barton. There had been no hard proof of an affair, just repeated sightings of a busty blonde woman coming around to Echo’s house while she was at work. So she paid a guy from the club five hundred dollars to stake out her house and, if necessary, follow Casey around while she was working. Her paid stalker reported the bad news via a call to the club earlier today.

  She fled the club in a blind rage and took Casey’s truck—which she frequently drove to work—to the address her informant had provided. Echo was incapable of playing it cool. So many guys had come and gone in her life and the eventual parting of the ways never bothered her. Again, though, Casey was different. He had really gotten to her on a level no one else ever had. She had tears in her eyes when she arrived at Ella’s cute little prefab house. The visible emotion annoyed her. No one had ever made her care enough to shed tears. And this guy—this fucking snake—didn’t deserve any fucking tears.

  After slipping into the house via an unlocked back door, she found the semi-clothed couple making out on a sofa in the living room. They were both clad only in their underwear and Casey was on top of the woman, prone between her whorishly spread legs. Ella was writhing and moaning as he kissed her, her hands tangled in his long hair. Echo loved Casey’s long blond locks. He was a good-looking guy to start with, but the hair really sealed the deal.

  Echo totally lost her shit.

  She screamed.

  She threw things. Anything that was handy, especially if it looked expensive.

  Casey tried to reason with her, shedding tears of his own and sounding oh-so-sincere as he told her over and over how sorry he was for “fucking up”. But Echo was in no mood for his apologies, regardless of how heartfelt they seemed on the surface.

  She didn’t depart until Ella—a woman she’d known in passing from hanging out with Casey at a local bar—got on the phone to call the police. On the way out, she grabbed a golf club from a bag of them propped up in a corner in the foyer.

  Now that she was out of the neighborhood and driving back toward town, the worst of her rage seemed temporarily spent. She started thinking about her next move. Obviously Casey was getting his cheating ass kicked out of her house effective today. She briefly considered trying to get to the house before he could so she could systematically destroy everything he owned. But she rejected the id
ea immediately. Trashing his stuff would just reinforce the impression of being devastated by his actions. Now that she was thinking more clearly, that was the last thing she wanted. What was called for now was absolute cold detachment. She would show no emotion whatsoever when he came around to see her again.

  An image of Ella’s shapely legs wrapped around Casey’s muscular back made her grip the steering wheel harder and push the gas pedal to the floor.

  Or fuck that, she thought. Maybe I’ll just kill the son of a bitch.

  She could do it. A vivid fantasy formed in her head as she drove. Casey on his knees as she held a gun on him, crying and begging for his life. Then her smiling coldly as she pulled the trigger and blew his worthless brains out.

  It would be nothing less than what he deserved.

  So why did she have tears in her eyes again as she thought about it?

  Rather than going home or returning to the club, she drove for a few more miles and pulled into the parking lot of a bar called Buffalo Ted’s. An ordinary dive from the looks of it. Nothing special. But it would do for what she had in mind. And what she had in mind was getting shitfaced drunk in a place where she wasn’t likely to be recognized.

  She grabbed her bag and got out of the truck, her flip-flops flapping loudly on the asphalt as she hurried across the parking lot en route to the bar’s entrance. The sooner she could get that first drink inside her, the better she would feel. Or maybe not, but at least it would be something to do.

  A bell chimed as she banged through the front door and took a quick look around. A few faces turned in her direction. Most of the handful of patrons present went right back to their drinks, but a few gazes lingered, which was not surprising. Echo was long accustomed to being ogled by a certain percentage of the population wherever she went. She had tantalizingly long, exquisitely toned legs and a chest that irresistibly compelled the attention of heterosexual males wherever she went.