Heartless (Delirium Novella Series)

by Allan Leverone

  The narrow alleyway might have contained picnic tables and benches decades ago to allow happy customers to enjoy their ice cream in the shade, but now it offered as close to a guarantee of privacy as Gary felt they were likely to get. He told Audrey to drive right into the slot and they disappeared behind the old building, now completely invisible to anyone in town unless someone were to drive or walk back there and check. Gary felt comfortable that would not happen.

  “Shut the car off,” he instructed, and the girls stiffened as Audrey turned the key and the engine died. For the first time, he saw what might have been a flicker of fear, or at least concern, cross Janelle’s face and he felt a rush of savage triumph. Then the look was gone and her face regained its familiar stoicism, giving away nothing, as she turned her head and gazed with her typical apparent lack of concern out the window.

  And that pissed Gary off. Part of the fun of kidnapping, raping and murdering young women was the rush he experienced from seeing the fear etched onto their faces, from enjoying the symphony of submission as they begged and pleaded for their lives, from holding absolute power over the fate of another human being before crushing the life out of her like she was a bug.

  It was so tempting to do that uncooperative bitch Janelle right now. He could incapacitate Audrey—duct-tape her hands and feet together and slap a nice, thick strip of tape over her mouth—then toss her out of the car while he took care of business with her stuck-up friend. Then he could choke Janelle to death and drag her corpse into the woods, throw Audrey back in the car, and hit the road again.

  Getting rid of one of the girls would certainly simplify things. He was finding it much more than twice as difficult to control two prisoners as one. Just something as simple as finding a place to let them pee had turned into a major fucking undertaking, leading to this creepy little town in the middle of nowhere, at least ten miles from the interstate.

  But he wasn’t quite ready to kill Janelle. He wouldn’t mind fucking her, that much was true. She had a smoking body—both girls did—and self-control had never been Gary Newton’s strong suit. That was exactly the problem, though. He knew if he raped her he would never be able to stop himself from strangling her.

  That was how it worked: sex equaled strangulation. That was how it had always worked for Gary. He wondered if he might have turned out differently had his next-door neighbor, Rick Santos, not taken such an intense “personal” interest in the shy, withdrawn young boy when he was growing up. Gary’s father had never been in the picture and his mother, a drug-addicted, self-absorbed hooker, paid little attention to him, allowing the slimy asshole living in the apartment across the hall to exorcise his own demons using Gary.

  Gary had known his treatment at the hands of his neighbor was wrong, especially when the man wrapped those hands around Gary’s neck and squeezed until he passed out, but at least it was attention, which was more than he could expect from his whore mother, and besides, what could he do about it, anyway? He was just a kid.

  Eventually the neighbor had been busted for something—drugs, Gary suspected, although he never found out for sure—and been taken away for good. The last time Gary saw Santos his hands were manacled together and he was being shoved roughly down the shabby hallway of the apartment building by two cops who looked as though they might be as twisted in their own way as the freak Santos was in his.

  By then, though, it had been way too late. The damage was done. Gary had suffered at the hands of his neighbor for years and although he was able to imitate the people surrounding him who seemed normal, he knew deep inside he wasn’t normal. He wasn’t even close to normal. He knew normal people didn’t fantasize about fucking and strangling pretty girls. At least he suspected they didn’t.

  As soon as he was old enough, Gary walked out of that scummy apartment and never looked back, not slowing down even to say goodbye to his slag mother, who probably never noticed he was gone anyway. He hit the road, leaving his home town of Providence, Rhode Island behind and vowing never to return.

  And he hadn’t. He traveled around the country, the very essence of the twenty-first century drifter, earning money by doing odd jobs, sometimes staying in one location for as long as six months, before always eventually striking out again in search of something he could not quantify but that drove him relentlessly.

  One thing about his travels was consistent, though. Everywhere he went, he left bodies in his wake. Young, female bodies. And their condition was always the same. Strangled after sexual penetration. The funny part—and Gary was highly intelligent, certainly smart enough to appreciate the delicious irony—was that he was a good-looking guy with a handsome face and easy smile, the kind of clean-cut looking young man any parent would welcome into their home as their daughter’s date.

  But of course it was all a sham. “Normal” relationships were completely unfulfilling, and in fact Gary had never been able to manage sex with a girl unless he was holding the threat of extreme violence over her. And when he was done, he always found himself with his hands clamped around the girl’s neck, her lifeless body cooling beneath his.

  Always. He couldn’t remember one time when he had had sex with a girl who was still breathing when it was over. He was the ultimate one-night stand. Gary had long ago come to grips with his unusual situation and stopped worrying about it. Killing was no big deal, as long as he didn’t get caught, and terrorizing pretty girls really revved his engine, so that’s what he did. It seemed a strange thing to dedicate your life to, bizarre even, but there it was.

  He blinked and shook his head and realized one of the girls had said something to him. Every so often he would fall into one of these weird, trance-like fugues, usually when thinking about his mother and his awful past, and he hated when it happened. He considered himself extremely fortunate that the girls hadn’t just opened their doors and walked away from the car. They could have done exactly that while he was lost inside his own head and he would never have noticed until it was too late.

  “What did you say?” he asked testily, hoping the girls hadn’t noticed his temporary exit from the land of reality. They were still inside the car, so he guessed they hadn’t. He glanced at Janelle and saw that goddamned tiny smile on her face, like she could see straight into his twisted brain and found the results somehow amusing. He felt a fresh wave of hatred roll over him.

  “I asked if we were just going to sit here all night,” she said. Gary had to admit it was a good question, but once again it was the sort of thing he had never heard before out of one of his victims.

  He smiled coldly. It was important to demonstrate that he was still the one in charge. “Why, are you anxious to get down to business?”

  Janelle flashed him a look of scorn. It was almost as if she was intentionally goading him, taunting him, trying to see what might happen if she pushed him too far. “We have to pee, remember? Isn’t that why we’re sitting here behind this broken-down shed in this God-forsaken little shithole that if we’re very lucky we’ll never have to see again?”

  “Christ, you’re a pain in the ass. Yes, you can go pee.” He reached into his backpack, rummaging around until he found what he was looking for. He dug out the roll of duct tape and held it up for the girls’ inspection, hoping to provoke a look of horror and accomplishing his objective with Audrey. Janelle, though, just smirked and looked away, like she had known all along what was coming.

  Gary tried to ignore the little bitch’s button pushing. He ripped off a good-sized strip and slapped it over Audrey’s mouth, lifting her hair out of the way and rolling the tape around the back of her neck, then again over her mouth. He did this three times and then moved to Janelle and repeated the procedure. Then he taped her left wrist to Audrey’s right, rolling the long piece of tape around and around their slender arms, ensuring it would take too long for them to remove the adhesive from either their mouths or their wrists with their free hands to make an escape from the thicket of trees. Finally, he opened the rear door and stepped
into the last lingering remains of the evening twilight. The heat and humidity struck him like a sledgehammer.

  He opened Janelle’s door and pulled her roughly out of the car. Audrey followed, stuck now to her friend like glue. Gary knelt down carefully, ready to react quickly in case one of the girls—Janelle, most likely—came up with the bright idea of kneeing him in the face. Neither of them did. He ripped off another long roll of duct tape and fastened their ankles together; Audrey’s right to Janelle’s left.

  Then he grabbed Janelle’s free hand and led the two girls through the shrubbery and into the cover of the trees. The going was slow as they moved clumsily, trying to synchronize their steps with two legs taped together. It reminded Gary of a three-legged race at a county fair, minus the laughter and fun, of course.

  He walked them a few feet into the woods and said roughly, “This is far enough. Do your business and then get your asses back to the car. You each have one free hand so you should be able pull your shorts down and then back up when you’re done. Try to take off your duct tape and I’ll kill you both. Try to escape through the woods and I’ll kill you both. Take too long and I’ll kill you both. Fuck with me in any way whatsoever and I’ll kill you both. Got it?”

  Audrey nodded, face downcast. Janelle glared at him, her eyes smoldering with unconcealed hatred. Gary smiled. “If you’d rather, I can stay and help you with your shorts.”

  No one spoke.

  “That’s what I figured. Now, hurry up so we can get back on the road.” He turned and walked away.

  * * *

  Traffic on the highway had lightened up considerably by the time the strange trio backtracked out of Lore City and resumed their westbound journey. Big rigs seemed to make up a much higher percentage of the traffic count as the darkness deepened, the last lingering rays of daylight reluctantly surrendering to the oncoming night, signaling to many travelers that it was time to get off the road.

  Gary was most comfortable at night; its black cloak allowing him to do some of his most satisfying work while minimizing the likelihood of being caught. Nighttime was the right time, indeed; it was exactly what he had been waiting for since taking his latest two victims, and now that it had arrived, he wanted to begin getting down to business. With two girls to enjoy instead of the customary one, a little judicious planning would allow him to enjoy his unusual hobby for most of the rest of the night.

  He hadn’t been paying much attention to the odometer, but Gary did a little figuring and decided they had traveled well over two hundred-fifty miles by now. They had left the ice cream stand—the first one—at a little after four in the afternoon and headed straight to the interstate, traveling at a sedate sixty miles per hour ever since. The time was now almost ten o’clock, so even accounting for their one pee break, Gary knew they were well outside the range where law enforcement would be conducting any serious search for the girls.

  That was assuming anyone even knew they were missing, a possibility Gary considered extremely unlikely. His victims had told him they were college students on their way back to school, but he had known their story was bullshit right from the get-go. They looked to be about college-age, but Gary Newton had plenty of experience with college girls, and these two had struck him right off the bat as much…harder…than the typical fresh-faced American coed. They clearly had been around the block a few times.

  He hadn’t disputed their story though, because, quite simply, he didn’t care why they were traveling crosscounty. If they weren’t college kids, they were on the move for some other reason and the fact that they chose not to share their motivation made no difference to him. Within a few hours they would both be dead anyway, beginning the early stages of decomposition in a pair of very shallow matching graves, rendering their reasons for traveling America’s highways permanently irrelevant.

  2 - Janelle

  The big dumb asshole was working himself up, getting ready to make his move; Janelle could tell. And it was about damned time, because although it was interesting being the victim of a kidnapping for a change, rather than being the perpetrator—it added an element of danger and excitement into the mix—the whole scene was becoming a little tiresome.

  The guy flashed that little blade around like he thought he was fucking Zorro or something, like he thought just because he could flick the spring-loaded mechanism with his thumb, making that annoying clicking sound over and over, his victims were going to just keel over, or maybe lie back and spread their legs. “Please, mister, don’t stick me with the knife; stick me with something else instead, mister, please!”

  She supposed his crude techniques probably worked just fine with most girls, which might make it the only reason in the world Janelle was glad she wasn’t like most girls. She wasn’t anything like most girls. Janelle had been prepared for her and Audrey’s little charade to end back at the broken-down ice cream stand, assuming their guest had been planning to rape them behind the building. When it turned out he really only wanted to let them pee—and in relative privacy, at that—she had nearly burst out laughing. Would have, in fact, if it hadn’t been for that goddamned duct tape he slapped over their mouths.

  Thankfully, he had removed the gags as soon as they struggled back to the car. First he unwound the strips of tape from their wrists and ankles, prominently displaying his knife, of course, just in case they had forgotten he had it in his possession during the five minutes they spent out in the woods peeing. Then he ripped the tape off Audrey’s mouth and pushed her back inside the front seat of the car before removing Janelle’s tape, opening the rear door, and shoving her roughly into the back seat and then quickly following right behind.

  To Janelle, that was the tipoff he was preparing for his pathetically obvious end game. There was no reason for one of his victims to join him in back unless he was planning on raping her back there. Strategically, it would have made more sense for him to leave both of them up front where he could keep an eye on them. It was what she would have done. Of course, Janelle was much better at this sort of thing than their “kidnapper.” She certainly had more experience at it.

  He forced Audrey to return to the highway and continue westbound, tossing out the obligatory threats about the horrific fate that would befall her if she so much as slowed the car down or exited the interstate without permission or took one wrong turn or basically did anything but sit up there and continue straight down the highway. The black-haired beauty had played her part perfectly, just as she had been doing since Gary struck up the conversation in the broiling sun six hours ago.

  Now the car cruised along the asphalt and Gary fidgeted in his seat. Janelle sat pressed against her door, as far away from her “captor” as possible, doing her best to project an aura of fear. She wanted him to think she was so afraid of him she could not stand to be any closer than absolutely necessary. Outside, the highway was mostly empty, a long dark ribbon of pavement stretching off into the distance. Every once in a great while an eighteen-wheel behemoth or another car would pass them in the left lane, but that didn’t matter; it wasn’t like anyone could see inside the Saturn.

  She watched him unblinkingly, knowing her steady gaze was beginning to unnerve him, enjoying how hard he was trying not to show she was getting to him. He was failing. Not only was he failing, he knew that she knew that he was failing and of course, that pissed him off, which only compounded his nervousness and made it that much more enjoyable for her.

  In a way, she almost felt sorry for him, he was so overmatched. It was clear that somewhere in the back of his brain, in the most basic, primal section of the cerebral cortex, where all our ancient caveman fears are stored, where the terror of being alone in a dark room manifested itself even when the rational mind knew there was no reason for it, the guy was beginning to realize he had fucked up this time and bitten off more than he could chew.

  Undoubtedly their kidnapper’s conscious mind didn’t even understand what the problem was, not yet, but the seeds of doubt and fear had been
planted and every second she gazed at him, her eyes clear and steady and glittering, a little more water sprinkled down onto the crop of terror she and Audrey would harvest very, very soon.

  The reliable Detroit engine hummed quietly away and Janelle’s eyelids began to feel heavy. Her body was reacting to the stress and adrenaline of the last several hours as well as to the other changes taking place; changes she could feel beginning to accelerate. She knew Audrey would be getting tired too, although her friend was one strange chick, wired differently than anyone else Janelle had ever met, and that was saying something.

  Audrey’s personality was lacking in anything remotely resembling normal human emotion, her dazzling brown eyes providing an effective screen for the complete absence of a soul. Or a conscience. Her beauty and sex appeal made luring male victims into their clutches almost embarrassingly easy, although even Janelle, who had been with some pretty scary dudes over her long lifetime, occasionally found her friend’s shark-like dead stare more than a little difficult to hold.

  But even cold-blooded husks of human beings were subject to the normal requirements of the earthly body, which meant that if Janelle was having a hard time staying awake, Audrey would be getting drowsy, too. She hoped Audrey would manage to keep her eyes open; it would be the ultimate irony for this loser sitting next to her in the back seat to die in a sixty mile per hour auto wreck before she had the chance to carve his sorry ass up. And he thought he was dealing with a pair of helpless college girls.

  Janelle chuckled at the thought. Gary had no fucking idea. And while she couldn’t care less about all of the innocent, dewy-eyed young women this slimeball had victimized—it was clear he had been kidnapping and brutalizing young women for some time, maybe for a long time—she still very much appreciated the delicious irony of what would soon take place.