I Kill in Peace

by Hunter Shea

  To my shock, I touched solid, unblemished skin.

  “What?”

  I looked down, pulling the hole in my jeans up so I could see the flesh underneath.

  Hooooooonnnnnnkkkkk!

  “Holy mother of—how the hell?”

  The hole had been there, as evidenced by the pain and copious amount of blood on my pants and the car.

  But now it was gone. I wiped the blood away and saw my unblemished thigh, the hair tinted crimson.

  Hoooooooonnnnnnnkkkk!

  I looked up. The pickup was inches away from my trunk. Was this guy insane?

  Elated and pissed off that this jackhole was spoiling the moment, I slammed on the brakes, not thinking about the fact that the pickup was going to plow right through me. The truck rammed into the rear of the Mustang. My car was rocketed into overdrive. I slammed back into my seat, my hands trying to keep the wheel straight.

  Suddenly, the pressure from behind was gone. The back of the Mustang fishtailed.

  “Where the hell—”

  I jumped in my seat when the pickup dropped in front of me, landing on its roof. The truck was still going over sixty miles an hour, kicking up a fireworks display of sparks.

  Cutting the wheel to my right, I swerved around the truck, nicking one of its fenders, sending it spinning. I watched in my rearview as the truck whirled off the road, coming to a great, heaving stop at the base of a thick-trunked tree. All that was missing was a theatrical fireball.

  I kept on going. A strange heat flushed my skin. My balls felt as if they were on fire.

  I felt good.

  Holy shit, I felt more than good. I felt amazing.

  Somehow, I knew the man in the pickup was dead. Knowing that gave me a strange sense of…accomplishment.

  In under an hour, I’d killed three people and I never felt so alive.

  My hands burned so hot, I thought the steering wheel would melt in my palms. My vision wavered between blurred edges and the clarity to see all the way into Canada.

  What the hell was happening to me?

  * * * * *

  Instead of my usual Cobb salad, I dove into a double cheeseburger deluxe at the diner, sucking down a large Coke and a chocolate milkshake. The last time I’d been this hungry was back in high school when I was on the track team, carbo-loading for a race. Katie nibbled on my fries and took sips from my shake.

  “I did feed you breakfast,” Candy said, staring at my plate.

  “My meeting with Jimmy V didn’t go so well. I guess I’m a nervous eater.”

  “You never were before.”

  “I never really had much to be nervous about I guess.”

  The truth was, for the first time in my life, there wasn’t a nervous cell in my body. When I changed clothes back home, the throbbing heat had bled from my body, but I was still hyper-charged.

  Because of all the unrest in the town, we were the only people in the diner. Candy was uneasy, but I was hungry.

  “Mommy, I’m tired,” Katie said, leaning her head back against the vinyl booth.

  I was just sucking up the dregs of my milkshake. “Okay, let’s get you home for a nap,” I said, tucking thirty bucks under the salt shaker.

  The drive down Main Street was eerie. It was the middle of the day and there wasn’t a soul on the streets. I noticed that even half the stores were closed. People were scared. Others angry. And still others, grieving.

  Candy put Katie to bed while I went to the kitchen looking for cookies.

  “I will not endure a fat, unemployed husband,” my beautiful wife said when she walked into the kitchen.

  “One day of being a pig will not make me fat. Besides, I think I lost my appetite…for food.”

  I slipped my arm around her waist and pulled her to me. We kissed, long and hard. “You should have more bad meetings,” she said, rubbing my cock outside my jeans. I undid her bra and pulled her shirt over her head, sucking her thick nipples. My hand felt the heat of her sex, caressing her.

  The buttons of her jeans popped off, clattering on the linoleum floor. I tugged her pants off and lay her on the kitchen table.

  She held my head for a moment and said, “What if Katie wakes up?”

  “Then we’ll have gotten the whole ‘getting caught by our child’ trauma out of the way.”

  Before she could offer a counter argument, I wrapped my mouth around her pussy, pushing my tongue inside her. She moaned, locking my head between her thighs. Slickening two fingers in her yearning muff, I gently inserted them in her ass. She nearly bucked off the table. Candy came in my mouth. I greedily drank her in.

  Her cheeks bloomed as she pushed herself from the table. “Your turn,” she said with a wicked smile.

  I jumped out of my jeans, briefly looking down at my thigh to make sure it was still all right. It was then I noticed my flaccid cock. How was that possible? Just thinking of sex with Candy got me rock hard—every time.

  “Hope you didn’t wear yourself out after that big meal,” Candy said, caressing it in her hand. “I know how to wake him up.”

  She took it in her mouth, all the way to my balls, which she cupped with one hand. The vibration of her moaning on my member should have been enough to send me skyrocketing.

  Bu the more she did, the softer I became.

  “Honey, I don’t know why, but – “

  “We can try again later,” Candy said. “You’re under a lot of stress. It’s totally understandable.”

  I smiled down at her, but I felt like screaming. This didn’t happen to me! How could I feel so alive and be so dead down there? It didn’t make any sense. Candy’s silky, naked curves were inviting me to explore every inch and I couldn’t even grow a damn centimeter.

  “What’s more important is that I made you feel good,” I said, attempting to recover any sense of manhood I had left.

  She rubbed her inner thigh. “That you did. Wow.”

  We dressed, somewhat awkwardly, and settled onto the couch, falling asleep to the news. I thought I heard something about another Ebola outbreak in Africa as I drifted off.

  Screw Ebola. Who cared about panic-driven epidemic reports when you couldn’t get it up?

  Chapter Fourteen

  The first thing I did the next morning was destroy my cell phone. I snuck out of bed, Candy snoring lightly, and padded down to the garage. I wrapped a thick cloth around the phone and hammered away at it until I was pretty sure it was toast.

  “Fuck you, AO,” I seethed.

  I went back inside and found the family iPad, breaking it in half over my knee. A part of me cringed, thinking of the money wasted. That shit wasn’t cheap.

  But I was done with AO, whoever it was. Sure, for some reason, AO had some scary yet bizarre ability to control me and force me to do things I didn’t want to do. But that was only once I’d answered AO’s call or text. If I could destroy AO’s means of communication, I would stop being sucked into the murderous sickness.

  Damn, it had felt good, taking down that fucking would-be school shooter, his white trash mother, and that dickweed road hog. I couldn’t deny the intense feeling of elation that trilled through me when I snuffed them out. It felt…righteous.

  All the more reason to put a stop to this—now!

  I was going to avoid all electronics today. Even the radio and TV were off limits. I’d tell Candy and Katie that I wanted a special day to spend with them, with no distractions. We would go for a walk, play in the yard, break out the board games under Katie’s bed. Time to get back to the Little House on the Prairie days. Charles Ingalls would never have been possessed by AO. No sir. And not me anymore.

  I was just hiding the TV remotes on the top bookshelf in the living room when Katie waltzed down the stairs rubbing her eyes.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Do I have to go to school today?�
�

  “No, honey, not today,” I replied, picking her up. “We’re going to have a lot of fun. You want to help me make blueberry pancakes?” Maine was filthy with blueberries. Everywhere we looked, someone was selling blueberries out of their front yard. Thankfully, my daughter couldn’t get enough of them.

  Her face lit up, casting aside the drowsiness of sleep. “Yes! Can I do all the stirring?”

  I walked her into the kitchen. “I’ll even let you flip some.”

  She surprised me by kissing my stubbly cheek. “I like it when you don’t work.”

  I kissed her back, smiling. “Me too. Now, you get the blueberries and I’ll get the pancake mix.”

  “Can we listen to Radio Disney?”

  I paused. “Not today. Why don’t you tell me a story while we cook?”

  “What kind of story?” The pint of berries looked enormous in her tiny hands.

  “Any kind. No, wait, make it a funny story.”

  “Like one about butts?” Katie giggled. She had recently discovered the word butt and there was no end to the fascination it held for her.

  “Sure, a butt story will be perfect.”

  We cooked and talked about an angry butt that coughed farts. It was sick and so smelly, no one wanted to take it to the doctor. As I genuinely laughed at her potty humor tale, I couldn’t stop wondering what she would think if she knew the very bad things her father had done. Would she be afraid of me? Would she run to her mother, pleading with her to send the bad man away?

  Or would she still love me, not caring a whit about my recent bout with insanity?

  Above all, that thought disturbed me the most. I’d become a monster, whether I liked it or not. I didn’t want to know my child could love a monster.

  The sweet aroma of pancakes brought Candy down from her slumber and I proposed my day of being unplugged. She nearly choked me out when she hugged her arms around my neck.

  It was a good day, despite the strange silence of the neighborhood when we took our walk. The only vehicle that passed by what was usually a relatively busy Route 302 was a lumber truck, rattling past well over the speed limit, the stack of logs on the flatbed threatening to topple off. We had the park to ourselves, then went home and played Frisbee in the back yard.

  Later that night, Candy and I again tried to make love, but it just wasn’t happening. She said all the right things while I brooded in our darkened bedroom.

  I fell asleep feeling like a hollow man. It wasn’t just the fact that I couldn’t get it up that had scooped out some vital part of my being. That strange, telltale heat reddened my palms and legs as I tried to force sleep to come. I’d just had a near perfect day. After being a desk jockey for years, the amount of physical exercise I’d engaged in should have wiped me out.

  Something had been missing.

  My stomach lurched when I peeked into the black corners of my mind. I knew exactly why I was feeling unfulfilled.

  I hadn’t killed a single person.

  And it was eating me alive.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I took a trip the next afternoon to the library to do some job hunting after lying to Candy that I couldn’t find the iPad. She packed a legal pad, two pens, highlighter, and a bag lunch. “Good luck, honey,” she said, the look in her eyes filled with hope that my finding a job would ease my issues…down there.

  Like the streets and shops, the library was empty save a young librarian with hair dyed pink at the tips. There was a growing tension not just in Bridgton, but it seemed everywhere. When you’re a fledgling killer with impotency issues, you tend not to pay attention to very much outside your crumbling self, but it was getting impossible to avoid.

  “Do I need to reserve time on the computer?” I asked.

  The librarian looked around the room with an arched eyebrow. “It’s all yours. You’re the first person that’s come in here all week. I don’t even know why I’m here. Things are getting kinda scary, you know? I just keep telling myself that nothing bad ever happens in a library.”

  I wondered if she’d ever read Stephen King’s It. Of course, that was fiction.

  I snagged copies of The Bridgton News, the town’s weekly, and The Portland Press Herald before settling behind the library’s computer. The monitor was big and boxy and out of date by about a century. While I waited for the desktop to boot up, I scanned The Bridgton News.

  The normally idyllic town had become a nest of crime. Between the main articles and the police blotter, I counted four homicides, three suicides, and seventeen assaults. This from a place where the biggest crime was usually people speeding off from the gas station without paying. The paper said the State Police were going to assign several cops to the town to assist the locals.

  The Herald was much the same thing, though it encompassed a wider swath of towns.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” I muttered, fumbling through the pages.

  There, on page three, was my handiwork.

  MANHUNT STILL ON FOR ACCOMPLICE IN POTENTIAL SCHOOL SHOOTING

  It appeared that the Saco police had come to the conclusion that the crazy ass kid I’d killed must have had a partner in crime. Said partner either had second thoughts about laying waste to the school, or wanted all the glory for himself. Police were busy interrogating every student in the high school, which was leading to some serious unrest with the kids and their parents. Who the hell were the cops to come barging in, assuming their kids were stone cold killers?

  To my utter shock and surprise, I felt a world-class hard-on tenting my jeans. My groin area was stoked so hot, I could have fried an egg on the tip of my dick.

  What the hell was wrong with me?

  In fact, the more stories of murder and mayhem I read—and they were everywhere—the hotter and harder I got. Mixed in with police reports were more stories about a potential Ebola outbreak in Nebraska. Also, some kind of flu epidemic was sweeping through San Francisco at a time when no one should have the flu. I plopped my briefcase over my lap just in case the cute librarian walked by. The last thing I needed her to see was my erection while I was surrounded by open pages filled with nightmares.

  The fever heat worked its way outward until I thought I was going to spontaneously combust. Oddly enough, I wasn’t sweating. I kept wiping my forehead, expecting my hand to come away dripping.

  Setting the newspapers aside, I opened up my Facebook account without thinking why I’d check something so nonsensical when all of this insane shit was going down.

  The little Facebook message box that blinked on the bottom right of the screen gave me my answer.

  Even though I had no friends with the initials AO, there was his message, waiting. I enlarged the message box. The text bubble sprouted from AO’s image, which was a picture of a roaring flame.

  AO: I see you’re starting to come around.

  I typed: What the hell are you?

  I pushed my chair back from the computer. My briefcase slipped off my lap. The sound was like a thunderclap in the silent library.

  I had asked AO what it was instead of who. Why had I done that? Did a part of me know better? A what could be a tumor, the perfect alibi. A who, now that would be trouble. The tried and true mother’s lament, would you jump off a bridge if Jimmy told you to?, could not excuse me from what I’d done.

  AO: Do you want to tamp out the fire?

  I typed: You know I do, so why ask?

  It felt as if my flesh was going to melt from my bones. In another minute, I’d start stripping and the cops would be called to haul me away. Not that they had time to waste with a nude man in a library. What other horrors were being committed behind closed doors right now?

  What horror could I be doing, right now? Just thinking about it dialed up the heat. I thought I smelled roasting pork and wondered if it was me.

  AO: This is bigger than the others. You have
to want it.

  I typed: Just tell me what it is. I’ll do it.

  AO: There’s no return from this point on.

  I typed: How the hell can I go back from what I’ve already done?

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause. I wiped some saliva from my mouth with the back of my hand. It stung like acid.

  AO: The Mustang is parked behind the library. There are two cases in the backseat. You need to use what’s inside each case.

  I read on as AO dictated my marching orders.

  It was awful. Unthinkable. For a moment, I thought I was going to pass out.

  As the sun peeked through the windows behind me, I caught my reflection in the monitor’s glare.

  Despite everything I was feeling, I was smiling.

  Smiling like the devil on a feast day.

  * * * * *

  I didn’t go back home to Candy or try to call her at the town’s last remaining pay phone. The Mustang ate the road like a man whose hunger strike had just ended. My hands should have been shaking, but they were steady on the wheel.

  I had two destinations today. The first was in Portland. The second would be in New Hampshire. I figured the round trip would take me four to five hours. I could be home just in time for dinner.

  If I had an appetite.

  The agonizing heat had subsided the moment I sat in the car, but it was still there, a humming undercurrent like the thrum of a nuclear reactor.

  At a light in Raymond, I leaned back and opened the two cases. The first one had my trusty scimitar. It should have been stained with crusty blood, but the blade shone like it was newly minted.

  The other case contained an Uzi along with a half dozen magazines.

  If I were a real man, I would take that Uzi, press it to the side of my head, and pull the trigger.

  If I were a real man. I wasn’t even sure what I was anymore. After this day, I wouldn’t qualify as the worst speck of humanity’s garbage.