A Blood of Killers

by Gerard Houarner

  “I like this bitch,” the rough voice said.

  Denise jumped in her seat, opened her eyes and looked around. The diner’s patrons were staring at her. A waitress approached their booth and asked in a hushed tone, “Is everything all right, ladies?”

  “I forgot she doesn’t like cream in her coffee,” Kristy said with a half smirk, holding the little milk pitcher over Denise’s coffee cup.

  The waitress went away and the customers went back to their meals.

  “It happened again,” Denise said, her arms crossed rightly around herself. “Somebody said ‘I like this bitch.’ Meaning you, that is.”

  Kristy put the milk down. “Why thank you ever so much.” She took hold of Denise’s hands in hers, squeezed them. “Look, baby, you know I love you. I’m sorry I said the things I just did. You went through so much when you were a kid, more than I can imagine, more than I could have handled, and you survived. You still survive. I love that toughness in you. I just wish things were better for you, that’s all. You deserve better than just surviving, don’t you know that by now? You’re smart, smarter than me, that’s for damn sure, and if you took care of yourself you’d do a hell of a lot better than Brian. You’re just having a rough time. The way Brian treats you—I can’t believe you put up with it after your father and brother. I know, I know you don’t like talking about it,” she said, holding up a hand, squeezing Denise’s hand harder with the other, “but you have to face things, look at what’s real. The way he is with his sister, I can’t figure why you don’t put his picture in that album you showed me with the articles on your father’s trial. That’s what’s real, not these voices in your head, not this ghost. You understand what I’m telling you? Right now, I think you need help.”

  “But I heard—”

  “I know what you heard, baby, but I never said anything, and no one else did, either. It’s just been too much for you, is all. Come stay with me, Den. Don’t worry about money. Leave everything back there. Just come with me, now, and I’ll help you get yourself together.”

  “It’s not possible …”

  “Sure it is, Den. There’s groups, there’s doctors and therapists. All kinds of people want to help you, Den. If you just let them. Let me.”

  “It’s not possible it wasn’t him,” Denise said, staring out the window at a group of workers milling around an open manhole. One of the men saw her, leered and waved, then shrugged his shoulders and turned to the other men when she didn’t respond. “I felt him, his heat, his skin. I heard a voice, it had to be his. A minute ago, I smelled him right behind me. It’s not possible.”

  Kristy wiped tears from her eyes and cheeks. “Baby, what is that you want to do? Why did you call me?”

  Startled, Denise met Kristy’s gaze. She studied her friend, the way her expression of concern battled with sadness over some unspoken tragedy. For a moment, she wanted to ask, why do you care? But she did not really want to know. She had her own needs, her own wounds. She couldn’t burden herself with what someone else wanted.

  Denise shook her head, trying to shake the questions her friend had asked out of her mind.

  “I had to get out, talk—”

  “Yeah, but what do you want?”

  Denise bowed her head under the weight of the question. That question again. How the hell should she know? She wanted Brian, she wanted his love, his attention. His strength. His power.

  “I want to get rid of his sister,” Denise said. She knew she had spoken because her mouth moved, but the voice she heard belonged to another. The one who asked questions.

  Kristy broke into tearful laughter and leaned back in her seat. “Honey, you need to get rid of both of them.”

  When Denise came back home, she knew Brian had left. The air was lighter in the condo, the tension was gone. It didn’t hit her until she was in the kitchen that someone else had taken his place. She froze, holding a glass over filling with water under the faucet, as she tried to sense who was in the house with her. Could it be the shape she had felt in the bed? Her heart raced with anticipation, with eagerness.

  “Take a look in the bedroom,” said the gentler voice.

  Not a question. A direction. She liked that. It was clear, concise. Something to do, something to fill her life with purpose and meaning. Best of all, there was no pain implied in the command. Unlike … other times.

  She choked, coughed, as something blocked her nose and mouth. Something sweat-slick, hairy, heavy. She gasped for breath. Her vision blacked out, and she waved a hand to clear her eyes. Water sprayed over the counter. The glass fell out of her hand, shattered on the ceramic tile floor.

  Fragments of her nightmare flashed across her consciousness: “For Daddy, baby …”

  Chest, stomach, moving over her face …

  Weight, crushing her …

  Legs pinned under a grinding body …

  “Move this … that way … wider … don’t say anything, not a word … don’t breathe …”

  Hands pinning hers, salty sweat filling her mouth, flesh sealing off her mouth and nose, suffocating her …

  Denise found herself on her knees, pieces of glass embedded in her legs and hands. Slowly, she stood up and brushed the glass from her skin and washed the scratches and cuts clean. The blood stopped flowing, like memories stanched by darkness, by forgetfulness, refusing to remember. She went to the bedroom.

  “Good girl,” said a voice.

  “Stupid bitch,” said another.

  Her family, after her mother left. Father and brother. One jailed, the other sent to special hospitals and residences. She had the clippings in her album, for when she couldn’t remember.

  Nothing more than voices. Nothing more than parts from the shape of her pain.

  Brian’s sister Barbara was sitting up in the bed reading a magazine. She was naked. Her long, straight black hair fell in disheveled streams over her creamy white shoulders, splashed across her pale breasts. The rumpled bed sheet covered only part of her thigh.

  “Where’s Brian?” Denise asked, crossing her arms as she stepped around the bed to open the window. The room smelled of sex.

  Barbara smiled a thin smile as she glanced up. “Hi, Denise. I thought you were Brian. He went out for a minute, said he’d be right back.”

  “He told me he was going to work at his store this morning,” said Denise. She slid the window open slowly, and shivered at the first rush of cool air that flowed into the room. Then she felt a hand grip her shoulder, turn her around. Another hand held her head. Fingers entangled in her hair, made her face Barbara.

  There was no one around her. Yet she smelled sweat and aftershave and chewing gum. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes from the pain of her hair being pulled and her arm being gripped by strong fingers.

  “Changed his mind. He left Sasha in charge for the morning.” Barbara blinked as she scanned the magazine and ran a hand through her hair. There were red marks on her arms, her neck. “You know how he is,” she added quietly, defiance mixed with conspiracy.

  “And what do you think you’re doing?” Someone else asked the question for Denise. Shadows played across the wall, twisting, thrusting. The sounds of cars passing on the street below, children playing, birds chirping, drifted into the room through the open window. They deepened, echoed between the walls, became moans, gasps, small cries of pleasure.

  Barbara put the magazine down and met Denise’s gaze. “I just wanted to take a little nap. Didn’t think you’d mind, since you weren’t here. Brian didn’t think you’d be back anytime soon.”

  “Fuck you, bitch.” The voice was low, gravelly. Nothing like Denise’s normal voice.

  Barbara watched Denise warily. “What did you say?”

  She had tried to give her voice an edge of anger, but Denise heard the fear underneath. She felt Barbara’s barely contained panic, her sense of losing control over the situation. Things had changed. Denise watched Barbara, fascinated by the reflection of her own awakening captured in the
subtle shifting of flesh, the tremor of repressed emotions playing across Barbara’s shadowed face.

  Denise was still frightened, desperate for someone to love. Her world remained wrapped in a darkness, her body sore and bruised from all the little things that had been done to it.

  But she was not alone.

  Denise closed her eyes, turned her attention inward. Her wounds stirred in the shadows of her mind. She felt them inside of her, moving, whispering, filtering through her senses. Exploring their world. Testing the limits of creation. They were a part of her. And apart.

  They had a shape. And now the shape was all around her, like a suit of armor, protecting her. And inside of her, telling her what to say.

  “Are you all right, Denise?” Barbara asked. She slid to Brian’s side of the bed, searched for the phone on his night table with one hand while keeping her eyes focused on Denise. “I should let him know you’re home. Maybe he can help you.”

  “He’s helped enough.” Denise giggled at the gruff words rumbling from her throat. She understood exactly what Barbara was feeling. It was the same thing she had felt as a child, the same thing she felt with Brian. The waiting, the expectation of something terrible about to happen at any moment. Anxious for the explosion to come, so peace could finally follow, even for only a few brief moments. Barbara was living the nightmare that had plagued Denise all her life.

  Barbara didn’t have a shape to protect her. Denise shook her head with the sadness of it. What she wanted was for Barbara to leave. She would have to help her.

  Denise left the room, the shape an invisible sheath around her body, guiding her steps. Invisible hair tickled her. Sweet-candy breath made her nauseous.

  “Denise?” Barbara called out after her. Her voice was thin, high pitched. A plea.

  Denise found herself taking a knife from the kitchen drawer. Blood pounded in her ears, the stink of alcohol filled her nose and mouth.

  Barbara wanted mercy, she did not want to be hurt. As if Denise would hurt her, as if she would abuse Brian’s sister, like he did, like her own father and brother had done to her.

  Never.

  The shape marched her back into the bedroom. Barbara stood with the sheet draped around her like a toga, pushing buttons on the telephone she had finally found. “I’m calling him, Denise. You’re not feeling—”

  Denise brought up the knife. The smell of blood filled the room. Her arms and legs trembled. She moaned, but could not speak or scream because of the fleshy weight across her face. But she heard a scream, long and piercing, and heard the knock of metal striking bone.

  “Do this, for me, baby,” said a voice inside of her, speaking through her lips. “And this, and this …”

  “Don’t you even squeal like the little pig you are,” said another.

  And other voices spoke, men’s voices, Brian’s loudest among them. All the men she had ever known were inside of her, all the men she had sought out, all the men who had made the darkness of her nightmare. Barbara lay on the floor, moaning, bleeding. She convulsed, her legs kicked out, her mouth opened and closed around incomprehensible words.

  “Quiet, little baby,” Denise said, in her gentler voice. She stood over Barbara. The knife was gone. The shape hugged her body, fit over her like a snug suit. As she watched Barbara bleed, the voices inside of her quieted. The sickly-sweet smell of aftershave mingling with sweat and alcohol passed over her like an occasional breeze, providing a welcome relief from the stench of blood and ruptured guts.

  She wondered who, exactly, lay dying on the floor. Who had been killed. The only thing she was certain of was that the woman had been abused. Tormented. Pushed and cut and wounded for so many years, she had lost herself, become a creation of someone else’s imagination to satisfy their needs. She moved to the bleeding woman’s side and went down on her knees. She laid herself over Barbara’s head. Her stomach covered Barbara’s face.

  “What do you want?” asked a voice.

  It was her father’s question, when he was over her. The answer he demanded echoed in her mind. Whatever you want.

  Another answer rose in her throat, bitter, burning.

  THE SHADOW OF HIS KILLER

  Max stood beside Mr. Jung beneath the fire escape halfway down the service alley. The cracked concrete beneath their feet was slick with rain and spotted by decaying scraps of restaurant food spilled from the small, industrial dumpster behind them. Large rats scurried along the walls and darted between their feet. They came out at all hours of the day, but night made them bold. Or perhaps they were comfortable with the company. Max was comfortable with theirs. Mr. Jung didn’t pay them any attention.

  The Beast writhed and convulsed in a seizure of need within Max. It wanted to feed, as well. Rats would do.

  But snatching a rat up and sinking his teeth into its furry flesh simply for the comfort of twitching flesh and hot blood was not an appropriate act in that moment. Max was working. Mr. Jung would notice. So Max let the Beast thrash in its house of meat and bones, swallowed the nausea its displeasure aroused, and focused on the job.

  The kid hadn’t showed up, yet. For whatever was coming, this wasn’t a good sign.

  A police car cruised slowly past gated storefronts. An officer cast a quick glance into the alley, never saw them. Max wanted to laugh. But that would also not have been appropriate. So he made a tight fist and tasted smoke in the misty rain falling from the narrow patch of sky above them.

  They waited. Mr. Jung remained patient. Max sensed this was going to be one of those jobs he wasn’t going to like.

  Then Mr. Jung, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a cigarette, pointed to a slim young man in baggy jeans and sweat shirt who appeared suddenly out of the shadows across the street to stand, hood up over his head, against a steel gate.

  A bus passed, motor straining to climb the hill. The boy was gone. “He’s the target?” Max asked.

  “No. He’s the contractor.”

  Already, a complication. “So you want him done afterwards.”

  “No. Nothing must happen to him.”

  They were crossing into troublesome borderlands. “I’m not a bodyguard.”

  “You’re the backup.”

  “I’m not a backup.”

  “Then consider yourself an angel of inspiration.” Mr. Jung walked to the back of the alley. A door opened with a slight creak, closed, invisible in the deeper darkness hanging over the dead end like curtains gathered at the wings of a stage. No light.

  Max didn’t need the Beast’s predatory sensibilities to tell him Mr. Jung had left.

  Max broke out of the alley, crossed the street. Music drifted from passing cars and the apartment windows above them, bass-heavy, tuneless but urgent, delivering a tapestry of random words and phrases in an interlocking skip-dance of rhythms. The noise distracted the Beast’s preoccupation with rats and hunger, until it felt both hemmed in by the rush of speech and spurred to action by the layered storm of driving beats.

  Frustration’s pressure filled Max. He wanted to kill something.

  Not the boy. Mr. Jung had warned him. What would happen to him without Mr. Jung’s protection?

  Mr. Jung. Mr. Frank. All the rest. Always asking the same question.

  At least they never sent a woman as his contact. They knew better.

  The Beast spat its contempt. But there was no room in this world for monsters in the open. They had to be kept hidden so that the illusion of civilization could remain unblemished. And so the prey would not, in their fright, overwhelm and devour the monsters.

  Lost in thought, he reached the young man before he expected to and raised a hand, ready to protect or strike.

  Already, he wasn’t taking this assignment seriously.

  “What do you want,” the teenager said, eyes slitted, hands resting lightly in the pockets of his sweatshirt. Unlike an amateur, or a lesser professional, he didn’t let nerves overplay the aggressiveness in his voice or the cool remoteness of his expression.
<
br />   Yet Max didn’t think he’d ever killed anyone. The Beast circled around the tall brush surrounding the young man’s nature, sniffing the air for vulnerabilities and threats.

  There was potential, but nothing quite realized, yet. The boy was like a cub from another closely related species. He couldn’t be certain they’d ever hunt the same prey and become rivals, or if the young man would find another path and become irrelevant.

  Max thought he might have an interesting time in a second floor apartment three buildings down, judging from the sounds he heard drifting out into the night from its open window. The Beast reached higher, and further, tracking grunts and weeping. But neither of them belonged in those places. Instead, Max answered the boy’s non-question: “You tell me. Mr. Jung sent me.”

  The boy’s gaze picked over him like a vulture at a carcass, and Max almost laughed for the third time. The kid’s right eyebrow raised slightly when his gaze passed over the tiny bulge of the shoulder harness for the Glock beneath his light jacket, but nothing else. Of course, he had no idea about the Beast.

  “Oh,” the teenager said. “What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m—”

  “I don’t care.”

  The boy glanced up and down the street as if searching for a distraction. When none arrived, he said, “Mr. Jung wants me tested. He told me I had to kill someone I love.”

  Max waited for more.

  “I guess you passed that test,” the teenager said.

  “They never bothered giving it to me.”

  Letting his breath out slowly, the boy’s gaze finally stopped darting everywhere like a caged chimpanzee and settled on Max. “We’re going to church,” he said.

  Half an hour later, they reached a dilapidated building topped by a rickety steeple and cross, a slate roof needing repair. The walls were accented by weathered bricks, two broken stained glass windows, and cracks along the foundation. Half the street lights were out in the neighborhood, which cast the mostly sealed structural shells of former houses into a sea of darkness, leaving the buildings landlords still cared about isolated in islands of light. A few men stood or sat on shadowy stoops, more lurked in stairwells leading to basement entrances. A few mostly-naked women worked a corner on the next block, wrapped in clear plastic rain coats. Cars with out-of-state plates cruised slowly by. Dogs barked incessantly, in pairs, occasionally rising to a parliamentary brawl. A pack roved among the side streets, far from traffic. The Beast wanted to howl a challenge at them.