Corrupts Absolutely?

by Peter Clines

  Painkillers don’t help. Believe me, I’ve tried.

  I have a talent, and the pain is a symptom. Another man might get off on the talent. I don’t, but I think that’s the point—I’m not supposed to. Or maybe the person who gave me this ability is incompetent, and I’m just one unlucky son of a bitch.

  #

  I was twenty when it first happened. I don’t think it was a coming-of-age. Sometimes, shit just happens when it happens.

  I was on my break in this seedy little diner down the road from the hospital where I work. I was pulling a double shift to cover for a colleague. The rims of my eyelids felt like cracked earth, and I still had to slog through another seven hours when I went back. I opened my throat and tipped some coffee into it, trying not to taste it.

  A guy exited the men’s room and went by my lifted elbow. I got a flash of pain—a microsecond at most but enough to make me gag on the coffee.

  Then the facts fell on top of me like old shoes tumbling out of a cluttered closet.

  He had abducted a girl one night. Dragged her into a dark spot, held her down, and raped her. When it was over, he closed his fingers around her windpipe and watched on as she thrashed and waned and then finally died. He had then bundled her into a garbage bag, added some rocks, and tossed the package in a river.

  I knew that. I also knew where he lived and where he would be at any particular time on any given day. It was as if the information had been hibernating in my mind and suddenly woken up.

  I also knew something else: I was supposed to avenge the girl’s death. Eye for an eye, death for a death.

  I twisted around in my booth. The man was pushing open the door now, and I got a brief but clear look at his profile.

  When he was gone, I shook my head and drank some more coffee, wondering not for the first time if shift work was slowly killing me. It seemed I had the makings of a headache too. Odd since I hardly ever got headaches.

  I walked back to work and set about cleaning and dressing an old lady’s leg wound. But after an hour, the headache started to worsen. I stopped by the nurses’ station and popped some paracetamol then continued on to some obs. I got through two wards reassuring myself the drugs would kick in, but then the pain dialed up. That’s the best term for it. It was like someone had attached electrodes my forebrain and begun shocking its jelly with increasing voltages. Each pulse also brought a reminder message: I was supposed to kill the guy in the diner. I didn’t know his name, but I knew where he was. In my mind’s eye, I could see him sitting at his terminal and scratching the back of his neck. Like most murderers, he held down a steady job and threw the occasional dinner party for friends.

  I was supposed to be stitching up a skateboarder’s gruesome knee when the pain hit a new high. Dark things sparkled in my eyes, and I dropped the tweezers, which clattered into a tray. When I could see again, the skater looked worried. I didn’t blame him.

  One of my workmates walked in, and I told her I had come over ill. She offered to assume the job, much to the skater’s (and my own) relief.

  I stumbled down the hallway, masking my eyes, and lurched into a quiet room. I closed the venetian blinds, already subconsciously aware my condition had nothing to do with the sun, and collapsed into an armchair. I persisted for another ten minutes, trying to control my breathing, but the pain refused to abate. Large-bore drill bits were now screwing into my temples, and it felt as though my teeth had come loose in their sockets.

  Between the layers of agony, soft voices wheedled, assuring me I could be free from this torture in a second…

  As I unwrapped the syringe and drew cleaning fluid into its barrel, I did wonder—as well as I could in my high state of misery—whether I had lost my mind. But I didn’t feel insane. I felt as an ant must feel when an impossibly huge human hand herds it away from its chemically-determined task.

  I didn’t tell the nursing unit manager I was leaving. For that, I could have been reprimanded or even fired, but rational concerns were far down my priority list. What mattered was the pounding in my head and the capped syringe in my shirt pocket.

  As I drove my car from the hospital parking lot, the pain relaxed a little. Only a notch or two but enough for me to feel the difference—a grim reward.

  The guy from the diner worked in a call center, one of a hundred cubicle dwellers fitted out in pants and a collared shirt. My nurse’s uniform attracted attention, but I strode amongst the cubicles as though I had important business to attend to.

  Which I did.

  I knew where the men’s room was even though I had never entered this building, and I also knew the guy from the diner had a full bladder. I hid in a toilet cubicle for perhaps thirty seconds before he stood at the urinal and unzipped his fly.

  I walked out, staying on my toes so my shoe heels wouldn’t click, and plunged the needle into his neck.

  He cried out and batted my hand away before I could press more than half the cleaning fluid into him, but a small dose of that shit in your bloodstream goes a long way. I do not intend to describe his death.

  The moment Diner Guy’s heart ceased to beat, the brutal pounding in my head did also. Heroin users claim their first experience is like kissing God, and this neared that: a sudden absence of pain coupled with a sense of immense achievement as if killing this man had done the universe a favor.

  I walked out unmolested and returned to work. It was a quiet day, and my departure had gone virtually unnoticed.

  So now you know what it’s like. There have been more than fifty incidents since that first day, and they’ve all gone down much the same way. I’m not writing this from a jail cell. I should be. After all, a nurse in a call center does not go unremarked, and the most dunderheaded detective could link my absence from work and my appearance at the murder scene. But I’m put in mind again of that ant, giant fingers briefly steering it on a new course…

  Not what you might expect from a vigilante, huh? Righter of wrongs, scourge of evil, apathetic fatalist.

  But this is not just about me. This humble posterity is also about a girl called Claire.

  When they’re not eviscerating innocents, murderers like Diner Guy maintain the semblance of normal lives. The murderers of murderers do too. I had three full-time girlfriends before my “power” kicked in; the occasional kill urge did nothing to stem the more socially acceptable ones.

  I met Claire, of all places, in a bar. I was alone with a beer, my eyes glued to a game on TV. Claire was two tables over with a group of friends. On the way to the bathroom, she stopped to look at the TV and asked how we were doing. I said, “Not too good.”

  As a tree grows from a seed, love grew from an offhand remark about a ball game. Claire had strawberry-blonde hair and blue eyes and long eyelashes that seemed to wave at you when she blinked. I don’t know…what makes you love a person? It can be a few things or everything. How it happened doesn’t matter anyway—just that it did.

  We moved in together after six months, and in the first year I killed only two men: one had molested and finally poisoned his stepdaughter, the other liked to bait dogs.

  I passed the first man in the hospital halls. He had his arm around his distraught wife and was working hard to suppress a smile. That time, the pain barely got past a regular headache. I just followed them home, waited until he gave his wife a sleeping tablet, and then strangled him with a length of rope while he writhed in an armchair with a bowl of macaroni tipped over in his lap. I told Claire I had been held up at work.

  The dog-baiter, however, was messy in every sense. I tracked him to a park and watched as he threw rat bait around like chicken feed. As he returned to his car, I leaped out from behind a hedge and plunged a scalpel into his throat. It’s human instinct to touch the site of an injury, but dog-baiter was cut from unusual cloth. He threw his arms about my neck and pulled me into a bear hug. My face pressed against his jetting neck. Warm blood trickled into my eyes and onto my shirt. I managed to es
cape his manic grip, but by then, it was too late. I looked like one of the car accident victims that arrive in the ER most days.

  I left Dog-Baiter choking in his own blood and made a dash for my car. I wiped my face with my shirt sleeves and then put on a jacket that I always kept in the back seat. As drove off, I glanced at myself in the rear-view mirror. My ears and eyelids were still smeared with drying gore, and I wished the car had tinted windows.

  Arriving home, I sprayed bleach on my shirt’s stiffening, red-brown patches and tossed it in the washing machine then went upstairs to shower. As I scrubbed the blood out of my eyebrows, it occurred to me that Claire might one day be home, and I would have no safe-house should another “directive” go awry.

  Two weeks later, I decided to confess what I was and what I had to do. Better to be upfront and have her leave than be deceitful and suffer the same fate.

  We were eating breakfast on the back deck, the autumn sun shining on us. I could not imagine a better time to say what needed to be said, so I put down my toast and took a sip of coffee.

  “Claire,” I began. “I have something to tell you.”

  An expression flashed across her face. At the time, I thought it was worry or concern, but in hindsight, I believe it was guilt.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “There’s something you don’t know about me.” I hated the stupid cliché as soon as it left my mouth. “I have a certain…calling, I suppose you’d say.”

  Her face fell. It tore my heart to see it. “Please don’t say you’re leaving me.”

  “What? God no. That’s the last thing I would ever do. No, I’m not leaving you. But after I say what I have to say, you might leave me.”

  The forlorn softness left her face, and the bright-eyed, no-nonsense Claire returned. “Just say what you have to say.”

  I decided to leave the supernatural out of it. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

  How many rueful men have spoken or written those words?

  “I kill people,” I blurted out. “Bad people. Not often. Only when I have to. But there it is.”

  She stared at me for a long time, perhaps trying to gauge whether I was messing with her. Then she shrugged and said, “If they deserve it, I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

  Relief gushed into my veins. It was not as intense as the post-kill euphoria, but it was definitely sweeter. I picked up Claire’s hand and kissed it.

  Love kills logic.

  With Claire providing a shoulder to rest my head on when I needed to, I almost felt like a normal person again. Hell, excepting an occasional head-splitting directive, we led the most normal lives imaginable. We got married eight months ago with all our friends and family in attendance. On the desk where I’m writing this, there’s a wedding photo of Claire and I. She looks gorgeous with her hair up and her shoulders exposed above the fitted curves of her dress. She’s smiling.

  Smiling.

  Our happy life ended at seven o’clock this morning. I was engulfed in a somnolent bliss after a week of night shifts. I rolled over and placed my hand on Claire’s hip. A familiar sliver of pain lanced through my head and burst an information sac, spilling it into my brain.

  I gasped and sat up, windless with horror as I learned things in a manner no mortal person has a right to.

  I saw my lovely Claire, an IT consultant in her more pedestrian moments, fixing a telescopic sight onto a rifle and shutting one eye to check its aim. I saw a portly businessman’s reddened face appear in the sight’s crosshairs. I saw the hair on the back of his head fly out like a bad wig in a breeze and his brains follow an instant later.

  I saw an ethnic man, perhaps Greek or Italian, standing near a steel door in a dark alley way. He spoke to someone for a few seconds. Then the door closed, and he started toward the street. A red dot appeared at the back of his head, and then a bullet punched through it. He fell forward, and the red dot moved to the left side of his back, roughly where his heart would be, and three more shots ripped through his jacket’s black material.

  My wife Claire: the hit woman.

  Why the directive happened then is another of those ant-questions. Some particular victim, some critical mass—it could be either or neither. Whatever the case, a dull throb set in behind my eyes.

  Terror clinched my heart—terror beyond words. I retched and almost vomited in my lap. When the nausea passed, I reached over with a trembling hand and shook Claire awake.

  She made a sleepy sound and regarded me with half-closed eyes.

  “You have to get out of here,” I said. “Get as far away from me as you can. Right now.”

  Her eyes opened wider. “What? Why?”

  I thought about going all nineteenth century and telling her not to ask questions and ordering her from the house. Then I considered what she did in her spare time and almost cracked a bitter smile.

  Almost.

  I sighed. “Claire, you know how I said I kill people from time to time? Bad people?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I don’t do it by choice. Someone…something…forces me to do it.”

  Her face hardened. I wondered if that was the face her victims saw as they cowered against the nearest wall. “Who forces you to do it?”

  “I don’t think they exist on this Earth. Or maybe they do, just not in the same way as you and I.”

  Claire sat up, scrunching the bedclothes in her lap. “What are you talking about?”

  “This is why I didn’t tell you about this part the first time around. But you need to know now.” I rubbed a hand across my eyes. “You’re a…what? A hit woman? A hit person? Does political correctness apply to assassins?”

  Claire’s mouth fell open.

  “You got into the gig through one of your brother’s friends, who first showed you how to shoot a rifle. You made your first kill when you were twenty-one. A right-wing politician that a gay activist wanted dead. You’ve made eight kills since then, three since you met me. One of them was last night.”

  Claire tried to draw breath, and it stuttered in her throat. “Who…who told you this? Who ratted me out?”

  I shook my head. “I rolled over in bed this morning, and whoever gives me these directives gave me one about you. I don’t know. Maybe the last person you killed was innocent or something. Bad info, you know?”

  “He was a gangster,” Claire protested. “He was responsible—”

  I held up a hand to shush her. “It doesn’t matter now. The directive’s been set in motion. The pain is going to get worse and worse, unimaginable. And only one thing can stop it.”

  “Isn’t there pain relief that—”

  “Trust me, morphine couldn’t take the edge off this thing when it really gets going. So before that, you have to get going. Pack some stuff and get as far away as you can. Another state, another country if possible. And don’t tell me where. Believe me, in a few hours, I’ll be dying to know.”

  Claire must have thought she was humoring a madman, but she got dressed and began to stuff clothes and toiletries into a large sports bag. I sat on the bed and watched her do it, feeling the tight pulse behind my eyes.

  When she was done, she came over and kissed me.

  “I’ll try to trick you,” I said. “I’ll say anything and everything to get you back here. Don’t buy it. In one week, give me a call from wherever you are. Don’t tell me where it is. I’m hoping if it’s somewhere I’ve never been, I won’t be able to track you there. When you call, keep me talking. It shouldn’t take you long to figure out whether the kill-urge has passed.”

  “Okay,” she said in a strained voice. A tear spilled onto her cheek. She looked like she was about to say she loved me and then appeared to think better of it.

  I understood completely.

  So that’s it. She left more than two hours ago. She’s in a plane flying west. I know that for certain even though it feels like tiny needles are pier
cing my optic nerves.

  I need to stop. The screen is blurring, and every third word is a typing mistake. The writing helped take my mind off it for a while, but soon, nothing else will matter. When it feels like my overgrown brain is about to crack its casing, I’ll need to make a decision.

  Which of us has to die?

  Oily

  A.D. Spencer

  The marble in itself was nothing spectacular: average in size; clear, opaque glass; and a smooth, iridescent finish. When the light from the swaying, fluorescent bulb above danced across the surface, a hazy rainbow appeared on the orb. Almost an illusion but not quite. It was a simple thing, polished and lacking the small chips that would have marked it as a game piece, yet it sat inside a wooden box upon a black, pillowed bed of velvet like a fine piece of jewelry.

  The father, Jim, had hands that were as flat as rolled dough and rough, the skin splashed with white and pink scar tissue and brown and leathery liver spots. He closed the box’s lid and handed it to his daughter with no preamble.

  “Just an oily?” Cin asked because she knew the type and knew her father’s craft well. She had seen him sculpt glass, pull colored strings of it across the length of a room. She had seen him make swirling artwork out of crystal balls no bigger than the tip of her thumb. This little marble, this oily, though, was more toy than masterpiece.

  She smirked. “Kind of plain for our taste, Poppy.”

  He scratched the steel bristle along his weathered jaw line, trying to hide a proud grin when he recognized the compliment inside her words. “Not my work actually. Just a little something I found in a box of your old toys.” He put distance between those words and the next ones, his lips curling with each syllable as if they had a sweet taste: “Figured you’d find a good use for it.”

  This was the way it began.

  Cin knew what was hidden in the comment. It was a request. Usually, she was the one asking him for favors, but this wasn’t entirely new to her. She swayed slightly, as if a wind were pushing against her, and found balance on the balls of her feet. Fingers grasped the box tightly, taking it. Accepting it.