Among Prey

by Alan Ryker

  He didn’t know why she hit him. He’d probably done something wrong. Something stupid. If he could, he’d tell her he was sorry, but he didn’t know how.

  Then he did. He grabbed a different colored pencil, and drew himself beside her. He was way taller than her, and had an arm around her. If she saw that, she’d know how he felt and she’d come back.

  He carefully pulled the drawing out of his book and showed it to his mother so she could take it to Carol. At first, she barely looked up from her laptop to say, “That’s very nice.”

  Bobby shook the paper until she looked again.

  “Oh, Bobby, it’s wonderful!” She took the drawing from him, and he felt excited that she understood. “Wait until your father sees this. I think that looks just like me. You’re such a good artist.” She kissed him on the head, then left the room with his drawing. He heard her go down the stairs.

  He started on another.

  * * *

  The ghosts told him untruths. He didn’t know if they meant to. Maybe they couldn’t remember things exactly. Maybe dying did that to you.

  The details of their deaths were always the same. They remembered the smallest details of how they died. They remembered how they fought, the sounds they made, how long it took before they were folded into a big duffle bag and tossed into the back of a car. They showed their wounds to him endlessly, night after night. They never grew tired of it. He would plead with them to leave him alone, to let him sleep. He would plead with thoughts, but he knew they could hear, because that’s how ghosts talked. Right into your brain.

  They wouldn’t leave him alone. They kept coming back, again and again. They floated in the darkness almost every night, glowing, burning into his eyes, into his brain. They told their stories again and again.

  But the stories started to change.

  At first, they talked about how scared they’d felt. About how horrible it was to die.

  Later, they’d sometimes talk about how bad they’d wanted it.

  The first girl, the one who got caught in the rain, she said, “I stood in the rain and got all wet on purpose, to show off my puffy little nipples. I wanted to drive him crazy. I wanted it bad, and I loved every second of it. I cried, because it felt so good, the way he split me open.”

  In his brain, Bobby begged her to stop. She didn’t. She went over every detail, and talked about how much she loved it, how it was all she’d ever wanted.

  Then she’d come back another night, and the details were the same, but she’d died scared, so scared. She hadn’t liked it at all.

  Even in the home, dressed in all white and living in white rooms with white tile floors, Bobby didn’t feel crazy. But now he thought he would go crazy if the ghosts didn’t leave him alone. He wanted help. He wanted someone to make it stop. He felt himself slipping, the way he’d slipped when that neighbor boy teased him day after day after day until he snapped. Until he couldn’t even think, so that he could barely remember what he’d done because the memories were all light and noise and feel, but not put together right.

  The pressure was building again, and Bobby didn’t know how much more he could take.

  The Night Man

  Derek had never intended to spend his life taking care of old farts and retards, but he discovered he really enjoyed the work and stuck with it.

  Ignoring his parents’ pleas, Derek didn’t apply to college. He didn’t even take the SATs. Making it through high school without blowing all those phony, ignorant assholes away, all those brain-dead, zombie, sheeple fucks born with targets on their foreheads had been a miracle. He would not be able to put in another four years at another school. The way he heard it, you could only get a shit job with a four-year degree anyway. You had to go to grad school and bury yourself beneath tens of thousands of dollars of student loans just to get a decent cubicle job anymore, and that would probably be after three unpaid internships. They knew they should keep people like him chained to a school until he was old enough to be harmless. They wanted as much time as possible to brainwash him, to cram that bleeding-heart liberalism down his throat and cloud his vision. He saw the world how it really was. Most people were prey. A few were predators. Except in cases where keeping the prey alive served the predators, it was survival of the fittest, and they were fattening most of America for the slaughter. They made education seem like the path to success, to becoming one of the predators, but he knew better.

  People like him forged their own paths.

  If he were truthful, though, the main reason he made it through school without going Columbine on everyone’s asses was Columbine. Those pathetic losers really fucked it up. If their bombs had gone off, if one had gone back in and set off the bomb manually, knowing he was going to die anyway, if there had been any method to their hallway wanderings, if they’d just shot every person they saw, their legacy of destruction would have been something to aspire to. Hundreds or even thousands would have died. Instead, their massacre was a joke, the police cover-up of their videos and journals left them looking like bullied nerds, and they still managed to be the originals of which every teenage predator to come would be considered a copycat.

  That was okay, though. Derek realized it was good that he survived high school. The outside world wasn’t nearly as intolerable. Yeah, it was full of imbeciles who would have been culled by natural selection if society—against its own best interest—didn’t go out of its way to protect them from their own idiocy, but at least he wasn’t locked into close quarters with them and forced to interact. Outside of the cramped hallways and claustrophobic rows of desks, he no longer felt a desperation to leave his mark. He had time.

  After two years of working third shift at a gas station, he again felt like he was about to lose it. He liked working third shift, but the money sucked bad and so did the way some people treated him. Most were fine. Idiots, but tolerable. A few, though, thought that because they were buying a pack of cigarettes that he was their slave or something.

  It was after such an interaction, where he’d come close to pulling out the wooden baton they kept under the counter except the dude was one of those huge idiots who spent hours at the gym picking up heavy things and then setting them back down, when he decided what he needed to do. He was watching the tiny little television set he had to be careful to keep out of view of several different security cameras (because he’d been told numerous times it wasn’t allowed) when he saw one of those technical school commercials. He couldn’t stand four years to get a bachelor’s, or even two to get an associate’s, but he figured he could spend a couple of months becoming a certified nursing assistant.

  He checked into it. The shit work was done on first and second shifts, and yet it was third they had trouble filling. He could “work” third shift at some old fart’s home or something, and get fat pay to watch TV and play video games. The world was filling up with these wastes of space, and he might as well make money off the situation. Instead of serving customers, he’d be in charge of people. They’d be at his mercy, a weakness Derek didn’t have.

  Getting the certificate was ridiculously easy. So was landing a job at a nursing home. On his last night at the gas station, he just locked the place up and drove away. Fuck them.

  * * *

  It didn’t take a week for Derek to decide he’d found his calling. He couldn’t believe they’d let someone like him be alone with helpless people, if you could call them people, these wrinkled, stinking almost-zombies.

  It was thrilling. Derek had never known anything but boredom his whole life, but seeing how much he could get away with jacked him up better than coke. He pushed himself a little further every night. He started out riffling through their belongings. Then stealing. Then he started on them.

  There were a bunch of them who were barely there. They had dementia or senility or had otherwise checked out and left their body still breathing and shitting. He had some super old person porn on his computer. He liked it. He didn’t like GILFs, like, horny grand
mas. They seemed to enjoy it. He liked the really old ones, the ones who looked like they didn’t know what was going on, or who were doing it because otherwise they’d be eating cat food. And now he had them for real.

  But he immediately found out he should stay away from their crotches. He could clean them up first, but no fucking way was he going to clean them up. That was first-shift business. But he could hurt them. He could pinch them until they cried, and they had no idea what was going on. They were covered in bruises and bed sores anyway.

  He had to keep going further to get the same rush, until he was afraid he would get caught. If he broke a bone, someone would ask questions.

  Once again, even with the general direction the nursing assistant certificate had given him, he wondered where his life was ultimately headed. Then he saw an ad for a job that sounded too good to be true: third shift, one sleeping charge, and big bucks. And more than that, it felt like the next step. He applied, and got the job.

  When he’d imagined having one person under his control, he wasn’t imagining a giant. Especially not a giant with night terrors that could ramp up into full-on berserker rages if not dealt with quickly. So Derek didn’t hurt Bobby. But the pay was good, the work was beyond easy (he arrived after the retard had gone to sleep and left before he woke up and they didn’t care at all if he watched TV, browsed the Internet or played video games, as long as he stayed awake), and he could bide his time.

  Derek didn’t believe in the Christian god, but he believed there was a force out there, a force that loved the predators, and Derek felt it had a plan for him. Working for the Miltons was part of that plan, and the next step would be revealed in good time.

  * * *

  Derek’s passenger-side door flew open, bringing torrents of rain into his car. Then a little girl jumped into the seat and pulled the door shut with both hands.

  “You took so long I didn’t know if you were coming to get me,” she said, “so I started walking.”

  The little girl didn’t have an umbrella, or even a jacket. Her hair hung in tendrils in her face. She wrung her see-through white T-shirt with both hands. The big red heart printed in the center of her chest narrowed as it gathered on itself. “I’m so wet! And I bet my homework is soaked and now I…”

  This little girl whom Derek didn’t know kept up a torrent of words as steady as the rain. He’d simply been stopped at an intersection about two blocks from the school. The school traffic was moving even slower than usual due to the sudden deluge.

  Eventually, a gap appeared in both crossing lanes and he turned left onto the main road.

  And eventually, the girl stopped talking. She sat still and quiet for a moment before slowly wiping her hair out of her face and turning to look at him.

  “You’re not my mom.”

  “You don’t say,” he said, smiling a friendly smile he used when he had the patience to deal with the herds.

  “This is the same as our car.” The girl looked to be around nine or ten years old.

  “Should I take you home?” he asked. He had intended to cross the through street, but he didn’t want to stop the car at every intersection. Little girls didn’t just jump into your car. This was fate, and he wanted to give it every opportunity to play out.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should get out.”

  Adrenaline hit Derek hard in the chest. He never felt anxiety. Boredom was his constant companion. But this turning point had snuck up on him, and he didn’t feel prepared to make this decision. He pulled over and said, “Alrighty.” He bounced his eyebrows once and nodded to the door handle.

  The little girl looked at him for a moment, then looked at the rain, then looked at him. He nodded again. She pulled the door handle and pushed at the door. It didn’t move. She pressed her body against it. As the door open, wind blasted into the car, driving rain all the way over onto Derek.

  The little girl let the wind blow the door shut.

  “You’ll drive me home?” she asked.

  Derek pulled back out into the road, though he hadn’t yet decided what the universe was telling him.

  He asked, “Where do you live?”

  She gave him the address, and he turned off the through street and in the general direction of her home.

  Neither of them spoke. He could feel her staring at him through the wet hair she’d let fall back into her face. Then he noticed her begin to shiver.

  “I’m freezing.”

  He didn’t respond.

  She reached for the temperature controls and he slapped her hand. She gasped and retreated into the corner. At that contact, a thrill went through Derek’s body and warmth exploded from the base of his skull, and he knew he wouldn’t be dropping her at her house.

  He locked the doors and switched control to only his panel. He looked at the little girl. She still sat with her back halfway against the door, watching him with big, round eyes. But like a scared little rabbit, she didn’t make a sound, and she held perfectly still.

  * * *

  A movie played on his laptop, but outside of Bobby Milton’s room, Derek sat looking at the pictures on his phone over and over. He’d thought about not going into work, but worried that would look suspicious if any of this came back to him. And it might. The girl had gotten into his car only a couple of blocks from the school. Someone could have seen her. A friend could have seen her and thought she’d gotten into her mom’s car. That would let the police know what sort of vehicle to be looking for, and could lead straight to him.

  On one hand, he cursed his lack of self-control. On the other, the universe offered up a perfect opportunity to do what his entire life had been building toward, and he took it.

  He would get away with this one, and the rest he would plan carefully.

  Still, he worried.

  Still, he couldn’t stop looking at the pictures of the dead little girl.

  He almost couldn’t force himself to sit. He’d never been so energized in his entire, dreary life. He knew now for certain he was a predator among prey, and he felt no more remorse for them than he did for the hamburger he ate at lunch.

  Already in an agitated state and constantly looking over his shoulder, Derek literally leapt up from his seat, knocking the wooden chair over behind him, when he heard Bobby get out of bed.

  Derek picked up his flashlight, but did not turn it on, and went into Bobby’s room. This was a nightly occurrence. The only question was how many times in the night Bobby would sleepwalk, and if it would turn into a night terror. If Bobby flipped, light would bring him back. But the key was to get Bobby into a deep sleep. If he used the light to wake him up, it guaranteed that he wouldn’t go psycho, but it also started the process over again, sending him through that hour of light sleep during which he was most likely to get up again.

  So instead of flipping on the bedroom light, Derek held the flashlight in reserve, keeping it aimed at Bobby’s face with his thumb on the switch.

  “Bobby? It’s okay. You’re dreaming. You need to get back in bed.”

  Bobby turned and faced Derek. Goddamn, he was monstrous. Derek was pretty tall and lifted weights in a struggle to add bulk to his slight frame, but Bobby dwarfed him as if they weren’t even the same species. Derek would find himself getting accustomed to Bobby’s size, but then seeing him thrashing around the room as he battled some invisible nightmare creature would always remind Derek that the giant retard could casually break him apart.

  This time, Bobby had not progressed from sleepwalking to night terror, and he responded to Derek’s voice by looking confused for just a moment, then getting back into bed.

  Derek stood in the doorway, watching Bobby settle back in. Derek had never encountered a parasomnia disorder before. Some of the old people had been insomniacs, but none had night terrors. It was strange to think Bobby could do all this and still be asleep.

  Once Bobby had settled, Derek carefully approached his bed and sat beside him. It helped prevent him from falling right back into the
same dream.

  As Derek sat there, he noticed he still held his phone in his left hand. He turned the screen on and started flipping through his photos again. When he saw Bobby watching, he tilted the glowing phone so Bobby could see better. He twisted and turned the phone through the air and made a ghost sound. Bobby actually pulled his covers up to his chin.

  In a high voice, Derek said, “I thought it was my mom’s car. It was raining so hard I couldn’t see inside, and I just jumped in.”

  * * *

  Derek never felt more disconnected from the rest of society than when the sun rose. As his shift ended and he packed his laptop and magazines into his backpack, the sun peeked at him from the window at the eastern end of the hall, reminding him that when he prepared to rest, the flock stirred. It was the time of day when they could forget there were predators like him roaming the world, when the air was brisk and the sun was bright and kind.

  He didn’t like it. He preferred to be in his bedroom with heavy blankets tacked over the windows before the sun rose.

  Just as he was getting ready to walk downstairs and out the front door, Mrs. Milton came up the stairs.

  “Derek, I’ve got a big favor to ask.”

  “What’s that, Mrs. Milton?”

  “One of my contractors has really screwed the pooch. I need to get on-site to smooth this over. Could you stay a few extra hours? I’ll be back by lunch. You’ll get double-time.”