by Dan Jolley
He didn’t want braces. The other kids made fun of him enough already.
But his mother took him to the orthodontist, and they made plans to put the braces on, and that night he came home and stared into the mirror for a very long time. He wanted his teeth to straighten out, focused on it, concentrated as hard as he could.
And they did.
While he watched.
He was afraid to show his mother for days. He thought he knew what she’d say. It turned out he was right.
She hadn’t really talked to him much since then.
He kept it up, though, and not just with his teeth. Sometimes he’d will his muscles to grow, and they would. He’d make his hair get longer, or change the color of his eyes, or turn his skin a darker shade. It felt nice.
Of course he didn’t tell anybody else about it, not even Paul next door, since he knew nobody else would understand. And even if they did, they’d probably still stop talking to him, just like his mother. So except for his teeth, which he kept straight, he didn’t let anyone else see his changes. That was private. That was his.
Simon pulled the jacket tighter around him and walked into the trees behind the house. His mother paid people to come in and keep the undergrowth cleared out, so it was easy walking. And so quiet, in the cold of the winter. No birds. Not even any katydids. Just him and the fallen, decaying leaves and the light from the moon.
Restless. Was that the right word? He’d surely been feeling something lately, more and more. A little more each time he changed, in fact. What was it? He felt as if he needed...something. What?
He heard a noise behind him and whirled around, frightened, ready to run, but it was only Ruby. She came running toward him through the carpet of leaves, tongue wagging out, her breath hanging in the air around her. He knelt down to pet her and she whined as if in pain.
“Whatcha doin’ out here, girl? Huh? Whatcha doin’ out here?” Simon knew she was supposed to be leashed behind Paul’s house. He noticed a few dark streaks on her fur.
Was that...blood?
She whined again.
He smoothed the fur away from a deep abrasion around her neck, where the collar had been. “Did you break your leash?” he asked. He kept his voice soft and comforting. “Did something make you run away?” He remembered hearing a dog barking earlier in the evening, but he hadn’t connected it with Ruby. Again she whined. Simon parted more of her thick gray fur, tried to get a better look at her wound in the moonlight.
He felt strange. Simon looked up, through the trees, and saw a star right above him grow very bright, and a wave of something thick and dark crashed through his mind and along his limbs, and he fell backward into the leaves.
Ruby danced away a few steps, but came back, concerned. Simon’s stomach knotted, and his jaw and hands both blazed with pain as if they’d been smashed with hammers.
“What...oh God...” Pain. More pain. The cool blacks and grays of the woods flip-flopped, and his eyes burned in green and yellow. “Ruby...” he whispered, gasping. “Get...somebody. Bring somebody.” He rolled onto his side and gasped again as the agony ripped into his lungs, his heart. Ruby whined and chuffed, hovered over him. He reached out to her—
—and his fingers twisted, stretched and writhed. They circled Ruby’s neck as he tried to haul himself up off the ground, and the tips found the leash abrasion and dipped into fresh-flowing blood.
Simon blacked out.
* * *
Later. Hours? Minutes?
White skin glistened red, and tendrils like steel cables flung away the dry, spent carcass. Jaws of ivory spines caught the moonlight, a cluster of narrow blades, and eyes filled with silver fire scraped across the yellowgreengold woods. Acid sweet as cider filled his veins, set him alight, more powerful than a hundred orgasms, and Simon Grove wanted more.
His joints clicked and ratcheted free of their restrictive sockets, and he skittered through the woods, moving like a bloody golem built of pipe cleaners and knives. Within seconds he reached Paul’s house.
Something had happened here. He would’ve known that even without his new eyesight. Ruby’s leash hung frayed and broken, and the back door stood ajar. On all fours Simon scuttled across the Burneys’ side yard, out of the woods, with his fingers curled up onto the backs of his hands and his feet pointed the wrong way. His distended jaw brushed the grass, and when a fat cricket made sluggish by the cold lodged in the spines of his teeth, a long reddish-purple tongue flicked out of his mouth and dragged it inside.
He could hear someone moving around inside the house, but he didn’t think it was Paul or either one of Paul’s parents. He pushed the door wider and went inside.
He found Paul first.
His friend lay just outside the kitchen, in the living room, and his head was flat on one side. The floor all around him was slippery with blood. Simon stepped over him and continued into the house, and where his hands touched it, they soaked up Paul’s blood. This act of absorption sent tremors out along every nerve, and thin streams of red ran down from Simon’s eyes.
Paul’s father lay sprawled on the stairs. A double-barreled shotgun rested in one out thrown hand, unfired. Only a few strands of skin and tendons held his head to his body. Simon heard a sound from the second floor, and started up the stairs.
Heavy rhythmic breathing came out of the parents’ bedroom. Simon recognized it from the websites his mother didn’t know he visited, the websites he’d masturbated to with his door closed and locked, but this didn’t sound right. Uneven. One-sided. He peered around the door.
A huge naked fat man knelt on Paul’s parents’ bed. Paul’s mother lay on her back in front of him, and he held her thighs across his, shoving himself into her, over and over, over and over. Her ribcage had been smashed in, and part of her face was gone. All the breathing came from the man.
Outlined in brilliant green, a heavy spade lay beside the bed. Its blade had been sharpened, and both it and the handle were covered with blood.
Simon rose to his feet. He let his fingers uncurl, and they waved around him like the tendrils of a sea anemone. The fat man gasped and arched his back, and Simon’s fingers wrapped around his throat and pulled him off the bed.
The fat man started to scream, so Simon slid two fingers over his head and clamped his mouth shut. Simon’s body hummed with energy, with power, and his muscles felt like steel, and he raised the fat man completely over his head, knelt on the floor, and dropped the man straight down onto his knee.
The killer’s spine crunched apart, and Simon set him on the floor and straddled his chest. The fat man stared up at him through eyes glazing with pain and shock and fear, and Simon curled his fingers around the man’s head and neck and arms and drained him dry.
Up through his fingers the blood came, the sensation so far beyond orgasmic he couldn’t imagine words for it. It built with every drop he took, thrummed inside him, tuned each nerve into a high-tension wire and jangled pleasure down it. His vision darkened, returned, darkened again.
All over his body, from every pore in his skin, the blood emerged. Like a thick, dark red sheen of sweat, the flow accelerated, poured out of him in millions of tiny rivers, collected in pools on the floor around him.
Soft warm tongues licked and caressed inside his shoulders, in the small of his back, in his groin.
Tiny, thrilling touches like eyelashes flickering under his skin traveled the length of him, stroked the bones and ligaments of his feet, massaged the insides of his ribs.
He threw his head back and his mouth gaped wide and his eyes rolled all the way back in his skull, and he crowed the sensation, crowed the rush and the rapture as the fat man’s body withered and dwindled and collapsed on itself, crowed the pleasure, crowed the joy.
When all the blood was gone, Simon rolled off the corpse onto his back on the floor, dripping and sticky and more sated than he�
��d ever felt in his life. He closed his eyes, breathed in the rich, coppery smell...
And wanted that feeling again.
Needed it.
* * *
The town was not as stunned as it could have been by the brutal mass murder because the full details of it were never released to the public. In a way, it was all very neat: victims and killer all right there, all waiting on the police.
In another way, it was grist for screaming nightmares.
The police chief at first thought it would be an isolated incident, a meteor strike of horror in an otherwise peaceful town.
But a few weeks later other bodies started turning up.
* * *
The rain slowed and trickled out of the sky in a gray, depressing haze as Janey parked the Civic in the LaCroix’s private lot. She shut off the engine, and neither she nor Tim moved from their seats.
Janey stared straight ahead, while Tim gazed out the window. He didn’t focus on anything. The only thing to see was a blank brick wall that ran along one side of the lot. A faint electric flash lit the rear- and side-view mirrors, and several seconds later they heard muted thunder.
“So the guy in the park,” Tim said, finally, into the silence. “Simon. He was like you.”
“He’d have to be. The things I saw him do...”
“And you’ve been looking for him.”
Janey nodded.
“If you find him, what then? What’re you going to do?”
“I’m not sure. It’ll depend on him, I guess. But I don’t think he’s going to be very friendly. I mean, he didn’t seem all that malicious when I caught up to him, just scared, mainly, but we both saw what he did to that girl.”
“Yeah.”
Janey shifted around in the seat to face him, unbuckled her safety belt to do it, and tucked her right leg underneath herself. “Tim. Do you believe humans are basically good? Or basically evil?”
“Jesus, Janey, that’s a tired question. I’m sorry, but that’s, like, college student stuff.”
“Well? What do you believe?”
He sighed. “I guess...I think the human race is good. Basically. Yeah, I do, I think people will be nice if you give them the chance.”
She stayed quiet for a long time. Finally looked down and shook her head sadly. “I disagree with you.” She said it with regret, as if she had just lost something, or the possibility of something. “I wish I could agree, but I can’t. Humans are selfish, and greedy, and...and it takes so much effort to teach ourselves to be anything but animals. I think, I believe, that’s what makes us human—the ability to rise above our impulses. But so few of us do...”
Nonplused, Tim said, “That’s pretty bleak.”
“Have you read any history? Have you paid attention to what the human race does to itself, every day?”
Tim shook his head in denial. “Lots of bad stuff happens every day, sure... Wait. This relates to you directly, doesn’t it? You think this is some kind of justification for what you do? You’re rationalizing your actions?”
She bristled, but her voice stayed level. “I’m not rationalizing anything. What I’m saying is that I can have a direct effect on the amount of shit out there.”
Tim gestured in the air for several seconds as he gathered his thoughts.
“I’ve said this before. To you, I think—but it’s still true. The only thing you can control is yourself. It’s not up to you to try to change the world…at least, not like this.”
Janey looked out through the windshield and drummed her fingers on her thigh, silent, scowling.
Tim realized in a flash how exhausted he was. He’d spent the night almost without sleep, and run an emotional gamut for several hours straight. His eyelids grew heavy even as his heart thudded.
“Okay, look. I’ve missed a whole day of work, I’m sure the maintenance guy is about to report me missing, and I absolutely cannot handle any more surprises from you. Not for a while. I’ve got to go.” He opened the door and was about to step out into the rain when Janey took his upper arm in one hand.
“Wait a minute. Close the door.”
He did, but wouldn’t look her in the eye.
“Can I trust—” She stopped and started over. “You know about me. Can we keep this between ourselves?”
He darted a glance at her. “If I told anyone...”
“If you told anyone.” She paused. “It would be really inconvenient. But it wouldn’t stop me. I just wouldn’t have this apartment anymore.”
He sighed. “Nobody’s going to hear about this from me.” He gently pulled her hand off his arm. “But we’re going to have to talk about this some more. A lot more. Soon.”
She nodded. “Fair enough. Thanks. Oh—let me give you your coat back.”
Tim smiled faintly. “Nah, you keep it. I’ve got another one. And I wasn’t lying. It does look better on you than on me.”
* * *
Neither of them noticed Simon in the brown Ford, watching them. The skinny towel-head got out and ran inside the building. A few minutes later, wearing a badass knee-length gray raincoat, Janey Sinclair unfolded her long, delicious body from the car and followed after him. No sign of the gray body armor.
Simon had excellent vision, and saw Janey’s tag number clearly through the rain. He jotted it down in a three-by-five spiral notebook, started the Ford and headed back out to Brenda’s house.
On his way, he pulled out a cell phone and dialed eleven digits. The phone rang four times before it picked up.
“Hello?”
Not as confident as she used to be, Simon thought. Some of that zing missing. He said, “Hi, Mom.”
In Louisiana, Anna Grove said, “Simon?”
“Yeah. How’s it goin’?”
“Where are you? You didn’t even say goodbye, I didn’t know what happened! Are you all right?”
He sighed, stretched a little before he answered her. “Well...yeah, I’d say I’m all right. There’s been a lot going on. I can’t really tell you about much of it, but believe me, it’s been an experience. Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Where are you?”
“It still is an experience, if you want to get technical about it. Stuff’s still happening.”
“Simon?”
“Y’know, Mom, how I used to be? All timid and shit? Well, it’s really not like that anymore.”
“You need...need to...” Her voice shook, choked. He heard the tears in it. “Simon, you need to come home. You know you need to come home.”
Simon grinned and tapped his knuckles on the wheel in time to the song on the radio. “Is Jessica there? Can I talk to her?”
“Simon...”
“I think Jess would like the new me, my new direction. I think we have some old times to catch up on, if I remember correctly. Do a few things should’ve been done before.”
His mother cried softly into the phone for a few moments. Simon tried to figure out how he felt about that, and settled on annoyed.
Haltingly she said, “Please come home. Simon...I love you. I want to help you. Whatever’s happened, whatever it is you’ve done, I want to help you.”
He waved her words away impatiently. “Hey, listen, I just wanted to call and say, you don’t need to worry about me, all right? Wasn’t looking for melodrama. For the first time in my life I’m on top of things, and I wanted you to know that. Okay? Next time I’m in town I’ll try and stop by.”
He heard her say, “Simon!” one more time before he ended the call. He rolled his eyes and shook his head. Okay, so that was a bad idea.
Simon concentrated on his driving as the rain grew heavier.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Janey went up to her apartment the traditional way: through the lobby, up the elevator, down the hall, through the door. Rain dripped down the back of her neck, and s
he scowled as she pulled off her clothes and got into the shower.
She tried to let her mind wander. It worked after a fashion. The water beat across the bruises on her chest and side and made her catch her breath, but soon she began to grow numb under the near-scalding spray. She mentally ticked off everything that had happened in the last few days—finding Simon in the park, the chase, the fruitless search, the discovery of the little girl, Tim’s discovery of her, the visit to Adam at the home. She couldn’t remember when so many things had happened to her so fast.
Janey dried off carefully and dabbed gingerly at the bruises, which had turned a sicker shade of yellow around the edges. She dressed in a loose T-shirt and running shorts and padded into the kitchen on bare feet. Her stomach growled. When had she last eaten?
Her mind was still on automatic as she prepared a breakfast-type meal of scrambled eggs, meatless bacon, and toast with honey. Tim knew who she was now. Knew what she was…at least, as much as she did herself. At this moment, in her apartment cooking breakfast, she could pretend that everything would continue as it had before—though she knew it couldn’t.
Well...maybe it could.
She could take Tim out of the picture.
The thought came to her unwanted, dark and ugly.
With Tim gone, she could be more careful, take more precautions than before, and make sure she never repeated her mistakes. She knew fifteen different ways to kill with her hands, each of them precise and fast.
Dizzy, Janey braced herself against the counter with one hand, sick to her stomach. She washed her hands in the sink, then her face, then her hands again. “No,” she said to no one. “No. No. No. No. What the fuck, Janey?”
Minutes later, after her stomach had settled down, Janey carried her loaded plate and a glass of orange juice to the couch, set them both down on the coffee table, and picked up the TV remote. She hardly ever watched TV, and really just wanted background noise. So when the opening credits of what was apparently a special televised edition of the Good Morning Sheree show started—Janey had never heard of Good Morning Sheree—she left it there, staring at the floor as she ate.
