by Mike Leon
The door flies open, scaring her. She jumps back and shrieks. The hollow man stands in the crooked door frame, glaring down at her with those abyssal black eyes.
“How did you find me?”
“I taped my iPhone to your truck and set it to email its location to me every two minutes,” she brags. “There’s an app for that.”
“Fuck,” he mutters.
“Yeah.” She offers him a smug smile. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah totally cool,” he says, returning to his usual frosty disposition. “You know, I can kill you out here and no one will ever know.”
Lily rolls her eyes at him. “Whatever.”
He raises a curious eyebrow.
“Go ahead. Do it,” she says. “I ain’t scared.”
He sighs and turns, walking back into the house. She follows.
“So like, do you own this place?” Lily asks, panning around the collapsing house.
“No,” he says.
“Well, I guess that’s good. It kinda looks like a crack den.” Lily narrowly avoids stepping through a dark hole in the wavy wooden hallway. She peers into it and sees nothing but black. She convinces herself man was not meant to know what subterranean horrors lurk in those depths, and continues down the hall.
There is no furniture to speak of, except an ancient refrigerator stained brown from decades of smoke damage, and a TV stand with no TV on it. Some copies of Maxim and FHM and a few other lad magazines sit on top of it. The top one is a Revolver with a cover photo of bleached blond faux-punk Taylor Momsen dressed like a stripper, holding some guns.
“Is this what you’re into?” Lily asks, pointing at the magazine. “She’s totally corporate manufactured, you know.”
The hollow man doesn’t seem to be listening.
What she notices then makes her jaw drop. It was so absurd and so in-her-face that it somehow didn’t register with her immediately. There is a dinner table in the middle of the room covered with guns and ammunition piled to absolutely cartoonish heights. Bandoliers drape over the sides of the table and a few loose bullets roll off the edge from the vibrations of her footfalls. Her mind conjures an image of Ted Nugent leaping into the pile and swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck. Lily doesn’t know much about guns, but she knows this is some serious firepower.
“Where did you get all these guns?” she asks.
“Walmart,” the hollow man says. “Low prices every day.”
He opens up the refrigerator, pulling out a bottle of crisp and refreshing Aquafina® water.
“I think these guns are illegal,” Lily says.
“Really? You should call the cops. We’ll see who comes out on top in that fight.”
He removes the camouflage hoodie he’s worn every time she’s ever seen him, tossing it on the countertop nearby. Underneath, he has a simple black T-shirt that exposes bulging arms covered in a crosshatch of old scars from his hands to his elbows.
“Holy shit,” Lily says. “What happened to your arms?”
“I followed a strange man home from a movie theater.”
“You don’t have to be a dick.”
“Yeah I do. Why won’t you go away? What the hell do you want from me?”
“I need your help.”
“I don’t do charity work.” He gulps down some water from the bottle.
“My stepdaddy used to fuck me,” Lily says. It just comes out point blank. The hollow man in front of her spits his mouthful of water on the floor.
“That, uh,” he chokes. “That’s not my business, really.”
“Like, when I didn’t want him to.”
“Oh. You mean he, uh, he r—”
“No.”
“What?”
“That. It wasn’t that.”
“Then what was it?”
“I just don’t say it like that.”
“Okay . . .” his fuddled eyes move away from her, down to the floor.
“I need you to kill him.”
“What?” His gaze bounces right back up to her in surprise.
“I need you to kill him so he never hurts me again.”
The hollow man gives her a grim look. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into here.”
“Yeah, I do,” Lily tells him. “I don’t have any money, but if you do this for me I can do other things for you.”
“Like what?”
“You know. Like, other things . . .” she bites her lip seductively.
“Oh,” he says. He still doesn’t get it. She can read him that well now.
She puts her hand on his crotch.
“Oh,” he says. Now he gets it—and it’s amazing to her how dense he is. She chased him all this way dressed like a fucking streetwalker, and he never put any of it together until this second. They’re like sheep—all of them.
She unzips his pants and wraps her fingers around his dick. It’s already hard as a rock.
“You can fuck me right here,” she says. He likes sluts with guns? She can give him sluts with guns.
She tries to hop up onto the kitchen table, but clumsily rolls off when a bunch of bullets avalanche under her butt. She reaches back and waves her hand across the table, scattering ammo and handguns all over the floor.
She pulls up her skirt and hops back up on the space she cleared. She lies back on a bed of shell casings as she slides her black lace thong down her legs.
“Come on,” she says. “I want you to fuck me on your big pile of guns.”
“I don’t have any . . .” he says. Any what? Guts? Balls? He’s being a total pussy right now. He probably means condoms.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. She wraps her legs around him and pulls him up against her.
He leans to kiss her, but she plants a hand on his face and pushes him away. She doesn’t like to kiss any of them. It’s not a fairy tale. She doesn’t want someone to call her pet names. She doesn’t want a fucking romance.
“Don’t make love to me,” she says, preparing for the coming disappointment. She holds her palm over his mouth. “Fuck me!”
She barely gets the words out before he pins her hand to the table. His other hand is around her throat like a vise. He’s choking her. She can hardly breathe. She has to claw his fingers away. Desperately, she gasps for air.
She lets out a shriek as it happens. He clamps her body down as he stabs her over and over. She didn’t expect this at all.
The room seems to dim as her pupils dilate. His hand returns to her throat as she feels her blood rush to where she was wounded. She moans as her insides contract and the world fades away.
It’s just a little death.
When her heart stops pounding and she regains some composure, she feels his warm leavings inside. Her legs are coiled so tightly around his torso that her muscles ache as she unwraps herself from him
She needs a cigarette.
INT. MAXIMUM SECURITY FACILITY – DAY
Dr. Danny McElroy slams the heavy steel double door behind him as he scans the room angrily for Sam Siegel. Inside the box, the subject is on the floor, pasty white, slack jawed, vacant eyes looking up at the ceiling without blinking. It’s as dead as a body can look before the flies get there.
“How long has he been like that?” McElroy yells.
The guards offer little more than a glance. Most of them are closer to the box than usual—a few even having crossed that stupid line they spray-painted around it some months ago. Superstition is what that is. Most days Danny is amazed these idiots haven’t called an exorcist or some other bullshit artist to drive the evil spirits out of the poor bastard in that box.
“I said, how long has he been like that?” he demands again.
Sam Siegel turns from a conversation with another trooper holding an unnecessarily big gun of some kind. McElroy petitioned to have the guards removed twice already, and again to have their weaponry reduced to batons. Both times, his requests were rejected by the warden. These fucking Neanderthals need their big boom sticks
to compensate for their own petty insecurities. They dress like they think they’re Special Forces commandos, with body armor and helmets. It’s enough to make Danny ill.
“Ten hours,” Sam says.
“You must be shitting me,” McElroy says. “Ten hours and nobody bothered to call for help?”
“We’re not in a hurry.”
“Open the cage. I’m going in there.”
“Nobody’s going in the box with him.”
“Damn it, Sam. My patient needs medical help.”
“You’re not going in the box. Nobody goes in the box with him.”
“You really want me to go to the warden with this?” McElroy shouts. He can’t believe this barbarian. “You want me to tell him an inmate died on your watch and you didn’t report it for ten hours?”
“I don’t work for the warden,” Sam says. “And as far as I’m concerned, that piece of shit can stay right there in that box until there’s nothing left but maggots. Then maybe I’ll open the door.”
“You’re a real tough guy, Siegel. You know that? Real tough with your tiny dick and your big guns. Ten of you all standing around, afraid to open a door for a naked dead man.”
“Drag him the fuck out of here,” Sam says, motioning to the two apes closest to Danny.
“Touch me and I’ll sue you into a damn dumpster,” Danny says. He smacks a guard’s hands away as the grunt reaches for him. “I know my way out.”
Danny backs toward the door. Sam and the others watch him tensely. As he reaches the door, most of them return their attention to the box and its mysterious occupant.
The door is already against Danny’s shoulder when he notices something important. The control panel for the cage has been left totally unguarded. All of the apes are too busy gawking. The little brass key that dangles from the rotational switch in the middle of the panel only needs to be turned to throw the door open and put all these idiots in their place.
That inmate is dead because of the positively medieval conditions in this place, and Danny plans to blow the lid off the whole thing . . .
Sam Siegel sees him reaching for the key and shouts at him to stop, but the big dumb gorilla is too far away to do anything about it. Danny turns the key and a deep air horn sounds as a spinning red light flashes to alert them the cage door is about to open.
“Close it!” Sam yells. The guards rush Danny and the control panel, but it’s too late. The door slides open, quite possibly for the first time since it was built. The overpowering smell of death and decay that wafts out of that cage is enough to knock a man over.
Danny covers his nose as one of the guards tackles him.
“See?” he says, wrestling to escape from under a commando who weighs almost twice as much as he does. “He’s dead! I told you! You killed that prisoner, and the world is gonna find out about it, Siegel. You and whatever barbarians you work for!”
He’s pinned against the floor, but he can see the open cage door from under the brute holding him down. He sees a flash of pale white. The man in the box bounds off the doorframe the way a monkey would, or some kind of cat—more agile than any human. He has something in his hand—a knife? No. That’s impossible. Broken glass? No . . . it’s a folded up triangle of newspaper.
Blood sprays the floor as the man from the box stabs the nearest guard in the neck with the newsprint shank. The other sentries in the room react instantaneously. Danny’s ears throb with pain as the echo of automatic weapons fire assaults them from all sides.
The man on top of him is off in a split second, shooting at the prisoner from the box like the rest of them. A body falls next to Danny and gore sprays him in the eyes.
“Fuck!” he shouts.
He wipes his eyes in time to see the man from the box pull a combat knife away from one of the guards and slash the man’s throat with it. Danny screams. He reaches for a gun on the belt of the dead man next to him. He’s never fired a gun before, and fears what might happen if he drops it or shoots one of the guards by accident. He sees something then. The guard has something else on his belt—something he knows well from self-defense courses at the hospital. A Taser.
Danny grabs the Taser and pulls it free from the dead man’s belt. He rolls over and sees, to his astonishment, that all of the guards between himself and the cage are already dead. The last of them crumples in a heap as he aims the Taser at the man from the box.
“Don’t come any closer!” Danny yells.
The pale, naked, blood-splattered killer in front of him says nothing at all. He looks down at the twitching red dot glowing on his chest. He smiles menacingly as he advances, stepping over a corpse along the way.
“Stay back!” Danny yells, but the killer keeps coming.
He pulls the trigger and closes his eyes. The Taser launches its dart at the prisoner and Danny hears the familiar rapid clicking that means it is working. He opens his eyes.
The man from the box is still coming for him. The Taser wires hang from his chest, swinging as he stomps forward.
Danny pulls the trigger again. He watches as the Taser rattles and the man from the box’s chest twitches, as if he might be slightly tickled by the device.
The murderous man from the box towers over him, grinning silently. He leans and takes the Taser from Danny’s hands.
“Thanks for the newspapers,” the killer says.
Danny tries to run, but he doesn’t even get up off the ground before he feels the Taser wires coiled around his neck. They tighten like a noose, then worse. They saw into his flesh. His head feels like it’s being crushed under a battle tank and he thinks it might have popped when he sees the steamy red liquid spray the floor.
The last thing he ever sees is the man from the box leaving the room, the Taser dragging along the floor behind him.
INT. SHATTERED HOUSE – NIGHT
“What’s your real name?” Lily says. She’s crawling around on all fours feeling under his kitchen table for her lost panties.
“You don’t need to know,” the hollow man answers.
“We just had sex,” she reminds him. “What kind of girl do you think I am?” She stops and looks up at him from the floor. He’s no expert, but he’s pretty sure he knows now exactly what kind of girl she is.
“A promiscuous one.” It’s nothing to him but a statement of fact.
“Ass.” She sticks her tongue out. It’s a strange gesture. He’ll never quite understand why anyone does that. She finds her underwear in a wad and shakes some shell casings out of it. Nines mostly, a few five-sevens and one seven-sixty-two.
He finds his open bottle of water where he left it, on a rotting old countertop with a stray weed growing up through it. He takes a swig, watching her. She lies back on the floor, stretches her legs high in the air, and pulls those black thong panties up her silky smooth legs. She’s a beautiful girl. She looks like the girls in the magazines he looks at.
“How can you even see in here?” Lily says. The sun disappeared while they were fucking, and the house is now almost completely dark.
“I’m good at seeing in the dark,” he says. He shrugs.
“Awesome. Can you hand me my purse then?”
He grabs the tiny handbag she left on the counter, tossing it to her. It smacks into her lap. He had worried it might be a bomb when he saw her set it down, but he smelled no explosives.
“Thanks,” she says. “I guess.”
Lily opens up the handbag, withdrawing a box of Marlboro cigarettes and a lighter. As she flicks the lighter, he instinctively turns his back on her to avoid ruining his night vision. The smell of smoke fills the room, but he barely notices. He only smells her: the flowers in her perfume, the fruit smell of her hair, the salty wetness of her insides. That smell is on him now—all of them are. The only thing anyone has ever left on him before was blood.
“You want a smoke?”
“No.” He never smokes, and never will. That was beaten into him from early on.
“Cool. So let’s try th
is again,” she pauses to exhale a lung full of smoke. “Hi. My name is Lilith Elizabeth Hoffman. What’s yours?”
“Sid,” he says.
“Sid?” she repeats. “Just Sid?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s kind of a menacing name. Sid. I don’t know anyone else named Sid.”
“I don’t know anyone else named Lilith.”
“It’s because of the music festival. My real dad was a roadie there.”
“You have a real dad, and then another dad?”
“And another dad. My mom is like a total hussy. My actual dad, like, the guy who got her pregnant, was just a one night thing. I never met him. She married this other guy when I was a baby, and I barely remember him. Then after him there was Ted.”
“The guy you want me to kill.”
“Yeah. How soon can you clip him?”
“Clip him? I’m not clipping anybody. I’m out of that kind of work.”
“We made a deal.”
“No we didn’t. You—”
He stops. He hears something he doesn’t like. It’s faint, but it’s there, in the distance. It sounds like a simple buzzing from here. To anyone else it would be nothing—maybe the sound of a far-off freeway. To him it is an all-too-familiar cadence.
“What is it?” Lily says.
“You don’t hear that?” he answers. Of course she doesn’t. She’s just a girl. She’s not what he is.
“No. What are you freaking out about?”
“It’s a chopper,” he says. “We’ve got problems.”
“Problems? What kind of problems?”
Sid grabs an M4 from the ammo pile and smacks the magazine to make sure it’s seated firmly, then snaps back the charging handle to chamber the first round. He straps a KA-BAR knife around his leg.
“What the fuck?” Lily says. “What are you doing?”
