Mercy Killer

by T S Paul

  Of that I agreed.

  Tonight was a new moon, according to the Farmers’ Almanac. If I was going to do what I’d planned, I could only do it now.

  Getting out of the house was easy. As was having the proper tools for the job. Grandfather really did have me clean out the shop, and then the attic, to appease Grandmother. During the course of my cleaning, I discovered many lost items. Like several tool boxes and missing gadgets. He’d given me one of the boxes as payment for my help.

  Mr. Pace drove a Ford, but according to Grandfather, the connectors were mostly the same, so I only took those tools I could carry easily. In my head, the plan would work. I hoped. Maiming the man just wouldn’t do. He never let any of the girls in class even touch the materials the boys got. If we tried, like I did more than once, we’d get a spanking and detention. I held the record for the most hours served this year.

  I was breathing hard when I got to the house. My berry picking adventures had shown me both a way up and down that wasn’t in complete sight of the road. As long as the moon stayed dark and nobody hit me with a light, I was safe. Deer season was more than a month away, as well. The irony of getting shot while plotting a murder wasn’t lost on me.

  Pace lived in an old cabin near the top of the mountain. It had been modernized a bit with running water and electricity, but was still way more rustic than even the place I’d lived with mom. His car was nicer than his whole house!

  Crouching down beside the car, I scanned the road and yard for any sign of movement. The house was completely dark and only the sound of crickets and cicadas filled the air. As silently as I could, I slid under the car’s front end. It took more than an hour to locate and loosen what I needed. Anyone can tamper with brake lines. It took a true master to loosen them just so.

  Howard Pace was having a good morning. He’d woken up early, broke his fast, and gathered up the notes he’d made for the day. Monday morning pop quizzes were a favorite of his.

  The green 1953 Ford his mother had left him sat in the driveway. She’d been such a huge drag on his life that her passing was a blessing in disguise. Getting both the car and the house was a bonus. He’d thought for sure that his Uncle Jim would get it all, but Uncle Jim wasn’t a church-going-man, and Howard was. Giving the car a pat, he smiled to himself again. Too bad so sad, Uncle Jim.

  Sliding into the car, Howard gave the green interior a swipe with his sleeve. Time to give it a good clean soon. Protecting his investment was always a good idea. As usual, the car started right up. Checking carefully behind him, he put it in reverse and backed up.

  “Hmm, that’s funny,” Howard muttered to himself. The car gave almost a hiccup when he threw it in gear and started down the hill. There was more give to the brake pedal than usual. He made a mental note to drop it off at the service station.

  Giving the car some gas, he started down the mountain. If the test went well, he’d squeeze in more of the lesson plan and assign some homework. A typical Monday. At the first bend in the road he depressed the brake pedal to slow down.

  Under the hood of his car a brake line gave way. It was only screwed in a quarter of a turn and when the pressure hit it, it popped out. Brake fluid sprayed like a water hose until it was gone.

  “The hell?” Howard cursed as his foot moved all the way to the floor of the car. Pumping the pedal, he tried to build up pressure to apply the brakes. Instead of further compressing things, it emptied out the majority of the special fluid.

  The car continued to build speed on the turns. Howard jerked the wheel to one side, trying to use the skid to slow him down, but to no avail. Reaching down near the floorboard, he gave the emergency brake a pull.

  Under the car there was a ping that Howard couldn’t hear. It was the sound the cable equalizer makes as it separates from the cables attached to the handler. There was no stopping the car now.

  This wasn’t the movies, and Howard knew it. A crappy science teacher he might be, but he was qualified to teach it. Jumping out of a moving car was a death sentence. Maybe, just maybe he could ride it down. There weren’t that many trees in the way.

  At the second major turn he twisted the wheel to one side, causing the car to slide and almost topple over. Physics might just be a bunch of numbers, but he was running through them as fast as he could. But as he approached the next turn, his luck ran out. Sliding sideways just wasn’t the same on concrete, and the moment the wheels touched it they sent the car spinning sideways into the brush along the road.

  “Oh Shit!” Howard screamed as the car spun like a sideways top through the weeds across the inside of the curve and across the road. The momentum of the car was slowed just enough as it slammed into the curb along the downward slope of the mountain.

  Howard groaned. Every part of his body hurt. Glasses broken, arm twisted, one of his legs hurting so bad it had to be dislocated, he fumbled at the door. “Have to get out.”

  He couldn’t see straight, and completely missed the fact the car was balanced upon the edge. Sliding out he stepped down.

  “Aaaaa!” Pace screamed as his foot landed on nothing but air and he all but jumped down the mountain. The rocking motion of him leaving the car unbalanced it and tipped it over.

  Anyone looking up the mountain would have seen what looked like a man racing a car in a losing battle downhill.

  Six

  Burning down someone's house with them inside sounds like a good idea, but they can still escape. Figuring out how to prevent that and still have it look like an accident was the big problem. If I was going to kill the headmaster, I would have to make it the perfect murder.

  I’m not a firebug. Later in life, I found out that was what police called arsonists that got off on fire. To them it was beautiful and seductive. They could sit and watch the orange and red flame forever. Psychologists claimed that what firebugs did was a gateway to suicide and animal mutilation. Surprisingly, women were the most prevalent arsonists. It was often a way to seek revenge upon someone. I just want justice, not a feel-good drug. Fire is a tool, that’s all.

  An accident in the kitchen at home gave me an idea of how I might do it. The perfect way to immobilize the man.

  “Miss Gen, will you sit down and stop pacing? You’re dirtying up my floor,” Francis remarked as she ran the mop over where I just walked. The kitchen smelled strongly of bleach.

  It was Wednesday, and I’d just gotten home from another day of mowing. I knew the school had it in for me, but this was ridiculous. For more than a solid week now, I’d been the only student on lawn duty. All the others had their parents complain and were allowed to attend the new after-school study hall. Grandmother was useless. She cared less about me than the headmaster did.

  Sighing, I plopped down in the kitchen chair. As my weight hit it, the table lurched a bit, shaking all the bottles and things sitting on it.

  “Watch out!” Francis cried out. A large bottle of vinegar rolled off the table, hitting the floor with a crash. Shattered glass flew everywhere.

  Jumping up, I started apologizing. “Sorry! Let me help.”

  I reached down and started to pick up the larger chunks of glass, but suddenly felt a bit faint. “What…what…” Steadying myself, I gripped the edge of the table. Faint wisps of...something were curling up from the floor.

  “Child, you need to get outside.” Showing strength I didn’t know she had, Francis scooped me up with one arm and opened the door with another. Much faster than a human, the Were woman quickly opened up the windows to air out the kitchen.

  Gasping, I forced more air into my lungs. Like there was suddenly two of everything, my vision was all wobbly. “What happened in there?”

  “Them chemicals can kill you if you mix them. Every cook in the world knows about bleach and ammonia. Always watch what you’re doing in the kitchen. Sit out here a pace while I get that mess cleaned up,” Francis instructed me.

  Kitchen chemicals could kill you? That was news to me.

  “Bleach and vinegar? B
e sure to thank your cook when you go home, Miss Vogel. She may have saved your life,” William Ney, the new science teacher stated. He’d been with us for about a week now. Tall and thin, he had a half-starved look about him. “By accident, you created chlorine gas.”

  “Clor...what? How did I do that?” I asked him.

  Mr. Ney turned to the chalkboard. His hands had ugly brown spots on them and they shook a little as he scratched away with the chalk “We haven’t gone over this yet, but try to keep up. Bleach is actually sodium hypochlorite in a suspension of water. We’d write it like this.”

  Mr. Ney wrote on the board, then read it to me. “NaOCl + H2O.” I gave him a blank stare.

  “Hydrochloric acid is a caustic agent that can and will burn a hole right through you,” he said, pointing his chalk at me. “They use it to make batteries and to descale steel. When you increase the acidic level or PH of it, you get chlorine in a gaseous form. If you’d been in a closed room, you might have suffocated. They used a form of chlorine gas on the French front during the great war in 1915. High levels of the gas can contribute to fluid buildup inside the lungs. What doctors call pulmonary edema,” he explained. “Now, if what you spilled had been ammonia instead, you would have created chloramine vapor. While not as toxic as straight chlorine gas, it might have affected your lungs. That mixture in large amounts has the potential to turn into hydrazine, which can become explosive. Your cook deserves a raise for getting you out of there so fast.”

  I nodded, deep in thought. “But why wasn’t Francis affected as bad?”

  “She’s a Were you said?” Ney asked me.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “They have an unparalleled immune system, and their bodies have amazing self-curative powers. Cut off one of their fingers and it will actually grow back in a few days. I served with several Weres during the war,” Ney replied. “Politics aside, they are good folks.”

  “Yes, they are,” I replied.

  Thanking the man, I hurried off to my next class. For once, the school had hired a teacher who wasn’t sucking up to Meyer. Much older than the other teachers, I figured Mr. Ney was pretty near to retirement.

  Bleach and vinegar. Who would’ve thought that would be the answer. Now to set a trap and end a life. Justice needed to be served.

  The school library didn’t have any books on locksmithing, but the public one had a few. Locks were interesting. Grandfather had already shown me the basics of how to open a car door. He couldn’t find the keys to the Nomad, so we had popped the locks with a slim jim. I couldn’t use that on a house, though.

  Pin tumbler locks were the most common type on household doors, according to the books I found. Actually picking a lock, though, was really hard. Using some of Grandmother’s bobby pins, I made some very crude tools. The tension wrench was just a bobby pin bent into an L shape. I made a raker by straightening out another one.

  I tried the back door and the attic first. In her infinite wisdom, Grandmother didn’t allow me a key to the house. I had to knock just like a visitor. Learning this would help me a lot.

  Grandmother had dragged Grandfather off to some charity event, so the house was deathly quiet tonight. Using the tension wrench, I applied a bit of pressure to the bottom of the attic door’s keyhole, called the plug. Then I started raking the other tool along the inside top of the keyhole. The idea was to cause the individual pins to loosen and unlock. There was a definite trick to it.

  After almost ten minutes of this, I managed to open the attic door successfully. Dusty stairs reached up into a part of the house I, until this moment, hadn’t had access to. Looking for a light, I patted both sides of the door, to no avail. I ducked into my room and grabbed one of the flashlights I’d found in the barn.

  Creak!

  The sudden noise elicited a slight scream from me. My heart was beating so fast I thought it might drum its way right out of my chest. Eyeing the steps in front of me, I carefully placed my foot closer to the wall where the nails secured the treads. I shifted my weight and continued to climb. Mental not to myself: pay more attention in the future. My life might depend upon it.

  Shining the light around the room, all I could see were boxes and furniture. Only a few of the boxes seemed to have any sort of order about them, and those were the ones that belonged to Grandfather. The rest were my mother’s. When she’d fallen from grace in the eyes of my grandmother, the servants had boxed her things instead of disposing of them. It made me wonder if the Church Lady even knew they were up here.

  Stacking and shifting the boxes took hours, but my efforts yielded a small partition hidden from direct view. I’d spent time and mapped out all the loose spots on the floor. Future trips to the attic would help me learn stealth and caution. If I was careful, this space could be where I would do my planning. Some things needed to be kept secret. From everyone.

  Seven

  “Nurse!”

  Like before, the cry for help broke me from my memories. It was a never-ending battle on the Demon ward. Way too many lost souls in pain and torment.

  “Chris, see what you can do with that one. I’ll see if Norton and Christine are done.” This shit was getting old. I thought about reporting those two all the time. But what would the point be?

  As usual, the door was closed and locked, a stethoscope draped over the knob.

  “What is this, a college dorm room?” I murmured even as I banged on the door.

  After a moment, a disheveled Doctor Norton yanked it open with a shout. “What?”

  My face didn’t show it, but I was raging inside. The sheer gall of this man. Ignoring the look he was giving me and his anger, I started right in, “We need Christine on the ward. And I’ve got a whole box of evals and med permissions that I need your signature on.”

  “We’re having an important meeting in here!” Norton thundered, trying to keep his composure.

  I shook my head. “No. Let’s not play that game, shall we? This,” I waved my hand over his shoulder and into his office, “is no secret from those of us that actually work here. Regardless of your needs, we have work to do out here.”

  Giving him a glare, I spun around to get back to work. He could try, but firing me wasn’t in the cards at the moment. With all the budget cuts, I was it up here. Something needed to be done about those two, though. The little voice inside of me gave me all sorts of fun and bloody things I could do to the both of them.

  “I just poked the bear. Expect Dr. Norton and company soon,” I said to Chris as I breezed past him.

  The overworked nurse looked up from the seemingly endless pile of files in abject horror. “What?”

  “We need the help!” I waved at the wings stretching out from our desk. “Some is better than none.”

  Chris looked at his watch. “Day shift will be here in three hours. We could’ve made it.”

  “No, we couldn’t. You know it and I know it. Something’s stirring them up tonight and we need all the help we can find.” Reaching over the desktop and past the files, I grabbed my nurses’ kit. “We may have to give Thorazine the lot of them? B ready for it.”

  “Damn that woman.” Norton twisted around to look at the bedraggled nurse climbing to her feet from underneath his desk. Christine was all fun and games, but Norton secretly had to admit that Genevieve was probably right to not trust her or him. He only saw his position here as a stepping stone to something greater. “Clean yourself up. We’ve got work to do.”

  Brushing her hair back from her face, the blond nurse forced a smile. Just a little bit longer and she would have had him wrapped around her finger yet again. Brushing her hair back from her face, the blond nurse forced a smile. Just a little bit longer and she would have had him wrapped around her finger yet again. They both knew sex was just a tool in her arsenal of tricks. She wanted something, and he was more than willing to let her work for it.

  “You said we had more time,” Christine whined. “I really wanted to show you that trick my roommate told me about. It’
s something she picked up in France.”

  Norton stepped all the way back into his office and closed the door. “If you want to keep your job, you’ll do as I say.”

  Running her hands down both sides of her bulging breasts, the shell of the woman known as Christine approached the doctor. “You’re really sexy when you get all forceful like that.”

  Taking her outstretched hands into his, Norton pulled her closer and whispered, “You’ll see how forceful I can get later. Let’s go.”

  Christine pouted but buttoned up her blouse anyway. Using the small sink and mirror in the office, she quickly made her body presentable.

  Shaking his head and wondering if he was just that crazy, Norton yanked open his office door and stepped out into the bright light of the hallway. The usual dim area was lit up like it was day shift. The cries for help and succor were much louder now. He’d allowed his urges to interfere with his job and that wasn’t how things were supposed to work.

  “Honey, you need to fix that,” Christine said, pointing towards him even as she the door close behind him. Just like a man to leave he fly open as he exited a room.

  Looking down with a frown, Norton followed the direction of her finger. “For Christ’s sake.” Reaching down, he closed and buttoned his fly. “Take the patients on the left, I’ll check with the others and get the right.”

  Christine’s lips twitched, and as the door closed, Norton thought he saw just a trace of evil in Christine’s smile . Just a little bit longer and she’d have him.

  Eight

  Using muscle memory, the body that once housed the soul of Christine pulled the patient file from the box outside the room. Patient forty-five was screaming his head off about mice and rats in the walls.