Mass Hysteria

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  He made a show of picking up the phone and dialing Mabel’s, and the father beamed as he reserved them “the best seat in the house.”

  Mouth dry, heart racing, Harbin could barely contain himself. He’d been waiting for just this stroke of luck. But, he couldn’t rush into it. That was how mistakes were made. Besides, he needed to calm down. Thoughts of the girl’s thin, coltish legs ran through his mind’s eye, the way her hips swayed as she walked, a little bit clumsily but the bare stretch of skin still enticing.

  He had maybe an hour, which was enough time to work with. He had spent days hunting and tracking his prey, and now the animal was cornered and ready to be taken down.

  He took the elevator to the third floor and took the maid’s laundry cart from storage. If he moved quickly enough, nobody would be any wiser. He didn’t even bother knocking at Room 317, using his universal card key to gain entry.

  Ruby was asleep in bed, the covers pulled up tightly to her chin.

  Harbin approached her silently, savoring the moment. He cupped his hand over her mouth, pinching her nose shut, smiling as her eyes bolted open and flushed with fear. His body pressed against hers, trapping her beneath the bedsheets and comforter.

  She tried to scream, but his palm muffled her words. Her arms strained beneath the comforter, pinned to her sides by his knees.

  That warm and familiar blossoming heat grew between his legs, straining against the crotch of his khakis. He laughed quietly, keeping her quiet with one hand while his other grabbed her throat and squeezed.

  He pinched off the blood flow to her brain, and the lack of oxygen turned her face red, then a deep purple. Her eyes rolled back in her head, but he did not let up on the pressure. She had passed out, but he pressed and squeezed until he was sure she was dead.

  He tossed the comforter and sheets aside, then hefted her body off the bed and into the laundry cart, covering her with the clean replacement towels stacked on the cart.

  Wheeling her back to the elevators, a mental timer clicked down in his head. He imagined her parents were probably settling in for their first cup of coffee or juice, studying the menu carefully and discussing their plans for the day, one of them perhaps suggesting they take Ruby out for a game of mini-golf if she was feeling up to it. He was unable to suppress the smile that stretched across his face.

  The service elevator took him down quickly, and his luck held. Still early in the morning and between shifts, the area was clear. He wheeled the cart out to his truck and loaded the girl into the back, covering her again with the towels. As he unfolded a hotel towel over her legs, he noted the large wet patch staining the crotch of her pajamas, the ammonia stink of fresh urine strong in the enclosed space. He was used to the body’s expulsion of waste during death, and was untroubled by a little bit of piss. If anything, it made him hornier. He looked around the parking lot, satisfied that it was empty and nobody had witnessed his movements. The truck’s windows were deeply tinted, and he doubted anybody would be able to see inside as they passed by.

  He hurried the cart back inside, rode the service elevator back to three, and returned it to the closet. Heart hammering, he licked his lips and unconsciously rubbed at his crotch, squeezing his erection, needing his release. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  He went back to his vehicle and drove to a secluded spot in the woods, his secret spot, and there he got to know Ruby, and when he was finished he licked his lips, feeling immeasurable relief. His body had been so tense with desire that finishing inside the dead girl had brought him such intense relaxation that he nearly passed out. Instead of sleeping beside her, he got to work. He buried the body and burned the towels and her clothes, then called in sick for the rest of the day.

  When the police began snooping around the hotel and questioning his absence, his father’s money bought the best team of lawyers possible, and his assuaging conviction that his son was perfectly innocent, to the point that his father lied during questioning to protect his boy, directing the cops elsewhere. Surrounded by lawyers, young Harbin had weathered the questioning, the police stymied by his council’s advice of total silence. They had little to go on—the maid’s cleaning destroyed much of the forensics that Harbin had left behind, and in the end all the police really had to go on was the thin fact that Harbin had called off sick the afternoon the girl had been reported missing.

  The Harbins were well loved in town, and contributed regularly to the policemen’s fundraisers and the Kiwanis Club. They went to church regularly and filled the collection plate well, sponsoring St. Francis’s potluck lunches and suppers. There were rumors, as there always were, but most suspected that Craig Harbin was completely innocent. He could never have harmed a hair on Ruby’s head. Ruby and her family were from downstate, down near Detroit, the whispered voices said with an air of disapproval, and downstate was an entirely different world than the small upstate town of Falls Breath. Those downstate people were savages and trolls, used to murder and pointing the finger elsewhere. Nobody said it, but the implication was clear enough—whatever had happened to Ruby, she’d had it coming. Her disappearance was sad, certainly…but, well, she wasn’t from around these parts.

  Eventually, Craig was cleared and the case went cold. Ruby was never discovered, nor any trace of her.

  After that, he was very, very careful. He saved his two-legged prey for special occasions, and could sometimes go years in between kills. There were seven human deaths by his count, most of them girls, but a few boys, which he enjoyed just as well when the mood struck. Hunting human prey usually took a lot of him emotionally, but left him deeply satisfied. Slaughtering animals was enjoyable enough to satiate him in the cool-down periods, particularly big game like that Zimbabwe lion. While he could go years without murdering a human, he never missed a hunting season, ever.

  Harbin’s hunting exploits even made him something of a local hero. Much of the local economy was dependent on hunting, and everyone in town knew that Harbin was a splendid sportsman. It was probably that love of hunting, along with his deep roots in the community and the popularity that name recognition brought, that helped him win the mayor’s office.

  As mayor, he had spent the day watching and listening as the town went to hell around him, a certain bubbly measure of excitation rising in him.

  The animals were fighting back.

  The goddamn animals were fighting back! He laughed giddily to himself, eyeing the woman curled in the corner of the front lobby. He admired the way her crisp uniform shirt wrapped around her torso, even if the real goods were hidden beneath the bulk of her Kevlar vest. He could tell she had rather nice attributes, regardless.

  The wolves were at the door, howling. He laughed again, a rush of bloodlust soaking his veins. He thrilled at the prospect of no longer having to hide his ambitions and talents. He was perfectly free to hunt, and would hunt for as long as he could, until a larger, better predator took him down, as was Nature’s way, God bless.

  Until that moment came, though, it was open season.

  Shay Hendrix awoke to a painful throbbing in the center of her face. Her skull felt as if barbed wire had been shoved into the hollow recesses and snaked through all the various cavities. Dried blood caked her lips and when she reached for her nose, she gasped, finding the epicenter of her pain. Her nose was broken and puffy, the skin around it aching, that ache bleeding out beneath her eyes.

  The back of her head hurt, as well, and the pieces of fractured memory started to fall back into place beneath foggy recollection.

  Vaguely, she remembered reaching the glass front doors of City Hall and being yanked inside by Mayor Harbin. Her fingers found wounds dotting her hair, and a small, exposed patch of scalp. He’d pulled hair right out of her head, and then, as she spun around, he’d slammed the butt of his rifle squarely in her face, knocking her out cold.

  She wasn’t in the lobby, though. She had been moved while unconscious, and found herself in a spacious office that she recognized from newspaper phot
os and weekly addresses on the public city TV channel.

  Harbin’s grotesque animal trophies marred the walls, and her eyes passed over the head of a lion that had been much ballyhooed in the local yellow rag, and the source of a number of vocal admonishments online as well as several petitions calling for him to resign. There was a deer, an elk, an antelope. She had always thought Harbin was a small man, a dickless wonder who tried, too hard, to overcompensate for his deficiencies by slaughtering animals. The fact that he literally surrounded himself with the heads of his victims told her all she needed to know about the man.

  As her eyes scanned the wall, she pressed her hand into the carpet, readying herself to stand despite her head swimming in pain and the world going all crazy tilt-a-whirl. Her fingers squished against the wet Berber and for the first time, she saw that she was not alone.

  Sheriff Tremblay lay nearby, or rather, what was left of him.

  The body would have been lying facedown if he still had a head. Instead, there was only a grisly stump, the neck meat savagely hacked at and the white circle of vertebrae unevenly cut through the center.

  Without a head, she recognized the sheriff by the stripes on both of his shoulders, and his stocky, well-padded frame was unmistakable.

  His pants and underwear were bunched around his ankles.

  She covered her mouth, but too late. She had used the hand that had touched the carpet, and the minute her bloodstained fingers touched her mouth, it was all over. She turned to the side and vomit ejected between her fingers and spattered the wall beside her.

  “Oh, god,” she moaned.

  Dizzy, she forced herself to stand, grabbing onto the edge of the large, shiny desk that the mayor used. She nearly pulled the desk blotter off and tumbled back down on her ass, but corrected quickly.

  A gentle breeze blew in from the open window, and she saw the street below and the mangled remains of the wolves Harbin had shot down. He had used his office as a shooting perch, and he had a wide, direct view of Old Downtown. Anyone or anything coming down the street was fair game from his chair, which was wheeled right up to the open panes.

  The wind carried in an assault of smells, the air itself cobbled together on coppery fumes and loosened bowels. Tremblay had evacuated, and the stench riled her, unable to escape it even by breathing through her mouth.

  Standing now, the animal heads circling Harbin’s office once again drew her eyes. On the coat hooks screwed into the wall near the door, she noticed a trophy she had not seen from her previous vantage point of the floor behind the desk.

  Tremblay’s head had been impaled upon a coat hook, his mouth hanging open in a gaping O, eyes wide with—what? Shock, horror, surprise? All of the above? A hole above his right eye had dribbled a line of blood down his face, and the wall around the severed face was splashed with dried, dark red stains.

  She shook her head, trying to deny the sights around her. Her hands curled into fists and she beat at the side of her skull, cursing this day, this life, and this total upset in the balance of nature all around her.

  Was this the end of the world? she wondered.

  Her father had warned her of this day, the day mankind would fall and cease to be, a world gone crazy and upside down, torn apart in a wide, mass hysteria. He had warned her of the devil, and the return of their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and the foul demons that would wage war against Heaven with the Earth as their battlefield.

  “Have you repented?” she heard her father ask. Her father, who she had not even thought of in years, who she had buried nearly two decades ago. “You foul whore! HAVE. YOU. REPENTED?”

  “No, Daddy, I haven’t,” she whispered to the angry, and oddly soft yet stern voice. “I am a filthy sinner, lost in a filthy world, condemned to hell and hell on Earth. Jesus, forgive me.”

  Absently, her hands glided over her torso, from navel to forehead, shoulder to shoulder, warding herself with the sign of the cross.

  How many times had her father warned of this day? Too many, she knew. Enough to the point of outright dismissal. The boy who cried wolf. She had heard it all her life, and her daddy, he had taken each claim of prophecy seriously.

  In 1980, when Leland Jensen, the founder of a Bahá'í sect, predicted a nuclear disaster prior to God’s Kingdom being established on Earth. Again, the following year, when Calvary Chapel pastor Chuck Smith said 1981 would be the world’s last. And again in 1982, when Pat Robertson predicted the end of the world. Yet again, in 1991 when Louis Farrakhan said the Gulf War would be the final breaking point, the War of Armageddon. In 1993, when another Bahá'í sect leader, Neal Chase, said that the end would come on March 23, 1994. All of the various dates throughout 1994 and 1995, and again in 2011 when all those failed to pass, as heralded by Harold Camping. Her father’s deathbed warning to Shay about the years 2000, 2010, 2011, 2012—because the Mayan calendar failed to continue past December of that year—and even 2013 because Daddy had read somewhere that Grigori Rasputin had prophesied it way back when. One of them had to be right. They couldn’t all be right, of course, but one of them had to be.

  All bunk. All nonsense.

  Until now.

  Now it was all finally happening. It had to happen eventually, didn’t it?

  Maybe that was what she saw in Tremblay’s empty, dead eyes. A knowledge and the certainty of the inescapable end.

  She drifted to the open door on wooden legs. Her hand went to her hip, where her gun was holstered, and met only empty air. She clutched at nothing, and then felt her waist. The Sam Browne belt was gone, as was the radio mic that should have been clipped to her shoulder. No gun, no club, no mace, not even her handcuffs.

  Harbin had stripped her of everything except her clothes and boots. She had nothing useful on her. Tremblay’s corpse, too, was stripped of weapons and restraints. All he had was a cloud of buzzing flies encircling him.

  The office door was open, and beyond was the darkened secretary’s office. She slowly walked toward the entrance, keeping close to the wall and poking her head around the corner. One quick look and dodging back, in case crazy Mayor Harbin was waiting around the corner to take her out. When no shots came, she looked around the doorframe again, longer this time, taking it all in.

  The blinds over the windows in the outer office were all drawn tightly shut, which was why it was so much darker there than in the mayor’s office. Sunlight came through the blinds well enough to see by, blanketing the room in a murky gray haze, but there was no sign of Harbin. Only an empty workstation, a dead computer, a silent refrigerator in a small kitchen area with cold coffee going stale in the pot, and a quiet corded phone. She recognized the phone as an IP set, and the LCD display was dark. The power was still out, then.

  Looking toward the glass door at the other end of the office, she saw the dark—and thankfully empty—corridor beyond.

  She pulled at the desk drawers and the filing cabinet drawers, glancing toward the door every few seconds, but everything was locked. On the desk was a hefty three-inch-by-three-inch glass paperweight shaped like a pyramid. The engraving said “Sandy: Congratulations on 5 GREAT years!” and etched beneath that was the city seal. Shay clutched it, the tip of the pyramid jutting from between her thumb and forefinger like a stubby knife.

  Walking quietly to the other side of the office, she was careful to stay to the side of the glass door and out of the direct sight line of anyone that might be out there. She ducked into the shadow of the sofa beside the door and studied the hallway on the other side.

  The stairs leading to the first floor were a clean shot straight ahead and halfway down. Past the stairs, at the opposite end of the hall, were the useless elevators. There were several darkened offices between her and the stairs, but it was impossible to tell if anyone was inside.

  She thought about turning around, heading back into the mayor’s office and going out the window. The drop would be steep, and she’d probably break a leg, which would then make her easy pickings for any crazed and w
ild animals lurking nearby, or a clean target for Harbin.

  Had he gone crazy, too, like the animals? Fine until all of a sudden he wasn’t? Was the disease spreading? Was she infected, too?

  Christ…

  She pushed all that out of her head, forgot about going out the window. This door right here, this was the way out.

  Shay stood, put her hand on the metal bar, and pushed her way into the dark stretch of hallway. The rush of panic shamed her, brought a red heat to her cheeks, and she broke out into a run, her boots slamming loudly onto the tiled floor.

  She hit the first stair and hurried down, nearly losing her balance halfway down, and grabbed onto the railing to keep from tumbling down and breaking her neck.

  Glass exploded above her. She looked up and saw Harbin striding through the opening of the office she had passed by only seconds before at the mouth of the stairs. He had an ugly smile on his face and a bulky crossbow in his hands. He raised and fired, not wasting any time at all while Shay fought to process the surprise. She turned to run and a burst of pain blew through her arm as she screamed and fell, rolling sharply down the stairs. The steps kicked at her along the way, bursts of starlight skittering through her vision as her head slammed into the floor.

  “Gah!” she cried, her feet kicking at the ground, pushing her forward.

  Her uniform blouse was thick and sticky, tight around her biceps. Blood poured down her arm, and as she stood, dizzily, it began dripping from her fingertips.

  Footsteps pounded down the stairs behind her, piercing the high-pitched whine that filled her ears.

  “Run and hide, you little cunt!” Harbin screamed, his words breaking off into a squealing peal of laughter.

  She decided to take his advice, but as soon as she put the weight on one leg, her knee gave out in painful protest. Her spine and ribs ached from where the stairs had punched into her, and the aches bloomed freshly as she fell. She hit the ground hard, jolting her wound and jostling the arrow stuck in her arm. Very briefly, the world went dark, then her eyes snapped into an unfocused blur as a new pain erupted in her scalp as her head was pulled back by her hair.