The Ignored

by Bentley Little - (ebook by Undead)

  The programmers left the break room and I was alone, standing in the center of the room, surrounded by the humming refrigerator and the vending machines. Things were moving too fast. This wasn’t who I was. I wasn’t a criminal. I didn’t kill people. I shouldn’t even want to kill people.

  But I did want to.

  And, as I stood there, I knew that I would do it.

  TWENTY

  On the day of the murder I went to work in a clown suit.

  I don’t know what possessed me to go to that extreme. Maybe, subconsciously, I wanted to be found out and stopped, prevented from going through with it. Maybe I wanted someone to force me to do what I knew I should do and couldn’t.

  But that didn’t happen.

  There’d been fewer preparations necessary than I’d expected. As the days passed and the certainty grew within me that I was going to kill Stewart, I started to formulate a plan. At first, I thought I’d have to learn all of the of the exits and entrances within the building, the location of each fire alarm, the exact shift hours of each downstairs security guard, but I soon realized that it would not be that complicated. I was not robbing Fort Knox here. And I was practically invisible already. All I really had to do was get in, do it, and get out.

  The major problem would be Stewart himself. I was not invisible to him—he saw me—and he was in a hell of a lot better shape than I was. He could kick my ass with one hand tied behind his back.

  And if he knew what I was—what we were—he could kill me and get away with it. No one would know. And no one would care.

  I’d have to have the element of surprise on my side.

  I followed him about for a few days, trying to learn his patterns, his routine, hoping I could figure out from this how, and where, I could most effectively strike at him. I was sneaky about it, not obvious. Since no one ever noticed where I went or what I did, I staked out a corner by the programmers’ section where I could keep an eye on Stewart’s office. I watched him come and go for two days, and was gratified to learn that his habits were very regular, his daily routine practically set in stone. From there, I moved to the main hallway, making sure I was walking down the hallway at the times he left his office so that I would be able to see where he went and what he did.

  He went into the bathroom each day after lunch, at approximately one-fifteen, and he stayed in there a good ten minutes.

  I knew that that was where I would kill him.

  It was the perfect spot, the bathroom. He would be vulnerable and unsuspecting, and I would have the element of surprise. If I could catch him while his pants were down it would be even better, because he would be partially incapacitated: he wouldn’t be able to kick me or run away.

  That was the plan.

  It was simple and to the point, and I knew that that was why it would work.

  I set a date: January 30.

  Thursday.

  On January 30, I woke up early and put on my clown clothes. The clothes had been a last-minute decision. I’d stopped by a costume rental shop on my way home the night before. I’d pretended to myself that it was a disguise, but I knew that was bullshit. In a business environment, a clown suit was not an effective disguise, it was a red flag. And I’d paid for the rental with my Visa card. There was a record of this. There was a paper trail. Evidence.

  I think, subconsciously, I wanted to get caught.

  I took my time painting my face with the greasepaint supplied by the costume shop, making sure I covered every inch of skin with white, making sure the red smiling mouth was perfectly painted on, making sure the nose was precisely in place.

  It was already after eight before I left the house.

  Next to me, on the passenger seat of the car, was the carving knife I’d taken from the kitchen.

  It was like I was someone else, like I was in a movie and watching myself secondhand. I drove to Automated Interface, parked way the hell out in God’s country, walked through the rows of cars to the building, walked through the lobby, took the elevator upstairs, and went into my office. I carried the knife all the way, holding it out in front of me, practically advertising what I intended to do, making no effort to hide it, but no one stopped me, no one saw me.

  I sat at my desk, unmoving, the knife in front of me, until one o’clock.

  At five after, I stood, walked down the hallway to the bathroom, went into the first stall. I’d expected to be nervous, but I was not. My hands were neither sweaty nor shaking, and I was calm as I sat down on the toilet. This was the time to back out. Nothing had happened. I could call it off right now and no one would know. No one would get hurt.

  But I wanted Stewart to get hurt.

  I wanted him dead.

  I made a deal with myself. If he walked into my stall, I would kill him. If he walked into one of the other stalls, I would call the whole thing off now and forever.

  I grasped the knife tighter. Now I was starting to sweat. My mouth was dry, and I licked my lips, trying to generate some saliva.

  The bathroom door opened.

  My heart was pounding, whether from excitement or fear I couldn’t tell. The sound seemed extraordinarily loud in my head and I wondered if Stewart could hear it.

  Footsteps crossed the tile floor toward the stalls.

  What if it wasn’t even Stewart? What if it was someone else and they opened the door of my stall and saw me there, a deranged clown with a knife? What would I do? What could I do?

  The footsteps stopped outside my stall.

  The metal door was pulled open.

  It was Stewart.

  For a split second, his face registered surprise. Then I stabbed him. The knife did not slide easily into his body. It hit muscle and rib and it was tough going, and I pulled it out and pushed it in again, only this time with more of a thrusting motion. I guess the shock must’ve worn off then because he started to scream. I shoved my left hand over his mouth to keep him quiet, but even without the screams the loud, rough sounds of our struggle echoed in the empty bathroom. He was pressed against the side of the stall, and he was kicking and fighting and trying desperately to get away. There was blood everywhere, flowing, spurting, on him, on me. A kick connected with my right knee and almost brought me down. His fist hit the side of my head. I realized instantly that I’d made a mistake, but it was too late to turn back now, and I continued to stab.

  It didn’t feel good, the way I’d thought it would. I didn’t feel satisfied, didn’t feel as if justice was being served. I felt like what I was. A cold-blooded killer. In my plans, in my fantasies, this had been the payoff scene of a movie, and I’d been cheering the hero—me—as he finally meted out retribution to the villain. But in reality it was not that way. It was brutal and messy and ugly: he trying furiously to save his life, me no longer wanting to kill him but fully committed to that course of action and unable to stop.

  He fell, hitting his head on the bottom edge of the metal door and causing a new geyser of blood to gush forth from his forehead. He was dying, but not quickly and not without a struggle, and I was being hurt. If he had been quicker or I had been slower, he would have knocked the knife out of my hand or wrestled it away from me and that would have been the end.

  He punched me in the balls and I tripped backward, but I fell onto the toilet, and I lunged forward and stabbed him in the face.

  His body convulsed crazily for a few seconds, then was still.

  I withdrew my knife from his nose. It was followed by a wave of blood and some sickly gray clumpy stuff that washed over my shoes.

  How was I going to explain all this to the costume rental shop? I thought stupidly.

  I stood, pulled off some toilet paper, and wiped the blood from the knife. I stepped over Stewart’s body and closed the stall door behind me. His head and one arm were sticking out from underneath the side of the stall, his hand practically touching the edge of the adjacent urinal, but I didn’t care. There was no way I could hide the body at this point or even remotely disguise what had
happened.

  I felt nothing. No guilt, no fear, no panic, no exhilaration. Nothing. I realized that I was probably suffering from some kind of shock, but I didn’t feel like I was suffering from shock. I seemed to be thinking clearly, my mind functioning normally.

  It had not happened the way I’d thought it would happen, but I decided to stick with my original plan. I walked out of the bathroom and down the hall to the elevator. I walked through the lobby and outside, but by the time I started looking around for my car I had already passed it. I was on the sidewalk and looking at cars parked on the street. I guess I was more in shock than I thought.

  It hit me then.

  I started trembling, and I dropped the knife. I could no longer see because of the tears in my eyes. I could still feel the knife stabbing through muscle and hitting bone, could still feel my hand over his mouth as he bled and drooled all over me and tried desperately to escape. Would I ever be able to erase those images and sensations from my consciousness?

  I walked slowly and dazedly down the sidewalk. I probably would have felt foolish had I thought about the way I was dressed, but right now my appearance was the last thing on my mind.

  I had killed a man. I had taken a human life.

  I realized that I knew nothing about Stewart’s existence away from work. Was he married? Did he have a family? Would there be a young son and daughter waiting at a house with a white picket fence for their father to come home for dinner? I felt guilty, horrible, and within me was a black blank feeling that went far beyond depression. The strength and will I’d felt at the moment of the murder was gone, replaced by a tired, lethargic despair.

  What had I done?

  Behind me, on the street, I heard sirens.

  Police.

  “Bob!”

  I turned around at the sound of my name.

  And saw the sharp-eyed man running toward me across the sidewalk.

  I had a momentary sensation of panic, a quickflash feeling of fear, but though I wanted to run, I did not. I turned fully, faced the man.

  He slowed as he approached, grinning at me. “You killed him, didn’t you?”

  I tried to keep my face innocently neutral, tried not to let the alarm show on my face. “Who?”

  “Your boss.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do, Bob. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “No, I don’t. And how do you know my name?”

  He laughed, but strangely enough there didn’t seem to be any maliciousness in the laugh. “Come on. You know I’ve been following you, and you know why.”

  “No, I don’t know why.”

  “You’ve passed the initiation ceremony. You’re in.”

  The fear returned. I suddenly wished I hadn’t dropped the knife. “In?”

  “You’re one of us.”

  It was like I’d suddenly figured out how to do a complicated math problem that had been frustrating me. I knew what he was. “You’re Ignored,” I said.

  He nodded. “But I prefer to call myself a terrorist. A Terrorist for the Common Man.”

  I felt strange, unlike I’d ever felt before, and I didn’t know if the feeling was good or bad. “Are… are there more of you?”

  He laughed again. “Oh, yes. There are more of us.” He stressed the word “us.”

  “But—”

  “We want you to join us.” He moved forward, next to me. “You’re free now. You’ve cut off your ties to their world. You’re part of our world now. You never were one of them, but you thought you had to play by their rules. Now you know you don’t. No one knows you; no one will remember you. You can do what you want.” His sharp eyes focused on mine. “We’ve all done the same thing. We’ve all done what you’ve done, I offed my boss and his boss. I thought I was all alone then, but… well, I found out that I wasn’t. I found others. And I decided that we should band together. When I saw you that first time, at South Coast Plaza, I knew you were one of us, too. But I could tell that you were still searching. You hadn’t found yourself yet. So I waited for you.”

  “You don’t even know me.”

  “I know you. I know what foods you like; I know your taste in clothes; I know everything about you. And you know everything about me.”

  “Except your name.”

  “Philipe.” He grinned. “Now you know everything.”

  It was true. He was right. And as I stood there and looked at him and that strange feeling settled inside me, I knew that the feeling was good.

  “Are you in?” he asked.

  I looked back down the street, toward the mirrored facade of the Automated Interface building, and I nodded slowly. “I’m in,” I said.

  Philipe pumped his fist in the air. “Yes!” His smile grew broader. “You’re a victor now, not a victim. You won’t regret this.” He spread his arms wide. “The town,” he crowed, “is ours!”

  PART TWO

  We Are Here

  ONE

  I felt no guilt. That was the weird thing. Aside from those first few initial qualms, I felt no guilt over what I’d done. I wanted to; I tried to. I even attempted to analyze why I didn’t. Murder was wrong. I’d been taught that since I was a child, and I believed it. No human being had the right to take the life of another. To do so was… evil.

  So why didn’t I feel bad?

  I suppose it was because deep down, despite my surface reservations against murder, I felt that Stewart had deserved it. How I could think that, how I could believe that arrogance toward an underling qualified one for the death penalty, I could not rationally say. It was an instinctive feeling, a gut reaction, and whether it was Philipe’s persuasive arguments or my own rationalizations, I soon came to think, to believe, that what I had done was not wrong. It might have been illegal, but it was fair, it was just.

  Legality and illegality.

  Did such concepts apply to me?

  I thought not. I began to think that perhaps, like Philipe said, I had been put on this earth for a purpose, that my anonymity was not a curse but a blessing, that my invisibility protected me from the mundane morality that ruled the lives of everyone else. I was average, Philipe kept telling me, but that made me special, that gave me rights and licenses that went far beyond those accorded to the people who’d surrounded me all my life.

  I was born to be a Terrorist for the Common Man.

  Terrorist for the Common Man.

  It was an attractive concept, and it was obviously something to which Philipe had given a lot of thought. He introduced me to my fellow terrorists that first day. I was still stunned, still not fully functioning, but he led me back to my car and had me drive, following his directions, to a Denny’s coffee shop in Orange. The other terrorists were already there, taking up two pushed-together tables in the back of the restaurant and being completely ignored by both the waitresses and the other customers. We walked over to where they sat. There were eight of them, not counting Philipe. All men. Four of them, like Philipe and myself, appeared to be in their twenties. Three of them looked to be in their thirties, and one was an old man who could not have been a day under sixty-five.

  I looked at the men and I realized what had struck me before about Philipe, why there had been something familiar about him. He looked like me. They all looked like me. I don’t mean that we had the same physical features, the same-sized noses or the same color hair, but there was a similarity in our expressions, in our attitudes, an undefinable quality that marked us as being of a kind. We were all Caucasian. I noticed that immediately. There were no minorities among us. But our similarity went far deeper than mere race.

  We were all Ignored.

  Philipe introduced me to the others. “This is the man I’ve been telling you about,” he said, gesturing toward me. “The one I’ve been cultivating. He finally did his boss today. Now he’s one of us.”

  Nervous, embarrassed, I looked down at my hands. I saw dried blood in the short lines of my knuckles,
around the edges of my fingernails. I realized I was still wearing the clown suit.

  The others stood, all smiling and talking excitedly, and they shook my hand and congratulated me one by one as Philipe introduced them. Buster was the old man, a former janitor. The young guys were John, James, Steve, and Tommy. John and Tommy had both worked for chain department stores before hooking up with Philipe. James had been a circulation manager for the Pennysaver. Steve had been a file clerk working for a temporary agency. Two of the thirtysomethingers, Bill and Don, had both held middle-management positions—Bill with the County of Orange, Don with a private investment firm. The other, Pete, had been a construction worker.

  These, then, were my peers.

  “Sit down,” Philipe said. He pulled out a chair, looked at me. “You hungry? Want something to eat?”

  I nodded, sitting down in the chair next to him. I was hungry, I realized. I hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, and all of this… excitement had left me with a huge appetite. But none of the waitresses had even looked in this direction since we’d walked in.

  “Don’t worry,” Philipe said, as if reading my thoughts. He walked to the middle of the room and stood directly in front of a plump older waitress who was heading back toward the kitchen. She stopped just before running into him, an expression of surprise crossing her features as she saw him for the first time. “Could we get some service?” Philipe said loudly. He pointed to our table, and the waitress’ gaze followed his finger.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I—” She caught herself. “Are you ready to order?”

  “Yes.”

  She followed Philipe back to our table. He ordered a patty melt and a cup of coffee, I ordered a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a large Coke. The other men had already eaten but asked for refills of their drinks.