Death City

by Sam West

  Despite the fact he couldn’t see anything from the living-room window, apart from the vast front garden, he strode over to the sash window to take a look.

  The view never got old. Two years had passed since his parents’ tragic demise, yet the view still made him tingle.

  It’s mine, now. All mine.

  Technically, the house wasn’t a mansion, but it wasn’t far off. His six-bedroomed, detached house was on Willow Road – easily the most upmarket, residential street in Ashburn.

  The carefully-tended front lawn – tended to by a gardener, not by him – was shrouded in darkness. His gaze flickered to the oak tree to the left of the garden next to the pond. For a second there, he thought that he detected movement, but no, it was just the gentle sway of the branches in the light breeze.

  He frowned, resting his hot forehead against a cool pane of the sash window, not knowing why he should be so on edge.

  Probably because you’ve got a dehydrated, beaten woman in your basement.

  Except it wasn’t that, it was something else, something other.

  Even thinking that confused him no end, because he really wasn’t following his own train of thought.

  I’ve been playing too many video games, he decided, his head apparently still being firmly stuck in game-land – in zombie outbreaks due to leaks in top-secret, government, chemical labs. He didn’t interact with people all that much anymore, unless he included kidnapping Claire in that – admittedly small – list of human interactions. Most interaction, such as it was, was conducted online, specifically in forums on the darknet.

  Sighing heavily, he turned away from the glass. He had to get his shit together. He had a guest to see to, and that guest was thirsty.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Drink your water.”

  The girl groaned, her eyes rolling back in her head. It was funny; he was no longer thinking of her as Claire, but just as The Girl. Somewhere along the line, she had become dehumanised to him. Maybe this process had started after he had first ejaculated inside her. Not immediately afterwards – it had perhaps been a more of an insidious creeping, but happen it did. His obsessive crush had gone and deflated like an old party balloon.

  Perhaps it had happened when she had tried to slash open his jugular, when she had morphed into that crazed, wild animal. And that’s all she had been to him since then; an animal.

  Yeah, that’ll do it.

  “I said, drink your fucking water, bitch.”

  He studied her, irritated no end that she was choosing to ignore him. She lay slumped against the stonewall, naked, her head lolling on her neck, her legs splayed in a most undignified manner. To think, the hours he had spent fantasising about what lay between those long, elegant thighs, and now that it was displayed to him, he was largely indifferent.

  Leaning over her, he fisted her once lustrous mane of honey-hued hair. It was quite amazing really, how only three days into their relationship, her hair had turned into a bird’s nest. It was really rather unappealing.

  He rattled her head by her hair until her face wobbled and a low, moaning noise escaped her lips.

  “Leave me alone,” she groaned, although that might have been what she said, because it was hard to know for sure.

  “Drink.”

  Still holding her hair, he shoved the glass against her cracked lips. Her hands curled over his forearms, like a new-born clutching its parent’s fingers for the first time – so delicate, so vulnerable.

  It left him singularly unmoved.

  Her eyes fluttered open – eyes that had once been the colour of a clear, summer’s sky, a shade not unlike his own. Her pretty eyes had been one of the things that had first attracted him to her.

  She drank, her throat bobbing. When she coughed, he removed the glass from her lips for a moment, not wanting her to choke to death. One that little fit had subsided, he made her finish off the tumbler of water.

  He stepped backwards, staring impassively down at her. She was a mess. She had soiled herself – piss and shit – her inner thighs and vagina smeared with brown, sticky lumps, and his stomach roiled in disgust. He didn’t have a problem with blood, not the freshly-drawn kind anyway, but stale blood, and shit especially, did him in.

  Truth was, he couldn’t for the life of him fathom what he had ever seen in her.

  She glared up at him, as much as a girl could glare, seeing that he had got to work on her left eye with a lighter, and it was swollen to such an extent that it had closed over completely and was a blistering, redraw mess…

  A waft of foulness hit his nostrils – the fetid, sweet stench of excrement, and rank BO, mixed with that indefinable odour of despair – and he backed further away from her. Maybe he should get a bucket of soapy water and give her a good drenching.

  “Please let me go,” she whined, albeit more coherently now. That drink of water must have revived her somewhat, dragged her back from the point of no return.

  “If you’re a good girl, I’ll let you go,” he said.

  That was a blatant lie, of course, but the simple fact was he liked toying with her, both mentally and physically. It was why she was here, after all.

  “Tell me something,” he continued, genuinely curious, now. “Did you know?”

  “Did I know what?”

  She was sounding more with it by the second. Ryan wasn’t sure if that was a good thing, or a bad thing. At the end of the day, he supposed it was just a thing. Either way, her days were numbered.

  “Did you know that I was following you?”

  Now that she was more with it, she had clamped her legs shut and pulled them sideways under her body so that her bare feet tucked in under her rump. She pressed the side of her body against the wall, wrapping her arms around her chest, hiding her small breasts from view.

  “No. I didn’t know.” Despite everything, that familiar note of defiance had crept back into her voice. It pissed him off no end, but he also grudgingly admired her resolve. She was a feisty one, there was no doubt about it.

  She swivelled her head to look at him once more, her face steaked with grime, which was weird, because it wasn’t as if the basement was even dirty. She peered up at him with her one, good eye, the rat’s nest of her hair framing her ruined face.

  She’s lost a lot of weight, came the indifferent thought. Was it possible to lose weight after only three days of not eating?

  Yeah. Apparently, it is.

  There wasn’t much meat on her to start with, but now she looked about as attractive as a concentration camp victim. He liked them thin, but this was just too much. Hunched over the way she was, her ribcage resembled a rack of lamb, and the shoulder blade he could see in profile looked as if it were about to pierce her skin. When he had first clapped eyes on her in the chain clothing-store in the main high street, her tall, slender, rather boyish figure had driven him wild. It had certainly been one of the main attractions when he had started following her home after her shifts at work.

  He smirked at the memory. It had been so easy to stop and ask for directions at a spot where he knew there were no surveillance cameras. The stupid cow had passively watched him and done nothing when he had got out of the car, walked all the way around it and had come right up to her.

  It was as if she had wanted this to happen to her, that it was some subconscious wish fulfilment.

  The bitch was gagging for it.

  “Why are you doing this?” she whined, although her voice was certainly now getting into the realms of normal.

  He regarded her thoughtfully for a moment. That was a good question, one which he had often wondered himself. He decided that honesty was the best policy, figuring that it might be cathartic. She was as good as dead anyway, so where was the harm?

  “I’ve always wanted to take a girl, you know? Take her, and have some fun with her, but I never had the guts to do it before. I guess now I finally grew a pair and actually did it.”

  The girl had begun to sob, clearly trying not to make a
big deal out of it and hide it, and he wondered in an entirely detached kind of way if the act of crying aggravated her fucked up eye, or if the tears maybe soothed it.

  “Please, just let me go,” she cried, her voice suddenly weirdly thick and deep. “No one has to know, I won’t tell. I promise I won’t tell.”

  Ryan smirked. Surely she didn’t really believe what she was saying?

  Maybe she does. Maybe she really is that stupid.

  “I’ll let you go if try and get into things a bit more. You know, enjoy it, and stuff.”

  She just sobbed all the harder. She looked ugly when she cried, the fucked-eye aside. With her dirty face all blotchy and swollen, and the snot bubbling in her Rudolph nose, she was quite the sight.

  He sighed deeply. “All you have to do is relax, get into it. We could be good together, you and me. If you please me, we can go upstairs, and you can have a shower and get dressed. I’ve got some nice clothes for you, and then we can have dinner together. Come on, baby, buck your ideas up a little bit, and things could get really good for you. And after that, maybe I’ll let you go, if you promise that you’ll come out on a date with me this weekend.”

  The lie tripped easily off his lips. If she believed a word that he was saying, then she was even stupider than he thought.

  So far, he had only used his fists on her. And his cock, of course, having fucked her in every orifice. He had only used the lighter on her eye because he hadn’t liked the way she had looked at him. There was a whole bunch of other tools that he couldn’t wait to use on her. He supposed he was waiting for the grand finale to do that other stuff. He wanted her to go out with a bang, not drear on forever.

  Better to burn out than to fade away.

  And that was the part that he wanted to record. His very own snuff film. It was going to be brilliant, especially if she cooperated. Especially if she acted like she was into it, if she thought that it was going to save her life. With the things he had planned for her, he supposed that her acting abilities were going to be pushed to the max.

  “Okay, I’ll do whatever you want, if you just promise that you’ll let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

  “That’s my girl. And I know you won’t, baby.”

  He couldn’t seem to wipe the smirk from his face. This was going to be so much fun.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A few minutes later he was upstairs, getting his things together. He had one huge, fuck off toolbox, like a proper little workman, complete with a foldout top lid, which he thought was particularly nifty. This box of delights was jampacked with special goodies, from hammers to chisels, pliers to electrical sheers and handheld saws to an assortment of knives with the sharpest of blades. There was even an unopened packet of five mousetraps, which he thought might also be especially hilarious to use.

  He also had a couple of guns hidden in the house, but he didn’t think that they would be appropriate for this endeavour. He had brought them from his regular coke dealer – two 9mm handguns – not that he had ever fired one before. Theoretically, he knew what went where, but he hadn’t got the chance to play with them yet. He just liked having them around – it made him feel very gangsta.

  He put down the toolbox at the top of the basement stairs and made his way back down the long hallway with the gleaming floorboards – again, the immaculate state of the interior of the house down to the cleaner who came in every Monday and Thursday to give the place the once over – and entered the living-room.

  The tripod and the latest, state-of-the-art camera sat perched on top of it behind the red-leather sofa. Striding over towards it, he plucked the small camera off the stand with the intention of folding up the tripod and carrying everything down into the basement.

  Instead, he looked down at the camera in his hands. Sheer vanity made him pause to replay the little video that he had made of himself yesterday – a short video which was intended to serve as an appetiser to the main event.

  The little screen at the back of the device filled with an image of his face, and he couldn’t help but grin. He was just so good-looking, although he conceded that he perhaps might be better described as beautiful rather than handsome. One would never guess that such an evil, twisted soul lurked behind that angelic face.

  The ironic fact that he even looked a little bit like Ted Bundy was not lost on him. Or not Ted Bundy, perhaps, but Zac Efron, playing the part of Ted Bundy. They had the same shiny dark hair that flopped onto a smooth, broad forehead, and both of them had pale blue eyes that sparkled with good humour and mirth. It wasn’t good humour and mirth, but one would never know that just from looking. He just couldn’t help but marvel at how young he looked, at how fresh-faced and innocent he outwardly appeared, yet there he was, internally Satan.

  I really am quite something, he thought with a stab of satisfaction, followed by, Maybe I should’ve filmed myself from the waist up, instead of just the shoulders up.

  One couldn’t see how thoroughly worked-out he was from this talking headshot, because boy, did he work out hard to look the way he did. When he wasn’t playing computer games, or watching snuff films and discussing the ins and outs of them with fellow deviants on the darknet, he was hitting the weights hard in a bedroom that he had converted into a home gym. He kept a careful eye on his diet to ensure that he didn’t put on weight or get too bulky, and he loved how it resulted in his sinewy, defined body that positively rippled.

  The fact was, he could have any woman he wanted, but he had never wanted women in the regular way – he only wanted them in an irregular way, in the cutting, hurting kind of way.

  Yes, maybe I really should redo this introductory bit. Get more of my torso in frame.

  Or not, he decided. His perfect body would be in view just fine when he got to the nitty-gritty of the film. And who was going to see this film anyway, apart from him? Well, the next girl after Claire might, which he supposed was the whole point of this little exercise. Because there definitely was going to be a next girl, he had already decided that much.

  Just thinking this caused the blood to rush to his cock, making him harden instantly.

  Sighing deeply, he pressed play:

  “My name is Ryan Clarke,” said the handsome and smiling talking head with the square jaw and sparkling blue eyes on the camera screen. “And this is my first movie, starring the beautiful and very talented, Claire Eames. She’s my first, so this is will be a very special moment for me, hence I want to record it for prosperity. I concede, it’s possible that I may one day share them with like-minded people on the darknet, but for now, this is my own private, little venture. One day, I hope to have a whole collection of films, just like this one. I’m sure I will, because I’m the type of guy that always aims high, that always tries to make his dreams come true. You have to realise your potential in life, don’t you? You have to do what you were born to do, whatever it is you believe that you were put on this on Earth to accomplish.

  “It was my destiny that I should meet Claire Eames, and that I should fall in love with her from afar. They say that we always destroy that which we love the most, and believe me, I do love Claire the most. I have never wanted to love someone so badly.

  “Let me tell you a little bit more about Claire. And when I say you, I guess I’m either addressing the next love of my life, or my kindred spirits online. Perhaps I am addressing both. Or maybe I am in prison and there are a bunch of po-faced, police cunts watching this right now, and maybe later on this video will do the rounds on the surface net, and I am now as famous as my idols, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson. I am certainly better looking than them, so should I be caught, I will be a million women’s secret masturbatory fantasy… Although I doubt very much that I shall be caught, because I am good at this.

  “No matter. I digress. Let us get back to the point, and the point is Claire...”

  The image of his face on the screen cut to jerky footage of a beautiful girl with flowing, honey-blonde hair, standing behind a till in a
clothes’ shop. She was oblivious to the fact that she was being filmed from afar through the shop window, and every so often, a customer obscured her view. She looked like such a happy girl, smiling for the customers, like she genuinely gave a shit about their sad little lives and their pathetic shopping experience.

  And all the while, Ryan’s smooth upper-class twang provided the voiceover…

  “Behold Claire Eames, an object of extreme beauty, as I am sure you will agree. I first saw Claire when I popped into this shop to buy a couple of t-shirts. It was only sheer fluke that brought me in here. Normally, being as rich as I am, I wouldn’t lower myself to buy such trashy attire, but seeing as I was passing after a pleasant afternoon walk to clear the cobwebs, and an impulse buy of a rather lovely Rolex, the t-shirt on the mannequin in the window caught my eye.

  “‘Why not,’ I said to myself, so in I went, and lo and behold, there she was, the delectable Claire. I was at the foot of the escalator when I first clapped eyes on her, folding some rather nasty, three for two, summer t-shirts, and I was instantly smitten. From that moment on, I was in love and I kept a very close eye on her. I followed her home to her sad little flat, which she shares with her best girlfriend, who is also a student like her, who, incidentally, is also studying English Literature, just like my Claire. Not that she will even get to finish her education, but I don’t suppose that it matters, because it would’ve been a bloody useless degree anyway.

  “Although really, I am a fine one to talk, seeing as I read Art History at University, and I only did that because it was a piss-easy degree, and it got my parents off my back until I turned twenty-one. After I turned twenty-one it was a different matter, so I just killed them.

  “Anyway. I am digressing. Again. It’s talking to the camera, it’s very cathartic.”