Sociopath (10 page)

4

I felt cold and we ran as long as we could, then we walked. The forest at night was not as welcoming as the day; every noise was a predator and every glimmer of light fearsome eyes. It felt as if everything was aimed at us, every tree a hiding place and broken branch a joke.

We ran so long
that neither one of us had any clue where we ended up. The same forest scenery, the same moon, but nothing else felt the same. Even the air was heavier and harder to breathe.

Finally nearing exhaustion, Me
lissa stopped and collapsed close to a tree. She leaned against it and closed her eyes and tilted her head back and then forward.

“Can you hear that?” she said.

I listened. A crashing noise from up ahead. Something like static from a television … water crashing against rocks.

“A waterfall,” I said, sucking for breath.
“There might be a trail by it.”

I helped her up and we
walked.

Touching the wound
on my head, I could tell much of the flesh was gone but I didn’t feel a deep puncture. Then again, I may have been losing sensation. I tried to keep my eyes on Melissa as she was pushing through the shrubbery; the crashing of the waterfall getting louder.

The forest suddenly went quiet. I was wondering what had happened to the animals when I saw that I was looking up at the sky.
Something had struck me in the back of the head and I’d fallen. A black figure was standing over me with something in his hands.

“Run!” I shouted.

Melissa ran. The figure lifted the thing in his arms. I twisted and kicked out its legs and it lost balance but didn’t fall. It aimed at me and fired and I held up my arm. The arrow went through my forearm, the tip an inch from my face. Blood spattered into my eyes and I screamed from the pain that shot through me like fire.

I kicked at him as he came
at me and I staggered to my feet. He swung and I ducked and struck with my good arm to his face. He kicked out in to my chest and sent me sprawling back into some trees. I heard something then in the distance, almost like a muffled animal. I could see another dark figure farther out. It was Melissa and she was trying to draw his attention away.

“No!”

He lifted what I could see now was a crossbow and I ran at him. He turned it to me at the last second and the shot went off but it went wide and only grazed my shoulder. I was on top of him and he reached back and elbowed me so hard in the jaw I thought I would lose consciousness. I saw stars and felt myself going out, the world closing in to a pinpoint of black. I fought to keep conscious, jumped up, and ran.

I wasn’t even sure which direction I was running but as the ringing in my ears subsided I saw Melissa in front of me
, shadowy by the light of the moon. An arrow whizzed past my ear like a bee but I didn’t stop or look back. We were at the lip of the waterfall now and it was impossible in the darkness to see exactly how far down it was.

“We have to jump,” I said.

“No, it’s too far. We should—”

She closed her mouth and looked at me and I wondered if I had said something. She glanced down to her chest and I saw the tip of the arrow sticking out, bits of gore on the edges.

She collapsed and I held her. Sucking in breath like she was drowning, her muscles stiffened and then turned to jelly as life left her. I had her in my arms, oblivious to the fact that someone was running toward me in the dark. I shouted at her, but it was too late. She was gone.

I stood up. The figure was loading another arrow and I saw his face in the moonlight. He was handsome and his wavy hair came down over his eyes. He looked up
at me and our eyes caught like flint in the darkness and he froze. We stood like this just a moment and time itself was still. I couldn’t hear the rush of the water behind me or feel the pounding of my heart. I had made a decision and everything else came to a standstill.

I took a step back, and jumped.

THOMAS FISCHER

I couldn’t believe that crazy bastard jumped. He was as nuts as the blogs and the newspaper articles said he was. I knew this land well and that was a fall of at least a hundred feet in
to water that only went down about nine feet, with jagged rocks sticking out. I stepped close to the edge but the moonlight did not illuminate much and I lowered my weapon. He was probably dead, but I would have to make certain.
He saw my face. He knows my name, where I work, probably who my father is …
I had killed an FBI agent. They would scour the earth for me and find me in a hole like Saddam Hussein, broken and filthy.

I turned to the woman at my feet. Grabbing her by her ankles, I brought her to the edge and kicked her
over, watching the body tumble and disappear.

A trail was off to the left and I had to pull out my flashlight to find it. I began running down, careful to watch for branches, roots and rocks. Breaking my ankle out here, no one would find me for days. We were a three-hour drive from the nearest city and not many tourists knew about this place.
Primarily bow hunters used it in the off-season. Park rangers and the locals had an agreement that what happened here would be between nature and the men that hunted. No one would be cited for any poaching. The rangers were mostly local boys themselves and their loyalties lay with the community, not the federal government.

I skipped over a small root and landed at an odd angle on a r
ock. My ankle twisted, I fell to my backside and slid about five feet before I came to a stop on some other rocks. I lay a moment staring at the sky, breathing hard, a soft euphoria coming over me. I felt like the world was spinning but I knew I hadn’t hit my head. I just felt ghostly … like I’d found what I was put here to do.

I jumped up and continued down the trail until I got to the bottom. I scanned the surface of the water and then the edges around the pool. Would a dead body float? I had no idea. I assumed it would. But the currents pushed everything away from where the water was falling so he most likely would have washed up on the sides.

The pool itself was maybe the size of an Olympic swimming pool, not terribly large. I walked around the edge slowly, my flashlight scanning back and forth. I came to the other side and in the forgiving mud saw something. I bent down over it: they were footprints. And they led from the pool into the forest.

I raised my weapon and headed into the trees.

JON STANTON

The air rushed my face and I lost my breath. I saw only blackness below but I sensed that it was whirling toward me. I hit the water so hard it felt like concrete. My feet hit first and I bounced backward and when I submerged I went so far down I hit the bottom. I don’t know how far it was but I had thought I might’ve broken my leg.

I crawled to the surface, gasping for air as I doggy-paddled my way to the side. I clawed up into the mud and lay there, trying to determine if I could walk. I raised myself up and put pressure on my leg and stood upright. I didn’t think it was broken, or if it was the nerves had been damaged and I couldn’t feel the pain.

I looked up to the waterfall. The moonlight was dim but I could see the black outline of someone standing at the lip. I didn’t know if he could see me or not but I guessed he couldn’t because of the added darkness of the shade of trees
and shadows.

Hobbling into the forest, I stopped and
glanced back once. Melissa was gone. She had to be. I saw it, and yet I wasn’t entirely sure. Had I jumped too soon? Had I just left her up there to be killed by him? I couldn’t think about it now. I had to keep going. I didn’t know why, because I had never been frightened of death before, but I had to keep going.

Once I got into the trees, I bent down quickly and said a prayer to the Lord for sparing my life
, and asked that he grant peace to Melissa as she passed through the veil. And then I stood and ran.

About two hundred yards out the pain in my forearm was so intense I had to stop and lean against a tree and examine it. The arrow had entered on the soft underbelly and was sticking out of the top
of my arm. Attempting to pull it out, I nearly fainted from the pain. The arrow had barbs and would’ve taken chunks of flesh with it. It would have to be left there.

I took off my shirt and wrapped it around the wound as tightly as I could to try and slow the bleeding.
The pain was radiating up my arm and into my shoulders and neck. I had a migraine and every little sound was like drums going off in my head; every ray of moonlight, dim as it was, felt like a flashlight in my pupils. But I kept moving.

I was embraced in darkness. Entering a part of the forest where the canopy was so thick above me that I couldn’t even see the sky, I felt like I was groping my way around rather than looking
where I was going. But I’d been in darkness before.

When I was sixteen I
’d fallen into a depression so deep I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d had no desire to. The entire world, all of existence, had seemed futile and ridiculous. I wondered at the time how it was that people had the motivation to even go to work knowing that their work was to put food in their stomachs to be used as energy so they could work. And then one day death would just come along and rob them of everything they thought was precious. It was all so pointless.

My father, one of the most respected psychiatrists in Washington
State, tried everything to pull me out. He never said anything about it, but I know it cut him deep. With all his education and experience and theories and centuries worth of knowledge of the mind, he couldn’t even convince his only son that life was worth living.

I was shy and mostly a loner at school so no friends came and saw me.
Except for one girl. She knew me from a mathematics class and we’d spoken a few times but had never hung out. When she noticed I hadn’t been to school in a few weeks, she came over.

She was Mormon, the first I’d ever met. She was polite and not pushy and asked me to come over to her house on a Monday for something called family home evening. It was some sort of ritual where a Mormon family, no matter how busy, would make time to spend that night with their loved ones.

I remember walking in and instantly feeling like those people cared about me. I had never met them before in my life. They had no conception of who I was or where I had come from, but they’d welcomed me with open arms. I hadn’t actually known people like that existed.

We spent the evening playing games and having snacks and telling stories. Despite the intense inner pain I was feeling, the type that painted the world black, I had fun. As I was leaving, she gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon
and a hug. Having nothing else to do during the days, I read it.

My father, seeing that nothing worked, transferred jobs to San Diego, hoping that the sunshine and fresh ocean air would snap me out of whatever was going on with me. I did heal, but the ocean was only part of it. I converted to the Mormon Church at eighteen
and my father nearly disowned me.

He didn’t care that it was the Mormons per se; he saw all religion as a scam perpetrated by the bourgeois on the working class. “The greatest hoax in the history of mankind,” he called it. When I converted, our relationship changed. He didn’t think you could be counted a man of the intellect if you believed in ghosts in the sky.

But science didn’t mean the same to me as it did to him. In my darkest days I fell into the 18
th
and 19
th
century philosophers, and I knew from Kant that for every phenomena there were not one or two or even several, but an infinite number of possible explanations. This was the reason for the constant changing of science. Aristotle gave way to Copernicus who gave way to Newton who was upended by Einstein who was at odds with quantum mechanics.

And I knew that science would never reach an objective truth. Our species would
go on infinitely changing our perspectives and models and theories, never stopping to ask if it had an end.

When I chose to abandon medical school for a PhD in psychology,
my father had held out hope that I would attend afterward. When instead I applied to the police academy, it was another blow to our relationship and his view of my intellect. One that we never recovered from. He told me that power would corrupt anyone, no matter how nobly you applied it.

I thought of him now as I trekked through the dark with an arrow sticking out of my arm and my head bleeding into my eyes. The pain he would’ve felt that this is how my life
would end. That, with the intellect he gave me, this was what I had chosen to do with it.

I stopped and
glanced around. Everything was black and every direction looked the same. It didn’t matter where I chose. So much blood was pouring out of me I couldn’t run for much longer anyway, and even if I could, where would I go? I didn’t even know what state I was in anymore.

And worse, everyone I’d ever cared about
had told me this is how I’d end up. My ex-wife Melissa, for a decade, tried to get me out of police work. She understood that you couldn’t chase monsters without having them consume you, or becoming one yourself.

I couldn’t extricate myself, even long enough for me to see she was slipping away from me.
By the time I realized what was happening, she was gone.

Michael R. Harlow, my first boss as a police officer, also saw my background and asked what the hell I was doing as a police officer. I had no real answer for him other than vagaries about doing
good and helping others. He’d looked at me a long time and said, “Leave, right now. This is going to be your last chance. Because if you stay and fall in love with it, you’ll never leave. And you’ll lose everything else in your life.”

Even my partner, the only one I had truly bonded with, Eli Sherman,
had told me that police work wasn’t for me. That it would eat me up and he would one day have to visit me in an asylum.

Emma was only the latest. She had made a pact with me that
if I left police work she would date me. I left and became a private investigator and nothing changed. I still chased madness through the streets. In order to marry me, she’d made me promise one thing: no more crime. I had to find something else to do.

I realized, only now, that I had broken that promise. I
hadn’t seen this as a case I was working. I had come because my friend died. But that was simple rationalizing. I had missed the chase and since I had left it I hadn’t felt complete. I wondered if she was already gone.

I sat down in the middle of the forest. There was no use running. Everything I’d done in my life, all of my actions, had led me to this point. I
’d seen this point in my dreams as a child, that I would die alone in the dark. Whether now or fifty years from now, what was the difference?

My arm was causing intense pain and it hurt to sit. I lay back and stared at the canopy above me
, moving with the wind like whirling phantoms.