Sociopaths In Love (24 page)

She pulled his large hand from between her
legs and said, "Don't."

"I understand," he said. "I
really do. I've . . .
hurt
you somehow. I'll find a way to
make it better. Just give me some time."

She took his hand in both of hers and said,
"We've got all the time in the world. I love you so much,
Walt."

"Let's go watch the girls, huh."

He stood up and she followed him. He slid
the eye slot on the door open and motioned for her to get close.
The girls were sleeping in the far right corner. One of them lay on
her back, the other's head resting on her stomach.

"What I can't figure out," Walt said, "is
why they haven't tried to eat each other yet. They have to be
starving but they don't even fight."

Erica swallowed hard and hoped it wasn't
audible. "Were they . . . friends? Before?"

"I told you they were sisters. But there are
no friends or relatives when it comes to survival. You know
that."

She was going to back away, bolt to the
front door, toss a lame excuse at him, and get out of the
apartment, but his hand was already around the back of her neck. He
laughed shortly and slammed her head against the door. The pain was
tremendous and shot from the top of her head to the arches of her
feet. Then he did it again. And again until she lost
consciousness.

Breaking Up

When she finally came to Erica felt like she
was falling and her heart skipped crazily, the blood rushing to her
head threatening to send her back into unconsciousness. A few quick
seconds and she figured out what had happened to her. It made her
wish she were falling to her death.

She was suspended upside down from the
balcony. She tightened her stomach muscles enough to raise her
torso and look at her feet, her body shaking with the effort. Walt
wasn't the only one who'd fallen out of shape the past few months.
A yellow rope was bound around her ankles. If she were meatier, the
rope would dig in. Given her relatively low body fat, the greatest
risk she faced, aside from falling, was severe rope burn. And that
was only if she struggled too much. She would probably fall first.
If she knew Walt as well as she thought she did, the rope probably
wasn't tied very well. She could only know Walt's actions. She
didn't think she could ever know Walt. Or, rather, she thought she
knew him pretty well and there just wasn't much to know. In that
way, they were a lot alike. Could two people be attracted to each
other based on a mutual lack of empathy and conscience? Well, she
thought her current predicament probably answered that question.
And given the fact she had seemingly faded from humanity's radar,
she didn't see anyone coming along to save her any time soon. Maybe
Dawn. Maybe.

She let herself go limp. It felt better that
way. She stared at the sidewalk beneath her and the people walking
to and from wherever. Focusing on things made her feel less likely
to pass out.

She heard Walt laughing and once again
strained to look toward her feet, toward the balcony. She
immediately wished she hadn't. He stood at the railing, cock in
hand, and she braced herself for the rancid torrent of piss that
hit her in the face.

A naked woman dangling from a balcony in the
downtown of a city and no one even stopped to gawk. She wondered if
she had really been doing everything she wanted. Maybe all she
wanted was for people to notice her. But how did that sound? How
would that have sounded when Walt asked her what she wanted to do
and she replied that she wanted to be noticed by as many people as
possible?

She thought about pleading with him,
promising things, but he was already gone.

She continued to hang and wait, watching
normal people go to their normal jobs and live their normal lives.
Was that what she wanted? She didn't think so.

There was a moment when the streets and
sidewalks were oddly empty and she had the sensation she'd gone
under, passed out, or ruptured something in her brain. She imagined
everyone slowly disappearing from the surface of the earth until it
was just her, dangling in a breeze that, under the circumstances,
would seem spectral. Then she watched a homeless guy sift through a
blooming pot of plants and figured it must just be some kind of
afternoon lull.

Walt came back out to the balcony and shook
the rope as if to rouse her from sleep. Maybe it was to scare her.
She didn't know if she thought of it as frightening. How could
falling a few stories to the concrete be any worse than what
awaited her if Walt decided to drag her back up and take her into
the apartment?

He looked over the railing at her until she
made eye contact with him.

"How could you do this to me?"

She wasn't going to argue with him. She
wouldn't like the sound of her voice and would therefore be
powerless from the outset.

"I'm a sick man."

To say the
least
, she thought.

But he didn't mean sick in the head. He
braced himself on the railing and vomited. Most of it passed in
front of her face in a stinking cloud, but some of it landed on her
and she wiped it away with balloon arms.

"I keep doing that!"

He didn't need to shout to be heard and it
didn't exactly sound like he was mad.

He heaved again.

"I've been sick for a while. Maybe that's
why I've done the things I've done. Just trying to get it all in. I
don't think I'm going to get any better."

As much as she didn't want to, she decided
to talk.

"Do you need someone to take care of you?
I'm . . . I'm not sure what you're asking."

"I've already found someone else to take
care of me. That's what I wanted to tell you. This is really hard
for me."

"You're . . . you're leaving me?"
She tried to sound surprised.

"I think it would be better for both of us.
You're not very nurturing." He vomited over the side again.

"It doesn't have to be like this, Walt. You
could bring me up. Let me live. I won't bother you. I promise. I'll
pack my stuff and be on my way."

"I don't like the thought of anyone else
having you."

"Then what do you want? Do you want me to
stay with you and this new person? Is she okay with it? Is it even
a she?"

He roughly shook the rope again. "Of course
it's a she! I'm not a fucking faggot."

"Okay okay. I'm just . . . like I
said, I'm just not sure what you want."

He lit a cigarette, leaned over, and blew
smoke toward her. "I'm going to pull you up now and put you in the
room with the girls."

He began pulling on the rope. It dug into
her ankles and it felt like she was being stretched to the breaking
point. When he got her close enough, he grabbed her calves with his
hands and pulled her up. She felt like it could all be a joke. That
he could bring her up this far and untie the rope before dropping
her again, this time unfettered.

Even though her body felt weird from being
suspended like that for such a long time, she had every intention
of trying to get away from him. She didn't know exactly what he had
planned but it seemed to be some kind of end game. If he was going
to bring the girl from the cafe back any time soon, she knew he
would probably want some level of normalcy in the apartment, which
meant he would construct some grand finale for those remaining
people. Erica felt stupid for getting the apartment cleaned. That
might have involved organizational skills beyond his control and it
might have been just that one hang up that prevented him from ever
having the girl from the cafe back to the apartment. But she knew
that was faulty logic. Walt did not put down any roots. If he was
afraid to bring her back to the apartment he would have probably
just insinuated himself into her life before dragging her along on
some kind of trail of destruction like he had with Erica.

Her feet came down on the concrete of the
balcony and before she could move an inch toward the doors, Walt
wrapped the rope around her, pinioning her arms to her sides and
binding her feet together. He punched her in the stomach hard
enough to take all the fight from her and dragged her toward the
room with the girls in it. She could have tried to scream but
didn't see the point in it.

Support Group

The first thing that struck her about the
room was the stench. She guessed, maybe, because the stench hadn't
wafted out into the rest of the apartment, she just hadn't thought
about it. But the simple logistics of the girls' situation
warranted it. She wouldn't have had to think about it very long to
know it would stink in there. Still, the intensity of it was eye
watering – rotten meat and piss and shit and blood and sweat and
some all-pervading stench Erica thought of as girl stink, something
unique to poorly cleaned girls' locker rooms and bathrooms,
something like menstruation and BO.

The next thing that struck her was how dark
it was. She had looked into this room before and didn't know why it
hadn't struck her until now. There weren't any lights in it and the
rest of the apartment was kept laboratory bright. Once the slot in
the door was shut, it was completely black. She didn't know how
long it had been since she'd experienced this utter blackness.
Possibly never. How is that possible, she thought, that people born
into this modern world could go their entire lives and never
experience total darkness? It made her think of the cave. And that
made her think Walt should be in here. But Walt didn't really dwell
in a cave. Not even the cave she had in her head. Walt dwelled in a
more metaphorical cave. It didn't matter how bright his
surroundings were, he would put out the light. Wherever he went he
established a perimeter of total darkness.

Erica had forgotten what the two girls in
the room looked like, if she had ever known. She had thrown them
food and looked at them with Walt, but she hadn't let her gaze
linger, hadn't taken the pleasure of looking upon them as Walt did.
She also didn't know how long they'd been in here.

"Hello?" Erica said into the darkness.

There were grunts from the far corner.

Had they been in here long enough to lose
their minds from fear and hunger?

"I'm not going to hurt you," Erica said.

More grunts.

Erica meant what she said. She had no
intention of hurting either one of them unless they attempted to
hurt her. At this point, she was certainly the strongest of the
three. She could kill one or both of them and not worry about
starving for a while, at least. Even thinking about her situation
imbued her with an overwhelming sense of defeat. There didn't seem
to be a point to anything. Well, she guessed the point to
everything about this room was Walt's entertainment. She knew
whatever she did would only delay the inevitable – her death. She
could kill them and eat them or just kill them because they
threatened her but she knew the end result would be her dying alone
in this room. If she didn't kill them, they would surely die before
she would. Then she would be stuck in the room with two rotting
corpses. She wondered how long it would take for her to break down
and start eating them. She knew, at the moment, being still
somewhat sane, she could rationalize that eating them would only
delay the inevitable. But how would she feel in days when she was
starving and she was immune to the passage of time and three days
felt like three weeks and she had herself convinced Walt was just
keeping her in here to watch her suffer, teach her a lesson, and
would one day let her go?

One of the girls started to whimper. Maybe
it was both of them. The only thing she had seen before Walt shut
the door was that they were against the back wall. She didn't think
they were huddled together or anything but they could have
been.

"I . . . I'll try to get us out of
here," Erica said.

This was met with one girl grunting and the
other one laughing hysterically.

"Can you guys talk?"

She wondered if she should go over to them,
if that would display some sort of solidarity. Then she thought of
the way they smelled and didn't want to get too close.

"Yes," one of them said in a barely audible
whisper. "But it takes too much energy."

"I see."

"You shouldn't talk anymore. There's nothing
to say anyway."

So Erica stopped talking. She found a wall
and sat against it, pulling her legs up to her chest. This was
going to be the saddest possible way to die. But what could she do?
The simplest answer screaming at her was to kill the other two
girls and see what happened after that. She'd already killed at
least two people, so it wasn't like she didn't have blood on her
hands. Plus, it was the only outcome that wasn't certain. While
there was any more than one girl alive in this room, she knew Walt
was just going to sit around and watch them, waiting for something
to happen. But what would he do after that something happened?
Would he let her go? She knew he wouldn't let either of the other
two girls go, which was all the more reason to kill them anyway.
They knew too much. She knew too much too but she was also an
accomplice.

She could wait but . . . wait for
what? Wait for one of the feeble girls to finally get so hungry she
came at Erica? Erica would certainly defend herself at that point.
Yet another result ending in the death of the girls.

She could wait for Dawn but she didn't even
know if Dawn knew where the apartment was. Erica was pretty sure
she knew what building it was but few people other than Walt had
the wherewithal to just walk into a place and start randomly trying
doors. And how long would it take Dawn to come looking for her?
Wasn't it more likely to think that, after a few days of Erica not
coming around, Dawn would just convince herself she'd lost interest
and gone elsewhere?