The Killing Kind (3 page)

March 15

The days were getting warmer, but it wasn’t quite full spring yet, and the nights in Tennessee still possessed enough of a chill to set teeth to chattering, especially this close to the border with Kentucky. The breeze didn’t slice through your flesh quite the way it did up north when the weather was cold. But any sane person would find the conditions nippy enough to at least wear a light jacket or sweatshirt.

However, the man sitting cross-legged in a grassy field adjacent to a stretch of I-40 was not sane. At all. The earth beneath him was still slightly damp from last week’s rains. With his eyes closed and his head tilted upward, he appeared to be in a meditative trance. He sat perfectly still and outwardly looked as peaceful as a Buddhist monk.

However.

He wore only a ragged and dirty piece of clothing that had once been—in its former life as a young woman’s halter top—as brilliantly white as a mound of uncut cocaine. The bit of flimsy fabric was tied in a knot around his waist and the little flaps in front and back just managed to cover his genitals and ass cheeks.

The doctors who had cared for this man up until a month earlier would not have referred to him as “insane” in any official documentation. That word long ago fell out of vogue in the medical community, mostly because it has come to be
seen as too limiting a term, or too inflammatory or insensitive, a relic of a less enlightened time. The man’s doctors instead said that he exhibited a number of symptoms typical of various abnormal brain syndromes. Schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, psychosis, etc. His chart back at the facility, where he’d spent the bulk of the last fifteen years, contained reams of notes detailing what was described as hallucinations and an elaborate but clearly delusional belief system, including reports of his frequent consultations with a “spirit guide” he called Lulu.

The man knew the details of his chart well. He’d snagged it on his way out of the loony bin and carried it with him in his bag. It made for very interesting reading when he wasn’t raping or eviscerating someone. Although he’d not been labeled insane anywhere within those pages, he knew what his doctors really thought. For instance, there’d been the time Dr. Freeman had referred to him as a “fucking psycho” when instructing a team of orderlies to remove him from his office.

Well.

Their opinions of him no longer mattered.

They were all dead. Zebulon Elias Geddy had slaughtered them in the process of escaping the facility and he’d done so without regret. Lulu said they deserved to die, and that was good enough for him.

Telling him who should die was just one of the many ways in which Lulu was useful. She would often also tell him how he should go about killing the people she identified as wicked. Tonight, for example. She had specified that a particular target deserved to suffer an especially prolonged and agonizing death. Zeb always did his best to do what he was told, although there were times when Lulu would fall silent in the middle of a killing and he would be forced to improvise.

“Woooooo-eeeeeeee!”

Zeb’s eyes fluttered open.

A man was dancing in the tall grass some twenty feet
straight ahead of where Zeb sat. The dancing man was wiry, his slender, rawboned body a whirling mass of flesh that looked translucent in the moonlight, legs spinning him about in a drunken stagger, arms upraised and stretched out to his sides in imitation of a helicopter’s rotors—in this case, apparently, the rotors of a badly damaged helicopter on the verge of a flaming spinout toward the ground below. The man made chugging sounds between crazed whoops, noises meant to mimic the sound of failing rotors. Here in the dark, you could squint and almost imagine he was a child on a playground, engaged in a bit of innocent, rambunctious fun. A few things made it impossible to buy into the illusion completely. The haggard, gaunt features. The livid knife scar down his left cheek. The explosion of bushy, scraggly hair atop his head, which might have resembled a cut-rate clown’s bedraggled fright wig had it not been so irretrievably, disgustingly
foul
, quite likely not washed in years. But all of this only served to make him look like a career hobo. Unpleasant, yes, but hardly remarkable.

The man’s name—supposedly—was Clyde Weatherbottom.

Two other things distinguished Clyde from your garden-variety psycho vagrant: (1) He was completely nude. (2) Wound in the fingers of his right hand were many long strands of formerly lush (and now sticky with coagulating blood) blonde hair. The hair was attached to the severed head of an attractive young woman.

Formerly attractive,
Zeb thought, and smiled.

The rest of her body was staked to the ground on a patch of pushed-down grass directly in front of Zeb. She’d been stripped of her clothes at the outset of the evening’s festivities. And though she’d endured a lot, her body remained a work of natural art—from the proud jut of her large breasts to the sweet swell of her hips and the tender slope of her flat but soft belly, and down to the sculpted length of her long,
elegant legs. Zeb supposed the ragged and bloody neck stump would’ve robbed her of any inherent eroticism for most people. But he was not most people. For Zeb, it was just another means of ingress.

In other words, he’d fucked it.

This was not normal, of course. Even he knew that. It was the kind of thing crazy people did. He was crazy. Hence, stump-fucking. Fuck that politically correct BS the docs were forced to spew. Some had attempted to link his “erratic” behavior with the onset of puberty, and hormones gone haywire. Others had looked for a root cause in the ferocious abuse he’d endured at the hands of his father. All a crock, far as Zeb was concerned. He’d been stone-cold cuckoo from the beginning. He could recall watching Mr. Rogers on PBS as a toddler and thinking how he’d like to pull the man’s eyes out and eat them raw.

So, yeah, Zeb knew the truth. He was crazy, like the regular folks said, and had probably had been born that way. When you looked at it that way, you could almost see all these killings as being the work of the Lord. Kind of. But not really.

God was the creator, and He had made him this way.

Crazy.

But God didn’t make him kill.

That was all on Lulu.

And Lulu had always been there, whispering naughty things to him during his childhood. Things that had disturbed and excited him at the same time. Ideas about interesting things to do with knives and bricks. He would sit in a classroom and smile at a cute girl, who would maybe smile back, never imagining his thoughts. She would think he had a crush on her, but instead he would be thinking about smashing her head in with a rock. The things Lulu suggested had ignited an obsession so feverish, it was inevitable he would follow the typical path of the young serial-killer-to-be
and experiment on animals. It taught him some valuable things, like how hard living things will fight against you to avoid pain or death. By the time he was ready to move on to his first human victim—shortly after his sixteenth birthday—he knew to always be sure to have the upper hand in any situation. Mostly that meant selecting weaker victims. Like that first one, the fourteen-year-old neighbor girl he’d lured into the woods.

Priscilla.

So pretty.

My, what a mess he’d made of her.

Later, as he grew taller and stronger, the field of potential victims widened to include just about anyone. He could go toe-to-toe against any man out there, even the kind of musclebound behemoths you’d see in a wrestling ring or shoring up an NFL team’s offensive line. And he would come out the victor every time. But he preferred female victims. He enjoyed them on an aesthetic level, that simple appreciation of beauty, but he loved to defile beauty even more. For Zeb, there were few joys in life equal to carving up a bit of lovely flesh with a sharp knife. He loved how the flesh parted so easily, the fresh wound spilling forth that sweet torrent of precious life blood.

Mmm…He liked to drink their blood.

It was wrong that he’d gone so long without knowing that pleasure. The memory of those long years of confinement still made him throb with anger. But now he was free again. And crazier than ever.

With a head full of new ideas he was eager to road test.

Clyde ceased his impression of a doomed whirlybird and staggered toward Zeb. He came to a woozy stop several feet short of his seated friend and flashed a fiendish grin. Though there were some gaps, his teeth were still mostly there. This Zeb attributed to good genes. Hell, even crazy hobos could spring from otherwise-sturdy stock. And Zeb’s friend was
proof that even the sturdiest of family trees can sometimes sprout a diseased limb.

All of Clyde’s worldly possessions were contained in a canvas knapsack he carried everywhere. Zeb had poked through its contents a time or two. There were three dog-eared paperback westerns, decades old. There was a lot of assorted junk. Lighters with no fluid in them. A jar filled with dirt. Sets of keys he’d saved as souvenirs from various murders. But most revealing was a stack of old photographs bound together with several thick rubber bands. The pictures showed various members of an obviously healthy and prosperous family over a period of maybe ten years. Some were vacation photos, shots of men in khakis and sunglasses relaxing with drinks, and attractive women in string bikinis stretched out on beach blankets. Others images were from birthday and graduation ceremonies. Clyde was in many of the photos, but the Clyde from that vanished time bore little resemblance to the man Zeb knew today. Somewhere along the way, obviously, something had gone very wrong for him. Clyde Weatherbottom wasn’t even his real name. Various clues from the photos made this clear.

Not that Zeb cared, really.

Clyde wasn’t that person anymore. Hadn’t been for many years.

Clyde held the severed head close to his face and pressed his chapped lips to the dead girl’s blood-caked mouth. Zeb watched him push his tongue between the dead lips and felt another little twitch at his groin. He glanced at the headless corpse and thought about spreading her legs for another go. But the exaggerated slurping, smacking sounds Clyde was making distracted him.

“Come on, baby. Gimme some lovin’.” Clyde kissed the dead lips again, made the same absurdly exaggerated smacking sounds. He glanced at Zeb and grinned, turning the head’s slack features toward him. “Ain’t she the sexiest bitch
you ever seen, Zebbo? I think I’m gonna marry her. What do you think?”

“You have my blessings.”

“Superb! You’ll be my best man.”

Clyde did a wobbly half spin away from Zeb and cupped his free hand around his mouth. “Hey, asshole. I’m engaged to your bitch now. What do you think about that?”

A longish moment passed.

The only sounds were the sigh of the wind and the hiss of tires on the nearby interstate, which was obscured by a stand of tall trees.

Then a muffled whimper drifted across the field.

Zeb grinned.

Clyde whooped and waved the head again. “Yeah! I knew you were faking being unconscious, motherfucker! Check out the blushing bride!”

Another wild wave of the head.

Another hopeless whimper.

“She’s mine now, ya fuckin’ punk!
All miiiiiiiiiiiiinnnne!
”

The whimpering briefly gave way to an outburst of impotent bravado. “I’ll kill you! Both of you. What you did…both of you…”

The voice cracked again and the whimpering resumed.

Zeb snorted. “Typical.”

Clyde shot him a wild, gleeful grin. “Well, shit, I guess we’re gonna have to take some reasonable steps to defend ourselves, Zebbo. I do think I heard that boy threaten to kill us. Did I hear right?”

“You heard right.”

Zeb got to his feet and started across the field, stepping on the dead girl’s stomach en route to where her handsome boyfriend hung upside down from the sturdiest low-hanging branch of a tall tree. When Zeb and Clyde reached the tree, they could see the headlights of cars zipping by on the interstate.

Zeb held out a hand. “Your knife.”

The Buck knife was embedded in one of the dead girl’s ears. Clyde extracted it and passed it to his friend. Zeb approached the dangling boyfriend, savoring the fear evident in the way he thrashed and screamed. The thick branch creaked, but showed no signs of breaking.

Zeb stared down at him. “I spent a lot of years in a nuthouse, boy. I got out. Obviously.”

Clyde snickered.

“One time I heard an orderly talking. He was saying how there’s different kinds of crazy. There’s your regular, everyday crazy. Folks take pills for it and they’re mostly okay. Mostly they’re only dangerous to themselves. Then there’s a middle-ground kind of crazy. People who are mostly just a threat to themselves but might snap one day and hurt somebody else. But this would just be an isolated incident. These people can still be treated, and maybe there’s even some hope for them. And then this orderly talked about me. According to him that day, I’m the worst kind of crazy. The hopeless kind. The killing kind. You see, I don’t struggle with my feelings or any of that shit. I like to hurt people. You might say it’s my main interest in life. My calling.”

Clyde said, “Your raison d’être.”

The boyfriend looked up at Zeb and sniffled. “Fuck you, man.”

Zeb’s expression didn’t change, nor did his tone. “That orderly was right. And I told him that right before I slit his belly open. Which, by the way, is what I’m about to do to you.”

Clyde laughed. “Gut him!”

Zeb plunged the knife into the man’s flesh at a spot just below the waistline and drew it downward in a single vicious slash. He tossed the knife aside and gripped the edges of the wound with both hands, tugging at the gash and ripping it open as far as he could. Blood and loops of viscera spilled
through the opening. The man wasn’t dead yet. He thrashed some more, but Zeb easily held him in place, pinning him against the tree. Then he pushed a hand all the way through the gash, groped around until he found a soft, squishy organ…and squeezed.

The man screamed one last time.