Alphabet Soup

1

Donald Moore had never been the kind of man who was capable of maintaining healthy romantic relationships. It wasn’t that he was crass or unfaithful, and it wasn’t even that he would prefer playing the field over keeping third base all season; it was merely that he couldn’t lie.

Magazines like Cosmopolitan or Glamour or Allure invariably claim that honesty is one of the most vital aspects of a good relationship, but that argument—like any—has its issues. One major flaw is that pure, unadulterated honesty is so rare that it may well be considered a symptom of a mental disease in this day and age. Most people define honesty rather loosely and subjectively, and the rationalizations behind white lies, truth-bending, fact-omissions, and semantic-manipulations muddy the Merriam-Webster waters and make a true, universal definition of honesty almost impossible to achieve. Not to mention, the people who actually display genuine honesty are so rare that they are more likely to die alone on a planet of seven billion inhabitants than to actually meet a compatible mate who is also genuinely honest. This brings into question the second major flaw with women’s claims that they value honesty above all else: real honesty from only one party in a relationship is as useless and irrelevant as the sugar coat encapsulating an anti-viral pill. The final and perhaps most damning flaw of the honesty plea is that the women who write and take to heart the articles making these claims quite frankly don’t know what they want in a relationship. These are primarily superficial young waitresses and actresses and models with soft spots for hard heads and big muscles, but these characteristics are typically possessed by egotistic narcissists who will cheat and lie and laugh about it when the shaky relationship finally crumbles. The simple fact is that most individuals seeking relationships are neurotic and damaged and unsure of what they want. They resent being used and cheated in the past, and they truly believe that honesty is all it takes to maintain a healthy relationship.

Donnie, however, knows better than anyone that this is all a load of malarkey. Women who pine for honesty have never been faced with pure, unapologetic truths in their everyday lives. Real honesty is shocking and unyielding and raw, and in the end it always breeds resentment founded upon words that can never be taken back. Not so long as the truth is to be maintained, that is.

Now, gazing contemplatively at the floor and caressing the hand of his lover of four years, Donnie never would guess it would be one petty joke from a stranger that would ultimately dismantle everything he had so painstakingly created.

... To be continued ...

Could anyone help me create a blog for this story? I've navigated all through the site's blog options etc., but I can't figure out how to create an entry.

Thanks in advance!

Hey G-Man,

Not sure, but there might be a post requirement for starting a blog. Hopefully someone else knows for sure.






J

Sardonic and perceptive.
Like your style GMen.
Keep it coming.
M

2

Loud pop music permeated the vibrant air of Walton’s, equal part restaurant, bar, and nightclub. Because Walton apparently couldn’t decide what sort of establishment he was running (hence the incomplete, non-descriptive name), the scene attracted individuals of all ages; middle-aged biker friends drank ale and loudly played pool in the back, older women drank margaritas and chatted about their cribbage buddies in the restaurant-style booths, and young college students flocked around the bar and travelled in and out of the dark doorway to the dance room.

To Naomi the entire place seemed far less attractive than it had ten years ago when she spent each free evening here during her last two semesters of college. She and Donald had been fast friends at the time—the kind of friends who spend every weekend together throughout college, laugh uproariously together at how much of those weekends neither can recall, and then graduate and move on with their lives, rarely (if ever) keeping in touch. But Naomi and Donald had gotten lucky. Nearly five years after graduating and parting ways as nonchalantly as any pair of friends who would see each other in the coming days, they had found themselves simultaneously feeling nostalgic and visiting that old hangout near their college town. Either five years wiser or five years more desperate, the couple had exchanged enthusiastic greetings, drank and caught up for hours, and spent the night making mutually well-received love nearly ten years in the making. The rest came naturally and rapidly.

When Don voiced in his blunt, unashamed way his opinion that Walton’s just wasn’t what it used to be, Naomi smiled and admitted her agreement, but the place had had such significance to them both, so it seemed a reasonable venue to spend their fourth anniversary.

She excused herself to visit the restroom, still smiling at Don’s quirky frankness, a quality she’d readily grown to love in him. He still claimed he feared she would grow to resent it like all his other girlfriends, and, sure, there were times when it was obnoxious and unnecessary, but Don was a decent enough man that always saying what was on his mind wouldn’t get him into irredeemable trouble. And the two shared enough common interests to find themselves in disagreement remarkably seldom. He simply couldn’t pretend. And if he did, he couldn’t for long. Don just couldn’t admit to liking her new dress if he truly didn’t like it, but he had a charismatic way of rationalizing his claims and making them seem less harsh. There were plenty of other dresses he liked. And if she liked it, wasn’t that all that mattered? Besides, there were far worse qualities for a man to have . . .

Naomi entered the restroom still smiling about her life. Sure, this wasn’t a fancy five-star restaurant with maudlin violinists and candles on every table for their anniversary, but this satisfied her and Don’s shared plain interests. Right now, she was happy. Later there would be fights and blights and sleepless nights; later she would dwell on Donnie’s plain admissions, question his desires, and seethe unfairly over things he’d never done and would never do; later his harmless truths wouldn’t seem so harmless, and they would ultimately come to unravel the very foundation of their love; later there would be days when she felt okay at best and days when she even thought she might make it through . . . But right now, she was happy.

... To be continued ...

Thank you for the support!

I'm very new with this site. What's the best way to do this and keep the thread fresh and easy to find? Should I edit the original post, or continue posting new segments as replies?

I normally just use the "Quick Reply" box and post another chapter.

3

Three years after graduating with a degree in secondary education, Jessica Langevin was still frequenting nightclubs three nights a week and working as a waitress the other four. Her degree would still be good in a couple years. And getting a teaching job wasn’t easy with the state of the economy. Not to mention, she would be young only once, and giving up this rambunctious lifestyle—which was more than supported by tips for her good looks and winning smile—was simply too hard to do this soon.

Walton’s was far more tame than some of the clubs she’d been to closer to the heart of Knoxville. And Knoxville clubs didn’t hold a candle to those in Panama City or Myrtle Beach, but Spring Break lost all meaning once you were out of school for good. Maybe getting back in on the other side of the public education pool wouldn’t be such a bad idea. But no employers would be apt take seriously a teacher who utilized Spring Breaks for such frivolities. For tonight, however, Walton’s would be perfect. She was getting tired of half-recalled one-night-stands and panic-stricken pregnancy tests anyway. Tonight she just wanted to hang out, get giddy, and screw with some of the poor weirdoes who frequented this place.

Jessica didn’t bother pretending to listen as her girlfriends argued about Krista’s clingy boyfriend who wouldn’t stop texting her and let her enjoy a single night out. She turned her back to the groups of older men sitting in the bar area and bent forward to retrieve her cell phone from within her knee-high leather boots. Turning back around and leaning against the bar, she pretended to type messages on her phone as she glanced over the top of it and searched to catch any guy (or girl) who may have been sneaking a peek at her tight, high-riding skirt.

Who was she kidding? None of these old perverts were into girls with degrees. She was only twenty-four, but this game was already losing its luster. These clothes hardly even fit her anymore, and she felt out of place and self-conscious not for the first time this week. She was adopting this persona fewer and fewer nights each month.

But here was one looking after all! He must have bought her text-messaging rouse, because he seemed to be still staring unabashedly at her crotch even as she watched.

The man sat stock-still as if in a daze with her long, tan legs as his apparent date walked toward the restroom wearing a blouse that was far too fancy to be worn to dinner in this establishment. A lock of his moppy hair fell across his forehead, but he made no move to brush it back. He was only five or ten years older than she felt, so he wasn’t as ideal a target as some of these other old trolls, but Jessica figured her clock was only moving forward. The game wouldn’t be as easy as usual, but she thought she could work something out.

She dropped her phone tantalizingly into her low-cut top and turned back toward her friends to interrupt their rants and admonitions. “Do y’all see that guy over there?”

“The one with the mangy hair staring at your *** right now?” Rebecca asked.

Jessica laughed and looked coyly back over her shoulder. “He ain’t that mangy,” she said, feeling a spark of pity so fleeting she may have mistaken it for a muscle twitch. The girls scoffed, and Jessica took Krista’s hand. “Come on. Let’s go **** with him to take your mind off Steven.”

... To be continued ...

4

Andrew Babbitt entered Walton’s at half past seven on a muggy June Friday. It was late enough to sustain his hopes of meeting a woman and early enough to ensure that the packs of hood-rats wouldn’t be out and about yet. At a place like Walton’s, it was always a safe bet that you wouldn’t find yourself waking up next to anyone too crazy the next morning.

Heavily synthesized music with overly complicated vocals was blaring out of the speakers, and a deep, rhythmic thumping from the dark dance room overlaid the tune of the song playing in the bar area. Andrew had missed the bandwagon for this music by about half a generation. He wasn’t a hardcore, guitar-solo-worshipping child of the late ‘70’s and ‘80’s, but he preferred music made by real instruments. This stuff all sounded the same.

Despite the unfavorable soundtrack to the night, Drew had a pretty good feeling about tonight. A moppy-haired man at a nearby table was arguing with his girlfriend, insisting that he “would never do that” to her, quite obviously struggling not to raise his voice; a burly man with a beard as big as his biceps was glowering angrily at the loud-mouthed drunk who was making a scene out of winning the pool game; a couple of old cougars straight from the casting rooms of a Sex and the City sequel were drinking margaritas and discussing what a disgrace their daughters-in-law were; yet through all this negativity and blooming animosity there was a girl at the bar. The girl at the bar.

Drew had been focusing far too much on his work lately, and his social and romantic lives were suffering. Slowly trudging toward a stress-induced cyclothymia, he had awoken with the determination to turn things around this weekend. A good girlfriend could help turn things around. A good relationship would be just the thing he needed to add a sense of normalcy to his life and break the monotony in which he’d been residing for so long.

The girl had unnaturally pin-straight hair just past her shoulders, a contrived but comely white smile, and ample breasts that were daring every man in the room to snap a furtive picture with his cellphone; her legs weren’t very well concealed either, and Drew thought that, without the mere inches of skirt impeding them, she would surely be able to wrap them twice around his head. The only contradiction to this demeanor was subtle, but Drew was sharp enough to catch it and be drawn to her despite her whorish façade. Her eyes, even from all the way across the bar, told a very different story. They were sultry, knowing eyes. Like the eyes of an owl. Sharp and astute, the girl’s gaze knew no compromise. Her eyes knew what they wanted, even if she herself did not. Eyes that said she would spot her prey and take it.

Her eyes alone told Drew that she wasn’t where she wanted to be. On some level she must have known this. Despite the way she was dressed and the way she was animatedly laughing with her friends about some crazy **** she’d just pulled, her eyes said that she had a level head on her shoulders. Despite the fact that she was probably ten years too young for Drew, her eyes said that not too deep inside this shell of a college-aged biddy was a mature, self-reliant woman with a remarkable figure just waiting to settle down with the right man.

Those eyes glanced up and caught Drew’s own directly, and in that moment he knew that she would be a challenge, but that challenge would be welcome. He would have her . . . had to have her.

... To be continued ...

This is great !

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by cacian

This is great !

---

Thanks for the kind words! It's about to take a turn ... Brace yourselves.

5

A middle-aged man walked into a bar called Wax and Wix and Candlestix in Newark, located just off the New Jersey Turnpike. More commonly referred to as “Whacks” by the heterosexual community, the bar had three bright red neon X’s in its otherwise blue name on the sign over the door, promising a good time for any gay man who ventured into this semi-seedy establishment that stayed open through the night seven days a week. And that’s precisely what Scott was looking for. A fair conversationalist turned triple-x by sunup.

He was relieved instantly upon hearing that the music playing was not quite as stereotypical as some other gay clubs he’d been in. Sure, grimy techno beats with heavy bass that was choreographed perfectly with the lights on the dance floor is precisely what one might expect to hear in a place like this, but at least it wasn’t Abba or Lady Gaga or some ****.

Scott picked out a group of nice looking young men who were conversing at the bar rather than grinding upon each other on the dance floor. While his conservative family and vicious schoolmates of yore may have sworn otherwise, Scott had never been one to dance.

He sat down next to the kids at the bar and smiled in greeting at the blonde-haired boy beside him.

“Well, hello,” the kid said, extending his soft hand to be shaken, “Adam Walker.”

The guys were all college-age and most likely in college to be hanging out at a place like this, and Scott suddenly felt self-conscious of his age despite how young his long, straight hair and clean-shaven face may make him appear. He lightly shook Adam’s hand nonetheless. “Scott Thompson,” he replied with a lisp he had had since middle school. He would forever curse his parents for giving such a cruel name to a gay child.

Adam must have understood. All four boys around him smiled, and he said, not unkindly, “That sure is a gay name.”

The guys were obviously being friendly and warm, and Adam was clearly speaking in jest, but Scott’s familiar rage flared up inside him, and he felt sure his face flushed as his skin increased in temperature dramatically. Of course these kids were in college. Probably some liberal school nearby where gay was okay. They clearly hadn’t shared the same childhood that Scott had experienced nearly a whole generation before. These days it was hip to be homosexual.

Let it go, Scott thought. You can **** the sassiness right out of that mouth later if you play your cards right. He forced a smile, but it must have been see-through. Adam touched his shoulder and apologized, assuring Scott that he was only kidding around. “Let me buy you a drink to call it even.”

“It’ll take a bit more than a drink to even us out,” Scott ventured. These guys were clearly into him, and he didn’t care that they had just met two minutes ago. An opening was an opening.

Adam chuckled coyly as he beckoned the bartender. “What did you have in mind?”

“Anything to take my mind off reality. Daddy just died, and I’ve been dwelling way too much on my past lately.”

“I think I know just what you need.”

Four hours later Scott lay beneath the stranger’s sheets covered in sweat and out of breath after the second round of much-needed writhing. Adam had shown him an entire cabinet filled with prescription (and likely some non-prescription, non-over-the-counter) medications. In the end they had decided on a tiny pink tablet, and boy, did it do the trick! For such a tiny pill, it certainly packed a punch. They had done every position Scott had ever known and more in a span of nearly two hours, and they both came harder than Scott had in years. Now, despite his lack of oxygen and skyrocketed blood pressure, he felt that he could easily run a marathon or at least go another three rounds, but Adam seemed to be calming down for the night. He must have had a tolerance for drugs like this.

Scott’s pupils were quivering against the upper limit of their possible size; his deep brown irises were almost nonexistent, and he could see everything in the dark bedroom with perfect clarity. He had too much energy to just let Adam fall asleep now. He slapped the drowsy figure sharply upon the chest. “Adam!”

“What the ****?” Adam asked in shock, drawing his arms in against his glistening torso.

Scott climbed on top and felt Adam’s shriveling penis between his legs. “I want to thank you for being so kind to me tonight.”

Adam tried to roll over and push Scott off of him, but he was too groggy. “It’s fine. But I’m exhausted now. I can’t go again tonight.”

Suddenly Scott’s entire body was convulsing. Rage and adrenaline and energy filled his tissues, and he slammed both his fists down upon Adam’s guarded chest. “Get hard!” he screamed. His soft, feminine voice sounded bizarre with such anger beneath it. “Get it up!” He reached between Adam’s legs, grabbed his limp tool, and harshly began tugging and pulling on it.

Adam’s eyes opened fully again, and he finally started showing signs of fear. This was a little rough even for sexual roughhousing.

Good. Let the fear come. Let it come just as Scott’s had come all those times at the hands of his father. The hands of his aunts and uncles when his father had let them come over just to screw with him. The hands of the countless bullies in grammar school, middle school, high school, the two years of college before he finally dropped out. Let his hands evoke the same fear that he had felt when his freshman roommates dragged him out of the shower, duct taped his arms and legs, and left him nude in the freezing campus courtyard in January.

“Get off me,” Adam said sternly. “It’s time for you go home.”

Scott interrupted this by forcefully slamming his bony elbow into the center of Adam’s face, instantly drawing profuse blood and a sharp shriek. He grabbed the boy’s ears, pulled his entire body into a sitting position, and slammed the back of his head against the wall once, twice, three times. Adam’s screams stopped on the third strike, and his body went limp. Scott twisted his shoulders to roll the body over onto its stomach. Still throbbing, he entered Adam, who groaned sleepily, and reached around to grab the front of his blood-soaked face.

Thrusting forcefully in and out of Adam, Scott yelled triumphantly at the top of his lungs, likely waking multiple neighbors in the surrounding apartments, but he didn’t care. His fingers prodded unceremoniously into Adam’s semi-conscious eye sockets, his nostrils, his mouth. He pulled at the loose skin of Adam’s lips until he felt the tissue ripping and tearing from the gums. His fingers hooked into Adam’s nose, and he pulled the head back as far as the spine would allow. He ripped clumps of hair effortlessly from Adam’s scalp. He simultaneously mutilated Adam’s face and backside until the boy slipped fully out of consciousness and finally out of the realm of life. When Adam’s weak struggling and breathing stopped for good, Scott came again, this time harder than ever before.

He leapt out of the bed and threw the ceramic lamp against the wall across the room. It gave a satisfying shatter and sprayed parts of all sizes along the floor. Now he grasped the heavy bedside table and hurled it as far and hard as he could. It crashed across the floor and spilled the drawers and contents everywhere. But still Scott’s heart pounded huge quantities of blood into his head and dick.

He jumped back into the bed and wrapped his fingers in the corpse’s beautiful blonde hair. This time he rolled the body over before penetrating it. As he pulled the legs over his shoulders and thrust himself inside, he pounded his fist into the face of the twink that was. He pounded again and again into the mouth until the sharp teeth first drew blood from his own fists and then crumbled and popped from their sockets.

After he climaxed again, Scott still had two loads and two more rounds in him before he slipped away silently in the night.

... To be continued ...

6

Donald’s gaze followed Naomi as she walked toward the restroom while some pop singer who’d had as many domestic assaults as singles was singing about S and M. His eyes froze on a group of younger women gathered around the bar. One was bending over with no self-consciousness to retrieve a cellphone from her gaudy boots. She must know that her too-tight skirt revealed an obvious outline of her thong underwear beneath.

In his prime Don would have been drooling from more than one orifice at the sight of this goddess in his vicinity. Ten years ago this girl would have seemed as incredible as she thought she looked, but now she just looked like a gross, sad waster, a clone of her peers who would never amount to anything outside of perfecting the art of fellatio. She looked like someone easy trying way too hard to look easy. What Don never understood during his own college years was that the easy girls are actually the hardest. It was nearly too late in the game when he discovered that easy girls have droves of men after them, and the odds of any given individual getting lucky were so greatly diminished that one was far better off spending his time pursuing shy, sheltered, nerdy, and—surprisingly—Christian girls. The notches on Don’s bedpost doubled and then tripled in a single year after this counter-intuitive revelation.

But he’d had his fun, and now he was done maturing. He’d settled down and was madly in love with the perfect woman. Of course, as Don had himself openly admitted multiple times, the perfect woman doesn’t exist, but Naomi was his perfect woman.

The girl in the skirt and blouse that would make men slightly older than Don blush suddenly grabbed one of her friends and pulled her away from the bar. At once, Don’s ideas of maturity and settling vanished as quickly as his scornful disapproval of their attire, and his heart started pounding the way it had on so many occasions when he was a kid. They couldn’t be walking over to him, could they? And then there was Naomi, rounding the corner on her way back from the restroom. Surely this wasn’t really happening.

The duo stopped at Don’s table, still hand-in-hand, and greeted him with a giggle as he stared at them expressionlessly. They timed it perfectly. Just as Namoi reentered earshot, the girl with the red skirt and black boots said, “We were wondering if you wanted to ditch your date and come have a threesome with us at our place.”

Naomi froze, inches from her seat, and stared wide-eyed not at the girls, but at Don, who was glancing back and forth among the three onlookers incredulously. A threesome? What man in his right mind would deny two beautiful, barely-legal, semi-drunk sorority sisters a threesome? Never mind their apparently atrocious personalities. In any other situation, Don may have been necessarily obligated to make this work, but right here on the spot like this? He could think of nothing to say.

The girls simultaneously looked back at Naomi and gaped in transparent feigned surprise at her untimely arrival. What a sick, cruel joke this was. Torturing a stranger who was biologically programmed to think with his dick in situations such as this, as well as humiliating an innocent woman on her fourth anniversary. In a sinister way, it was flawless.

Donald stammered. “Is that . . . rhetorical? I won’t even grace it with a response.” It was a pretty good save, but Don couldn’t lie forever. Naomi would grow insecure, and he would exacerbate that by admitting that of course he would have accepted the invitation were Naomi not in the equation. He loved her and would never do anything to hurt her and couldn’t fathom being unfaithful to her, but the simple fact remained that no male would deny a fantasy such as that being dropped into his lap. Sadly, in time, this rationale just wouldn’t be enough for Naomi.

The girls backed away grinning sadistically and hurried back to their friends at the bar to laugh at the efficacy of their joke, leaving Naomi to sit uncomfortably back down with her meal that would remain unfinished.

... To be continued ...

7

South of Trenton, New Jersey, was a small town with virtually no nightclubs, fine dining, or trendy bars. Instead there stood a decrepit tavern where dreams went to die painlessly and silently in a river of hard liquor. An untouched jukebox stood silently in one corner, and the building was filled with the sounds of quietly clinking glass, flowing taps, and sad, hushed conversation.
Quincy Robertson had rolled his wheelchair off a city bus in Trenton that morning, and ten hours later he was well met in this nameless pub with a medical student from Philadelphia.

“I grew up near here,” the kid was telling Quincy.” I watched my dad drown himself in Daniels at this place.” He paused reflectively. “Guess I learned it from him.”

The older, scraggly-haired man in the wheelchair learned that Philip Cook had grown up in Trenton, excelled in school despite the early death of his father and estrangement of his mother, and shipped out to a college in Pennsylvania as soon as he’d graduated high school. Once he’d earned a pre-medical undergraduate degree, the boy had been accepted into Drexel, where he’d signed away any hope for a social life and entered extreme poverty on account of the nationwide economic despair and lack of government loans for medical students. All this Quincy had learned in a manner of minutes as Philip downed shot after shot and spilled his guts with increasing sorrow and sincerity.

“What do you do?” Phil asked at last, after finally seeming to run out of steam on his own.

As if a nearly forty-year-old man in a wheelchair and with dirty hair and smelly, layered clothes far too stifling for the summer heat would have a profound answer to that question. “Drifter,” he rasped though slightly yellowed teeth. The boy nodded morosely. “I’m a con man,” Quincy said, laughing a bit more. There was an ironic truth to that.

Philip raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?” he asked. “Must not be very good at it.”

“Don’t let my appearance deceive you,” Quincy said, still smiling. “I live as well as I want.” Despite his tangled hair and expressionless, dusky gray eyes, he had a trustworthy air about him, but the kid still looked dubious. Quincy removed a wad of miscellaneous bills from one of his large pants pockets. “Just last week I split $500,000 with some chick after I helped rob her rich prick of a husband.”

“Then why do you just wander around like a homeless person?”

“I am a homeless person!” Quincy laughed heartily. “I don’t have to worry about settling down anywhere and getting caught. I don’t have to worry about how I look or how I act in public. I don’t have to worry about bills or debt or taxes. I have more than enough money for food and booze and travel—and the occasional prostitute,” he interjected, pointing at his useless legs. “I get to see a new city every week. From slimy ****holes like this to the lively streets of Las Vegas!”

His hoarse voice seemed on the verge of going out, yet he retrieved a packet of cigarettes and lit one, offering the rest to Phil, who refused.

“That’s quite a story,” Philip said. Quincy nodded in agreement. “Almost sounds better than the life I’ve worked so hard to obtain.”

Quincy smiled again. “Do you think you’d be happier if you were rich?”

Philip scoffed and replied, “As much as I hate to admit it, yes. Money’s really what drives everything in this country. It’s most of the reason I wanted to go to med school in the first place.”

“And do you think you’d spend less time punishing yourself in places like this if you had money right now?” Of course he would. This kid was a textbook assistant for a conman, a young, naïve, down-on-his-luck drunkard with little to lose and a great amount of money to be gained.

Philip was nodding. “Would you be willing to help me?” he asked, his voice suddenly low and confidential. His mind likely flooding with images of himself roaming the streets of Las Vegas with wads of twenty dollar bills lining his coat.

Quincy leaned forward and matched the kid’s low tone, “Do you have access to the bodies?”

An hour later the pair was riding the SEPTA toward Drexel College of Medicine in Philadelphia and discussing the insurance scam. Quincy in truth knew nothing about life insurance policies, but Philip apparently knew even less. He swallowed every assurance the conman made about medical schools having insurance policies for every student and being liable for accidents and deaths on campus. They’d take a cadaver from the school’s morgue, ensure that the teeth were removed and properly destroyed so no dental records could be obtained, and set the body somewhere on campus with a gas line that could be lit and exploded. All Philip had to do was place some of his belongings nearby and lay low long enough for his friends to miss him and the authorities to release the insurance money to his mother, who would never touch a penny of it if Quincy came through on his end.

Of course none of this was true, and the entire plot had more holes than Quincy’s underwear, but he was a professional. Selling stories was what he did, and once someone bought it, they’d go along with just about anything. Especially if they were already wasted.

“I can’t get in the morgue after hours,” Phil had said, “but my roommate’s a pathologist. I think he has a key.”

Once he had drunkenly stumbled through his apartment and secured a morgue key, the pair was home-free. They snuck into the deserted pathology department, made their way to the basement, and chose a body to pull.

“Okay,” Phil slurred, chuckling hysterically, “let’s drag the body out in the hall, then I’ll go find the files to get rid of.”

They tried to pull the cadaver tray out of its cubby hole, but Quincy was too low in his wheelchair, and the tray tilted, spilled the corpse into the man’s lap, and clattered noisily to the floor. Quincy gasped and rolled backwards into the wall, and Phillip fell to the floor in absolute hysterics. His infectious laughter got Quincy laughing drunkenly as well, although he’d had nothing to drink all day.

“Be quiet!” he tried to instruct, but his peals of laughter became just as loud and out of control as Phil’s.

After the two finally calmed down, Quincy grabbed a scalpel off a nearby counter and said, “Teach me some anatomy.” This sent the two into another drunken giggle fit.

Phil grabbed the scalpel and prodded at the prone body’s shoulder blade. His hands shaking uncontrollably and tears streaming from his bloodshot eyes, he managed to scrape out a crater in the corpse’s gray outer layer of preserved tissue. Quincy leaned forward, laughing uproariously as Phil attempted to exclaim professorially, “And here . . . Here we have the s— . . . The subscapularis!” The two pealed laughter in the dark, eerily quiet morgue basement, and Quincy fell out of his chair and landed flat on his stomach. This alone sent Phil onto his back, screaming hysterical laughter and clutching at his abdomen.

When he calmed down slightly, he swiftly rolled the body onto its back and started hacking into its lower abdomen. This night was turning out to be so much more than Quincy could have hoped for.

“And here we see the subject’s left kidney,” Phillip exclaimed, still laughing uncontrollably as he ripped a hunk of unrecognizable tissue out of the hole he’d dug. “If we follow the ureter down . . . here . . . we can see . . .” Phil struggled to stifle a giggle at his perceived cleverness, “. . . this patient has a tiny penis!” He squealed laughter as he dropped the scalpel and folded over face-first onto the cadaver.

Quincy could scarcely breathe. He was shaking his head and hands and attempting to pull himself up onto his hands and knees. Once successful, the man picked up the scalpel and stood completely upright onto his feet, still wheezing hoarse laughter.

The rapidity with which Philip stopped laughing and stared in wide-eyed amazement at the miracle before him sent Quincy into one last fit of laughter.

“Wha—?” Phil managed.

“Come here,” the previous paraplegic said with a wicked yellow grin, “it’s time for my test.”

Philip’s ****-eating, drunken smile finally faded for good, and he struggled to back himself away, but once he reached a corner, he no longer struggled or spoke as Quincy drove the scalpel into the boy’s throat and proceeded to practice his new medical knowledge while the subject struggled to take a breath and stay conscious through his rapidly plummeting blood pressure.

... To be continued ...

8

“Oh my God!” Becky exclaimed after Jessica and Krista stopped laughing long enough to tell the other girls what happened. “Did y’all really say that?”

Jessica nodded, still chuckling, and looked back over her shoulder at the couple. The woman was seated and already arguing sourly with her shaggy-haired date. She had just ruined their entire evening. Part of her could still laugh at the joke the way she would have four years ago, but mostly she just felt bad for them. What was she doing here? She was too old for this nonsense. What would she have done if the guy had agreed? Then it would have been awkward for everyone, and things would have gotten a lot less entertaining in a hurry.

“What an idiot. He probably jizzed all in his pants,” Krista chortled.
Jessica turned back to her girlfriends and looked down at her hands. Suddenly she wanted to call it a night and head home. She no longer felt like being around other people.

“Excuse me,” chimed a polite, reserved voice from behind her. The faint southern accent was nearly undetectable to Jessica, who engaged solely with phonies and die-hard Southerners who’d never travelled to any other part of the world. She turned to find a clean-cut man probably ten years older than herself. His dark hair was short and neat, combed over to one side, and he had a professional-looking short goatee that looked to be walking the line between youthful and salt-and-pepperishly distinguished. The whole group of girls was taken aback by his sudden appearance. Everyone stopped laughing and quieted expectantly.

The man extended his hand and continued looking Jessica squarely in the eyes. “Hi. I’m Andrew,” he said with a small smile. The introduction should have seemed forced and uncomfortable, but the man seemed entirely placid and at ease.

One or more of Jessica’s friends snickered behind her, and she followed suit with a short, breathy laugh. “Um . . . hi,” she responded with an interrogative inflection.

Andrew didn’t seem deterred. “May I buy you a drink?” he asked, smile never faltering.

Despite his pleasant demeanor and appearance, Jessica found herself struggling not to instinctively laugh in his face. How could someone this old have the balls to approach her and strike up a conversation.

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked snootily.

“Not at all,” Andrew replied, “I saw you and thought you looked interesting, so I’d like to buy you a drink if you don’t mind.”

Jessica couldn’t bear to turn back around and face her friends right now, but she had to stop looking into this guy’s piercing green eyes. They were too sincere. And they never left her own.

She sighed and looked over the man’s left shoulder. Her eyes immediately fell upon the couple she had terrorized only moments before. The two had stopped quarreling, and the man was staring at his date with his mouth slightly open in disbelief while she stirred her unfinished soup absentmindedly. The same way Jessica used to as a kid when she had no appetite for her alphabet soup. She always hated that stuff . . .

Yeah, tonight would likely be the last night in a while that she’d go out.

... To be continued ...

9

The dark interstate was unfolding monotonously beneath his tires as Oscar Phillips powered through the night on I-276 West. His hands were locked rigidly on the wheel at ten and two, and his hazel eyes remained fixed straight ahead, lids blinking closed every four seconds exactly. Oscar alternated between struggling to allow the two passenger-side tires to hit every two-foot white line in the road and struggling to maintain his vehicle’s position squarely in the center of the ten-foot lanes. It was driving habits like these that rendered him incapable of driving during the day when the streets and highways were crowded with other vehicles.

In fact, Oscar had trouble doing anything in public during the day. His obsessive-compulsive disorder was crippling and insurmountable. In the daytime crowds of other individuals made it impossible for him to walk in perfectly straight lines down the center of sidewalks. When people weren’t getting in his way, they were shunning him and laughing at him and giving him a hard time, making his life far more difficult than it already was.

It was well after three in the morning, and Oscar’s tank was beginning to run low. He had filled up before setting off on his excursion, and he couldn’t stop now! That would throw off the dynamic of the whole adventure. He couldn’t stop until he found what he was looking for . . .

Minutes sloughed away as his eyes ticked shut mechanically fifteen times each. He would not look at the fuel gauge, refused to take his eyes off the dark, lampless stretch of asphalt before him. If something didn’t change soon, this could end tragically for him. If he stubbornly let himself run out of gas and coast to a stop on the empty street, then what would he do? He would be trapped, frozen here for the rest of the night like a sitting duck, until the authorities came and gave him enough sedatives to make him cooperative. And then they’d surely discover everything . . .

Finally Oscar’s foot switched over to the brake pedal, and the dark night was illuminated by the red glow of his car’s brake lights. The car came to a smooth, calculated stop, and he put it in park right there in the middle lane of I-276. He also put the emergency brake on before risking to turn his head away from the road. Exactly beside his car and two lanes over, on the side of the interstate, stood an abandoned red pickup truck with a Pennsylvania license plate. Oscar glanced ahead and saw a green road sign illuminated by his headlights: Exit 326, 2 miles ahead. Then exit 326 it would be. Chesterbrook, Pennsylvania.

Ten minutes later the red truck stood alone once again, encompassed in complete darkness, its license plate removed, and Oscar was entering Chesterbrook, where he would wait until morning.

--------------------

By ten o’clock the next morning, Oscar had two women bound and gagged in his trunk. They were still struggling and clamoring noisily as he put the third woman in the backseat. He would probably be able to fit three more in the car with him, but five would be his new record, and there was no reason to push it until he was ready. Five was a nice, solid number.

He proceeded to drive with the three struggling women to the next residential street he encountered that started with the letter D. Woman one had come from a street beginning with the letter A, woman two from a street beginning with B, and so on. He would continue until he had two in the trunk, two in the back seat, and one in the passenger seat.

Coming to a stop at address 4 on Deckler Drive, Oscar took his roll of duct tape and a plain white hand towel and stuffed them into his pockets. If no one was home, he would go to the next street he found that began with a D; if a man answered the door, he would politely claim to have gotten the wrong house, and he would go to the next street. Men simply wouldn’t do. Men would respond with rage and act out. Women and children were better candidates for Oscar’s purposes.

He drove around until after one o’clock, going to address 4s on D-streets and 5s on E-streets until he finally found a fifth lone woman at her mailbox. Address 5.

Oscar stopped the car with its newly added PA license plate near the woman and got out, tape and cloth concealed behind his back. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he said in a reedy, quavering voice that passed through a larynx with morphological deformities from a lifetime of excessive levels of generalized anxiety, “I’m looking for a certain address.”

The woman closed her mailbox and walked over to meet him. “Which address?”

Oscar struck as soon as she was within reach of his arms. He gruffly seized the back of her head and threw her to the ground in broad daylight. Luckily for him no one else was around to witness except the two women still screaming through their mouthfuls of cloth in the cab of his car. Oscar likely couldn’t have stopped his method now even if the street were filled with a parade of veteran police officers. He forced her to the ground and smashed her head against the pavement just hard enough to momentarily stifle her shrieks and resistance. Once he’d taped her hands and feet together thoroughly and gagged her with the clean white towel, he carried her swiftly over and sat her in the front seat. A pretty young blonde, he would let her ride shotgun for the day.

They drove for hours on back roads, steering clear of busy streets and interstates where other drivers may notice three gagged women in the car. Oscar drove slowly and carefully across city and county lines through remote woodlands and vast, rolling hills. By nightfall, everyone in the car had lost all track of where they were, especially the two in the trunk, who had finally stopped their whining hours before.

When Oscar finally stopped at a dark, remote barn miles from the last sign of civilization, a thrilling frisson ran through his body like the electricity he would undoubtedly receive for what he was about to do. He got out and inspected the barn while the women in the car began struggling and sobbing anew. The wooden sliding doors were held together loosely with a steel chain and lock, but they were so old and rickety on their hinges that Oscar could simply push them apart and slide right through.

He inspected the barn with the flashlight he had brought especially for this until he found a chain for the overhead lamp, and, when he found a variety of instruments to his liking, he unlocked the side door and went back to the car to dragged his victims in one by one, each sobbing harder and trying to shriek louder than the last. Once everyone was inside and attentive, Oscar began pulling tools from the shelves and racks inside the barn and laying them out neatly on a workbench in the middle of the floor.

Finally he chose a pair of rusty garden shears, a small hatchet, a dull handsaw, a screwdriver, and a steel rake with sixteen blunt prongs. He took the garden shears in his hand and pointed to the blonde from 5 Eberhardt Lane. “I like you, so you get to go first.” He lifted her upright by the hair as she writhed and screamed with her mouthful of cloth. Bitter tears were coursing down her face, dripping from her chin and wetting the dusty floor beneath her feet. This couldn’t have made Oscar more pleased.

He used the shears to cut the tape binding her ankles and grabbed her shoulders to stand her upright. Then he turned her around and clipped the tape holding her wrists together behind her back as the five women screamed louder and louder in unison. Finally free to move her limbs, the girl stumbled forward and scraped at the tape over her mouth.

“Go,” Oscar said plainly. “You get the head start.”

She turned and stared at him with huge, flooding eyes.

“And don’t make this easy on me,” he continued. “Whoever I catch first gets this.” He held up the handsaw and waved it in their faces before hooking the handle into his belt. “If I catch two of you together, you both get it.”

The blonde was breathing loudly and irregularly, huffing out short bursts of weepy breaths as though she were trying to plead but was unable to conjure the words.

Oscar continued talking as he loaded the remaining instruments onto his belt and into his pockets. With only the rake left, he picked up the garden shears again and approached the girl he’d come to think of as 4-D. “Whoever I find last won’t suffer. Prolong the game, and you will be rewarded. I need a challenge . . . Since we started with number five, we’ll work the rest of the way backward.”

Blondie staggered crazily out into the middle of the night screeching for someone—anyone—to please help her. 4-D squealed when he approached, as if she still expected him to gut her on the spot, but he cut through the tape on her ankles and wrists and stood her up to push her out the door.

When it was 3-C’s turn to leave, she reached out and seized the sides of the door as Oscar was pushing her into the encompassing darkness, where increasingly distant screams could still be heard. “Please,” she sobbed. “Why are you doing this?”

Oscar gave her a dismissive kick in the rump and replied, “You’d better get a move on. And tell the others that the more they scream, the easier it will be for me to find them!”

2-B sat in silence while he cut her bonds, and when he took her by the shoulder, she lunged forward at him with a rebel yell, forcing him backwards and into the workbench and sending the leaning rake clattering to the ground. She was strong. But not strong enough.

1-A began writhing and groaning in vain moral support, but Oscar grabbed the girl’s hair and yanked her head back hard enough to loosen her grip on his immaculate blue shirt that was buttoned all the way to the top. Again in control, he forced her back against the wall and thumped her head against it brusquely. “You better hope I don’t find you first, *****.” He growled through gritted teeth. And with that, he spun her and pushed her unceremoniously out into the night.

The final girl seemed to have already accepted her fate, and, once freed, she set off into the darkness at a determined run.

Oscar was finally alone in the barn. He closed his eyes and allowed the stress of the day to wash over him, bathe him. His head cocked repeatedly to the side as a nervous twitch seized his neck, and he shrugged his shoulders compulsively. That was fine. Let it come. Soon he would be on the hunt, and all his anxiety would be gone.

He reached up and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Immediately, he felt a great portion of the negative energy flow forth from his mind. His breathing slowed, and his nervous tick ceased. He opened his eyes and imagined he was standing in a crowded street at midday. Someone had just laughed at his tidy attire: dress shoes, neatly ironed dress pants with an immaculate leather belt, pressed blue shirt tucked in and buttoned cleanly to the top, his thick rimmed glasses straight and clean beneath medium-length black hair that was slicked straight back. Or perhaps they had bumped into him as he was watching his feet while he walked, ensuring that he took two perfectly spaced steps on each slab of concrete. Maybe someone had pushed him gruffly out of the way as he compulsively attempted to reach out and touch any item that looked particularly new or shiny. But then they noticed the hatchet on his belt, the steel rake in his hand. Whoever it was and whatever they’d done, they froze in sudden fear and screamed, Oh please don’t hurt us! We’re sorry we laughed at you!

But it was too late. The deed was done, and sorry meant **** when you’d just laughed in a sick man’s face. They weren’t sorry anyway; they just didn’t want him to be angry. The crowds dispersed, and everyone ran in sheer terror from the deserved wrath that was about to befall them. The hunt was on.

Oscar snatched the rake off the ground with one hand and took the garden shears back up in his other hand. Obsessions ignored and rituals and repetitions forgot, he ran out the door and careened out into the wide-open pasture.

The field played out yards and yards before him as he ran down the hill. Surely none of the girls would be foolish enough to have hidden in plain view out here in the farm. The dense tree line ahead was far too tempting.

He barreled into the trees rake-first and started slashing through the thicket of branches and leaves. After he’d run as fast and far as he could without stopping for breath, he dropped to his knees and hyperventilated in short, quiet breaths, listening for any sounds nearby. He could somewhat make out crashing footfalls in in more than one different direction in the distance, but a soft sound was emanating from much closer. She would be the first.

Oscar remained still as his eyes continued adjusting to the darkness and his blood replenished the oxygen supply to his tissues. The moon was a wan sliver in the sky, and there was little light.

“You’ll pay for what you did,” he muttered. At that, a piercing, frantic scream arose less than thirty feet to his right. He leapt up and fell upon his prey, who was paralyzed with terror.

The girl writhed in agony as he rubbed the saw blade back and forth in the crook behind her knee. First the skin broke, and he watched the warm blood gush out of the long, thin wound. Her screams echoed through the hills as he dragged the blunt teeth rhythmically to and fro across the bone not far beneath. Realizing that the old tool wasn’t going to sever the leg completely, he switched to the other leg after nearly five minutes of scraping. As she bawled hoarsely and tried to drag herself through the underbrush, Oscar sawed through each of her Achilles tendons before grabbing her hair and rolling her over.

He stood upright holding one of her arms and kicked it at the elbow to force the bones to break inward. Her satisfying screams again echoed through the night. He repeated this step with the other arm. Now that she was immobile and starting to lose consciousness, he ripped off her shirt and began sawing at her soft belly, just below her lowest rib. When the gash was large enough to stick his hand in, he hooked his fingers under the rib and started sawing at the tough muscle just above it, separating it from the rest. Fifteen minutes later, he had six ribs on her left side nearly separated from the rest. As eighty percent of the hunt still remained, he had no time to go further, but he took each rib individually and pulled it back, enjoying the cracking and grinding sounds as they separated from the spine and sternum. Luckily his OCD was momentarily relieved, and he could leave this job unfinished.

A short time later, he had found the second victim doubled over and gasping for breath. He swung the heavy rake down upon her back, and all sixteen spikes entered her skin and muscle. He had to strike her several more times in the back, legs, and arms before he satisfied himself that this wasn’t likely to end her life any time soon. Still she screamed and sobbed as he kicked her over onto her back and drove the rake down into her neck and face until her breathing ceased. The killing was far less fulfilling than the hunt, than having them run and hide from him for once.

He discarded the rake and changed directions, pursuing the other rustling he had heard before. When he finally found the third victim, she had collapsed against a tree, covered her head, and proceeded to groan, “No, no, no,” incessantly.

“Don’t worry, dear,” Oscar said, kneeling beside her, “you win the bronze medal.”

He took her hand in his own, forced her unresisting fingers apart, and clipped them off individually with the garden shears. Bronze was still third place, and she would consequently be tortured. After one hand was done, though, Oscar took pity on her and placed her quivering neck into the crook of the shears, lay her on her side, and stomped the handle to force the utensil shut.

The next girl was harder to find. Oscar wandered and remained in the woods for over an hour before deciding that no one else was around. He finally made his way back to the road and saw a dim silhouette stumbling along it in the distance. This turned out to be the young blonde girl from Eberhardt Lane, and he was sincerely disappointed that she wasn’t the winner.

“You let me down,” he said, approaching her from behind. She screamed in fright and attempted to run away, but he deftly tossed the hatchet at her back, where it drove in to the left of her spine and rendered her body rigid. “I would have given you a special prize for first-place,” he continued as she fell to the ground.

He withdrew the hatchet from her back and brushed her hair off the side of her face. “At any rate . . .” The hatchet entered her skull through her ear, severing half of her jaw and locking into place parallel to her tongue. She was alive for minutes afterward.

On a hunch, Oscar began walking placidly back toward the barn. Halfway there he encountered the winner, who got a gold medal in the form of a screwdriver through the right eye.

His last stop was a small pond, where he washed the blood off of his hands and clothes. The anxiety was coming back with a vengeance, and he would soon need to focus on his driving.

By the time the morning sun touched the blood-soaked corpses of the women in the Pennsylvania hills, Oscar’s car was nowhere to be found, and the red pickup truck’s PA license plate was lying at the bottom of a river miles away.

... To be continued ...

10

Jessica had told him that she appreciated his offer but that she was done drinking for the night, and with that she had beckoned for her friends to follow her lead as she gathered her belongings and left Walton’s without another word.

Andrew maintained his smile and nodded in quiet acceptance as they exited. He sat down at the bar for a few moments by himself but didn’t order anything. He just couldn’t shake the image of the girl’s eyes.

With no desire to strike out twice in one night, he left the bar and got into his vehicle, but instead of driving anywhere, he just sat thinking.

The girl was clearly put off by his attempt—if not by his age alone—but her eyes had told a different story. On the surface, the entire exchange appeared discouraging and final, but Andrew saw through that. He wasn’t short-sighted, and he felt sure that he would see the girl again. He had peered through the windows of her eyes and into the depths of her character, and what he saw there was vastly different from the shell of her exterior. Her eyes defied her body language, and Andrew thought that she could escape that limiting cocoon and emerge a radiant butterfly. All she needed was a little prodding in the right direction. He could be that prod.

His attempt had been forced and awkward, but he had been hypnotized by what he’d seen within. Now he had hindsight, and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Given a second chance, he would make things right between them and secure himself a chance to show her how right the two of them could be together . . . He thought he’d found a way to get that second chance.

Andrew had taken note of the girl’s gym card attached to her key ring. The membership was part of a nearby apartment complex, likely the apartments where she lived. With one short but risky operation, he could find those apartments before she got back home tonight, see what kind of car she was in, and follow her somewhere innocuous the next day. Sure, if she found out he would likely never have his second chance and he may even earn some sort of legal action, but he didn’t have much to lose at this point, and he thought he could pull it off.

He started his car and drove to the apartments just outside of downtown Knoxville. After less than forty minutes, a red Toyota Matrix pulled into the parking lot, and he thought he recognized the face behind the wheel. When she got out and walked toward her apartment, he was sure that he recognized the tall black boots and short red skirt.

The next morning Andrew camped out again nearby in order to keep an eye on the Matrix. Shortly after noon, the girl came outside dressed in blue jeans and a modest shirt that blatantly contrasted her previous outfit. He followed her at a safe distance to a nearby grocery store, where he would manufacture a second encounter and attempt to redeem himself.

... To be continued ...

11

The Towson Town Center was already bustling with lively Saturday-morning shoppers by half past ten. Off-duty officer Bradley Houston was walking into the ground floor to make his way up to the AT&T store and inquire about some new subscription charges that his daughter claimed to know nothing about. He’d just finished a very trying Friday night shift in Baltimore, and he was contemplating padding his considerable gut with a fresh pretzel from Auntie Annie’s on his way out when a startlingly out-of-place British accent asked for the time.

Marvin Nash had moved to America when he was diagnosed with a glioblastoma. The tumor was deep, inoperable, and malignant, so he really wasn’t worried about the piteous state of the United States’ healthcare system anyway. As an unwed London hit man of more than 20 years, his only concern was living out the rest of his short life in wealthy peace. America had just about anything a man could want to spend money on, and he doubted if any previous employers or clients or families of victims would come searching for him here in the next eight months. Shortly after the move, however, he’d found that no strength of prescription painkillers could alleviate his headaches the way that killing could.

Marvin approached a police officer—a bobby, if you will—as he walked across the crowded parking lot toward the mall. “Excuse me, officer, do you have the time?”

The man glanced at his watch and cursorily spoke over his shoulder without stopping or turning. “Quarter to eleven.” That was fine. Let him be rude and dismissive and serve as a reminder for why Marvin had developed an antisocial personality disorder in the first place.

“I apologize, good sir, but is it ten forty-five exactly?” Finally the officer stopped and turned to face him. Marvin was well groomed with carefully styled hair made black by the gel in it and an immaculate black suit. The attire was topped off with impersonal black sunglasses and unseasonal black leather gloves.

“It’s 10:37.” Thirty-seven. That could prove difficult.

“Thank you,” Marvin replied with a hollow smile. As the officer turned back and went on his way, Marvin glanced around the parking lot, searching for anything to make thirty-seven viable.

There it was. Another police car turned around the corner of the Nordstrom department store and slowly rolled toward them.

Marvin wasted no time. He pulled a switchblade from his pocket, deftly seized the policeman’s left ear in his left hand, and sliced it off from behind with his right hand.

Chubby Brad Houston yelled and stumbled to one knee, seeming unable to decide whether he should grab at his gun or at the bloody pocket in the side of his head where his ear once was. Marvin was fast enough to spare the fat oaf the trouble of making such a hard decision in a time of agony. He reached down and thumbed off the strap holding Officer Houston’s Glock 9mm in its holster.

“One,” the British tongue said plainly as he put the barrel against the man’s head and sprayed his brains out of his nose onto the asphalt. Only fifteen rounds in the magazine at a maximum. As few as eight or ten if this silly git had failed to reload after any action last night. He would have to be careful.

Marvin turned in an instant to face the police car that was now speeding toward him through the crowds of frantically running and screaming shoppers. Don’t give them time to call for backup.

He lined his sights at the same time that he brought the gun down straight in front of the driver of the vehicle. In less than half a second, he squeezed the trigger coolly, and the driver’s head rocked back against the seat as the car swerved hard to the left and came to a stop against silver Ford Taurus.

“Two,” Marvin muttered.

The passenger had drawn his weapon and was clambering to call for backup into the walkie on his shoulder. Marvin’s third bullet went directly through his temple. “Three.”

Marvin walked briskly to the car and removed the two handguns from the other dead officers. Clicking on the safety and sliding the first gun in the back of his suit pants, he turned toward the door to Nordstrom wielding the other two.

A young woman who must have heard the shooting from inside was frantically running through the doors into the cleared scene. She must have sorely miscalculated the position of the shooter and thought she could make it to her car. Martin squeezed the trigger in his left hand, and she dropped midstride, the blouses in her arms splaying out on the concrete before her. “Four.”

Shoppers were still screaming and running all over the parking lot, and a small horde of escapees were nearly around the far side of the building. Martin turned toward the crowd with both arms extended fully in front of him. His right index finger twitched. “Five.” Left finger. “Six.” Right finger. “Seven.” Left. Right. Left. Eight, nine, ten individuals collapsed in the running crowd before the remaining were around the corner and out of sight.

Already Martin could feel the dull ache at the base of his skull receding. He turned and sprinted into the doors of the department store. Shoppers were scrambling in every direction, and none seemed to have a clue what was happening. Martin made his way swiftly through the store, stopping only once to put a bullet between the streaming eyes of an elderly employee behind the makeup counter. Eleven.

When he reached the door leading from Nordstrom to the open hallway of the mall, there were people flooding out of stores to run in the opposite direction. A few unwise individuals were frozen on the spot, more concerned with catching a glimpse of the mayhem in the department store than they were with their own safety. One woman stood outside Claire’s with her mouth agape and her hands on the stroller housing her infant son in front of her. She should be ashamed of herself. Marvin dropped her like a fly. Twelve.

The sounds of remorseless gunfire echoed throughout the corridor, and the rest of the rubberneckers in sight turned and ran at last. As Marvin walked by the stroller with the screaming infant, he coldly put a bullet in its tiny head lest his headache return. Thirteen.

Rather than chasing the hordes down the aisles, Marvin leapt upon the stairs leading up to the second level. Looking up, he could see scores of curious heads leaning over the balconies to see what was happening below. He aimed up at them and flawlessly popped them like balloons on the wall at a carnival game. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen heads exploded before the remaining all ducked and ran for cover. He managed to hit a seventeenth individual who was leaning just a bit too far forward over the handrail on the third level. The head rocked backward as the bullet entered and sent the body in a dead twist to the left. Its upper torso rolled and leaned over the railing, pulling the rest of the body over the side and sending it spiraling downward and landing twenty feet from Marvin with a satisfying crunch.

Marvin scaled the twenty steps in under three seconds and turned toward the fleeing crowd, into which he put six more flawlessly aimed bullets. A young teenage couple ran too late out of Abercrombie just as Marvin reached the doorway. He simultaneously pulled the triggers of both pistols and sent numbers twenty-four and twenty-five flying backward into a rack of pants. He entered the store and shot the dumbstruck cashier for good measure. Twenty-six.

Now the aisles on this side of the mall were nearly completely empty, and Marvin suspected he must be close to running out of rounds in each of these pistols. He took off at a dead run toward the crowds of people bottle necking into the stairwell and exit doors on the other side of the mall. He barreled headfirst into a crowd of frantic shoppers pushing each other down the stairs toward him. Making his way to the third floor, he shot three unlucky men who were blocking him, effectively clearing the entire stairway in under four seconds.

On the third level, he continued running toward the opposite side of the mall. He looked below and found a horde of screaming men and women on the ground floor, scrambling for an exit. It looked like Times Square on New Years Eve. Looking below and arbitrarily picking out four individuals within, he unloaded the last of the ammo in these two weapons and discarded them.

Marvin hit the next stairway and bolted up to the top floor. Here, trickles of scared shoppers were actually running toward him at this point, so he turned and made his way headlong into them back toward Nordstrom.

Pulling his last pistol from his black leather belt, he aimed and popped a college-aged guy who had apparently ditched his date and left her screaming his name farther back. Thirty-four.

As those ahead of him all skidded to a stop and scrambled to turn back in the opposite direction, he squeezed two more rounds into the backs of two black women with Victoria’s Secret bags. Thirty-six.

He spotted number thirty-seven immediately. She had dropped to her hands and knees when she saw the blood and brain and bone matter spraying from the scalps of the three before her. Marvin casually approached her and took notice that the gun’s slide had locked. Officer Bradley had forgotten to reload after his shift after all. “Dopey bastard,” Marvin muttered, tossing the gun to the floor.

He punched the unlucky girl in the back of the head, reached beneath her arms, and lifted her screaming, writhing body over the fourth floor handrail. Her wails stopped abruptly when she hit the ground a second later.

Marvin made his way quickly back to the ground floor and exited an empty door to the side of the department store he’d entered. He nimbly made his way through the crowded parking lot while removing his gloves and sunglasses. By the time he was in his car and pulling out of the nearby Walmart’s parking lot, he could just make out the first sirens in the distance.

... To be continued ...