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 ...
Reply With Quote
