The Feeder (20 page)

First, I removed the ballistic evidence, just in case. I had noted the path of each shot I had fired. One knee, in the dirt. One shoulder, in the dirt. That left two bullets unaccounted for. Using my hunting knife, I sliced carefully into his gut, following the entrance wound my fourth shot had made. I opened him up enough to fit my hand inside and groped around his guts looking for the bullet. He screamed like I was driving a hot poker up his ass. I couldn’t say for sure but I supposed what I was doing probably felt a lot like that.

I couldn’t find the bullet.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

I didn’t want to kill him yet and I didn’t want to have to bring his body out of where I planned to put him just to look for a damned hunk of lead. I pushed further into the slick steamy cavern, moving his insides away from where they were supposed to be. It was a lot like gutting a deer, except I was leaving the guts inside instead of removing them. Finally my fingers touched a small hard object. It was either a bullet or a kidney stone. I removed it to find out.

Bingo.
That was one.

I undid his bloodied, urine-soaked jeans to find the entry hole for the first bullet I had fired. That one was easy. It had entered through the base of his cock and left no exit wound. I probed the bullet hole with my finger and found the bullet almost immediately, lodged in his pelvic bone. I used the tip of my knife to dig it out while he wailed like a banshee.

I held the knife blade just above his penis.

“Well, ain’t this irony? You wanted me in your pants and here I am. Betcha didn’t think it was going to turn out this way, didya?” I giggled, thinking about what I’d done to the private parts of some of my past victims.

“Do you know how many of these I’ve cut off?” I asked him.

Of course, he didn’t know. How could he? This was the first time I’d killed him. Pete thrashed around and tried to squirm away from my blade without success.

“In Los Angeles, they called me The Feeder. Know why? Course you don’t,” I said, answering my own question, reveling in the psychological torture I was inflicting on my prey.

“They called me The Feeder,” I told him, leaning forward as if sharing a secret. “Because I fed my victims before I killed them. Gave them a last meal, so to speak. They got to eat the parts I cut off of them. Like
that
, for instance.” I tapped his dick with my blade, opening up a small cut in the skin. He didn’t appear to feel it. He redoubled his panicked efforts to escape, thrashing around in the dirt, a one-armed, one-legged lump of shit.

There was only one logical place to put shit.

“Don’t worry, fuckface. I’m not going to cut your junk off. I have something special planned for you. You’re gonna need your appetite for this one.” I grabbed his legs and started dragging him up the path toward the outhouse.

The outhouse my father and I had built was the deluxe model, when it came to shithouses. Built in a charming A-frame style and painted in boreal camouflage, it blended into the forest background. The one thing that made it visible from a distance was the peak of the roof, which we had made from translucent corrugated fiberglass to create a skylight of sorts. The outhouse was nice and bright, even on cloudy days, for those who favored magazine reading while using the facilities. It blew away the dark little stinkholes you found in most campgrounds.

We had built the outhouse so that it would never need to be pumped, excavating the pit below to a depth of twenty-five feet and widening it toward the rear of the structure. The house itself sat on a sturdy wooden platform, built wide enough to extend past the edges of the pit and ensure that cave-ins would never happen. The size of the pit and the fact that it was dug into natural earth made it a gigantic composter that would never need emptying.

Pete began to struggle when he saw where I was planning to put him but he wasn’t able to put up much of a fight as a disabled crab-worm. His keys jingled in his pants pocket as he struggled, reminding me that I would need them. I emptied his pockets of all of their contents, which consisted of car keys, wallet and a condom, which he would never need. I didn’t need it either, but kept it just the same.

“You’re in the shithouse now, asshole!” I laughed, grunting as I hoisted him over the seat and stuffed his head and shoulders into the hole. He squirmed some more, which helped my cause by making his body slide further into the shit-hole. I shoved him the rest of the way through, enjoying his satisfying screams as he fell headfirst into about ten years’ worth of accumulated human excrement.

“How does it feel to have a face full of shit?” I yelled down to him over the sound of his screams. “I’m sure the dog didn’t like it much. Just consider yourself lucky I didn’t decide to feed some of it to you first.”

Damn
, I thought. That would have been a good one, feeding him some shit… but it was just as well that I didn’t have to handle any other disgusting things besides him. Besides, there was a pretty good chance he’d gotten a good fresh mouthful when he landed. I rented the cabin out to other hunters when I wasn’t using it, so the outhouse had seen some steady use over the years.

I could hear him thrashing around in the dark, making a slopping noise in the muck, between hoarse, desperate screams.

“That’s the beauty of being out in the wilderness,” I told him cheerily. “Nobody can hear you scream.”

I went back to the house and fired up the generator, drowning out the sound of his cries. I let Missy outside to relieve herself, then scooped the poop like a responsible citizen and tossed it down the outhouse hole.

After that I lit a fire in the woodstove and began heating water for a nice relaxing bath. I felt confident that this time, I would be washing human blood from my body for the very last time.

After eating a huge meal of BBQ burgers with potato salad and canned beans, topped off with a large bowl of bran flakes cereal, I crawled into bed, exhausted. Missy curled up next to me on the duvet and fell asleep, looking like a tiny ball of dandelion fluff.

I woke early the next morning to something tapping on my cheek. I opened my eyes and found myself face to face with three black dots surrounded by white fluff – two sparkling eyes and a wet black nose. Seeing that I was awake, she lunged forward and planted her cold nose on my cheek in an endearing puppy kiss, then bounced backward with a squeaky little yip.

I took Missy outside for a doggy pit-stop and then returned to brew a nice strong pot of coffee. To my surprise, I found no puppy-related accidents inside the cabin. She must have stayed on the bed with me all night.

“What a smart little girl you are!” I told the puppy. She sat on the floor, her little head cocking to one side as she hung on my every word. It was nice to have someone listen to me for a change.

I wouldn’t have punished her even if she had made a mess on the floor. I was delighted that she had waited and even woken me up to take her outside at such a young age. It also angered me because Pete must have left her with absolutely no choice when she soiled the seat of his car.

Pete.
The dirty fucker deserved what he’d gotten. I wondered if he was still alive, and if he was conscious.

After my morning coffee, I felt the urge to use the outhouse and decided that it would be the ideal opportunity to see if Pete had survived the night. After shutting the generator down for the night, I had heard no more screams coming from the hole. I brought a flashlight with me so I could get a good look at him.

He looked dead at first, but moved and groaned when I threw a couple of rocks at his head.

“Good morning, Fucko!” I greeted as I positioned myself on the toilet seat.

“How’d ya sleep, Pete?” I reached over and selected an old, yellowed copy of Guns and Ammo from the magazine rack we had installed in our deluxe shithouse.

“Hope you’re hungry, ‘cause here’s breakfast!” I called down into the hole, just before releasing my previous night’s meal on top of him. I thumbed through the magazine for about the hundredth time while humming the melody to “Little Green Bag”, my favorite tune from the
Reservoir Dogs
soundtrack. I hoped Pete was enjoying his meal. It had been pretty good when I ate it.

I opened a package of Rot-It, a nitrogen-based compost accelerator I kept on hand to keep the contents of the outhouse decomposing and keep things smelling as nice as possible. I dumped in the entire bag of the white powder. I guess it must have burned because Pete started screeching like a teakettle.

Back at the house, I fired up the generator again and filled the bathtub half full of warm water to give Missy a bath.

I shampooed the little dog, removing all traces of dirt and fecal matter from her soft white fur. I used a washcloth to clean her face, taking great care not to get any soap or water in her eyes and nose. She stayed calm throughout the bath, showing no signs of fear. She gazed at me with nothing but trust and adoration in her liquid brown eyes.

I had never felt such tenderness toward any living thing before, except for Cammie. It was then that I decided to rename the puppy after my late sister.

After Camille was bathed and dried, I sat in the big overstuffed armchair and held her securely in my lap while I carefully trimmed the clumps of matted fur from her coat. Once she was free from mats, I marveled at how thin and delicate her floppy little ears were.

As quickly as the feeling of tenderness had overwhelmed me, it was replaced by another hot surge of anger at Pete as I imagined what he might have done to her if he’d been inclined to try grooming her. One slip of the scissors with a struggling dog and there goes an eye – or an ear gets sliced off. It made me want to go out there and plug a few more bullets into him.

The puppy gazed up at me with an expression of such utmost love and trust that my eyes stung with tears and my throat tightened again. I was a monster; even more of a monster than Pete, maybe. Yet here was this tiny little soul, offering me her unconditional love and acceptance. Lost in the dark pools of her gaze, I could almost believe that my horrible deeds were forgiven. In her eyes, at least, they were.

* * *

It took Pete nearly three days to die. He was a pretty tough little bastard after all. I helped him out on his journey to decomposition by adding a bag of steer manure I’d been saving for the few shrubs I’d planted around the cabin in one of my rather half-hearted attempts at landscaping.

I also dug up a particularly industrious anthill I’d found in the forest about a mile behind the house, in a spot where I usually disposed of unused parts of carcasses after a successful hunt. They were those angry red ants that fed on dead things. They played a major role in nature’s cycle of decomposition, cleaning soft tissue from bones when animals died. I dug up as much of the anthill as possible, sealing it into a plastic ice cream pail I’d brought on my hike for that purpose. Pete was looking lonely down there. Nothing like a swarm of ants to keep a man company, in both life and death.

Once Pete was good and dead, I went about the business of eliminating all evidence that he had been at my cabin: the most obvious one being the orange car. Disposing of a large noisy car that resembled a Jack O’ Lantern wasn’t the easiest thing to do but I had already thought of a solution.

With my quad still loaded into the back of my pickup, I drove about twenty miles up the lake before turning off onto another, rougher gravel road. It was an old, forgotten former logging road that I’d taken on some of my hunting trips. At one point, the winding road edged along a sheer rock face overlooking the lake. It was a spectacular view, despite the feeling of vertigo I got each time I looked over the edge. Harrison Lake was a deep glacial lake, icy cold even during the hottest of summers. It was rumored that the lake had swallowed a logging truck or two back in the sixties when that road was in active use. Surely it had room for one more vehicle.

I wasn’t sure how deep it was at that particular location, but looking over the edge on a sunny day into the crystal-clear water, I couldn’t see any sign of the bottom. Just ink-black water.

A little way past the cliff, the road widened again and angled away from the lake into the alpine forest. I parked the truck in a small clearing and unloaded the quad. I parked it in some dense undergrowth and tossed an army camouflage net over it. Having an ex-military man for a father had given me a particular interest in collecting army surplus items. After hiding my quad and letting Camille out for a puppy pit stop, I made my way back down the mountain to the cabin.

I checked on Pete, who was still dead. I had covered him with leaves and grass to camouflage him, on the million-to-one chance that someone happened to drop by my cabin while I was away and happened to feel the need to use the outhouse AND happened to look down inside the pit (having also been carrying a flashlight in the middle of the day, of course). I shone my flashlight into the pit to make sure he hadn’t come back to life as some sort of nitrogen-powered zombie and clawed his way out of the pit. (I made a mental note to stop reading so many zombie novels). I could see a bit of white peeking through the grasses, and after using a long branch to brush the grass aside, confirmed that the white was part of his hand.

Nope. No zombies there. Pete was definitely dead. I went ahead with phase two of making Pete disappear forever.

I left Camille locked safely inside the cabin while I took the big orange Dork-Mobile for its final ride. I returned to the clearing where I had parked my quad and turned the car around and took it back down to a bend in the cliffside road. After giving it a wipe-down (just in case) to remove my fingerprints, I positioned the car with the tires turned toward the edge of the cliff, dropped the gearshift into neutral and stepped out of the way. The car rolled down the hill, leaving the road as soon as it reached the curve. The Buick sailed over the edge of the cliff with the grace of a paper airplane, gliding in silence to the lake below. It hit the water nose first, bobbing once, twice, then diving beneath the surface as the water rushed into the open windows. In moments the car was gone, leaving only fading ripples on the surface to reveal that it had ever been there to begin with. I scanned the surface with my binoculars and could find no trace of the orange car. It was unlikely that anyone would ever find it.