The Feeder (21 page)

I retrieved my quad from where I’d left it and rode back to the cabin, where I checked on Pete one last time. He was still dead. I almost wished I’d sent him to the same watery grave where his car now lay but it would have been far too risky. The lake was different from the ocean. In the ocean, things like bodies were quickly devoured by crabs and scores of scavenging fish. The lake was home to fewer life forms, some of which were likely to ignore a submerged body. By sinking him with the car, it was possible he would be found, riddled with bullet holes. It was much too close to my neck of the woods for comfort. The cabin was my sanctuary and I’d already tainted it with murder. It was my responsibility to ensure that Creepy Pete would never be found as long as I was alive.

~ Chapter 28 ~

Finale

I sat in my father’s La-Z-Boy chair, watching television with Camille snuggled in my lap. I stroked her silky fur and fondled her delicate little ears. How anyone could handle a tiny little being such as this with anything but tenderness was beyond my comprehension.

Even after the atrocities I had committed against members of my own species, I still felt as if I’d retained some of my humanity. Watching the news, I was bombarded with one atrocity after another. An item about the Whistler sled dog massacre made me reach for the remote and turn up the volume.

It was a short blurb about how the man responsible for the brutal slaughter of 56 sled dogs had finally had his day in court.

I was familiar with the sordid tale. A company that offered sled dog tours had prepared for increased business during the 2010 Olympics. Afterward, they had more dogs than they needed and an employee was instructed to ‘thin the pack’.

In a three-day-long bloodbath, dozens of dogs were shot to death execution-style in front of their pack mates, sending them into a terrified frenzy. The man found it difficult to get a clean shot at the panicked dogs and ended up missing some, leaving them mortally wounded. When the story came out, the public learned about dogs running around with heads partially blown off and holes through their bodies, floundering in a pit of corpses that later became a mass grave. When the executioner ran out of ammunition he resorted to slitting throats and stabbing the remaining dogs to death.

The fallen sled dogs were dubbed the Whistler 100, based on the killer’s estimate of how many dogs he had slaughtered. In the end, 56 bodies were unearthed. The forensic investigation revealed evidence of animal cruelty and the man was charged and convicted of the crime. His punishment: a fine and a ban from working with animals.

Not a single day in jail.

The dogs’ remains were reburied in a pet cemetery in Penticton.

The story of the slain sled dogs upset me far more than any of the atrocities I had committed. I supposed it was because the dogs had been innocent – loyal working animals that were slaughtered without provocation.

My victims were different. Not one of them was innocent. Some of them had killed; some had not, but each was guilty of destroying one or more lives in some way.

One had destroyed
my
life by killing my sister.

I felt no remorse for what I had done but my mind was far from at peace. I would have liked to say I could sleep well at night but it would have been a lie.

There were too many dreams. Dreams of Camille, laughing and calling me a fucktard one moment, then saturated in blood the next. In one of the dreams she sat on the bathroom floor where I’d found her, with her abdomen ripped open and intestines spilling out onto the floor. She kept picking them up and trying to stuff them into her mouth, looking up at me expectantly.

“Like thith?” she asked, over a mouthful of her own guts.

Or, in a variation of the same dream, she removed one of her sliced-off nipples from her mouth and offered it to me, as if sharing a snack.

During the many sleepless nights I had spent, sitting in my chair in front of the television, watching nothing in particular, I’d had plenty of time to think things over. Reliving the murders in my mind always led me backward in time to a place I didn’t want to go but like in sleep, my stubborn psyche insisted on going where it chose to go.

Was I different from the people I had killed? How could I justify what I had done? Was punishing brutality with equal or even greater brutality a good thing, or did it make me no different from the people I had killed?

I remembered something I had written in a paper I’d done for Psych class:

“Good and evil; right and wrong are, like beauty, in the eye of the beholder…”

My professor had liked that idea and asked me for permission to share it with the class for discussion. I agreed to let him use it, provided that I remained anonymous. I had no desire to be put in the spotlight, especially for something that was bound to provoke a heated debate.

I had expected some of my classmates to disagree but was shocked at how many misunderstood the concept I was trying to convey with that simple sentence.

The key phrase of course, was, “eye of the beholder,” but few students actually got it.

What I’d meant was quite simple:

What may be wrong to one person may be perfectly acceptable to another. The perspective of each individual changes what is to be considered acceptable.

For example, we accept in our society that cannibalism is ‘wrong’, yet in a cannibal tribe it is considered a normal way of life. What about those stories about humans eating each other for survival, like the Donner party, or that soccer team that crashed in the Andes? I’m not saying I recommend going all Hannibal Lecter on the Avon lady, I’m just saying that
it is what it is.

A matter of perspective.

Take pornography. The televangelists and door-knockers wail about the evils of adult films, magazines and other things of that nature. The people who enjoy those things have a different perspective on the matter. The people behind the scenes: actors, filmmakers, photographers and models have built careers on what the holy rollers are calling ‘evil’ and ‘wrong’.

Perspective.

Those were some of the more mainstream examples. The whole ‘eye of the beholder’ thing takes an ugly turn when you approach topics such as child abuse, pedophilia and similar horrors that nobody in their right mind could find acceptable. It’s impossible for some people to comprehend that these things could ever be considered anything but wrong. For some, to even theorize that some people (however sick and disturbed) might see such things as acceptable is akin to condoning them.

And that was when the shit hit the fan.

The whole class erupted when some of the more disturbing examples were used to test my ‘eye of the beholder’ theory.

The general argument went something like, “Child abuse is
WRONG
, and in no case is it
EVER
right! You’re sick to even suggest that it could be!”

I didn’t disagree with that. In fact, I couldn’t agree more.

From
those
people’s perspectives, they were absolutely correct. From
my own
perspective, it was also correct, since I agreed with the people who made that claim.

BUT, (and it was a
big
‘BUT’ to swallow, for some) from the perspective of the sick fuck who was doing the abusing… was it as wrong to that individual as it was to us? It couldn’t be, or it wouldn’t be happening to begin with.

For an individual to voluntarily and knowingly commit an atrocity, there must be some kind of justification in that person’s mind for what he or she is about to do. Either the individual does not believe that the act is wrong, or he feels that he is in some way justified in doing what he is doing, thereby making the act ‘right’.

See? It really is a can of worms, isn’t it? Kind of a ‘Schroedinger’s cat’ sort of thing, only more disturbing.

Even the things one mind can never accept may be considered acceptable by another.

Pimping was, in my eyes, wrong.

Getting rich by preying on young and naïve women, exploiting them for their dreams of becoming famous, drugging, raping and torturing those women; all of those things were wrong.

The fact that it had happened to my own sister made it a thousand times more wrong.

In my eyes.

Slicing off a girl’s tits in a fit of rage? Well, I couldn’t find anything right or acceptable about that.

Feeding a man his own dick or intestines? Leaving a gut-shot asshole to die in a shit pit?

Wrong, to most people.

But that was where the variable of perspective got thrown into the equation.

The difference was, the scumbags I killed had deserved to die.

The ones they had victimized deserved to be avenged. The fact that I had taken it upon myself to be the bringer of vengeance for those individuals was simply a matter of my being in the right (or wrong?) place at the right time.

If any of those assholes had demonstrated even a shred of humanity, they might have been allowed to live.

I doubted anyone else would see my unique perspective on the situation, though Camille might have.

It simply was what it was, and it was now in the past…

I was done with killing.

For
real
this time.

You could only murder so many perverts before you realized there was no end to them. It was like that old video game, Space Invaders. No matter how many of those pixelated aliens you shot, more and more just kept appearing. It was impossible to win the game; it just kept getting faster and faster and more complicated until you either died or gave up. My killing game had become like Space Invaders.

I chose to give up rather than be killed. I was tired of punishing unknowns for the sins of ones long dead.

No number of deaths could ever bring Camille back – I knew that.

I wasn’t sure when the killing got out of control but at some point it had become some sort of addiction. Dispatching an asshole gave me a weird kind of high unlike any drug. I’d never used any drugs, but I somehow knew there was no substance on earth that could ever recreate or surpass the feeling of righteous justice that came with ridding the world of a piece of human garbage. If murder was an addiction, then I’d beaten it. I’d kicked the habit just before I left for the cabin that last time. When I ran into Pete, I’d had a little relapse but I was okay now. I had it beat. I didn’t need to take any more lives.

I had a reason to stay alive now. Love filled my heart as I looked down at the tiny ball of white fluff snoozing in my lap. Once again I had someone who depended on me and this time I wouldn’t let Camille down. She was frail and sweet and loved me unconditionally; so much like my sister in so many ways.

I hadn’t cared about anyone or anything, including myself, since Camille’s death. Some might think that a puppy named after my dead sister was a poor substitute but it made me capable of feeling something good again, for whatever it was worth. I also realized that it was the closest I would ever get to knowing how it felt to be a parent.

I had spilled a glut of blood and gotten away with it. As long as I owned the land where the cabin was, the odds were next to nil that Creepy Pete’s body would ever be discovered. I had dumped enough leaves, weeds and other plant matter into the pit to ensure that he would be well covered, even after decomposition.

I had been watching the news and there was still no mention of him as a missing person, leaving me to conclude that he had been telling me the truth about none of his family wanting anything to do with him.

A guy had to be a pretty big asshole for nobody to miss him.

I realized that with Camille gone, nobody would have missed me either if luck had turned against me during my killing spree. The men I had killed were all monsters in one way or another and all of them, I was sure, were just as capable of taking my life as I was of taking theirs. One mistake and I would have been the murder victim and nobody would have missed me.

Cammie would have missed me, but she was nothing but ashes now. It still stung to think about her. The gaping hole that Camille’s death had left in me would never heal but now, at least part of it had been filled.

I had a new mission; taking care of my new baby and keeping her safe from abusers like Creepy Pete. Who knew? Maybe I would get a little friend for her one day. There were plenty of rescued dogs in need of loving homes. For the first time in years my home felt like a loving place. Maybe even a place where I could finally get a good night’s sleep.

Ridding the world of a handful of degenerates as I’d done had no effect whatsoever, when you looked at the big picture. The world was what it was and nothing I could do would ever change it. There were still just as many perverts in the world and there would always be women for them to prey on.

Just like there would always be sick bastards who harmed sweet little animals. When I thought about the last creep I had dispatched and how I had saved little Camille from him, I got a warm fuzzy feeling inside. I didn’t want that feeling to go away; I wanted more of it.

There were a lot of animal abusing monsters out there.

A
lot
of them.

It was staggering to think about the horrible shit some of those creeps did to helpless little creatures like my Camille.

I started thinking I might be able to keep that warm fuzzy feeling inside if I could thin their numbers, just a little.

~ THE END ~

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this book (or even if you didn’t), please take a moment to
leave a review on Amazon
to let other readers know what you thought of it. Please read on for a sample of more work from the same author:

~*~

Preview:
Fed Up
~ Sequel to
The Feeder
: