The Killings (3 page)

There was no awareness in her posture or movements as she made her way down the street. She didn’t even look back once. She had no idea she was being followed, no idea that she was a victim, prey, meat for an appetite so strong that it negated her very right to exist. It was past midnight. She was alone, probably unarmed, yet there was no fear in her at all as she passed one dark alley after another. Michael would have sensed it if it was there. It would be there soon enough. The fear would come right before the pain.

Her name was Nona Gates. She was just three years out of her teens and beautiful ... intimidatingly beautiful, the kind of half-White bitch who would have made him stutter and twitch before the fury entered his head. Cappuccino-colored skin, the thin waifish body of a dancer, and light-colored eyes like sandalwood. Her hair was soft, wooly, picked out into an afro that reached from one shoulder to the other. She wore a brown leather miniskirt and matching hip boots with a white halter top. Her seventies retro look was almost flawless, ruined only by the Bluetooth earpiece attached to the side of her head. She wasn’t talking and hadn’t been for several blocks, not since she left her house on her way to see her rich, White boyfriend. Michael had followed her many nights. He knew where she was going, what she was doing, and it was wrong, wrong, WRONG! Michael made a note to rip the Bluetooth out of her ear first, before she could call for help.

He was right behind her now. Six steps away. Five steps, four steps, three, two. She turned around seconds before his hands reached out and clamped down on her throat, crushing the cry for help before it could form. He effortlessly lifted her off her feet and dragged her into an alley. It was empty, occupied only by rats and garbage cans. Michael was still holding the woman by the throat as she thrashed and kicked and punched at his face. She was making little gurgling sounds. Her eyes were wild, panicked, a rabbit in the jaws of a wolf, struggling to escape. She tried to claw his face. Michael relaxed his grip on her throat and let her catch her breath.

She wheezed, coughed, stumbled backward against the graffiti-covered, piss-stained alley wall, clutched her chest like she was having a heart attack, and then spoke. “You fucking psycho! You almost killed me!” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I know you, don’t I, motherfucker? You’re - “

Michael seized her again and began to squeeze, harder this time, dragging her down to the filthy concrete floor and sitting on her chest, crushing more air from her laboring lungs. She beat at him with her fists, clawed skin from his arms, until he let go of her throat again.

“Heeelp!” she tried to scream, but she could not get enough air into her lungs to manage more than a hoarse whisper. “Please don’t kill me. I’ll do whatever you want.”

“You’ll do whatever I want?” Michael still had his hand on her throat. He backhanded her lightly with his other hand.

“Please!” Tears began to pool in her eyes. “I’ll do whatever you want!”

“You’ll suck my dick?” Another backhand to the face.

“I-”

He tightened his grip on her throat. “Would you like that? Huh?” He released his grip on her throat again, giving her a little more air.

“Don’t kill me, please ...” Her voice was gaining strength. “I ... yes ... I’ll suck your dick. I ... I’ll let you ...you can do anything you want ... you can fuck me in the ass if you want. Just please ... don’t kill me.” Her eyes were darting around in a panicked state. She would be screaming again soon. Michael began strangling her again.

The fury was wailing in his skull like a siren. Its power increased with her fear. Michael was drunk with the ecstasy of the kill. He squeezed until her eyes rolled up in her head and she blacked out. He let go of her throat, still sitting on her chest, pleased to see that she was still breathing. He slapped her several times until her eyes came back into focus. There was fear in them now. So much fear. She knew she was about to die, knew there was no escape.

“You’d let me fuck you in the ass? Let me? Let me?” He was yelling in her face now. His voice sounded to him like the voice in his head, the voice of the fury. He lowered his volume, brought himself back under control. “Is that what you and your White boyfriend do? Does he like big, fat, Black asses? You like his little pink cock in your ass? You like sucking it? I’m going to fuck you in the ass all right. I’m going to do anything I want to you, but you won’t be alive to enjoy it.” He whispered the last words directly into her ear.

He was grinning now, smiling, almost laughing. There was nothing like destroying the thing you hated most. Nothing on earth could compete with that sensation. The scrawny little White boy she was fucking was going to be lonely tonight, but not Michael. He pulled a long antique straight razor from his pocket and flipped it open. He was going to be busy for quite some time.

***

Her body came apart as he slashed at it with the razor, cutting her throat so deep he almost removed her head. He sliced her halter top down the center and then ripped it in two as blood bubbled from the severed arteries in her neck. Gurgling, whistling sounds came from her lacerated trachea. She took a few final breaths through the yawning maw he’d cut beneath her chin and then began to convulse. Her bowels voided, filling the dank alley air with the smell of human urine and feces, which perfectly complemented the putrescent odors surrounding him.

Michael seized her jaw and pulled her head back, widening the wound until he could stick his entire hand inside. The strangled breathing noises stopped. Michael wondered if she’d lived long enough to feel him rip open her throat, wondered if she’d been conscious as he’d tried to pull her head off. He hoped she was. He hoped she’d felt it all.

Michael stared at the woman’s firm, round breasts, their dark chocolate nipples like two Hershey’s kisses. They were the perfect size. Not too big. Not too small. They fit his hands like they’d been made for them. He squeezed and pulled them, twisting the nipples like he was trying to tear them from her chest, saddened by the fact that she was already dead and couldn’t feel this violation, this last degradation, or those soon to follow. A torrent of red gushed between her cleavage as she continued to bleed out. Michael’s cock throbbed urgently in his pants, the Fury urged him on, shrieking obscenities in his skull.

The Fury was more than just an emotion, more than just his own rage anthropomorphized. It was a living presence, an entirely separate consciousness with its own unique thoughts, emotions, and desires. It didn’t control him, nor did it serve his will. It was simply there, whispering suggestions, cheering him on when he was on his rampages. It was not like being possessed. It was more like being inspired. Like a best friend who liked to do the same shit he liked, a muse helping him get over the hurdles of social morality and civilization, to shrug free of the fetters restraining his darker, more animalistic nature, urging him to have fun.

Go ahead! Fuck her. Hurt her. Kill her!

He liked that analogy.
A muse
. It reminded him of a composer staring at his piano for hours at a time when
something
suddenly pops into his head and unleashes a torrent of creativity from which a symphony is born. That’s what Michael felt now, a flood of creativity, his mind alive with so many seductive possibilities for the dead thing beneath him that he could hardly decide.

What to do? What to do?

He freed his tumescent organ from his pants, stroking it vigorously as he stared at her breasts, her face, her dying expression. He slid his cock between the dead woman’s breasts, squeezing them together as he fucked her blood-slickened cleavage in a hate-fueled fit of satyriasis.

He roared like a lion as he ejaculated, spraying his seed across the dead woman’s face. His erection remained undiminished. The Fury still shrieked its rage in his skull, filling his mind with more ... inspiration. He picked up the razor again and began sawing off her breasts, cutting through the tender fat and muscle and lifting her mammary glands from her chest. He plopped the bloody trophies into his jacket pockets and then dragged the razor down her belly, opening her up and spilling ropes of bluish purple intestines onto the alley floor as he cut his way down to her sex.

Her labia and clitoris were slowly and carefully excised. Michael was meticulous now. He wanted her sex intact. He had seen the act in his head, courtesy of his gruesome little muse, and he knew then that he had to do it, had to have that trophy. The Fury was fond of trophies and Michael was acquiring a taste for them as well.

He looked up and checked the alley, making sure he was alone, that no one could see. There was a large trash bin blocking him from the view of anyone passing on the street, and the businesses that bordered the alley had closed hours before. They were alone.

With delicate care, Michael peeled Nona Gates’s vagina off in one piece and held it up to the moonlight. He held it to his face and peeked through the orifice that had once led to man’s greatest obsession. He dragged his tongue languorously over the silken folds of flesh, tasting her meaty blood, the acrid tang of urine, inhaling the musky earthy aroma of her. Michael shoved this last trophy into his pocket as well.

Nona had been right - she
had
known him. They had gone to elementary school together before her family moved out of the neighborhood. Michael had occasionally passed her on the street or in the grocery store or downtown as he rushed to begin another day in his mind-numbing, soul-sucking, office-drone existence and she hers. Now he had found a way out of the monotony of his paycheck-to-paycheck servitude, and he had liberated Nona as well. She would never again have to worry about how she was going to pay the light bill or if she was going to get laid off today or if she could afford those new shoes or that new Smart Phone or to get her hair done or her nails done or if her weak-ass peckerwood boyfriend was cheating on her or any of the other stupid shit stupid bitches like her worried about. She didn’t have shit to worry about now.

Michael looked down at Nona’s face, but it wasn’t Nona anymore. It was just a dead thing barely recognizable as female. He had removed everything that had once made this lifeless sack of flesh a woman - almost everything. He sliced deeper, cutting and sawing through skin, muscle, and tendons, digging his hands through her organs and then seizing his prize, grabbing it and yanking it out through the jagged hole where her womanhood once was, removing first her ovaries and then her entire uterus. These he left beside her in the alley.

Michael squirted antibacterial hand lotion into his palms and cleaned his hands. He reached into another pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and sprayed more of the lotion on it, washing his hands as thoroughly as he could. He did a quick cleanup of his face. Then he pulled his hat down low, turned up his shirt collar, and left the alley. Michael had a skip in his step as he raced home.

There’s just nothing better than this,
he thought.
Finally, something I’m really good at!
His smile was wide and terrible as he hurried down the sidewalk. He wasn’t the type of person people normally thought of as dangerous. He had an average, somewhat soft look about him. His weak chin and the one beneath that, his big, doe-like eyes with the long eyelashes, his belly that hung over his waist, his polo shirts, cargo shorts, and skateboard sneakers ... they didn’t say “badass” in a language anyone could normally translate. But tonight, as he made his way down Carson Lane, grinning like a wolf with a mouth full of Little Red Riding Hood, people got the fuck out of his way.

THREE

July 20, 2011, Georgia State Prison, Sparta, Georgia
 

She told prison officials she was seeking a meeting with Inmate #7643-876 because she was a journalist and was writing a book on his case.

Carmen Mendoza reflected on this as she sat in the stiff plastic seat behind the glass barrier, waiting for the prison guards to usher him in to the meeting area. As always, she’d come to Georgia State Prison dressed professionally - burgundy business suit, matching pumps, hair pinned up in an attractive, but conservative ponytail. As per the rules, while she was allowed to record her conversations with Inmate #7643-876, she had to acknowledge and accept that the state was videotaping and recording everything they said. Carmen had no problem with that. She had no doubt her subject had been interviewed by other journalists in a similar manner for the past thirty years.

There was no reason for prison officials to worry. Over the past two weeks, Carmen had done a marvelous job making her subject feel at ease. She’d told him she wanted to approach his story from an entirely different angle. The more they talked - with Carmen sitting back and not interrupting him as she let him tell his story in his own words - the more revealing he became. Naturally he told his story from the perspective of a man who’d been wronged - he was serving a life sentence for murders he did not commit. It was like that line from the movie
The Shawshank Redemption:
“Everyone in here is innocent.”

Today she was going to tell him the murders had started up again.

This was the real reason for her visit with Inmate #7643-876. Wayne Williams. The Atlanta Child Murderer.

The door to the visiting area opened, and a slim, light-skinned Black man in his early fifties dressed in tan slacks and shirt - Georgia State prison garb - was ushered in by a porky White man with a handlebar mustache. The guard made eye contact with Carmen. “You have an hour,” he said.

Carmen nodded and smiled. “Thank you.” Then she turned her attention to her subject as he approached his side of the barrier and sat down.

Wayne Williams regarded Carmen from across the white desk, separated by thick glass. Carmen reached for the phone receiver on her side as Wayne reached for his. His brown eyes displayed curiosity and warmth from behind his wire-frames. “Hello, Ms. Mendoza.”

“How many times have I told you, you can dispel with the formalities. Call me Carmen.”