The Mad and the MacAbre

THE MAD AND THE
MACABRE

by Jeff Strand and Michael
McBride

This eBook edition published 2010 by Dark
Regions Press.

http://www.darkregions.com

SMASHWORDS EDITION

It is available
as a
Trade Paperback here.

© Jeff Strand 2010 and
Michael McBride 2010

Cover Design by
Frank Walls

Ebook Creation by Stephen James Price

www.generationnextpublications.com

Table of
Contents

Kutter

Remains

About the Authors

KUTTER

-1-

Charlie Stanlon held the dead woman and wept.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. He'd
been careful, like always. He'd applied antiseptic and bandaged
each cut right after he made it, and he hadn't cut her anyplace
where she should've bled to death. Though her nude body was covered
with dozens of bandages, she should've been his for at least
another week.

But, no, she'd just given up. After the
first few slashes, she'd barely even struggled.

Charlie walked away from the bloodstained
metal table, to the other side of the basement, and tried to
compose himself. Crying over this was ridiculous. He was forty-two,
not a little kid who'd broken his toy airplane. He grabbed a rag
from the crooked shelf he'd installed himself and wiped his
eyes.

Pathetic. He was absolutely pathetic.

Charlie forced himself to shrug. "Oh well,"
he said out loud. "These things happen. Can't win 'em all. That's
life in the big city for you."

He glanced back at the
corpse. He could
pretend
she was still alive. Pretend she could feel the
new cuts. Pretend she was so petrified with fear that she'd slipped
into a catatonic state where she could see everything, feel
everything, yet couldn't make a sound or move a muscle, even though
she was screaming inside of her brain.

No. He'd just be cutting up a dead woman.
That was no good. There was no satisfaction there--he'd simply be
making a mess.

He felt the tears start to form again, and
bit down on the sides of his mouth--hard--to keep them from
flowing. It didn't work. But at least the pain made him feel a
little bit better about crying.

Charlie sat in the corner on the cement
floor, and silently wept. It wasn't fair. Nine hours. He'd only had
her for nine hours.

Maybe this one wouldn't count. If he had
less than a day with her, she shouldn't count. That made sense.

No.

No, no, no.

He had a rule: one every two months. No
more. Not ever.

It was always somebody who wouldn't be
missed. She was homeless and usually a junkie, although he
preferred it when she wasn't on drugs. He could barely even imagine
the euphoria if he were given the chance to cut somebody healthy
and attractive--maybe even one of his co-workers--but he didn't
want to spend the rest of his life in jail. He had to be cautious.
And that meant no more than one victim every two months, even if
one died prematurely.

He'd just have to figure out a way to make
it through the next few weeks.

* * *

Alicia dropped the papers into Charlie's
in-box. He didn't look away from his computer monitor until she'd
walked back to her desk.

He picked up the stack of papers and sighed
with frustration. She'd stapled them in the top center. She was
supposed to staple them in the top left, so that he could easily
fold the papers over when he was photocopying them. He quickly
typed an e-mail to Bob Testiro, his supervisor, explaining the
issue once again and requesting that he send out a note to the
department to remind everybody of the proper procedure.

He flipped through the pages and sighed
again. She hadn't written the customer report date on the balance
adjustment form. Charlie sent another note to Bob to inform him of
the situation.

A few minutes later, Alicia walked back to
his desk. "You know, I sit in the next row," she said.

"Okay."

"Instead of trying to get me in trouble, you
could've just asked me to write in the date."

"I wasn't trying to get you in trouble."

"It took more effort to get Bob involved
than it would have to come to me directly."

"Okay." Without looking Alicia in the eye,
Charlie took the papers out of his in-box and handed them to
her.

"Did I do something to piss you off?" she
asked.

"No."

"Are you sure?"

Charlie didn't respond. He looked back at
his monitor and silently pleaded for her to leave him alone. If
she'd done it right the first time, he wouldn't have to bother
anyone, and nobody would have to bother him. It was just a staple
and a date. Not that hard to remember. She'd been working here
three weeks; it wasn't like today was her first day.

Alicia scribbled on the form and put it back
in his in-bin. But she didn't leave.

"Charlie?"

"Hmm?"

"Look at me."

Charlie reluctantly turned to face her. She
was a couple of years younger than him, as far as he could tell.
Not model pretty or actress pretty, but her beauty still made him
nervous. She had curly red hair that went down to her shoulders,
and freckles. Lots of freckles.

"We have to spend nine or ten hours a day in
this place," she said. "So why don't we try to make it a pleasant
work environment?"

"Okay."

"If you have an issue with
me, bring it to me first, all right? If you're still not
happy,
then
take
it up a level. We're supposed to be partners, not
adversaries."

Charlie nodded. Why wouldn't she leave him
alone?

She stood there for an excruciatingly long
moment, as if waiting for him to continue their conversation. He
had nothing to say. Finally she left.

* * *

Charlie sat in his
basement, staring at the empty table. He'd disposed of the dead
woman in what he liked to call the Body Pond four days ago. She
should still be alive and thrashing around in front of him. He had
no idea how he was going to make it all the way to September
24
^th
, the day he was
allowed to stalk his next victim. He'd go insane.

She really shouldn't count. If they died in
less than twenty-four hours it shouldn't count. Otherwise it wasn't
fair. Just not fair.

He closed his eyes and lightly rapped his
head against the basement wall. This wasn't about fairness. This
was about being careful. He'd go hunting every week if he knew he
wouldn't get caught, but after claiming his first victim three
years ago in what had been the greatest single moment of his life,
he'd promised himself that he wouldn't get greedy. Wouldn't get
sloppy. One kill every other month.

The schedule had always worked out well. It
gave him something to look forward to. But after getting ripped off
so badly this time, he wasn't sure he could wait for the next one,
especially because he rarely found somebody the first night of a
hunt. It usually took a couple of days of searching to find a
suitable victim where there'd be no witnesses and little chance of
injury. Sometimes it took more than a week.

He couldn't break the rules. He'd created
them for a reason.

Yet...if he thought about this logically,
which was more dangerous? Seeking another victim sooner than
planned, or waiting until he was so desperate and frantic that he
made a mistake? If he went now, he'd still be in top mental and
physical form. In a few weeks, he might be like one of those
twitching junkies he sometimes killed.

Yes, waiting was far more dangerous. He'd
have to be a complete fool to wait. And since he hadn't been caught
in three years, Charlie Stanlon knew he was no fool.

He'd begin the new hunt tonight.

* * *

As Charlie walked down the
sidewalk, his heart raced with excitement yet he was also sick to
his stomach with dread. As always, he knew that this could be the
one that went bad. He could end up in jail, or lying on the street
with a knife in his belly, or strapped to a metal table in
somebody
else's
basement. He shuddered at the thought of the things he did to
the women happening to him.

He wore a pair of gray sweatpants and a
matching gray shirt, specifically chosen to be nondescript. The
clothing was hotter than he'd prefer during the summer, even at
night. But though Charlie wasn't obese, he was a couple dozen
pounds overweight, and he figured he'd be more memorable to
possible witnesses in shorts.

It wasn't a good evening. Too many people
hanging out in groups. There was one potential: a middle-aged woman
huddled on the bench at a bus stop, trying in vain to light a
cigarette butt that had no tobacco left. Charlie watched her for a
few minutes, then decided that she could be carrying a can of
pepper spray. He had to get up early for work tomorrow, so he quit
around ten-thirty, went home, and went to bed.

The next hunt began much better. She wasn't
attractive, at least not at the moment, but she was young. Sixteen
or seventeen. She looked scared.

For several minutes, he stood thirty feet
away and watched her dig through the garbage bin behind the crappy
restaurant, working up his courage to approach her. Finally he did
so, keeping his pace casual, trying to be as quiet as possible.

The girl gasped and spun around to face him.
She dropped a Styrofoam container and looked almost embarrassed.
Her eyes darted back and forth, as if trying to decide where to
run.

"Hi," Charlie said, trying to sound
friendly. "I'm not going to hurt you."

"I wasn't stealing anything."

"I don't care." That didn't come out right.
"I mean, I don't care if you were. I don't work here. Did you run
away from home?"

The girl nodded. She still looked like she
was about to flee. If she did, Charlie would just let her go--you
couldn't be cautious enough when you were sprinting after a
potential victim.

She wasn't a good choice. If she was a new
runaway, then somebody was probably looking for her. Charlie
preferred to prey upon people who wouldn't be missed right away, if
at all. Too risky to take a girl away from parents that cared about
her.

Still, he
really
wanted to do
this.

"Do you have anywhere to go?"

"I'm fine."

Charlie thought carefully about what he was
going to say. Though he said the same thing almost every time and
had even written it down, he occasionally got the words wrong and
scared the woman off. "I'd offer to let you sleep on my couch, but
I'm crammed into a really small apartment and I barely have room to
turn around as it is. I can't give you any money--nothing personal,
it's just the way I am after getting burned a few times. Drug
users, you know."

The girl stared at him. Charlie cleared his
throat.

"Anyway, I can't do any of that, but I'd be
happy to buy you something to eat."

He waited expectantly. He considered
offering a friendly smile, but that wasn't something that had
worked out well for him in the past. Charlie wasn't sure why. He'd
practiced his smile in the mirror and it seemed pleasant
enough.

The girl shook her head. "I...I don't think
I can."

"Why not?"

"I just can't. I'm sorry."

She stepped back. Charlie grabbed her
wrist.

Oh, no. Why had he done that? He never did
that kind of thing. He always got them back to the car before
laying a hand on them. This was sloppy. This was horrible.

He realized that he was squeezing way too
hard and let go of her. "I'm just trying to be nice," he said.

She ran.

Charlie took a step forward, then stopped
himself. He couldn't chase her out where people might see. That was
ridiculous. He'd screwed this one up and couldn't salvage it, so it
was time to go home. That was his rule: if a hunt was close but
didn't work, he quit for the night.

The rules were what kept him out of jail.
Kept him alive.

God, he wanted to chase her. Chase her down,
drag her back to where they'd been standing, and bash her head
against the rusty metal side of the trash bin. Not hard enough to
kill her--hard enough that she knew he wasn't playing around, hard
enough that she knew he was controlling her fate, hard enough that
she knew there was a lot more pain on the way.

There didn't seem to be anybody else around.
The whole area was quiet.

If she was reduced to digging scraps out of
the garbage, she probably didn't have much energy. He could catch
her quickly. She wouldn't put up much of a struggle. He could
handle the situation in less than a minute. Nobody would see.