A Blood of Killers Read online

“The dead people.”

  “You’re all already dead, as dead as your victims. What’s a few more bodies in the name of a greater cause? You have to see the big picture, Seth.”

  They took an elevator down to sunless depths, walked a long, winding corridor filled with the echoes of their footsteps. Arriving at another security door, Mr. Black passed his card through the scanner. Seth reeled at the wall of malevolence shooting out at him as soon as the door opened. He barely felt the exchange of his body from one set of attendants to another. The door clanged shut only dimly in his mind. The ward’s population, about twenty men in orange overalls, was gathered in the dining room for lunch, and they stopped and stared at Seth when the keepers dragged him in. Rage boiled over the stewing pot of their hatred. That was when he passed out.

  “Hey, there,” the man said, sitting on Seth’s bunk and leaning over him. He was clean-shaven, eyes bright and blue, crinkle lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth shaped into a glyph of mild amusement. “Welcome to the real world.” Laughter, edged with cruelty, rose from outside the room they were in. “The name’s Bix,” he said. His eyes were clear, deep, empty. Seth felt nothing from the man, and found no comfort in the emptiness. “You want to get out of here?”

  “Yes … no,” Seth said, sitting up. Bix backed away from the bed. Seth swung his legs around to sit on the bed’s edge. The room was stark and spare, with curved-edged wooden furniture bolted to the metal floor and a television recessed into the wall behind a thick, Plexiglas window. “I want to get off this ward, but not out of the hospital—”

  “No, you want out. I can tell. I’ll help you.”

  A few men lingered by the room entrance, crowded together but not touching each other, staring at him. There was no glimmer of comfort or understanding in their eyes. Anger came from them in low, steady waves, lapping at the boundaries of Seth’s self, hinting at storms to come. He had known the instant he saw Mr. Black that he would be placed in a ward without sensitives, taken to a place of nightmare, full of the emotions which had driven him mad in the outside world. But he did not know why. He did not understand the point of Mr. Black’s proposed treatment.

  Seth shuddered and looked back at Bix’s calm face and wondered how much the madman knew, what his true purpose was in offering help. He missed Omar and Kasie’s touch, the sensation of the pleasure they took from and reflected to one another in an endless, perfect circle. Senders and receivers, those were his kind, not this collection of mental circus freaks, emotional abortions, psychological cripples. He was not one of the monsters.

  Seth sucked in air. Stared at his trembling hands. No one had given him medication.

  “They’re doing reconstruction,” Bix continued, pacing along the wall of the room, carefully going around the dresser and table and chair and bed without bumping into anything. “Tearing out the firewall above the suspended ceiling, putting in new duct work, cables, pipes. It’s a comfort to know even a place like this has a building code to follow.”

  Seth had seen similar construction taking place on his ward. “Can’t get to it,” he said. He stood up, wanting to break through the men at the door to find a keeper and ask for his medication. But he was afraid of inadvertent contact, of explosions and consequences.

  “Yes there is, through the service elevator foyer.”

  “It must be locked.”

  “There’s a way. There’s a whole list of escape routes passed on by the lifers from one generation to the next, depending on the situations that have come up. Horace Menniken got out twenty years ago this way, hasn’t been back since. There’s a prison helper, from one of the minimum security wards upstairs, who comes down with the library cart under escort. He’ll leave you a swipe card in a magazine on your bunk. It’ll be a black ops card, so it won’t register with the main computer, but you can only use it once or you’ll trigger an alarm. You can’t use the elevator, but the foyer camera feed will be looped at the guard console for about thirty seconds. You have to climb up into the construction hole, get into the duct work, get up and out through one of the service vents in the minimum security yard. I can get you a map, but you’ll have to take cutting yourself on the wire getting over the fence. And you have to move fast, because someone will pick up on you being in the elevator foyer on the camera tapes, which are reviewed in the central guard house on delay.”

  “How do you know—?”

  “We’re all professionals down here.”

  “Why don’t you go?”

  Bix stopped. “We’d never let one of ours go out.” He smiled. “We’re family. Like the Blood of Killers, or the street gangs, or special ops units. Only we were captured. And we don’t want to serve the keepers. We’re wild, and we’ll stay wild, which is why they’ll never let us stay in the outside world. But you’re tame. It’s the suffering you understand, the suffering that drives you mad. So the keepers can use that. And we’re only too glad to help them, and you, if it means they’ll leave us alone and throw us some serious porn DVDs and give us more Internet access.”

  “Keepers!” Seth called out. “I need meds. Hello, keeper!” He turned to look for the security camera bubble in the ceiling.

  Bix was on him, his fist bearing down on Seth’s face before Seth could react. A starburst of pain took the place of a blink. Another fist to the gut doubled him over. Bix pummeled him, beating a steady rhythm, like a march, across his back, ribs, gut, chest, face. But he never kicked him, or put more weight behind a blow than his bones could take.

  The beating was clean, without a hint of anger. Seth could not read the danger in Bix’s eyes, couldn’t smell it on his scent, even as the man punished him. Seth looked to the doorway but the other men were gone, as if afraid the beating might excite them, and their bubbling rages feed him, giving him strength to fight Bix.

  “Of course, most of this bunch doesn’t have the skill set to survive on the outside,” Bix said, his breathing rate barely raised despite the work involved in his methodical attack. “They’d only get caught and killed if they went out without supervision. And some of us, believe it or not, actually like it in here. You know what I’m saying?”

  Seth could not answer. His mouth was swollen, his thinking stunned into a single, fetal survival mode. Deep inside, he wanted to ask what Mr. Black, what the keepers intended by arranging for his escape, by manipulating him so that he had no choice but to leave. He wanted to know his treatment plan, and why his sensitivity to suffering was so important, and how the keepers could use his talent.

  But the questions died in the darkness, starving for the light of answers.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Seth whispered.

  No one heard. No one was paying attention to him as the fight broke out in the shower room and the keepers rushed in with cattle prods crackling and the inmates screamed and tossed furniture around and feinted rushes and swings at each other and the staff. Rage washed down the hall, filled Seth’s mouth and nose and ears, tumbled in his stomach, sent tremors through his limbs.

  Bix appeared before him, grinning, a cut over his brow dribbling blood into his eye. The minimum security prisoner bounced off of Bix, fell into Seth’s arms, stuck the card into Seth’s shirt as he fumbled for balance, then staggered off. Bix smiled. “What the fuck are you waiting for,” he said, words running together into a hiss. He poked Seth on the cheek, jaw, shoulder; in the ribs and gut; wherever tissue and bone ached. “Get moving, and don’t even think about fucking up and coming back here, do you understand?”

  A sudden paralyzing pain stabbed down from Seth’s neck to his heart. He went down on one knee.

  “Take the pain, it’ll numb you to the wire,” Bix said. “And if you do get caught, don’t tell them how you got out. Not even before you kill yourself to keep from getting sent back here. Because killing yourself ain’t gonna stop us from getting revenge, you understand?”

  Seth understood only Bix’s fingers expertly applying pressure to bundles of nerves that sent th
e message of pain down his torso and legs, and back up to his other shoulder. Pain chased away anger, let him see clearly into Bix’s emptiness.

  The pressure left with Bix. Seth stumbled toward the service elevator door. Two of the ward patients pinned a third against the wall in front of Seth, tore his pants down, exposed his hard cock. While one held the victim in a headlock, the other jammed his own stiff cock into the offered ass. At the other end of the ward, four patients had disarmed and cornered a keeper, who was crying out for help from his colleagues focused on the shower fight. Screams and shouts filled the ward. The television blared at the height of its volume setting. Blood was in the air, along with semen and fear-soured sweat. Seth pressed his face against the tiled wall, his old inner wounds rubbed raw and infected by the surrounding madness. He pleaded for the storm to stop, for a comforting embrace, for death’s silence. His own erection pressed against his trousers.

  “What separates you from these animals?” Mr. Black asked, suddenly by his side. “What would Captain Kirk do in this situation?”

  Seth recoiled, sliding closer to the entanglement of rapists. He realized Mr. Black was as empty as Bix, a walking void capable of approaching him without warning. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Mr. Black fended off an attacking patient with a lightning elbow blow to the nose. “Will you give in to the base natures around you, or your own? Will you hide, survive, adapt? Transform those around you, and be transformed yourself?” Mr. Black passed Seth, dragged one man off of the other, disabled him with a blow to the temple.

  “What do you want from me?” Seth asked, pleading with his eyes, hands clasped together.

  Mr. Black watched as the remaining assailant released his victim and backed away. Mr. Black kicked the victim sharply in the groin and dragged him aside by a foot, leaving the way to the elevator door clear for Seth. “I don’t know. Sometimes, when the lamb is sacrificed, the priest does not know what the gods will bestow on him. The gods are fickle. We can only perform our sacred duties and abide by what is given to us in return.”

  Seth ran to the alcove door and escaped.

  Outside, alarms blared and searchlights sliced the gloom of the prison minimum security yard. It had taken longer for him to climb to the surface than both he and Bix had anticipated. A small duffel bag lay in the grass by the vent from which he had emerged. Outside, in neatly typed letters, clearly legible in the limited light, was the message: Good luck. We’ll be in touch. Inside, along with tools, money, identification and a change of clothes, was a crumpled piece of stained, yellow paper with words: accept our sacrifice kill for us send us back a sign let us know we gave you our freedom for a reason do the work we want to do but cannot because you can and we cannot

  Seth climbed the fence, threw the bag over the wire, and crawled over the top. Razors still managed to cut and slice his skin.

  He missed Omar and Kasie. He spent his first night of freedom bleeding, watching porn on cable and tying to imagine himself as one of the men on the television screen. The motel room smelled of old men and unwashed underwear. When he ejaculated, his seed felt cool, thin and slimy on his hand. He stained the sheets, bed and carpet with blood. He washed, tended his wounds, slept, moved on, wishing for the company of people who understood him, men who knew what he felt, knew how to touch him inside and out.

  Old habits kept him on back roads, away from towns and cities. He visited all-night groceries and laundries, shopped in malls early in the morning with retired men and women getting their aerobic activity for the day, even camped in federal parks. Disconnecting himself from his past, his power, and people was the only way he could conceive of surviving.

  He killed his first man three months after escaping. After blundering across the firing line of a hunter hidden in a blind and startling a deer away, Seth had no choice but to murder the hunter. The man’s rage flew from his eyes, overwhelmed Seth, filled him to bursting. It was a wonder to Seth that the deer had not been able to smell his stalker.

  His second kill, the next day, was a woman with a van full of kids who swerved out of a side road and cut him off while he was driving the hunter’s car. A momentary glance, a glimpse of panic and hatred and self-righteous indignation, was enough to spark Seth. He pushed her off the road, down an embankment. The van tumbled. Screams mingled with the cacophony of metal and rock colliding. He stopped, went down, and broke her neck to finish her. But he left the children alone. At the very least, he told himself, he did not check them to see if they were alive, and then kill them.

  Seth left for the city, knowing he could not continue to survive in isolation. Individual rage stood out more clearly when there were no other emotions to dilute it, and his own quick, savage reactions came more from the nature of animals surrounding him than his own, or any, human instinct. He hoped.

  On the bus ride back to the city, he could not shake the feeling that he had traveled the same road before, one that led to the hospital he could not return to.

  The sleepy cloud of emotions on the bus, tinged with flashes of hope and excitement, lulled Seth into believing he had made the right choice. He needed to be connected with people. In the wilderness, he felt as if he had lost a part of himself, intensifying the infrequent interactions with others and led to more killing. If he was fast and clever and careful, the constant fog of other people’s inner lives would dull the occasional sharp psychotic edge that managed to cut through the cocoon of dense city populations.

  His invisible supportive network continued to hold. While never receiving a bill, his credit cards remained active and there was always cash available. He watched cable and rented videos. He tested himself in crowds, but stayed away from sports arenas after killing a rabid basketball fan in a bathroom during a game. The first time he received a postcard in the basement studio he rented, he left the house and never returned. “Send us a sign,” was the only message on the back. The front of the postcard was glossy black.

  He left another studio apartment, and the few pieces of furniture and electronic equipment he had bought for it, after the second card came, also glossy black, with the same message. Troubled, he went to another city, but a third card found him. After the fourth, he wept. Upon receiving the fifth, he considered killing himself. The sixth prompted him to overdose on Valium. His neighbors found him when they discovered his front door unlocked. While recovering in the hospital, another glossy black card was left on his bedside tray. “Your mother is dying,” it said.

  After his release, Seth went across country to visit his mother. He did not actually ring the bell of her house, only stayed outside and watched the home attendants coming and going daily. He recognized his brother and sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins, visiting daily. Late one night he broke into her home. He had no plan, no words to share with her. He just wanted to see her, like he wanted to see the patients on his old ward. He wanted the illusion of feeling safe, as he had when he was very young, before the power of his empathy made him a killer. He wanted to taste the kind of intimacy born from trust and the knowledge of secrets, the kind of intimacy shared between infants and mothers, and lovers on his old ward.

  Her room smelled of medicines and antiseptic, not the perfumes and kitchen cooking he associated with her.

  She awoke and saw him standing over her bed. Her eyes grew wider. “Bastard,” she whispered. Her heart monitoring machine chirped urgently. “Murderer.”

  He remembered killing her husband. His father. That had been a long time ago. Nothing was proven. How could she be certain after so many years?

  Seth absorbed the old woman’s anger, surprised by its strength and intensity. Then he put his hand over her mouth and nose until her chest stopped rising and falling and the monitor showed her heart stopped beating. He smashed the skull of the attendant who rushed in to answer the alarm with the heart machine that had called to her. Standing over their bodies, blood and bone and brain matter splattered over his mother’s still form, a sense of peace and fulfil
lment settled over Seth. Something noble had happened out of the pain and anger that had possessed him. At last, his empathic power resulted in mercy, not random destruction. His mother was at peace.

  Seth scraped tissue and bone from the bed, cut off his mother’s wedding ring finger, and left. Following instructions left in the bag he took during his escape, he mailed out the trophies from his latest kill along with news clippings covering the murder and mutilation. “I have found my calling,” he wrote on a black piece of construction paper with a silver-ink pen. “I will grant the suffering mercy.”

  The next day, he visited the hospital that had supervised his mother’s care and made his way to the ward on which she had been treated. Disguised as a house cleaner, he went from one room to the next until a roiling mix of pain and anguish awakened his empathy. An old man, eyes bright with indignation over his suffering and helplessness, spat on the floor Seth had just washed. Seth returned later, in the night, and quietly pushed the old man to the end of his life’s journey. He sent the clippings, as well as a trophy of a lock of the old man’s mangy grey hair, to the mail drop address.

  Hospital security increased in response to the terror created by the news media, so Seth chose to bestow his next blessing on one of the homeless, a young woman desperate for money for drugs, filled with an intoxicating mix of despair over lost children, need for love, the pain of botched abortions, and a slowly boiling stew of petty disappointments that flowed like a tide into him and empowered his own killing nerve. He held the knife she had wanted to use on him against his throat, watched a thin red line open on her skin where the knife edge cut her.

  She moaned. Their gazes locked. His strength drained into her. The knife fell from his grasp. Moments later, she was on top of him, straddling his chest, the knife in her hand against his throat. But the needs and pains were gone from her. She had only survival in her eyes as she looked down at him and asked, in a gravelly, street-worn voice, “What was that? What the fuck was that?”