Fuck! he cursed inwardly, gritting his teeth as he slammed his palm against the wheel. The horn sounded briefly from the sudden impact, but nobody seemed to notice. He let out a sigh, then slammed the wheel at least thirty more times. “Fuck!” he said out loud, forcing himself to re-grip the wheel before he did damage to it. He let out a long breath, his cheeks shaking back and forth violently as his fat lower lip made a sputtering sound like a small motor revving.
He leaned his head forward until his forehead rested between his two hands against the wheel, taking another deep breath as some of the scarlet started to drain from his cheeks. That God-damned kid, he thought, reminding himself of one of the over-the-top villains from Scooby Doo. The image of himself in a large Halloween mask being confronted by four hippies and their dog brought a smile to his face and helped him relax a little. One quote from Kennessy would have made this story soar. Would have made it jerk at the heartstrings of every teenage girl and little old lady from here to Timbuktu. She’s the perfect little victim. Sticking a knife through Miss America wouldn’t get as many results; it’s perfect. ‘Crazed killer tried to take a slice out of American Sweetie-Pie’. It’s the thing Pulitzer was made for. The type of thing that movie studios would bend-over backwards to take off your hands. Without her input, it doesn’t have that same tug. Like the kid on the milk carton. Everyone feels bad for the kid whose picture’s on the milk carton. But if they just told you about the missing kid, people wouldn’t even read it. You need their picture, their words... something to make the idiots reading it think they know this person. That it could have been someone they know. Their daughter, their sister, their...
He pictures Xander’s stubborn gaze again as he slammed Drake into the wall. It interrupted all other thought and made him jolt back off of the wheel as though he’d just awoken from some nightmare. Wincing, he reached around and felt the back of his head again. It was still moist, the hair around the bump pointed and hard like it had been gelled. A stinging sensation throbbed through his skull as his fingers connected with something damp and when he brought his hand back around, there was more blood on it. Less than the first time, but it was still there.
He stared at it for a minute, looking too watery to be the blood he was used to seeing in the movies, before wiping it into his pants. Squinting, he tried to think of another angle to go from now that his story lacked a quote from Kennessy.
Once again, Xander’s blue eyes flashed over his memory like a strobe light. How the boy’s lips had curled when he’d forced him into the wall. He was so full of hate, even though he hadn’t done anything that bad. It was like that hate was always there, just waiting to come out.
A slow smile started to spread over Drake’s face, as a new story started to fall into place inside his mind. Bracing himself against the wheel, he took a quick glance around and then slammed his head back against the seat, hissing as sharp pain pinched at him and his ears started to ring. He bit his lip to muffle the grunts, then slammed his head back again against the firm leather. And again. And again. He did it eight more times before stopping, when he couldn’t take the constant throbbing anymore and his brain felt like mush.
Again he brought his hand to the back of his head and when he brought it back there was more blood then there had been even when the wound was fresh. He thought he even felt a tiny trickle tickling its way down his spine. Smiling, he wiped the blood away again then started the car and pulled out of the parking lot.
After all, he couldn’t go back to his editor with nothing.
“Genblade, you got a visitor,” the guard said in a gruff voice, one hand resting nervously on the revolver strapped to his side. Behind him, four other guards stood at attention against the wall. Beads of sweat rolled down their foreheads into their eyes and made them itch, but they did not move. Did not twitch. Didn’t do anything except watch Genblade.
When he’d first arrived a few weeks ago, he’d tried to escape. Genblade had pulled a guard’s head through the bars of his cell and twisted it off. Then he’d kept the head in the cell with him and used it for a toilet for two hours until the guards shot him full of drugs in order to retrieve it while he was in an unconscious stupor.
After that, the warden had moved Genblade to a special needs cell and had requested extra guards. Billing finally approved it from the fall budget. Now he was under constant supervision by five full-time guards twenty-four hours a day.
His room had been padded until recently, everything having been stripped from it so that nothing could be used as a weapon. His bathroom was a hole in the center of his floor that dropped eight feet before becoming
