He remained unresponsive. Roy slapped him again, harder. He didn’t even blink. Roy felt a tingling sensation in the bottom of his gut; it was the same sensation he’d felt after being forced to strip down in front of Marie Hodgkin. He wrapped his fingers around the man’s throat and shook him. Roy squeezed harder and the tingle at the bottom of his stomach travelled down into his genitals. His scrotum tightened, his cock hardened. I’m not gay, he told himself. This had nothing to do with touching another man—that was sick. This was something entirely different. He had felt it the very first time when he was eleven years old, and had a cat pinned to the ground with his knee. He had wrapped his hand around its neck and squeezed and twisted until it was dead. Young Roy had then bludgeoned three of its new-born kittens with the side of his fist into the floor and thrown the other three against a wall with all of his might. His cock and balls responded when he did it again a year later to a stray mother dog and its single pup. He had a raging hard-on when he’d murdered over a hundred people at the shopping mall, and he had another erection now.
It wasn’t a gay thing. Roy wasn’t even convinced it was a sexual thing. It was what it was, and it felt wonderful. Both hands were around the man’s neck now, throttling, shaking. Feeble fucker. Helpless, defenceless, stupid retard. The man remained completely silent as his life was choked away. Roy made lots of sounds. He moaned as he breathed in and whistled as he exhaled.
Finally, when there was nothing of the man left to kill, Roy released him. His fingers were stiff and sore, as if rigor had set in. He staggered back and saw the wet spot on the crotch of his pants. Goddamn, that’s never happened before. It’s not supposed to do that. How am I going to explain this to Louie? Fuck. I’m not gay.
He continued stepping back until he bumped into the window ledge. Moments later, the room grew dark. Roy turned and looked at the narrow pane of glass set behind the bars. Light had been shining through there seconds earlier, he was sure. Roy had seen the forest beyond the front parking lot, and the clouds in the sky. Now the glass was covered over in grey. It looked as if someone had thrown a can of paint over it, coloring the window a dismal shade of light black. It grew darker.
“What the fuck?”
He looked back at the man he’d murdered. The erection in his pants had started to subside. Roy remembered the woman downstairs saying there were a few of them left. Two, three, five, twenty—it didn’t matter how many. Just imagining them laying in their beds, useless and defenceless, brought his boner back.
I’ll choke them all. I’ll do more than that. I’ll make them suffer.
He left the room, hunched over slightly and limping to accommodate the throbbing bulge in his underwear. The grey mist, turning darker with every passing second, was forgotten. It pressed against the glass, and worked its way under the frame’s bottom edge.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” Louie explained as he dabbed the nurse’s face with a wet face cloth. “If it wasn’t for Roy, I’m not sure I’d still be alive. He’s helped me out of a few scrapes since I resurfaced.”
“Hees a reah angull.” Tracy Klausburg was still sitting in the chair behind the reception counter. Her head was resting back against the black leather upholstery to stop the bleeding.
“What’s that?”
She sat forward, winced, and repeated herself more clearly through her shattered mouth. “He’s... a real... angel.”
“I know what he is, but he’s kept me safe. Most of my life guys like him have been teasing and hurting me. It feels good to have one of them on your side for a change.”
Tracy stared back at him with wet, terror-filled eyes.
Louie chuckled uncomfortably. “Sorry about your nose and teeth. He gets carried away sometimes.”
“Wha... wha iv he doee now?”
Louie stared at her swollen lips uncomprehendingly for a moment until he caught on. “What is he doing now? I imagine he’s going through the building, finding supplies for us to take. We have to get as far away from the city as possible.” He leaned forward and whispered. “I think something really bad is spreading out from there. If you were smart, you’d leave whoever’s left here and join us.”
Roy covered the next man’s face with a pillow and pressed down. He watched the simpleton’s legs thrash, and listened to the pathetic muffled moans until he thrashed no more. He found a woman in the next room. She was old, and she asked him if he was there to feed her. Roy hammered her in the chest with both fists and crushed her ribcage.
He started up for the third floor, unzipping his fly and letting his penis out to breathe. It wasn’t like this back in the mall. It feels so good standing over them... doing it with my bare hands. He massaged his aching balls with one hand and dragged himself along the banister with the other. I’m going to jerk off on the next one. Let all this stress go.
Roy entered the first room on his right and found a fat woman propped up in a chair facing the window. He walked up to her. “I’m going to hurt you, and you’re going to make me feel good.” He kicked at her thick calf. “I’m fucking talking to you. Look at me!”
The room was dark. The window was covered with the same dark slime as he’d seen below. Roy bent over and studied the woman’s bloated face. He was too late—the
