Rich gripped the tool near the center of its wood handle and stood quickly, spinning around to find Julia looking for something else to throw at him. The cashiers’ counter held very little in the way of missiles, and she turned back to lock her maddened eyes on his.
He felt a rush of joy as her eyes went from rage to a shadowy and angry fear. He began to stalk towards her, slowly, drawing the fear out of her like a siphon, reveling in her fright.
“Rich, stop!” Daniel Becker shouted at him as another screech from the mountain subsided. He got between Rich and Julie, like some barrel-chested hero. He was a large boy, near seventeen now, and overly muscular. He had worked the farm since he was young and could wrestle the heaviest bales into the highest of barn lofts.
Rich did not pause, did not think, he simply struck at the hulking teen with the sickle. It came down at an angle, ripping open his throat and chest and cleaving the arm he had brought up in an attempt to defend himself just below the elbow. The teen crumpled immediately and began feeding a puddle of blood around him. Julia screamed sweetly before throwing a display case of Kershaw folding knives at him and making a break for the opening in the counter.
Rich barely got within reach of her as she leapt from the enclosure trying to flee his murderous intent. He brought the sickle down hard, catching her in the top of the head as she turned to run, impaling her like a macabre marionette. As she jerked and danced on the end of the sickle, Rich began to chuckle manically. Her brain-dying antics seemed to tickle him in a strange place, deep in his mind.
His heart flooded with euphoria, with a complete abandon of moral responsibility. In his head, he heard a voice that was not his, explaining that he could do this to anyone he wanted and release the tension and aggravation that had been building all day. This was the way of life now, it explained, and the avid executioner may find himself as favored acolyte.
He turned back to the store, the half-shelves not quite concealing the remaining patrons, two of whom were now also armed with tools of their own. The blood smell, the coppery tinge in the air had brought them to their own lust, and they began to stalk the others weaker than them.
This enraged Rich even further. This was his store, so these people were his to kill. Rich used his boot to remove Julia’s head from the end of the sickle and rushed up behind the closest one. He could not remember the old coot’s name but he did not care. The sickle cut through a shoulder and then neatly through the old man’s spine.
The man fell to his knees revealing a round woman, draped in a screaming moo-moo, holding a three-foot monkey wrench. Her face was a mask of bitter rage, and she rushed Rich as soon as she saw him. He brought the sickle up, catching her under her nose. Her face tore open and she fell backwards, her nostrils no longer attached to the puffy flesh of her makeup-caked face. Blood poured from the wound as she let go an angry yelp. The end of Rich’s sickle met her chest as her head struck the floor.
Rapturous joy flooded through him again, this time surging with an almost orgasmic strength. He had known the love of Jesus, sung about it in his small church, but it did not compare to this violence-spurred release. The warmth of the thick blood now sheeting his face and forearms, the dizzying knowledge that he was the superior killer and slayer of humans—his body shook with the pleasure of it all. He had to find more, others he could ruin to prove his worthiness to an entity he did not know but was sure watched his every murderous action.
Whimpering turned him around where he found a man coming toward him. He was limping from an open gash down the entire length of his leg, and his right eye was twisted and open, dead in the socket it had grown from. In his hand, he carried a sledge, the yellow plastic handle dripping blood, the heavy metal end adorned with a hairy piece of scalp. His clothing was blood-soaked and the leg he dragged left a smeared red trail behind him.
Rich, completely calm in his ecstasy, waited for the man to be close enough, for him to heave the maul over his shoulder. When he did, Rich reached out with the sickle and opened his throat just below the chin. The man’s head lolled back, and the weight of the sledge pulled him down and into a gushing fountain of crimson. He made a soft gurgling sound before the store went silent.
Rich slowly scanned the store, looking for others, someone else to strike at to prove his worth, but the shop was achingly vacant of the living. He could barely contain the elation swelling in his chest and ached to feel more. He wanted to scream his glee, draw others to him so he could kill them as well, amp his pleasure higher until he came to that moment of reward.
“Your path has just begun, Richard Bowman. Many others still wait…” a voice spoke in a stumbling Southern lilt. It was the voice of dry leaves rubbing, of rusted metal forced into motion, but it was still clear and powerful.
Rich turned to find the eternal force he had sought. Although the corpse-like body was an ashen gray, the clothing it wore almost rotted to thread, it was a thing of magnificent wonder…and the reward he sought for himself.
“Go, Richard… Find others… Bring them death in my name…” it drew out in a wicked wet hiss. “Take your trophies from these and prepare yourself for my coming…my judgment…”
“Yes,” was all Richard could form in his dark thoughts.
“There is one among them, Richard…one who shares his mind with another… Do not take him for he is my own prey…”
Richard placed the fat woman’s nose in the large pocket of his apron. “Yes,” Richards’s mouth formed from a mind no longer his own.
The thing who he now served turned and walked away, its long greasy hair trailing the floor behind him for some distance. “I take only the last…” it hissed as it eased into a bank of fog just now invading the store.
Richard collected the remaining trophies from the faces of those slain and left the store in search of further rapture. The street, chocked with hacked and mutilated corpses, ran dark with blood, pooling and scabbing in puddles randomly along its length. Distant shapes moved through the fog as shadows, shapes of inhumanity seeking the same reward as he.
Richard began to search them out, these vague shapes all about, just beyond his reach, killing any he found until another took him with a shotgun blast from behind.
Chapter 20
Kayla knew fear. Before last night, she had avoided with great dexterity the furry, black, kid-eating monster under her bed and always made sure her closet door remained closed to keep out whatever it was knocking around in there every night. It did not matter that she had never seen one of these childhood baddies—not seeing them did not make them less real—and so she remained vigilant and prepared.
Tonight, however, altered her perceptions of evil and her definition for the word monster. In a moment of clarity, she realized that monsters really do exist, but they are not furry, many-legged things creeping silently under the bed, they are people; not just certain people, but everyone. She also learned that her father had been keeping a gun in the house and her mother could still swing a cleaver even after Daddy shot her.
It had started with the screaming. Something far off began screaming just before lunch, and by the time school was over, almost everyone was in a terrible mood. There were arguments and even two fistfights on the bus, and the bus drive, fat Mr. Combs, broke them both up by smacking the offenders on the face—Bobby Daniels hard enough to bleed. That was enough to quiet the others, brooding and plotting events for after they were off the bus.
Luckily for Kayla, she was the only student who got off at her stop and one of the first to actually get off. This spared her torments and maybe even a beating from other unreasonably angry kids. Throughout the day, every few minutes, the scream would slice through the forest of the mountain and cut into her head, pushing her to an uneven edge, but she knew how to keep herself calm, her mom had taught her that.
When Kayla entered the kitchen, she could see her mother was having one of her off days. She sat at the kitchen table with a pack of Camels and a bottle of vodka. On her worst days, there would be no glass. Today, there was not even an ashtray, just a bottle, a pack of cigarettes, a disposable lighter, and countless snubbed butts smashed into the surface of the fine wood table Daddy had made for her.
“Mommy?”
“Leave me alone,” she hissed in a venomous tone.
