Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
Marie empathized with the dog.
She shut the book. The salt in her tears burned the vulnerable surfaces of her eyes. She was moments from being swept under. Now she allowed herself to feel the hatred she had been repressing.
It felt like a curse.
Marie rested a hand on her thigh. In Maine as a child, when she was still considered retarded rather than deaf, a baby-sitter had purposely ground her heel into the top of that hand while Marie was playing on the floor…
And the thigh under her hand—Edwin had once kissed it, run his tongue along it. Well, he still did. But he had also crushed that thigh in his hand recently while they were in the car, so upset had he become at her driving. He hadn’t hit her—yet. Marie felt that first blow moving toward her through time. The bruises from his grip had taken days to fade…
Marie rose from the chair, slid the book back into the shelf. At a table close by she stood and gazed down at the unique items spread there. A tarnished pocket watch. Costume jewelry. Several ivory-handled straight razors, the blades old and brittle but still frighteningly sharp…
She sat back down beside the glass counter where the alligator stood, an array of African tribal masks hanging above it like an audience of spirits. Marie didn’t mind their company. They were a comfort, in fact. They could lead her away, if they wanted.
She rolled up the sleeves of her bathrobe, hating the smell of sex on her now also, and anxious to escape it. She
wanted
to drown like the dog, in salt tears. In blood. She cursed the frail impermanence of humankind, which caused so much greedy fear. She would have plenty of time to let this happen; Edwin would remain in the tub for two hours or more, soaking himself outside and in. She reached out to the alligator…somewhat guiltily…and flicked on its light so as to wash out the vivid color when it came—but it was intimacy, not exploitation.
* * *
Mrs. Morris found Marie, and the horror of it made her scream. Pale as she was, Marie looked like a mannequin propped in her chair. Mrs. Morris cried out for Edwin, and bolted upstairs to wake him…
In the open doorway of the bathroom, Mrs. Morris screamed a second time.
It was a perverse way to kill a man, the police said when they came. As perverse in imagination as the creation of that lamp in the first place.
First they found a wooden bowl in the threshold of the bathroom. Then in the tub they observed the male corpse. He had died by electrocution, the cord of the lamp plugged into an outlet close at hand. But rather than simply toss the alligator lamp in there with him, the woman had gone to the trouble of stabbing the nails which protruded from the creature’s palms into the sides of her husband’s neck, so that the creature appeared to be strangling him.
But the sequence of all this was confusing. There was no great splashing of blood in the bathroom, so she had to have slit her wrists after the electrocution. How, then, or when, had the woman managed that other bizarre flourish…wetting the hind feet of the alligator in her blood, and tracking its prints up two flights of stairs and on into the bathroom?
“Freaky,” the policemen said, in disgust of her.
Mass Production
Harris shot his boss first. Though he would have liked to save the best for last, he was afraid that if he didn’t, the bastard might escape. Most of the people in the plant would escape; he had no delusions about killing them all…though God knew he had enough ammo, and enough inspiration, to do so.
He took the courtesy of knocking before he came in, and while his boss was in the middle of churning out one of his patented manufactured smiles, the kind that promised promotions, changes, raises that never came, Harris swept the ten pound Galil assault rifle out from under his rain-spattered coat, brought it up to point from the waist. Now he smiled. His boss didn’t. One cherry bomb crack for the group leader he never became. One crack for the unmade changes. One for the recently denied raise. And Harris made sure that the boss was conscious of the first two cracks before the merciful third. There. Now he’d take whoever else he could.
Turning back toward the door, he folded out the skeleton stock of the gun, an Israeli weapon roughly patterned after the AK-47. It had a thirty-five shot magazine. He had another magazine in one pocket, and a whole box of shells for the .357 revolver holstered on his belt. He had armed up and loaded up with the same care he had taken to shower and shave and dress…a little addition to the daily routine. He didn’t feel a hot, maddened surge inside him, to have set the machine into motion. He stepped out of the office and into the plant as if to go to work.
* * *
Thomas Willis Peterson was the head of maintenance, and at the time of the shooting was up on a step ladder replacing the blown fuse that had cut power for the processor upstairs. At first he thought it was something to do with the plant itself, until moments later he heard female screaming and the correct interpretation came to him. He almost fell coming down the ladder, and held onto it to listen as more gun shots rocked the plant…three in rapid succession. He tried to determine their direction, and to get parts of himself to believe what other parts knew was happening.
Warren was the supervisor upstairs, the one who had told Peterson the processor was down, the one who had insisted he stay and see to the problem himself although he had a dentist appointment at five and the second shift supervisor was certainly capable of changing a fuse. Peterson’s ten year old niece could change a fuse. But Warren had insisted, and here I am, Peterson thought, trapped in the building with somebody going nuts with a gun.
Warren didn’t get it yet, even with the screams and shouts. “What the hell is that?” he said indignantly, insulted at having been startled.
“Sounds like somebody’s on a spree out there,” Peterson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Kill spree. With a gun.”
“Bull-shit.”
“Why not go have a look? Sounds like it’s coming from the social presses.”
“For God’s sake,” Warren hissed, and actually stormed off in that direction as if to break up a squabble between two workers. Peterson had to snort at that. Good. He hated that arrogant dick. He’d put up with his crap for a good fifteen years now. Let him go walk into a bullet. Peterson was going to get the hell out of the plant.
He removed the noisy and heavy hindrance of his tool belt, but first drew from it a screwdriver with a very long blade. More shots. Chaos out there. The most Peterson had experienced in the way of excitement at work was presses running down and toilets running over. He had to smile. This would be on the news for sure. A dentist could be gone to any time.
* * *
Harris had dropped Chuck and Kevin, the two sub-moronic pressmen who had laughed at him several times, as they were wont to do with most everybody in their boozer-jock superiority and perfection. Harris had brought them down to earth—literally. Then he had swivelled and picked off a kid all the way down at the end of the line. He had walked in on the kid doing some coke in the men’s room one night. Scummy little loser. Snort this. The kid got up and staggered out of view, however. Oh well. Three out of four so far…
Peripherally he glimpsed Tracey of the dyed blond hair and skin-tight sweat pants, who had declined the nervous invitation to dinner he had offered her last year, after months of screwing up the nerve. He spun and fired as she was darting for cover, hit the Coke machine by the time clock instead. He started walking casually after her, not too intent on catching her since he had pretty much gotten over that. But he made a very deliberate point of stopping at the time clock. His worst enemy in the plant, it had followed him here from place after place, dogging his trail for twenty years now. So what if this one was digital, computerized…it couldn’t hide its identity. Harris grinned as he blew it to pieces. Whatever else happened to him after today, he was finally liberated.
* * *
“Easy, easy does it.” Peterson crouched down beside the boy who was cowering behind the fork truck, clasping his thigh and sobbing. Peterson pried his hands away and looked at the wound through the hole in his jeans. “Looks like it went clean through…bet it didn’t hit the bone. It’s bloody, but I don’t think it got an artery.” From the fork truck he snatched an oily rag, and tied that around a big wad of tissue he pulled from a box at the shipping station behind them. It would have to do for now.
“Can you make the effort to crawl out of here, kid?”
“I don’t know,” he whimpered.
“Try. Right out the loading dock behind us…he sounds like he’s heading off for the commercial presses. Do you know who he is?”
“I don’t know the dude’s name…Harris?”
Peterson nodded. Harris. That made sense. You’d have thought the company would have been more careful about a forty year-old man who came into work this week with a Mohawk haircut. Warren was going to go stomping up to
that
? What was he going to do, write him up? True, the company did frown on mass murder. Insolent bastard, that Warren. His shit didn’t stink. But Peterson had a hunch he wouldn’t prove bullet-proof.
“I’d get out while I could, kid.”
“Thanks, man. Hey, what are you going to do…go after him?” The kid hadn’t missed the giant screwdriver.
“Yeah,” said Peterson.
The boy looked up at him, clearly impressed. In every harrowing situation, one man stepped forward. It was what sold
People
magazine. It was the American fighting spirit. Peterson’s fist was tight on his greasy Excalibur. The kid suddenly felt excited to be a part of it all. Maybe they’d even interview him in the
Enquirer
.
* * *
Warren hunkered down behind a shelf full of boxes of paper. If the killer knew he was there, the bullets would tear through easily, so the idea was to simply stay out of view. The shooting was uncomfortably close at hand; commercial press line, he figured. Good God, who could it be? These things only happened on the news! If that damn Peterson hadn’t taken so long with the fuse, he’d be safely on his way home by now…
The plant reminded him of a sinking ship now—the Titanic—the gunfire its engines exploding, and the crew screaming and running about in panic. He had to get to the nearest exit…leave it to somebody else to call the police. Women and supervisors first…
A man knelt down suddenly beside Warren, and his heart almost cried out with a voice of its own. “Peterson,” he hissed, “are you trying to get me killed?”
Peterson smiled at that, and drove the screwdriver up through the front of Warren’s throat. The impact bulged his eyes from their sockets. Then Peterson pushed sideways on the clear yellow handle as if forcing a stuck lever.
Police in Europe are well acquainted with the likes of a Thomas Willis Peterson. A man frustrated by his fearful desire of women and inability to communicate with them for terror of rejection, who takes to stabbing them with an easily palmed awl in the buttocks or thighs in tight crowds and then drifts anonymously away. A sort of revenge on the whole unobtainable species, and a kind of brief intimate penetration. A cowardly, pathetic sort of man they give the elegant name piqueur. In America, in these parts, for ten years now they had called their version of this man—less elegantly, more ominously—the Pick.
Thomas Willis Peterson—the Pick—had never killed anyone, however. But today it had come easily. Today he was inspired…
Now to find Harris, and kill him. He had to stop to reload sooner or later, and the Pick, ever stealthy, would be there. And why not? He could murder a man and become a hero for it. How ironic! Then he’d simply say he had pulled the screwdriver out of Harris’s pocket during the struggle with him. The screwdriver Harris had killed the upstairs supervisor Warren with. Saw the whole thing, Peterson the heroic murderer would tell them…
From anonymity to limelight. Maybe he’d even attract a girlfriend from all this. The idea gave him the courage and power to move on and stalk Harris, his next victim…
* * *
There were four of them hiding behind the shelf in the stock room—the teen age stock boy, an expediter girl and two of the girls who glued the samples in the catalogs the company sent out for dealers to display in their print shops. Harris pointed the assault rifle at the boy’s face and with two shots ruined reams of expensive paper, soaked thoroughly. One girl tried to run for it. Didn’t get far. This was easier than the arcade video shooting games Harris loved to play. More realistic graphics. Though he was a bit disappointed to have found today that blood didn’t fly profusely from bullet wounds as it did in the movies…let alone in glorious slow motion.
He turned on the remaining two, Alise and Joanie. Alise was a pretty teen ager. Easy for a misogynistic psychopath to kill. But Joanie made him hesitate. Poor Joanie…he could empathize with her. Shy, homely. Laughed at behind her back. Worse than they did to him, actually. Small and greasy-haired, eyes blankly timid behind thick lenses. No, even Harris the Mohawked berserker couldn’t shoot so helpless and pitiful a creature. A crippled fawn. He pivoted to point the weapon down at Alise. Her screaming became a hysterical siren…
Click. All thirty-five rounds in the first clip gone already? Harris gave Alise an apologetic grin while he yanked the mag out of the Galil’s belly.
He saw Alise’s eyes move, and whirled around. Peterson. Arm upraised. The Pick, descending on him…
The shot hurled Peterson back, though he remained on his feet. Harris turned again to Alise and Joanie, caught between two confusions.
Joanie’s pistol was a .22 target automatic; not at all powerful, but she was a good shot. One bullet into his left eye was enough to drop Harris at her feet on top of his big masculine rifle.
“Joanie,” Peterson began. He showed more disorientation and annoyance than fear or pain. He watched as Joanie tore the front of her blouse open with one dramatic wrench of her free hand, revealing the colorful massive tattoo of a demon which even flowed across her tiny breasts.