Dark Creations: The Hunted (Part 4) (6 page)

Of course, his unproductiveness had not been his fault.  He had
thought
he was following a pregnant woman, as per his maker’s command, and that he would seize her quickly, then resume his daily activities.  But things had not gone as he’d expected.  She had looked to be approximately five months into her pregnancy, and therefore fit Terzini’s criteria.  He had spotted her near the food court in a crowded shopping center and had tracked her until she had headed to her car.  He had watched her pull away then returned to his patrol car to continue his pursuit.  He had waited until she had been on a virtually deserted street before pulling her over.  Routine traffic stops had been the pretense he’d employed with all the other abductions.  They were effective, efficient ways of obtaining otherwise unwilling subjects.  But unlike his previous stops, the woman he had followed from the shopping center had been far from compliant.  From its inception, she had done nothing but protest.  His dislike of her had been immediate.

He had told her that he was stopping all cars similar in make, model and color to hers.  She had found fault in his excuse immediately and had criticized him, and all police officers, for conducting such searches.  She had been agitated and complained loudly that he had been wasting her time.  She had railed and protested, pausing only when she had noticed that his badge was not from her town, that it indicated he was from the Santa Ynez Police Department.  He had been abducting women from surrounding towns in an effort to
not
draw attention to the town he and Terzini operated in.  Before her, none of the other pregnant women had noticed a detail as small as the engraving on his badge.  Perhaps the others had been too stupid or unobservant to spot it, but she had.  And she had become indignant.  She had raised her voice at him and spoke huffily, as if she were his equal.  She had had the audacity to question his jurisdiction.  No one had ever questioned his authority before; No one.  He had not liked being questioned by a human, her in particular.  

He had wanted nothing more than to silence her, to strike her about her wretched face so that she would no longer be capable of speaking again.  But she had been pregnant.  That single fact had made her a valuable commodity.  So he had refrained from any irrational, albeit deserved, acts and allowed her to throw her driver’s license and registration at him. 

He had walked back to his car, thankful for the brief respite from being forced to look at her face.  When he had returned, he had planned to inform her that she would need to come with him, but had asked her how far along she was in her pregnancy first.  Her answer had come as a great surprise to him.

“
Pregnant
?” she had asked indignantly.  “I am not
pregnant
, you asshole!  I should report you for harassment, for pulling women over for no reason and insulting them!”

He had been shocked by her revelation, and looked at her with equal parts bafflement and disgust.

“You’re not pregnant?” he had asked without masking the incredulity he felt.  He had struggled to fathom how a woman managed to carry so much weight around her midsection without having a developing human inside it. 

“No, I’m not, you jerk!” she had shouted, her hoarse, nasal twang clawing at his eardrums.

She had inarticulately informed him that she was not, in fact, an overweight pregnant woman, as he had originally assumed.  Instead, she was a beastly creature who had overindulged gluttonously, regularly, until her body had swelled and bulged, dangerously close to eruption, from the excess blubber.  And she had had the nerve to be offended, to be mad at him. 

He had never met a more revolting human being during his short period of coexistence with them.  He had not been sure what to do and had had no choice but to let her go.  She had not been pregnant.  Further interaction would have been utterly futile, nearly as futile as the time spent trailing her had been.  So he had given her back her identification and had sent her on her way.  He had watched her go until her taillights had disappeared from sight.  He had felt irritated and unsatisfied by his encounter with the corpulent woman.  She represented all that was wrong with humanity, all that his maker sought to rectify. 

During Jarrod’s brief stint on Earth, he had come to share his maker’s viewpoint.  He was designed to feel an inherent aversion toward humans, but found that their behaviors often superseded the stringent indoctrination he had received.  To him, all humans were ugly, foul beings; the more insulation they possessed the more unsightly they became to him.  He watched in revulsion as they answered their every extravagant habit, filled their faces with as much fare their pudgy hands could find.  Food was not eaten out of necessity, to satiate an empty belly; it was not mere nourishment.  The humans he encountered relied on food to fill ridiculous holes their own vapid emotions had created.  They celebrated around tables overflowing with numerous rich courses, each more abounding than the last, until finishing with treats created almost entirely from sugar and butter.   Their overconsumption of food was representative of their whole belief system, how they continuously needed to be validated by extraneous sources, by each other.  He found the entire arrangement to be horrid and reprehensible, their sick codependence with food, with each other, nauseated him.   He could not wait until the world was cleansed of the parasitic human race altogether, replaced by his maker’s superior, comelier creations.  That would be the advent of paradise.

Until that moment arrived, Jarrod was forced to walk among the vile masses, outnumbered and stifled by their ghastliness.  Day after day, he labored through life forced to look at the disgusting drudges, had to smile at them, eat near them.  At times, their ugliness was more than he could bear; it overwhelmed him.  When their unsightliness overtook him, the only solace he found was to rush to the nearest reflective object and stare at himself.  His reflection was water in a desert, fresh air to breathe in otherwise fetid environment.  The truth of his beauty, his perfection, never failed to inspire him and refresh him anew.  His reflection gave him hope.  In it, he saw the future and drew strength to endure the world until the day of reckoning arrived.

After his unsuccessful abduction, his reflection had soothed him enough to return to the shopping center he’d found the obese wretch at and search for a woman who actually was pregnant.  It had not taken him long before he had spotted one waddling around.  Only her belly was rounded and her hand instinctively protected it as she moved through the crowds.  He had been certain she was expecting so he had watched her and waited until she left.  Unfortunately for him, she had traveled along routes that were frequented.  He had to follow her to her house in a cramped suburban development and, with her address and the information revealed by the computer mounted to his cruiser, had been able to learn her name and various other miscellaneous tidbits of information.  Her names, both maiden and married, had been the most useful pieces of information he had gathered.  Social networks revealed the rest.  On one such network, she had confirmed his suspicion by posting that she was twenty-two weeks into her pregnancy. 

He had left her at her house, relieved, and had known that returning at nighttime would be necessary.  

Partially enveloped in the velvety shadows of night, he looked up at himself, caught in a perfect glow of moonlight.  He saw the faint crease his earlier frustration had created between his eyebrows and frowned.  Frustration, though still an attractive expression on him, was by far his least flattering and threatened to permanently wrinkle his smooth skin.  He would be sure to reduce the likelihood of making such faces in the future by eliminating circumstances that caused them.  What he was about to do was one such elimination.

He sat outside her house, readied to right a wrong with his own perfect hands.  And though he was only supposed to act against the current social norms when ordered by Dr. Franklin Terzini, Jarod felt compelled to undertake an assignment he thought demanded immediate attention, and correct it.

He stepped out of his car and strode assuredly to the woman’s front door, only not the pregnant woman who had chronicled her prenatal period on a social networking site.  The woman he was visiting was not pregnant at all.

He knocked on her front door and waited for a response.  After several seconds, the door opened and a man stood in front of him.  He had to suppress a gag at the sight of the slovenly beast looming in the doorway.  Dirty and doughy, the man wore a soiled, sleeveless undershirt that did little to contain his generous belly which protruded out from his unbuttoned trousers and dripped like lard to his lap.  Jarrod found himself reconsidering his earlier estimation, that the man’s wife was the most hideous being he’d ever seen.  Clearly, the man of the house deserved that title.  Just looking at his sweat- and barbecue sauce-stained undershirt made Jarrod want to abandon his plan and flee the property immediately in search of a mirror.  But he knew he had to be strong, that to begin his maker’s mission independently, he needed to proceed without delay.

“Can I help you with something, pal?” the slob asked as his wife walked up behind him.  Her eyes widened in shock.

“That’s the jerk cop I told you about,” she whined and pointed. “The one who thought I was pregnant! What the hell are you doing here?”

Her husband appeared to be motivated by her aggravated droning as he puffed out his chubby chest and added, “Yeah, pal, what the hell do you want?”

Jarrod could not be bothered explaining the entire situation to them.  Without warning, he launched his powerful fist forward and punched the slob in his throat.  The blow silenced him immediately.  The man fell to the floor, a quivering heap of gelatinous skin, wheezing and clutching his throat.  His wife looked on in horror, sheer terror in her eyes.  She turned to run, but Jarrod moved quickly and caught her from behind.  He lifted her off her feet and slammed her facefirst into the far wall.  She fell to the floor and rolled over.  He stood, towering above her, glowering at her.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she pleaded tearfully.

“Why am I doing this
to you
?” he asked in disbelief.  “Take a look at yourself!  You think it’s fair that I have to walk around looking at the likes of you?  Do you think it’s fair
to me
?”

She began to cry harder.  “What are you talking about?  I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she sobbed.

The pathetic creature was not just hideously ugly; she was also too stupid to understand how much her presence sullied the face of the planet, the beauty of it.  Her wretchedness, her ignorance, neither was a pitiable quality.  Both served to irritate him.  He grabbed the woman by her face, took her head in both of his hands and gazed at her a final time.  He then twisted her head violently to one side and snapped her neck.  A wave of satisfaction washed over him as he looked in to her eyes again, saw their vacant, lifeless stare. 

His sense of gratification was interrupted by a sound, then movement in his peripheral field of vision.  The woman’s husband had begun to gasp and flail his arms.  Jarrod sprung to his feet immediately and was at the man’s side within seconds.  He scowled at the mess below.  The raspy, labored sound of him drawing in air between his blubbery lips, the jiggling it caused on the loose flesh beneath his chins, made for a despicable display.  The man writhed about on the floor of his dirty, cluttered foyer, wheezing and waggling the entire time.  He had also lost control of his bladder.  The pungent scent of urine combined with his offensive body odor created a vile stench.  Jarrod resisted the urge to vomit and lifted his knee, high, off the ground.  The man grew still and looked up in confusion.  His confusion ended abruptly as he stomped down hard on the man’s throat.  He was certain he’d crushed the slob’s windpipe, effectively ending his miserable existence.  He knew his act was noble and felt a satisfied sensation return.  The man did not writhe or jiggle anymore.  He lay motionless.  And though his bulging eyes and bloated features looked anything but peaceful, Jarrod knew he had ended the man’s suffering, his repulsive existence, and felt proud of himself.  He had begun his maker’s mission.  His only regret was that he could not tell Terzini of his deeds, of his honorable achievement.  The genius geneticist would not approve of a member–even one as elevated as Jarrod–initiating an exercise before being instructed to do so.  Thankfully, his approved
task was already under way.  He had sent fellow members, who also served on the local police force, to the pregnant social networker’s house.  He had charged them with picking her up and bringing her to his house either that night or first thing the next morning.  He would then deliver her to Terzini himself.  As long as his maker received a pregnant woman, there would not be any questions asked.  Neither the delay nor the time of night would raise questions.

As he stepped outside into the warm, clear night, he inhaled deeply.  The air smelled fresh and sweet, a sharp contrast to the noxious odor he was forced to breathe just moments ago.  A faint breeze stirred fronds overhead and cooled his face.  He smirked then remembered how handsome he looked when he smiled broadly, and his smile spread farther across his face.  He felt buoyant and swore that he could actually
feel
that the world was slightly improved, just a little less ugly.  He felt confident that he’d made the right decision.  He breathed in one last delicious gulp of air before he opened his car door and headed to this home where he hoped a pregnant subject awaited transport to Dr. Franklin Terzini’s laboratory, and become part of the changing history of humanity.