Highways to Hell (8 page)

Only the results were important.

What he did was simple—he extended a foot as Hank walked by, and the big man pitched forward, the nightgown-clad woman spilling out of his arms. It was an awesome sight, like watching a mountain collapse.

Will liberated the knife from the brunette’s hand before she knew what was happening. He moved with a speed surpassing anything in his experience.

One moment he was on the sofa.

The next moment the knife was in his hand and he had a knee planted squarely in the middle of Hank’s back.

A fraction of a moment later the blade was buried to the hilt in Hank’s neck.

Hank spasmed.

Tried to rise.

Will yanked the knife out and put it in him again, this time through the ear.

He gave it a twist and yanked it out again.

The knife rose and fell several more times. Hank was dead after the first few thrusts, but Will wasn’t inclined to stop butchering the behemoth’s body. Adrenaline was part of it, but the murderous fury was also fueled by paranoia, by a conviction instilled by a lifetime of watching bad movies on late night TV.

He imagined Hank rising from the dead like Jason Voorhees.

Crazy.

Thing was, Will could just see it.

It would be a defiance of reality every bit as absurd as the notion that he’d managed to successfully vanquish the monster that was Hank.

So he kept stabbing him.

After a while, he rolled the big body over and stared at the dead man’s unseeing eyes.

A chilling sight.

But then Will experienced another flash of inspiration.

He grinned. And he started cutting again.

Daylight.

The house and immediate vicinity was crawling with cops and evidence techs. The authorities had been summoned by the concerned night manager of a Pizza Zone restaurant. One of their delivery boys had gone out on a run last night and never returned.

Detective Mitch Roth suspected no one would ever see the pizza boy again. He was officially missing, but he had a feeling his body would be discovered in a ditch or ravine sometime in the coming hours.

He leaned against the archway leading into the blood-splattered living room.

He was trying to stay out of the way of the evidence techs—Lord knew they had their hands full with this one.

He heard footsteps on the hardwood floor behind him.

Detective Cooper moved into his field of vision. “Looks like some shit out of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Roth nodded. “Yeah, what they did to the one guy, the big one in the leather pants...you just don’t want to believe people capable of sick shit like that are out there.”

Cooper grunted. “You know they are, Mitch. The world’s fulla scum.”

One of the evidence techs gagged behind his mask.

Another tech leaned over his shoulder, grimaced at what he saw, and looked at the detectives. “You guys should see this.”

Roth and Cooper exchanged wary glances.

Both men started moving toward the techs.

The first tech said, “Careful where you step. Stay off the marked areas.”

Roth said, “So what is it?”

They were looking at a pizza box.

The lid was emblazoned with the familiar red and green Pizza Zone logo. Someone had scrawled PEEK-A-BOO across it in big letters with a marker.

A tech lifted the lid.

Cooper shuddered.

Roth could barely breathe. “Oh...Jesus...”

The remains of a barely-eaten pizza were at the bottom of the box. Stretched from crust to crust was something that resembled a mask.

Except it wasn’t.

Cooper said, “It’s the big guy’s face.”

There was more.

Two bloody orbs that had to be eyeballs had rolled into the corners of the box.

Roth couldn’t suppress what happened next. He upchucked all over the box and coffee table, tainting a shitload of evidence and soiling his new suit.

He tendered his resignation later that afternoon.

Will Hopkins’s body wasn’t discovered in a ditch or ravine.

He was very much alive—more alive than ever, in fact.

He rode off into the night with ‘Starlene’ (whose real name turned out to be Nicole), Crystal, J-Dog, and a woman in a nightgown they jokingly re-named Patty.

As in Patty Hearst.

The gang had many adventures together in the coming years.

Will avoided the dreaded fate of a life in mundane suburbia.

And they all lived happily ever after.

The same could not be said for some of the people they encountered on the endless highways and byways of the land of the free.

Now that it was done he wished he could take it back. Now that the surge of adrenaline had passed and he was no longer in the heat of the moment, he wanted to roll back time and choose another course of action.

It wasn’t possible, of course.

There was no ‘Undo’ button for bloody murder.

The blood-spattered cleaver slipped from Jack Roth’s numb fingers and fell in a smooth arc toward the hardwood floor, where the exquisitely sharp blade embedded itself with an emphatic
thunk
.

Jack was alone in the room.

Now.

The only other humans in the room had recently ceased breathing. And dead people didn’t count as company. Jack didn’t know the guy’s name, but he recognized him from the coffee shop down the street, Mondo Java, where he worked as a cashier. Lorene, Jack’s now-deceased fiancee, was always raving about their lattes. Visits to Mondo Java were a long-established part of her daily routine.

Now, of course, Jack knew the attraction was about more than coffee.

Attraction he understood. That was something you could forgive. Monogamy didn’t render a person blind. There was a place for benign, purely aesthetic appreciation of the opposite sex. But to take attraction one step further and betray the trust of a committed relationship just wasn’t something he could let pass.

Still.

Probably he’d overreacted.

If things had gone according to the night’s original schedule, he wouldn’t be standing in the middle of this charnel house of a room with blood all over his nice clothes. He’d been set to spend the weekend in another city on business, but he’d only gotten as far as the airport lounge. Luke Riggins, a senior VP at his company, called Jack’s cell number to inform him the scheduled round of meetings had been canceled. Jack, who’d been none-too-happy about spending yet another business weekend away from Lorene, decided not to call her.

He wanted to get a bouquet of roses and make a romantic, surprise return.

She’d been surprised, all right.

“Surprise” was a mild word for what Jack felt upon seeing Lorene and the coffee shop guy writhing about on the sofa in a state of partial undress. She’d been on her back, with the guy kneeling between her knees and fumbling with the clasps of her bra. When Jack opened the door to their penthouse apartment, the shirtless guy shrieked like a woman, grabbed his shirt, and began mumbling apologies as he headed for the door.

But loverboy never made it to the door.

Jack knocked him to the floor with one blow to the throat. Lorene opened her mouth to scream, but he moved to subdue her just as quickly. Then he went into the kitchen to get the cleaver.

And now Lorene and Mr. Java lay dead on the floor.

In pieces.

Lorene’s head was in a flower pot on the coffee table.

Mr. Java had been posthumously castrated.

And Jack felt ill.

Very, very ill.

Not at all as he’d felt in the midst of creating the carnage before him. There had been no thought process involved in what happened, no conscious decision to kill and mutilate. He’d acted on brute instinct, blind rage consuming him as he butchered their flesh and wallowed in blood. The animal primitivism of the act had affected him another way, triggering an arousal that was only now beginning to fade.

But now he was shaking. His teeth chattered and he felt feverish, like a person coming down with the flu. Sweat streamed from his pores, gluing his starched white shirt to his back and armpits. He coughed and loosened his tie so he could breathe. Looking at the strewn parts of his dead love’s body, he realized he’d crossed an important line, from human to monster.

Numbness gave way to sobs and tears.

He removed his tie and shirt and covered his face with his hands.

“Jesus, forgive me.”

But Jack wasn’t really a religious man. Beseeching Christ now was a pitiful joke. How could there be forgiveness for his awful deeds? He felt vile, like something gross you wipe off your shoe. Like fresh dogshit. The memory of the erection he’d sported while chopping Lorene’s limbs off shamed him.

Jack had always considered himself a moral man, a good man. He’d gone out of his way to live right and treat others with respect and kindness. He’d never so much as raised a hand to a woman. Jesus Christ, he donated money to shelters for battered women every year! So he couldn’t understand why he’d so easily surrendered to murderous fury. Maybe hitting the guy once would’ve been acceptable. It was what guys wanted to do when confronted with a situation like this.

But to kill him?

To kill Lorene?

To butcher them?

These were not the actions of a sane man.

How could he live with this?

Well.

The answer to that question, at least, was simple.

He
couldn’t
live with it.

He thought again about his wish to take it all back. It didn’t seem fair that a few minutes of unthinking violence should so irrevocably alter everything. He should be able to reverse this insanity. Erase the whole regrettable episode from his memory banks. Remembering his thought about life not having an ‘Undo’ button, he now thought a more desirable option would be a ‘Reset’ button, like the ones on video game systems—you used them when you didn’t like the way the game was going and wanted to start over.

If there is a God, he thought, He needs to enter the goddamn digital age.

Come on, God, bestow upon humanity the miracle of the holy reset button!

Grief-choked laughter bubbled out of Jack.

And he thought, I’m going insane, yes I am, la de da de da.

“You’re not insane, Jack.”

Jack jumped at the sound of the other voice in the room.

“Okay, so maybe you flew off the handle here a bit, but you’re not insane.”

The voice was behind him.

Jack whirled around and gasped at the incongruous sight of a smirking, leather-jacketed thug leaning against a wall. The dark-complected man’s shaggy hair was greasy and he had what looked to be a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He wore boots, faded jeans, and a t-shirt emblazoned with a picture of a beer bottle and the words “Salvation Ale”. A halo and wings logo fluttered above the bottle.

Despite the substantial guilt he felt, Jack nonetheless panicked at the notion of a witness to his crime. The tip of his right foot nudged the embedded cleaver blade. Indignation flooded his senses, overwhelming the guilt and remorse. This person was an intruder in his home! He was violating Jack’s privacy. He was a threat, a danger clear and present.

Jack knelt and pried the cleaver out of the floor.

The thug chuckled. “You really don’t need to do that, Jack.”

Jack snarled and leapt toward the intruder. The man just kept smiling as Jack bore down on him, and he didn’t so much as flinch when the cleaver blade slammed into his shoulder.

Jack wrenched the blade out and whipped it around again, this time burying it in the grimy fuck’s neck. The force of the blow was nearly enough to fully decapitate the stranger. Jack pulled the blade free and finished the job with one more swing of the cleaver.

The man’s head tumbled off his shoulders.

And he caught it in his outstretched hands.

Staring up at him, the head said, “You have some serious anger management issues, Jack.”

Jack screamed and ran out of the room.

He raced into the bedroom he’d shared with Lorene for so many months and barricaded the door by pushing the dresser in front of it. Then he stepped back and stood staring at the blocked door while he huffed and puffed. Then he cursed himself for continuing to behave like a fucking moron. He’d made the mistake of every bubble-headed bimbo in every dimwitted slasher movie ever made. He’d trapped himself in another room inside his home instead of
fleeing
the goddamn place.

Jack seized handfuls of his hair and shrieked.

“Severed...heads...don’t...TALK!”

Of course they didn’t. And Jack dismissed the notion that he’d actually seen this happen. This was just added confirmation that he’d suffered a psychotic break. Something in him had snapped when confronted with the visual evidence of Lorene’s infidelity, a crucial component of his soul that was just irreparably broken.

I need to kill myself, he thought.

I can’t live like this.

He heard a sigh behind him. “Jack, if you kill yourself, you’ll burn in the lake of fire. And you don’t want that, trust me. But them’s the rules, buddy.”

Jack remained where he was.

Why bother confronting a stubborn hallucination?

“You’re...not...there. You...don’t...exist.”

“Jack, look at me.”

There was some steel in the intruder’s voice now. The jovial quality was gone. Jack felt helplessly compelled to obey it.

He swallowed hard and turned around.

The stranger was sitting on the edge of the bed. He was still cradling his head in his hands. The stern expression on his face sent a shudder through Jack. It should have been an absurd tableau: a still-sentient decapitated head and a still-mobile headless body.

But Jack didn’t feel like laughing.