Pure Hate (2 page)

Fifteen Years later . . .

Paul was silent as he sat in the car next to the tremendous black man—the man he loved. He
knew the violence Malcolm was capable of when he was in these moods, but his
fear of Malcolm only fueled Paul’s passion for him. Malcolm was more than a man
to Paul. He was like a primal, savage, force of nature—a tidal wave or an
earthquake imprisoned in human flesh.

Paul knew Malcolm didn’t love him. He
knew the big, fearsome man only kept him around because Paul reminded him of
Reed. Malcolm had even forced him to undergo cosmetic surgery to make him look
exactly like his old high school friend. He knew that Malcolm wasn’t really
gay. To Malcolm, sex was just another way to humiliate and conquer Paul, to
punish him for not being Reed.

Malcolm often beat him, whipped him,
strangled him until Paul passed out, brutally sodomized him while hurling
threats and insults, cut, burned, and degraded him. Paul just kept coming back
for more. He was a glutton for pain and humiliation. For him it was better than
sex or love.

Paul had other lovers with whom he
had experimented with S&M and B&D, but it had always lacked something.
With Malcolm he discovered what that something was—realism. He knew in his
heart that Malcolm truly wanted to hurt him, and that at any moment he just
might kill him. That was the biggest turn-on of all, and after they killed Reed,
he’d have Malcolm all to himself.

Paul sat quietly beside Malcolm,
watching as his mood went from anger to depression. He had witnessed Malcolm’s
mood swings before and knew their sequence. Anger gave way to depression, followed by indifference, which then turned to a
wicked playfulness that proceeded violence. A shudder of fear and an almost
sexual excitement shivered up Paul’s spine as Malcolm began to smile.

Malcolm was in a frenzy as he read
through Reed’s newest novel. He ripped each page out as he finished it, wishing
it were Reed’s living flesh. He was growling low in his stomach and grinding
his teeth.

“That sonuvabitch!”

Malcolm grabbed the novel between his
teeth and ripped it in half, tossing the remains of his kill in the backseat
where the pages fluttered to the floor like the feathers of a gull chopped down
in mid-flight.

Malcolm started the engine and pulled
away from the curb, startling a small flock of pigeons—
flying rats
—as he
roared into the street, still growling, the bloodlust boiling in him like
physical hunger. The air around him was thick, lush with his hatred. It weighed
every movement with deadly purpose. Rage filled his shadow and gave it
substance. Someone was about to catch a bad one . . . a very, very bad one.

The block-long, battleship gray ’72
Impala purred like a lion with a belly full of antelope as it rounded the
corner. For Malcolm, the menacing rumble was soothing. The power of the huge
V-8 engine was comforting. It made him feel invincible. The sawed-off,
Mossberg, pistol-grip pump shotgun that hung in its handmade holster under his
sports jacket, his massive, heavily muscled, hormone enhanced physique, and his
irresistible homicidal rage completed the feeling of invincibility. He was a
monster. And he blamed Reed for it.

Fifteen years ago, it had seemed
impossible to him that Reed could’ve ever betrayed him. Even when he knew the
truth it had seemed unreal to him.

Didn’t Reed know how much he loved
him? Didn’t Reed know what he would do to him? What he was capable of?

He would know after tonight. He would
know and regret it.

Reed had taken away the only two
women that Malcolm had ever loved, taken them from right under his nose
,
while they laughed, joked, and dreamt together
every day, confided in each other, trusted each other. Reed had single-handedly
made it impossible for Malcolm to ever love or trust anyone ever again,
impossible for him to feel anything but his own pain, his own hate, his own
sorrow, his own emptiness. Now, he would have to bring the pain to the best
friend he’d ever had. He owed that to him, and he always paid what he owed with
interest.

The Impala cruised into the little
cul-de-sac just as night smothered the day. He parked a few houses down from
Reed’s home and waited.

Malcolm had been watching the house
for weeks. He’d seen Reed’s family playing in the yard, peered into the bedroom
window as Reed made love to his wife in the middle of the night. He wanted to
murder them both at that exact moment as Reed was pounding into her
,
poised on the edge of orgasm. He wanted to
smash through the window and chop them to pieces, a double homicide O.J. style,
but he restrained himself. He wanted the anticipation to build. He wanted
Reed’s pain to be exquisite.

Malcolm Davis slid silently from the behemoth
urban tank with a full-toothed grin chillingly contorting his face. In his
mind, he was already in the house, already awash with blood. His body uncurled
and rose to its full 6’5’’ height. He was an impressive and intimidating figure
with his loose fitting Hugo Boss suit riding smoothly over his massive chest
and shoulders. His onyx skin blended with the black suit and the black silk
Armani shirt. He merged into the night as the shadows began to knit together,
and he became just one more penumbra in the increasing darkness. He looked like
the angel of death in that music video from
Bone Thugs N Harmony:

Meet me at the
crossroads

Crossroad,
crossroooads, crossroooads.

Meet me at the
crossroads.

“Hurry up, white boy,”
Malcolm growled, and the slender “white boy” with the long, brown, feathered
hair and baggy, pleated pants slid from the passenger side of the Impala, eager
as a puppy to obey his master.

Reed’s house was small and vulnerable looking. It
was brand new. A production built tract home. A crackerjack box. It was a
single story with three bedrooms, two baths, one dog, one couple, two kids, and
one murderous sociopath grinning on the lawn. A fifteen-pound sledgehammer and
a pair of wire cutters and you could have leveled the house to its foundations.

The yard was professionally
landscaped and perfectly manicured with neat little shrubs of sage and rosemary
lined up by the front window, and a midget evergreen tree in the front yard. A
three-foot tall wrought iron fence surrounded the entire property. It looked
just like every other house on the block. Middle America.

Malcolm stepped over the gate without bothering
to open it and strode across the lawn, leaving footprints in the soft, freshly
watered sod. His shoes made wet squishy sounds as they pressed into the earth.
The sound made Reed’s old, overweight Rottweiler go wild.

The dog dies, too
, Malcolm thought, almost giddy, a predacious smile
tearing across his face like the grin of a piranha. And Malcolm had fangs. His
canines were capped with platinum and rose to sharp points. A diamond was
embedded in each one. He looked like some kind of hip-hop vampire.

“Knock on the door, white boy.” Malcolm growled again. His
longhaired accomplice slipped ahead of him and up the steps onto Reed’s porch.
Malcolm followed close behind, pulling the Mossberg from his coat and jacking a
round into the chamber.

Paul paused for a moment at Reed’s
front door, breathing heavily from an overdose of adrenaline. He was dying to
finally meet the subject of Malcolm’s obsession, the author of the madness and
misery that had engulfed them both. His whole arm shook as he reached out to
ring the doorbell. He wanted to kill so badly his dick was hard.

Reed was having a hard day. The sci-fi novel he
was working on was three months past due and he was no closer to finishing it
now than he was three months ago. This was the twentieth time he had rewritten
the last chapter and it still didn’t work. The characters had long ago gone
stale for him. His writing seemed stiff and wooden. This was no longer a labor
of love; it was just labor, pure and simple.
His heart wasn’t in it anymore. He was just imitating himself. Reed was nearly
paralyzed by the fear that he had become the one thing he had always detested—a hack. He had already spent the ten thousand dollar
advance, and the bills were starting to roll in again, but he couldn’t let the
manuscript go until it at least approached the level of talent he knew himself
to be capable of. If he just turned it in as is he would truly be a hack.
Reed’s perfectionism was going to drive his family to the poorhouse.

In the kitchen, his wife was creating one of her experimental, gourmet,
vegetarian dishes from a recipe book she bought at one of those over-priced
cooking stores. The kind that sold dried peppers, pickled mushrooms, and spices
he’d never heard of. Whatever she was cooking, it smelled delicious. His
growling stomach was one more distraction he didn’t need. The kids were
another. They were getting on his fucking nerves. Slamming his hands down on
the desk so hard the keyboard flipped over, he turned toward the living room
and did what all fathers do when urgent, effective, communication with their
children becomes necessary. He clenched his fists and yelled.

“That’s it! That is it! If you two
can’t play that damned thing together without arguing I’m gonna turn it off and
give it to the Goodwill! If you can’t appreciate it maybe they can find some
kids that will.”

“But Daddy, Mark keeps playing that
stupid hedgehog game over and over and he won’t let me play Gears of War!”
Jennie’s sweet, innocent voice came sailing out of the living room.

Reed’s seven-year-old daughter Jennie
looked every bit like her mother. She had her mother’s long blonde hair, fiery
emerald eyes, and long legs. Too bad she had her father’s disposition. The face
of an angel with the mouth and temper of a drunken sailor.

“That Sonic the Hedgehog is a faggot
game!” she taunted, scowling at her little brother with disdain as if she’d
caught him wearing his mother’s panties.

“Hey, hey, young lady! You watch your
goddamned mouth! Now both of you turn that crap off and get ready for dinner.
I’ve got to finish working goddamn it!”

“But daddy, I’ve almost got the high scoooore!” Mark
whined in a high-pitched squeal that made his father cringe.

Mark looked exactly like Reed did at
that age, the same crooked pointy nose and Dick Van Dyke chin, except Reed’s
pants never hung off his ass like his son’s over-sized black denims, and Mark
had a better haircut. Reed’s hair had hung down his back until he was a junior
in college, while Mark wore a short neat crew cut. That’s the first thing Linda
changed about him. They had been flirting with each other in literature class
for weeks before Reed had gotten up the nerve to ask her out. She had given him
her phone number and before their first date they had nearly fallen in love
over the phone. They were getting intimate for the first time when she told
him, “Look, I think you’re great but I can’t go out with a guy who looks like a
damned hippie. If we’re going to date, you’ve
got to cut that hair.”

He did, and in exchange she had
agreed to another date. Then another, and another, and then she agreed to marry
him, and then she gave him two beautiful
children. But sometimes, like when Mark did that annoying whining thing, Reed
wondered if he should have kept the long hair.

“Stop whining and turn it off like I
said!”

“Fuck! Man, this is bullshit,” Mark whined.

Reed snapped.

“Damn it, that’s enough! Both of you
get in here now!”

“Damn it, Mark. See what the fuck you
did? You got Daddy mad, you little punk!”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck you, too, faggot!”

“I said get in here
NOW
and
close your mouths!”

Jennie and Mark walked slowly into
the bedroom where Reed had been banging away at his Mac
,
trying to wrestle out an opus. Now he stood in
the middle of the room, glaring down at his two little brats with his hands on
his hips. Jennie crossed her arms over her chest and huffed defiantly, rolling
her eyes and stamping her foot the way she’d seen the black girls at school do.
Mark imitated his big sister, crossing his arms and huffing his own annoyance.
Reed fought the urge to slap the shit out of both of them. He took a deep
breath and mustered up the calmest, most diplomatic voice he could manage. He
still sounded pissed.

“Now, both of you listen. It is
absolutely
NOT
okay to curse in this house. You are children! You do not
use that type of foul language around your parents! Now, I am trying to finish
this novel so that maybe we can get some bills paid and perhaps have some money
to live off. But, if you think your stupid little video game is more important
than food, clothing, and shelter, then go ahead and keep this shit up.”

“Oh, but it’s okay for
YOU
to
curse.” Jennie grumbled under her breath.

“What did you say, little girl!”

“The doorbell is ringing.”

She turned and ran for the door, cutting short her
father’s lecture. Mark looked sympathetically at his father, shrugged his
shoulders, and chased after his sister. Reed threw up his hands and shook his
head in exasperation.

Jennie flung open the front door and
her jaw dropped as her mind slammed on the brakes. She couldn’t make any sense
of what she was seeing. Mark came running up alongside her and his eyes grew
large with surprise as he found himself staring at his father’s face on another
man. His eyes drifted to the darkness behind the daddy-clone. Something out
there in the night was grinning at him with long silver fangs. Fear raked its
icy talons across his spine even as the darkness reached for him. He tried to
grab his sister and pull her from the doorway but it was too late. The darkness
swept into the room and scooped him and his sister off the floor in arms that
felt like what it must be like to be hugged by a granite statue.

“Reed!” the darkness yelled as it
hurled the two terrified children into the living room. Their small, helpless
bodies slammed headlong into the far wall, knocking the wind from their lungs.
Dazed and frightened, they huddled together, crying for
their father. The long- haired guy who looked like their daddy charged into the
kitchen and attacked their mother, smacking her to the floor and dragging her
across the linoleum by her hair. A huge, curved knife with a spiked knuckle
guard was pressed against her throat, and as
she thrashed to free herself, it cut into her
skin drawing blood. That’s when Reed charged in looking like he was ready to
kill.

“Daddy!” the kids yelled, confidant
that he would be able to save them. They were confidant until the huge black
vampire turned to greet Reed and their father’s face drained of all color. He
looked small and helpless next to the tremendous black man with the shotgun.

“What the fuck is—”

Reed’s protest died in his throat as
his eyes widened with recognition and he came face-to-face with all his guilt
and fear.

“Malcolm?”

“Reed. I’m so glad you remember me
after all these years. I never forgot you. I almost didn’t recognize you with
the haircut but I never forgot . . .”

Malcolm leered at Reed, his face mere
inches away as if he were about to embrace him, that malevolent grin spreading
even wider, splitting his face like a jack-o-lantern.

“. . . Not for a second.”

“What the hell do you want, Mal—.”
Again Reed found his words choked off in midstream. This time it was due to
Malcolm thrusting his thumb into Reed’s Adam’s apple. He fell to his knees,
gagging and coughing, his eyes wide and teary.

“Do you know what I was doing while
you were going to college and getting married and writing your cheap little
books? Well, I’m going to show you. ” Malcolm’s eyes flashed with an almost
unbearable hatred. They burned into Reed as if he were trying to immolate him
where he stood.

“See, your death had to be perfect
because I can only kill you once, Reed. What a pity that is. I wish I could
keep killing you over and over again. There are so many ways I could make you
suffer. I have dreamed about it so many times. But I can only do it once. I
have to choose one death for you. One perfect death. It has to make up for the
pain you caused me all these years. So I’ve been practicing.”

Reed swallowed hard. He looked from
his son to his daughter, and then back to Malcolm.

“W-what do you mean, practicing?”

Malcolm smiled again.

“I cruised the little back-alley bars
on Pine Street, picking up pretty little long-haired white boys, taking them
home and cutting them up . . . practicing.” He spoke calmly and evenly as if he
were giving a lecture, but that searing hatred and madness still burned in his
eyes and his smile kept curling up on one side making it look more like a
snarl.

Reed looked over at the man who was
threatening his wife and noticed for the first time that the man looked exactly
like him. He wondered why Malcolm hadn’t killed him? If what Malcolm said was
true and he was the slasher who had been killing homosexual men plucked from
the seedy little gay bars on Pine Street, then surely that’s where he had found
this guy. So why hadn’t he killed him too? The Malcolm Davis he remembered
certainly didn’t need this anemic looking queer to pull off something like
this, but then again he had no idea what it was they were trying to pull off.
At least that’s what he told himself. The terrible thing, the horrible
god-awful thing, was that he knew . . . and he knew he couldn’t stop it from
happening.

“That kept me amused for a while.
Their fear was like yours now, lush and pungent. It was a delicacy. Their
deaths were pure ecstasy. But soon it wasn’t enough. I started doing couples
and then . . . entire families. Then . . . .”

He stared off into space, lost for a
second in some distant memory.

“. . . nothing helped . . . it . . . it
was never enough. I needed you. I needed to taste your fear, to drink your pain
like hard liquor. I was in agony, hating the world, trying to understand how
the people I loved, the people I trusted, could have done this to me. I could have had a lovely family like this.” He
gestured broadly at Reed’s terrified wife and kids.

“I could have had an over-priced
pre-fab house. I could have written novels, better than the shit you write!”

Reed flinched, wounded by that remark
despite himself.

Malcolm continued, “But you took all
that away from me, Reed!”

Despite his cartoonishly fiendish dress, the silver
fangs, and melodramatic little soliloquy that Reed was almost certain the man
had rehearsed, the emotions appeared genuine, and that in itself was
disturbing. Malcolm almost looked sad, on the verge of tears, as he glowered at
Reed. His eyes were full of questions, full of pain. He almost looked
vulnerable in a one-missing-plate-on-the-armored-belly-of-a-dragon sort of way.
Then the darkness and the madness and the flames came back into his eyes and
his face turned to carbonized steel. He bared his fangs in what passed for a
smile. He was through talking. It was time to bring the pain.

Too late, Reed allowed himself to fully comprehend what Malcolm was planning.

”I’ve killed you in my mind more times than I can
count, yet still you remain. So what is a
brotha to do but cut off the problem at its source?” When Malcolm smiled this
time, it resembled the slavering grimace worn
by the alien in that movie before it tried to thrust its secondary mandibles
through Sigourney Weaver’s skull. Reed could vividly remember that moment in
the movie theater when everyone shuddered in horror, imagining what it must be
like to face such a relentless murdering creature. Then he had been confident
that he would never find out. Now he was.

“No . . . no . . . no. You can’t!
Malcolm, we were just kids! I made a mistake! I’m sorry! What do you want from
me?!” Reed croaked, still clutching his throat and gasping for air.

The smile left Malcolm’s face
completely and his eyes pinned Reed down like the twin barrels of the Mossberg
he was leveling at the children.

“I want you to watch your family
die.”

The shotgun ripped the night in half
and blew little Mark’s chest open. Jennie’s screams filled the silence before
the thunder of the shotgun left the air. She recoiled in horror from the
bleeding corpse that seconds ago had been her brother. Linda reached out for
her dead son but was again smacked to the ground by her husband’s doppelganger.
Reed seized the shotgun and tried to wrench it free from the maniac who had
murdered his only son. A look of amusement crossed Malcolm’s face as he looked
down at Reed.

“Now, now, don’t make me kill you so
early in the game.”

Malcolm let go of the shotgun with
his right hand, just long enough to crush Reed’s nose with an elbow that once
more deposited Reed’s ass onto the carpet. Barely conscious, Reed still tried
to hold onto the Mossberg and delay for a second the carnage he knew was about
to take place. Malcolm jerked it free from his weakening grasp and kicked him
savagely in the chin with his mud encrusted Karl Kani boot.

“Don’t go to sleep, Reed. The show’s
not over.”

Malcolm reached under the coffee
table and seized little Jennie by her ankle. She kicked and fought as she was
dragged out of her hiding place.

“Take the shotgun, white boy!”

Reed’s look-a-like dragged Linda across the room,
the knife still cutting into her skin as she struggled, giving her a wet ruby
necklace that hung down between her pale breasts in gory contrast. Malcolm
handed the Mossberg over to Paul and took the knife. When he stood, he had
Jennie in one hand, dangling by her ankle, and the wicked looking knife, her mother’s
blood dripping off the blade, in the other.