Sociopaths In Love (15 page)

Walt had left about a half hour ago without
saying goodbye. Erica went out to the balcony, smoked a cigarette,
and loosely plotted a walking path. She didn't see any place that
looked that exciting. Most of it was pretty nondescript. There was
the dark tower she imagined housed a bunch of boring businesses.
Next to that was the parking garage where she had seen the figure.
She thought about looking for him but now, in the glare of
daylight, that notion seemed absurd. To her left was a library with
a bunch of seedy looking people milling about in front. That didn't
look like a lot of fun. She supposed she could have grabbed one of
the laptops they'd found and searched for points of interest but
that felt like too much work and rather than admit she was lazy,
she convinced herself it would remove a lot of the fun of
exploring. She finished her cigarette, changed in to some of the
clothes she had stolen, made sure she had her key fob, and hit the
street.

She looked toward the front desk as she
passed through the tiled lobby. The clerk did not even look at her.
She stepped outside and breathed in the damp air. To her right, a
fat bearded man had dismantled a cigarette butt depository, looking
for something smokeable.

"Hey," he said. "Got a smoke?"

She fished into her pack and handed him
one.

"Thanks so much, lady. Can I get a couple
dollars for the bus?"

She looked at him, smiled, and said, "Go
fuck yourself."

She began walking away and he called after
her, "That's real nice. Why don't you suck my dick you uppity
cunt?"

It was probably the first time she'd ever
been described as uppity. Steal some nicer clothes, infiltrate a
posh building and murder the people who live there, and apparently
people's perception began to change. At least he noticed her. She
walked a block to the south and it didn't take her long to notice
all of the street level storefronts were vacant and closed. Some of
them had broken windows but most of them had large banners
announcing the space was for lease only partially hiding the ripped
apart insides from the last business's hasty retreat. A few held
promises of great things to come.

For the first block, the only thing she
passed that seemed to have anyone around it was a bus hub. She
thought about getting on a bus. Taking one bus to a distant bus
stop and then getting on another bus there and then maybe getting
on a Greyhound bus and taking it as far as it would go. She wasn't
going to do it now but she would keep it in the back of her mind.
She could drive but didn't really like to and felt like riding a
bus would give her a greater chance to observe people.

She was looking for a clothing store but
didn't see many of them. One looked like it catered to young black
men and another seemed to specialize in formal wear and cater to
older black men. She moved another block over and came to a CVS.
She went in, grabbed a water from the refrigerator, and stole as
much makeup as she could get into her purse. It wasn't the great
stuff but she thought it would do. Besides, the corpse paint had
kind of grown on her. She supposed she could do something similar
that would probably last a lot longer with what she grabbed.

She passed a theater that didn't open until
later and wasn't showing anything she'd ever heard of anyway.
Finally she found something close to what she was looking for. It
seemed to be called the Oregon District. It only took her about
five minutes to walk from one side of it to the other but it
allowed her to make a quick inventory. It was mostly comprised of
bars and restaurants. There was a bookstore that didn't hold much
interest to her. Ditto the record store. There was a sex shop that
would be fine to kill a few minutes in if she wanted a laugh. But
there were a few small clothing stores she could probably spend a
couple of hours in.

By the time she left the Oregon District,
she had enough clothes to last her a couple of weeks. On the way
back to the building she passed a bar called the Epoch. She made a
note of it. It seemed to be the closest bar to the building.
Although she had done it to drop the baby off with the homeless
guy, she didn't think she wanted to wander around this area after
dark very much. And she didn't really see Walt wanting to go a lot
of places with her. She felt like there was still a little more to
explore but she wanted to get back to the building to drop off her
bags. She was tired of carrying them. She made a note to look for
one of the former residents' credit cards so she could just order
things online and have them delivered. That seemed like it would be
a lot easier.

In front of the building she saw Walt. He
had apparently swapped the Bug out for an enormous truck. There
wasn't a freezer in the back so he must have already taken that up.
Or had it delivered. That seemed more likely. Just when she thought
they were falling apart, it was the little things that reminded her
how much they had in common. She wondered if he killed the delivery
guy. Wondered if it would be considered ironic for the guy who
delivered the freezer to be murdered and then stored in said
freezer. She didn't really know what irony meant but knew it was a
cool word to use.

She stood, bags in hand, and watched as Walt
reached into the bed of the truck and pulled out a shiny red
wheelbarrow. He set the wheelbarrow on the sidewalk, reached back
into the bed of the truck, wrapped his hand around the ankle of a
corpse, and slid it toward him. He spotted her and said, "Could you
help me with this?"

She shook her head and was pretty sure she
heard him mutter "bitch" under his breath.

He pulled the corpse out, slung it over his
shoulder, dumped it into the wheelbarrow and wheeled it toward the
doors. "Would you at least get the door for me?" he said.

She swiped her key fob and pulled the door
open, holding it for him as he wheeled the body inside. She
followed him to the elevators. He pressed up and they waited a few
seconds, neither one of them saying anything. Erica looked down at
the body in the wheelbarrow.

"Another girl, huh?"

"Yep. It's my thing. Don't you think it
would be a little faggoty if I got off on killing dudes?"

"I don't know. More faggoty than sharing two
girls with a bunch of your guy friends?"

"You're a cunt."

"Thanks."

The elevator doors finally opened. A
well-dressed man stepped out and around them, glancing down at the
wheelbarrow and the corpse but Erica thought it was probably the
wheelbarrow that caught his attention more than the corpse. He
glanced at Walt and Walt said, "Dinner."

The man continued into the lobby. Erica knew
nothing would come of it.

They took the elevator up and Walt pushed
the wheelbarrow to the apartment. Erica held the door for him. She
shut the door behind them.

"I don't like it when you talk to me like
that," Walt said.

"I don't particularly like to be called a
cunt."

"Really?"

"Not really. No. I don't like to be called
that, I mean." She didn't know if that was true or not. Already,
she could feel Walt's anger rising and it made her tingle somewhere
deep inside.

"Stupid little whore," he said.

"Psychopathic cannibal. Corpse fucker."

She walked toward the balcony. He followed
her. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the railing. Walt
leaned against her. The railing dug into her hipbones and she could
feel his cock pressing into her lower back. He could lift her and
toss her off the balcony in a second, she thought. She moved back
against him. The sky was darkening to the southeast and the street
lamps and lights from the buildings winked on. Walt's hands were on
her hips, beneath her skirt, sliding her underwear down. She
continued smoking while he slid into her. She smiled as she came
thinking maybe it was her indifference that made him work
harder.

That night, she tried on
her new clothes and perused the latest edition of
Glamor Face
while Walt
dismantled the corpse in the master bathroom.

They fucked again before going to sleep.
This time it lasted a lot longer and was a lot more brutal.

Famished, Walt brought in a plate of meat
and scarfed it down while Erica dozed off.

Routine

Over the following weeks
they established something of a routine. Walt went out hunting
during the day, bringing back his kill and butchering it in the
bathroom. He had begun gluing the bones, which were numerous, to
the walls of the apartment. It didn't take long for the living room
to be completely covered in them. Erica would wake up in the
morning, shellac makeup on her face, dress in the most expensive
clothes she could steal, and wander around downtown Dayton. One day
Walt had surprised her with a silver Jaguar and, some days, she
took that to the malls and restaurants in the suburbs. They
reconvened in the evening to have lengthy, sometimes brutal sex
before falling asleep in front of the torture or war footage on TV
and waking up to do it all again the next day. They didn't talk
very much. If they did, Walt would talk about his kills and she
would talk about her errands and neither one of them was much
interested in what the other one had to say. Sometimes Erica would
mention someplace she wanted to go, like another city or another
country, and Walt would tell her that they were
just fine
here. If she got too
insistent then he told her she could go by herself and maybe if she
did then she shouldn't bother coming back. Him saying this should
have hurt her but, if the situation were reversed, she would have
probably told him exactly the same thing. Nearly every night she
contemplated going out to the balcony to try and see the man in the
parking garage but she never did. It was like this for the next few
months and she saw them doing it for a very long time. He seemed so
content doing what he was doing and she seemed so content wanting
to do anything else that she really didn't see either of them doing
anything different.

Some time in early October, they had their
worst fight yet. Only Erica wasn't really sure it could constitute
a fight. For her, it wasn't in response to any kind of emotion
happening inside of her. It was merely the reaction she felt like
she was probably supposed to have. She couldn't speculate as to how
Walt felt, his interior monologue was mostly a mystery to her, but
she imagined it was more self-defense.

The thing about a routine
was that when one part of that routine was altered it became
obvious. While they hadn't completely stopped having sex, the
nature of it had changed. While watching bombs drop over some
foreign country or a scared dark skinned man being waterboarded,
Walt stopped taking off his clothes and stripping Erica out of hers
before violating her in varied and mostly painful ways, inevitably
depositing a copious amount of come somewhere on her. Instead he
just lay there until she initiated it. Half the time she felt like
she was raping him. And then they would slowly grind against each
other for a few minutes before Walt would go soft or, if she were
on top, completely lose interest and fall asleep. She would then
either take her laptop into the bathroom and masturbate herself to
orgasm while watching pornography or, if she didn't feel like
browsing for porn (she was kind of picky), she would rub it out to
images of the models (sometimes male, sometimes female) she
remembered from
Glamor
Face
, imagining their heated, oily skin
sliding against her. And while this was okay, she came to realize
that it wasn't a substitute for the real thing.

On the night of the fight or disagreement or
tennis match of learned reactions or whatever it was, it had been
two weeks since the last time they had fucked. Erica spent fifteen
minutes giving Walt head, trying to get him hard. He said he just
wasn't interested. Didn't feel like it. She took her mouth off his
cock and lay beside him with a sigh.

"I notice the girls you've been bringing
back are younger and younger. Some of them are quite
attractive."

"Yep. I told you about that."

"Have you been fucking them?"

"No. Of course not. You asked me not to do
that."

For a while she had believed he hadn't been
doing this. But, in that second, the reality of it finally hit her.
Walt did exactly what he wanted to do. He didn't feel bad about
doing anything. Of course, he knew she didn't want him doing that,
but it didn't mean he had to stop doing it, it just meant he knew
he shouldn't admit to it.

"When did we start lying to each other?"

"What makes you say that?"
He acted really interested in what was on the TV, a man
reading
Ulysses
to
a dog while a young Mexican girl tap danced next to them. Possibly
torture footage. She wasn't sure.

"You've always said you do whatever you want
so I don't know why you're bothering lying to me."

"I don't know what you mean."

She stood up and went into the bathroom. He
hadn't yet gotten around to dismantling the corpse of the gorgeous
black-haired girl, completely naked, ice blue eyes staring up at
the ceiling. He'd gotten lazier and lazier about this. Sometimes
there would be two or three corpses in the bathroom and if she
questioned him about it he would describe it as a 'weekend
project.' Sometimes this meant a lengthy and elaborate gorefest but
mostly it just meant chopping them up and throwing their body parts
at pedestrians. As distasteful as it was, she reached down and slid
her middle and ring finger into the girl's vagina. She knew exactly
what she was feeling for, she'd certainly swallowed enough of it,
wiped enough of it out of her own vagina, felt enough of it drying
on her skin. She wished she had been more surprised when her
fingers came away slick with Walt's come. The thought of tasting it
was even more repulsive so she held it close to her nose and
smelled it. Not that she had smelled a lot of semen but Walt's was
very distinct, possibly because of his unique diet consisting
mostly of human meat.