Sociopaths In Love (9 page)

Walt fed coins into the
control module and Erica thought,
Machines
are a weakness
. She had just enough time to
cover her face before the first blast of water hit her. It stung
but felt good and cleansing and she almost came when he sprayed her
vagina.

"Sit down. Spread your legs."

Erica grabbed his jeans and sat down on
them, spreading her legs. Walt shot a stream of water at her. She
braced herself with her hands on the pavement behind her. The water
pounded her clitoris and she almost cried out with pain and
ecstasy.

"Now get on your hands and knees. I need to
make sure that asshole's good and clean."

Her hair soaking wet, water running into her
eyes, Erica got onto her hands and knees, raising her ass into the
air.

"I need you to spread your cheeks."

She put her forehead against the pavement,
reached back, and spread her buttocks. Walt blasted her anus and
she fought the desire to shit, the sphincter closing as tight as a
fist.

When he was finished, Walt had a crazy
electric look in his eyes.

"Now you do me."

She repeated pretty much the same routine.
When Walt sat on his ass and spread his legs, he covered his
scrotum while she sprayed his cock. Thick ropes of come ejaculated
onto his lower stomach and she sprayed it away.

Before putting on their clothes, Erica lay
back on the hood of the car and Walt ate her out for about a half
an hour but she never came.

He gave up. They put their clothes on, got
back in the car, and headed for the highway. They passed a thin old
woman pulling a Radio Flyer with what looked like a roadside
memorial in it.

Erica fought the urge to look at the woman
through the rear window, fought the urge to look back at the place
they had just left. She didn't know if she was afraid those things
would still be there or if she was afraid of realizing they'd never
been there.

Eventually, they came to a town called
Marshall and one of the highway signs had ample places for lodging.
Walt got off the exit, pulled through a Wendy's, ordered an
abundance of food, drove directly to the second window to retrieve
their food, and then drove away. He pulled into the parking lot of
a Ramada and they ate in the car. They walked into the lobby. The
night clerk didn't even glance up at them. They took the elevator
to the top floor. Walt said all these places had a presidential
suite or equivalent and no one ever stayed there, especially on a
weeknight. He pulled his gun from his pants, shot the lock, and
they walked in, shutting the door and using the deadbolt to hold it
closed. Erica took a long shower, a real shower with soap and
shampoo and hot water and everything, and wrapped a towel around
herself because she didn't want to put her dirty clothes back on.
Walt hopped in after her. She lay on the bed and turned the
television on. She kept pressing the button, hovering no longer
than a couple of seconds on any one channel, digesting nothing, not
wanting to digest anything. Some new torture video must have gone
viral and most of the channels consisted of clips from this. People
in military garb beheaded, spinal columns poking out of red necks,
severed heads that looked more Halloween prop than human. Well,
that was something to digest anyway. Otherwise the television might
as well have been filled with mannequins speaking a foreign
language. Before Walt came out of the bathroom, she decided the
light the TV emitted made her angry so she turned it off and waited
in the darkened quiet.

Walt came out of the bathroom naked. Erica
threw her towel off. They went to sleep a couple of hours
later.

Presents

Erica woke up before noon the next day. Walt
wasn't in the room. She decided to take another shower and think
about the dream she'd had while it was still fresh in her head. She
didn't remember many of her dreams.

Walt drove a luxurious car. She wasn't sure
what kind of car it was, but it had plush leather seats and an
almost science fictional array of bright electronics embedded in
the gleaming wood of the dash. She felt happy but had the distinct
feeling some other emotion was on the backburner of her brain.
Something like fear or anger or anxiety. It seemed like it was in
the future, she wasn't sure how near or far because it felt like
she had been with Walt for a long time. He drove really fast and
she kept telling him to slow down. Maybe that was the cause of the
anxiety. But he kept going faster and faster. It was bright and
sunny outside and the windows were down and, with the exception of
the speed they were going, it was a nice ride. Despite her
protestations, even the speed seemed excessive and exhilarating.
They were in the mountains somewhere. It could have been back in
Missouri or somewhere else. Hell, she didn't know what anywhere
else looked like. Suddenly the road ended and they were headed for
the sheared gray of a mountain. She'd seen these all over in the
hills, some construction crew just blasting and sawing their way
through a mountain to put down a road. Rigid with terror, Erica
braced for the impact but there wasn't one. They passed through the
rock wall of the mountain until they were in a dark room. She knew
the room was dark but it seemed lit with some internal light. Like
there weren't any windows or anything and the walls and ceiling
were black. Maybe this was what it was like to be able to see in
the dark. It finally dawned on her that she was in a cave. The
thought of caves normally made her feel claustrophobic and squirmy.
But all she felt at the exact moment was an almost fluffy sense of
comfort. Walt was no longer next to her. Noticing them for the
first time, she saw that hundreds of beds filled the chamber of the
cave – for as far as she could see. An old person slept in each
bed. It was their gray skin giving off all the light. Something
like an umbilical cord trailed from each of their stomachs and into
the darkness above. She knew they were deriving oxygen and
nutrients through their cords but had no idea what they were
attached to. At first, she had a panicked feeling they were
attached to some kind of hovering, mammoth creature. Some kind of
monster mother. When she strained harder to see where they led she
saw hundreds of glowing specks in the ceiling of the cave and then
she thought the cords were connecting the old people to the outside
world and that was what was keeping them alive. When she heard the
crack of gunfire followed by lunatic laughter, she strained to see
where the sound came from. Walt, several beds away from her, had
his gun aimed down at another one of the sleeping people. He pulled
the trigger, there was a blinding flash of light, and then the
glowing gray person went dark. She tried to call out to him, tried
to ask him what he was doing but her mouth wouldn't work. He shot
another one and there was the same blinding flash of light – even
the light reminded her of something but she couldn't figure out
what it was – before the person went dark. She tried to move toward
him. Since her mouth didn't work, she thought she could physically
restrain him. It seemed impossible to move around all the beds. As
soon as she made it past one, there was another one at a slightly
different angle. She felt like she was in a maze. Like no matter
how quickly she moved, there would always be a bed in between she
and Walt and she would never be able to get him to stop. He shot
another one and another one and she realized she didn't really care
that he was shooting the old people. What she cared about was that
when all of the old people had been shot and shattered, the cave
would be plunged into darkness and then it could collapse around
her without her even knowing it.

The warm shower water beat down on her. She
was surprised at how perfectly she recollected the dream. She tried
to play it over and over in her head, knowing she was certain to
forget it if she didn't. Maybe it would be better off
forgotten.

She got out of the shower, dried off, and
walked out of the bedroom to find Walt lying in the bed. A couple
of shopping bags sat on the floor.

"Where did you go?" she said.

"Stepped out to get you some clothes.
Looking at panties gave me a hard on."

"Thanks." The thought of clean clothes
seemed like heaven to her.

She pulled the bags up onto the bed and
pulled the contents out. She guessed she could still be thankful
the clothes were new and clean but other than that . . .
It was like Walt's purchases had been designed to insult her.

The underwear were the huge, unflattering
kind, mint green. The clothes consisted of a matching, satiny top
and bottom, both of them belonging to some kind of running suit she
wasn't sure people wore anymore. Predominantly electric blue, the
zippered top was festooned with sparkles and a weird gold pattern.
She'd never seen anyone under seventy wear anything like this. The
bottoms were elastic at the waist and ankles.

Walt stared at her with a perplexing
expression on his face like maybe he was waiting for her to laugh
or maybe he was waiting to laugh at her. "I wasn't sure what you
liked."

She wanted to tell him that no one in her
right mind would like this shit but forced herself to calm down.
He'd done something nice for her, after all.

"They'll work," she said.

"We can always get something later."

"Yeah, we might have to do that." She
couldn't help laughing, just a little, before putting the clothes
on. She would have to avoid mirrors until she found something
else.

Goals

Back in the car the terrible reek was
powerful. They began what was possibly the last leg of their
trip.

"The good thing is," Walt said, "is that
this car has a window that isn't blown out. The bad thing is that
you have to keep it down because it smells so fucking bad."

Erica rolled her eyes. He'd been complaining
about the way the car smelled since they'd gotten in it over an
hour ago.

"Why don't you just stop and get another
one? I thought you were going to get one at the hotel."

"I was but I didn't see anyone in the
parking lot. I have to be able to take the keys from them. I can't
hotwire worth shit."

"So we'll probably reach Dayton by tonight,
huh?"

"Looks like it."

"What are we going to do when we get
there?"

"Whatever the hell we want."

"I'm still trying to figure out what that
means."

"You don't know what you want?"

"Not really."

"Have you ever known what you wanted? Like
when you were little."

Again it was like he was asking her to dip
down into some well of memory that was mostly empty. Because she
felt like she had to say something, she said, "I don't know. I
guess I wanted what everyone wanted. Go to college. Meet somebody.
Get married. Have kids. Have a house. A career."

"And you don't want those things
anymore?"

She didn't know if she
didn't
want
those
things anymore. Now, she felt like it would be impossible for her
to have them. She felt tainted. It didn't seem like one who'd seen
the things she had in the past couple of days would be allowed to
participate in a normal functioning society. And she wasn't really
sure how much she wanted them before hooking up with Walt. So,
okay, say her Granny
had
been dead before Walt shot her in the face.
Couldn't Erica have accepted her death and dealt with things in a
normal way? There would have probably been a life insurance payout
and Granny had signed the house over to her when she'd turned
eighteen. She could have sold that – not for a fortune – but it
would have been enough for her to float on for a couple of
years.

"You didn't say anything," Walt said. "It
was like you thought about what you were going to say and then
. . . nothing."

"Well, I know I don't want to go to college.
I tried it for a little while. Not for me. Everything else I think
I'm too young to really think about right now. Or maybe I kind of
want them but . . ." She exhaled an exhausted breath.
"Maybe I just don't know how to go about it. Fuck. Maybe I'm just
too lazy to try."

"Except meeting somebody.
You
have
met
somebody."

She glanced over at him but he stared
intently at the road and didn't return her look. "Yeah. And it
feels really good when he fucks me . . . And I love him
more than anything."

"You want to?"

"Want to what?"

He was unbuttoning and
unzipping his pants by way of answering her. All she had to do was
slide hers down and try not to laugh at the
zhoot zhoot
rustle of them. He pulled
the car over on the side of the highway and she was crying by the
time he finished.

"I feel like somebody else." She could taste
blood on the back of her tongue and wasn't sure if it was hers or
his.

They were moving again. Had been for a
while. Now crossing into Ohio.

"How's that?"

"I need my clothes. I need my makeup."

"But those are just things."

"My things."

"We can get your things anywhere."

"Can we do it soon then?
You asked me what I wanted to do.
That's
what I want to do. I want you
to drive this foul smelling piece of shit to a mall and occupy
yourself while I go in and get the stuff I need. Maybe you could
get a different car."

He nodded. "It's Ohio. There's probably a
mall every fifteen minutes or so. I'll stop at the next exit with
potential."

They didn't really come to much until they
were about a half an hour from Dayton. Another hour and the mall
would have probably been closed. Not that that would have been a
huge problem. It would have just meant a few more obstacles and a
greater hassle.