Bare, save for their undergarments, Kirsten laughed hysterically, running to get away from Willy, as he imitated a dog, growling with her ringer tank top in between his teeth and chasing her around the master bedroom in circles.
The good time was important; they both had to have a good time in order to gain his trust, and for that to happen, she had to actually experience a good time. She had to enjoy his company, enjoy herself to put on a good, genuine impression, make the mood right—and she really did—this guy was cute, fun and really funny, that was where the tinge of regret had flickered dimly. What a waste. But she needed her fix for the night and if she didn’t get it tonight, there was no telling what she would do next. Would she stick the other one? The one who was kind of cute but also kind of a pussy? Probably. He was also a perfect first timer for Holly, so ultimately the match-ups tonight couldn’t have been planned better.
What if it came down to just Holly? Would she do her? She didn’t know…yeah, maybe she would. She hadn’t killed many women in her life (one or two) and it wasn’t that she didn’t like it—of course she had no qualms about it—she just got her thrills eliminating the malefolk. It had started when she was thirteen, which would make this her ninth year now. She would go as far as to say it was better than intercourse; as the days and killings went by and she got more sexually-concerned, the killings made her feel more and more tingly and overwhelming with a lustful desire afterwards. In fact, the last one that happened two months before nearly made her climax in her panties. She…it…whatever it was was evolving into something gargantuan, something immortal, something above law, above all power, and she was lucky to have possessed it, fulfilled it and have it become a part of her.
Holly was a good listener and a follower, and she was fun to be around, too. It was still unclear to her as to why she’d taken her under her wing. Maybe because playing a shepherd was therapeutic; guiding the weak and vulnerable to reach out and touch that disclosed, off-limits, God-knows-what-lies-beyond-that-point region in the fogged, muddled and shadowed depths to where the human mind feared to tread but believed an answer to so many issues would be found. She herself found that special place when she blessed Toby Matthews—the ugly burnout loser from school, at the age of thirteen.
To make a long story short: although they shared answers and joked around in science class, he was on a whole other lower level than her and he should have kept his place. They were assigned to dissect a frog together, that led to a comparison between the human-like organs of the frog to the organs and insides of different horror movies. She confessed to him, in a moment of weakness that she'd like to refer it, that she loved blood and guts ever since she could remember; he responded energetically and enthusiastically—ecstatic as though he found and shared a bond with an attractive girl—that had a library of different imported Euro-trash gorefests, imitated snuff films, the whole nine. She tried her best to keep their pseudo-friendship at a minimum and only in science class where it was to stay; anywhere outside that room, walking down the hall, in the cafeteria or otherwise, she did not acknowledge his presence. If he noticed, he never said anything. Then came the day of her thirteenth birthday, and Toby must have figured the so-called relationship was open-to-the-public because he had drawn a picture and posted it on her locker with Scotch tape. The picture was of her, sitting and smiling and before her was a pile of human organs in the shape of a birthday cake, poked with exactly thirteen candles on the top surface. She looked at how he had drawn her. In the midst of her ravaging fury and overwhelming humiliation, she felt it—a very small and very brief feeling that flashed and gone like the glowing of a firefly—she felt touched, perhaps a little infatuated with him. It poked gently at her heart giving it a very warm feeling, but again, it was only in passing. That day the kids let her have it. The boys laughed at her, her girl friends second-guessed her, other losers in his clique began frolicking with her as if they had a chance, too. Never in her thirteen years in existence did she want to destroy something with the strength of her bare hands so badly. About a month later, when it all simmered down, she whispered to Toby in science that day that she would like to meet after school at 3:20. She wanted to wait twenty minutes after everyone left so they wouldn't be seen together. Once they met outside, she told him of a creek she liked to go to to skip rocks and asked if he was interested in going to which he had greatly accepted. They reached the creek and they walked deeper down the creek, and deeper, and deeper. Toby's concern grew and was asking why she had come down this deep in the creek to skip rocks when he had been interrupted mid-sentence when a large rock collided to the back of his head several times. Kirsten sobbed, lifting the heavy rock and slamming it down onto his head continuously, screaming him, cursing him.
After a hundred, two-hundred, five-hundred times, she stopped to take a look at him.
Holy shit, what a rush...
There was a streaming river not too far from where they were, were the water bumped into several rocks and stones and a mini-waterfall was stationed somewhere down the path. Kirsten grabbed him by his ankles and pulled him all the way down to the running current and pushed him in. It was twelve days before a kid and his dad found his body washed up on the riverbank half a mile down from the mini-waterfall. The school was in tears. Students, faculty, collages of family pictures in the hallways. Even her own girl friends and boys they hung out with were hugging and crying! She was absolutely astounded that everyone was so torn up over this guy! She was the closest thing he had to as a “friend” that she was aware of. She thought nothing at school or anywhere else in the world would change with him gone. She stood corrected, big time. After a week of mourning, the police began to arrive, roaming the halls, asking questions. The word “terrifying” reached an entirely new level for her; panic was pulsing, throbbing every nerve in her body. Then the second day of the police interrogations, she had been called in to the principal's office for a little sit-down. She informed him that they had talked and cut a frog open together and joked around, telling each other what movies they liked, and that he drew a picture for her, and that was when she erupted in sobs—it wasn't hard to do; in fact it was a little (very little) genuine, looking at the drawing of her, she remembered that heartwarming feeling and managed to take a little of it and prolong it to an uncontrollable fit of tears. The detective laid his rugged, heavy hand on her shoulder and said that unfortunate accidents happen and sometimes happens to those who don't deserve it—
Ha!
—and the only thing we can do is keep him in our hearts, remember his positive aspects, know that he's in a much better, happier place and remember we owe it to him to live our lives as merrily and joyfully as we can. Kirsten played the old man like the big dumb cello that he was. She then heard that the killing was ruled out as accidental. That was all fine and dandy for her, but it didn't mean the trace of it was totally gone. A handful of kids in particular, those who were to recall the drama between her and Toby, raised an eyebrow to her every now and then, but eventually that minor tension had cooled and evaporated, and that was just as well, for afterwards was right around the time her and her family were packing everything in cardboard boxes and moving to St. Louis.
Kirsten would always feel that block of solid concrete in her hands; the weight of it as she heaved it over her head; the way she threw it down with such extravagant force; the puncturing, cracking sounds of his skull and the dripping, suckling, sploshing sounds of his innards; the amounts of blood and brain that his tiny fat head produced and were now splattered on the dirt ground, clinging to leaves and sticks…it was as close to God as you could possibly get.
That was what she became that day in that creek—an immortal, esoteric goddess. It was better than anything in the world; more satisfying than slipping into a hot tub; more captivating than winning the Olympic gold; more rewarding than accomplishing a friendly deed like rescuing an old couple from a burning building…this was as close to the next world—the greatest technology; the next POWER as
you could get. Hell, everyone should be doing this. But then again, if you gave it that much thought, if everyone did, then she would just be another ordinary. And being “ordinary” was never her style. Never was and never would be. She had the grade-A package and what was beautiful about it was that it was all a hundred-percent natural. No surgery, cosmetic or plastic; of course there was the make-up even though her elder relatives said that it debased women but they were some over-the-hill fucktards anyway—the ass and her prized-possession of a 38D chest, including her genuine long blonde hair, she was just more than a goddess—she was a fucking goddess that spawned from the imagination of every sheepish being that walked the earth; the object of every male’s wet dream (and female for that matter; they were either desirous or envious) and walked the earth as a physical embodiment, destroying everything in her path.
And Holly was her first minion.
The bitch had potential, and looks; looks nowhere near good as hers, but looks that would help get the job done, nonetheless.
When Kirsten first laid eyes on Holly, she could sense that aura right away, like a scent that only a chosen few could only pick up and respond to; she didn’t figure her for having the same pleasures she had, but just the look of her, it was written all over her, mingling everywhere outside of her…something was off with this chick. Something made her different, some secret, and her instincts had known right away that it was a dark one—deep, damp and dreadfully dark!
Intrigued, she sat down next to her on a bench on campus during lunch one day, introducing herself and making small-talk, which then turned into a lengthy discussion that had been picked up right after school the same day as they both went down to her house and talk some more. Her secret had been revealed to her through their first fight they both had eight months later. Holly was flat-out jealous (she didn't actually say those words even though it was all but obvious) of her lifestyle, her looks, her energy; she was pretty much the opposite: quiet, boring, unless she’d been around her, at least. Her guy friends had always told her they thought she was cute, and that’s what she told her to make her feel better. Holly had accused her of enjoying her easygoing life of glamor and popularity more than she had her company. She remembered it like it was last night: in her room, dark save for the only lit desk lamp, she and her trading screams back and forth, tension growing and then it just…popped, exploded like a firework right in the middle of the room, permanently staining a black mark on everything.
“You don’t know what I have to suffer every day!” Holly shouted.
“You think just because I have these looks that everything is fucking sunshine and rainbows for me? Fuck you! I pay my dues just like everybody else on this block, in this neighborhood, at our school, in the world!!”
“Not like I do. And never like I do! You don't know what I carry on my back every day of my life!”
“Yeah, like you do, Holly, baby. Just like you.”
That’s when Holly walked straight up to her face, lip trembling, on the verge of tears.
“Like wanting to kill someone, hacking it to bits and setting them on fire??!!”
She remembered the way those eyes looked: simmering with rage, quivering with pain, both emotions building a film of tears that streamed down her face, smearing her make-up. Kirsten felt a prick in her heart that pierced deeper slowly as she realized she herself had found a counterpart. She began taking in huge wafts of air; she placed her fingers over her mouth in total shock, beginning to form glassy-eyes herself, and then wrapped her arms around her in a hug. She was stiff, reluctant at first, then loosened up and gave in, burying her face into her chest, unloading tears and mucus on her favorite purple fuzzy sweater. She didn’t mind.
“What are you saying?” said Kirsten. “Oh, my God...sweetie...did you?”
Holly shook her head.
“No,” she said through a wavering tone. “But...it's like I...I kind of have these urges...this need that I can remember ever since kindergarten. I just wanna do it sometimes. I really wanna do it sometimes. You know?”
She broke down, hugging her knees to her chest, sobbing.
“I can't fight it! I don't wanna fight it then I do wanna fight it! I don't know what to do!”
Kirsten knelt down to her distraught friend, wrapped her arms around her and rocked her back and forth like a mother and baby.
“Small world,” she whispered in her ear.
Holly brought her gaze up to her, this time she was shocked and puzzled…and then morphed into a look of wonder, affection…like she finally found her long lost sister she’d been searching for all her life.
“You too?”
“Yes,” she said, “...and then some.”
First disbelief struck, like she might have misheard or misinterpreted, but she was well aware of what words her ears had pieced together, and she picked up the truth that hindered within those words as well. Then her ears rang loud; time froze; her world became a haven of discombobulation; stupefied awe.
She reached up and wrapped her arms around her in an embracing hug.
Holly felt herself moved, and she also felt herself granted a first member of her alliance. Her high school cliche was being the general of an army of insecure pretty girls—well this was the same thing and a can of gutsy, chunky, watch-out-when-you-heat-it-up-or-it’ll-splatter-everywhere-inside-your-microwave SPAM.
It was then that the friendship changed a whole three-sixty. After twenty-four hours of silence, consoling, allowing the smoke to clear, she confessed the murders of eleven people ever since the age of thirteen, explaining her usual routine: how and where to lure them, her favorite snuffing method, what tools and other prerequisites were required to dispose of the body afterwards.
As quid pro quo would have it, Holly then explained to her what had happened to her at six years old when she opened the door to her parent's bedroom, her mother soaked head to toe in blood, holding a gigantic knife, standing over the mutilated carcass of what was once her father. His head was positioned towards the door, his eyes looking directly at her daughter. She told Kirsten that she could see the dimming of life in his eyes, like a candlelight flickering and minimizing as the wax had all but disintegrated into a pile of liquid. She remembered locking her gaze into those eyes...a pair of eyes that were round and protruding with uncanny fright, total and immense refusal to believe what had just happened to him...and then the lights went out.
Holly loved it.
Before this altering occasion, she told Kirsten that she also remembered the beatings her mother suffered from the hands of her drunken asshole of a father. She told her she remembered the screams, the cries, the way he hollered at her to go to her room. She told her that as the nights went by, the fear and hatred for him grew intensively worse.
Looking at him like that—looking at a face (his face) that was looking at something far more dangerous, far more stronger, far more dreadful and overpowering—was the most uplifting and most desirous and most fulfilling thing she had felt and would ever ever feel in her whole life. She liked the results, but wanted to perform the deed herself. It was probably double the satisfaction and the relief and experience if it was done herself.
At the time, Kirsten found it moving; she had shed tears and found someone who shared the same dirty little secret. Weeks later, she remembered that in spite of the fact she had a bloodlust underneath that prissy, do-good, whiny pretense, she was just another spoiled, jealous bitch and never failed to get on her nerves more and more and she kept getting worse with it, too. She was kind of fun, but let's face it, she was a little on the nerdy side and pretty much a douche when it came to socializing and picking out clothes. “Oh, that's too flashy,” “Aw, come on, I'll look like a slut!”
What does that mean? Does that mean that I like slutty clothes? Fucking bitch...
She would keep this on for a while and see where it would go, but she knew Holly well enough to know that she leaned more to the side of what was right, honorable, equal
ity, blah blah blah. The bottom line would turn out that she would have to be added to her list as number thirteen, after number twelve here was dealt with.
Willy caught her and picked her up off her feet. She cried and laughed hardily as she was slung over his shoulder bouncing up and down as she was being carried to the bed and plopped down onto the mattress, her hair splayed over her face that was reddened from so much laughter. He climbed on top of her and the two engaged lips in another carnivorous French kiss. She could almost feel her tonsils beginning to shift now.
The blood in her veins burned and simmered like battery acid at the feel of squishing around on the bed against Willy’s athletic build; she fought the urge to scamper under the bed where she was now keeping the knife and just drive it into that six-pack of his; she wanted to plunge it in there, she wanted to push and twist and just push some more through all that tight muscle—the blood, oh the gorgeous blood—and the look on his face! So unexpected, so out of nowhere, so submissive to the inevitable…he was going to the Promised Land—
“Hey!” he said, whacking her hard over the head with a pillow. “Where are you?”
“You can see me right here in front of you, can’t you, dumbshit?” she said with a grin.
“Stay focused, now. I'm gonna show you how I earned the nickname 'Playboy Willy.'”
Oh, wow. I am so gonna make yours a slow one, she thought behind a face that fraudulently displayed eagerness.
He stuck his thumbs down behind the wasteband of his boxers, only a fraction of a second away from pulling them down until a knock on the door stopped him.
Willy spun his head over his shoulder looking at the door, then brought his confused and annoyed gaze back to Kirsten.
“Who is it?” he called.
No answer. Another rap ensued.
He stuck his hands out, irritated, denoting a is this really happening right now? face.
“Spense?” Willy said. “Did yours bust? Too bad, I’m dried out. Go ahead and slip it in anyway, she won’t know the difference.”
He looked at Kirsten to see her reaction; she smiled wanly and threw a fist to his shoulder out of playful nature. Willy snickered under his breath and froze to hear a response. The voice was so small that they had barely heard it.
“Kirsty?”
Holly.
Kirsten swung her legs around and off the mattress, heading straight for the door. She knew that voice and it meant that something was not going right. She stopped just before the door when she remembered she was wearing nothing but her thong. She turned around to grab a top and before she took a step towards the bed, Willy had out-thought her by tossing the ringer tank top she’d been wearing right into her arms. She slipped it on, approached the door, turned the knob and opened it five inches from the door frame as if a chain lock were there to stop an intruder from barging in.
One look at her said it all.
Whoooo-hooo! That’s my girl! From what I can tell you ripped the shit out of him!
A cry nearly escaped her vocal cords; not a cry of fear, but a cry of victory, of love, of happiness. She had done it. She took a few hits herself, but needless to say it went with the territory—better that she discovered that on her own than telling her beforehand. She fought back the urge to jump on top of her, wrap her arms around her and plant every square inch of her beautiful profile with big sloppy kisses. Her heart rose in her chest, beating and pumping with triumphant excitement. She felt a great sense of pride, but more for herself than for Holly. Just the briefest glimpse of her current state proved to even a blind man that she was the truest of true warriors, thanks to her. She was gonna have this mutt trained to kill in no time at all.
Judging by her condition, he must have put up quite a struggle. Her makeup was smeared to shit, practically gone. She'd seen her without her makeup plenty of times before but nothing at all like this; indications of cuts that had been cleaned up; her gorgeous brown curls pulled back in a tail and the poor lighting from the hallway outside revealed the coily dirtiness that it suffered from the battle; she stood with her arms crossed, holding her elbows, knees locked together; shirt and pants on, barefoot.
Her eyes looked halfway blank; the other half had something indescribable in them—something aware, alive and kicking, that was for sure.
“’Sup, byaatch!” Kirsten exclaimed through a whispered shout, followed by a laugh. Holly didn’t move a muscle. “What’s up? Is everything alright?”
“Can you come outside?” she said, again in that distant, petite voice.
She would think it would be her natural instinct to be concerned at this point, but she wasn’t. Kirsten knew it had to be a variety of different things. The first was always the shocker, the real deal, that moment when you’ve felt yourself evolve into something beyond humanity. It’s a new reality and you’ve lost all sense of reason and morale and what the fuck you were supposed to do afterwards. So she's back for a few last-minute questions, to seek a little more counseling. She had this bitch on a leash, God she loved it.
Kirsten walked outside the hallway and closed the door, her eyes locked onto Holly’s the entire time.
“Did you do it?” she whispered.
Holly said nothing, just kept staring with that war-torn face.
“Let’s go into the other room,” she said after a pause.
The other room turned out to be some type of upstairs living room—a library, relaxation room, no TV, just bookshelves lined up against the walls, a grandfather clock with no pendulum swinging, a framed painting, a sofa, some easy chairs, a coffee table and a window oddly positioned high up near the ceiling. Kirsten found the switch next to the door and flipped it on. The four bulbs connected beneath the ceiling fan lit the room to life, as it were.
Holly closed the door behind them.
“So what’s up?” she said. “Is it done?”
Holly stood there, crooked-legged, staring deep into her friend’s gaze with those fatigued, bloodshot pupils, and Kirsten was taken back to that same day in the courtyard on the bench. Something about her condition right now was stunningly similar to the way she stared ahead. An aura of something that was capable of action—lots of horrendous terror and havoc begging to be wreaked—it laid there quiet and lifeless, immobile, resting…like an alligator in the misty swamp waiting for the next piece of lively meat to wander near its incisors.
“Something’s on your mind,” Kirsten said, curling the corner of her lip.
Finally a sign of emotion crossed Holly’s face when she tucked in her lips and raised her eyebrows.
“You won’t believe it,” she said, lacing her fingers behind her back.
“You know me, I’ll believe anything.”
For what seemed to be the longest and most anticipating pause she’d ever been through in her life, Holly stood and stared at her and spoke with a voice that withheld a brave, uprising tone that she never heard or thought was even possible to compose through her vocal cords, hers especially.
“I think I have just experienced my very first...I don't know...epiphany,” she said, slowly beginning to grin. “Of course, in my perspective, I don’t know if that’s the right word, seeing as I might have been living the other side of the mirror for my whole life, would that still qualify as an intuition?”
Kirsten was speechless now.
“They make mirrors out of quicksilver, I think I heard somewhere. This feeling I have, it’s like this whole changing mood—I’m the other side of the mirror, or the other side of the mirror is me! I’m switched! I’m out! I’m still in but I’m out! Don’t you see?”
She did see. She saw perfectly. It was just that something was off here. Way off.
Holly’s voice began to rise, quavering with giddiness, her eyes bulging with excitement, grin spreading ear to ear; like she was accepted into her dream school or she’d just been proposed to. Kirsten felt her face furrow from confusion, never taking her eyes off the friend who was suddenly starting to become a stranger—a str
ange stranger.
“I’m not one to jinx luck,” she continued, “but I feel like if I take my time, things will start to make more sense. When I was little, I walked in on my mother stabbing my father to death over a sheet of plastic so that the blood wouldn’t soak the carpet permanently and since then I was addicted to murder and blood. I didn’t feel any remorse for the bag of shit because he always lied to her, hit her, cheated on her. I would say that was when I was caught in the flying shard of mirror that those three villains Superman’s Dad trapped them in, remember? That’s exactly where I was. Floating endlessly through this life in a fucking prison, looking out at the world before me. Then I remember my mother and I held each other and held and held for something that felt like an eternity when it was really four hours and then we called an old friend of hers, or a friend of a friend—I don't really recall—to help us with the body. I watched as he came at like two or three in the morning with a friend of his, they took him into the bathtub to hack him to pieces for the furnace at an old steel mill somewhere downtown. I wanted to watch, but my mom wouldn’t let me, she made me sit in my room, but I snuck out to hear the sounds, and I loved them! I loved the sounds of sawed-fat, the squishing, the tearing, the crunching, the suckling, the dripping, the…oh god, I wanted more. But I wasn’t ready. I don’t know. Just something I wanted in me to keep pure, wait for the right person. Spencer told me that it was his first time sticking someone, too, and that we should do unto others as others do unto us. And I thought I’d do that…”
“Wait, what do you mean ‘Spencer told—“
“Starting with you!”
Kirsten didn’t know what happened, how fast it happened, when it had happened, or what in the world was going on. With a whistling noise like a martial arts movie, Holly charged at Kirsten with the blade and drove it straight home into her abdomen, her sweet amber eyes piercing delicately into hers in the process. The eyes did not burn with blood-lusting rage or any intensity…the same pure, harmless, innocent Bambi orbs that that sweet angel possessed during any other normal day.
Kirsten felt the stick of metal rotating in circles inside her, tugging, pulling and tearing at the muscles of her mid-section. Holly gripped onto her shoulder as she pulled it out. Then she felt and listened as the object slurped out of her stomach, a sucking-feeling out of her six-pack. The knife splurged out and then Holly stuck her again, this time the penetration was a little higher up.
“Don't stop looking at me, sweetie,” she heard her shout, voice wavering and eyes bulging with profound derangement. “Please don't stop looking at me!”
She felt the knife vengefully jab inside her breast plate, sticking into something that she’d never felt physically before but knew right away what it was—her heart. There was pain, unbelievable amounts of it, burning and tearing and jolting of indescribable proportions, shooting through every pathway throughout her entire body that she became paralyzed. She managed to keep her eyes locked onto Holly’s, who’s face had not adjusted in the least bit. It was still the same angelic coy girl-next-door frame possessed with indescribable and inhuman madness.
Holly pulled the knife out, and then rammed it into another point on her body…to the side. Kirsten felt warm everywhere on her flesh, dampening her clothes. Warm, wet, and hot, getting even more hotter.
Holly was losing control; she began to make grunting noises, she saw as she felt some of her blood had streaked across her lips and she used the tip of her tongue to remove it. Wherever she didn’t see a wound on her body, she made one; adding more and more to the puddle of blood that was expanding ever more so on top of her and all around her.
Then she knelt down and held her head in her hands, bringing her face up to hers close enough for a kiss.
“I'm sorry, Kirsty,” she said softly. “I don't want you to think of this as a betrayal. It's not like that at all.”
She planted her lips to hers, tracking the blood coughed up from her lungs onto her mouth.
“I love you,” she whispered.
The last thought before she lost consciousness forever was
Why all over my best denim jacket you stupid bitch?...._________