Sociopaths In Love (14 page)

The girl's hand was on the stainless steel
doorknob, turning it. She didn't even look back. Erica charged
across the living room, slamming into the girl, smashing her
against the door. She hoped it was at least hard enough to wind
her. The girl kept a death grip on the knob. Erica tried to pull
her away from it. She didn't want to take her eyes off the girl,
but she could sense Walt nearby. Sense how excited this made him.
Erica didn't have to ask herself why she was doing this. The choice
had been removed. The only reason she needed was very simple, the
most primal: to live. She grabbed the girl around the waist and
shifted all of her weight to drag her away from the knob. The girl
screamed the entire time. Her grip broke on the knob and Erica
slammed her against the wooden floor. She had resolved not to use a
weapon unless the girl came up with one.

Now disoriented, the girl scrambled in the
direction of the balcony doors. Erica ran after her and threw
herself on the girl. They both went crashing onto the coffee table.
It was made well and didn't break. The girl's skin felt hot and
sweaty beneath Erica and she wondered where she had come from,
where Walt had found her. Was it someone he had watched and had in
mind for this sort of thing or did he really just grab up the first
person he came to? And if he did, where was it? A truck stop, a
rest stop, a restaurant? The girl smelled like cheap perfume, piss,
and acrid sweat.

The girl twisted herself around and ripped
at Erica's shirt. She'd often heard of girls doing this when they
fought each other. Like nakedness equated to shame and loss of
power. Erica half-wished she was naked. It would make her feel even
more bestial. It was not in her instincts to know how to kill
another woman with her bare hands. It required tapping into
something ancient and long forgotten. Something buried in the
viscera and the muscle more than the brain.

The girl was still screaming.

Erica ripped the girl's hands from her now
shredded shirt and thrust them above her head. Again, the girl
tried to search Erica's eyes with her own but whatever she saw or
didn't see in there must have terrified her even more because she
started screaming faster and louder. Erica felt the girl's hips
pressing against her own and when she thought of what they were
doing as something sexual she felt some knowledge about what Walt
must feel every time he did something like this. Maybe he just
understood more than she did.

The girl rammed her head up, aiming for
Erica's mouth. A white light went off in her head. She felt teeth
shift and tasted blood. Erica let go of the girl's wrists and took
a swipe at her face with her right hand. She felt it connect. It
threw a bolt of pain up her forearm but she felt the promise of
soft flesh beneath her fingertips and drove her body against the
girl even harder. She was wriggling backward, farther along the
coffee table, and Erica got both of her hands beneath the girl's
chin and pushed up. Her pinkie got too close to the girl's mouth
and she bit it. Didn't let go. The pain was tremendous and when
Erica broke her grip she saw that the last joint was missing. She
hadn't heard the girl spit it out and wondered if it was still in
her mouth. Erica moved up until she straddled the girl and drove an
elbow into the girl's throat. The girl's eyes went wide and she
coughed. She finally stopped screaming.

A savage instinct to wrap her hands around
the girl's throat filled Erica. She scooted forward until her knees
were on the girl's arms. She clenched her hands around the girl's
neck. They locked eyes. Erica felt the girl's pulse against her
palm. All the girl's muscles were tense beneath her. She bucked
against Erica, a last ditch effort to throw her off. The girl's
pulse hammered in her throat. Erica didn't want to feel her life
ebb out. She thought about taking her out to the balcony, throwing
her off. She decided against it. If she was going to kill this
girl, she felt like she deserved to experience this. She deserved
to go to sleep at night seeing this girl's eyes, feeling her sweaty
skin dying against her own. Spit foamed at the girl's mouth as she
fought desperately to take in air. Drool and blood poured from
Erica's mouth as she squeezed with everything she had and rocked
all of her weight against this poor girl. She watched the eyes
bulge, the skin turn purple, the veins standing out in the
temple.

Erica had started crying. She didn't know
when. It felt like every hole in her face leaked some kind of warm
fluid and she kept pressing her hands into this girl's throat long
after she had stopped feeling a pulse, long after the girl had
stopped breathing.

She heard her own pulse pounding in her ears
and a rhythmic slapping sound that almost seemed to match it. She
turned away from the girl and saw Walt off to the right. His pants
were down around his ankles and he masturbated his thick cock until
a rope of milky come shot out onto the floor.

He came to her side and Erica threw her arms
around his neck and snottily mumbled against his chest, "You're all
I have. You're all I have now."

Plans

Erica awoke with every muscle screaming.
Completely naked, she climbed out of bed on shaky legs. Now all of
her injuries sustained while battling the other girl announced
themselves in her bones and, more visibly, across the surface of
her skin. The apartment was redolent with the smell of cooking
meat. She didn't think she could deal with Walt right now. She was
sure he was happy. Today at least. She slid into the shower, unsure
if Walt was ever actually happy or if the happiness was more of a
mask he wore. If that were the case, what was it hiding? She
thought she had seen the darkest part of his insides and wasn't
sure he could be hiding any worse. She guessed, much like her, it
was just hiding a great absence.

She wrapped the woman's robe around her and
went out into the apartment. She supposed she could stop thinking
of it as 'the woman's robe.' Everything here belonged to her and
Walt now. It was her robe. Her apartment. Her bed. It felt good to
finally have things. Nice things. She had always had things but
there had never been very many of them and most of them had
previously belonged to someone else. So, no difference really,
right? Thinking about it that way kind of burned her. She'd have to
go to a store. Maybe she could get Walt to steal a moving truck and
they could go get some new furniture.

Walt sat at the table, scarfing down some
eggs and some other meat she guessed was human.

He'd made her eggs and an English
muffin.

He sat at the head of the table and she sat
to his left so she could see the sky through the balcony doors.
They were open and the morning breeze smelled wet and good. The
city sounds flooded in but she could also hear the wind gusting and
birds chirping.

"Soon you'll develop a craving for it."

"We'll see. Did you make any coffee?"

"I couldn't figure it out."

She glanced into the kitchen. Around the
coffee maker was a brownish puddle of water.

"I need coffee," she said. She didn't feel
like cleaning up the mess. Luckily, none of the coffee had actually
made it into the carafe. The basket didn't contain a filter or
grounds or anything. She would have to remember to ask Walt to make
coffee again so she could watch. She was having trouble imagining
how it went down at this point. She leaned against the counter
while it brewed, staring at the back of Walt's head while he
scarfed down his food.

Last night she dreamt about the man she saw
on the top level of the parking garage. This time he wasn't on the
top level. He was a couple levels down. It wasn't foggy in the
dream and she strained to get a better look at him, to see if she
could make out any features at all, but couldn't do it. There was
always something obscuring him or something in her eyes, always
something preventing her from focusing on him. This time, the
alarming thing was not the man but the shadow moving behind him.
She watched it spill out from the elevator doors and slowly grow
and gain mass, moving toward the man the entire time. But just when
it got almost close enough to touch her she had awoken.

The coffee finished. As she poured it into
her cup, she noticed Walt had a whole skillet filled with meat. She
wondered if he had originally intended to try and get her to eat
more of it or if he had just cooked the abundance for himself. Why
wouldn't he if it was now an unlimited resource?

She took her cup to the table, the residue
of the dream still clinging to her. It almost made her think the
time she had actually seen the figure on the parking garage had
really been a dream. She had to convince herself that had been
real. She'd watch for it again. Her mind reeled as she began to
think of ways to carve out time for this observation period. How
many hours a day should she spend doing it? How long should she do
it before she gave up? Deep breath. She tried to rationalize
things. She hadn't established any real kind of routine yet. Wasn't
sure she wanted to. She guessed she still wasn't too sure about
much of anything.

Walt got up and went into the kitchen. Came
back with a heaping plate of meat.

"We're not eating the girl I . . .
killed last night, are we?"

"No way. I told you we wouldn't do
that."

"Did you get rid of her?"

"Yes. Just like I said I would."

"What did you do with her?"

"I threw her off the balcony."

"Dignified."

He either didn't catch the sarcasm or didn't
know what the word meant because he said, "I did. You can go look
if you want. She was still out there the last time I checked."

Erica believed he'd done what he said but
wanted to see this for herself. She took her plate and cup out to
the table on the balcony. She glanced over the railing and saw the
girl, still clothed but very red, lying askew on the sidewalk in
front of the building.

Walt stood at the
threshold, raising his shirt and rubbing his hairy stomach.
"Sometimes the things we do . . . It takes them a while
to resonate. It's like our insubstantiality rubs off on other
people or something. Sometimes. Once they finally scrape her off
the streets they'll just be doing some physical kind of job and
won't really put much thought into how the girl actually got there.
In a day or two, when her family or loved ones or whatever start
trying to track her down,
if
they try to track her down, the path will be
muddied and the authorities will be mostly embarrassed so they'll
provide an answer that is clear cut enough to keep the family from
questioning them any further and provide enough evidence, whether
true or not, to back themselves up. So, in a way, they're working
for us."

Why was he telling her this? Why was he even
talking? She responded with a "huh" and went back to eating her
breakfast and drinking her coffee.

"So what were you planning on doing
today?"

"I don't know," she said. "I might go see if
there's a store somewhere around here. I need some more makeup. I
might steal a car that isn't a manual." She thought about that. It
seemed like a lot of work. "Nah. I probably won't do that. What
about you?"

"I was thinking I'd probably go to Home
Depot and get a wheelbarrow and a freezer."

"Where are we going to put another
freezer?"

"In that baby's room."

She almost wished she hadn't asked.

Exploring

Erica decided she didn't
want to be cooped up in the apartment but didn't really have any
idea of what she wanted to do. If she hadn't grown up in the
mountains, the idea of walking would have hit her sooner. To live
in the mountains and walk required being a certain type of outdoor
person, possibly even a nature person, one equipped to and possibly
even look forward to dealing with snakes, bugs, the elements and
other outdoor occurring things. When she finally realized there
probably wasn't going to be much of that here and that, actually,
what she would mostly find would be stores containing things mostly
free for her taking, she decided it wouldn't be a bad idea. She
wondered if she was getting tired of Walt. It didn't really bother
her if she was. They weren't married or anything. Sure they loved
each other but she didn't really know what that meant and wasn't
sure Walt did either. For her, it was something she said but felt
like it was supposed to correspond with something inside her. She
imagined something like fireworks. Or maybe the emotional
equivalent. That made her think about fireworks going off inside
someone and how the person would probably explode and rain down
some sort of gore confetti. She could get another apartment if
things didn't work out between them. Possibly make new friends or
even just be alone. She didn't mind being alone so much. She had
been alone for a while, if you didn't count Granny, and thought
maybe she even kind of preferred it. She just didn't want to be
there when Walt came back. She didn't understand what he was doing,
not that she really tried. It just seemed like they could be doing
so much more. If he wanted to eat people, like if he had to have
a
thing
and that
had to be eating people, she didn't see why he couldn't do it
anywhere. They could have been in New York by now. They could have
been well on their way to Los Angeles, which seemed a lot nicer, a
lot warmer. The Midwest was okay in the summer but once Halloween
was over and she was hit with the cold every time she walked out of
the house, she would be ready to move to a warmer climate. Again,
she guessed it didn't really matter if Walt wanted to come with her
or not. She could always go by herself. But she couldn't help
thinking there was some reason he was here. In Dayton,
specifically. She hadn't been to a lot of places. She knew places
mentioned on TV and maybe a few books she'd had to read for school.
It didn't seem Dayton was often mentioned on TV or in books and,
after being here only a few days, she couldn't imagine anyone who
had the chance and ability to go anywhere she wanted to go
choosing
to come to and
stay in Dayton, Ohio.