Sociopaths In Love (25 page)

While she still had energy, Erica did the
only thing she could think of to do. She stood up and felt along
the wall until she found the door. She began beating on the door
with everything she had and screaming as loudly as she could. She
knew she would pay for it. This time her payment wouldn't be
collected by Walt but by herself. It would be a massive loss of
strength with nothing to replenish it. She pounded and screamed
until her fist and throat felt like shredded meat. The wild torrent
of emotion pouring from her felt somehow liberating. She had
typically seen emotions as either weakness or a tool that could be
used to manipulate other people. She continued pounding long after
her hands surpassed pain and went numb. She continued screaming
long after her voice went hoarse and then went completely. She
continued until she couldn't continue anymore. She didn't rest
until her shaky muscles no longer supported her. She let herself
collapse on the floor, the stink of the room replaced by a fresher
stink, something coming from inside her – fear, desperation, and
all the fluids that had escaped her over the last several minutes
all released to the rancid atmosphere of this room and decaying at
its touch.

Separation Anxiety

When conscious, she huddled at the bottom of
the door. Sometimes she was awake when Walt slid the slot open and
she would try and take in what the light illuminated before
deciding she didn't want to see it. The two girls across the room
from her were her future, she realized. Gray, bony, and shuddering,
hardly anything left in their eyes. There were two reasons for
staying against the door. The first was that, in case Walt opened
it, she wanted to be ready to bolt. She didn't even know if she had
the strength to do this or not. The second was that she didn't want
Walt to be able to see her in the flesh, which might lead to him
opening the door. She knew he had a night vision camera set up in
two opposite corners of the room. She thought she remembered him
pointing these out to her but it was entirely possible she had only
imagined that. Regardless, seeing something on camera was not the
same as seeing it in person. That explained the popularity of strip
clubs, she thought. Why else would people pay to have something
they couldn't touch that tantalizingly close to them? Because it
was real. It was actual flesh. Something about mass and the way the
body occupies a certain space and being able to gauge that space in
person. Otherwise, one could just stay home and watch way more
attractive people completely naked and actually fucking on a
screen.

She kept her nose pressed to the door but
the absence of sound only made her more afraid. It meant Walt was
either spending less and less time at the apartment or he spent
most of his time plotting or, quite possibly, just sitting on the
floor in the living room watching the monitor display what went on
in this room. Which was nothing. Which was three girls suffering
with no way to fight. If she knew how or maybe if she had the
strength she wished she knew of a way to suffer loudly. That would
ruin it for him. She imagined him in there, naked, drinking a beer,
knowing that the quiet lack of movement in this room was suffering
manifest. If there were movement and screaming, he would see that
as strength, he would see that as meaning there was still fight
left and the more fight there was, the less suffering there
was.

When everything was black, it was hard to
discern waking dreams from sleeping dreams. It was like the mind
hated blackness. Like it wanted to see it as a canvas to paint
things on. At one point, she was sure her eyes were open but she
was back in that cave and searching for the glowing hollow people,
not finding them, only stepping on shards of their shattered skin
and she kept thinking these were the people who had brought light
to a very dark place and they had been smashed. Every last one of
them.

She was pretty sure one of them had made her
drink a heart one night. It was something she hadn't thought about
a lot and now she found herself doubting it had really happened.
Everything could be analyzed, she thought, although she didn't
usually like to subject herself to that kind of thing. It probably
had something to do with Dawn. Like maybe Erica was afraid she
didn't have enough emotions, enough heart, for Dawn and conjured
this magical glowing man to bring it to her. But the man had been
around before Dawn had reentered the picture. Maybe the figure had
been the nebulous something she wanted. A blank waiting to be
filled.

She had a lot of thoughts like this but it
wasn't long before they fragmented and vanished completely and she
would try to go back and seize upon so much as a shred of it but
there weren't any to be found.

At one point she was sure she heard Walt
vomiting, possibly in the bathroom across the hall or possibly just
on the floor of the hallway. She imagined smelling it. She imagined
what was causing it. She remembered thinking he was sick when they
had first met and how it seemed like so long ago. She imagined
reaching an arm down his throat, finding whatever virus or cancer
lingered in his stomach and stroking it, petting it, telling it,
"Good job. Good job." Only, if Walt died, how would she ever get
out of here?

More blackness.

Slanted beam of light thrown across the room
and falling on the girls now huddled against the far wall like the
world's most sadistic flashlight.

Blackness.

Vomiting. Distant sound of sirens from
outside.

A steady low-pitched hooting coming from the
far side of the room. A low placatory whisper. Erica tried to close
her ears to this but it kept going and going. It didn't stop. Low
and steady it worked its way into her brain and insinuated itself
into all of her nerve endings. A period of time would pass and she
would convince herself it had to stop but it kept going and she
would tell herself any second, any second, and then she realized
what she heard was the sound of one of the girls dying so,
surprising even herself, she stood up and crossed the room. She
pulled the hooting girl away from the wall, straddled her hips,
wrapped her hands around her neck, and choked the remaining life
from her. Then she did the same thing to the other girl. She went
to stand in front of the door but didn't last very long before she
got tired and slid down until her ass rested on the floor and she
looked in the direction of the two girls she had killed. No, she
hadn't killed them. They were already dead. What she did was
preventative maintenance. She didn't know how long it was before
she saw two gray things – one for each girl – crawl out of their
skin and disappear through the far wall and drift into oblivion.
She thought it was strange. She had been thinking of their skin as
fragile and glass-like but maybe it was more like chitin and needed
to harden.

"What do you want to do?" Walt had asked
her.

"I want to be able to walk through walls,"
she should have said.

"When nobody's paying any attention, you can
do whatever the hell you want," Walt had said.

But what can you do when there are two
cameras trained on you?

Feeling around in the darkness, she found
one of the girls and tore at her neck until the blood began to
flow. She collected palmfuls of the stuff and flung it at first one
camera and then the other. She would give it a while to dry and
crust over the lens and then she'd do it again. For as long as the
blood in the girls remained liquid.

What did she want?

Not this. Anything but this.

Too Much Alike

She stood at the door and waited without
knowing what it was she waited for. Well, she knew what it was she
waited for – a chance to get out – she just wasn't so sure it was
going to happen. Eventually she collapsed into a heap in front of
the door and woke up with a great thirst. The feeling of gnawing
hunger had long since passed and she wasn't going to submit to the
desire to eat from the girls she had killed. Besides, it wasn't so
much a desire to eat human flesh as it was to stay alive. She
wondered if that would change the way she felt about Walt at all.
If he needed human flesh to stay alive, like if he was a vampire or
something. She doubted it. Didn't even think that was the reason
she felt about him the way she did. Didn't even really know how she
felt about him. After all, it wasn't like he had surprised her.
Maybe at first. But he had given her the option of running if it
freaked her out. She was attracted to him. That was what it
amounted to. She was attracted to him and she was lonely. Early on
in their relationship he probably could have done anything and she
would have found some way to justify it, some excuse for his flaws.
Which, ultimately, only let her know she was as fucked up as he
was, if not in the same exact way.

She thought about screaming again but, no,
she would no longer give him that satisfaction. Besides, she was
all screamed out. Part of her wanted Dawn to show up and another
part of her wanted Dawn to stay as far away as possible. If Dawn
showed up then Walt would hurt her.

Or he would take an interest in her.

And that might be even worse.

Walt would never open the door if he knew
she was in here waiting for him. Unless it was to open the door for
the last time. At least that would put an end to it. If she were
given the choice of dying right now or facing all the potential
things awaiting her, she would have probably chosen death.

But she couldn't bring herself to do it. She
knew she could root around in one of the corpses on the floor and
find a bone fragment or something to open up one of her veins. And
she knew she wouldn't do that.

No. Walt wouldn't open the door. But he
probably looked in. With the cameras blinded, having her in this
room without watching her was completely useless for him. He wanted
to see the suffering. He needed the spectacle. Just like with
eating all the people he had eaten. It wasn't really about the
flavor or eating until he was gorged. It was about knowing he was
consuming a life. It was about consuming a person who potentially
had everything Walt didn't have – emotions, feelings, family,
friends, hopes, desires – everything that makes a human being
human.

She continued to wait for him. The first
time he slid the view slot open, she stood too close to the door
and by the time she had taken a few steps back to try and make eye
contact with him, he'd slammed it closed.

She didn't want to be standing in the middle
of the room when he saw her anyway. She wanted to be right in front
of him, close enough to touch him. Close enough for him to smell
her.

With what little strength she had, she
dragged the corpses over to the door. She tried to remember if the
door opened in or out and couldn't. She thought that doors were
supposed to open out but then she didn't know if that would have
been for the person standing in the hallway or the person standing
in the room. It seemed like if it opened into the hallway it would
block everything. If he was ever going to open the door, she
definitely didn't want anything blocking it. But she needed the
corpses for leverage. She kept thinking about this, which way the
door opened, to the point her mind was nearly as exhausted as her
body.

She stood on the corpses to make sure they
would support her. While there certainly wasn't any life left in
them, they felt almost warm compared to the floor. Or maybe it was
just the difference between soft and hard.

When the view slot opened again, she was
pretty sure she had fallen asleep standing up with her head resting
against the door.

Her eyes sprang open and she hissed, "I'm
coming for you."

Walt stared into some dying place within
her. Once she had looked into his eyes and thought about a wild
electrical storm. Now she thought about concentration camps, of
flesh-covered skeleton people huddled in the corners of bare
stinking rooms.

He smiled and made a sound like, "Hup hup,"
before slamming the view slot closed.

Just Like Old Times

She thought something would
happen. She stood on the corpses until it felt like her legs
wouldn't support her anymore. She sat down with her back against
the wall, the floor cold on her ass. She closed her eyes, death,
surprisingly, not the first thing on her mind. With no clocks and
no real sense of light, time was more liquid than concrete. The
truth, she knew, was that time didn't exist. The only thing that
existed was the rising and the setting of the sun and humans had
found a way to capture it to the millisecond. Her sense of hearing
seemed to be more acute. She hadn't really heard many sounds coming
from the apartment because there were so many of them going on
outside – traffic, sirens, people, airplanes, the apocalyptic hum
of a city's infrastructure. Now she heard voices from behind her
cell door. Walt's and someone else's. Everything Walt said had the
quality of a megaphone, said as much to be heard by everyone around
him as much as by the person he was actually talking to. Erica
imagined it was her replacement. She wondered what it had taken to
get her here. She wondered what Walt had said to her to make her
think he was the slightest bit normal. But not all girls are into
normal, she reminded herself. It was her own aversion to complete
normalcy that had kept her from her shit town's pattern of getting
married at nineteen and pregnant before twenty-one. And that was
conservative. That was 'holding out.' Okay, so she wondered what
kind of excitement Walt had offered this poor girl. She wondered if
he had gone back to the girl's apartment. From what Erica had seen
of her she may not have even been old enough to have an apartment.
Maybe she'd taken Walt back to meet her parents. Maybe they had
killed her parents and eaten them. Maybe the girl was into that.
Maybe Walt wasn't even into that anymore. She thought she should
scream. She thought she should yell and try to disrupt, anything.
Surely any female in her right mind would run screaming if she knew
the potential boyfriend kept girls locked in rooms with the corpses
of other girls. She didn't scream. Didn't know why. Didn't know if
it was because she didn't have the energy to scream or if it was
because she felt like if this girl was stupid enough to be seduced
by Walt then she deserved to suffer at least a little. Maybe it was
just jealousy. Maybe it was fear. Fear that the girl
was
into the exact same
thing Walt was into. On Erica's first night with Walt, he had taken
her to see the boys and she still stuck around. Part of her felt
like she should die for being so stupid. To stay alive meant doing
something about that stupidity. It meant making up for
. . . something.