Chapter 39

 

Herbert wheeled around the corner and let the car idle. Everything was going as planned. He’d been talking to his passenger the whole time. So what if she was out of her gourd? So what if all she said was fuck? Herbert didn’t give a shit. Herbert was boiling over. He had to talk. Shit, he’d talk even if she wasn’t back there.

And nobody could do anything about it.

He chuckled. Then, looking in the rearview mirror to where the meatheads were just rounding the corner at a trot he said, "Here come the assholes."

Then, rolling down his window, he called back, "Come and get it, you stupid bastards!"

A hundred yards back, the meatheads raised a collective roar and quickened their pace.

This made him laugh harder. Stupid fucking meatheads. He’d been leading them for several blocks now, their group swelling the whole time, growing from four or five to a couple of dozen. And every last one of them wanted to kill and eat him. He thought about that for a second, tried to picture it going down, tried to imagine them catching the car and pulling him out, eating him, and found he couldn’t make it real in his head. It just wasn’t possible.

Still, he got close enough to make his ball sack tighten and crawl.

He grinned.

"I’m the Pied Fucking Piper," he said and started the car crawling ahead again.

The idea of letting the meatheads close the gap tempted him, but he couldn’t let manic enthusiasm cloud his thinking. If they got too close, and he came to some large obstruction, an overturned trailer truck or a burning spill, he wouldn’t have time to turn around and build the speed needed to mow through them. And he wasn’t about to let a group of pudding-brained assholes get the best of him. No thanks.

He reached the end of the street, checked the sign, and turned left, thrilling with fresh anticipation; one more block and he’d turn onto Darlington.

Darlington was Milling’s street.

Milling. That fucking asshole. He thought he was so goddamned smart.

When Herbert was a sophomore, he’d taken Milling’s English class. They’d read some George Orwell essays, one about a rogue elephant and another about a guy getting hanged and how a dog came up and wanted to play with the guy while he was being led to the gallows. Herbert smiled now, remembering that old dog. Those essays were pretty good, but otherwise, they’d read a bunch of bullshit, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the most boring book ever written, Sister Carrie. Milling had talked all that lit-crit horseshit and ruined everything, even the essays, talking about inherited guilt and how much America sucked and feminism and Marxism and all kinds of whiney crap. It had bugged the shit out of Herbert, but if blatant stupidity and wasting Herbert’s time had been the asshole’s only offenses, Herbert probably wouldn’t have listed him. What did it was the paper.

Toward the end of the course, the spring of Herbert’s sophomore year, Milling had come in all emotional. He said he loved the weather. Said his wife was sick. Said sometimes he didn’t know what teaching was all about. And then he told them he was breaking from the normal curriculum, that he wanted them to do a short paper on what they would do if they only had five days to live.

Herbert had raised his hand.

"Yes, Mr. Weston?"

That was another thing the guy did, always calling them Mr. so and so and Miss so and so, all smarmy about it, like this was some private school for spoiled teens or something.

Herbert asked what the paper would replace. They’d had the syllabus since the first day.

Milling didn’t like that. It was enrichment, he said. Above and beyond the syllabus.

"Extra stuff you cooked up on a whim, you mean?" Herbert asked, and some of the asshole kids around him laughed.

"Just write it," Milling said, all pissed off just like that.

So Herbert had written it.

He’d surprised himself, getting into it, writing it all in one sitting, "pouring out his heart and soul" like some kind of English-major queer-bait. In clean prose, he explained that he’d spend the five days driving around, killing people who’d done him wrong. It was logical, detailed, and even funny at points, Herbert thought. Honestly, he’d been kind of proud of it.

A week later, it returned to him, a big, red F on the last page. Below the grade, Milling had written three words: This is sick.

Those three words were the only justification the asshole had offered for the failing grade on a bullshit assignment he’d given on a whim. And in the end, it had been just that poorly justified grade on that sky-blue bullshit assignment that had dropped Herbert’s final average in the course to a B+.

A fucking B+?

In all of Herbert’s time as a college student, Milling’s course was the only class in which he’d been given something other than an A.

He’d gone to office hours to complain. No Milling. A teacher from an adjacent office tried to cover for him, bringing up the sick wife. None of that mattered to Herbert. He knew the truth. Milling was such an inept piece of shit he didn’t even attend his own office hours.

So be it, Herbert had thought, standing there outside the locked office. So fucking be it. Even then, back in sophomore year, the seed of some grand plan had begun its dark germination. He’d settle the score, all right.

So even before there had been a list, Milling had been on it. And that only made this moment sweeter, for, as the old Spanish proverb said, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

He’d taken his time, rushing nothing. That was cool. And Herbert Weston was the Master of Cool.

Now he’d see about Milling’s whimsical assignment.