THE LAST THING YOU WANT TO BE
“Sir, I’m going to need you to step out of the—”
I blew the cop away.
Correction. I would have blown the cop away if I’d had access to my bigger, more powerful guns, which were under a blanket on the back seat. So I just shot him in the forehead with a pistol. Not as messy and thus not as much fun, but the end result was the same: one less cop trying to muck around in my business.
For the pedantic among you who think it should be one “fewer” cop, what I’m saying is that there was less of him. Heh heh. And for those of you insisting that my joke still doesn’t make sense from a grammar perspective, I just murdered a cop in broad daylight. What makes you think you’re safe?
To be fair to the unfortunate police officer, he was simply doing his job. His job was to catch bad guys, and I’m a bad guy, so I couldn’t really bear him any ill will. It’s not accurate to say that I’d left a trail of dead bodies between Nevada and Louisiana, but I’d left a few of them along the way. One in each state, at least. Maybe that does count as a trail.
You may think there’s going to be some sort of twist where I reveal that I only kill pedophiles or vampires or something like that. Nope. I’m a total thrill-killer. I’m not trying to cleanse sin from the world or silence voices in my head or anything that might cause you to think, “Well, I don’t agree with his actions, but I can on some level empathize with his plight.” I kill because, if I may take on the persona of an uptight British prick for a moment, it’s a jolly good time. I love the sound of screams. It doesn’t get me hard but it does make me happy.
My victims were mostly women, because I don’t like women very much. If my misogyny offends you, then take your virtue-signaling social justice warrior snowflake ass someplace else. I’ve got a story to tell, and you’re not my target audience.
So anyway, yeah, I shot the cop because if it were up to him, I wouldn’t be able to kill any more women. And that would make me frown.
I love to take risks, but I try not to be stupid about it. Therefore, instead of leaving the cop to rot by the side of the road, I dragged his dead butt down into the ditch. He wouldn’t have actually rotted—somebody would’ve seen him or run over him relatively soon, but it would be better for me if he were found the next morning instead of a few minutes after I’d murdered him.
Some people might be uncomfortable dragging a dead cop into a swampy ditch at midnight. Harder to see gators in the darkness. Me, I kind of liked the idea that I might accidentally step on a gator and have to fight it with a hunting knife to keep it from biting my leg off. Which is not to say that I purposely put myself in situations where I could be mangled by wildlife; I’m just saying that when I had to drag a cop into a ditch out of necessity, the extra element of danger was exciting to me.
Do I sound deranged? I hope so.
My mother once called me “a cartoonish parody of an evil person.” I wanted to stab her for it, to prove her right, but I was only six. And she’d installed a lock on the silverware drawer.
Does that sound like something I made up? Am I a liar as well as a psychopath? You be the judge!
(The truth: After a very unfortunate incident when I was a child, she did indeed lock up anything I could use as a weapon between the ages of six and thirteen. I also wasn’t allowed any more pets. She did call me a cartoonish parody of an evil person, but not until I was seventeen. I didn’t stab her because I didn’t want to do anything that might invalidate her life insurance policy. As of now, she’s alive and well.)
You may be wondering why the cop pulled me over in the first place. Was I dragging a dead pedestrian behind the vehicle? Did I have a severed head mounted on the dashboard? Did I take a swig from a flask of whiskey just as he passed me?
Nah. I was speeding. Not recklessly. A few miles above the limit that would’ve been perfectly okay any other time, but not when driving past a hard-assed small town cop who needed to make his quota for the month. I’m not very good at high-speed chases, so I decided to pull over, smile, politely hand over my (fake) driver’s license, registration, and proof of insurance. If it went smoothly, I’d stick to the posted speed limit for the rest of Louisiana. If he heard noise coming from the trunk, I’d shoot him in the face.
You know how that turned out, but I’m going to repeat it, simply because I enjoyed it so much.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to step out of the—”
I blew the cop away.
Got him right in the nose. Few body parts do well when a bullet hits them at close range, but your nose is particularly susceptible to destruction. I wish I’d recorded it so I could watch the video over and over. In slow motion. In reverse, so it was like the splattery gore was sucked back into his face to form a regular Jewish-style nose. Maybe even in sped-up motion, though it happened so quick that a sped-up version would be over in a blink.
Anyway, I dragged the cop away (you already knew that, but I’ll be as redundant as I damn well please in my own narrative) and then got back in my environmentally friendly vehicle (I’m not a complete monster) and drove a couple more hours. Then I decided to stop to make sure the bound woman in my trunk wasn’t dead.
She probably wasn’t. She’d only been in there for about six hours. Not enough to dehydrate or starve to death, and though she had duct tape over her mouth her nose was clear, so there was no reason she should have suffocated. The only way she should be dead is if she’d bonked her head when I hit one of the many bumps I’d encountered on various crappy roads. Barring a fatal brain injury, she should be okay.
I found a small convenience store that looked like it hadn’t been open for business in many, many years. Some of the graffiti on the boarded up windows was a couple of election cycles out of date. I don’t know the swamp equivalent of a tumbleweed, but I expected one to roll past my car as I drove behind the building and turned off the engine. It probably wasn’t safe to check on her here—the entire building could come crashing down if I sneezed, removing my car.
I got my hunting knife out of the glove compartment, got out of the car, walked over to the trunk, and knocked on the lid. “You dead?” I asked.
No answer. She was either dead or pretending to be dead in a clever attempt to catch me by surprise.
“If you don’t answer, I’m going to shoot through the lid,” I informed her. This was a bluff. I wouldn’t damage my car like that. But if I were locked in a trunk by a psychopathic killer and that psychopathic killer threatened to shoot through the trunk, I’d assume he was telling the truth. I wasn’t expecting a coherent response through the duct tape, but she could say something muffled or kick something like she had when the cop pulled me over.
She made a muffled noise. I grinned.
“I’m going to open the trunk now,” I told her. “Don’t try anything.”
I was just being amusing. No way could she try anything. Her arms were taped behind her back (which I’m sure was extremely uncomfortable during the long ride) and her feet were taped together at the ankles. I’d been generous with the tape; no cost cutting measures there. I obviously wasn’t going to throw open the trunk and then just stand there in prime position to get kicked in the chest, but with just the bare minimum of caution on my part, I knew she’d pose no threat.
I opened the trunk. She did not try to kick me in the chest.
She lay on her side. Her hair was all messed up and filthy (I didn’t do a good job cleaning the trunk before inserting a victim into it), as were her clothes. Light pink sweatpants and a dark pink sweatshirt—I’d kidnapped her while she was jogging. Her face was stained with tears. She gazed at me in terror.
It wasn’t the same woman.
She was in my trunk, and she was wearing the same clothes, and she had duct tape in all the right places, but the woman I’d kidnapped had red hair and freckles. This woman was a blonde. And a different face, at least the part that wasn’t covered with tape.
“What the—?” I said. I stopped because I was too shocked to finish the sentence, not because I had any aversion to saying the word “fuck.”
She tightened herself into the fetal position.
Was I mistaken? I couldn’t be. I had a very clear memory of the jogger. The woman in my trunk had bland good looks—still hot, but boring. The jogger had quirky good looks, like she’d be in a sitcom where she was a total klutz who messed everything up but the male viewers would still desperately want to bang her. She wasn’t the first woman I’d ever locked in my trunk, but she was the only one of this particular cross-country killing spree.
This was not flawed recall. This was something very strange.
I couldn’t interrogate the woman with her mouth taped up, so there was going to be some trust involved here. I held up the hunting knife and slowly slid it out of its leather sheath. “I’m going to take off the tape,” I told her. “If you scream, I will use this to poke a dozen tiny holes into your lungs so that you choke to death on your own blood. Do I need to explain what a terrible way that is to die?”
She shook her head.
I’d wrapped the duct tape around her head a couple of times, so trying to unwind the whole thing would be too much trouble. Instead, I slipped the tip of the knife under the edge, right next to her mouth, and cut a straight line down. Having the knife so close to her face would be wonderfully intimidating.
“Stop trembling,” I said. “I don’t want to cut you.” (“I don’t want to cut you” was a lie.)
She kept trembling, but I worked carefully and all she got was a small nick. Then I tore the tape from her mouth, eliciting a wince of pain, and cut away the part that had been over her lips.
“Hi,” I said.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m Mike.” (Not my real name.) “I’m a serial killer. What the hell happened to the woman I kidnapped?”
She looked surprised by my question. It was, I suppose, an odd question. But though I’m insane, I know the parameters of my insanity, and they do not include hallucinating shit like this. The woman I’d kidnapped was not the same woman who was in my trunk right now, and I wanted to know what was going on.
“Answer me,” I said, waving the knife in the vicinity of her right eyeball.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“Yes, you do! I stuffed a redheaded jogger in here a few hours ago, and you’re not her. I’ve stopped the car three times since I kidnapped her; once to fill it with gas, once to kill a cop, and now. I was right next to the car the whole time I was at the gas station, and it was in my sight the whole time I hid the dead cop. So what happened to her?”
“Listen to yourself,” said the woman. “If you never let the car out of your sight, how could she get out? It doesn’t make any sense! What was she wearing?”
“The same thing you are.”
“Are you saying that somebody broke into your trunk, took her out, and replaced her with me, wearing the same clothes and tied up in the same way?”
“I never said that you were tied up in the same way.”
“You didn’t say anything about it when you cut away the tape.”
“I think you just gave away that you know something.”
She frantically shook her head. “I don’t know anything. I don’t understand what you think could have happened! I was jogging through Wilson Springs Park, you jumped out at me, you shoved a wet cloth against my face, and I woke up in here!”
The woman was correct about that part. But I absolutely was not imagining this. I was not questioning my sanity (in this particular regard). This was not the same woman.
I held the tip of the knife half an inch from her eye. “Talk. Now. Or I’ll get sprayed in the face with eye jelly.”
“I’m a shape shifter,” she said.
“You’re what?”
“I can change form. I did it to try to get out of the duct tape, but I can’t really change my body size or shape, so it didn’t do any good. I tried a bunch of different options, and when you opened the trunk I couldn’t remember what I’d been when you grabbed me.”
That sounded absolutely batshit crazy, but there wasn’t an answer to this that wasn’t, so I nodded and moved the knife away from her eye. “Thank you,” I said. “That’s all I wanted to know.”
“You’re . . . welcome?”
“Prove it. Change back.”
She immediately transformed back into the quirky looking redhead. I’m not proud to say that I jumped back and let out a yelp. Though I’m sure it was less of a yelp than you would have let out under these circumstances.
“Please don’t kill me,” she said.
“Are you kidding? I’ve got a shapeshifting chick in my trunk and you think I’d kill her? I’m sure there are lots of great things I could do with you.”
She nodded. “There are. Lots.”
“Kinky things.”
“Yes! Very kinky!”
“Do tell.” I hadn’t raped any of my victims on this particular trip, but such a thing wasn’t entirely out of my realm of experience.
“I can change while we’re having sex,” she said. “It’s like you can have one girl after another. I can’t change my body that much, but I can make my boobs grow a little in your hand, and with my face I can even do requests. Any celebrity you’ve ever wanted to be with, I can look like her.”
“Make yourself look like Marilyn Monroe,” I said.
She did.
I very nearly crapped my pants. I could have any woman I wanted, all with one woman! Sure, I’d have to go elsewhere for my fat chick fetish, but if I locked the jogger in my basement (I’d have to get a house with a basement) I could fulfill every celebrity fantasy I’d ever had!
As a reasonably cautious psychopath, I knew I should wait to get her someplace more private before we really got into it. But I couldn’t help but grope Marilyn’s breasts. While I squeezed them, she leaned up to kiss me. I returned the kiss, figuring I could punch her in the stomach if she tried to bite me.
I suddenly got very dizzy. I lost my balance and fell to the ground.
It took her a few tries, but she sat up and peered over the edge of the trunk. “I forgot to tell you. I can also change other people. And until you get used to the process it’s really hard to control your body.”
I wanted to call her a bitch, but I couldn’t get my mouth to move.
I had to watch, unable to do anything but flop around a little, as she got out of the trunk, landing on the ground with a painful looking thump. She managed to get to where I’d dropped my knife, and after a lot of effort she wedged it under a tire, then scraped her wrists against it until she’d cut through the tape. The whole process took at least an hour, and I wasn’t getting any better with my motor functions.
With her hands free, it was easy for her to cut away the tape binding her feet.
She rubbed her legs to help get the circulation back, then, with some effort but less than it had taken to get the knife into place, she got me into the trunk and slammed the lid.
I felt like she might not treat me with kindness.
That is, I feel like she might not treat me with kindness. I’m still in the trunk. I think I’ve been here for a couple of days. I’m making up stories to keep my mind occupied. Nobody will ever hear them, I’m sure, but at least the distraction is keeping me within the previously established parameters of my insanity.
The trunk lid opens.
She jabs me in the arm with a hypodermic needle.
Suddenly I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a car. We’re parked outside of a restaurant. The woman is wearing different clothes but she still looks like the quirky redhead.
“Hi,” she says.
I try to see myself in the rear-view mirror. She tilts it to help me out. I don’t look all that much different—like I could be my own brother.
“I’ve been resting up,” she says. “Changing myself is no problem, not anymore, but changing somebody else is pretty exhausting. I’ll need a lot of energy. Did you know that I can change you into somebody that already exists, almost like I transported your mind into them? Of course you didn’t. But I can. And I’ve been waiting for the perfect specimen.”
“Who?”
She points to the restaurant window. A heavyset man sits in a booth, his face covered with orange sauce, eating Buffalo wings. A very large pile of bones is on a plate next to him.
“He’s eating inferno wings. He’d eaten at least two dozen of them when I walked up and kissed him, and he hasn’t stopped. I can still feel them burning my lips.”
I can’t figure out her angle. This seems pretty bad, but not vengeance bad.
She notices my confusion and smiles. “I don’t have to change you into a complete person. I can change you into part of a person.”
Suddenly, I understand.
“That’s right,” she says. “You’re about to become his asshole. Enjoy your evening.”
She kisses me.