Keirnan stared at the orange Dodge in the parking lot for several minutes. There were shadows moving around it. He guessed both were male, but the shorter one could have been a really undefined tall woman, especially since the shorter one was definitely not in control of the situation.
The taller one was holding a sword. Keirnan had no other word for it. It was a giant sword that looked like it would cut the shorter person in half either way the taller one used it. He’d wanted to display the bones of his last conquest here. The park had interesting acoustics that would make the find more delightful when the person realized no one could hear them screaming.
However, the sword wielding maniac in the parking lot was a deterrent. Keirnan wasn’t a small guy. He was tall and muscular and he worked for a living, but that didn’t mean he could take on whoever the guy with the sword was. For starters, the sword looked close to four feet long and the man holding it appeared skinny. Keirnan knew he was a psychopath, but he also knew another psychopath when he saw one and the guy with the sword appeared to be a crazier psychopath than he was. Meaning, he’d lose that fight. He had no desire to end up on the wrong end sword being easily handled by a psychopath.
Who even used swords anymore? Keirnan could read about it in the newspapers. He slowly backed his car up, leaving all his lights off. He did not want to be seen leaving this place by either of the people in the parking lot. One would wonder why he didn’t help, the other would consider him a threat. Keirnan had things to do. He couldn’t be found dead because of a misunderstanding.
There were other parks. For that matter, there were other nights. He could wait and display the story tomorrow.
This story needed to be displayed though. It mattered. Not because the person was important, but because her struggle had been. Her bones had told him about abuse and neglect, probably as a child. As an adult, she hadn’t fared much better. She’d tried to act innocent, but Keirnan had seen through it quickly. She had been desperate to find someone that night.
She’d found him. It had been less than a month ago. He’d been drinking quietly, enjoying a few beers during one of the World Cup Baseball matches along with some nachos, when she had approached him. She had even offered to buy him a beer. He had declined and instead, ordered her a drink and him another. He’d even bought her dinner.
Getting her to go home with him had been very easy. She’d followed him to his house, all the way south of the city, onto the dark country roads that made up rural Missouri. Her plates had read Kansas, meaning she was from the other side of the border. She had looked and acted like a city girl. Her following him all the way home had surprised him. He’d expected to get halfway there and see her turn around, go back to civilization and the lights of city life.
He hadn’t needed to do anything special to kill her either. The moment she was parked and out of her car, she was all over him. Her shirt was off before they even got in the house. Keirnan had fought to maneuver her back towards his car, it had taken him maybe a minute to reach in, get the knife, bring it out, and stab her.
She had not looked surprised. She had smiled at him. She closed her eyes and let herself bleed to death in his driveway without any fight. It was as if she had given up long before that night. Once Keirnan had cleaned her bones, he had figured out why. There was no reason to fight when you were always a victim.
Her story was as much about him as it was her. He had been a victim for many years. He had fought against it and won. He found his freedom and his peace with the death of his father, until his mother died. That had opened him up to the rage that now consumed him. He wanted to kill more men, but they were much harder to lure out of bars and clubs than women.
His good looks and easy smile was hard for a woman to resist. Getting them to follow him or just go with him wasn’t all that hard. Even the ones who were unsure about leaving with him, eventually did it. He was charming and reassuring. Traits that he no doubt got from his psychopathic personality. They belied the rage that burnt within his soul and consumed his body.
That rage needed to be quelled. Only when he displayed the stories of his victims did he feel it die down ever so slightly. Their bones freed them, just as displaying his father’s skeleton had freed him. It was all about the bones.
He’d started with easy victims. Homeless people that could be killed quickly and without a fight. He’d worked up from there. Their bones told stories, but it also wreaked havoc on his barn. Most had been rotting before he got them to it. Gangrene and canker sores that oozed puss had covered their dirty bodies. Their feet were blackened by frost bite or disease or both. The smell of them would linger for days, despite the insects not caring one bit about what was going on with their flesh. Keirnan had learned that healthier people, people who weren’t already dying, didn’t smell as bad, alive or dead.
He drove all the way home. He had other bones he could display. He was starting to get a stockpile of them. People were easy victims when a man was attractive and charming. He’d always heard that beautiful women have easier lives, he was sure the same was true of handsome men, like himself.
Inside the barn, he swapped duffle bags. Everybody had a story to tell and each would get their turn. Some were more special than others though. Plus, not leaving them in the order they disappeared was actually a great countermeasure to forensic analysis. He’d recently watched a show about forensic detectives that had given him the idea.
He picked a closer park to the southern part of Kansas City. The drive wasn’t nearly as long and he knew it well. He’d come here on multiple occasions when he was child and his mother had taken him out for day trips, before his father had turned into the monster he had become.
Very carefully, Keirnan unzipped the bag and began to layout the bones. There was a pattern to it. The largest bones first, meaning the spine went on bottom, then the femurs were laid out next to it. The ribcage was placed beside the right femur and the skull was placed inside of it. Then came the smaller long bones of the arms and legs, and the bones of the torso like the collar bones, shoulder blades, and pelvis were arranged in a circle around the largest bones. The tiny bones that made up the ear, fingers, toes, and a few joint pieces were all put into a bag and sealed before he brought them here. This bag was placed beside the left femur.
It was a beautiful sight to behold when he finished. More importantly, he was getting much faster at it. It had only taken him ten minutes to lay them all out this time. He smiled with pride and headed back to his car.
The news would probably feature the bones first and then the man killed by a sword. That still bothered Keirnan. He’d been able to take his mind off of it while he worked with the bones, but now that the entire task was done, he was curious about it again.
The more Keirnan thought about it the more he remembered and the more he realized it didn’t make sense. The tall man had stepped into the light once. Keirnan should have seen features. Instead, he had seen a skull and black robe.
But Death had always used a scythe, not a sword. If the guy had wanted his imagery to make him look like Death, the giant sword wasn’t working. So maybe it wasn’t Death he was trying to emulate. Maybe it was something else. Or maybe he just had bad fashion sense.
Keirnan shook his head, trying to dislodge the thoughts. He wanted to drive back by there. He wanted to see if it had been a hoax or if he had seen something wrong and his mind was filling in blanks with false details. He focused back on the bones. Not the ones he’d just placed, but his father’s skeleton.
They’d shown him many secrets. Just like his overly-eager young lady, his father’s bones had shown massive damage. The same type of damage that Keirnan’s bones would show if he ever needed an X-Ray. Keirnan had never met his grandfather. George Janson had died before Keirnan’s parents had gotten married.
Keirnan was sure he knew why. His father hadn’t always been a monster. He had changed sometime after the birth of William. Until then, Myron had never even shouted at Keirnan. After William was born though, Myron began to abuse both boys regularly. He was repeating the pattern. He was torturing his children and making them suffer just as he had suffered.
After looking at Myron’s bones, Keirnan had understood the suffering his father had endured. William had been a sickly child. He was in the hospital several times in just the first year of his life. The financial and emotional stress had been too much on Myron and he had snapped. He had taken to beating Keirnan. He had taken to drinking too much. And he had murdered his own son.
None of these revelations made Keirnan hate his father any less. It just meant that Keirnan knew he had followed in his father’s footsteps. He too had eventually given in to his darkness and snapped. Now, he lived there, with only his rage and the stories of others as company.