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“Slow down, Goddamnit,” Board hissed, his arm jerking out taut ahead of him as his dog—a year-old, 75 pound Japanese Akita—launched its stocky, muscular body forward, perhaps having caught a whiff of another neighborhood dog.  She was dragging him along, panting with her effort but also seemingly unaware of him. He tugged back on the choke chain; she hacked once and slowed a little. “Fucking dummy,” he growled.

The dog had already been named Sada when he’d acquired her from a Japanese neighbor three months ago, but he called her Sadie most times. Once, the Akitas had been owned exclusively by Japanese royalty, then called Matagiinu—the “esteemed hunter”. Over the centuries, they had been used to hunt bear (their own broad faces making them appear bear-like), been fighting dogs, been eaten (especially during the last World War) and been used for their pelts. Since that war, they had been brought home by a lot of servicemen and had begun to become something of a popular breed.

Sadie was a “pinto”, primarily white but with a black mask that obscured her small, slanted eyes. A large black triangle on her back, a smaller black splash behind that, and then a black band around her bushy, curled tail. With her large pointed ears and regal carriage, she was a striking animal, and on four or five occasions while Board had been walking her cars had literally stopped in the road (one had even made a U-turn) so that the drivers might get a better look at her or even ask him what kind of breed she was.

There was an abandoned abrasives factory at the end of Board’s quiet little side street, and he liked to walk Sadie through its empty parking lot, though he tried to keep her from plunging into the tall grass that grew along its far border. She’d picked up ticks there on two occasions. The last time he’s found it in her armpit, and it was just a little black disk. But the first one, right between her shoulder blades in that black triangle, had been gorged into a small green grape by the time he discovered it. He’d pulled both of them off her with tweezers, and flushed them down the toilet, smiling as he watched their legs paddle futilely.

Today Board wore a big Colt .45 semiautomatic in a shoulder holster, as he did every time he ventured outside his house. It held eight bullets (seven in the clip, one in the chamber)—which, plump as they were, reminded him of the atomic bomb nicknamed “Fat Man” that a Japanese kamikaze plane had dropped on Pearl Harbor years ago—and in his jacket’s pocket he carried a spare magazine.

A person was allowed one kill a year, but you could carry that kill over into the next year. A lot of people never used their kills, so they accumulated them. With the proper forms, you could even give away or sell your allocation to another. Since the law had been passed ten years ago—in an effort to control crime, in an effort to give the public a therapeutic way to vent, to channel their aggression—Board had not used his allocation once.

He had ten kills available to him. Anyone he chose, excluding a Medium or politician. Any man, woman, or child. Any policeman, priest, or spouse. He had not taken advantage of this freedom, this right. But he always made sure he had ten bullets with him. More, in case he ever wanted to shoot someone multiple times. He had saved his kills for self-defense from other killers, other of his fellow citizens, but to date he had never been chosen as anyone else’s victim. He tried to be an invisible man. Nondescript, a nonentity. Nobody’s target.

As Board half-stumbled along the street after his dog, approaching the grounds of the derelict factory, a bicycle came zipping past on his right. Sadie gave a half-hearted lunge after it, grinning foolishly, tongue lolling. It was a boy of about twelve.

Behind him, Board heard another child’s voice bellow, “Running home to your Daddy, pussy?”

“Fuck you, homo!” the boy ahead of Board shouted back over his shoulder.

“Queer!” came the nearing voice.

“Fairy!” barked the retreating voice.

“Fucking fudge-packer!” yelled the voice that now coasted up alongside Board. Another boy on a bike, and with him the brother or friend who always rode this neighborhood with him. Board tensed up, and Sadie flicked her head toward them with interest. Several times these two had made whistling or howling sounds at Sadie as he walked her, and he expected more of it now. Maybe even mocking statements directed at him; if they were afraid of him then they never would have teased his dog in his presence.

But as Board looked their way, hoping he appeared surly without being challenging, the boy who had just been roaring obscenities cried out, “Your dog is so beautiful! I love that dog!”

Board gave an uneasy smile, a bit surprised but still wary. “Thanks. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

The friends/brothers picked up speed again, resumed chasing after the first boy. Maybe they did have some respect for him, after all. Because he was an adult…because he was an aging adult…or maybe because of the Colt .45 he plainly wore? Not that guns were a rarity.

Did they intend to beat up that other boy? They couldn’t legally kill him—they weren’t eighteen yet. Unsanctioned murders were treated with the utmost severity. Those found guilty were set free within fenced areas of woodland where others who were sanctioned would hunt them down. There, the condemned could only hope for a quick, clean kill. Once in a while, a prisoner might wrestle a gun or crossbow or axe or what have you away from one of the hunters, but there were plenty of guards on hand to watch out for things like that…

When Board was a child, even saying “damn” or “hell” in front of his mother would have been unthinkable. His mother had been a demure woman who abhorred crudity, which had made the eye-stabbing, silently shrieking horror of her appearance in death all the more surreal, disturbing. Strangely, too intimate—like seeing her naked inadvertently. Embarrassing, in a way. Like hearing one’s mother moan in pleasure behind her bedroom door. Like hearing his father cry late at night, as Board once had before the man disappeared on that train to oblivion.

He and the dog had entered the desolate parking lot now. He could imagine that this was what the city would look like if there were ever an Apocalypse. Or if all the citizens finally killed each other off…except for him. It was a half-welcome fantasy.

Wild grasses bristled up from cracks that snaked through the asphalt; nature reclaiming her ground, like vines growing through skull sockets. In the center of this lot was a small brick warehouse, an outer structure of the sprawling factory, with two arched loading docks along one flank…but these had since been filled in with cinder blocks. They reminded Board of two huge, blinded eyes.

They crossed the lot under the stark tarnished sky, and reached the grassy fringe of the parking lot’s rear border. There were a few scattered birch trees here, their bark peeling white and black as if the trunks and branches had been covered all in newspapers. In the tall weeds lay two long rusted train rails without the ties to connect them. Beyond the factory, Board frequently heard trains moaning by, even late at night. The most haunting, mournful of sounds; when their whistles called, he imagined dinosaurs might have bleated such sounds to each other, perhaps not so unaware of their impending annihilation.

Sadie squatted, urinated next to a magazine warped from recent rains, splayed open to its center. Board kicked it over with his toe; the title was Alarma! He’d seen the original Spanish version and lately the English version of it, as well, on newsstands. Each issue was full of lurid photos of shotgunned Mexican dope peddlers and sundered auto accident victims.

There was a condom close by, dried out from the sun and looking brittle, a dead thing in the surf. Sadie sniffed it but Board jerked her along…past glinting shards of broken beer bottles, and an intact whiskey bottle further back in the underbrush.

At the corner of the lot, a street lamp rose up. Its own trunk was streaked with rust like splatters of dried, flaking blood. Board tilted his head back to squint up at it.

At its summit, a camera was mounted. Its single, milky eye gazed down at him in turn with seeming blankness. Its kind could survive for nearly a year without nourishment until a maintenance worker from the town would climb up on a ladder to feed it some bone grit. At night, when the post’s lamp automatically came on, its beam would draw clouds of moths and beetles, as if they had come to pay homage to this proud sentinel. This solemn, remote witness.

Board was almost jolted forward off his feet, as Sadie abruptly surged into the grass. He caught his balance and snarled, “You stupid damn dog…I’ll send you back where I got you, I swear to God!” He’d probably been a fool taking on such a boisterous young animal at his age. He had thought she’d be good company after Judy—his live-in girlfriend of eight years—had succumbed to smallpox (which had been released from an Italian bomb in the most recent war). That had been two years ago now. Well…the dog was good company. The dog worshipped him, even tried to park her seventy-five pounds in his lap when he sat before his TV. He supposed the problem wasn’t so much with her, as it was with himself…

Reining in his temper, fighting to rein her in, he pulled back on her leash once more. “Come on…you’re going to get another tick, you moron.”

But it wasn’t a choice spot to stack a mound of turds that she was sniffing for. Not the territorial markings of an earlier dog she was investigating. Board finally saw the bare feet poking out from behind a particularly thick and tall clump of grass. Riding on that visual, a scent made itself known to his conscious mind at last. And a sound that had been subliminal, as if only imagined. The low humming of flies.

Board wrapped Sadie’s leash around and around his hand to bring her in close. Then, trying his best to keep her beside him as he advanced, he gingerly moved nearer to those jutting naked feet. He found himself holding his breath.

The woman’s legs were spread out but bent inward at the knees in a frog-like posture. Board felt she might have been posed that way. She was nude, and her skin was a light brown. Smooth, tight, youthful. There were no stab wounds peppered across her vulnerable breasts, yawning open in her elastic skin, as he might have thought. Instead, she was more or less pristine except that her head had been run over by an automobile’s tire (or two). Board could see the markings of its tread a little further along, where red-streaked weeds had been crushed into a patch of dirt. The young woman’s head had been flattened into something like a discarded rubber mask, its gaping expression almost comically unreal. Its contents had been squeezed out in a paste. It couldn’t be her tongue alone that protruded from her wide, dismayed mouth—it looked like she’d vomited out a raw steak.

She couldn’t have been killed this way; she must have been strangled first. Or beaten over the head with a chunk of cinder block; there were a few of those in the grass here and there. Then, then she had been disfigured so contemptuously. It couldn’t have been an accident. Intentional, Board was sure, like her splayed legs.

Because of her skin tone, and her apparently slanted eyes (it was hard to be certain about that), Board figured her to be Asian. For a vertiginous moment, he took the woman to be his neighbor Kei, from whom he had obtained Sadie when the woman decided the dog was too wild for her home, played too rough with her small children. But Board concluded that was not the case; this woman was too young.

A drop of liquid splattered against his forehead. Board touched it, looked at his fingers, then at the sky, as if he expected to see blood dripping down from a second body in the crotch of a bone-white birch. But no, the sky had gone a darker shade of silver, and a light rain had begun to patter down.

With his eyes still turned upward, Board again took in the camera mounted at the top of the lamp post. He shifted his gaze to the right, swiveling until he spotted another camera atop a distant telephone pole.

Board returned his attention to the woman, whose head and thus identity had been obliterated. He saw no clothing, no purse in the vicinity. Debased before and then even after her death—ground into the dirt like a cigarette under a heel. Stripped down to nothing but this mass of cells. The ruined head making the smooth prettiness of the rest of her grotesque in its contrast. Like his mother’s pretty dark hair, hanging down around her discolored face…her bare feet, pointed downward like a ballerina’s, fine in form but black as overripe bananas.

Board felt oddly more embarrassed for this anonymous woman than mournful. He wanted to throw something over her legs, her gaping crotch, but had nothing to cover her with but his own jacket. And what good would that do, anyway, except get him wet from the rain on his walk back home?

“Stop it,” he hissed to Sadie, who had been snuffling at the girl’s pretty feet and even gave one sole a lick before he wrenched her away. “Let’s go,” he told her. “Come on, idiot, let’s get back home.”

He threw another look at the dead woman before he left her there. He saw flies crawling across what had once been her mind. Another fly picked its way across the wires of her pubic hair as if playing a game, trying not to fall into the crevice of her vagina. No other region of the human body—not even the brain, it seemed—had inspired so much killing as the one that gave birth.

When he got home, Board immediately called the police. He told the detective he’d been transferred to that he had stumbled upon a murdered woman on the property of the old abrasives factory.

“Right there at the corner of the warehouse parking lot?” the detective asked him.

“Yeah, yeah, that’s it.” Someone else had already reported it, then?

“We know about it. There’s a camera right there. We just haven’t had a chance to pick up the body yet.”

“Well…so…did you see who did it, then? On the camera?”

“It was a legal kill, sir, don’t worry about it. The man’s already been checked out. We’ll try to get down there tomorrow.”

“But…” Board began to stammer now “…kids play down there…”

“I said we’d get to it. Kids shouldn’t be playing around there, anyway…it’s private property. And you shouldn’t be walking your dog there, either.”

“Sorry,” Board mumbled, hanging up.

Later he fed Sadie her supper, and then tried to find something he could watch on TV. When he saw that the popular “reality show” Rape Island was on, he quickly changed to another channel before his bile began to rise. Even the newspapers reported on each weekly episode with the same fervor that workers gushed about it around the water cooler. As much as he tried not to hear anything about the program, even Board knew that it looked like Elizabeth would be the last woman to be raped on Rape Island, and thus would win the ten thousand dollars. The first woman who’d been raped, he’d heard people cynically joke, had been caught after only an hour on the island—proving that she’d wanted to be raped.

Turning off the TV after coasting through its several hundred channels in two full, restless loops, Board looked toward the window he had stood before when it had still been light. Out there in the dark, in the now drumming rain—just at the end of his little suburban street—that young Asian woman lay in the street lamp’s glow. Only that camera watching over her. The lonely rushing vibration of a passing train might have been the moan of her spirit, struggling to free itself from the chaos of her head. Emptied, flattened, like that discarded condom. Just like a tossed condom, to the man who’d killed her; something he’d briefly put his dick inside.

Am I insane? Board wondered. Is it me?

Was he too old, too traumatized maybe from events of his boyhood, to just loosen up and sit back and watch Rape Island? To go outside tomorrow at six o’clock, after coffee and bug eggs, and shoot his neighbor in the head for playing his radio so loud when Board was still trying to rest his aging bones? He could shoot the man’s entire family and still have five or six kills saved up.

Was there something wrong with him? Was he simply unable to blend in with society like the majority? He the mutant? He the misfit, the outcast, like a murderer who couldn’t ask a woman for a date and thus stabbed her, who couldn’t interact with his coworkers and shot them instead?

Judy had been the longest relationship of his life. She hadn’t wanted to marry him; she was a divorcee who after twenty-plus years with an alcoholic harbored a dark view of marriage. A rather dark temper, too. She’d slapped him across the face on several occasions. But she’d died with eight kills accumulated, unused. Gone to waste, some would say, because she hadn’t willed them to Board or anyone else.

He’d waited all his life for Judy. He was grateful he’d had her for the eight years he had.

Young men would often make a kill in front of girls they wanted to date, to impress them. So many young men had it easy…had no problem meeting women, dating, marrying, (cheating).

Yes, he was thankful for the eight years. But that didn’t erase the bitterness that his girlfriend had been murdered. By tiny organisms too many, too distant from him, to count. By humans too many, too distant from him, to count. Before her death, her face had become discolored and disfigured by the virulence. He was lucky, he supposed, that he hadn’t caught it from her. Hadn’t died, too. Lucky, he supposed.

In war, you could kill as many people as you wished. No limits. And there was never a shortage of volunteers.

Judy had liked his mustache and goatee, silvered these days. He stroked his bristled chin now, but instead of Judy he briefly thought of Louise. He hadn’t heard from her since she’d sent him a Christmas card in 1938, the same year that her last movie, Overland Stage Riders, had come out. He’d listened to her in radio plays several times, but he’d never seen her on any of the countless TV police dramas and sitcoms. Just movie late shows. Not young enough to appeal to casting directors, he supposed. He had even heard a rumor that she’d taken a sales position at Saks Fifth Avenue.

The rain increased to a pounding downpour. Biblical torrents that threatened to drown the world. Board went to the window but could barely see through the glass, which seemed made of some unstable, rippling black matter. He wanted to go out there, nonetheless, into the drowning world. To bring a blanket or a tarp with him, and cover that woman lying there alone in the night. Her smooth belly, that once a mother might have nuzzled and kissed as his own mother had kissed his, was being hammered mercilessly.

But again, as with his jacket, the urge was a pointless gesture, and he turned it away. He pulled the shade, shut off the living room light, and went to his bed. Sadie followed him, to sleep at its foot. Before climbing in, he stroked her head and said, “Good girl, good girl,” to her in baby talk. He always felt badly, later, when he’d lost his temper with her. But she always forgave him. Her loyalty didn’t swerve. He admired her for that. Despite her savage fangs, her simplicity, she was—to him—as fine a creature as nature could ever conceive. “Esteemed hunter,” he cooed to her as he slipped under his blanket.