I drove back to Bridgton with Armageddon on my heels.
Surprisingly, I hadn’t gotten a drop of blood on me, even though I’d just murdered several dozen people, setting off what was sure to be a New England holy war. It was almost as if someone were looking out for me. Yeah, right. The Uzi had jammed in the synagogue, so I’d had to finish the rest with the scimitar, leaving a lone survivor to spread the word.
Spread the word?
I didn’t even know what the hell the word was supposed to be: that a maniac had come to town and decided to make it his own killing field?
According to the radio, I wasn’t the only problem facing the country at the moment. What I’d done wasn’t small potatoes, but it was still pretty substantial.
“Not even an attaboy from you, AO?” I shouted in the car. I felt like I could shoot flames from my eyes and fingertips, like something out of an Iron-Maiden-fueled fantasy. I’d done everything AO had ordered me to do—most of it with a sick glee that made me want to run from myself.
And now I was going home to my family. A demon on fire, looking to spend some quality time with my daughter and a nice, hot dinner. Oh yeah, the hotter the better.
“They were all hypocrites.”
The voice carried over the radio, the DJ talking about a mass murder at a Portland mosque. Muslims as far away as the Middle East were already promising vengeance. The bodies were still warm and sabers were rattling.
I realized that AOs voice wasn’t coming through the car’s speakers. I turned the radio off.
“What did you say?”
“Hypocrites. All of them. Poseurs of the worst kind. They were all representative of the cancer that has festered within their faiths for far too long. You have nothing to feel sorry about.”
AO was in my head now. Odds are, he always had been.
I looked down at my lap. Obviously my cock wasn’t feeling the slightest twinge of regret. It could have doubled as a maypole. I was pretty sure that if I undid my jeans, I would see an appendage far bigger than the one I’d been working with all my life. Blood ran through my groin like magma.
“Those were innocent people,” I said, swerving around a truck to get into the left lane. A black pillar of smoke billowed out from the tops of the trees to my left. The steady bleat of sirens charged the late afternoon air.
“No, not a one.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one doing the killing. What I did isn’t going to stop there. It’s going to ignite a damned holy war! And I left witnesses! My face is going to be on every news channel. You had me kill a school shooter and avoid a catastrophe, only to make me the worst kind of mass murderer. What I did isn’t going to stop there. Just like in Bridgton, it only spurs people to do bad shit!”
The wheel turned of its own accord, breaking my hot grip. The Mustang cut across three lanes of traffic, settling onto the shoulder of the highway.
“You don’t tell me what is and what isn’t easy! You have no concept of the amount of pain and loss I feel! I suffer not just the now, but what has gone before and what is to come.”
“Cry me a river. You’re just a voice in my head. When I get electrocuted for this, you won’t even feel a spark.” I was breathing awfully heavy. My emotions were riding a high wire. I was seething with anger at the same time I was disgusted, terrified as well as reveling in the power a voice, car, and two weapons had given me.
“Just let me get back on the road so I can see my wife and child for the last time.”
I tried to turn the wheel but it didn’t budge.
“Come on, AO old buddy, I’m not kidding around! I don’t think I have much time left outside a prison cell. For all I know, a squadron of cops is waiting for me to get home. They’ll probably shoot me on sight. All I ask is that I get to see Candy and Katie one more time, even if it’s from a distance.”
The wheel suddenly stopped fighting me.
Wow, for once AO had done something I’d told him to do instead of the other way around. Maybe I was finally gaining control of myself.
A day late and a dollar short.
If my sanity was returning, it was just in time to watch my life spin down the toilet.
I thought of several excuses I could give Candy for being out all day. I’d decide which one to use when I saw her, feeling her out. If I wasn’t going to be gunned down on my front lawn, I just wanted to hold her and Katie. That is, if I could get my core body temperature down. If they were with me now, I’d give them third-degree burns.
The redness was leaching from my eyes. It seemed the closer I got to Bridgton, the more my humanity returned. I kept the radio off. I’d heard and seen enough today. Talk about killer diseases couldn’t penetrate the scenes in my head—bullets tearing through people, the explosions of tattered flesh, muscle, and blood, limbs twitching on the floor after I’d carved them with the scimitar. Heads bouncing like stinky pinky balls.
And the cries, the pleading, the wails of agony moments before I ended their misery. Christ. They would plague me the rest of my days, which was all the more reason to hope there weren’t many left in the life bank.
Turning onto my block, disappointment and elation at not seeing a sign of any police played tug of war. I pulled the Mustang into my driveway. There was no sense hiding it at this point.
My forehead smashed into the front door when I turned the knob in full stride. It was locked. Candy never locked the door during the day. It was part of the appeal of moving up to Maine.
I checked my pockets for my keys, relieved that my body had cooled considerably. The door whooshed open. Candy looked at me and broke down crying. She tugged me into the house by my shirt collar, closing the door behind me.
“Thank God you’re home,” she said, sobbing into my chest.
Confused, I put my arms around her.
“What happened? Is Katie all right?” I said.
“Haven’t you seen the news?” Her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. “That virus or whatever it is, is spreading like wildfire. Peter, my mother called two hours ago. She and Dad were going to the hospital because they think they have it. They’ve been running high fevers and vomiting nonstop since last night. She said she’d call me right back and I haven’t heard from her. Every time I call, I get a message that all the circuits are busy. I…I’m going crazy not knowing where they are or what’s wrong with them.”
Candy’s parents lived all the way in Arizona. It wasn’t as if we could just hop in the car to check on them.
“I’ll go look at flights,” I said.
She held me so hard, I couldn’t take a step. “You can’t. The FAA grounded all flights an hour ago.”
“Are you kidding me? What are we, at war?”
This was bad. Real bad. Maybe so bad that I would get away with all of my crimes. When things were so screwed that travel was suspended and martial law enacted, a few shootings could easily slip into the cold case files quickly.
But people had seen me. I hadn’t even had the sense to wear a ski mask.
Candy sniffled. “The government wants to cease all travel to prevent this from becoming a pandemic. The only way we could get to my parents is by driving, and I’m pretty sure the highways are the next to be shut down.”
I led her to the couch. “First, your parents are going to be all right. Remember when 9-11 happened? All of the phone lines were jammed. I couldn’t get through to you all day. I guarantee your mother is trying to call right now but the circuits are busy.”
That seemed to calm her a little, but she was still trembling with hysteria.
“If you want, I’ll keep trying to call her every five minutes until I get through. Why don’t you take a Xanax and settle down? When I do get through to your mother, it won’t do her any good to hear her daughter freaking out.”
Candy kissed my cheek, her tears falling onto my flesh.
“God, I love you,” she whispered. “And you feel warm again. I hope you’re not getting one of those fevers. I don’t want to have to go to the emergency room. I bet it’s filled with people who are either sick or think they are.”
I cupped her face in my hands. “I’m fine. We’re not going to the hospital. Where’s Katie?”
“Upstairs playing.”
“That’s one good thing. I’ll get the pill and some water.”
Candy turned the TV on while I went to the medicine cabinet. I peeked in on Katie, who was putting on a cooking show with her little plastic kitchen set. Her audience was her stuffed animals, all lined up to watch her talk about how to make chocolate chip cookies. She didn’t notice me.
As we sat on the couch flipping through all of the news channels, and every channel was now broadcasting live news feeds, I could see why Candy was a mess and so afraid for her parents.
It looked and sounded like the world was coming down around us—people getting sick in record numbers, looting, the military trying to get a lid on large cities, talk of food shortages, and strange weather patterns. And murders. Sweet Jesus, people were killing each other as if it were a video game and a billion dollars was the prize.
Who was I to be shocked by that? On one local channel, they briefly mentioned the shooting at the mosque. I guess the other two holy institutions didn’t rate. My stomach clenched when the talking head said the police had a sketch of the shooter. I tried to grab the remote from Candy’s hands to change the channel. I noticed, too late, that it had slipped between the cushion and the couch.
A black and white drawing of what looked like a middle-aged rabbi flashed on the screen.
“If you recognize the man in this photo, the police are urging that you call their tip line at…”
What the hell?
The poor schmuck in the sketch didn’t look a thing like me. How could the guy I’d let live come up with that?
Candy stared at the TV, numb now, thanks to both the information overload and tranquilizer.
Then it hit me.
Someone was looking out for me.
AO.
Which meant, he wasn’t in my head at all.