The man in the worn easy chair was a man with a great deal on his mind. Present circumstances were as uncertain as any he had faced in his 58 years, and he didn’t much care for uncertainty. For a reason that stubbornly eluded him, his mind was drawn back to the night he had been pulled over in Williamsburg, Iowa with that girl in his trunk. He regretted that night all those years before; he regretted his carelessness and the loss of innocent life. He regretted the fact that success breeds the expectation of success without necessarily inspiring repetition of the actions that bring success, but mostly he regretted that he had panicked and disposed of his prize before truly enjoying it.
He had been a wanderer in those days, not a nester like now; he really hadn’t even been on watch that night, just out connecting dots on the map. It had then been months since he had felt the beginning of that anxious tug that would build to an all-consuming urgency, but that night opportunity had surprised obsession when he pulled off Interstate 80 near midnight and saw her sitting on the cold concrete in front of Casey’s General Store. So many years as an apex predator had refined his perception of distress to an acute level, and he sensed the aura of death enveloping her even before he opened the car door. She was pale and slim and average and looked frightened and tired, and after kind words and coffee and her entire, pointlessly tragic life story they had been in his car on the way, she thought, to a friend’s place, a place where she could be warm and safe, at least for a while.
Things had departed from the script when she had started to squirm. He never could decide what had spooked her; his tone and facial expression had been consistent, his movements controlled, but sometimes prey will just sense the lurking predator, using some dormant primordial wisdom that informs anxiety to deliver a jolt of adrenaline an instant before the jaws snap shut. Unfortunately for the small, dark-haired girl, he was very unlike the predators with big jaws; for him, capture was just the beginning. He had punched her viciously twice below her right eye, probably not enough to damage her fragile brain, but enough to momentarily cloud her mind and, perhaps, dissuade any further resistance. She was quickly restrained with his ubiquitous duct tape and was in the hopeless darkness of the trunk before she completely regained consciousness. He was taking a moment to assess his situation and plan his pleasure when the Iowa State Trooper arrived.
He had been distracted with his thoughts and, he had to admit, careless. The blue lights rhythmically illuminated the interior of his car before he sensed the unwelcome presence, but he had not managed to remain free to pursue his satisfaction all those many years by being paralyzed by the unexpected; he always had a plan. He got out and stood by the car facing the pulsating lights. He knew this would put the patrolman on his guard, but this disadvantage was offset by the freedom it gave him to maneuver. The trooper emerged from his car, gradually rising to his full height and walking forward, looking for all the world like a massive corn-fed golem backlit by a field of stars. Standing next to his car with the girl, his girl, in the trunk, the man watched the trooper advance, calculating all the possible outcomes, and waited.
The trooper sized him up momentarily and asked what he was doing out there in the dark, stopped by the side of the road. He responded that he had gotten lost trying to get back to the Interstate after buying gas and had pulled over to get his bearings. He knew that the trooper didn’t believe him, but he didn’t care. He knew that just because the trooper didn’t believe he was lost didn’t mean that the trooper thought he had a girl bound with duct tape in the trunk. Did he have a driver’s license? Why of course he did, and here it was. Where was he headed? Lincoln , actually, to visit a friend working at the University of Nebraska
The trooper turned only slightly, surprised by the muffled thump from the car. The man had anticipated this eventuality and moved with the dispassionate necessity born of years of life as an invisible horror, preying on the weak and the foolish. The blade was in his hand and wielded horizontally to slide between the ribs. He closed the small distance between himself and the trooper in one, swift lunge and all six-inches of the blade were buried in the upper left of the trooper’s back before he could react. The rest of the struggle was brief, the outcome decided. He stood contemplating the fallen giant, the trooper looking for all the world like a drunken Hawkeye fan, slumped against the car in his blue clothes with their bright yellow patches. The man took no pleasure in the trooper’s death; the patrolman had been, after all, just doing his job and was probably a decent enough fellow, maybe even with a family, but the man would not allow himself to be discovered and confined. He had to be able to find them and see the dread in their eyes. It was the only thing that could feed him, that could make him whole. The man quickly but calmly replaced his tag with one of the many concealed in the car, and searched for a place to dispose of his possession, who was now a dangerous liability. Law enforcement did not take kindly to the death of one of their own, and the effort to identify him would be intense. Later, he separately disposed of a few items, located Interstate 80, and headed east.
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The man shifted uneasily in his easy chair. He was surprised at himself for being so affected by the memory. It would be quiet an irony if he was developing some humanity at this late stage; now, when no one could be saved. Over the years the man had moved often, but as he aged, he had longed to settle and eventually he found a permanent home. Naturally, he sought seclusion, but not so much that he made his cautious disassociation from society apparent. He was careful not to be an outsider; he made certain to ritually greet his few neighbors, to make routine appearances in the small town and to explain his frequent absences by visits to a family he could never have endured. He pursued his pleasure with a methodical caution and a calculated randomness. Over the years, dozens made their way to him, the wretched refuse of broken families, failed romances and unrealized dreams. Each had learned how thin the veneer of human civility was, how easily hidden the depth of his need could be; each had come to know true dread as the last sensation of their conscious minds.
Somewhere along his twisted path the man had reached the point where he could no longer endure to leave them discarded in lonely, silent places. Eventually, they began to come to rest with him, in his home. They filled the empty spaces beneath the floors; they luxuriated under the carefully tended beds of marigolds and lilac. He was always at a project; there was never an air of neglect or any indication that his attention was anywhere but on his modest home with its large yard bordering on the deep woods that stretched for miles. Over the years he added a garage, then a shed, with neat, concrete foundations, and of late he had begun to fill them with blue plastic 55 gallon barrels, made, he noted with humor, from completely recycled components. He had gotten them for $79.95 each from a local farm supply retailer and had already acquired sixteen, although five were still empty. He had been in no hurry; life was good and there was time enough.
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The man sat in his worn easy chair focusing on the scrolling message from the Emergency Alert System. His healthy dinner sat untouched on the adjacent table. The events that had unfolded over the past few days had at first intrigued him, and later concerned him, but he found himself then, as always, incapable of true fright. The quest for this quality, so lacking in himself, had been at the root of his being for as long as he could remember. He had fed from the dread of his victims as surely as a spider nourished itself from the visceral soup of a fly. Now, he catalogued the grainy images from the television and listened to the endlessly repeated and mostly ignorant speculation and jealously absorbed the terror of the stream of witnesses and supposed victims. The plague, the virus, the judgment of God had struck the world and science and reason were insufficient to understand it or check its advance. Violence on an unimaginable scale was the new rule and the structure of society itself was in jeopardy. His few neighbors had fled to alleged safety, but he had remained, initially by choice, but now by absence of choice. He did not believe in God or the Devil or the rising of the dead, and he had on several recent occasions thought to venture out to assess the situation for himself, but he had been persuaded otherwise by the sound of containers tumbling in his garage, the random thumping on his doors and the incessant scraping on the underside of the pine planks of his carefully polished floor.
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