Alien Caller (43 page)

“It’s a
terrible thing. But if you aren’t able to, you will all die. He
will not keep his side of any deal, no matter how much you want him
to. Remember that. He does not fear you, he will not be reasoned
with though he will let you think he can be. He will not stop
hurting you, and he will take every concession you give him and
give you nothing but blood and suffering in return. Then he will
come back stronger and more powerful every single time, and sooner
or later you simply won’t be able to defend yourselves at all if
you don’t kill him the first time.” It sounded even to him as
though he was pronouncing their doom, and in a terrible way David
knew he actually was. No plague, no pestilence, no invading army,
just one man, and yet that one man was the next worst thing to an
actual demon walking the Earth, or actually now, among the stars.
He carried on, knowing he had to.

“Before you
judge me, hear me out first. Then, if you still can, call me
paranoid.” It must have been enough as Cyrea nodded slightly and
stopped her objections. She wasn’t happy with him, in fact looking
at her wide eyes she was desperately worried, but she would
listen.

“The evil began
from his very birth. It was a miracle he was born at all, a dark
miracle. Dimock was born to an alcoholic, drug addicted mother and
a psychopathic, schizophrenic father who died of congenital heart
defects not long after. He should never have reached term, but he
did.”

“He was born
with severe problems, three months premature, massive deformities,
kidney and heart problems and an extra Y chromosome. He was a crack
baby with foetal alcohol syndrome and probably neonatal syphilis
although somehow his eyesight and intelligence weren’t impaired. In
hindsight maybe his survival was a very dark day for mankind. They
say the devil looks after his own. If so Dimock is that proof.” Of
course the Leinians didn’t believe in such things, but he guessed
they’d understand.

“He was born a
psychopath. He didn’t learn it and the drugs and the treatments
didn’t make him one. He was born it. The records are easy enough to
find. I have copies of the journals the local doctor’s office kept
of him. How as a baby he repeatedly bit his mother, drawing blood
as well as milk. He liked the taste from birth. Probably even then
he liked causing pain though no one could have believed that at the
time. Not of an infant.”

“He was a
hunter too, a born predator. His mother kept a diary of his
attacks, in between her bouts of drug fuelled mania and black outs,
and she told of how he stalked the pets, of how he bit them. Bit
them and kept biting, never letting go, even as they tore into him.
The cats, the dogs, they were all stronger and faster than him, but
they had no concept of his intent before he struck, and no wish to
harm him. They saw him as family; he saw them as food, as creatures
to hurt. When they should have fought or fled they tried to submit,
thinking he wanted dominance. They had more humanity in their paws
then he did and they paid for it with their lives.”

“His true
nature became more obvious when Dimock turned three and the doctors
began the surgeries and medications to make him better. Every
single one of them, no matter how small its chance of success or
how great the risk, worked on him. Worked even better than they
expected. Far better. Skin and bone grafts took immediately, organ
donations were never rejected and he didn’t seem to need the drugs
to stop rejection either. Reconstructive surgery always went
without a hitch and never needed to be repaired. It’s like Satan
himself conspired to let this one live. And after each operation,
not before since he knew he needed the operations, he attacked the
hospital staff.”

“At first it
was simple violence, all that a three or four year old could do,
although even then he was surprisingly quick and strong, especially
considering his enfeebled condition. But later, he grew cunning. He
learned to lie well, so that he wasn’t restrained, or else so that
others would release him thinking he was in pain. And he had an
angel’s face, and the devil’s own tongue, so that time after time,
people believed him. They always believed him and it was always a
mistake.”

“By the time he
was five he’d learned to hide scalpels, and to attack from behind,
and he was already getting stronger. There were some terrible
injuries, and but for the fact that they were in a hospital, there
would have been deaths. The doctors restrained him of course,
building a straitjacket just for him, chaining him to his bed,
locking the doors to his room, believing like you that he was safe.
But of course he wasn’t. Time and time again, no matter the
precautions they took, that five year old child escaped to cause
more injury and suffering. By six, he’d discovered that injecting
people with syringes was a good method of hurting them. Especially
when he broke into the anaesthetic supply one day.”

“He got three
nurses on that day. Injecting them with unknown drugs, rendering
them unable to defend themselves, and then cutting them up with
broken glass or anything sharp he could find. He drugged, mutilated
and tried to kill the people who were only trying to help him. It
was only due to good luck that they didn’t die as he cut them very
deeply. And though they didn’t want to accept the possibility from
a six year old, he was also showing signs of sexual perversion and
cannibalism even then. He cut the nipples off one of the woman, and
slashed other women in the genital region and then drank their
blood. One of them said he licked and bit at her wounds like a
ghoul while she lay there, unable to move. None of them were ever
able to work again.”

“After that
every surgery, every procedure he had done, was done while he was
under total anaesthesia and he was fully restrained, chained as a
criminal and guarded for his entire stay in the hospital. Even then
many of the hospital staff didn’t want to perform the operations.
They called him the demon child. Too many had suffered at his
hands. Some wanted to kill him even then and most said he didn’t
deserve to be treated, but the law said different. He was a child,
he had to be treated. So doctors and nurses had to be flown in from
outside the region to work with him. Again it’s all on record, and
there’s paper after paper written about him.”

“In the end
though even what they considered their over the top precautions
didn’t prove enough against Dimock’s unique evil. They didn’t
realize that even once it was all over, he would still never
forgive them for laying their hands on him. He would never forget
either, just as he will not forgive nor forget what you’ve done
today. Regardless of whether he believes I’m alive or dead, he will
hunt you. Next week, next month or next century, it doesn’t matter
which, he will come for you as he came for them.”

“Years later,
he returned to the town, and hunted down every single doctor and
nurse who’d treated him. Even the ones who’d been called in from
outside. The ones he’d never seen, never spoken to. The only way he
could even find them was by hunting out the records of each and
every operation, breaking into classified medical databases and
torturing the systems analysts until he had a list, and he did just
that. He surely didn’t even remember anything about those
surgeries, he was never hurt by any of them, only helped, but
simply the knowledge that someone, anyone had worked on him while
he was unconscious was too much for him to allow. Remember that. He
will not stop coming for you. There can be no appeasing him. No
reasoning with him.”

“They’re all
dead now. Their families too. And the ways they died were too awful
to believe. Rape, torture, mutilation. Those are normal acts for
him, even pleasures. Two hundred or more people, murdered for their
good deeds. Again that’s all on record, but locked away from the
public. The CIA’s investigators didn’t think it would be good for
people to know that such a monster ever existed, especially after
their involvement in letting him survive, and they made up
elaborate cover stories and smoke screens.”

“But that’s
barely the beginning of his evil, and far from the first of his
crimes. He killed his first person when he was eleven. Or at least
that’s the first we can prove. Many of his mother’s men friends
vanished without trace long before that, and many of their body
parts were found stashed in his room. Souvenirs of his crimes, and
just maybe food as well. But it was his mother who was the first
homicide we can confirm, and it was ugly. He stabbed her hundreds
of times, but always only just enough to cause her more suffering.
Once he’d crippled her, once he had her at his mercy, he played
with her. A lot.”

“She lasted
many hours according to the coroner, before death finally claimed
her. She was repeatedly raped, horribly mutilated and tortured so
badly that she actually ruptured her vocal cords screaming. There
was even some evidence that he ate her, though no one’s ever proved
it. No one wanted to. Instead they couldn’t believe an eleven year
old boy could have done something like that. To his own mother. So
the authorities let him go, looking for some out of town crazy who
never existed. It was a mistake of course. One of far too
many.”

“He lived alone
after that. His half-brother was put in foster care, and he was
just as mad. Dimock was supposed to be taken into care as well. But
somehow every time social services came to pick him up, he talked
his way out of it. For years. They could never explain it.”

“He killed
dozens more over the next couple of years, or at least dozens that
we know of. So many more just disappeared in the area, probably due
to him, that we have no true idea of the extent of his early
homicides. Strangers, tramps, prominent citizens. People he didn’t
know and people who’d been kind to him. Everyone was a waiting
victim for him. The murder and missing persons rates in that county
rose 10,000 percent over those years and no-one even guessed who
was responsible. No one could believe it was him. He was just a
kid. Small, weak, a sickly child with an angel’s face and innocent
looking too. But finally they had to.”

“The Sheriff
flung him in jail one day, after a lucky break. He was seen
butchering some hikers with a cut throat, and for once some of the
witnesses were able to get away. Even then they didn’t want to
arrest a scrawny little teenager, but the evidence against him was
simply so strong. The forensics especially.”

“Then they
watched him kill three hardened cell mates for fun. It’s all on
video. Between one prisoner check and the next he murdered them in
cold blood. He crippled them, and then one by one he slaughtered
them like sheep. They were bigger and stronger than him. Toughened
by years in jail, violent and dangerous men all of them. He was
just a slip of a kid still with underdeveloped lungs. But they
never stood a chance.”

“It was brutal,
perfectly planned, perfectly executed, and pure evil. Without
warning he gouged out the eyes of one of them with his fingers,
stabbed a second from behind with a knife he’d smuggled in in his
shoe, and then threw the knife at the third even as he was
screaming for the guards, slicing his neck wide open. The whole
attack took less than five seconds.”

“Then, when he
had them at his mercy, he spent the next fifteen minutes playing
with them, while they screamed their heads off. Slicing them up,
chopping off body parts, raping them, all men, and all directly
under the view of the video camera. He even waved and smiled at the
camera while he worked, somehow knowing that no one was watching.
You see he knew he’d been caught, and he knew he was going to be
tried and sentenced to death no matter what he did, and so he
decided to have a little fun while he had the chance. What he did
to those people was simply a pleasant diversion for him.”

“That was when
the authorities first understood what he was. A psychopath. The
first bonafide one seen in many years. The others play at it, but
he is truly the real deal. Genius IQ, completely amoral, and
totally devoted to sating his every degenerate whim. In his world
other people are put there purely for his pleasure. And his dinner.
All other people. Family, friends everybody. The most any of them
are to him is sport. To add to that he has a god complex. One
backed up by experience. He hates it when people don’t obey him. To
the point where he takes revenge on a biblical scale if
possible.”

“It was only
then that the authorities started putting him together with the
large numbers of unsolved homicides and missing people in the area.
They found many of their remains buried in his back yard, along
with his dead mother’s ex-boyfriends, and his house even now is a
crime scene as they continually find new bodies, or pieces of
them.”

“Having been
found guilty of killing at least twenty people by then, though the
true figure is thought to be well over one hundred and fifty and
maybe as many as five hundred, he was due to be executed at
fifteen. He would have been the youngest ever person executed, and
they actually had to rewrite the law to let them do it. He would
also have been the first man in the state to be executed for a
decade. It would have been younger still, but civil rights lawyers,
not stupid enough to get into a cage with him, held up the
execution for at least eighteen months. During that time he killed
seven more prisoners and mutilated a guard all from solitary
confinement. He also started several riots, and convinced three
more prisoners and another guard to commit suicide.”