Collected Kill: Volume 2 (2 page)

He drifted off to the vision of blue skies and slack-necked chickadees.  His face cramped with laughter, his jaw aching from the smile permanently etched onto his sagging face.

Mr. Langford had never felt more alive or alone as the van spiraled down an exit ramp, circling in descent, lower and lower, around and around, the scenery swirling under grey skies, deeper into darkness, downward toward the unknown.

THE BOY WITH THE RAZOR-SHARP TEETH

Every smile seemed dangerous with pointed teeth and bleeding gums.  And with dark beady eyes and breath that could choke a mule, no one ever talked to the boy with razor sharp teeth.  

His deformity was so evident that his name became “The Boy With The Razor-Sharp Teeth.”  Even Ms. Adams addressed him as such ever since the morning he first arrived during show and tell.

Jimmy Wilson had just finished showing off his new wooden rubber band gun by flipping Jackie in the rear.  Ms. Adams jerked the gun away from him as The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth entered.

I looked in the doorway and there was the hideous smile.  Susie and Jenny screamed, Ms. Adams gasped, holding her chest.  Jimmy Wilson looked up, shouted “What the F—” before his jaw dropped.

The boy quickly shut his mouth, looked down into the rust-colored carpeting and swayed back and forth with some mutated innocence.

“You must be Daniel,” Ms. Adams deduced, finally collecting herself, though her face still slightly cringed.  “Come sit in the circle....we’re in the middle of show-and-tell.”

The boy shuffled over next to me and crossed his legs.  A sour, rotten smell drifted from his gaping mouth.  The girls shifted away.

“Okay, I believe it’s Sarah’s turn.  What do you have for us today?”

Sarah Weller opened the cardboard box in front of her as Jake Foster probed the holes poked through each side.

Something squealed inside until she pulled out a fat rodent.

“This is my Guinea Pig, Virgil.”

Ms. Adams smiled.  “Class, let’s all welcome Virgil to his first day at school.”

Everyone sat in silence, staring at The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth.

“Pass him around, Sarah!”

As the Pig moved counter clockwise it dropped a pile on Liz’s forearm, chewed a hole in Brandon’s shirt pocket, and crawled up Megan’s dress.  The pig wriggled in Jake’s hands until he reluctantly handed it to The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth.  The Guinea Pig glared up at the boy, unmoving, like it too was terrified.  The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth studied it closely, like it was the first animal he had ever seen, softly stroking its head.    

Then he popped the Guinea Pig in his mouth and started chewing.

Everyone rose, scurrying away.  The girls screamed, the boys looked on in astonishment.  Ms. Adams passed out cold.

The terrible squeals surfaced, muffled within the grinding cavity.  Blood spilled from his lips, streaming down his shirt.  Bones snapped, the animal shook violently.  The boy’s death grip soon took the animal’s life.  Somebody vomited down my trousers.

Soon the boy belched and the room cleared.

About a week later, The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth came back.  Sitting in the back row, he was ignored.  He became a loner, unspoken to and untouched by everyone.  Soon his hideous face turned sad and lonely.  

I felt sorry for the boy.  Being a loner myself, I knew the emptiness he must have felt.  Ms. Adams must have felt the same way I did because soon she found ways to force him to interact with the rest of the class, though he never made an effort by himself.

But, with his lack of effort, it never made a difference.  In a game of dodge ball, all the boys aimed directly at him, hoping to knock out a tooth in order to claim a souvenir.  Billy Ripley came close, striking the boy on the side of the face.  But the ball just stuck there, deflating on a tooth which was poking through the boy’s cheek.

When he slept during nap time, kids would throw things into his mouth just to see if he would chew them up.  It started out with pencils, crayons, and erasers and progressed to pencil sharpeners, gym shoes, and glue bottles.  

His one moment of glory was when everyone in the cafeteria gathered around him to watch an entire tray of corndogs being devoured, sticks and all.  

He proved to me a number of things that day: the boy wanted to be liked, he needed to be accepted, and that cafeteria corndogs were actually digestible.

His face started turning grey and weary, always looking downward.  He always kept his mouth shut, never even smiled or yawned.  It was as if his difference kept him from opening up to the others.  Months had passed and he made no effort to fit in.

Show-and-tell rolled around week after week and he sat there, saying and showing us nothing about himself.  

Until one day.

To the class’s surprise, he answered Ms. Adam’s request with a jagged, horrible smile, looked around and spoke for the very first time.

“I want to show everyone something.”

“Go right ahead, Daniel.”

He pulled out a small box with a collection of both plastic and glass bottles.

“What do you have to share with us?”

He faintly smiled, uncapped a liquid-filled bottle and began sprinkling it over everyone.

Girls giggled and boys smeared the substance on one another.

“Daniel, you’re making a mess.  Please stop it!”

The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth continued relentlessly dousing his peers in liquids and powders and other substances.  

A glass bottled rolled against my leg.  I hesitated to touch it, frightened that it might be some form of potion which would mutate everyone into People With Razor-Sharp Teeth.  Finally I mustered the nerve to flip the bottle over and read the label.

Suddenly Jenny and Susie screamed.  Liquids and sandlike granules with an eye-watering fragrance pelted my arm.  Crimson splashed against my shirt, running down atop the bottle of meat tenderizer I held tightly.  It took what seemed minutes to be brave enough to look up toward the screams.

Susie’s legs were missing and Tony’s face was half-eaten.  Bobby crawled toward the door, dragging behind him a mass leaking from his punctured stomach.

The door slammed shut.  Dark, beady eyes glared at me, but lunged in another direction, to where Ms. Adams stood, breaking a window with an umbrella.  The Boy With the Razor-Sharp Teeth came down on her, sinking his mouth into her neck, ripping out a segment of her spine.  She flopped wildly against the heat register, her body trembling in shock.

There was a disturbance at the door, a few more screams, distant sirens closing in.

I crawled into a corner and sat there, witnessing the boy returning to the wounded to devour what remained.

Even when the police arrived, the horror of what they saw repelled them from the door.  No shots were fired, no dogs came barging in.  Just Daniel, the boy with the razor-sharp teeth, and I glaring face to face, surrounded by fresh carnage and crimson-stained carpeting between blood-splattered walls.

Slowly, his dark beady eyes gazed over to a bottle next to me. He picked up the bottle and serenaded me with tenderizer like a priest exorcising demons with holy water.  He smiled and I saw flesh caked against his gums and an entire fingernail stuck in a gap between two pointed teeth.

In the back of my mind, the screams of my classmates echoed as well as their taunts and name-calling, their cold shoulders, and nasty glares.

And I understood him.  And he, in turn, saw this in my eyes and stopped.

A tear streamed down his face in a pink line, separating two congruent segments of his own blood-caked cheek.

“But they were never mean to you just because you were different and they were normal,” he whispered sadly, his eyebrows arched, searching to understand.  “They accepted you.”

I shook my head and looked away in frustration.  “You never let them know you.  You never gave them a chance to accept—”

“No!” he shouted.  “They would’ve always seen me as the different one.”

“It is true you have something strange,” I mumbled, feeling the anger bubbling within my mouth, my cheeks expanding with every passing minute.  “You have something that they don’t, but if you would’ve let yourself get to know them better you would’ve learned that Susie has a third nipple and Billy has a glass eye.  Megan has no genitals and Liz’s really a guy.  Jake’s heart is on the outside of his chest and Jimmy thinks he’s a tree.  Brandon talks to demons and Ms. Adams is part turkey.  And I can’t forget Sarah, poor Sarah, possessed by the ghost of Hitler, nor Jenny having sold her soul for cash.  Jackie is a seven-year-old stripper and Bobby is living with a deadly rash.  Tony collects chicken heads and Denny lives in a hole.  Candy has sex with aliens and Marvin is really a troll.”

“Ms. Adams...part turkey?”

“Fears Thanksgiving and gobbles from time to time.”

“But I didn’t know..I’m so sorry.”

My heart spasmed wildly within my chest, sweat trickled down my forehead.  My jaw cracked.  “Didn’t your parents explain why they put you in this class?  And that it was a special class...”

“B-but what about you?  You’re normal!”

I gagged, feeling the anger escape me.  My tongue lashed at him.  His eyes fluttered in horror as he watched my tongue uncoil and branch into two flickering points which quickly wrapped around his neck and squeezed.

TWINS

It was the first time Nathan had really looked at his girlfriend’s vagina.  It seemed like such a foreign terrain now, like some kind of stretched and mutated alien landscape.  Even the smell seemed odd, like she had been bathing in fish oil or douching with salmon cakes.  

The whole moment of revelation almost eclipsed the excitement of labor.  But Nathan quickly snapped out of it as Jenny screamed, “God, get it out of me!”

“Okay, now push!” the doctor said calmly.

Nathan stared into the dark tunnel as blood trickled out the side.  Mucus and water soon trailed as he could almost see her dilating by the minute.

“Okay, I see the head!” the doctor informed them.

Nathan just knelt there, glaring into the dark void that was now eclipsed by a tiny ball of flesh with hair.  He dreaded the coming moments, knowing that Jenny was too unstable to become a mom so soon.

*      *      *

The pregnancy was a mistake.  Nathan had been seeing Jenny for only six months when they found out the news.  Nathan went into a depression after the shock and Jenny was full of excitement and anticipation.  Nathan couldn’t understand why.

Then came the talk about twins.  Jenny was suddenly obsessed with having twins.  She told him that she had always dreamed about having twins.

Next came the matching outfits and double strollers.  Twin cribs and changing tables.

But the first ultrasound only showed one.

And Nathan thought the madness would end.  

It didn’t.

Next came a new apartment for the “twins” to grow up in.  Jenny wanted something with more space, so that both kids could have their own room.  Nathan argued with her, stressed the point of the ultrasound, but it was no use.

“So, it was wrong!”  Jenny said.  “I’m having twins!”

“But you seen it with your own eyes!”  Nathan shouted.

“But I can feel them both.  My body doesn’t lie to me!”

Nathan felt his anger subside and sadness and pity eclipse everything.  He felt sorry for Jenny.  He knew she was unstable.  Nuts, to be exact, but he couldn’t muster the nerve to leave her.  Not in her fragile condition.  And he couldn’t bear to leave his firstborn child to live with a nutcase-mother.

*      *      *

The baby slid out in a torrent of blood and mucus.  It didn’t scream.  It didn’t move.  

The doctor flipped it over and slapped its back.  Nathan noticed its body was blue, its head was strangely oblong.

Another slap and Nathan heard it cough.

The doctor siphoned the excrement from its mouth and cleaned off its body.  He wrapped it in a towel and turned to Jenny, “Congratulations, Mom.  It’s a boy.”

Jenny took it into her arms and cried and Nathan felt his own lip quivering at the sight.

Then Jenny handed the baby to Nathan and started pushing again.

“What are you doing?” the doctor asked.

“My other baby is in there!”

“No.  Stop pushing, Jenny.  There was only one.”

Nathan bundled his son up tight and took a deep breath.  The doctor briefly glanced over at him, and Nathan shook his head.

“Please stop pushing, Jenny.  You might hemorrhage.”

“No!” she screamed, “Get the fuck down there and deliver my other baby!”

“Nurse!” the doctor yelled.

Nathan stared between her legs as a nurse rushed in.  

“Restrain her!”

Jenny started fighting the nurse, screaming and kicking.  The doctor held her there and managed to work on her stomach, massaging it until a bloody mass plopped out of her.  Nathan cringed as the doctor threw the chunk of afterbirth on a scale and said, “That’s it, Jenny.  I’m sorry but there was only one.”

Jenny calmed down suddenly, like the realization finally struck her.  

In the middle of the chaos of nurses checking vitals and other nurses administering medicine, Jenny requested that everyone leave her room.  The doctor looked again to Nathan, as if to ask why?  Nathan just shook his head and was the first to leave.  The nurses and doctor quickly finished up weighing the baby, set the IV drip, stitched Jenny back up and turned on the heat lamp where they placed the baby beneath.

Jenny just stared hollowly at the ceiling as each left the room.

When Nathan returned, Jenny had cleaned the blood off the floor and replaced the sheets by herself.  She wouldn’t speak to him.  She just slept.

*      *      *

A day later, she was still hospitalized.  The nurses were monitoring her condition around the clock.  She was treated with antidepressants and all sharp objects were removed from her room.

Nathan had to return to work as Jenny’s mother watched after the baby.

Around noon, Jenny’s mother called the office.

“They’re sending her home today,” she stated, “The drugs have stabilized her depression and she has really come to terms with it all.  She’s smiling and joking around.  We’re packing right now.”