Highways to Hell (17 page)

Ray was sure some unseen witness—a meddlesome lurker in the nearby woods—had reported his crime to the cops. Why else would he have been brought here? Then again, maybe this had nothing to do with Rat’s murder.

This prospect was somehow more frightening. The cop’s next words cranked his fear up yet another notch.

“I get bored.”

Then he unsheathed his nightstick, prodded Ray with it, and directed him toward the shack.

“Get in there, bitch.”

Ray trembled.

Bitch?

When they were inside the shack, the cop told him to walk to the center of the room, then turn around and get on his knees. Ray did as he was told. He had no choice, he could only hope he possessed the strength to endure whatever foul thing the cop had in mind.

The cop grinned. “How do you like my pad?”

“Ummm…”

Maniac Cop laughed. “This is a dull damn job boy. I’d go crazy if I didn’t have my little home away from home.”

“Ummm…”

The cop unzipped his fly.

Ray’s heart sank.

He had been hoping for a beating.

“I think you know the drill, boy.”

Ray guessed he did.

“You don’t wanna disappoint me.”

Ray did his best.

When it was over, the cop took him back outside. “We’re gonna walk down to the pier.” The nightstick poked his back. “You hear me?”

Ray nodded.

They kept going when they reached the pier. The cop kept poking him with the nightstick. Ray kept thinking about what Rat had said about accumulating bad karma. What a major goddamn understatement.

This was a karma neutron bomb.

The cop told him to stop when they reached the end of the pier. Ray supposed he would’ve kept on going if he hadn’t been told otherwise.

Not that it mattered.

Hell, the water almost looked inviting.

The cop sheathed his nightstick, unholstered his gun, and said, “Any last words?”

Ray thought about it. “Nah. Fuck it.”

The cop shot him once in the back.

It hurt like a son of a bitch.

The blast propelled him off the pier, and he was momentarily airborne. Then the water was rushing to meet him, and he accepted the bracing cold slap of its embrace with equal degrees of fear and acceptance.

He sank.

He saw a lot of scary things on the way down.

Body parts.

Bones.

Rattlehead.

His old friend had almost managed to escape from the sinking car. His left foot was caught in the crumpled steering wheel. The rest of his body floated outside the ruined vehicle, arms outstretched, head lolling to the side, He looked like an underwater scarecrow.

Ray saw these things too clearly.

He shouldn’t be able to see at all down here.

Then he understood.

He was already dead.

He studied his dead friend’s face more closely.

The bastard was smiling crookedly, an all too familiar taunt.
Welcome to hell, genius
, the smile seemed to say.
Guess you fucked up again. What a freakin’ surprise.

Ray could hear the implied words echoing in his head, and his mouth opened in a silent scream. Water that tasted like an odd mix of semen and cheap beer flooded his dead lungs. He dug his nails into his scalp, shredding dead flesh and releasing a steady stream of blood that drifted upward into the distant light. But the flesh began to heal almost instantly, and he knew this fevered attempt to free his tortured brain from its moorings was doomed.

Like me
, Ray thought.

Doomed to taste cheap beer and cum forever. Doomed to never hear again anything but Rattlehead’s mocking words and strangely satisfied laughter. But a simple truth bothered Ray more than any of these tortures—even in death, even here in hell, nothing much has fucking changed.

Except that Rat’s laughter was growing even louder.

This is a dream. No question this horrid thing
isn’t
happening. Kyle Miller is aware of this on an intellectual level. But his dream life has achieved such an advanced state of lucidity that the gruesome imagery often seems more real than the world of his waking life.

In the dream, he is in a stranger’s apartment. A skinny blonde girl in her early twenties is tied to the headboard of a king-sized bed. There’s a rag stuffed in her mouth and a strip of duct tape covers it.

There is a knife in Kyle’s right hand.

A big, gleaming knife with a nasty-sharp blade.

The dream Kyle climbs onto the bed and begins the slow process of flaying every inch of flesh from the girl’s body. It is what he always does with his dream victims. There is no sexual component to this obsession. At least there is no bodily evidence of arousal.

He does not rape his victims. Instead, the need that drives him to do these vile things is more esoteric.

He needs to see what his victims look like without their flesh.

Needs to bear witness to the truth beneath the flesh.

When he thinks about this in his waking life, the idea strikes him as simultaneously repulsive and absurd. There is no great “truth” to be exposed by skinning innocent people alive. But the dream Kyle exists only to do this thing. He sees himself as a servant of truth. Flesh is a façade, a barrier to knowledge and understanding. When the flesh is gone, he learns.

He grows stronger and more powerful.

The exposed organs and sinew speak to him in a language only a being as uniquely informed as Kyle can interpret. He has become so skillful at extracting truth that his subjects are often still alive after the last strip of flesh has been peeled away.

This is what he strives to achieve, anything else is failure.

Kyle the observer, the real Kyle, suspects the dream Kyle’s ideal isn’t achievable in the real world. But in this dream, Kyle the seeker, the dream Kyle, observes the flayed girl’s inner workings until he senses her body is about to give up the fight. He gleans what knowledge he can from this observation. Then he uses the knife to free her still-beating heart from the chest cavity.

The taste of it in his mouth is sublime.

Then he wakes up.

Kyle’s eyes snapped open, blinking at the early morning semi-gloom filling the room. The clock on his nightstand gave the time as 5:41 a.m., which was a little more than a quarter hour before the alarm was set to trigger him out of sleep.

Carol, his wife of twelve years, slept soundly next to him. In a little over fifteen minutes, the alarm would snap her awake and she would lurch out of bed to go wake up the kids and start getting them ready for school.

Kyle’s eyes misted with tears even as he smiled at the image. He loved them all dearly and would lay down his life for them without hesitation. They were everything to him. There were times when he wished something would happen to take him away from them, something beyond his control life like a heart attack or a freak auto accident. A suicide would negate much of the insurance, and he couldn’t stomach the idea of leaving his family with less than what they deserved.

Still, he wished he could die.

For their sakes.

He was a monster. His very existence endangered them.

The murder dreams had plagued him for years, since the early part of his college career. Before he met Carol. And long before Joshua and little Angela had come along to brighten up his life. The dreams had become more frequent over the last several months, and he’d been having them nightly for weeks.

The increased frequency of the dreams was bad enough, but the dreams were longer now, more vivid and more detailed. Feature films instead of short, grainy loops. The skinny blonde from the latest had seemed as real to him as his wife.

He was spooked by the sudden conviction that the dream girl existed, that she was walking around somewhere out there in the flesh and blood world, just waiting for the day when Kyle Miller would shrug off his inhibitions and come to her in the night to slice away all that lovely, tanned skin.

I’ve got to end this
, he thought.

Got to find a way out of this madness.

But how?

Death via some external means seemed the best option. It would eliminate him as a threat to both his family and society at large. If suicide was out as an option, he could pay someone to kill him. Have it done so it looked like the byproduct of a crime, a robbery gone wrong, something like that.

He saw the potential complications immediately. For one thing, he had no idea how to go about setting something like that up. He didn’t know the sort of people who would kill a man for money. And the prospect of finding a suitably shady character to do the deed seemed like more trouble than it was worth.

So strike another option.

The next most obvious solution made his heart ache and filled him with dread. He glanced again at his wife. He knew she loved him and the children. She was happy. She had a home, a family, a husband with a job that afforded them a comfortable lifestyle.

She would be devastated and mystified if he filed for divorce.

So Kyle set that idea aside, too. For the moment. He would hold it in reserve as a last resort, an escape hatch he could utilize if his mental health took a dramatic turn for the worse—or if he ultimately failed to come up with a viable alternate solution.

The only other option he could think of was professional help. Seeing a shrink was what most people would consider the sensible thing to do. But Kyle was terrified by the notion of allowing anyone to know about his dreams. He didn’t talk about them with Carol. He’d never discussed them with anyone at all.

He was a good man.

A decent, honest, hard-working man.

A good parent and role-model with impeccable values.

At least, that was his image in the community. He was proud of that image, and he worked every day to uphold it. He couldn’t stand the idea of that image being tainted. Sure, divorcing his loving wife and abandoning his kids would damage his reputation, but not nearly as much as being outed as a closet sicko.

Which left…nothing.

For the moment, he was out of ideas.

The alarm went off.

Carol yawned and sat up.

Kyle feigned a yawn and rolled over to switch off the alarm. An hour later, he was at work, where he was able to forget about his problems for a little while.

He dozed off on his lunch hour. A round of extraordinarily dull morning meetings about procedural matters concluded just before noon, and he retreated to his office, where he folded his arms on the desk and put his head down for a quick nap.

He experienced a jarring reentry into the nightmare world. He saw his own gloved hand peeling away the scalp of yet another young girl. He heard her muffled scream through the gag and duct tape. Her wide eyes looked up at him with unadulterated terror, the big white orbs dancing wildly in their sockets.

The door to his office opened and he jerked awake with a gasp.

Ann Slattery strode into his office without asking permission to enter. She threw the door shut and plopped into the chair opposite Kyle. This was typically thoughtless behavior for Ann, who, at forty, was not only the company’s first female CEO, she was its youngest ever. Though she had a very cool, buttoned-down public persona, she was extremely attractive in a very icy way.

He wondered how good she’d look with the flesh stripped off those high cheekbones. The stray thought startled him. It was the first time he’d even fleetingly entertained an idea like that outside of his dreams.

Still…he couldn’t shake the image.

He sensed something long-dormant uncoil inside him as he allowed the image to breathe in his mind. He saw Ann tied to a bed. The bed was in a room that was very tastefully, and expensively, decorated. It was how he imagined the bedroom of a woman like Ann Slattery must look. He grew hard as he pictured himself climbing onto the bed with the big knife in hand.

Ann squinted at him. “Kyle, are you all right?”

Kyle blinked.

“Yeah…yeah…I’m okay. Sorry. What’s up?”

Ann frowned. “You had me worried. For a second there, you looked like a drooling headcase in a mental ward.”

Kyle forced a smile. He tried to make a joke of it. “I’m perfectly sane. But now that you mention it, I could use a dose or two of lithium.”

Ann rolled her eyes. “Seinfeld, you’re not. Listen, I want you to have dinner with me tonight.”

Now it was Kyle’s turn to frown. “Are we entertaining prospective clients? I thought there was nothing on the calendar for the next few days.”

Ann stared at him for a while. Her pale blue, intense eyes unnerved him. At last, she said, “That’s what you can tell your wife.”

Kyle flinched.

Ann’s gaze never wavered.

Kyle fidgeted in his chair. He felt sweat form along his hairline and in his armpits. The CEO of the company was propositioning him. It was unethical and risky. And yet, she seemed as supremely confident as ever. It distressed him.

Ann sighed. “You’re about to miss your chance. I’d like an answer
now
, Kyle.”