Roy did not flinch. He didn’t smile or tic or anything. He just looked at him. “I’m asking you, David. You can do it, no matter what you think. Kill me.”
What was this? Some deranged philosophy major going around to people? Recognize the Dark Side, stare the Beast in the eye and make friends with it and all that happy horseshit?
“Get out.”
“If you want me gone, take the proper steps, David. I’ve told you. You know how to get rid of me.”
“I,” David said, “am not. For the last time. Going to kill you.” He went for the phone again. At least there was one thing besides death that made the guy leave.
“You will,” the guy said, just as the door closed. He tossed something onto the carpet before it did, which made a muffled chink as it landed.
David knew what it was before he even got there. He recognized the miniature tennis shoe.
Christina’s keyring. He felt his head go numb as he picked it up, saw the sole of the little sneaker smeared red, pieces of sandy hair stuck in it, the message suckerpunching him and leaving him trying to breath.
Stepped on her, bro. Kill me.
David remembered calling the police, vaguely remembered mentioning Swanson and Bentley, and he must’ve called a cab because one came to pick him up.
That was about all from the next several hours, except for the image of flashing red and running people, that the cops had gotten there before his cab and wouldn’t let him see.
David flew to his brother’s in Akron the next afternoon. The cops had found the cabbie in whose company he’d been when it all went down. There were also strands of hair in his robe and evidence that the lock to his door had been picked, verifying his claim of an intruder. The strands of hair were important in that they a) weren’t his and b) matched the ones beneath Christina’s fingernails.
After Christina, they took him seriously enough to send him to the airport in a squad car.
The cop waited with him until he boarded.
David threw a last look back as he ducked into the boarding tube. Back, far back beyond the cop and the people waiting in the gate lobby, he could see Roy, leaning up against the Arrivals/Departures kiosk with his hands in his pockets, watching him. His stubble was slightly darker now. He was wearing a long coat.
Then the line swept David along like a leaf in a stream.
It would be all over the national news broadcasts for most of the next week, riding out its life on the local stations for longer than that.
But then, when a guy pulls a Mini-14 and three loaded clips out of his coat in the middle of a busy airport, you’re gonna have news.
In Akron, David caught it all. CBS to CNN to People to Maury Povich.
Roy burned out two and almost all of the third of his 30 round clips before he fled the airport and screamed off toward the city in a late-model Ford Taurus, hitting downtown just as the sirens kicked in, weaving in and out of traffic, careening through the city with the cops in pursuit. He hit the pedestrians too slow to move, actually made a point of swerving to do the job on at least two occasions (said an unidentified bystander one night on Hard Copy). Window open, he plugged as many at random with an unlicensed Beretta 9mm before the 15 round clip gave out. He’d been too busy driving, it seemed, to pop in another.
They brought him down at Sixty-fifth and Gable. Nobody got more specific than that in terms of location, but David recognized his own address when he saw it.
The trail of bodies led almost to the front steps of his building.
David overheard, one evening, very late, his brother and his wife speaking in the den, tones hushed, voices strained. About calling somebody, Christ, Caroline, I don’t know but I’m worried about him.
When the thing became redundant at last, when they stopped coming up with new stuff (it took a bit, the late-night could milk a thing like this for weeks), David catalogued all the VHS tapes (there were seven) and watched them again.
PORTRAIT OF A PULP WRITER
by F. A. McMahan
Frances A. McMahan prefers to write under the byline, F.A. McMahan. Much to her chagrin, she was variously listed under both bylines with her story in The Ultimate Zombie. We’ll try to get it right this time. Don’t fret, McMahan: A scrambled running folio in the British Edition of Jack the Ripper ran my name as Karl Edward Angels. Never been called that before.
Having established that she is indeed F.A. McMahan, when pressed for further details she writes: “I was born July 24, 1962, in Greenville, South Carolina. I live in Greenville now (with my husband, no children) but spent five years in Denver, Colorado, and intend to eventually return to Denver to stay. My fiction has appeared in several magazines since 1991 including Figment, Prisoners of the Night, Strange Days, Midnight Zoo, and the anthologies Chilled to the Bone and The Ultimate Zombie. I have a few novels (two horror, two fantasy, and one science fiction) out to publishing houses and am presently at work on a mainstream novel called The Movement of Hands.”
Roger Diggs sighed. He had been sitting in front of his TV that doubled as a computer monitor for three hours. Nothing came to him. He had received not one inspiration in the past month. They called it writer’s block. Diggs called it procrastination and laziness, but identifying the problem was little help in solving it.
He stared at the keyboard and felt a faint longing for his old typewriter. He had gotten the computer, disk drive, and printer used and fairly cheap from a friend. The friend had moved up to an IBM clone and offered his old Commodore system to Diggs. It had turned out to be cheaper than a good electric typewriter, so Diggs had bought it.
But he had to use his TV as a monitor, and that only served to enhance his slothfulness. Whenever he was at a loss for an idea, he would switch over to TV mode and flip through the channels.
Later he would realize that he had wasted an hour wondering whether or not Rex would discover that Julie had killed Ted with the carving knife that she had received as a present from her mother who was having an affair with Ted’s twin brother, Bobby. Or if the soaps were boring that day, he would count to twenty in Spanish with an orange puppet whose controlling strings were clearly visible. Or maybe try to come closest to the actual retail value without going over.
“The milky gray slime oozed through the earthquake fissure and bubbled deliriously, displaying a terrifying indication of sentience.”
Diggs stared at the line of white words. They contrasted nicely with the blue background color.
“As it flowed toward a nearby cactus, the pulpy mass glistened in the sunlight and left behind an unctuous spoor. A sunning iguana turned its brown head, watching idly, oblivious to the possible danger, and was snatched by a heretofore unseen tentacle and stuffed into the jelly-thing’s indistinguishable mouth.”
Diggs leaned his elbow on the computer, resting his chin on his hand. He counted the words, a habit he had when uninspired. His finger made little crackling noises when it touched the TV screen.
Seventy-five words. He did a bit of mental figuring. Forty times that would be three thousand words. Not too bad. The only problem was that the story so far was pretty much trash.
He saved his idea to disk just in case he decided later that it was good, then pressed control-delete on the keyboard.
“Are you sure? Y/N,” flashed on the screen.
He typed “Y” and his words vanished.
Diggs stared at the empty blue screen. He would work again tomorrow. Then he turned off the computer and checked his watch to see if it was too late to catch Julie’s trial on channel seven.