The Killing Kind Read Online Free
Author: Bryan Smith
Zoe. “Boys. How I hate them.”
Zoe shrugged, a what-can-you-do? gesture. “Yeah.”
Joe gasped. “How dare you! We’re not ‘boys.’ We’re men. We’re…we’re…”
“Barbarians?” Chuck suggested.
“Yeah!” Joe swigged more beer. At this rate he’d be passing out later in the afternoon. “We’re barbarians! We’re fucking cavemen !”
He held his hand up for a high five and Chuck obliged him.
Zoe listened to them trade beery inanities back and forth and felt the beginnings of a fresh headache. Every stupidthing out of Chuck’s mouth just made it worse. She snared some Tylenol from her purse and washed the pills down with a gulp of Coke.
She picked up her magazine and again tried to concentrate on it.
But it wasn’t easy.
She could feel Emily staring at her. It made her anxious and paranoid. She had the uneasy sense that her friend could see her every thought. Eventually she turned away from Emily and closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
C HAPTER T HREE
March 15
The days were getting warmer, but it wasn’t quite full spring yet, and the nights in Tennessee still possessed enough of a chill to set teeth to chattering, especially this close to the border with Kentucky. The breeze didn’t slice through your flesh quite the way it did up north when the weather was cold. But any sane person would find the conditions nippy enough to at least wear a light jacket or sweatshirt.
However, the man sitting cross-legged in a grassy field adjacent to a stretch of I-40 was not sane. At all. The earth beneath him was still slightly damp from last week’s rains. With his eyes closed and his head tilted upward, he appeared to be in a meditative trance. He sat perfectly still and outwardly looked as peaceful as a Buddhist monk.
However.
He wore only a ragged and dirty piece of clothing that had once been—in its former life as a young woman’s halter top—as brilliantly white as a mound of uncut cocaine. The bit of flimsy fabric was tied in a knot around his waist and the little flaps in front and back just managed to cover his genitals and ass cheeks.
The doctors who had cared for this man up until a month earlier would not have referred to him as “insane” in any official documentation. That word long ago fell out of vogue in the medical community, mostly because it has come to beseen as too limiting a term, or too inflammatory or insensitive, a relic of a less enlightened time. The man’s doctors instead said that he exhibited a number of symptoms typical of various abnormal brain syndromes. Schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, psychosis, etc. His chart back at the facility, where he’d spent the bulk of the last fifteen years, contained reams of notes detailing what was described as hallucinations and an elaborate but clearly delusional belief system, including reports of his frequent consultations with a “spirit guide” he called Lulu.
The man knew the details of his chart well. He’d snagged it on his way out of the loony bin and carried it with him in his bag. It made for very interesting reading when he wasn’t raping or eviscerating someone. Although he’d not been labeled insane anywhere within those pages, he knew what his doctors really thought. For instance, there’d been the time Dr. Freeman had referred to him as a “fucking psycho” when instructing a team of orderlies to remove him from his office.
Well.
Their opinions of him no longer mattered.
They were all dead. Zebulon Elias Geddy had slaughtered them in the process of escaping the facility and he’d done so without regret. Lulu said they deserved to die, and that was good enough for him.
Telling him who should die was just one of the many ways in which Lulu was useful. She would often also tell him how he should go about killing the people she identified as wicked. Tonight, for example. She had specified that a particular target deserved to suffer an especially prolonged
Zoe shrugged, a what-can-you-do? gesture. “Yeah.”
Joe gasped. “How dare you! We’re not ‘boys.’ We’re men. We’re…we’re…”
“Barbarians?” Chuck suggested.
“Yeah!” Joe swigged more beer. At this rate he’d be passing out later in the afternoon. “We’re barbarians! We’re fucking cavemen !”
He held his hand up for a high five and Chuck obliged him.
Zoe listened to them trade beery inanities back and forth and felt the beginnings of a fresh headache. Every stupidthing out of Chuck’s mouth just made it worse. She snared some Tylenol from her purse and washed the pills down with a gulp of Coke.
She picked up her magazine and again tried to concentrate on it.
But it wasn’t easy.
She could feel Emily staring at her. It made her anxious and paranoid. She had the uneasy sense that her friend could see her every thought. Eventually she turned away from Emily and closed her eyes, pretending to fall asleep.
But the feeling didn’t go away.
C HAPTER T HREE
March 15
The days were getting warmer, but it wasn’t quite full spring yet, and the nights in Tennessee still possessed enough of a chill to set teeth to chattering, especially this close to the border with Kentucky. The breeze didn’t slice through your flesh quite the way it did up north when the weather was cold. But any sane person would find the conditions nippy enough to at least wear a light jacket or sweatshirt.
However, the man sitting cross-legged in a grassy field adjacent to a stretch of I-40 was not sane. At all. The earth beneath him was still slightly damp from last week’s rains. With his eyes closed and his head tilted upward, he appeared to be in a meditative trance. He sat perfectly still and outwardly looked as peaceful as a Buddhist monk.
However.
He wore only a ragged and dirty piece of clothing that had once been—in its former life as a young woman’s halter top—as brilliantly white as a mound of uncut cocaine. The bit of flimsy fabric was tied in a knot around his waist and the little flaps in front and back just managed to cover his genitals and ass cheeks.
The doctors who had cared for this man up until a month earlier would not have referred to him as “insane” in any official documentation. That word long ago fell out of vogue in the medical community, mostly because it has come to beseen as too limiting a term, or too inflammatory or insensitive, a relic of a less enlightened time. The man’s doctors instead said that he exhibited a number of symptoms typical of various abnormal brain syndromes. Schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome, psychosis, etc. His chart back at the facility, where he’d spent the bulk of the last fifteen years, contained reams of notes detailing what was described as hallucinations and an elaborate but clearly delusional belief system, including reports of his frequent consultations with a “spirit guide” he called Lulu.
The man knew the details of his chart well. He’d snagged it on his way out of the loony bin and carried it with him in his bag. It made for very interesting reading when he wasn’t raping or eviscerating someone. Although he’d not been labeled insane anywhere within those pages, he knew what his doctors really thought. For instance, there’d been the time Dr. Freeman had referred to him as a “fucking psycho” when instructing a team of orderlies to remove him from his office.
Well.
Their opinions of him no longer mattered.
They were all dead. Zebulon Elias Geddy had slaughtered them in the process of escaping the facility and he’d done so without regret. Lulu said they deserved to die, and that was good enough for him.
Telling him who should die was just one of the many ways in which Lulu was useful. She would often also tell him how he should go about killing the people she identified as wicked. Tonight, for example. She had specified that a particular target deserved to suffer an especially prolonged
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