Chapter 5

        What the f**k?

        Was I dead?

        Guess not. The b***h should have finished the job. I opened my eyes to a familiar sight. At least Nicole had had the decency to put me in a f*****g box. Once again I was six feet under. At least I hoped she hadn’t put me down that deep, getting out was gonna be a b***h.

        “S**t,” I sighed as I looked at the blackness surrounding me. I started punching up, my fist coming into contact with cheap wood. She spared no expense for my casket. After about twenty or so punches into the same spot I was able to break a hole through, cutting my hand and wrist. As dirt started to pour in I quickly started kicking and punching my way out of my oblong box and up through the dirt. After about ten minutes of struggling up I eventually broke through the top of the dirt mound that was my grave.

        Gasping for breath I pulled my self out of the hole and collapsed on the ground. I opened my eyes and looked around. Nicole had buried me in the middle of the woods somewhere. I was certain she hadn’t gone to the police to tell them I was dead. She would have to explain what happened and worse, she’d have to go back to her ordinary life. So there was no doubt, the police were still looking for me and Nicole and had no idea that I was supposed to be dead.

        I got up and started walking. There was nothing to lead me to walk a particular direction, just instinct. I started planning my revenge on Nicole. Before, even knowing that she was cheating on me, I wasn’t angry. But seeing the b***h in the act had pushed me over the edge. The she f*****g shot me, trying to kill me. Torture, mutilation and death were very close to the timeline of her life. 

 

        I was in some house. No alarm, no dog, no people. People should really learn to protect their homes better. I was standing in the bathroom covered in dirt and blood. The first bullet had amazingly passed through me without hitting any vital organs. The second bullet was still lodged in my chest inches away from my heart. Pulling the bullet out hurt like a b***h. I washed and wrapped my body in gauze I found in the medicine cabinet. Then I started planning my revenge. I wouldn’t enjoy killing Nicole, but everything leading up to her death, well that was gonna be oodles of fun.

        I decided I needed to pull some psychological torture out on her. I was gonna have to kill her little boyfriend. This was going to be fun.

        I had been stalking Nicole for a couple of weeks, studying her habits and finding out when would be the best time to strike. She was no living with her man, Daniel Williams. He was some young hotshot lawyer who came from an already rich family. He was probably going to be my most high profile kill. Once again I scaled the gate and got to the house. This time I rang the door bell. 

        “What’s with the doorbell babe?” Daniel said opening the door, thinking it was Nicole.

        “Well I didn’t want to just bust in like last time,” I said pushing my way inside. He stood there in shock. “Please, close the door. I don’t think Nicole will be joining for at least another hour, which gives the two of us time to get acquainted.”

        “But, but you’re dead. I saw Nicole kill you with my own eyes,” He said in horror.

        “Yeah, but the thing about Nicole is she’s a horrible shot,” I said pulling out my dagger. “As a lawyer, I’m sure you’re familiar with my case. Of course since you’re f*****g Nicole, you probably have a better grasp on it than most people.”

        “Look, please, whatever you want you can have it. Just please don’t hurt me.”

        “Oh poor Daniel, while I appreciate the offer, the problem is that what I want is to hurt you.”

        “Please,” he said sobbing, “I didn’t know Nicole was with you, I didn’t know!”

        “Danny boy, believe me when I say that this is not personal. The thing is I need to hurt you to hurt Nicole. You see when she walks in later to see your mutilated corpse she will be hurt and traumatized. Of course, it won’t matter too much since she will soon be joining you in death,” I said advancing towards him with my dagger.

        “Oh God, please no!”

 

        It was very handy of Daniel to have security cameras installed all through his house. I morbidly enjoyed watching the footage of Nicole shooting me. After she and Daniel had carried me out of the house and quickly put together a six foot box for me to lie in, they had come back inside and fucked like animals that night. Nicole really got off on fucked up situations.

        I didn’t bother watching the rest of the tapes. I figured there would just be a lot of nothing and some f*****g. I was much more interested in getting to Nicole’s reaction when she returned home. I only had time to watch the tapes I did anyway, all the s**t I did to Daniel took almost an hour. Good thing Nicole had never been a punctual person.

        I saw in one of the monitors, Nicole driving up to the gate. I watched as she punched in the gate code, open the gate and start her way up the driveway. I watched her on the monitor as she got out of the car that no doubt belonged to Daniel and walk into the house.

        Her scream was priceless. Nicole had walked into the living room from the front hall to find her lover, Daniel, tied up in a chair from the dining room, naked, scalped, with his penis stuffed down his throat. Nicole was sobbing and screaming hysterically.

        “Oh, Danny! Who did this to you baby?” she sobbed

        “Good evening, Nicole. It’s so good of you to join the party. Danny and I had begun to worry about you. Needless to say we decided to start without you.”

        “Johnny? But you’re dead.”

        “You know, Daniel had that same impression when I showed up. I wonder why that is, Nicole?”

        “I shot you though! I shot you in the heart!”

        “Correction: you shot me in the chest. Nicole you’re really a horrible shot. I mean seriously, you shot me point blank and still missed my heart by a couple of inches!”

        “Where, where are you?”

        “Oh, here and there Nicole, here and there.”

        “Johnny please can we talk about this?”

        “Well, gee Nicole, now you want to talk? See that kind of presents a problem for me. I do want to talk, but I have no intention of listening to you blab away. The only thing I’m really interested in coming out of your mouth, is your screams.”

        “Johnny, please…Johnny?”

        I grabbed her by the neck and clamped my hand on her mouth.

        “Let the games begin.”

        Her muffled screams grew louder as I dragged her upstairs. She kept struggling so I grabbed a taser gun I had thought to bring along and gave her a full blast of it. She cried out and went limp.

        “Was all that really necessary, Nicole? I remember a time where I didn’t have to do anything to get you into the bedroom. Nicole, are you going to cry all night? Because I have to say, it’s getting annoying.”

        I took some duct tape and started tying her wrists together behind her back and then moved to her ankles.

        “Please stop, Johnny,” she cried pathetically. 

        “Ugh. You know you keep begging me not to do what you know I’m going to do. And I seem to recall no mercy from you, when you shot me in the f*****g chest! So please, for the love of God, shut the f**k up.”

        I put duct tape over her mouth in case she decided not to heed my advice.

        “You know, back when I did this at my school, I couldn’t enjoy all the little joys of hurting those that hurt me. You see, I knew the cops would be there sooner or later. So I had to speed through all their deaths. Don’t get me wrong, I was quite happy I was able to kill those fuckers, but I couldn’t enjoy all the little moments of their pain. This time is different though. ‘Time, is on my side, yes it is.’ You know that song? It was this big motif thing in this movie with Denzel called Fallen and there was this demon that would take over people’s bodies and he’d sing that song all the time. It was fitting and added some creepiness to the plot. It was a really good flick. Too bad you’ll never see it.”

        The whole time I had been talking I had been giving her little scratches all over her body. Tears were streaming down her face.

        “Hm, what do you say we go Van Gogh?” I cut off her ear. Her screams pierced through the duct tape so I grabbed her by the throat. “Either try to control the pitch of your screams, or I’ll make sure you can’t scream at all.”

        She stopped screaming but continued to cry.

        I sighed as I looked at her. She looked so f*****g pathetic.

        “Do you think I wanted to do this?” I asked her, no longer the heartless killer I am, but the young man that at one point loved the very woman I was now mutilating. “I mean what did you expect? For Christ’s sake Nicole, you cheated on a serial killer. You know me better than anybody. You f*****g know that I’m a murdering b*****d. At first I couldn’t believe it, then I didn’t want to believe it, but then I saw with my own eyes what you were doing behind my back. Did you really think I was gonna let you get away with it? True, you thought I was disposed of, but you were wrong. I have to be honest with you though. I really have no idea how I keep coming back from the dead. I guess I never really die, I just get really lucky. Of course that’s all going to catch up with me eventually. But not today babe.”

        I stabbed her in the stomach and she screamed out.

        I screamed as she did, “I’ll stop stabbing, when you stop screaming!” and stabbed her again and again.

        I was in a rage. I must have stabbed her at least ten times. Honestly I lost count.         As I noticed the life fading from her eyes, I started to try and stop the blood loss.

        “You’re not going to die, until I say you can.”

        “Please stop this…”

        “This is my revenge, Nicole! I will enjoy it.”

        “You f*****g b*****d.”

        “Oh, my goodness. Some spirit seems to be returning to you, dear.”

        “I wish I had a gun so I could finish the job!”

        “You should have done it when you had the chance you f*****g b***h!”

        I grabbed her left hand and cut off her pinky. She screamed and I cut off her middle finger. Then I stabbed her hand into the floor with another knife and cut off her hand. I wrapped a tourniquet on the stub of her arm. Next I cut up her right leg and foot, eventually hacking it off around the knee and tying another tourniquet. 

        “Oh, this is getting so f*****g messy isn’t it?”

        “F**k you!” she tried to scream, but it came out sounding hoarse and spit into my face. It was more blood than saliva.

        I wiped it out of my eyes and started hacking into her right arm as she screamed so loudly. After that I cut up her left leg, leaving her with nothing but stubs.

        “We’re getting closer to the end, Nicole. Are you excited?”

        She murmured something I couldn’t make out.

        “What’s that? I didn’t quite catch it.”

        Getting some energy back, she was able to tell me in a hoarse whisper, “I’m glad I’ll be dead soon. I was going to abort the baby you put in me.”

        That caught me by surprise. Nicole had been pregnant with my child. I had killed my child.

        “You f*****g b***h!” I screamed as I started stabbing her repeatedly below the waist. “You’re a f*****g liar! NO!”

        I had lost control. All I wanted was to kill her. I was done playing games with that w***e.

        I looked on as the fire in the house quickly started to spread. I had killed two and a half people. That is, if Nicole was telling the truth. I’d never know though. I could hear the fire engines responding to the fire and quickly fled.

        Later I watched the news as they covered the incident. They had been able to stop the fire before it got out of control and were able to discover the horribly mutilated corpses. I knew that F.B.I. agent Fox would figure out it was me when he got the full report of what all had happened. The news omitted a lot of details of the murders or just didn’t have the nerve to say out loud the things I had done to those people. The woman, they reported had been hacked limb from limb. They failed to report that before I had left her dead body I had carved into her, “I am a lying w***e and proud of it.”

        “Just one less s**t to walk this f*****g earth,” I said to myself.

        I skipped town quietly the next night. It wasn’t easy, since police were convinced the killer was still in the area and had set up road blocks. I had to leave on foot.

        I started camping out around these houses that had a little forest and started monitoring each of the families in the area. I got lucky and on of the families, pretty much just a husband and wife, were going on vacation to Europe for about a month.

I had to diffuse the alarm and started closing all the blinds and curtains. I went to the computer and made yet another MySpace profile. I went on to post a blog about my latest murders and informed anyone who wanted to know, that I was not going to stop. But I would be taking a break for a while. Nicole, her confession and her murder had done something to me. The bloodlust was quenched for now. I knew eventually I would have to kill again. I knew I would be forced to commit more acts of violence towards people.

        More people would die, I promised.

        Then I sent the link to Fox and his boys. I was sure they would find it interesting.

The question on my mind now was what’s next? I couldn’t get what Nicole told me out of my head. Had she really been pregnant? Or had it just been a lie, hoping I would end her suffering. She had no idea how I would react, but I had said it myself, she knew me better than anyone. There was no way I could know the truth.

        I kept watching the news, wondering if they would bring up the MySpace blogs. They eventually did. The feds were unsure if the blogs were really by me. Apparently there were some who believed I was taking credit for murders I had not committed.         What a******s.

        The next day I set up another MySpace and put up a blog of people I did kill or remembered killing. I said I remembered some of them clearly, like the school and Nicole and Daniel. I said I wouldn’t take credit for murders I didn’t do. I didn’t need to.

Fox believed the blogs. I knew he would. He was good. He studied me and knew my style. His only problem was he didn’t know what I would do next. I honestly didn’t know myself.

 

        Sometime after I had killed Nicole (I had lost track of days, weeks, months) the dreams started. I would start to see things. Most of it made no sense, but it was all horrible. Even to someone who had murdered and maimed so many people as I had, the things I saw made the hair on my neck stand. The first one involved my family.

We were sitting in the living room of our home, everything seemed normal, but then I saw my parents. They’re faces were melting and I could see the blood, muscle and bones being exposed. They just kept talking to me as if everything were fine. Then the scene switched to a dark ally, the buildings and street were all cobblestones, covered with filth. Mold, blood, semen, feces were all splattered on the walls and street. In front of me I heard the screams of a woman. I soon saw a familiar scene, though I had always been involved, never a spectator. I man dressed completely in black was slashing and ripping a woman apart with a dagger. The screams were in my head though. He had cut her throat out. Then he started cutting out her liver with a scalpel. As I looked on in shock and awe, he turned and let out a terrible shriek at me. The face was familiar to me. The dark hair, the grey eyes, and the flame that burned inside them, the face was mine.

        The man in front of me smiled and started cutting the liver with the familiar dagger and ate a slice of it raw. I didn’t scream.

        I awoke and vomited onto the ground.

 

        I made a mistake. I didn’t cover my tracks enough. The cops were getting smarter as to how I might act. I walked into a pawn shop hoping to get some new knives and maybe a scalpel. The clerk recognized me and went to some kind of alarm system. I did something I had never done before, I panicked. I jumped the counter and started slashing him to ribbons, but I was too slow, too late. The alarm had been activated. I hesitated on whether or not to finish him. The wounds I had inflicted on him already were mortal, but should help arrive quickly enough, he could also be saved. I finished him off with a cut of the throat.

        I ran outside and right into the cops. I had been slower than I originally thought. They were in the middle of setting up a barricade when they caught site of me. Some f*****g rookie panicked and started shooting like a jackass. S**t I shouldn’t have killed the f*****g clerk. I could have used him as a hostage. I went back inside as the police got on the bullhorn and started telling me to come out with my hands up. Were they f*****g serious? I started looking around and started pounding the floor with my foot in case there were some secret compartments for storing illegal items some pawn shops tended to carry. Amazingly I got lucky. My foot almost broke through what must have been a passage for the Underground Railroad. I grabbed a shitload of knives and somehow did find a scalpel and went back to the hidden trap door. I was much more delicate this time and found a way to open it. I rushed down and started making my way towards freedom.

        I needed to be smarter. I had to figure out ways to deal with things I had no idea how to deal with. Most importantly I need to figure out how to deal with the nightmares. They were obviously having more of an impact on me then I cared to admit.

That’s how I found myself outside a rather large state university. At seventeen, I could pass for older. Especially if I grew out my facial hair and a big enough university means it’d be much easier to become just a nameless face in the crowd. But I figured I should become properly enrolled just in case. I used some tricks I had picked up from Nicole and hacked into a computer off campus and made up a fake transcript. I was now Andrew Blake, the newest student of Death Valley University.