Chapter 7

        I followed a dark haired girl into a room, it turned into a disgusting bathroom that also seemed to act as a house of sodomy.  I felt bile creeping up my throat as I saw the various pools on the floor.  A mixture of piss, s**t, semen and blood.  At the bottom of one of the stalls I could see a half naked body lying on the floor, a rubber tourniquet wrapped above the elbow and a needle grasped in his hand.  I saw a mutant looking man whose face was a mask of sick ecstasy.  The stalls disappeared and a saw the horrified look upon an androgynous  young teen as the mutant savagely raped him.  I could no longer hold back and the vomit projected from me and I heard a disgusted yell.

 

        “What the f**k?!” yelled the blonde I had brought home this time.  She turned on the light and I could see a pool of vomit on the sheets between us.  She got up quickly and ran to the bathroom saying something about how she couldn’t stand the sight or smell of vomit and would puke herself if she didn’t get away.

        “Then get the f**k out,” I muttered under my breath.  I really had to work on getting these b*****s to leave after we fucked.  For some reason they always wanted to sleep over.  Didn’t they realize they were just the latest in a long line of pathetic one night stands?  If they didn’t, maybe I needed to set them straight.

        When I didn’t have my nightmares, I would roll over and fight the urge to just slaughter them in their sleep.  It wasn’t personal, I just wanted them out of my apartment.

        What’s-her-name, came out of the bathroom, fully dressed the tight little pink sequin dress she’d been wearing before we came to my place and fucked like animals.

        “I have to go,” she said quickly gathering her things.

        “Alright,” I said still sitting on the bed.

        “Um…bye,” she said uncertainly and left.

        I sighed, glad that she was finally gone.  I went about changing the bed sheets and when I was done finally looked at the clock.  Three a.m. the time of the dead.  There was no way I was gonna risk trying to sleep again.  The nightmares were coming more frequently.  Often times they varied, but at least once a month there was the dream of the man in black, with the scalpel and eating the liver.  The man who looked like me.

        Time flies sometimes, I was lucky and this was one of those times.

        I wasn’t happy, that much I knew.  I had come to this university to escape, trying to be the wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Sometimes the rage just overwhelmed me though.  I had to fight my urges to kill these wretched people so much.  Nicole had made things so much worse then they were.

        Since I’d killed her, I was plagued by nightmares.  They were constant and sometimes repetitive.  It scared me when the newer ones popped up.  I had to laugh at myself for that though.  All the horrible s**t I had seen and mostly done to people and it was the sick things in my dreams that scared the s**t out of me.

        I’d come to this university hoping to move on from my life of despicable killing and constantly being on the run.  I’d hoped a life of normalcy would provide a normal life.  But I wasn’t normal.  That much I was all too aware of.  I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I could never live a normal life.  I was a serial killer and something more…

        I’d never really stopped to figure out what exactly had changed me when I awoke in that first makeshift grave.  Even taking the time to think about it did no good.  I had lost track of time when I went on the run and lost more of it when Nicole tried to kill me.  I honestly had no idea how long it had been since I had murdered all those people at my school.  Somehow I had been able to enroll a little late in the semester here and I had just gone through the midterms so I kind of had an idea about how long I’d been back in school.

        It still did no good.  I hoped college would be different from high school.  In some ways it was, but some things didn’t.  I wasn’t picked on and bullied any more, a first for my entire academic life, but there were still those guys around that played so well into the system.  The frat boys, the jocks, they were still among us.  Ha! I’d love to see them even try anything with me.

        I still walked to school, I’d gotten an off campus apartment but it was close enough for me to walk to my first class in about twenty minutes.  I was technically enrolled in various classes, English, History, Sociology, Psychology, Biology.  However I occasionally attended classes that were of the same basic subject yet provided a clearer atmosphere for what I wanted to know.  The criminal element and how to deal with it.

        I was hoping some clue would explain to me why I had changed in that pit.  The first and only obvious answer I was able to really even to think about was adrenaline.  I could only assume that I’d had some kind of adrenaline rush that had made me be able to move faster, made me stronger then I had been.  But I’d never heard of an adrenaline rush that didn’t wear off.  Not only was I stronger and faster, but my eye sight had improved, my accuracy was so good I could kill anything that moved.  My hands were steady as rocks, I used to get the shakes so bad, especially when I was being bullied.  Nothing about me was the same.

        Something had changed the equilibrium of my body and mind.  I was no longer the boy that had so often been the target, the prey, the hunted.  Now I was the predator, I was the hunter.

        Further education did nothing to explain these things to me.  I had sat in on a mythology course for a week, but that had done nothing to ease my mind.  Nothing had clicked in place like I felt it should.  Magic?  I didn’t know and that bothered me almost as much as anything.  I didn’t have any cravings for blood, didn’t howl at the moon.  But I knew something was wrong with me, something that made me more than just a common man.

        I looked across the street still deep in my thoughts and saw a girl I had brought home the week before.  She was staring daggers at me.  I guess I should have told her not to expect a call.  The sleeping around disgusted me more than the dreams.  I felt like such an a*****e.  When I killed Nicole, it had been premeditated, but what she said to me during the act had thrown all premeditation out the window.  What she told me turned her murder into a crime of passion.  In some ways it was already, but really I knew what I was doing.  I knew exactly how I wanted to torture her before I finally finished her off.  But the things she said still haunted me.  That was my waking nightmare.

        Had I really killed my unborn child in the process of killing the treacherous harpy?  Had she really been pregnant?  How did she even know it was mine?  I wasn’t exactly the only guy she was screwing, that and the trying to kill me thing were the reasons she had died.  But the idea, the thought, made me shudder, made me cringe.  If there was one thing I never wanted it would be the death of my child.

        The whole situation had me thinking about the issue of abortion more then I ever imagined it would.  I was pretty pro-life at that point.  I couldn’t think of an undeveloped life form, all I could think of was the image of a child, blood flowing freely from it’s eyes, nose and mouth.  It’s soft delicate throat slashed.  Tears sprang to my eyes at this grisly thought that I did not want to have.  I never imagined I’d ever be able to cry again.

        That b***h Nicole had ruined my life.

        Not that this excused my treating all of these girls like common w****s.  But really I could not find one that could even carry on an intelligent conversation.  All they did was drink and want to dance.  I never drank, claiming I was the designated driver.  By the time they woke up the next morning they had forgotten that I hadn’t been just as wasted as them the night before.  When I didn’t dance, they danced for me.  I hated how they all had to drink to have an enjoyable time and most of the time it wasn’t a full night until they had released all of their inhibitions.

        I usually only went along with it because that’s what a college kid does.  What most of them didn’t know is that nothing happened.  The majority of them passed out cold before they could even pull my pants down.  In fact I’d only had sex with three of them.  The rest I just took care until they were sleeping peacefully.  That didn’t stop most of them from waking to believe that fornication had in fact taken place.  I didn’t contradict them.  Let them believe what they wanted.

        I tried smiling sheepishly to the poor girl who was still staring daggers at me.  Like a lot of girls, she believed herself a conquest that I’d made.  What I could never figure out is, they surely couldn’t remember anything that had happened, so how did all the recommendations happen?  I imagined that the few I had actually had sex with had been impressed and word got around, but I couldn’t understand how the rest of them seem to praise my performance.  Maybe they believed I had pleased them so well that the ecstasy of the act had been too much.  Whatever.

        I think most of them just believed that the strange brooding guy who was such a gentleman as to never fondle or grope in public was also an amazing lover.  They could never imagine that I was far from a gentleman.  That I had killed the only girl I had ever loved.  (Was it really love?)  That I may or may not have killed my unborn child.  I was no gentleman.  I was a monster.

        But let them think what they want.  That was the most important thing to remember.  I couldn’t let anyone know the real me.  Couldn’t let anyone guess the truth.

        I thought about walking up to the poor girl and apologizing, but decided against it.  Let her continue to think of me as a womanizing b*****d.  Better than knowing the truth about me.

        I walked to the student union instead of class, too deep in my own thoughts (my own personal hell) to be able to really concentrate on higher learning.  It was at that point that I realized how very numb I was.  Not in any physical sense, I would have been really worried then, but emotionally.  I didn’t feel anything for anyone, I was truly alone in the world.  This hurt me more then I really thought it could.  It must have been the idea of love lost and the idea of a child that would never be.  I was dying.  Drowning in my own pain.  Then everything suddenly became too much.

        I rushed back to my apartment, barely holding on to my grip on reality.  When I was safely inside my empty apartment, I finally broke down and harsh sobs broke the silence that I felt would always be hovering over me.  All the pain I had gone through in my life.  Every horrible thing that had ever happened to me and every horrible thing that I had done.  I had finally broke.

        The question then was, would all the king’s horses and all the king’s men be able to put Johnny Sikow back together again?

 

        A week later, I got an email.  The sociology department would be having a special guest lecturer the coming month.  Dr. Robert Fox.  I laughed hysterically when I read this news and knew that I would be there.  There could be no doubt about that.