Final Victim

Chapter 14

Leonard Land had awakened in the basement of his house. He didn't know why he was there, but he knew he had to hurry. It was 4:30 on Sunday afternoon. He grabbed a suitcase and drove his dark blue pickup straight to the Tampa Airport. He bought a ticket in coach on the American Airlines 5:30 flight to Los Angeles.

His row was halfway back in the L-1011. He had the aisle seat, but his huge body overflowed it; twice the flight attendants tripped over his legs as they rushed back and forth on their important pre-flight tasks. Manufactured air came out of the nozzle above his head and spilled down on him like the cold breath of redemption. He looked at his green corduroy pants, stretched tight over his huge, corpulent thighs. He was wearing a Disney World ballcap to hide his shiny naked head, but no matter how hard he tried to camouflage his grotesqueness, people still stared at him.

Leonard tried not to exist. In the back room of the computer store, sometimes he could concentrate so hard on a program, it was almost as if he ceased to be. Leonard could be free of himself in cyberspace. When boxes of new components arrived at ComputerLand from IBM or Texas Instruments, it was always Leonard whom Mr. Cathcart asked to assemble them. When he was working with new equipment, he could disappear, completely transported by the challenge… but afterward, inevitably, he would return. He would go to lunch and people pointed at him and whispered behind their hands. Leonard was forced to wear his awkward ugliness like a sandwich-board.

He missed his mother. He'd read in an old newspaper that she had burned to death in a fire. He couldn't remember the day it happened. Sometimes the anguish of missing her was so great, he lay in his bed and cried… Tears would roll down his hairless cheeks onto his sheets. Leonard was very alone, always frightened and confused. He couldn't remember long periods of time; sometimes whole weeks would disappear from his memory like misplaced keys. Like waking up in his basement with a mission to go to L. A. and not knowing why. He had become terrified of these huge blacknesses… these holes in his existence. He wondered where he had been. His time cards at ComputerLand said he had been at work, but he couldn't remember any of it. Once he had found dried blood all over his torso and legs. He didn't know why or where it had come from.

He wasn't sure why he had to go to Los Angeles, but he knew his very survival was at stake. He had an address and a message written in his spiral notebook… It was in his own handwriting but, try as he would, he was unable to remember writing it.

The seat-belt sign was turned off and he struggled up out of his seat. He took his small notebook and lumbered to the lavatory. He went inside and locked the door. The fluorescent lights shone down on him, finding only ugliness on his huge, fat face… his sagging eyelids, his horrible burned and scarred ears. He sat on the lavatory seat and opened the notebook: