Killing Ways

Prologue

Amanda Petrie stopped dead in front of the skeletal wreck of a creature stumbling toward her on legs like knotted spindles. The woman looked to be in her sixties, bruised, wounded and terrified. She was dressed in a faded blue nightgown draped no differently than if it was on a hanger in a store, except that it was caked in filth of all kinds, and it stank like something inhuman. Her matted gray hair grew between bald patches, she was missing teeth, she was hollow-cheeked, she was a shell.

Amanda dropped her cell phone, didn’t even notice how it bounced and cracked and spat out its battery, how the binder she’d been holding struck the ground, broke open, sent loose pages from magazines sliding across the concrete.

From the awful silence that followed, Amanda began to hear something — a soft pit, pit, pit. She looked down. A bright photo of a rainbow-themed garden party had floated from the binder and landed between the old woman’s dirty feet. Maggots were dropping onto it — pit, pit, pit — from under her nightgown.

Amanda turned away, heaving. She pressed her hand tightly over her mouth. Her eyes bulged and watered. Slowly, she turned back to the woman.

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Are you OK? I mean... do you need help? Obviously you need help...’

The woman stood before her, wide-eyed, not a blink. And from this desolation, Amanda noticed eyes the most incredible shade of blue, and was suddenly struck with an image of a baby girl in a bassinet smiling up at her parents, innocent, expectant, hopeful, years from this.

‘Where did you come from?’ said Amanda, looking around. They were on a quiet road in an isolated part of Sedalia, sixty miles southwest of Denver, Colorado. She was there only to check out a venue for her sister’s surprise fortieth. She had just crossed it off her list.

The woman didn’t reply.

Amanda took a step away from her, then crouched down to gather the parts of her phone, putting them back together with a shaky hand.

Kurt Vine was driving along Crooked Trail Lane, in his 1984 cream and brown pickup with the camper shell, radio off, cigarette burning down in the ashtray, running through the events of the previous night. He was on Level 9 of Hufuki, a video game with a great Japanese-sounding name that all the players understood was really an abbreviation of Hunt, Fuck, Kill. You just couldn’t say it out loud. Kurt had hunted down, raped and murdered forty-two victims to get to Level 9 out of 10. It was getting exciting. He had missed a few obvious traps in the last session. He should have known better. Some twelve-year-old kid in Ohio had beaten him. It was embarrassing. But Kurt was undeterred — no one had officially reached Level 10. There was a rumor that once you unlocked that world, real girls played the victims. You chased their avatar, but the screams were real, live, and you could see their faces in the right-hand corner of the screen, see their fear. Whether anything was being done to these girls to elicit these reactions was not something Kurt Vine considered. They were in a distant universe. They were the unreal real.

Every night, Kurt heard voices from all over the world in his ear, every accent imaginable, the tower of fucking Babel coming through the internet into his headset. When a player pissed him off, beat him, humiliated him, he would mimic them on the walk from the sofa to the bathroom or the bedroom or the kitchen. But only if he had ever heard their reactions when they knew it was game over, man. Loser sounds. Who wants to mimic the soundtrack to a rival’s victory?

Winning was important to Kurt Vine. He had a narrow focus, a regular grip on just a few small things... a games console, a camera, a bottle of Diet Coke, and his dick.

The camera was for taking photos of old buildings that he uploaded to his website, ForTheForgotten.net ‘To honor those who lived and worked within these walls’, wherever those crumbling walls may have been.

At the bottom of the site, he had a DONATE NOW button, a low-key ‘If you like my work, please consider contributing to my film, development, and print costs’. He was thinking of setting up an online store to sell some of his work, he was thinking of offering his services to corporations, or news organizations or stock photo agencies. Kurt thought about a lot of things. But mainly he thought about easy things, things that required no effort.

Kurt Vine had inherited most of his grandfather’s estate — including thousands of sprawling acres in Sedalia that were dotted with brush and ruins. The land and buildings were Kurt’s outright, but the remainder of his inheritance — the cash part — was dwindling fast. The donations were his only real income, and they were typically small. Sometimes he felt guilty that a lot of his donors were visual arts students, who likely couldn’t spare the money but wanted to reward him for his talent, probably in the hope that the same kindness would be offered them when they were spat out into the world after graduation.

Despite the modest student endowments, there was a new Nikon on the passenger seat beside him. Nine months earlier, an email had come into his inbox. YOU HAVE A DONATION. He clicked on it, expecting the usual ten or twenty dollars. This was different. This was $10,000. He looked at it for a while, and he mistrusted it for a while longer. And then he spent most of it. And, six months after the donation came in, he got the knock on his cabin door. The man who stood there smiled and said: ‘I’ve come to collect my debt.’

Weird shit always happens to me, thought Kurt, as he ran through the woods of his fantasy land, chasing screaming women.

He got hard just thinking about it. Kurt was always alone when he got hard.

Amanda Petrie dialed 911, her heart pounding.

‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’

‘Police, ambulance?’ said Amanda. ‘I’d like to report... a lady here, who’s in a state of extreme neglect, I think. She’s... very thin, very wasted.’

‘Ma’am, what number are you calling from?’

‘My number is 555-360-9597. That’s my cell phone. My name is Amanda Petrie.’

‘And what is your location, ma’am?’

‘We’re in Sedalia, Douglas County... um... I pulled in to the side of the road to take some pictures. The last place I remember is Crooked Trail Lane? I’m about a five-minute drive from there.’

‘Can you give me any more details, ma’am?’

‘Can’t you track my location?’ said Amanda.

‘We don’t have that facility here, ma’am.’

‘Oh,’ said Amanda. ‘Well, I can’t really say. I’m just seeing road and trees, a couple of barns. I think I’ve driven about seven miles from an inn called Russell’s?’

‘Ma’am, is the woman you are with in need of medical attention?’

‘Yes.’

‘We’re going to send help right away for you, ma’am, and I’m going to keep you on the line with me, get some more details from you. Are you in a position to stay with her while we send help?’

‘Yes, yes, I can,’ said Amanda. ‘Please hurry, though. Please hurry. She’s very distressed.’

‘Thank you, ma’am. Can you tell me the name of the woman please?’

Amanda turned to the woman, whose eyes appeared to be growing larger in her skeletal face. Her lips were dried out, cracked, ringed with deep lines. She pressed them together.

‘What’s your name?’ said Amanda. ‘Can you tell me your name?’

The woman’s lips parted. She began rocking back and forth. But instead of speaking, she quietly croaked a tuneless song, her voice flat, broken, her eyes now scrunched closed: ‘Needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part, needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part, needle’s pointing to your heart, now I know the way we’ll part.’

Her arm shot out, and she slapped the phone out of Amanda Petrie’s hand.

Kurt Vine was busy shunting memories of bad men and bad game plays out of his mind when he saw two women standing by the roadside. He looked around, for a moment thinking he was driving through a movie set. Or a game. There was a cute girl and an old lady who looked like she had been dug up from a grave. This was some kind of a two-woman zombie apocalypse situation.

Weird shit just keeps on happening to me, he thought. He watched as the old woman suddenly slapped the girl’s hand. He pulled over, parked the pickup, and climbed down.

‘Ladies!’ he said, moving as quickly as he could toward them, wiping the sweat that always flowed so readily. ‘How can I be of assistance?’ It was a line from Hufuki, but he figured it was appropriate.

Douglas County Undersheriff Cole Rodeal stood in the ambulance bay of the Sky Ridge Medical Center, tuning out his wife, Edie, the EMS Coordinator. As soon as she had used the expression ‘me time’, he was gone. Maybe that was because he didn’t love Edie any more, and hated himself for it. Really, it was because he was depressed and hadn’t realized it. He wanted to be home, in his den, with a box set from a time when women had never heard the expression ‘me time’. He was jolted from his thoughts by the screech of tires and a small scream from the wife he really did love. He turned to where she was looking.

Oh, fuck.

Kurt Vine liked being part of this emergency that he knew, in his heart, wasn’t a true emergency. He was driving like he had a siren, but he knew this crazy lady in the nightgown was going to be all right. She was starved and beaten and she smelled like shit, but she wasn’t dying, as far as he could tell.

He was finally easing off the gas as they approached the ambulance bay at Sky Ridge.

‘What is that smell?’ he said. He looked into the back seat. ‘Holy shit! She’s on fire! She’s on fucking fire!’

Amanda Petrie turned around at the same time and screamed. Small flames were rising from the terrified woman’s chest and shoulders. Her nightgown was melting into her skin, her hair shriveling.

‘Holy fucking shit!’ said Kurt, slamming his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake, sending the pickup shooting toward a group of EMTs, until he yanked the steering wheel hard and plowed instead into the side wall of the hospital.

On impact, the old lady said: ‘I did something real bad. Something terrible brought me here.’