The warm liquid, spraying gently onto his face and into his waiting mouth, gathered in a small pool on the tip of his tongue, tantalising his taste buds with its potent tang.
It was salty, yes, definitely salty, he decided, but there was an undercurrent to the taste, a certain piquancy, that was hinting at something a little more, something a little different from what he had expected. As familiar as it was, though, his mind, the mess that it was, was unwilling to provide the key that would unlock that particular part of his memory which would allow him to place it in reality. Perhaps, or so he wondered, he had tasted something similar before, somewhere, sometime, but the thought passed quickly, vanishing in an instant, for he knew that the answer was beyond his reach for the time being. Thinking back through a vast, barren emptiness was only ever going to be a complete waste of time, a mere distraction from the pleasure of the taste in the here and now. After all, beyond the here and now, there was nothing else.
His mind, free now from its momentary doubt, revelled in the wondrous taste filling his mouth. The liquid, while indeed salty, was also bitter-sweet in its taste, and with his mouth so full that he could feel little trails of wetness trickling down from the corners of his lips, it was easier to pinpoint every flavour, every nuance, with every taste bud, back and front, coming into play to lend their own unique expertise. Bittersweet indeed, he decided, a sweet bitter-sweetness, even, if there could possibly be such a sensation. In truth, he couldn’t see himself drinking great quantities of the rich, thick liquid, but a little bit now and again was an intoxicating suggestion that made him smile the more he considered it; it was a taste he liked already, but he could tell he could get to like it even more. As he swallowed deeply, tilting his head back to savour the feeling as the liquid ran down his throat, one last thought crossed his mind: does everyone’s blood taste the same?
She had stopped breathing now. His hands deep inside her throat, crushing her windpipe, had seen to that, but there was still a faint trace of a pulse that was sending a diminishing stream of blood out from her jugular vein and up into his face. He had been a little surprised by the warmth of the dark red liquid, thinking that her blood should have been as cold and as unforgiving as she had seemed in her entries while flicking through her diary. What a cold bitch she had seemed. What an ugly bitch she had been. He may just merely have been satisfying his own desires in killing her, but in doing so, he had felt like he done the whole world a favour. How anyone, how any man, could ever have loved this woman, this thing, this hideous beast, was beyond him. He could only imagine that the unlucky man was either blind or deaf or, more likely, both. Assuming there was a man, of course, he thought with a wry smile. The great “love” in the diary might equally have been a woman. Lesbians could have children too, presumably. All things considered, why he was even enjoying the taste of her blood was quite beyond his understanding.
Freeing his hands from around her shattered neck, he pushed himself back onto his feet and turned towards the en-suite bathroom to wash his hands. A movement underneath the doorway from the hallway outside the bedroom caught his eye, though, and he turned instinctively, freezing and blending into the darkness of the room.
“Mum?”
A girl’s voice. A teenager’s, perhaps, with its deeper, less innocent undertones. The way she had called for her mum, a certain inflection in her voice, a certain naivety, suggested she hadn’t yet been broken in entirely, though. The man smiled. A two for the price of one deal in this house, then. Twenty, followed unexpectedly quickly by twenty-one.
“Mum, you okay?”
The door groaned against the frame as it slowly opened on its hinge. Light from the hallway crept further into the room, creating a widening rectangle along the black floor, sneaking and creeping closer and closer to the crumpled lifeless body on the carpet.
“Mum?”
The man eased himself from his hiding-place next to the closet and slid slowly along the wall on the blindside of the opening door. The light reached the tip of the dead woman’s outstretched arm, her fingers frozen in a grotesque, mangled claw, and the door suddenly stopped opening any wider.
“Mum?”
It came out as more of a gasp this time. A weaker, tearful, involuntary gasp. It was more than the dead woman had managed before he had shattered her larynx with a blow to the windpipe. She had still tried in vain to shout for help, though. It had raised a smile at the time.
The door opened fully and the girl’s shadow was in the room now, elongated and distorted by the light that must have been somewhere low on the wall behind her head. He could tell by the particular shape of the shadow around the upper torso that the girl’s hands were covering her mouth. It was a typical primary defensive reaction to a devastating shock. It would likely be followed quickly by the typical secondary reaction: a scream of alarm.
“M-m-mum.”
Her shadow grew larger in the illuminated rectangle, her head blocking the light on her mother’s arm now, her shock dissipating and slowly giving way to the need to do something. The cry of alarm, he reasoned with cold calculation, would only be mere seconds away.
The man moved swiftly round from the blindside of the doorway, quickly swinging both hands together to the side like an axe and chopping them down onto the bridge of the girl’s nose with sickening force. There was a satisfying crunch of bone as he splayed her nose across the side of her face, a satisfying silence as the shock at what had just happened to her overrode all other thought and emotion, the reaction to scream pushed forcefully out of consciousness for now. The girl staggered back towards the hallway, her hands rising instinctively to her damaged face, but he moved quickly again and grabbed her by the hair, hauling her roughly all the way into the bedroom and throwing her towards the desk that lay underneath the window opposite, a mass of curly dark hair still clutched tightly in his grasp as she fell. The girl groaned loudly as her flailing hands tried to slow her descent, but she succeeded only in knocking the vanity mirror from the desk, smashing it against the hardwood of the chest of drawers nearby. The shattered pieces joined the scattered shards of glass lying on the floor underneath the window.
Her groans grew louder as she rested limply on the cold, hard wood and he sensed the anticipated scream, delayed though it had been, wasn’t far away. Grabbing her by the hair again with his left hand, he pulled her head back, her tearful bloodshot eyes staring up at him in wide-eyed horror, and brought his other hand down like a cleaver on her exposed throat. There was a loud crack and her eyes, her big blue eyes, exploded into the back of her head like the spinning wheels of a slot machine giving up its prized jackpot. He waited a moment, studying her closely, holding her upright by her hair alone, and then slapped her hard on both sides of the face. Her eyes, vacant and lifeless, rolled lazily back into view. Satisfied, the man finally loosened his grip on her hair and let her drop onto the carpet to lie at an angle, he noticed with some artistic amusement, almost perpendicular to her mother’s body.
Licking the drying blood from his fingers, the man studied the face of the woman he had killed first for a moment and then looked down upon the girl’s. At first glance, there was little similarity between the two: same colour of hair, perhaps; same colour of eyes, possibly; but beyond that, nothing.
The man bent down over the girl’s body and brushed his hands over her face, gently caressing her cheek and gathering some of her still warm blood onto his fingers. To be fair, it was difficult to tell with her nose knocked over onto the left side of her face, but he figured she had probably been a reasonably attractive girl, albeit in a plain, harmless kind of way. She wasn’t plump as such, nor could she be called chubby, although she was certainly carrying a few pounds more than was desirable, but once she burned off the puppy fat, she may even have become a knockout. Looking again, he really couldn’t see the mother-daughter link between the two dead women. Had the girl been fated to end up like the cold, shrivelled wretch her mother had become? He had heard somewhere, from someone, that all women ended up just like their mothers, and if this were true, then perhaps he had done the girl a favour in killing her while she still had her looks and vitality. After all, if she had known she would end up like her mother, the beast, then she may, one day, have simply ended up killing herself anyway.
Smiling wryly, the man carefully stroked his hand over the girl’s eyes, gently closing her eyelids, giving at least part of her face a sense of peace in death. As he admired the dark bruise that seemed to zigzag across her throat where he had broken her windpipe, he brought his wet fingertips to his lips and slowly licked them clean. Her blood was thicker and more pungent, yet perhaps a little more sweeter tasting with it, and it certainly lacked some of the bitterness of her mother’s. Perhaps, he wondered, the taste of the blood changed depending on the happiness of the soul within the body. That the mother’s tasted bitter, in that scenario, was perhaps no surprise. Still, he had only the experiences of a sample of two to draw upon in his study of the matter. Would the subtle nuances of taste in everyone’s blood reflect their character and age as precisely as these two had? Would the blood of an old woman be as bitter as the blood of a new-born baby’s be sweet? It was one to investigate for the future, perhaps.
A sudden twitch in the mother’s arm and the man’s head whipped round, his heart pounding in his chest and hurling blood into his muscles to ready them for action, his eyes narrowing on the guilty appendage. The arm twitched again, the gnarled claw of a hand spasming momentarily, but it was nothing more than the reflexive twitch of the trapped energy in the muscles finally being released. It was disconcerting, though. Grabbing the arm around the wrist, the man planted one foot firmly onto the woman’s chest and, leaning back with all his weight, wrenched the bone out of its socket in an attempt to silence her once and for all. It seemed to work.
Standing over the mother’s body, the man glanced through the gap between the thin curtains, the catch of the broken window he had climbed through still jutting into the room, and his eyes narrowed in concentration once again. A flicker of blue light was repeatedly coming and going from somewhere out in the grounds of the house. A pulse of fear ran down his spine. Dropping the woman’s arm with a thud onto the carpet, the man moved quickly over to the window and peered cautiously through the gap between the curtains.
Slowly driving past the front of the house was a police car, its lights rhythmically pulsing with blue light, its siren silenced. There were two cops in the car. From where he was standing, the man couldn’t make out the driver’s face, but he could clearly make out his passenger, who was half-leaning out of the window as he shone a flash-light around the bottom floor of the house. They were looking for something, someone – him, presumably. He hadn’t really thought much about covering his tracks as he made his way through the forest, trusting instinctively to nature to do it for him, but now it was clear that he shouldn’t have been so careless. The trail, as little as he could think there was, appeared to have betrayed him and led others to find him here.
The car slowly turned round in the yard and started back for another pass of the house. The driver’s face came into view and the man was surprised, though it may simply have been a trick of the poor light, to see a lack of urgency in the cop’s eyes. It puzzled him: would the driver really have been that disinterested if they really had expected to find him here? The man didn’t think so. Perhaps the trail was colder than he had thought just a second or two previously. The presence of the police car probably owed more to luck on a standard routine check-up than on any real intent to find him.
The man watched the beam of the flashlight lift up onto the top floor of the house and slowly start to pan across. Whether the police were here by luck or not, when their light reached the broken window, their suspicions, if they had any, would be confirmed in an instant. If he could just pull the window back into its frame and replace the catch, then he might just be able to...
The light quickly panned across the window, quicker than he had expected, and the man froze to the spot, watching in wide-eyed fear as the blue light flashed in front of his eyes before vanishing from view once more. Scarcely daring to move, he held his breath, hoping beyond hope that his fear wouldn’t become a reality. The blue light didn’t return, however, and as the car turned and drove in the direction of the open gates, he slowly released his breath, relieved as that horrible, possible reality slipped away with it.
Suddenly the car turned sharply and swung back towards the house, the passenger sneaking his arm out of the window once more and throwing another beam of light up in the man’s direction. Instinctively, he stepped away from the window and watched with a growing feeling of sickness in his gut as the light poured through the gap between the curtains. Cursing his lack of foresight, the man crept back toward the right-hand side of the window and tentatively pulled the curtain back a fraction so that he could more clearly gauge the cop’s reaction.
They were still sitting in their car, motionless now as it lay parked a short distance away directly in front of the house, and the flash-light had been hooked up onto a catch on the side of the roof so that it was supported without the need for someone to hold it. The man had expected to see them out of the car, at the very least, but there seemed to be something of a debate going on between the two cops. Under the circumstances, a broken window wasn’t something they could readily ignore, but as to exactly what a broken window might represent was something that was clearly up for heated interpretation.
The man knew he should take advantage of their hesitation to make his escape – after all, debate or no debate, any cop worthy of the name would eventually have to enter the house to investigate - but for some reason unknown to him, he found himself hesitating, strangely reticent to leave the room. In truth, though he was loathe to admit it, there had been something of an alien quality to what he had just done, as though killing the two women just hadn’t quite seemed as right as he felt it should have been. The feeling of emptiness inside his mind, which he had hoped would have been filled by the return to his true instincts, was still prevalent, was still getting to him in much the same way as it had before. Yet, as strange and as alien and as futile as what he had done had been, there was something about these surroundings, something familiar, comfortable even, which made him feel as though the house, the idea of a home, was somewhere he belonged.
The urge to take flight from the scene soon began to take over, however. The doors to the police car opened and the two officers, thick-set men with no necks and nervous looks in their eyes, stepped out onto the chippings and stood looking up at the broken window for a moment, their hands resting ominously on their gun belts. One of the officers, the older-looking of the two, reached round behind his back and pulled a small torch from his belt before stepping forward toward the house and disappearing out of sight beneath the window ledge. The faint rattle of a door handle a moment later told the man exactly what his intentions were.
Anxious, the man pulled his finger away from the curtain and let it fall gently back into place. Turning and stepping carefully over the older woman’s bloodied body, he quietly made his way across the bedroom, casting his eyes briefly at the girl’s battered face one last time before slipping quietly out into the hallway.
The cop was in the house. His footsteps were quiet, barely noticeable above the hum of the light bulb in the hallway, faint though even that was, but nonetheless he was definitely in the house. The front door had probably been unlocked, he figured, just like he had found with the last house he had been in - a typical country habit presumably. How irritatingly unfortunate.
The man waited in the hallway, standing stock-still, barely even daring to breath for fear of giving himself away, and listened with a straining ear to hear what the cop was doing downstairs. He would have to come upstairs at some point to take a closer look at the broken window - almost certainly sooner rather than later considering the ground floor was empty – but when he did, it was going to cause the man a big problem: quite simply, beyond taking the staircase, there was no other way out of the house. Climbing out through another window in one of the other rooms wasn’t an option - the other cop was almost certainly checking the outside of the house from both the front and rear - and there was no way that the man could see to get into the loft area above his head to try and make his escape from there. Going down the staircase and out the front door was the only way out, although there was presumably a back door somewhere, but either way he was trapped for now.
A grunt of effort and an unwelcome creak of wood signalled that the cop was starting up the stairs. The man cursed his hesitancy and quietly moved further down the hallway away from the top of the staircase. Running out of options, not that there had been many in the first place, he slipped back into the bedroom, hoping that the cop would check the other room first, maybe give him an opportunity to sneak past unnoticed.
The floorboards creaked out in the hallway, the cop’s bulkier frame eliciting a more unforgiving response than the man’s wiry body had seconds earlier. The man could feel his heart hammering away in his chest as he waited just inside the bedroom, praying that the cop wouldn’t have the nerve to investigate the broken window straight away, giving him at least one shot at making a bid for freedom.
The unmistakeable sound of a gun cocking answered his prayers in the negative. The cop, it seemed, wasn’t prepared to waste any more time. Thinking quickly, the man crept quietly across the bedroom floor, still wet in places from where blood had fallen, his feet almost seeming to stick at times, and hid inside the en-suite bathroom, his back resting against the wall next to the open door.
“Mrs. Carter?”
The voice sounded faint, the cop clearly still slightly hesitant at walking into the room too soon, perhaps still standing out in the hallway a few yards short of the door.
“Miss Carter, you there?”
The man knew that no one was going to answer, the silence doing that for the dead women instead. Hearing their family name being called at least answered one of his own questions, though, and now, finally, he knew who he had killed. Carter. The name was familiar to him. He didn’t have to dredge too far back in his memory, such as it was, to recall why it was familiar, either. David Carter had been the name of the patient who had died in the crash from which he had escaped. His file had been badly torn in places, and had made no mention of a family or where he lived, but wouldn’t it be a small world, wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic, if this house had been his home, too? The man smiled in amusement at his conclusion, marvelling at the mysterious, almost fortuitous, way in which the world worked at times.
Another creak, closer this time, snapped the man out of his thoughts. It sounded like the cop had finally plucked up some courage and reached the door.
“Jesus!”
The bodies, strewn across the floor and drenched with oceans of blood, had revealed the secret of the house’s silence.
“Christ almighty!”
The man, with his head right up against the doorframe, listened carefully as the cop stepped into the bedroom. He could hear the creak of his knees as he bent down, examining the bodies for signs of life.
“Aw, shit.”
A faint click and the crackle of static drifted into the man’s ears.
“You there, Reg?”
The cop, though his voice was weak and nervous, was calling for assistance. The window of opportunity for escape was seconds away from closing. With the gnawing sickness in his gut swelling to the crest of a wave, the man snatched a small pair of nail scissors from the glass shelf above the sink and, like a frenzied tornado, swirled back into the bedroom, slashing the sharp point of the scissors through the air. The cop was crouching over the young girl’s body, feebly checking her wrist for a pulse, but, as the man swept across the room, he turned his head sharply, looking round just in time to meet the scissors square in the eye. Howling with rage as he fell backwards, the cop, who had been clutching his gun tightly in his hand, instinctively squeezed off a round, the force of the bullet ripping the curtain in two and exploding the window outwards in a shower of glass, the sound ricocheting around the house, shattering the quiet.
Seizing his opportunity, the man, still clutching the scissors tightly, pounced on top of the wounded cop and repeatedly stabbed at the wrist and arm of the hand wielding the gun. Screaming in agony from the puncture wound to his eye and the cuts to his arm, the cop had no choice but to release his grip, spilling the gun onto the carpet and giving the man the opportunity to turn his attack elsewhere. Soaked in blood, his face covered with grazes and bruises, a wild fearful look in his eyes, the man gritted his teeth and bore down on his defenceless victim, beads of perspiration dripping from his face onto that of the wounded cop’s as he tried to choke the life out of him. Yet, though badly shocked and injured, the cop was still physically stronger than the man and, realising his survival depended on fighting back, he brought a knee up into the small of the man’s back, causing him to ease his grip round his throat. Using the second he had bought himself, the cop pushed upwards with everything he had and knocked the man back onto the carpet.
“What’s going on, Sam? I heard gunfire. Come on, talk to me, buddy!”
The cop struggled to his feet, staggering backwards toward the doorway with a hand over his ruined eye, groaning in pain from the multiple lacerations. The man recovered himself and scrambled across the floor on all fours, desperate to get to the unattended gun before the cop realised what was happening. As his hand grasped the ceramic handle, the cop stumbled out into the hallway and lurched out of sight towards the staircase. Rising quickly to his feet, the man charged into the light and fired a shot at the cop as he started to disappear down the staircase. The cop’s body twisted as the bullet ripped through the back of his shoulder, his legs giving way and sending him crashing and tumbling down the stairs. As the man hurried down the corridor to finish him off, the sound of wood breaking heralded the entrance of the other cop, the sound of gunfire for the second time forcing him into action. Seeing his colleague slumped at the bottom of the staircase, he looked up and instinctively fired a couple of shots at the sight of the man lining up for another shot.
The man ducked out of sight, casting a wary look in the direction of the two impact marks in the wall opposite him, and hurriedly backed towards the safety of the bedroom once again. If he had been running out of options before, then he had well and truly exhausted them now. For a second time, he cursed the hesitancy that had cost him the chance to make a clean escape. Had he previously been this sloppy when killing his victims? Had he always had a tendency to linger and think about his victims, their homes, before fleeing the scene?
Closing and locking the door behind him as he stepped back into the bedroom, the man turned and moved quickly over to the window to see what was happening. The injured cop was sitting with his back against the car, partially obscured from view by the open passenger door, his partner crouching a little closer, his head just about in view, as he used the radio to call for back-up. Sensing an opportunity, the man quickly moved the curtain to one side, squinting as the light from the flash-light poured into the room, and fired a shot at the cop’s head. It missed, the windscreen of the car cracking as the shot impacted against the toughened glass. The cop’s head, unsurprisingly, promptly disappeared from view. After a few seconds, a shaky hand rose into view further across the dashboard and grabbed the shotgun mounted next to the steering wheel. The man pondered over whether he should fire another shot, try and stop the man from making use of the more powerful weapon, but he suspected that would only leave him with two shots left in the gun. A Smith and Wesson was a good gun, he knew, very powerful and very reliable, but this particular model only packed six bullets at a time. The man shook his head in dismay. Trust a country cop to fancy himself as something of a cowboy.
The resounding crunch of a cartridge being pumped into the barrel of the shotgun made the man drop the curtain back into place and crouch down beneath the window. The debate over whether he should take another shot at the cop was finished. The second he showed himself anywhere near the window again he would be shot dead.
Somewhere in the far distance, but sounding as though it was drawing closer, the wail of sirens heralded the impending arrival of the cavalry. Two different pitch variations were evident, a sign that the back-up was more than just local, state police rushing to the scene too, perhaps. Clearly news of his earlier attempt had gotten out and attracted more interest than he had bargained for. Breaking into this house was beginning to look like a bigger mistake with every passing moment, any of which could be his last.
Several cars came to a crunching halt out in the drive, their locking wheels skidding across the chippings. Doors opened and a dozen more shotguns were pumped ready for action. Knowing full well what he would find, the man flicked open the cylinders in his gun and confirmed that there were only two bullets left. He was vastly outnumbered and totally outgunned. The situation was beginning to look decidedly grim. He closed the cylinders back into place and wondered, with increasing morbidity, if he should keep the last bullet for himself, to at least keep control of when his own life should end, rather than put that fate in the hands of some deranged, trigger-happy cops.
Feet crunching over the chippings, growing fainter with every moment, told the man that the cops were spreading out, making sure they had all the angles covered, making sure that he couldn’t make a bid for freedom out the front or rear of the house. Escape wasn’t what he had in mind, though, that option passed out of sight the instant he had hesitated upon seeing the first pair of cops arrive. Thinking back on it, he wondered if maybe he could have taken the cop he had attacked hostage, at least given himself some kind of leverage with which to bargain some kind of freedom.
“This is the police. We have the building surrounded. Throw your weapon out of the window and make your way outside through the front door with your hands in the air where we can clearly see them.”
Shaking his head clear of the thought about what he should have done - little point in dwelling on the past now, the irony that such an act had been in any case - the man glanced in the direction of the dead mother, her head lying back on the carpet at such an angle that her lifeless eyes were staring right at him, almost appearing to laugh at him for the way events had unfolded, finding some justice from beyond the world of the living. Snapping with anger, the man pointed the gun at her face, squeezed the trigger, and showered the room with her blood and grey matter. Her head had just about exploded, he noted with amusement, and her eyes, those beastly sad eyes he had so hated, lay scattered across the carpet in opposing directions, severed from her brain altogether. A great gash in the woman’s skull, a great hole with lumps of brain tissue dripping out onto the floor, a great gouge that was shaped like a mouth, seemed to smile at the man for his unthinking foolishness, though it took him a moment to think why. The answer came eventually: just the one bullet left now.
Or, thinking about it again, was there. After all, people living in the country frequently kept guns in their homes, protection against people like him who tried to take advantage of the cops’ inability to respond quickly in these areas. Surely, he reasoned, there was another weapon somewhere in this house? For some reason, some unknown reason, the man felt sure there was another gun in this house.
There was an eerie silence outside, the cops not daring to move for a moment, perhaps wondering if the man had made the job easier for them by taking his own life. Finally, some muted words were uttered and the man could hear the sound of feet entering the house. Firing another shot had clearly been taken as a sign that he had no intention of coming out of his own accord.
Hearing the stairs creaking once again, the man quickly made his mind up about what he was going to do. Stuffing the gun into his waistband behind his back, the man crawled over to the bedroom door and pulled himself back onto his feet. Quietly, he unlocked the door and slowly pulled it open enough so he could look out into the hallway. The top of a cop’s head was just about in view, coming up the staircase.
“Out ... okay ... coming!”
The cop halted and quickly raised his shotgun. Two more cops appeared at the other side of the staircase, both similarly poised and ready to shoot.
“Throw your weapon out into the hallway, buddy!”
The man pretended not to hear the order.
“Don’t ... I’m ... shoot ... out ... coming!”
He stepped very slowly and very deliberately out into the hallway, with his hands high in the air above his head.
“Stop right there! Where’s your weapon?”
The man nodded his head back in the direction of the bedroom.
“There ... left.”
The cops seemed to hesitate for a moment, the impassive look on the man’s face not betraying any sign of a lie, his garbled words taking a second or two to sink in, before one of them finally gestured for the man to walk towards them.
“Just real nice and slow, buddy.”
Nodding obediently, the man moved slowly toward the staircase; the cops moved back down in time with his own steps, their shotguns trained at his head. As he reaching the doorway to the room closest to the stairs, the man stumbled forward, seemingly tripping over his own feet, and, as he started to fall, his hands lowered, one stretching out to catch his fall against the door handle, the other snaking round and pulling the gun free from behind his back. The cops hesitated and backed away again, momentarily losing their sights on their weapons, giving the man the chance he needed to push down on the door handle and fire off one last parting shot that blew a hole in the head of the cop closest to him. Amid the chaos and furore of another falling body, the man ducked into the room under a hail of gunfire and slammed the door shut behind him.
Breathing hard and grimacing, his back against the wall, blood pouring out of a wound in his leg, the man reached up above his head and turned on the light switch. The room looked exactly as he had expected to find it. It was a study, he guessed, for with a large desk covered with books against the opposite wall, it couldn’t really be anything else. Study or not, mounted on the wall to his right was exactly what he had wanted to see. Hunting rifles, three of them, taking pride of place on the wall surrounded by various photos of some guy with a beard, Mr Carter presumably, standing next to wild animals he had, presumably, shot himself.
Wincing as he stood up, the man grabbed the most-powerful rifle and instinctively reached up to a shelf above and behind his head where there was a box of bullets. Smiling, he loaded several bullets into the magazine clip and locked it back into the rifle. He knew that this was only ever going to end one way, the cops wouldn’t take one of their own being shot dead lightly, but he also knew that he could hold out a little longer now. He had a rifle, three of them; he had ammunition, boxes of it; and he knew, he just knew, that Mr Carter would be the type to have some food and water stored nearby. The man looked around the room and smiled again. He could hold out for days if he had to, and, to be honest, it looked like he would have to. After all, it was the only future he had now. Killing more cops was the only thing left he had to look forward to. Perhaps, he wondered, turning and aiming the rifle at the door, that was all there had ever been for a man, a killer, like him.
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It was salty, yes, definitely salty, he decided, but there was an undercurrent to the taste, a certain piquancy, that was hinting at something a little more, something a little different from what he had expected. As familiar as it was, though, his mind, the mess that it was, was unwilling to provide the key that would unlock that particular part of his memory which would allow him to place it in reality. Perhaps, or so he wondered, he had tasted something similar before, somewhere, sometime, but the thought passed quickly, vanishing in an instant, for he knew that the answer was beyond his reach for the time being. Thinking back through a vast, barren emptiness was only ever going to be a complete waste of time, a mere distraction from the pleasure of the taste in the here and now. After all, beyond the here and now, there was nothing else.
His mind, free now from its momentary doubt, revelled in the wondrous taste filling his mouth. The liquid, while indeed salty, was also bitter-sweet in its taste, and with his mouth so full that he could feel little trails of wetness trickling down from the corners of his lips, it was easier to pinpoint every flavour, every nuance, with every taste bud, back and front, coming into play to lend their own unique expertise. Bittersweet indeed, he decided, a sweet bitter-sweetness, even, if there could possibly be such a sensation. In truth, he couldn’t see himself drinking great quantities of the rich, thick liquid, but a little bit now and again was an intoxicating suggestion that made him smile the more he considered it; it was a taste he liked already, but he could tell he could get to like it even more. As he swallowed deeply, tilting his head back to savour the feeling as the liquid ran down his throat, one last thought crossed his mind: does everyone’s blood taste the same?
She had stopped breathing now. His hands deep inside her throat, crushing her windpipe, had seen to that, but there was still a faint trace of a pulse that was sending a diminishing stream of blood out from her jugular vein and up into his face. He had been a little surprised by the warmth of the dark red liquid, thinking that her blood should have been as cold and as unforgiving as she had seemed in her entries while flicking through her diary. What a cold bitch she had seemed. What an ugly bitch she had been. He may just merely have been satisfying his own desires in killing her, but in doing so, he had felt like he done the whole world a favour. How anyone, how any man, could ever have loved this woman, this thing, this hideous beast, was beyond him. He could only imagine that the unlucky man was either blind or deaf or, more likely, both. Assuming there was a man, of course, he thought with a wry smile. The great “love” in the diary might equally have been a woman. Lesbians could have children too, presumably. All things considered, why he was even enjoying the taste of her blood was quite beyond his understanding.
Freeing his hands from around her shattered neck, he pushed himself back onto his feet and turned towards the en-suite bathroom to wash his hands. A movement underneath the doorway from the hallway outside the bedroom caught his eye, though, and he turned instinctively, freezing and blending into the darkness of the room.
“Mum?”
A girl’s voice. A teenager’s, perhaps, with its deeper, less innocent undertones. The way she had called for her mum, a certain inflection in her voice, a certain naivety, suggested she hadn’t yet been broken in entirely, though. The man smiled. A two for the price of one deal in this house, then. Twenty, followed unexpectedly quickly by twenty-one.
“Mum, you okay?”
The door groaned against the frame as it slowly opened on its hinge. Light from the hallway crept further into the room, creating a widening rectangle along the black floor, sneaking and creeping closer and closer to the crumpled lifeless body on the carpet.
“Mum?”
The man eased himself from his hiding-place next to the closet and slid slowly along the wall on the blindside of the opening door. The light reached the tip of the dead woman’s outstretched arm, her fingers frozen in a grotesque, mangled claw, and the door suddenly stopped opening any wider.
“Mum?”
It came out as more of a gasp this time. A weaker, tearful, involuntary gasp. It was more than the dead woman had managed before he had shattered her larynx with a blow to the windpipe. She had still tried in vain to shout for help, though. It had raised a smile at the time.
The door opened fully and the girl’s shadow was in the room now, elongated and distorted by the light that must have been somewhere low on the wall behind her head. He could tell by the particular shape of the shadow around the upper torso that the girl’s hands were covering her mouth. It was a typical primary defensive reaction to a devastating shock. It would likely be followed quickly by the typical secondary reaction: a scream of alarm.
“M-m-mum.”
Her shadow grew larger in the illuminated rectangle, her head blocking the light on her mother’s arm now, her shock dissipating and slowly giving way to the need to do something. The cry of alarm, he reasoned with cold calculation, would only be mere seconds away.
The man moved swiftly round from the blindside of the doorway, quickly swinging both hands together to the side like an axe and chopping them down onto the bridge of the girl’s nose with sickening force. There was a satisfying crunch of bone as he splayed her nose across the side of her face, a satisfying silence as the shock at what had just happened to her overrode all other thought and emotion, the reaction to scream pushed forcefully out of consciousness for now. The girl staggered back towards the hallway, her hands rising instinctively to her damaged face, but he moved quickly again and grabbed her by the hair, hauling her roughly all the way into the bedroom and throwing her towards the desk that lay underneath the window opposite, a mass of curly dark hair still clutched tightly in his grasp as she fell. The girl groaned loudly as her flailing hands tried to slow her descent, but she succeeded only in knocking the vanity mirror from the desk, smashing it against the hardwood of the chest of drawers nearby. The shattered pieces joined the scattered shards of glass lying on the floor underneath the window.
Her groans grew louder as she rested limply on the cold, hard wood and he sensed the anticipated scream, delayed though it had been, wasn’t far away. Grabbing her by the hair again with his left hand, he pulled her head back, her tearful bloodshot eyes staring up at him in wide-eyed horror, and brought his other hand down like a cleaver on her exposed throat. There was a loud crack and her eyes, her big blue eyes, exploded into the back of her head like the spinning wheels of a slot machine giving up its prized jackpot. He waited a moment, studying her closely, holding her upright by her hair alone, and then slapped her hard on both sides of the face. Her eyes, vacant and lifeless, rolled lazily back into view. Satisfied, the man finally loosened his grip on her hair and let her drop onto the carpet to lie at an angle, he noticed with some artistic amusement, almost perpendicular to her mother’s body.
Licking the drying blood from his fingers, the man studied the face of the woman he had killed first for a moment and then looked down upon the girl’s. At first glance, there was little similarity between the two: same colour of hair, perhaps; same colour of eyes, possibly; but beyond that, nothing.
The man bent down over the girl’s body and brushed his hands over her face, gently caressing her cheek and gathering some of her still warm blood onto his fingers. To be fair, it was difficult to tell with her nose knocked over onto the left side of her face, but he figured she had probably been a reasonably attractive girl, albeit in a plain, harmless kind of way. She wasn’t plump as such, nor could she be called chubby, although she was certainly carrying a few pounds more than was desirable, but once she burned off the puppy fat, she may even have become a knockout. Looking again, he really couldn’t see the mother-daughter link between the two dead women. Had the girl been fated to end up like the cold, shrivelled wretch her mother had become? He had heard somewhere, from someone, that all women ended up just like their mothers, and if this were true, then perhaps he had done the girl a favour in killing her while she still had her looks and vitality. After all, if she had known she would end up like her mother, the beast, then she may, one day, have simply ended up killing herself anyway.
Smiling wryly, the man carefully stroked his hand over the girl’s eyes, gently closing her eyelids, giving at least part of her face a sense of peace in death. As he admired the dark bruise that seemed to zigzag across her throat where he had broken her windpipe, he brought his wet fingertips to his lips and slowly licked them clean. Her blood was thicker and more pungent, yet perhaps a little more sweeter tasting with it, and it certainly lacked some of the bitterness of her mother’s. Perhaps, he wondered, the taste of the blood changed depending on the happiness of the soul within the body. That the mother’s tasted bitter, in that scenario, was perhaps no surprise. Still, he had only the experiences of a sample of two to draw upon in his study of the matter. Would the subtle nuances of taste in everyone’s blood reflect their character and age as precisely as these two had? Would the blood of an old woman be as bitter as the blood of a new-born baby’s be sweet? It was one to investigate for the future, perhaps.
A sudden twitch in the mother’s arm and the man’s head whipped round, his heart pounding in his chest and hurling blood into his muscles to ready them for action, his eyes narrowing on the guilty appendage. The arm twitched again, the gnarled claw of a hand spasming momentarily, but it was nothing more than the reflexive twitch of the trapped energy in the muscles finally being released. It was disconcerting, though. Grabbing the arm around the wrist, the man planted one foot firmly onto the woman’s chest and, leaning back with all his weight, wrenched the bone out of its socket in an attempt to silence her once and for all. It seemed to work.
Standing over the mother’s body, the man glanced through the gap between the thin curtains, the catch of the broken window he had climbed through still jutting into the room, and his eyes narrowed in concentration once again. A flicker of blue light was repeatedly coming and going from somewhere out in the grounds of the house. A pulse of fear ran down his spine. Dropping the woman’s arm with a thud onto the carpet, the man moved quickly over to the window and peered cautiously through the gap between the curtains.
Slowly driving past the front of the house was a police car, its lights rhythmically pulsing with blue light, its siren silenced. There were two cops in the car. From where he was standing, the man couldn’t make out the driver’s face, but he could clearly make out his passenger, who was half-leaning out of the window as he shone a flash-light around the bottom floor of the house. They were looking for something, someone – him, presumably. He hadn’t really thought much about covering his tracks as he made his way through the forest, trusting instinctively to nature to do it for him, but now it was clear that he shouldn’t have been so careless. The trail, as little as he could think there was, appeared to have betrayed him and led others to find him here.
The car slowly turned round in the yard and started back for another pass of the house. The driver’s face came into view and the man was surprised, though it may simply have been a trick of the poor light, to see a lack of urgency in the cop’s eyes. It puzzled him: would the driver really have been that disinterested if they really had expected to find him here? The man didn’t think so. Perhaps the trail was colder than he had thought just a second or two previously. The presence of the police car probably owed more to luck on a standard routine check-up than on any real intent to find him.
The man watched the beam of the flashlight lift up onto the top floor of the house and slowly start to pan across. Whether the police were here by luck or not, when their light reached the broken window, their suspicions, if they had any, would be confirmed in an instant. If he could just pull the window back into its frame and replace the catch, then he might just be able to...
The light quickly panned across the window, quicker than he had expected, and the man froze to the spot, watching in wide-eyed fear as the blue light flashed in front of his eyes before vanishing from view once more. Scarcely daring to move, he held his breath, hoping beyond hope that his fear wouldn’t become a reality. The blue light didn’t return, however, and as the car turned and drove in the direction of the open gates, he slowly released his breath, relieved as that horrible, possible reality slipped away with it.
Suddenly the car turned sharply and swung back towards the house, the passenger sneaking his arm out of the window once more and throwing another beam of light up in the man’s direction. Instinctively, he stepped away from the window and watched with a growing feeling of sickness in his gut as the light poured through the gap between the curtains. Cursing his lack of foresight, the man crept back toward the right-hand side of the window and tentatively pulled the curtain back a fraction so that he could more clearly gauge the cop’s reaction.
They were still sitting in their car, motionless now as it lay parked a short distance away directly in front of the house, and the flash-light had been hooked up onto a catch on the side of the roof so that it was supported without the need for someone to hold it. The man had expected to see them out of the car, at the very least, but there seemed to be something of a debate going on between the two cops. Under the circumstances, a broken window wasn’t something they could readily ignore, but as to exactly what a broken window might represent was something that was clearly up for heated interpretation.
The man knew he should take advantage of their hesitation to make his escape – after all, debate or no debate, any cop worthy of the name would eventually have to enter the house to investigate - but for some reason unknown to him, he found himself hesitating, strangely reticent to leave the room. In truth, though he was loathe to admit it, there had been something of an alien quality to what he had just done, as though killing the two women just hadn’t quite seemed as right as he felt it should have been. The feeling of emptiness inside his mind, which he had hoped would have been filled by the return to his true instincts, was still prevalent, was still getting to him in much the same way as it had before. Yet, as strange and as alien and as futile as what he had done had been, there was something about these surroundings, something familiar, comfortable even, which made him feel as though the house, the idea of a home, was somewhere he belonged.
The urge to take flight from the scene soon began to take over, however. The doors to the police car opened and the two officers, thick-set men with no necks and nervous looks in their eyes, stepped out onto the chippings and stood looking up at the broken window for a moment, their hands resting ominously on their gun belts. One of the officers, the older-looking of the two, reached round behind his back and pulled a small torch from his belt before stepping forward toward the house and disappearing out of sight beneath the window ledge. The faint rattle of a door handle a moment later told the man exactly what his intentions were.
Anxious, the man pulled his finger away from the curtain and let it fall gently back into place. Turning and stepping carefully over the older woman’s bloodied body, he quietly made his way across the bedroom, casting his eyes briefly at the girl’s battered face one last time before slipping quietly out into the hallway.
The cop was in the house. His footsteps were quiet, barely noticeable above the hum of the light bulb in the hallway, faint though even that was, but nonetheless he was definitely in the house. The front door had probably been unlocked, he figured, just like he had found with the last house he had been in - a typical country habit presumably. How irritatingly unfortunate.
The man waited in the hallway, standing stock-still, barely even daring to breath for fear of giving himself away, and listened with a straining ear to hear what the cop was doing downstairs. He would have to come upstairs at some point to take a closer look at the broken window - almost certainly sooner rather than later considering the ground floor was empty – but when he did, it was going to cause the man a big problem: quite simply, beyond taking the staircase, there was no other way out of the house. Climbing out through another window in one of the other rooms wasn’t an option - the other cop was almost certainly checking the outside of the house from both the front and rear - and there was no way that the man could see to get into the loft area above his head to try and make his escape from there. Going down the staircase and out the front door was the only way out, although there was presumably a back door somewhere, but either way he was trapped for now.
A grunt of effort and an unwelcome creak of wood signalled that the cop was starting up the stairs. The man cursed his hesitancy and quietly moved further down the hallway away from the top of the staircase. Running out of options, not that there had been many in the first place, he slipped back into the bedroom, hoping that the cop would check the other room first, maybe give him an opportunity to sneak past unnoticed.
The floorboards creaked out in the hallway, the cop’s bulkier frame eliciting a more unforgiving response than the man’s wiry body had seconds earlier. The man could feel his heart hammering away in his chest as he waited just inside the bedroom, praying that the cop wouldn’t have the nerve to investigate the broken window straight away, giving him at least one shot at making a bid for freedom.
The unmistakeable sound of a gun cocking answered his prayers in the negative. The cop, it seemed, wasn’t prepared to waste any more time. Thinking quickly, the man crept quietly across the bedroom floor, still wet in places from where blood had fallen, his feet almost seeming to stick at times, and hid inside the en-suite bathroom, his back resting against the wall next to the open door.
“Mrs. Carter?”
The voice sounded faint, the cop clearly still slightly hesitant at walking into the room too soon, perhaps still standing out in the hallway a few yards short of the door.
“Miss Carter, you there?”
The man knew that no one was going to answer, the silence doing that for the dead women instead. Hearing their family name being called at least answered one of his own questions, though, and now, finally, he knew who he had killed. Carter. The name was familiar to him. He didn’t have to dredge too far back in his memory, such as it was, to recall why it was familiar, either. David Carter had been the name of the patient who had died in the crash from which he had escaped. His file had been badly torn in places, and had made no mention of a family or where he lived, but wouldn’t it be a small world, wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic, if this house had been his home, too? The man smiled in amusement at his conclusion, marvelling at the mysterious, almost fortuitous, way in which the world worked at times.
Another creak, closer this time, snapped the man out of his thoughts. It sounded like the cop had finally plucked up some courage and reached the door.
“Jesus!”
The bodies, strewn across the floor and drenched with oceans of blood, had revealed the secret of the house’s silence.
“Christ almighty!”
The man, with his head right up against the doorframe, listened carefully as the cop stepped into the bedroom. He could hear the creak of his knees as he bent down, examining the bodies for signs of life.
“Aw, shit.”
A faint click and the crackle of static drifted into the man’s ears.
“You there, Reg?”
The cop, though his voice was weak and nervous, was calling for assistance. The window of opportunity for escape was seconds away from closing. With the gnawing sickness in his gut swelling to the crest of a wave, the man snatched a small pair of nail scissors from the glass shelf above the sink and, like a frenzied tornado, swirled back into the bedroom, slashing the sharp point of the scissors through the air. The cop was crouching over the young girl’s body, feebly checking her wrist for a pulse, but, as the man swept across the room, he turned his head sharply, looking round just in time to meet the scissors square in the eye. Howling with rage as he fell backwards, the cop, who had been clutching his gun tightly in his hand, instinctively squeezed off a round, the force of the bullet ripping the curtain in two and exploding the window outwards in a shower of glass, the sound ricocheting around the house, shattering the quiet.
Seizing his opportunity, the man, still clutching the scissors tightly, pounced on top of the wounded cop and repeatedly stabbed at the wrist and arm of the hand wielding the gun. Screaming in agony from the puncture wound to his eye and the cuts to his arm, the cop had no choice but to release his grip, spilling the gun onto the carpet and giving the man the opportunity to turn his attack elsewhere. Soaked in blood, his face covered with grazes and bruises, a wild fearful look in his eyes, the man gritted his teeth and bore down on his defenceless victim, beads of perspiration dripping from his face onto that of the wounded cop’s as he tried to choke the life out of him. Yet, though badly shocked and injured, the cop was still physically stronger than the man and, realising his survival depended on fighting back, he brought a knee up into the small of the man’s back, causing him to ease his grip round his throat. Using the second he had bought himself, the cop pushed upwards with everything he had and knocked the man back onto the carpet.
“What’s going on, Sam? I heard gunfire. Come on, talk to me, buddy!”
The cop struggled to his feet, staggering backwards toward the doorway with a hand over his ruined eye, groaning in pain from the multiple lacerations. The man recovered himself and scrambled across the floor on all fours, desperate to get to the unattended gun before the cop realised what was happening. As his hand grasped the ceramic handle, the cop stumbled out into the hallway and lurched out of sight towards the staircase. Rising quickly to his feet, the man charged into the light and fired a shot at the cop as he started to disappear down the staircase. The cop’s body twisted as the bullet ripped through the back of his shoulder, his legs giving way and sending him crashing and tumbling down the stairs. As the man hurried down the corridor to finish him off, the sound of wood breaking heralded the entrance of the other cop, the sound of gunfire for the second time forcing him into action. Seeing his colleague slumped at the bottom of the staircase, he looked up and instinctively fired a couple of shots at the sight of the man lining up for another shot.
The man ducked out of sight, casting a wary look in the direction of the two impact marks in the wall opposite him, and hurriedly backed towards the safety of the bedroom once again. If he had been running out of options before, then he had well and truly exhausted them now. For a second time, he cursed the hesitancy that had cost him the chance to make a clean escape. Had he previously been this sloppy when killing his victims? Had he always had a tendency to linger and think about his victims, their homes, before fleeing the scene?
Closing and locking the door behind him as he stepped back into the bedroom, the man turned and moved quickly over to the window to see what was happening. The injured cop was sitting with his back against the car, partially obscured from view by the open passenger door, his partner crouching a little closer, his head just about in view, as he used the radio to call for back-up. Sensing an opportunity, the man quickly moved the curtain to one side, squinting as the light from the flash-light poured into the room, and fired a shot at the cop’s head. It missed, the windscreen of the car cracking as the shot impacted against the toughened glass. The cop’s head, unsurprisingly, promptly disappeared from view. After a few seconds, a shaky hand rose into view further across the dashboard and grabbed the shotgun mounted next to the steering wheel. The man pondered over whether he should fire another shot, try and stop the man from making use of the more powerful weapon, but he suspected that would only leave him with two shots left in the gun. A Smith and Wesson was a good gun, he knew, very powerful and very reliable, but this particular model only packed six bullets at a time. The man shook his head in dismay. Trust a country cop to fancy himself as something of a cowboy.
The resounding crunch of a cartridge being pumped into the barrel of the shotgun made the man drop the curtain back into place and crouch down beneath the window. The debate over whether he should take another shot at the cop was finished. The second he showed himself anywhere near the window again he would be shot dead.
Somewhere in the far distance, but sounding as though it was drawing closer, the wail of sirens heralded the impending arrival of the cavalry. Two different pitch variations were evident, a sign that the back-up was more than just local, state police rushing to the scene too, perhaps. Clearly news of his earlier attempt had gotten out and attracted more interest than he had bargained for. Breaking into this house was beginning to look like a bigger mistake with every passing moment, any of which could be his last.
Several cars came to a crunching halt out in the drive, their locking wheels skidding across the chippings. Doors opened and a dozen more shotguns were pumped ready for action. Knowing full well what he would find, the man flicked open the cylinders in his gun and confirmed that there were only two bullets left. He was vastly outnumbered and totally outgunned. The situation was beginning to look decidedly grim. He closed the cylinders back into place and wondered, with increasing morbidity, if he should keep the last bullet for himself, to at least keep control of when his own life should end, rather than put that fate in the hands of some deranged, trigger-happy cops.
Feet crunching over the chippings, growing fainter with every moment, told the man that the cops were spreading out, making sure they had all the angles covered, making sure that he couldn’t make a bid for freedom out the front or rear of the house. Escape wasn’t what he had in mind, though, that option passed out of sight the instant he had hesitated upon seeing the first pair of cops arrive. Thinking back on it, he wondered if maybe he could have taken the cop he had attacked hostage, at least given himself some kind of leverage with which to bargain some kind of freedom.
“This is the police. We have the building surrounded. Throw your weapon out of the window and make your way outside through the front door with your hands in the air where we can clearly see them.”
Shaking his head clear of the thought about what he should have done - little point in dwelling on the past now, the irony that such an act had been in any case - the man glanced in the direction of the dead mother, her head lying back on the carpet at such an angle that her lifeless eyes were staring right at him, almost appearing to laugh at him for the way events had unfolded, finding some justice from beyond the world of the living. Snapping with anger, the man pointed the gun at her face, squeezed the trigger, and showered the room with her blood and grey matter. Her head had just about exploded, he noted with amusement, and her eyes, those beastly sad eyes he had so hated, lay scattered across the carpet in opposing directions, severed from her brain altogether. A great gash in the woman’s skull, a great hole with lumps of brain tissue dripping out onto the floor, a great gouge that was shaped like a mouth, seemed to smile at the man for his unthinking foolishness, though it took him a moment to think why. The answer came eventually: just the one bullet left now.
Or, thinking about it again, was there. After all, people living in the country frequently kept guns in their homes, protection against people like him who tried to take advantage of the cops’ inability to respond quickly in these areas. Surely, he reasoned, there was another weapon somewhere in this house? For some reason, some unknown reason, the man felt sure there was another gun in this house.
There was an eerie silence outside, the cops not daring to move for a moment, perhaps wondering if the man had made the job easier for them by taking his own life. Finally, some muted words were uttered and the man could hear the sound of feet entering the house. Firing another shot had clearly been taken as a sign that he had no intention of coming out of his own accord.
Hearing the stairs creaking once again, the man quickly made his mind up about what he was going to do. Stuffing the gun into his waistband behind his back, the man crawled over to the bedroom door and pulled himself back onto his feet. Quietly, he unlocked the door and slowly pulled it open enough so he could look out into the hallway. The top of a cop’s head was just about in view, coming up the staircase.
“Out ... okay ... coming!”
The cop halted and quickly raised his shotgun. Two more cops appeared at the other side of the staircase, both similarly poised and ready to shoot.
“Throw your weapon out into the hallway, buddy!”
The man pretended not to hear the order.
“Don’t ... I’m ... shoot ... out ... coming!”
He stepped very slowly and very deliberately out into the hallway, with his hands high in the air above his head.
“Stop right there! Where’s your weapon?”
The man nodded his head back in the direction of the bedroom.
“There ... left.”
The cops seemed to hesitate for a moment, the impassive look on the man’s face not betraying any sign of a lie, his garbled words taking a second or two to sink in, before one of them finally gestured for the man to walk towards them.
“Just real nice and slow, buddy.”
Nodding obediently, the man moved slowly toward the staircase; the cops moved back down in time with his own steps, their shotguns trained at his head. As he reaching the doorway to the room closest to the stairs, the man stumbled forward, seemingly tripping over his own feet, and, as he started to fall, his hands lowered, one stretching out to catch his fall against the door handle, the other snaking round and pulling the gun free from behind his back. The cops hesitated and backed away again, momentarily losing their sights on their weapons, giving the man the chance he needed to push down on the door handle and fire off one last parting shot that blew a hole in the head of the cop closest to him. Amid the chaos and furore of another falling body, the man ducked into the room under a hail of gunfire and slammed the door shut behind him.
Breathing hard and grimacing, his back against the wall, blood pouring out of a wound in his leg, the man reached up above his head and turned on the light switch. The room looked exactly as he had expected to find it. It was a study, he guessed, for with a large desk covered with books against the opposite wall, it couldn’t really be anything else. Study or not, mounted on the wall to his right was exactly what he had wanted to see. Hunting rifles, three of them, taking pride of place on the wall surrounded by various photos of some guy with a beard, Mr Carter presumably, standing next to wild animals he had, presumably, shot himself.
Wincing as he stood up, the man grabbed the most-powerful rifle and instinctively reached up to a shelf above and behind his head where there was a box of bullets. Smiling, he loaded several bullets into the magazine clip and locked it back into the rifle. He knew that this was only ever going to end one way, the cops wouldn’t take one of their own being shot dead lightly, but he also knew that he could hold out a little longer now. He had a rifle, three of them; he had ammunition, boxes of it; and he knew, he just knew, that Mr Carter would be the type to have some food and water stored nearby. The man looked around the room and smiled again. He could hold out for days if he had to, and, to be honest, it looked like he would have to. After all, it was the only future he had now. Killing more cops was the only thing left he had to look forward to. Perhaps, he wondered, turning and aiming the rifle at the door, that was all there had ever been for a man, a killer, like him.
If you have enjoyed this first chapter, the rest of the book can be downloaded from Amazon for Kindle via the links elsewhere on this page.
