This Is How You Die Read online

  “Wait, wait!” she protested, trying to spit out his sloppy attempts at foreplay, blocking his pulsating cock with the palm of her hand. “Condom. We need a condom!”

  Shame. I would have loved to see the mongrel offspring those two delinquents produced. The bastard, mutant child of two people who shouldn’t be allowed to live, let alone reproduce.

  “You’re on the pill!” Darren objected.

  “I have to be sure.”

  “But—but—” Darren was looking desperate. He swayed forward, hoping to slip in unseen. Perhaps thinking that he could get inside, do his thing, and then finish before she knew what was going on. She slapped him away again. “Come on,” he urged. “I’m clean, I swear.”

  Quite frankly, I’m amazed they didn’t hear my stifled laugh.

  “I don’t want to get pregnant!” the girl yelled. “Ya know what happened to my sister, she was on the pill and she got pregnant. Get a fucking condom!”

  “Fuck,” Darren spat desperately, looking like he was ready to explode. His eyes darted quickly around the room. “What if I pull out before I cum?”

  I grinned at his desperation.

  “Get a fucking condom!” she barked. “You’re not putting that thing inside me without one. I don’t want to get pregnant.”

  She didn’t care about the wiggling, festering things that would climb into her vagina and prepare—with the benefit of reinforcements from the town’s many diseased and desperate dicks—to fight an eternal battle against loosely prescribed antibiotics, but she did object to the idea of procreation. Thank God for small miracles and smaller minds.

  Darren groaned noisily and I grinned widely at his audible discomfort. I heard him shift away from his inebriated mate and scurry out of the room. The noise of his desperate search filtered through to his parents’ room like a lingering nighttime rodent scuttling through debris in an attic.

  The girl called out to Darren, “I have some in my bag.” But her words were heavily lubricated and soft, unable to seep through to her scrambling mate. She didn’t seem to mind and clearly wasn’t in a rush.

  I saw her loll back onto the bed, groaning as she did so. Her skirt had been pushed up to her bulbous stomach, her exposed vagina glistened as she set to work on pleasing herself. I scrunched up my face and gagged a little, making a soft but audible noise. She didn’t hear.

  Considering what comes and goes through a woman’s vagina, what plethora of typically disgusting fluids are ejected from its fleshy folds, it amazes me how men can find a moist one so alluring. When they’re not cleaning out the ejections of other men’s failed attempts at procreation, or wiping away the dribbles of their own spent urine, they’re picking the crusts of dried menstrual blood from those apparently appealing folds. Clearly men will stick their penises anywhere.

  Darren, who had yet to encounter a hole he didn’t want to poke, seemed a little insulted when, after stumbling into the bedroom with a pack of condoms held proudly in his hand, he discovered the moaning mountain of flesh had started without him. He wasted no time in slipping on the latex and then jumping on top of her, where he quickly finished what had taken him many breathless moments to start.

  He was practically wheezing when he finished. He rolled off of her and turned immediately away, his naked form curling into the fetal position. The girl looked perplexed. She hadn’t seen him reenter the room and seemed surprised that not only had the sex started, but it had also finished.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  He groaned in reply and held up his arm, exposing a filled condom that drooped toward the bed like a depressed, deflated balloon. He flung it across the room carelessly and the girl watched with absent eyes as it splattered against the far wall, hung there momentarily, and then began a slow decline, dripping down the magnolia like an anemic slug.

  She groaned in annoyance, peeking over occasionally at his disinterested form before staring at the ceiling, her fingers tapping her stomach. She turned to his back, moistened with his succinct lascivious labors. “Will you be ready to—” She stopped speaking when she received a preemptive snore in reply. Darren was already asleep.

  “Bastard,” she muttered under her breath. She turned over, facing away from him. She tried to continue her solo efforts at stimulation, but she seemed unable to get in the right mood. A feeling of being duped got in the way of her desire and eventually she closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep.

  I watched her attempts at slumber. She was distracted, uncomfortable, and annoyed; she wouldn’t be sleeping too soon. I sighed inwardly and skulked to the back of the cupboard, resting my head against a soft and heavy piece of clothing and preparing myself for a long night.

  ——

  I scrambled out of the wardrobe sometime later. Darren was still facing away, his naked and sweaty body rising and falling with the fluctuations of his rattling breath. The girl lay beside him, her body curved in a similar posture, the duvet half thrown over her body. Her suffering breath sang noisily as it strained through her dehydrated lungs.

  I watched them momentarily as they breathed their rotten breaths into an air that already stank of their sweaty and brief exertions. Their naked forms looked so vulnerable and exposed. It would have been so easy to kill them both there and then, to slit her throat and end her miserable existence without Darren even stirring, giving me enough time to reset myself before suffocating the pointless life from his diseased body. But I was tired, stiff, and ill-prepared for a double murder. I retired from the room and descended the stairs.

  The light from the hallway remained active; the house was bathed in a prominent glow. Despite the light and the sound of my footfalls on the stairs, still creasing and groaning an audible distraction, I was comfortable. There was little chance that either one of the comatose pair would awaken, and an even smaller chance that they would be capable of chasing me if they did.

  A handbag lay at the foot of the stairs, next to two pairs of shoes that had been kicked off in a hurry. The handbag was of a tatty denim material, shaded and pale in parts, rather like the chubby legs of its owner. Also like her legs, the bag had been abused by a number of teenagers—the illiterate hands of a dozen feckless youths had scrawled a number of inane references onto the worn material.

  There was very little inside. A purse, empty but for a fake I.D., a voucher for a fast food restaurant, and around $2 in change; a tube of red lipstick, glistening with the herpetic fluid of a hundred kisses; a makeup box, the colors and foundations of which were smudged into each other like a child’s paint palette; a large pack of condoms, wholesale protection for a wholesale whore; and a small pill box.

  The circular shaped pill box contained a number of contraceptive tablets. The pills themselves—small, white, innocuous—were embedded around the edges of the plastic device with the names of the days of the week above each one.

  So desperate to avoid the sin of a mutant baby, borne to an incapable and promiscuous teenage mother and a septic, pointless father of any possible age and all possible retardations, she fought the threat with a double-edged contraceptive sword: condoms and birth-control pills. No doubt it decreased her chances of sexual success to a reckless race of boys who preferred their tiny organs to be unsheathed, but evidently she still found willing members of the masculine race, whether through sheer desperation or complete drunkenness.

  There were two weeks’ worth of pills left, yet I had no doubt that the condoms, a hefty pack of well over a dozen, would be used up before that in an orgy of debauchery, disappointment, and drunkenness. In two weeks, those condoms would stop a flood of potentially virile semen, with the pills acting as a safety net to catch any that managed to slip through the latex barrier. It would be a shame if anyone were to bring down those barriers and blunt that double-edged sword.

  I took the pills to the kitchen and popped them out into the sink, using a flush of water from the faucet to send them down the plughole. The tiny tablets popped easily through the tiny grates in th
e drain. I found a small pack of pocket mints in one of the many drawers, spearmint flavored, white, roughly the same size as the pills. I put the mints inside the box, refilling it to within a pill of how I had left it. She might taste the mint as she washed them down, but I knew I wasn’t dealing with the sharpest tool in the shed, so she wouldn’t give it a second thought.

  The box went back in the drawer after that, but before I closed it, a picture in the drawer caught my attention. I stopped in my tracks, entranced. The picture was of Darren’s mother, sitting alone, sleepy, smiling warmly at the camera from underneath a cozy winter blanket. Her son, Darren’s younger brother, was curled up at her feet like a dog.

  I removed the photo, straightened it out on the counter. There was also a photo of her on the kitchen windowsill; she was grinning into the camera rather drunkenly. She wore a bikini and looked to be standing on some sunny beach. One of those lands of sun, sea, and sex, some distant cloudless paradise where no matter where you go, everyone you encounter is loud, horny, and British. That photo hadn’t intrigued me, I didn’t even give it a second glance, but this one was different.

  I carefully folded the photo and stuffed it into my pocket. It wouldn’t be missed, in a house full of junk, where the fridge was magnetized with a dozen trite slogans, postcards, pictures, and childish sketches, and where the floors were a battlefield of toys and the cabinets were mere storage rooms for the crap that couldn’t be thrown away lest they serve a point in the future. One photograph wouldn’t be missed.

  In another drawer, one that rattled disconcertingly with the sound of a multitude of cutlery and gadgets, I found a small pin with a pea-sized green head. I used this to puncture individual holes in each of the condoms, passing the needle through the wrapper and out the other side. It left an unnoticeable—especially in times of need—hole that would further serve the purpose of impregnating the sleeping beast upstairs. Despite failing to kill Darren, I left with a smile on my face. His death could wait. His parents would be back soon and my window of opportunity would close for an indeterminable window, but I was happy to bide my time. They say good things come to those who wait and I was happy to do just that.

  8

  It was Christmas in our own little tinseltown, and the streets were coated with a tacky shade of festive folly. Lights, strung across the road from lamppost to lamppost, dipped in the center like the jagged-toothed smile of a psychotic clown. Tinsel hugged lampposts and signs like brightly colored bristly snakes. Dancing Santas, cirrhotic reindeer, and bulbous snowmen stood to attention in windows of shops and homes.

  It was festive. It was joyful. It was merry.

  It was fucking disgusting.

  I hate Christmas and everything the season stands for.

  I hate the sense of self-importance in the church workers or the heavily religious; they think it’s their time to shine, their moment in the sun. Eleven months of regular church visits and senseless dogma all pays off when Christmas comes around and they can look down on the have-a-go Christians who go twice a year. And where have you been, hmm? I haven’t seen you since Easter.

  For the young, it’s all about presents, about receiving an ocean of gifts that they barely wanted and will never play with. It is about pigging out on chocolate and flying through the day on a rush of dopamine-induced hysteria. For adults, it is a season of indulgence and a season of loss, where overeating, overdrinking, and maxed-out credit cards combine to make sure that, whatever they do over those few days, they will be paying for it for the rest of the year.

  My dad was never big on Christmas, but he didn’t want me to feel left out so he did his best for me. He would buy me something small and then spend all day cooking a meal for the both of us. He was a terrible cook and he had no taste when it came to presents, but it was the thought that counted, and he wasn’t the source of my hatred for the season. I blamed everyone else. I blamed the smiley well-wishers on television, the presenters who always have a grin on camera, but are probably surviving on a diet of regret and cocaine off camera; the mail carriers, and paper boys and girls who are late and useless for fifty-one weeks of the year, but make sure they’re bright and early during the week of Christmas. Christmas is the Las Vegas of holiday seasons, coated in lights and colors bright enough to distract your attention from the misery that lies underneath.

  This Christmas was going to be different for me, though. This Christmas I was going to give myself the greatest present anyone had ever given me. It was going to be a momentous occasion. Christmas is a celebration of the birth of a powerful man, a God, a leader—a name that resonates throughout history. And this Christmas, a new God and a new legend would be born. This time nothing would stop me, because I knew that whatever happened, I was going to have my first kill. I was going to do what I was born to do.

  “Where you going dressed like that?”

  My uncle stood in the open doorway to my bedroom, looking me up and down with glazed-over eyes. Over the past few months, he had returned to being a miserable and worthless piece of shit. His girlfriend had left him, he had started drinking again, and I also suspected that he was using drugs. He had never looked worse, and I had never been happier. Some people don’t belong in regular society; I should know because I am one of them. But while people like me will thrive in the shadows, feeding off the darkness, people like my uncle live on the borderline. They are on the edge of both worlds, close to both, loved by neither. There are two evils in the world. There are the people like me, the ones who nightmares are made of, and then there are people like my uncle, the ones who leech from society, taking everything, giving nothing back, and who have the tenacity to pretend they are normal.

  Darren Henderson was also one of those people. He had nothing to offer the world and nothing to give anyone in it. He was a bully, a coward, a thug who would grow into a wife-beater, an addict, a waster. I didn’t see myself as a vigilante, but I was certainly doing the right thing, whether or not people realized it.

  I stared back at my uncle, gave him a little smile. I loved seeing him like this. It was early afternoon Christmas Eve and he was already dead to the world.

  “I’m Santa Claus,” I told him simply, gesturing toward my red outfit, my black boots, and the sack by my side.

  He didn’t reply and merely sneered at me.

  “Can I help you?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “You got anything in that sack for me?”

  I nodded slowly. “As it happens, yes I do, but you’ll get it later.”

  He perked up a bit, but as is so often the case with the terminally depressed, it didn’t last very long. He had nothing to be happy about. “Should I get excited?”

  “You can try.”

  I kicked out and caught the edge of the door, slamming it in his face. I heard him groan on the other side, heard the silence that followed as he waited and contemplated what to do with himself, and then I heard him slowly descend the stairs. He had a habit of taking them one step at a time, prolonging it as long as he could, as if hoping that by the time he reached the bottom, his life would be over or, at the very least, would be a little less shit than when he began.

  I stayed in my room for another couple hours, keeping a close eye on the world outside my window as it turned from gray to black. It had been like that all day. No sunshine, no joy. The perfect day for what I had planned.

  I spent a couple of hours downstairs, watching tedious television. All the programs that had done nothing of interest all year now had Christmas specials on and the nation was expected to tune in. There were also firework shows, talks with celebrities, and live music. I watched with disinterest, keeping one eye on the clock.

  “Are you going to go anywhere in that?” my uncle asked, gesturing toward the Santa suit.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  I paused and stared at him. I realized I could have told him every inch of my plan there and then, and he wouldn’t have remembered any of it in an hour or two. He was already
slipping into the abyss, his brain bathing in a cocktail of booze, heroin, and God knows what else since he first dragged his smelly, sweaty, and worthless ass out of bed.

  “I’m doing some charitable work.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Really?

  I nodded.

  “What sort of charitable work?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

  “Do I?” He seemed amused at that one.

  “If you must know,” I told him, “I’m helping out some disadvantaged teenagers, kids who were never as lucky as I was, kids who, without my help and assistance, might end up as worthless drunks or drug addicts, leeching from their dead brothers and pissing off their nephews.”

  I wasn’t entirely convinced he would put the pieces together, but he managed to do just that. The grin faded from his face and he no longer looked pleased with himself. “I try my best to look after you, you know that.”

  “No. You really don’t.”

  “Your dad would have wanted me here.”

  “No. He really wouldn’t have.”

  “It’s not my fault things are like this.”

  I sat forward, leaning on the edge of the sofa. “Really? Then why don’t you enlighten me? Whose fault is it? Is it the government? Is it your parents? Is it the little green men who sneak into your room at night and force the heroin into your veins?”

  He stared at me for a moment and I sensed something happening behind his eyes. I didn’t know whether he was about to cry or whether he was about to jump up and grab me by the throat. In the end, he did neither. His head lowered to his chest and he said, “I’m sorry. I really am. I tried my best and I was doing so well. But then she left and I couldn’t face another day without a drink.” He looked at me with sorrowful eyes. “I need help.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told him softly. “I’ll help you.”

  “Really?”