Road Kill - Part 5: Reaper

Never had Everett Burns crossed paths with a more perfect embodiment of the type of person he should meet than Nikki Price.

She reminded him of Connie Anders, his first target.

He was a junior in high school. He had a new ’77 Mustang II, and he was driving into the school parking lot.

She was jaywalking.

Two things excited him about Connie. One, she was beautiful. Her body was perfectly proportioned, and she had the face of an angel.

Two, she was a total bitch.

Everett had asked her out on a date, and she invited him to a Halloween party. The whole thing was a setup. She told him it was a costume party and it was not. She told him that she would be his date, and when he arrived, she asked the entire room who the hell had invited the centimeter peter.

So Connie Anders with her perfect body with her cheerleader friends was jaywalking. His first impulse was to scare the shit out of her.

He floored it.

The girls dove out of the way, but he was having far too much fun to remove his foot from the gas.

Connie turned and gasped.

The look on her face was exhilarating, but just before he was to do the deed, his conscience joined him and he slammed on the brakes.

It was too late.

Connie Anders slammed into the front of his car, flipped over the top, and landed on her head behind him.

The skid marks kept him from being prosecuted for manslaughter.

There had been many others through the years.

He had no set formula for who – men and women, adults and adolescents – all were fair game if they were more destructive than helpful.

He didn’t know why he was moved in such a way. Perhaps, he just had a habit of waking up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes. Or maybe, he just enjoyed the hunt.

The drive was a constant fire in his heart eternally burning.

Everett had never cared to delve too deeply into his own motives. His emotions were a deep, dark well of tumultuous waters. Rather than examine them, he preferred to indulge them – and to marvel at their sinister ambiguity.

After his unfortunate encounter with Nikki at the office – unfortunate for her anyway – he’d started taking a hard look at her. What he found were things that made her worse than most any other he’d ever encountered.

He could’ve killed ten decent people in the pursuit of her and still would have minimized the collateral damage that she would have caused to humanity exponentially.

There was truly no amount of good this girl could ever do that would ever make up for the mess she’d made of others.

And for all of this, he had something very special planned for her. Both the Romans and the Medieval Transylvanians would be awe-stricken.

* * * *
Nikki opened her eyes to find herself gazing at a drop sealing. Just over her head was a bright, florescent lamp.

She looked to her left to find that she was lying reclined in a chair that was not unlike a dentist chair. The armrests were folded out so that her arms were stretched out horizontally.

She looked down to find that she was still naked except for a fresh adult diaper.

As if he knew that she’d awakened, the door at her feet swung open and Everett Burns stepped inside the white room.

Now he looked like the man she remembered from the optometrist’s office. His beard had started growing back. His head was clean-shaven, and he wore a white dress shirt with khaki slacks.

"Good morning," he said cheerfully.

"Fuck you."

"How’s your diaper? Do you need a change?"

"How’s your leg?"

He looked down to his leg and nodded.

Then he smiled and wheeled a stainless steel cart that had been positioned by the door along side her chair. The objects on the cart were all covered with a blue sheet.

"Are you gonna kill me?" she said sheepishly.

He took a deep breath and released it slowly.

"Kill," he said pensively looking at the door. And then he looked at her. He had such kindness in his eyes. He looked like a shrink.
"You know, that word is a lot like the words Love, Hate, Ugly, Beautiful. It’s an abstraction. It’s used to describe so many different things that it really means nothing."

"Well are you?"

He shook his head. "No, I don’t think that what I do exactly qualifies as an abstraction but something very specific and richly deserved."

"All I did was make a scene, and I had a good reason," she pleaded.

Everett wheeled a chair by her and sat.

"Is that what you think this is about?"

"You don’t know me other than that."

He smiled warmly like he was talking to an old friend.

"That’s just what brought you to my attention. What I found when I watched was one of the ugliest examples of inhumanity I’ve ever seen."

"You don’t know anything about me," she snapped.

He smirked.

"Nicole ‘Nikki’ Price born on July 11, 1992. 2.8 GPA at Wood Central High. Captain of the Cheer leading team. Senior in High School. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we?"

She looked away from him.

"Your mother’s name is Amelia Long. She left your father when you were five because she had an itch. Bill Long, the man she had an itch for, made an honest woman out of her, and they were married for eight years.

"But when you were thirteen, you had your revenge against him and your mother. You spent two weeks at her house, and one afternoon, you called your Mother at work and told her that Bill was acting weird. That she needed to come home. When you got off the phone with her, you took off all your clothes, and tried to seduce him. Your mother came in and assumed the worst.

"Bill is still in prison for attempted child molestation.

"Your father, Nathan Price was unlucky in love. He spent all of his time after your mother trying to support you. It wasn’t until four years ago that he finally found time to date again, and finally he found a woman that was worth his efforts in Amanda Bennett.

"Amanda had one fault, she was jealous, but infidelity is not part of the program with your father. It would seem that she was finally safe from the philanderers of her past.

"But you didn’t like Amanda, did you? There was one girl that your father worked with that Amanda didn’t like. Her name was Lilith and she had an insatiable appetite for attached men.

"Just after the engagement, you set up a lunch meeting for your father with Lilith and just as you thought, she couldn’t stay off him. You also set it up so that Amanda showed up at the restaurant at exactly the right time.

"Amanda ran out of the building and into oncoming traffic. She’s a paraplegic now, and your father is still in therapy."

"I was a stupid kid. If you let me go, I’ll never do anything like that again."

He gave her a knowing look. "What about poor, young Zack? You were the first girl he’d ever mated with, and he made the mistake of telling you that he was molested by a man when he was a kid.

"When you broke up with him, you spread it around school that he told you he liked having sex with men. He killed himself. This was only a year ago. Do you not remember?

"Or what about Michelle Cassidy? She was your rival this year for Captain of the Cheerleading team? You planted drugs in her bedroom and told her overly religious mother that you thought she was on drugs. She now lives in a halfway house."

She started bawling.

"I know I’ve done some bad things, but I’ll do better. I swear to God!"

Everett gave her a paternal smile. "No you won’t. You’ll continue using people like puppets and throwing away lives until one day you end up with several kids by a father who hates your rotten guts. By then, the carnage will be insurmountable."

"I’m sorry," she cried.

He leaned close to her all semblance of kindness gone from his eyes. "You reap what you sew."

She opened her legs.

"Just don’t kill me. I’ll do anything."

Everett looked away from her and sighed. "How did I know it would come to this?"

He looked her straight in the face. "Your kind is always the same. You get in a tight spot and you always spread your legs. I wouldn’t dream of putting myself in your infection."

She bawled.

He stood up and pulled the cloth off the top of the tray revealing a nail gun, a hammer, a pair of cutters, and a vine of thorns.

"This is a rather long procedure, so I suppose we’d better get started."

She screamed.

He smirked. The glint of amusement was in his eyes again. "As much as I enjoy hysterics, please try to keep it down. The noise interferes with my concentration, and I might maim you inadvertently."

* * * *

Darren Rider was ecstatic.

He’d gotten the text message first thing this morning from Nikki’s cell phone. It had simply said, "Meet U in the Stadium at 10."

Maybe she was finally going to put out. He’d been working on the bitch for three months. It was about time.

pring break would be over tomorrow, and school would be over in weeks. After graduation, he might never have the chance again.

Wood County High’s Stadium was set back in the woods several acres behind the high school. It had been built in the late ‘60s long before the high school was ever placed on the land in front. While school was out it was the perfect make-out site.ecluded.

Unguarded.

A back entrance that few knew about.

Darren had lost his virginity here to Michelle Cassidy, the last Captain of the Cheerleaders.

He parked his Ranger just outside the Ambulance gate on the gravel road leading into the stadium, and then he climbed over the gate and walked through the back stands and onto the field.

The Press Box of the stadium stood high above the field its aluminum siding painted green. Beneath the windows where the announcers looked on the field, the yellow letters "Home of the Barbarians."

The stands were empty and looking like a sea of old concrete. It was always a rather eerie sight in the off-season.

But before he’d taken 10 steps onto the field, he saw something that stopped him.

Posted on the sidelines at approximately the fifty yard line rose a half cross made of 2X4s. Where the cross ended, a post jutted up out of the ground.

It looked like a person was attached to the cross and post facing the stands.

He ran as hard as he’d ever run to the other side of the field and looked at the spectacle.

Nikki was naked. Her hands were nailed to the sides of the cross and her arms were roped to provide extra support.

Her head was tilted down in a lifeless grimace of anguish. Above her head was a sign that read "She thought she was Queen."

And she’d been impaled on the post cemented in the ground.

Darren turned around and threw up into the dirt.

Soon, the stadium would be filled with spectators to view the sight -- to see how horribly Nikki Price had died.

Darren looked at the body once again.

A crow flew down from the top of the press box and purched on her shoulder.

He screamed at it, but the crow began picking at the flesh of her arm. Darren fell to his knees and cried in terror and outrage.

(Please leave comments positive or negative. If you liked it, tell me what I did right. If you didn't like it, tell me what I need to work on. And let me know if you read all of it, or if a particular part of it lost you).