Kill For Satan Page 3

  He had a sick feeling he’d have to make an exception to that rule today. If he couldn’t talk Sindie out of embarking on a murder spree, the bright future of fame and fortune he believed was her destiny might never come to pass. You couldn’t just go out and brazenly kill a bunch of people without being caught and thrown in jail. Jail wasn’t even the worst possible outcome. They might get gunned down by the police. A would-be victim might kill them in an act of self-defense. There were so many ways it could all go horribly wrong. In fact, he couldn’t imagine any way this whole thing could end well.

  Micah flushed the toilet and got shakily to his feet. He went over to the wash basin and turned on the cold water tap. After splashing some water on his face, he plucked a hand towel from a hook on the wall, patted his skin dry, and went out to the living room feeling determined. He had to talk some sense into Sindie. He loved her and wanted that bright future for her more than anything, but an insidious brand of craziness was consuming her life and he was the only person with even a remote chance of turning her in a different direction.

  She was standing at the big window in the living room, staring intently at something down in the parking lot. She looked enthralled. Captivated. Bursting with barely contained energy. They lived on the third floor of building G in the Crestview apartment complex. The view out this window wasn’t a particularly exciting one. Mostly all you could see were other buildings in the sprawling complex, which was the largest of its kind in Littleburg. From this vantage point, it looked as if it stretched out into eternity. Micah couldn’t imagine what she was looking at that could be so fascinating.

  Her head snapped in his direction as she sensed his presence. “Get the fuck over here, Micah. You have to see this.”

  He sighed and went over to the window, his sense of trepidation growing with each step closer. “Look, Sindie, we’ve got to talk because—”

  She shushed him with an impatient wave of her hand, then emphatically tapped the window glass. “Look!”

  Micah stared at her a moment longer before taking a look out the window. The desire to somehow make her see reason was still strong inside him, but already he could feel his resolve starting to crumble. As usual, he was overwhelmed by the sheer force of her personality.

  He looked outside and saw two women standing on the sidewalk in front of the building. One was a woman named Tanya Connor. She was a moderately attractive blonde in her late twenties who lived in the bottom floor apartment facing the parking lot in building G. The other woman was one Micah was sure he’d never seen before, but he noted a bit of familial resemblance. He had a hunch she was Tanya’s slightly older sister.

  Sindie nudged him with an elbow. “Do you see that?”

  Micah felt another faint twinge of nausea as he reluctantly nodded. “Uh … yeah.”

  After talking a few moments longer, the women on the sidewalk embraced warmly, then the one Micah didn’t know got in a blue sedan parked at the curb and drove away. Tanya waved as she watched the woman who was probably her sister weave her way through the complex and finally disappear from sight.

  Then she went back into her apartment.

  Micah continued staring through the window even after he could no longer see the woman. He was barely aware of it when Sindie moved away from him and went into the kitchen. Tanya had looked the same as always except for one important detail—every visible inch of her skin was imbued with a sparkly shimmer of light.

  His mind again flashed back to the night before. Speaking through his vessel, the priestess, the thing that was apparently Satan himself told the congregation they would gain the ability to identify the virginal by sight after consuming the blood and flesh of that night’s sacrificial victim. This now appeared to have been the absolute truth. In light of what he knew and had experienced, there could be no other explanation for what he’d just seen. It hadn’t been some weird optical illusion or trick of the light. The shimmer had been absent from the bare parts of the other woman’s skin. The contrast when they’d embraced had been striking.

  The revelation that Tanya had lived a sex-free life well into adulthood wasn’t quite as shocking as that, but it did come as a bit of a surprise. She was decent-looking and had a nice body. He didn’t get any kind of weird or off-putting vibe from her. Her sexless life was almost certainly a conscious choice rather than a result of being undesirable. Perhaps she was asexual. That was another of those previously marginalized communities he’d been hearing a bit more about lately.

  The creak of a door opening finally diverted Micah’s attention from the empty sidewalk. He turned his head in time to see Sindie leaving their apartment with a big butcher knife clutched in her right hand.

  Oh, shit.

  Micah ran after her, leaving the door to their apartment wide open. Buildings G and H were connected by a breezeway. The bare skin of his torso prickled in the chilly fall air as his feet pounded the stairwell steps between the buildings. His heart hammered painfully hard in his chest as his fear of what was about to happen rapidly mounted.

  By the time he finally reached the first floor, the door to Tanya’s apartment was coming open. Sindie was standing in front of it with the knife held behind her back. She glanced his way with a smirk and a wink. Tanya appeared in the doorway with a confused look on her face. She’d exchanged the clothes she’d been wearing for a plush pink bathrobe. Micah guessed she’d been on the verge of taking a shower when she’d heard the knock on her door.

  “Sindie, don’t!”

  Tanya glanced briefly in his direction before focusing on Sindie. “Sindie? What’s up? Do you need something?”

  Sindie smiled. “As a matter of fact, I do, you virgin cunt. I need to kill you and take your pure fucking soul.”

  The look on Tanya’s face conveyed utter shock and confusion. She had always known Sindie as the quirky but friendly girl who lived upstairs, a good, respectable neighbor who never made too much noise or caused trouble. Now that same nice girl was threatening to kill her for no good or obvious reason. The shock of it was so extreme it rendered her temporarily incapable of reacting or defending herself.

  Sindie grabbed the woman by the throat and pushed her into the apartment. Micah hurried in after them, thinking he’d wrestle the knife away, but he was already too late.

  Tanya was flat on her back on the living room floor. Sindie pulled open the front of her bathrobe and plunged the big, heavy blade deep into the quivering flesh of her abdomen. As Micah stood there and watched helplessly, she took the blade out and slammed it down again, punching another big hole in her stomach, which was already smeared bright red with blood. In between sobbing and squealing pitifully in pain, Tanya begged for mercy.

  Sindie sneered. “Shut up, bitch. Satan is your master now.”

  She cut the woman’s throat open and leaned over to let the spurting blood from the severed carotid splash against her face. When the blood flow slowed, she put her mouth to Tanya’s throat and sucked more blood out through the big gash in her flesh.

  Micah felt paralyzed, incapable of any kind of action.

  Sindie made a slurping sound as she lifted her face from the dead woman’s throat and turned her head to look at him. “Close the fucking door, bitch!”

  Micah gaped at her in flabbergasted disbelief a moment longer. Then he swallowed hard and nodded. He went to the door and pushed it shut with trembling fingers. Successfully turning the lock required multiple attempts. When it was done, he put his back to the door and slid slowly to the floor, putting his face in his hands.

  FIVE

  Three years out of high school and Johnny Romero was still working at the goddamn Kwik Stop on the edge of town, out near the interstate junction. Most of the convenience store’s customers were either hicks from the trailer park down the road or strangers passing through on their way to somewhere else. The ones passing through would pull in from the interstate to gas up and take a quick bathroom break, maybe grab some snacks while they were at it. The dumb hicks
mostly came in to buy cheap beer and lottery tickets. Johnny had a little side business going with the younger trailer park denizens, selling them weak ragweed for about double what it was really worth, which wasn’t much.

  Once upon a time, he’d had bigger aspirations, imagining a future in which he would get out of this nowhere town and make something of himself in the big city. The riddle he was never quite able to solve was exactly how he would go about doing that. He was only middling smart and had just managed to squeak by in high school. College was never a real option. Even if his grades had been more up to par, his dirt-poor, no-good parents wouldn’t have been able to pay for a higher education for their only son. They didn’t give a shit about him anyway, saving all their love and attention for his younger sister. She graduated high school two years after he did and now she was living in the next county over and going to that fancy-ass community college there. He hated that bitch. She thought she was better than him. He’d show her someday. Somehow.

  The bell above the door chimed and a long-legged young woman in a yellow tube top and denim cutoffs came into the Kwik Stop. She was pretty, but her face had that hard-edged look to it that pegged her as one of the trailer park people. Or maybe not. After three years manning the counter here, he knew most of the local rednecks by sight, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen this gal before. You could find a trailer park just about anywhere you went in this part of the country. Hell, maybe anywhere in the country, for all he knew. He wasn’t exactly widely traveled. He’d never even left the state. So this gal was a redneck, but maybe she was a redneck from somewhere else.

  He didn’t know.

  What he did know was her ass looked amazing in those tight cutoffs. He licked his lips and watched the way her buttocks moved as she walked down the middle aisle toward the bathrooms in the back. When he saw her go into the women’s room and close the door, he stepped away from the counter and headed for the open door next to the cigarette racks behind the counter. Through this door was the cramped manager’s office. Inside the office was a dented old metal desk and a filing cabinet that didn’t see a lot of use in this digital age. The desk was pushed up against the wall in a corner of the room. On its surface was a laptop computer that dated from the latter stages of Bush 43’s administration. It ran slower than molasses. In part that was due to its age, but another factor was all the viruses on it from the avalanche of porn he’d downloaded to it over the years.

  Above the desk on a metal shelf bolted to the concrete wall was a row of color monitors. Using the keypad on the laptop, he was able to toggle through views from several angles inside and outside the store. In most ways, it was a pretty ordinary security setup. It did, however, feature one special extra bit of functionality that wasn’t strictly legal. He hit some keys and the view on the middle monitor switched from the beer coolers to a shot of the hot number that had just waltzed into the women’s bathroom.

  The bathrooms here were the one-person-at-a-time type. There were no stalls, which meant nothing to obstruct his view. A couple years back, Johnny used some of his own money to buy and install a micro camera in the ladies’ room. The camera had Bluetooth capability, which allowed him to patch it into the system here. Any time any reasonably good-looking chick came in to take a squirt or a shit while business was slow, he would slip into the office and check her out on the monitor, often getting a pretty good look at cooter or bare ass. Now and then, if the gal stayed in there long enough, he’d even get to rub one out. The monitor with a view of the parking lot allowed him to keep an eye out in case a customer showed up while he was beating off. He had all his bases covered.

  In no way did Johnny feel bad about any of this. Holy hell would be raised if what he was doing ever became public knowledge, but he was relatively certain that would never happen. The well-hidden micro camera wasn’t something anyone would ever notice. They’d have to actively be searching for it, which was unlikely. Besides all that, he believed he was owed a little something from the female of the species.

  For as long as he could remember, girls had treated him like some kind of pariah, giving him dirty looks if he came near them or even looked their way. God forbid he should dare to speak to them, even if it was to say something nice, like how pretty their hair looked or how much he liked the dress they were wearing. In high school, he’d taken his share of beatings from angry boyfriends over that kind of thing. The worst beating he ever took, though, came at the hands of a trio of pissed-off girls after they caught him peeking in at the girls’ locker room after gym class. They waited for him after school, forced him into a car with a stun device, and drove out to the middle of nowhere, where they dragged him out of the car and took turns punching and kicking the shit out of him until he couldn’t move. They drove away, leaving him a bloody mess on the side of the road.

  He’d held the incident against the so-called fairer sex ever since that day. His anger against women never came close to leading him down the path of becoming a serial killer. He knew some people saw him as a creep, but he wasn’t that kind of creep. Not a killer. He was just a misunderstood guy who’d never gotten any poon because chicks had been mean to him his whole life. Came a point where he realized no babe would ever willingly have sex with him, which meant he had to take whatever meager level of pleasure he could by the limited means available to him.

  The bitches owed him, dammit.

  A little harmless voyeurism never hurt anybody anyway. It was a goddamn victimless crime is what it was. Hell, it was hardly a crime at all. More like a … whatchacallit … a quirk.

  The leggy tube top gal spent some time fixing her lipstick at the sink, leaning over it and making kissy faces at the cracked and dirty mirror. Johnny hit a key and zoomed in for a closer look at her boobs. They were big ones and looked totally fucking awesome in that skintight top. When she was finished doing the lipstick thing, she stood up straight and looked at the mirror, tossing her hair and making the kissy face again. Then she grabbed her boobs and adjusted them in the top. Johnny groaned and squeezed his stiffening rod through his jeans. He zoomed back out when she went over to the toilet.

  He let out a breath and squeezed his crotch harder. “Okay, baby, time for the main event.”

  The gal tore off strips of toilet paper and used them to cover the seat. He’d seen a lot of them do that. It was hilarious to him how afraid of germs or cooties they were. Heck, he cleaned the damn thing once a week every week without fail. When the seat was thoroughly covered, she lowered the cutoffs and her panties and gingerly sat down.

  Johnny pulled at the tab of his zipper, sliding it down a few inches. He’d gotten a good, long look at this girl’s shaved cooter. A longer than usual look thanks to her prissy reluctance to sit on the seat. The stimulation was more than he could take. He glanced at the parking lot monitor. Just two cars in the lot, his rust-bucket AMC Gremlin and a red Corvette he assumed belonged to the tube top gal.

  Go for it.

  He finished opening his pants and took out his dick. Before he started beating his meat in earnest, he pulled the box of tissues on the desk closer. When he looked at the monitor again, his breath caught in his throat and a chill slithered down his spine.

  The gal was looking right at the spot in the corner of the bathroom where he’d installed the micro camera. On the other side of that wall was the room where they stored the extra beer. It was right behind the beer coolers. He’d stood on a ladder and drilled through the wall from there. It’d been easy. The sly, smirking look on her face suggested she knew the camera was there, but that wasn’t possible. He’d never told anyone about it and it was practically invisible. The only thing he could guess was someone had come into the store and peeked into the office at a time when he’d been especially distracted, catching him in the act of spanking it while watching whatever gal had been in the bathroom at the time. He had a hard time believing he’d ever let his guard down enough for that to happen, but what other explanation could there be? The other thing he
couldn’t understand was why, if such a thing had happened, it hadn’t been reported to the authorities.

  Before he could spend any additional time thinking about it, however, something else strange happened.

  The tube top gal leaned back, spread her legs, and reached between her legs. She tilted her head back and her mouth opened wide. He heard her moan softly and realized she was masturbating. He couldn’t believe it. Nothing quite like this had ever happened at the Kwik Stop. A couple times redneck couples had slipped into the bathroom for a quick fuck, all the while believing they were being so sneaky, never realizing he knew what they were up to the whole time. Could see every second of it in HD video, even. But this was different. This wasn’t some white trash piece of shit hooking up with some flabby redneck dude. This chick was quality. She had one of the sexiest bodies he’d ever seen. And more than that, she gave every indication of performing for him. She looked at the camera again and smiled, licking her lips.

  Holy shit, Johnny thought. She’s fucking into it!

  Johnny’s nostrils flared as he stared at the bathroom monitor and started stroking his cock harder and harder. He was on the verge of spraying jizz all over the desk when he heard the creak of the door opening wider behind him. Hurriedly tucking his junk away, he tapped a key to kill the bathroom feed. He then spun around on the swivel chair and saw that another hot chick had come into the Kwik Stop. This one was also a tall, leggy blonde, but her features were softer, less severe-looking, than those of the gal currently petting her cooter in the bathroom.

  There was also something subtly familiar about the smugly superior look on her face.

  Johnny frowned. “Do I know you?”