Chapter Four

 

Joshua

The first one to die was Remus. He drowned in an icy pond in the dead of winter, under a pale blue sky.

I think Remus was around six. My father made him strip down in the sub-zero weather.

My father stripped down too, dropping his clothing into a pile in the snow. I’d never seen him naked before. He had scars on his body.

I was only a few years old then, but I’d already learned a lot about survival. We all had.

Even before they entered the pond, Remus’s lips were blue and his skinny body was shaking, but he didn’t say a word or beg for mercy. He knew better. He followed our father and marched right into the frigid water. They swam across the pond, then turned around and headed back. Halfway across, Remus sank. He disappeared, the black waters swallowing him. My father glanced over at him and kept swimming. He didn’t miss a stroke.

We were all lined up on the shore, watching. My mother included. She stared straight ahead, her eyes on Remus the whole time, obeying orders.

I would never admit this to anyone, but I still felt fear back then. And I was sick with it. But I also felt anger, and contempt. Why was Remus so weak? Why hadn’t he saved himself?

When my father emerged from the lake, he didn’t shiver. The man wasn’t even human. I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and sandals—clothing my father had picked out for me on this snowy day—and I was shaking so hard my teeth rattled. Somehow, as he approached, I locked my muscles tight and managed to force myself to stop. My other brothers didn’t. My brother Romulus, Remus’s twin, shook the hardest of all, and even worse, he had tears in his eyes. My father slapped him so hard he fell to his knees. Romulus lost the hearing in his right ear for the rest of his short life.

My twin brother, Charlemagne, sneaking glances at me, managed to suppress the worst of his shivering. He was quick on the uptake, like me, figuring out the rules of survival early. In the end, it wasn’t enough to save him.

My mother stared straight ahead.

Fortunately for me, that day, most of my father’s wrath was trained on my mother.

“Weak,” my father sneered at her. “They’re all weak. Because of you. My genes are strong. Yours are poison. You’ve ruined my sons.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” she whispered, the way she’d been taught.

We headed back through the woods, and her head drooped in despair. He would punish her for Remus’s failure—after making her watch her son die.

Her screams that night twisted through the air. He made sure we heard them. Our rooms were in a row down the hall from theirs so that we’d hear everything he did to her. Their couplings were always agony for her. That was all we knew of sex. A man’s cruel laughter, the dull thud of blows, a woman’s wails of pain.

Sometimes she needed time to heal. She’d limp around the house, dragging her body around, whimpering in pain with each step as she cooked our meals and washed our clothes and scrubbed the floors.

When that happened, he’d bring another girl home for a while. Never women, just girls, middle-school age. He kept them in the basement downstairs, until my mother healed and could serve him again the way a wife should serve her husband. My mother had been one of those girls, once. I found that out from her when I was in my teens. She thought she’d been eleven when he took her, but she was no longer sure.

I am nothing like my father.

But I absorbed his hard lessons, learned many things from him. On the day Remus died, I learned not to cry, or shiver. I haven’t done either since.

I think about that as I look at the man standing in front of me. He’s shivering violently. Weak.

Tall, distinguished with dabs of gray at the temple, still wearing his suit, although it’s filthy and stained now, after a day spent in my little deep-woods bunker.

Baxter Warburton III. Such a good man. Married to the same woman for thirty years, father of five. Pillar of the community, chairman of a philanthropic board that dispenses money to shelters for homeless women and children. Oh, and in his spare time, he has a fun little hobby he thought nobody knew about. Rapist and murderer of young male prostitutes.

He likes to tie them face down, take them up the ass with a giant dildo until they bleed, then cut their throats. Apparently, he’s been impotent for some time now, and this makes him angry.

Years ago, I invented a piece of software that detects patterns of disappearances among those who usually aren’t missed—prostitutes, boy whores, runaways, society’s cast-offs. Find a cluster of victims, and you’ll find a killer. It’s one of the methods I use to track down the best prey of all—men who prey on others. Often, such men are worthy opponents.

Unfortunately, Baxter is as far from worthy as a crippled kitten. Apparently, he’s not so tough when he’s faced with a man rather than a boy. He’s weeping and dribbling snot, and he’s already wet himself. There’s a disgraceful wet spot spreading over his crotch.

Is that why I feel so empty?

I should be feeling fierce joy. This is the part where I toss him a knife and urge him to save himself from me. Where I let him feint and jab at me again and again until I finally disarm him. And then the chase through the woods. The inevitable capture. The slow, ritualistic carving. The screams caressing my ears, then fading to silence.

The feeling of release.

But I’m restless and can’t concentrate. Images of Tamara keep forcing themselves into my head.

Mental pictures of her naked. Submissive. Crouched at my feet, the word “Master” falling from her plump pink lips.

Her imagined cries echo in my ears. “Please…don’t hurt me… I’ll do anything you want…” And the thought of what that “anything” could be sends a rush of blood to my groin.

I’ve never done anything like this before. Never taken a woman. Frankly, I’ve never wanted to have to spend that much time with anyone. Prolonged contact with anyone makes my skin prickle and burn as if I’ve run through a swarm of bees.

But ever since I met Tamara, strange feelings have taken up residence inside me. I don’t know how to name those feelings. She woke something up in me, a different kind of appetite than any I’ve experienced.

The only emotions in my mental lexicon are the darker ones. Contempt. Cruelty. Lust. Greed. Either I was born without the ability to access the softer emotions, like love and tenderness, or they were beaten out of me as a child. Either way, I don’t know what they’d feel like.

I’ve read the dictionary definitions. I’ve read romance novels and watched romantic movies in an attempt to understand. All I learned is that I have as much in common with those people as I do with a granite outcropping or a supernova. It’s hard to believe we’re spun from the same basic materials.

I can mimic the appropriate emotions long enough to pass for normal in my day-to-day interactions, but I can’t feel them. I’m a computer that hasn’t been programmed the same way as everybody else.

When I first laid eyes on Tamara, I found her intriguing and disturbing in equal measure. I couldn’t decide what to do with her, so I pushed her away from me and observed her from a distance.

I considered seducing her and experimenting with a “relationship” for the first time ever, but as time went on, I decided against it. She had a weakening effect on me. She was Delilah to my Samson; she scrambled my thought processes, made me less efficient.

My impulsive decision to kill Jorge last night, and at my place of work? Perfect example. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I plan my hunts for months. I never select prey who can be traced back to me. I am always in control. And yet, after I checked the security video feed and saw the way he put his hands on Tamara, I was not in control, and I don’t understand why. I was consumed by the desire to open him up and empty him out, until I literally could not stop myself.

Even firing Tamara was a snap decision on my part. I don’t make snap decisions. But when she approached me, I felt a flare of unfamiliar emotion—I think it might have been “need” —and it rattled me, which is another thing that never used to happen to me, so I decided to cut off the source of the disturbance. Problem solved.

But it wasn’t. I spent the entire next day obsessing about it. I had my private investigator hack into her cell phone, and saw that she was searching for new places to work. That made me angry, even though I was the one who had fired her.

When Tamara stumbled in on me taking care of the Jorge problem, I had to two choices. Kill her or capture her.

I only hesitated briefly before fixing on the proper solution. If I had her under my control, I could study her up close and learn more about human emotions. She was so different from me, so full of sloppy human traits like “kindness” and “mercy”. If I observed her in action, I could learn to mimic those traits and use them when necessary.

And then, let’s be honest, there was my purely selfish craving to dominate her and fuck her again and again.

I’ve got to admit, I’m a little angry at her for having invaded my thoughts for so long. With her in my possession, I’ve snatched my power back, and I’ll punish her for what she’s done to my mind…and also, whenever I feel like it, I’ll punish her just for fun.

I’ve called in to my office to let them know I’ll be working mostly from home over the next few months. Perks of owning the company. And I can do everything I need from my home office. I’ve been working on acquiring a media company for some time now, and I’ve almost got it in the bag. I’ve scared off all the other possible buyers. Now it’s just a matter of getting Phillip Morton to accept the insultingly low price I’ve offered him. Another man’s life work destroyed, and an easy hundred million dollars poured into my greedy, bulging bank account.

Morton Media will be wrapped up in a few weeks. Over the next few months, I’ll have all the time in the world to play with my new toy. To learn from her. To figure out what strange hold she has on me, and how to break it.

“I said I can pay you!” Baxter Warburton III screams at me, and I realize I’ve drifted away into a reverie and I’ve let him back away from me, gaining about thirty feet of distance. We’re deep in the woods on my thousand-acre property, and he has no hope of escaping me, but that’s not the point. The point is my laser focus went dim for a minute. Tamara again. Fucking with my head. “Anything you want, I’ll give it to you!”

The lovely picture of Tamara crawling for me fades, and I look at him with annoyance.

I’ve got a specific sequence of events I follow after I’ve captured my prey. Usually my excitement spirals higher and higher until the glorious release I feel as I watch them die.

But today, I’m having the opposite reaction. I’m growing more irritable by the minute. I want to get back home and play with my new toy. If it weren’t for the fact that I had already captured the pathetic, mewling bastard and put him in one of my sound-proofed basement cells the day before Tamara handed herself over to me as a gift, I wouldn’t have bothered with him at all.

I planned the taking of him for months, as tension coiled tighter and tighter inside me. This should have been ecstasy. Now it’s just a distraction.

I move forward and raise the knife so I can end things quickly. Well, for him it won’t feel quick, but I normally make these deaths last hours, and today I’m only going to spare him a few minutes of my very valuable time.

After it’s done, after I carve up his body into parts too small to recognize, I hurry to my four-wheeler and climb on. My hunting zone is deeply wooded, and the entire perimeter of the property is ringed with sensors that ensure my privacy during these hunts.

As I’m motoring through the woods, my burner phone rings. It’s an unknown number. A whisper of warning prickles under my skin. Only my servant, Elizabeth, has this number. I pull over and stop to check the voicemail, but there’s no message.

It could be a wrong number, but I’m not taking any chances. I remove the battery immediately so it can’t be traced. When I get home, I’ll destroy the phone and use a new one.

I shrug off the faint warning bells ringing in my head. Nothing can harm me; I am Joshua Smith, survivor, destroyer, master of my world.

As I steer along the narrow wooded path, all concern fades away and a smile plays on my lips. I’ve just enjoyed the termination of Baxter Warburton III, an embarrassment to apex predators everywhere, and I have all kinds of fun planned for my new acquisition.

Life is good.