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23

By. J Campbell

By Joshua CampbellPublished 2 years ago 10 min read
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His stool looked more like a throne the way he sat it, and he kept throwing them back to the general rapture of the onlookers.

He was middle-aged, late forties by his look, and his body was beginning to run into the zone of comfortable fat that seems the providence of men on the cusp of old age. He'd come here every night for the last week and for the last week I'd come here too so I could observe him. I knew his name, which was a rarity, but most were just a part of the faceless masses. Some of them would remain nameless forever, but all of them were known to me before the end.

I was their shadow, the one who knew their secrets, and the one who ushered them from life to death.

At that moment, I remember my first.

They say you never forget your first, and I can assure you that it's true in this case. How could I forget her? She ushered me into the world of the living, so it was only fair that I ushered her into the world of the dead. My mother was not what you would call a "loving woman." My father left shortly after my birth, and my mother became a hateful, gin-soaked creature who lived to work, drink and remind me how worthless I was. I must thank her one day. She made me into the man I am today. All those years of being told how I was garbage, a waste of space, and how I'd never amount to anything crafted me into a humble target for her to hurl her rage at.

Then, one night, I had enough.

She was dying. It was plain for everyone to see. It was a close race between the booze and the smokes to see who would come out on top. The arthritis was making a nuisance of itself as usual, and as I cut her meat, she continued to pick at my subconscious like a junkie picking at scabs. The meat wasn't cut small enough. Now it was cut too small. It was a funny shape. And what could she expect from a worthless pile like me after all? She was ashamed of her weak, servile son and if there was any justice in this world...but I never found out what would happen if there was any justice in this world. At that moment, I had suffered all I meant to. I yelled for her to shut up as I stuck the knife I'd been using into her chest. She looked up at me, and her eyes were so full of terror and wonder that I put the knife back in again. I'd stabbed her five times before she made a sound, and even that was unintelligible. A gurgling, incoherent sound that befits a formless hag-like my mother hand in glove. I moved her body and told the police that she had come home drunk and attacked me, and they let me collect her estate, such as it was, and I moved on.

The only thing worthwhile that I ever had from her, after all, was the knowledge that I was good at at least one thing.

He got up from the stool, and I tense as I come out of my memories. He took a step for the door but then changes his mind and walked to the bathroom instead. I settled myself and waved a waitress away when she starts to check on me. This was not the dying place I have planned for him, but I could feel his time getting closer.

I used the money I'd gotten from my mother's estate to travel. When I say travel, you probably think of planes or buses, but my mother's estate had mostly come with unpaid bills. Fifty in a savings account, another five hundred she'd hidden in the bookcase and forgotten about, and fifteen hundred in a life insurance policy I'd never known existed. I sold off what possessions she had, left her debts unsettled, and melted into the exciting world of public vagrancy. I rode the rails, slept under bridges, and all the time, I kept honing my craft. I killed a bum in New York that was found in the river, his pockets holding five dollars and a dirty picture of a woman. Then I found a junky in Jersey whom I later found out, had a wife and kids he'd been hiding his drug problem from. Then two prostitutes in Queens who had been sharing the same man without knowing it, and all the while Me staying one step ahead of the authorities. The investigations weren't lengthy, these were street people or people up to no good, and their investigations were forgettable.

The first one to matter since my mother was number 5.

Number five, we'll call him James, was a New York businessman with a darker secret than the money he was laundering for the mob. I was back home for the first time in a year when I bumped into James purely by mistake. Coming out of a bus station, he plowed into me on the sidewalk and barked at me to "Look where I was going." Some would have killed him then and there, but that was never my way. The stalk was the biggest thrill for me. Soon I discovered that James had a little secret of his own. He liked to pick up whores late at night in his fancy red sports car. He liked to take them to the docks, and after a little backseat back and forth, he would drug them and sell them to people he knew who would pay top dollar for good stock. These weren't mobsters either; these were men who could afford to make sure these women disappear. Afterward, he'd get high in his car and zone out as he thought his bleak thought and mellowed. He came back to reality pretty quickly when I slid the knife across his throat. His eyes rolled as I told him how bad he'd been as his life dribbled out. The police found enough evidence in his briefcase to follow the paper trail, but I was long gone by then.

He returned from the bathroom and staggered towards the door again. After bumping into a few tables and accepting the scornful shouts and hard shoves from the patrons, he found the door and wrapped his hands around the handle. I started to rise, but then his "friends" called to him from the bar, offering "Just one more for the road."

"Well, how can I say no to such a generous offer?" he asked and wandered back to the bar for more poison.

Killing this one would be doing him a favor.

Just like number 18.

Anna had been sweet, sweet enough to make me think about giving it all up and living a normal life. Too bad life is rarely that easy. During my travels, I caught pneumonia and was hospitalized for nearly a week. Anna was my nurse. She was the sweetest person I had ever met, and after bringing me back from the brink of death, she found out I was homeless and wandering and invited me to stay with her until I could get back on my feet. I stayed with her for nearly a year, the two of us becoming closer than we'd expected. In that year, I never once felt the urge to kill. We had been planning our wedding when they diagnosed her with cancer. As she underwent chemotherapy, tried new diet, after miracle cure, after experimental treatment, I went back to the only respite I had ever known. That year Chicago was hit by a serial killer, nine victims in six months, but my tenth victim was the only one that mattered.

On her deathbed, she told me that she knew I was the killer. She'd followed me one night, putting her own health at risk. She said she had to be certain I wasn't cheating on her. She saw me stab a man and push him into the canal. She was tired of living, tired of the pain, and she begged me to end it. "Be my mercy angel," she begged me, and I gave her what she wanted. By the time the air bubble in her IV killed her, I was already gone.

"One for the road" turned into four or five more. When he finally shuffled towards the door, I was there to hold it for him. He thanked me in a slurred voice and shambled out into the night, the king of inebriation. I followed after him like a hungry wraith, and when he turned down an alley, I knew the time was then. I tucked my knife up into the sleeve of my coat and began to creep up behind him as he moved to the end of the alley. I heard his zipper go down, and as he sent a stream of piss arcing into the bricks, I stalked up quietly behind him.

North Carolina had not been my desired destination, but I'd enjoyed the three years I'd been here. After Anna, I was drunk more than I was sober. Beer when I had money, hobo brew when I didn't, and always I rode the rails from one place to another. I picked up work in Maine and drank my way to Philadelphia. I sloshed my way back to Chicago, where I somehow drank my way into a drunk tank in Warren, North Carolina. After my release, I worked odd jobs for odd folks. I landed a steady gig as a day cook in a little greasy spoon diner, and only felt the urge to kill a few times. The people in Warren are good people, and the people I killed here were people who tainted that image. A rapist I knew from my days on the rails who blew into town and started doing his own stalking. A foul-mouthed drunk who kept driving after they took his license. A woman with a taste for married men. And finally Mr. Hamm; number 23.

Hamm was the worst of the bunch. He hated the homeless with a passion, and I suspected that he'd killed some of my fellow rail riders for imagined crimes. I had watched him for a week, marked his movements carefully, and now it was time to see him put away. I raised the knife as I came up behind him and prepared for the stroke that would take him while he urinated.

Then turned, and his arc of urine hit me full in the face.

I stumbled backward, momentarily blinded, and a solid blow took me in the knee. I toppled, leg hurting, and a heavy right stuck me in the chest as I flailed to get back up. I wiped at my eyes, and there was Hamm, towering over me. He was no longer looking quite so drunk, perched on my chest like the world's ugliest gargoyle. He smiled down at me, looking like the cat that's finally got the cream.

"I knew you were watching me all this time, so I thought I'd see what your intentions were. I suspected you were trying to kill me, kind calls to kind after all, but I do have one question before I kill you." The tip of my own knife pressing against my throat, "How many lives have you counted?"

I didn't have to ask what he meant, "You would have been twenty-three." I said evenly, and he smiled down at me as the cold point held me down.

He leaned in, wishing to impart a secret before the end and whispered, "You will be my forty-fourth."

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About the Creator

Joshua Campbell

Writer, reader, game crafter, screen writer, comedian, playwright, aging hipster, and writer of fine horror.

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YouTube-https://youtube.com/channel/UCN5qXJa0Vv4LSPECdyPftqQ

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