A Hacked-Up Holiday Massacre: Halloween Is Going to Be Jealous (25 page)

He thought about Kitten, about Bill, and Naomi, and Tara, all chained up in his apartment waiting for him to make up his mind. But he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. The question kept nagging at him.

What if I am wrong? What if this isn’t the true religion? What if by killing someone I am committing a sin and damning my soul to hell?

But then the opposite thought would immediately rise up to complicate things and send him spiraling into a near panic.

What if the Aztecs, the Druids, the Africans, the Greeks, the Polynesians, the Egyptians, and three quarters of the ancient world were right? What if by not killing I am damning myself?

Since he’d first been diagnosed HIV positive and then with full-blown AIDS Jamie had been struggling with this same dilemma. Ever since his death sentence, he’d decided that in order to ensure his soul would not perish or suffer eternal damnation he’d had better play it safe and worship every god known to man just in case one of them was the TRUE god. Better safe than sorry. The problem was that so many of the religions conflicted. What was canonized by one was condemned by another. Sinner and saint were one and the same depending on the religion or the times. In order to cover his ass, he’d have to worship every religion, but by worshipping them all he was sinning against many and condemning his soul anyway. And then there were the jealous Gods, the monotheistic religions that made it a sin to worship any other. They pissed Jamie off the most.

There has to be a solution,
Jamie thought.
There has to be a way to make it work.

Jamie unlocked his car and collapsed behind the wheel. He closed his eyes and bit down on his lower lip trying to control his frustration.

What do I do?
What if they are all wrong?

Jamie sighed in exasperation and looked at his face in the mirror. He looked like the Ghost of Christmas Past. He knew he’d be dead soon. If he couldn’t save his body then he had to at least save his soul. He drove to the hospital and followed the familiar path to the terminal ward. No one thought to question his presence there. With his emaciated body shivering from fever, the various rashes and tumors on his face and hands, Jamie looked like death. AIDS was kicking his ass. But he wasn’t technically terminal yet. The people housed here had only days or weeks to live. Jamie had another reason for visiting the terminal ward. Jamie was after virgins.

Finding virgins of any age was difficult. Even nuns were getting laid these days. Priests and altar-boys were having more sex than rock-stars if the rumors were true. The only place he could be relatively sure to find a pure unsullied virgin was among the diseased and dying. He considered it a safe assumption that the young adults, twenty-one and under, who’d spent much of their lives in and out of the hospital, probably hadn’t gotten laid much.

Jamie smiled at the night nurses as he passed their station. They smiled back with expressions of pity, disgust, or apathy. None of them questioned him. They had little doubt that he belonged. Jamie shuffled his way down to the farthest room and grabbed a wheelchair that sat unattended in the hallway. There was a boy inside the room exuding the all-too familiar smell of cancer. The smell was so overpowering that even without reading his chart Jamie knew the kid was terminal. No one survived with that much cancer.

The kid was tiny, his appetite long destroyed by chemotherapy along with his hair. Jamie looked down into the boy’s eyes as they fluttered open, his brilliant blue irises now wan and rheumy.

“Hi, kid. How was your Thanksgiving? Did they serve you turkey?”

The boy scowled and turned up his nose.

“Yeah, I don’t suppose turkey and gravy from the hospital cafeteria is much of a treat. Your parents sent me to get you out of here. Nobody should have to die in a place like this. We’re going outside beneath the stars. Would you like that?”

The boy nodded, too weak to speak. Jamie took a quick look at his medical chart to get his name and the name of his doctor should he need it. Then he slid the IV from the boy’s arm, disconnected his morphine drip, and removed his oxygen mask.

“You okay breathing without this thing?”

Again, the boy nodded.

Jamie threw back the kid’s covers and slid one arm under his legs and the other under his shoulder and lifted him from the bed. The boy’s head flopped backwards as if he had no spine and his head weighed a ton. Jamie eased him gently into the wheelchair.

“Do you have regular clothes?”

The kid nodded towards the closet across the room and Jamie walked over and withdrew a pair of shorts and a t-shirt. The kid must have been in the hospital since the summer. Jamie removed the boy’s hospital gown and slipped his t-shirt on over his head. Then he slid his shorts on.

“It’s kind of chilly out now. We’ll take this blanket with us to keep you warm.”

Jamie whipped the thin hospital blanket from the bed and wrapped it around the boy’s bare legs.

“There. That’s better. You ready to go?”

The boy smiled and Jamie wheeled him out of the room.

He wheeled the kid down the opposite hall, away from the nurse’s station, and into an elevator. Minutes later, Jamie strolled leisurely through the main lobby and out the front door without anyone once stopping to question why such a sick boy was being taken out into the cold.

Jamie wheeled the boy out to the parking lot and right up to his car. He slid the passenger seat back as far as it would go and lifted the boy into it. Then he hopped in on the opposite side and sped out of the parking lot leaving the wheelchair abandoned.

The boy was smiling as he looked out the window at all the passing cars. Jamie wondered how long it had been since he’d been outside. He decided to drive him around a little for one last tour of the city before taking him to the park and butchering him.

They cruised around Central Park, past Trump Tower and Rockefeller Center. Jamie watched as the boy craned his neck to see the top of the skyscrapers. He turned at Broadway and they cruised all the way down to Times Square. The boy smiled at the lights, and Jamie checked his watch. It would be dark soon.

Jamie turned the VW around and headed back toward the park. It was already emptying out. He decided to wait until the darkness was absolute. There were very few people willing to brave the park after dark even with all the progress Mayor Giuliani had made in the war on crime. They’d be alone soon.

They sat outside Tavern On The Green watching the carriage drivers change shifts as the sky grew darker. The park was alive with movement. Very little of it was human. Bizarre shapes gyrated and convulsed, thrashing about in the darkness. Here and there Jamie caught a hint of fangs or claws or flaming red eyes. He tried his best to hide his fear from the boy.

The hot dog and ice-cream vendors were streaming out of the park like cockroaches. Jamie jumped out of the car as one of them passed.

“Hey, my man, can I buy a fudgesicle from you? Two, please?”

“Uh-uh. I’m done for the night. I’ve got to get home to my family,” the guy said, his voice tinged with some faint Middle-Eastern accent that was nearly undetectable beneath the more pronounced Brooklyn one. The grizzled old ice-cream vendor pushed his cart right past Jamie without looking. He’d obviously had a bad day. Sales for ice-cream probably weren’t too good in November.

“C’mon, can’t you help me out? My kid is dying of cancer and I’m just trying to show him a good time on Thanksgiving before he has to go back to the hospital.”

“Thanksgiving is tomorrow. And I need to get home to my family tonight.”

“He might not be alive tomorrow.”

The ice-cream man knelt down and peered into the car. He saw the emaciated boy sitting in the front seat wrapped in a blanket, his mouth hanging open, struggling to breathe, his hair all but gone, and his eyes hollow pits sunk deep into his face. The boy’s eyes swam sluggishly towards the scruffy old ice-cream man as if even that took great effort. He smiled painfully, and the old man gasped and looked back at Jamie.

“Oh, Jesus. Is he gonna be okay?”

“No. No, he’s not.”

“I’m sorry, man. Here, just take the ice-cream. I already totaled my receipts for the day. It would be too much effort to make change for you anyway.”

“I appreciate it.”

Jamie took the ice-cream and hopped back into the car. The boy was too weak to hold the fudgesicle, so Jamie held it for him. He didn’t start eating his own ice-cream until the boy had finished all of his. When the boy was finished, Jamie wiped his chin with the blanket and unwrapped his own. They sat there quietly watching the curtain of night thicken as Jamie slurped on the melting fudgesicle. It was a good thing it was cold out or the ice-cream would have already melted.

“Thank you.”

It was a hoarse whisper barely audible above the sounds of traffic and the rustling of the trees. Jamie wasn’t certain he’d even heard it. He turned towards the boy. There were tears streaming from the kid’s eyes as he stared back at him.

“Don’t thank me.”

“My parents never come to visit anymore. They say it’s too painful for them to see me like this. I know they didn’t send you. They’ve forgotten about me. I don’t know why you’re doing this. But thank you.”

Jamie had to lean close to the boy’s lips to hear him. His voice was so weak, unable to get enough air into his lungs to project it. That close the smell of the cancer inside him was suffocating. Jamie smiled back at the boy and studied the kid’s face. It seemed impossibly cruel that someone so young was dying. Jamie wondered how long the kid had left. If he was in the terminal ward than it wasn’t long. They had only been gone for an hour but Jamie could already see the pain in the boy’s face as his morphine wore off and the agony of his disease slowly crept back upon him. His face twitched and spasmed as he struggled to maintain that appreciative smile despite his increasing discomfort. Soon the pain would be unbearable to him.

There’s no such thing as mercy killing,
Jamie thought.
Every death is an injustice.

Jamie cursed and started the engine. The wheelchair was still in the parking lot when they arrived back at the hospital. He wheeled the boy back through the lobby, up to his room, and then lifted him back into his bed.

“Thank you.” The boy wheezed again. Jamie turned quickly away. He walked off mumbling prayers in dialects that hadn’t been spoken on earth in two millenniums. His mind was in a tailspin as he drove home.

I can’t do it. I can’t fucking do it. I’m doomed. My soul is doomed. There has to be a way to satisfy them all without killing. There has to be a way!

The VW rocked and shook as shadows and dark apparitions hurled themselves against the vehicle, attacking it in a rage of disappointment. Jamie tried to keep his eyes on the road, looking straight ahead and not at the twisted creatures slithering across his windshield trying to pry their way in to pluck him from the vehicle and tear him apart, to punish him for failing them yet again.

“Give us our sacrifice! You owe us! Kill for us! Give us our sacrifice.”

“Who are you? What the fuck are you? Are you a God? A devil? What?”

“
We
are God. Kill for
us!
Kill for
us!
”

Jamie parked his VW back in its usual spot and headed straight for his apartment, shrugging off the spectral fingers clawing at him, threatening to make a sacrifice of him. He could feel the weight of their bodies as they grabbed hold of him as if they wanted to make it clear to him that they were not hallucinations. They wanted him to feel their strength and power. Jamie felt hands around his throat, choking him. He felt something jump on his back and drag him down. He was still being strangled as kicks and punches began raining down upon him. Jamie felt his ribs crack as something kicked him in his side. What little air remained in his lungs came exploding out as something punched up into his abdomen. He almost passed out when the presence seated on top of him suddenly disappeared and the pressure around his throat abated. He was left alone on the sidewalk bleeding and panting after being mugged by things he could not see. Jamie staggered home, trying to figure out what to do. This was no longer a matter of curing a disease. It was about saving his immortal soul.

He unlocked his front door and then the door to the spare bedroom where Tara, Naomi, Billy, and Kitten were still held captive.

“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. The spirits are demanding a symbol of my gratitude, a tribute, a sacrifice. But first, we’re going to have a last meal, a Thanksgiving feast.”

His captives wept and trembled as he spoke. Jamie dropped his head then slowly turned and walked out the door, back to his room.

Jamie’s dreams were dark and violent. Demons and spirits, angry demigods and angels, worried at him as he slept. He dreamt about murdering Kitten, the prostitutes, and the young boy, ripping their hearts out to sacrifice to the gods. He dreamt of what would befall him if he didn’t. He imagined himself covered in blood, sawing a torso, that appeared to be the streetwalker named Naomi, in two. In his dream, he had an erection. He woke up with a scream and was appalled to discover that he had orgasmed. His underwear were soaked with sweat and semen. He had cum while dreaming about mutilating one of the women he had locked up in the next room.

What the hell is wrong with me?

He stripped out of his soiled briefs and dashed into the shower. As he scrubbed his drying seed from his pubic hair, he steeled his nerves for what he had to do. The sun was at its full height when he stepped from the shower. It was Thanksgiving Day. Time to show his gratitude to the gods with a blood sacrifice.

Today, Jamie forsook his normal rituals. Instead, he took the last three chickens from the cage and slit their throats. He offered their blood and entrails to the various deities who were satisfied by such pedestrian offerings. The rest of them went into a large pan then into his oven. He sautéed some potatoes and green beans as well. It was all he had in his cupboard. He wished there was time to make a pie. It just wasn’t Thanksgiving without pumpkin pie, but cold shivers wracked his body and the thought of venturing out into the cold to go grocery shopping made the chills worsen. It would not be much of a last meal.