Pieces of Hate (24 page)

. . . it will do you no good . . .

. . . only hurting yourself . . .

. . . sealing your own doom . . .

. . . we are loved and for hurting us . . .

. . . you will be hated . . .

. . . despised . . .

. . . destroyed . . .

He growled through clenched teeth as he fired again and again and again, emptying the rifle.

The voices and thoughts and feelings that filled his mind like water filling a balloon prevented him from hearing all the activity that was going on outside his house.

The shouting . . . the car doors slamming . . . and more sirens.

The moment the rifle was emptied, he backed away and slammed the window shut. Once again, he returned to the living room, reloaded the rifle, and was on his way to the front door, planning to do the same again, when he heard something that made him freeze.

“. . . Clyde Trundle, who may or may not be holding hostages in his Sherman Oaks home,” a woman’s voice said. “However, he has been shooting from windows on all sides of his house, apparently with a number of different guns. And from what we’ve gathered, he has been shooting only at neighborhood cats. Police, who fear he may be very heavily armed, are now surrounding his house, although they are reportedly uncertain of the status of the situation. We will be keeping you up to date on the situation as details — ”

Clyde spun around and glared at the television to see his house on the screen. A number of police cars were parked in the street in front of it and, behind them, bystanders were standing around, watching with every bit as much suspense as if they were watching a thriller on television.

He slapped a hand to his forehead and breathed, “Holy God!” He spun around again and faced the front door.

They’re out there! he thought.

He stared at the front door for a long while, then went to the window and peered out cautiously.

The only cats left in the front yard were in pieces. Blood was spattered all over the grass. He spotted a cat’s head and a few severed legs. But the other cats were gone. They had spread out. He spotted them on the sidewalk licking themselves, across the street curled up as if they were napping, ambling along the side of the road.

And then there were the police. So many of them. All with rifles, very big rifles. And all of them glaring at his house.

“There is something terribly and unfortunately disturbed about a man who would hole up in his house and shoot only at cats, killing as many as this man has with the weapons he has in his possession,” a voice said from the television.

Clyde let go of the curtain and turned to face the screen. He saw a fat, balding man wearing a bad suit, and beneath him were the words: DR. MICHAEL KAMINSKY. Ph.D. Criminal Psychology.

“To take out aggression on other people is one thing. But to needlessly punish and kill — especially in this brutal way — helpless animals, is a sign of tremendous desperation and sickness,” the man went on. “Obviously, the law enforcement officers who are dealing with this man have their work cut out for them. And frankly — ” He laughed a little. “ — I don’t envy them.”

Is that what they think of me? Clyde wondered.

He stood in front of the television, staring at the screen, his eyes wide as he held the rifle tucked under his right arm.

. . . it’s over . . .

He blinked and shook his head. It felt so close.

. . . you are finished . . .

Clyde’s back stiffened and he looked around him. He saw nothing.

. . . the end has come . . .

There was movement in the corner of his eye and he spun around to the left, realizing suddenly, as if the thought had been pounded into his head with a hammer, that the window over the kitchen had no pane.

It was a black and grey striped cat, slinking into the living room. It sat on the floor and stared at him.

. . . finished, the end, no more threat . . .

Clyde made a small, whimpering sound in his throat as other cats filed in behind the first and faced him. They formed a half-circle around him.

He glanced over his shoulder. His only escape was the front door.

. . . we’re too close . . .

. . . to the good old days . . .

. . . the reverence . . .

. . . and the worshipping . . .

. . . won’t let you stop us . . .

. . . kill you first . . .

. . . rip you up . . .

. . . rip and rip and . . .

. . . tear and tear . . .

Clyde began to stagger backward.

“Oh, no, oh God please . . . please, please help me, I’m, I haven’t . . . I’m not guilty of anything, I just, I — ”

Suddenly, he spun around and threw himself at the front door, grabbing the knob. unlocking it, pulling it open

He threw himself out the door, the rifle still held under his arm, and screamed, “I’m sorry, I surrender, I sur — ”

The thunder began.

Clyde felt the bullets and they made him dance down the porch steps, arms splayed, the rifle flying away from him. He felt his blood spattering on his face as his legs waggled down the steps, until he finally fell to the concrete walkway.

The thunder stopped.

He could feel the blood leaving his body, could feel it spilling from the holes made by the bullets. But that was not what captured his attention. Instead, it was what was going through his mind during the last moments of life.

. . . gone, he’s gone . . .

. . . can go back to the plan . . .

. . . reviving the good old days . . .

. . . the gold statues . . .

. . . the reverences . . .

. . . the pharaohs . . .

. . . the queens . . .

. . . worshipping . . .

. . . revering . . .

. . . when we were gods . . .

. . . gods . . .

. . . and rule . . .

. . . ruling, yes, ruling . . .

. . . owning . . .

. . . owning their pets again . . .

. . . yes, owning and ruling the pets . . .

. . . the pets . . .

. . . again . . .

Clyde worked his mouth to tell them, warn them, let them know what was happening, what would happen . . . but all that came out was blood . . .

BAD BLOOD

For Pat Buchanan

The doctor’s waiting room was very quiet even though five other people besides Peter were waiting in their chairs. The only sounds were the slight crackle of the pages of old magazines as waiting patients turned them slowly, and the syrupy pop song playing very softly over the speaker in the ceiling.

Peter decided the singer — a male with one of those high voices — was probably just another faggot, just like all the others. The movie stars, the TV stars, the singers and the writers and the painters . . . all of them, nothing but a bunch of filthy, immoral faggots. The worst part of it was that they were slowly — ever so slowly but surely — spreading . . . imposing themselves on everyone else, on normal people, on children . . . spreading like a disease . . . just like the disease they had created.

Oh, well. It was very clean in here. Peter could smell the cleanness. And it was bright, with no shadows or dark corners. That was where they liked to hang out, the perverts and the faggots.

That was where Peter always found them.

But not here. He was clean and safe here. He leaned back in his chair and looked around slowly. He was the only one not reading a magazine. A tiny old lady looked up from her reading and smiled at him slightly. Peter smiled back and nodded. He hoped she didn’t say anything. He tried not to speak if he could avoid it because of his stutter.

Behind the receptionist’s window, the phone purred; she picked it up and spoke softly.

Yes, it was very nice here. Peter leaned his head back and looked up at the ceiling tiles. They had tiny holes in them and the holes were scattered over the tiles randomly, as if they’d been spilled there by accident.

As Peter stared up at them, he closed first his right eye, then opened it and closed his left . . . back and forth . . . left, right . . . left, right . . .

Yes, he could see patterns in those dots. Peter could see patterns in most things, patterns that other people could not see. Maybe he had a bad stutter, maybe he wasn’t as smart as most, maybe he’d had very little education and was just a lowly janitor who cleaned a couple restaurants for a living . . . but he could see the patterns.

And the pattern he saw above him there was a penis. A thick, erect penis that curved upward slightly. And the erect penis was sticking through something . . . a perfectly round circle.

A smile grew slowly on Peter’s face as he looked up at the pattern. He was smiling because he’d seen that very penis before.

And he’d taken care of it. Like any good janitor, he’d cleaned it up . . .

It had been the first of the dark places he’d ever gone to when he started, oh . . . how long ago had that been? He couldn’t remember. A long time. Yes, that was where he’d seen that particular erect penis sticking through the hole, throbbing and glistening. But the dark places — the faggot holes, he called them — were not the first places he’d gone to. First, there had been the clinics.

He’d started back when it became clear to him — when the patterns showed him — that the semen-slurping, butt-fucking, rectum-licking faggots were spreading their disease — and their diseased ways — over the country, over the world . . . a disease that was meant to punish them for their sick behavior, their disgusting “lifestyle,” as the cock-suckers liked to call it . . . a disease they had chosen to ignore in favor of going on with their foul acts in hidden places.

If the disease couldn’t stop them, then Peter decided he would do what he could. He was, after all, a janitor. It was his job to clean things up.

He himself had never had a sexual relationship. A normal one, of course, with a woman — he would never consider doing what those creatures did in their dark, smelly places. Peter had never really felt the need for such a relationship . . . and besides, he didn’t think women were to be trusted. He’d learned that from a very wicked, deceitful woman . . . his mother . . .

Once he’d made his decision, he made a few preparations. He bought a couple of razor-sharp skinner’s knives; they were all he’d really need, he figured. Then he went through the phonebook looking for AIDS clinics and other places that treated the faggots as if they were just normal sick people. New York City was filled with faggots, so it followed that it would be filled with those places. It was. He made a list of those places, visited them, then picked one.

He found a bench nearby and waited, pretending to read a paper, until he saw one of them come out. A tall, skinny, frail looking fellow — a classic faggot — and, with the knife hidden under his jacket, he followed that man to a ratty, dark little apartment building — dark, just the way the butt-fuckers liked it — and burst into the apartment behind him, before the queer could close and lock the door.

Peter was a small, wiry man and he moved very quickly. He’d done a lot of heavy lifting in his work and was in good shape. It was no trouble at all to open up the sperm-breathed pervert before he could make a sound. He quickly wiped the blood off himself, put the knife back in its hiding place and left as if nothing at all had happened.

As he walked down the stairs in that dingy apartment building, Peter had thought. One down . . . a lot to go. Peter liked to think. He never stuttered that way.

So, he had kept it up. Day after day, moving from one clinic to another. From one patient to another.

New York was a very big and busy city. The killings made the papers, but only in little articles. Peter was happy to see that the city was too big and too busy to concern itself with the deaths of a few unnatural, disease-spreading dick-lovers.

But then, quite by accident, Peter discovered something else that made his work much easier, made it move much faster: Times Square.

Oh, yes, they congregated there like churchgoers, all those sodomites and scrotum-lickers. It was their church, he found. As he walked through Times Square that first night, all the garish lights flashing in the darkness that they loved so much, knife concealed beneath his jacket, he saw them all around him, everywhere.

But there was something strange here in this busy, nocturnal carnival . . . something odd about the patterns.

Most of the signs showed pictures of women. They were naked, of course, which was sick and immoral . . . but at least it was normal. And yet, Peter spotted some of them going into these places, their long coats buttoned all the way up, their hands stuffed in the pockets. They looked more normal than many of the others — the swishy faggots with the wild hairstyles and the queer clothes, the earrings, the extravagant hand gestures and the facial makeup — but somehow, Peter knew that they were faggots. So . . . what would they want with naked women?