Badlands Trilogy (Book 3): Out of the Badlands Read online

  By thirteen, so many neighborhood dogs had gone missing that the local news showed up. To avoid detection, Lester resorted to capturing squirrels, muskrats and other vermin after that. When he was seventeen his father found the carcass of a fox Lester had trapped and tortured over three days. By the end it had looked like Jack the Ripper’s final victim, a stinking mess of blood and guts. Lester made up a bullshit story about trapping the thing for fur. His father only nodded, his face ghostly white.

  Things were never the same with his parents after that.

  They knew what Lester was and he really didn’t do much to hide it. They were afraid of him and he was just fine with that. He liked it, actually. Eventually they sent him off to college. No tears were shed and they never called. By the time he graduated he’d killed three people. By age thirty he’d taken the lives of fourteen people and gaslighted three patients to suicide. Vicarious murder was almost as much fun as the real thing. Almost.

  As much as he enjoyed the killing itself, he enjoyed the manipulation and the control equally. Like foreplay before sex with a beautiful woman, Lester would woo his victims into a state of trust. His extremely high intelligence and refined good looks made him instantly dateable. Add money into the mix and he became irresistible. With so many women looking for Mr. Right, they were practically falling over themselves to get to him.

  Women were stupid, so that also helped. So fickle and predictable. He’d talk them up at bars, at the grocery store, in waiting rooms. His training and intellect allowed him to see inside their tiny little minds and find all their buttons. Then he’d push them all, one by one, like a master pianist making beautiful music. He’d take them to dinner, feigning interest in their vapid babble while he took notes in his head of their favorite movies, their friends’ names, their favorite flavors of ice cream. The kinds of flowers they preferred. The kinds of character traits they searched for in a mate.

  Then he’d take them out for their favorite food and bring them yellow roses. He remembered birthdays and their mother’s middle name. He shed tears at their sappy movies, right on cue. After so many years spent psychoanalyzing people, he learned to wear their emotions like a mask, all the while allowing the anticipation to build, foreplay of his own making.

  But he was also careful. He never actually met their friends or family. He never used his real name. He rented an apartment that he fully furnished, used only to fuck these women, both physically and mentally. Like a lure on a fishing line, he enticed them, brought them in closer.

  Then he’d set the hook.

  Lester liked knives. They were personal, like extensions of his hands. Like surgical instruments. In medical school his professors always wondered why he didn’t become a surgeon. While Lester had enjoyed the cutting, he preferred the mind fucking even more, professionally at least.

  Besides, he had plenty of free time to practice with his knives.

  Lester particularly enjoyed the look in their eyes, once he’d hung them upside down from a sturdy hook mounted in the ceiling of his extra apartment. With his credentials and access, getting the drugs to put them under was easy. Once unconscious, he’d strip them naked and duct tape their mouth. Then he’d sit and watch them while they slept, cock hard and heart pounding. One hand on the tool between his legs, the other on his knife, his most favorite tool.

  He’d wait until their eyes fluttered and opened slowly. The look of confusion on their face was delicious. But he lived for that one moment more than any other: that look in their eyes when they realized they were going to die. Some cried. Some yelled, their shouts muffled by the tape. Some begged. All did it with their eyes. It was said the eyes were the windows to the soul and Lester wholeheartedly agreed.

  Once reality registered, once their eyes revealed acceptance of their fate and Lester’s total control over them, Lester got to work. A carefully placed slit would start the flow. Then he’d string them up, naked himself, and the blood really got to flowing. He’d pleasure himself, timing his climax just as the light went out in their eyes.

  Divine.

  That level of intimacy, something that could only be shared once between the same two people, needed to be complete and total. Once he’d taken a woman’s life, she belonged to him. It was then that Lester felt something akin to love. And he could never throw out something he loved like yesterday’s trash. He’d never consider dumping the body or burying it in the woods somewhere. No, an intimacy such as this required total dedication.

  With his climax complete and the bond cemented, Lester began lovingly carving flesh from bone.

  Once complete, it would take him six months to eat the meat. He enjoyed every delicious bite, reliving the murder in his mind as he chewed the delicate muscle.

  Lester had always been careful. He’d always been smart. No one ever suspected anything. Only once had he been compromised. An ex-boyfriend tracked him down, tipped off after Lester and the woman had been spotted at a bar together. Lester, the master manipulator, allayed the man’s fears and sent him in a completely different direction. He watched the man for three months, ensuring the pest didn’t get any closer than he already had. Loosening a natural gas line valve and swapping out dead batteries in the man’s carbon monoxide detector ensured that Lester’s loose ends had all been tied up. Collateral damage was sometimes unavoidable.

  He’d found over the years that one of the most effective hiding techniques was to never draw suspicion. The more others viewed him as unassuming, weak and harmless the more latitude they gave him to operate. Like being invisible. Lester played the part willingly enough; he never cared once what anyone actually thought of him or who he truly was. That he only revealed at the end, once they saw his knife and saw the look in his eye. By the time they realized they’d misjudged him it was too late.

  But now, at the end of civilization, Lester didn’t have to be careful anymore. There were no police, no nosey boyfriends, no ex-husbands, nobody asking any questions. No law, no order. No consequences.

  And Lester had himself a field day with the raw thrill of the kill.

  Now, years after the virus erased civilization from the planet, he’d killed eighty-seven people. And counting.

  Always counting.

  But eventually he began to miss the courtship, the calculated ruse that would ultimately disarm and incapacitate his victims. Like sex in a back alley, he had no foreplay now, only the killing. Nothing to stimulate the biggest sex organ in the entire body: the brain.

  He needed more.

  And when he saw the tall blonde girl walking along the highway beside a young man he knew his opportunity had arrived.

  Chapter Nine

  Two large flatbed trucks rumbled along a crumbling Interstate 70, the low drone of the tires cutting through the quiet afternoon like war planes soaring toward their target. With Kansas City three hours behind them, the convoy had chewed up a little more than sixty miles. Stalled vehicles littered the roadway, creating an undesired slalom course that sucked precious time and drank gasoline like water. Most times the trucks could push their way through the congestion or go around it. When going through or around failed, strong hands and winches were called out to move the obstruction.

  Ed sat in the second truck alongside Trish and his two sons, feeling every bump in the aging concrete like an electric shock arcing through his spine. Twelve people accompanied them in the bed of the truck after a handful of survivors opted out of the trip at the last minute. But even with the slight reduction in their numbers, Ed found himself sandwiched so tightly between the other passengers that it made little difference.

  With his back against the wall of the truck bed, he attempted to focus his attention somewhere other than the group of people sitting directly across from him. They were strangers to him, as were most of the people from the camp. Trish would argue that Ed needed to reach out more, to engage others, to become part of the group. In theory, Ed couldn’t argue with that logic, but he found time and again that he didn’t feel c
omfortable around others.

  Now he couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.

  From the moment Ed set out on the open road, he’d traveled only with his family. After the virus dismantled society, they sought refuge in a border town, an affectionate name for fenced-in refugee camps that sprang up along the coastal borders of the United States when the survivors ran out of precious land and couldn’t flee any further. Disease and famine forced Ed and his family to leave. At that time they were a foursome—Ed with his two sons, Zach and Jeremy—and his wife, Sarah. Beating the odds, the family eked out an existence in the wild, staying one step ahead of the infected carriers.

  Until the odds finally caught up to them and Sarah contracted the virus. All along, Ed had kept a special magazine in his front pocket, filled with four rounds. One for each of them. A final insurance policy. The virus had no cure, only release, so he used one of the rounds and released her.

  For almost two years, Ed and his sons walked from the east coast, toward the fabled Midwest city of St. Louis, Missouri. They avoided others and kept strict rituals that ultimately kept them alive. They relied only on each other completely and that proved enough.

  Now Ed found himself sitting in the back of a truck with a dozen people he barely knew while another person navigated their fortune from behind the wheel. No longer could he control the fate of his family. Crammed in with the others, the notion that he could avoid humanity altogether and exist in a vacuum disappeared. He didn’t much like it, but he could no longer deny the reality of their situation. He needed to get his family to a safe haven and he needed the people around him to do it.

  Movement caught his eye. Ed turned to find Jasper Carter crouch-walking toward him, taking care to avoid stepping on the others crowded together while struggling to maintain his balance in the moving truck.

  “You okay?” Jasper asked, grinning. Young and charismatic, Jasper seemed to get along with everyone. He’d saved Ed’s life not long ago and helped reunite him with Trish and his boys.

  “Just peachy,” Ed replied, raising his voice to be heard above the drone of the truck’s tires on the decaying concrete. “You?”

  “Right as rain, man. You excited?”

  “Maybe worried is a better word,” Ed said.

  Jasper chuckled. “You would say something like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “True to form, I suppose.”

  “At least you’re consistent.”

  “He’s ecstatic,” Trish said, joining in. “Can’t you tell by the look on his face?”

  “Clearly,” Jasper said.

  “How about cautiously optimistic?” Ed added.

  “I’ll allow it,” Jasper said. “It’s an entirely reasonable feeling.”

  “Now you’re just placating me,” Ed said. “You’re not really the cautious type, which is good I suppose, or else I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Nah,” Jasper said, shaking his head. “I’m careful enough. Besides, it’s a long trip. Lots of ground to cover. Anything could happen. We could use a healthy amount of caution.”

  “Weird hearing you say that,” Ed said.

  “I’ve mellowed in my old age, I suppose.”

  “I very much doubt that.”

  “They’re planning on stopping for bathroom breaks soon, I hear.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Terry.”

  “Who’s Terry?”

  “That guy over there,” Jasper replied, pointing. “The big guy with the red beard.”

  “I remember him from this morning,” Ed said.

  “He’s a cool dude.”

  “That so?”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “I don’t know him. I was asking.”

  “Oh, sure. Yeah, he seems okay. He knows John. Apparently they go way back.”

  “I suppose it’s good to know the guy in charge,” Trish said.

  “You’d think. Terry says John is a nice guy, but not really much of a leader. He says that if anybody’s in charge it’s Alice.”

  Ed remembered Alice’s “speech” from earlier that morning, mentally rolling his eyes. “Interesting.”

  “Something ain’t right with her,” Jasper said.

  “You’re not the first person I’ve heard that from.”

  Unexpectedly, the truck began to decelerate, the engine whining and bucking as the transmission reigned it in.

  “Guess that pitstop is now,” Ed said.

  “I really have to pee,” Zach added.

  Jasper stood. Balancing himself on the edge of the truck bed, he leaned out and peered around the cab. “This doesn’t look like a bathroom break.”

  Ed stood and took his own look ahead. Before them stood a line of nearly two dozen men standing shoulder to shoulder and blocking the road. A single jeep sat idle on the highway’s shoulder. A tall man dressed in long, flowing robes with a thick, black beard stood in the center of the group, waving a white flag attached to a length of PVC pipe. The trucks came to a groaning stop as the man in the middle approached.

  “What’s going on?” Trish asked. Ed gave up his spot so that she could see. “What do you think this is all about?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ed replied. “Be ready, guys,” he said to Zach and Jeremy.

  “Is everything okay?” Jeremy asked.

  “For now,” Ed said. “Just like always, be ready.”

  Both boys nodded in return.

  “Those guys look creepy,” Jasper said under his breath.

  “They’re waving a white flag,” Trish said, looking back at the others. “Maybe they’re friendly.”

  “Why are we stopping for them?” Ed said to no one in particular. “We should keep going.”

  Ed squeezed in behind Trish and took another look around the cab of the truck. The tall man with the black beard and flag approached Alice’s truck. Two men walked slowly behind him wearing garb similar to the others in the party, but to Ed it looked like they carried themselves more like bodyguards than followers.

  “I don’t like this,” Ed said. “Not at all.”

  “What do we do?” Jasper asked. “We’re stuck back here.”

  Ed didn’t have an answer. Instead he said nothing, watching as the odd men conversed with Alice in the lead truck, too far away to make out the conversation. Alarm bells rang in his head and he had to fight the desire to gather his family and run. They were bound now, bound to whatever decisions those in the trucks made for the group.

  He could only hope they were right.

  Chapter Ten

  Lester allowed the couple to pass before stepping out onto the road behind them. He spoke to them. “Hello there.”

  The two travelers turned quickly, or as quickly as the ridiculous sacks stretched across their shoulders would allow. The boy dropped his while he fumbled in his waistband for what Lester could only assume was a weapon, probably a knife or maybe a gun. The girl regarded him with a worried look on her face, but she didn’t attempt to retrieve any sort of weapon at all.

  Lester waited while the boy fished around in his pants, eventually retrieving a small hand gun. Lester supposed there was some chance that the kid would panic and shoot, but that was the chance one took. Instead of shooting, the kid pointed the pistol, hands as steady as an eighty year old grandmother with Parkinson’s.

  Kids. What fucking idiots they were. That said, the whole thing had been a fun little surprise. The look on their faces was priceless.

  “Whoa, partner. I’m not going to hurt you,” Lester said, holding his hands up in mock surrender.

  “Who the heck are you?” the kid said.

  Heck. How fucking droll. “Name’s Lester. And you are…?”

  The boy regarded him cautiously, obviously unsure of what to do next. He kept glancing over at the girl, who slowly lowered her own pack to the ground before placing her hand on a matching pistol of her own. Finally, she reacts. Clearly they hadn’t thought this far ahead.

  “Sam,” the kid
answered.

  “Good to meet you, Sam.” Lester turned to the girl. “And who might you be, miss?”

  Tall and good-looking, with a fresh face despite the treacheries of the world, the girl regarded him with well-placed suspicion. “Chloe,” she eventually said.

  Lester smiled. Smiling helped to put people at ease, so he did a lot of it in his line of work, at least during his work as a psychiatrist before the virus. “Good to meet you both. What brings you two out here on this lonely old road?”

  “What do you want?” Chloe said, taking a step back.

  “Look, I’m not going to try to hurt you,” Lester said. “I don’t want anything you have. It’s just been a long time since I’ve seen anybody. A person gets lonely talking to themselves all day.”

  The two didn’t look convinced, so he continued. Up next from the arsenal: the pity card.

  “I had two boys, around your age,” Lester said, pointing to Sam. “Well, they would’ve been if the virus hadn’t…” he trailed off, watching their faces. The boy’s stare started to soften, but the girl remained stoic. “My wife, she passed first. Very early on. I lost both boys shortly after.” Lester trailed off, his gaze becoming unfocused. That always worked to sell it. A few seconds later he snapped himself out of his feigned introspection. “How about you? Did either of you lose someone you loved?”

  Sam opened his mouth to reply, but Chloe cut him off. “We’ve all lost somebody,” she said, her tone curt and her glare harsh and bold.

  “Very true,” Lester replied. So the girl is in charge here. Interesting. “Where are you two from?”

  The pair paused again. Lester could almost see the wheels turning in their head. He loved this part, the part where they decided whether or not to trust him. It was like a dance, part of the courtship one might say.

  “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. It’s only conversation. I used to be a psychiatrist, so I’m used to talking to people.”