Fan Fiction ❯ Dead Fish ❯ Victim #2 ( Chapter 2 )

He was young, stupid, and unprepared: the perfect target. I wasn't very calm myself. This was going to be my first intentional kill.

After cutting off my breasts and bandaging the wounds with my hospital gown, Bones had given me a few clothes to "borrow". They were dirty and old, but I wasn't going to complain as long as I was out of that dreaded gown.

Bones had told me that I was safe from five to eight in the morning, excluding our people who were looking for young idiots to chew on. Apparently, this young boy had thought he was safe as well. From his appearance, his shaking fingers, his shifty eyes, and his crazed mumblings, I guessed he was unstable. Hopefully, this would prove to be good luck.

When I first walked out of Bones's apartment, I expected the terrain to be a bit like the city I had lived in before. Instead, I was greeted by sand and mountains off in the distance. The boulders lying about my new wretched home were helpful, especially while waiting for the boy to come close enough.

He had known I was close by the second I hid behind a rock. Possibly, he had been here longer than I had. I stopped and wondered how a boy like him could end up here . . . but like almost all of my thoughts, it went disregarded. He was a mess, unlike I, who wore clothes much too big with a sanguine stain on the chest portion of my shirt.

I was almost pleased with my cool collection. Jessica, my old best friend, would have been proud of me. "Now you deserve the nickname `La Femme Sarah'!" she would say, showing off the black mascara in her long eyelashes. "And here I thought you were just a pussycat . . ." Jessica always had expensive words. She always spoke as though she was somebody special. Nobody's special; not even my hard-working father who was once a hippie in the sixties.

The boy shifted from foot to foot. He whimpered, loudly enough that I knew this was going to be my victory. Still, I waited, glass shard in hand, for him to blindly run at me and attack. His breathing came faster; his grip on his small knife tightened. Once I was done with him, that knife would be mine.

He ran towards my rock, presumably hoping I was too stupid to hear him. Quickly, I snatched his hair before he could strike me with his weapon and threw his head against the rough sandy ground. He cried out, blood flying from his nostrils as I brought his head back up and sent it back down. This was the most fun I had ever had since my days in water polo.

I giggled for the first time since I had fallen unconscious. It was the same giggle that I used when Justin told me another one of his stupid blonde jokes, the same giggle that was uttered when I watched Jessica play with her rambunctious kitten. But this time, I was the one who was playing. His arm bent so easily behind his back; his tears flowed like waterfalls, a splendid sight for my dark, exhausted eyes.

"Please!" he screamed. "Please! I shot one man! Just one man! What did I do to deserve this?" He struggled against my hold, trying his best to survive. It was no use.

I placed my mouth against his ear, whispering, "You shot one man? You used a gun? Honey, I killed my man with a cleaver."

He stiffened in my arms, his quivering growing fierce. He looked so much like Justin now, only I was facing his back. He had the same shocked and fearful expression that had been on Justin's face when I threw him to the ground, butcher knife in hand.

Holding my glass shard carefully so it would not cut my palm, I turned him around, placing my knees on his chest. He appeared sickened, close to vomiting. I slid my shard across his cheek, watching the blood well at his new wound. He glanced once at my pristine nails, coated in scarlet nail polish, his eyes then widening until his eyebrows met the barcode imprinted on his forehead.

"You . . . you're a girl?"

"Not anymore." I grinned, wickedly, slashing his throat with my shard. He shook once or twice; I wasn't sure, I was too busy watching the blood flow silently. Eventually, he ceased to function and felt cold under my knees.

I pried the knife from his dead hand. I threw him over my shoulder. And then, I trekked back to Bones.

He was ecstatic upon seeing the fish I had caught today. I was able to skin the boy for him-it was just like peeling skin off of a fish, anyway. Bones built a fire and soon, we were roasting the body of a young man who had probably been as old as I.

"Where'd you get that knife?" he asked while we waited for dinner. I wasn't too happy to have human meat for dinner, but it was better than starving.

"It was on the boy. He didn't know how to use it, anyway. Damn idiot, so shaky . . . do they all shake like that?" Bones stared at me. He smirked and nodded slowly. "What?" I snarled.

"The boy must have gotten that knife from Zen", he answered.

"Zen?"

"I'll tell you later, when I'm not starving." I consented to his wish for now. That didn't mean that I wouldn't bother him later, though.

"So what are you doing down here, anyway? You seem like a perfectly normal child, aside from your recent hunting." I'm glad that Bones was the first one to break. I hated asking people questions about their life, even though I was the nosiest person on the planet. Often, I would follow them and hide, listening to their conversations and waiting for their life to come up as a topic.

"I killed my boyfriend. He was a perfectly normal kid . . . acing high school, best athlete at our school, friend to practically everyone . . . I guess I was an asshole for killing him . . . My friends remembered him for being such a cool person . . . they didn't know that he picked his nose when no one was looking or that he liked to kick cats. He was also rather afraid of handicapped kids. I thought he was perfect when I met him."

I smiled sweetly, eyeing the knife that I held close to my chest. "I didn't care that he wasn't perfect. But then he destroyed my fish and no one destroys my fish . . . so one night, when he wasn't suspecting me, I leaped on him. I leaped on him and I stabbed him ten . . . maybe twelve times . . . I never felt so alive in my life . . ."

I could sense Bones waiting for me to continue. I had to fill in the awkward silence with something. "I used to buy fish from the market. We lived by the beach, there were plenty of fish. At first, I went once a month but slowly, I began to come every week." Slowly, I became engrossed with my words. Finally, I didn't have to hide my secret! No one cared if I was a freak, not even Bones. "I would buy a fish and then I would cut off the skin and meat. I'd have to throw away the skin and bones where my mother couldn't find them. And then I would slowly put them back together until I had recreated the fish. It was my hobby for three years."

"That's not bad", he muttered, scratching his scalp. "I used to give customers the wrong prescription. It was this little thrill of mine. They seemed so happy to finally have a drug to solve their problems but they didn't know that it was the wrong one . . ." He chuckled until he began to cough.

Bones was kind enough to hand me some food. I was afraid of the meat at first, afraid to touch it. But, with my growling stomach in mind, I ate the meat and tried to pretend that it was that leg of lamb my father had tricked me into eating at a Greek restaurant. Once I was done with my food, I carefully picked off the left-over meat from the bones until I had them for myself. I spent the afternoon putting them back in place, hoping those physiology classes in high school would finally pay off.

Bones had promised that he would show me the ropes if I caught food for him. What he had really meant was he would show me how to live through the rest of the day. He told me that I wouldn't have to ask questions afterwards; he would try to be very thorough. But to this day, I still have questions. How did a C-average teenager wind up killing humans and eating their flesh to survive?