Ch. 9 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Bob had misinterpreted things. He had to admit that, at least.

The thought had first crossed his mind as he’d grabbed the first cop’s arm and hauled him bodily into the foyer. The blade met the man’s throat somewhere in between the two points, jamming all the way in until the edge of the blade caught on bony vertebrae and jerked out of Bob’s control. Bob had let the other man stumble balance-less through the foyer and into the kitchen, one hand flapping dumbly at his neck.

He’d jammed a steak knife into the second cop’s back. Even with his strength, the tip of the weapon barely pierced the knife resistant vest. The cop had jumped, jabbed, and had spun toward Bob. Bob had grabbed the cop’s arm, had flung him through the open condo door. The second guy tripped on the first guy’s blood. 

Bob’s memory fragmented around that point. He remembered two gunshots, the second cop having unholstered his weapon, and he remembered, having lost the steak knife at some point, grasping the man’s head in both hands and slamming it into the edge of his kitchen counter. After that…

Something about an app?

He’d fled the condo immediately. He’d thrown some spare clothes into an old gym bag, along with a spare pair of boots, a pair of sneakers, his freshly-cleaned knife, and a second, smaller knife just-in-case. He’d remembered to take off the Mask only after he’d driven all the way into Deer’s Head.

After ditching his car on the border of Deer’s Head and Denton, hoofing it north through a coastal park shared between the two suburbs, it occurred to him again that he’d perhaps misinterpreted things. If the cops had really believed they’d shown up to knock on the door of a serial killer, he wouldn’t have caught them so unprepared. So they’d shown up for some other reason and he’d preemptively killed them. Which effectively destroyed his anonymity.

“Fuck,” he scolded himself, leaving his blood-soaked rags in a copse of trees overlooking stony beach. “Fuck,” he repeated, bathing in the spray of the Atlantic, scrubbing himself with leaves snatched off of tree limbs. “Fuck,” he said again, changing into the first of the two changes of clothes he’d packed, and the only pair of sneakers.

He exited the park in southwest Denton and, wearing his gym bag like a backpack, jogged north through the suburban streets.

When had it gotten so late?

He kept a strong pace, winding northeast. Late afternoon tinged with sunset. When had he woken up? He waved at a young couple pushing a stroller down the sidewalk across the street. What had taken so long? How many minutes had it taken him to kill his quarry? It had felt so short…

The knife and Mask, secure in their own pocket, never shifted in his bag. The spare boots and extra clothes did, annoying him with every few strides.

As sunset reached its warm watercolors across the sky, Bob jogged through the forest north of Denton. He made his way due east even after the hiking trails stopped moving that way, even after he had to crash through shin-high foliage to keep running. Somehow, middle-aged and having not exercised in over a year, Bob never lost his breath.

The forest thinned. Bob crossed a half-mile of over-built roadway dividing the rest of the Oceanrest area from the collection of rotten, withered neighborhoods called Squatter City. Blue-purple twilight painted the sky, by then.

Oceanrest’s economic decline had started in the early eighties—some argued the late seventies—and dove, dove, dove until it cratered in 1999. It stayed bottomed-out until 2008, when the rest of the nation fell to meet it. In the decade since, Oceanrest’s slow-and-steady recovery had started to reinvigorate and refresh long-barnacled swaths of the peninsula. But it was too late to save Squatter City. The city and county had knocked down and condemned too many houses, and too many other houses had burned or collapsed in insurance scams, and too many other houses had burned or collapsed under the burden of their own disuse, and what few structures still remained served as shelters for squatters who had lived there long enough to establish rights.

And so Squatter City was, seemingly forever, Squatter City.

A couple street lamps still buzzed their halos down over Old Main and Lafayette, and Bob noticed five disheveled people chatting to each other on the steps of an old three-floor Victorian.

He turned sharply west. The farther a person traveled from Old Main and Lafayette, the fewer street lights buzzed and flickered through Squatter City’s darkness; and fewer witnesses gathered in such ominous shadows.

Bob walked along asphalt so long unmaintained the potholes and cracks had torn it apart. He passed empty lots and multi-floor wrecks. A couple blocks north of Lafayette, Bob stopped and knelt. As purple twilight peeled away to black night, he changed clothes again, wearing the boots this time, and pulled the Mask on over his head. When he stood, he felt different. They felt different. 

His lungs filled, inexhaustible, somehow larger than before.

To the east and northeast, the last houses still standing in the long-ago suburbs waited, slouched and ramshackled, wounded and curled. To the northwest, Bob had heard about a tent city that had formed.

Bob and the Mask headed east.

They drifted through overgrown brush and foliage, through knee-high weeds and grass. Even as night slicked ink across the sky, Bob still saw the world as if frozen in eternal mid-evening. Along with the Mask, he scanned his surroundings for an opportunity.

They stopped.

Directly north, they saw a cul-de-sac’d trio of abandoned houses. Two had collapsed into inaccessibility, entire floors sagged and rubbled, but the third stood sturdy. It wore scabs of plywood and two-by-fours over numerous wounds and scars. Someone had claimed and maintained it. On the fringes of the sub-civilization fringing civilization, someone had dug in, isolated, alone.

Did the Mask smile, or did Bob?

Why not both?

They approached. Circling the house, they searched for an easy opening. Boards blockaded the front and back doors. Bay windows, the same. But whoever nailed everything up had to enter and exit without un-nailing things, so somewhere an uninhibited ingress existed. They took their time. Whoever had claimed the place had covered up the windows, after all. Who would see them?

there

Bob noticed it, too. A glassless frame falling into a dark basement, their entryway waited behind a half-crushed shield of weeds. They walked up to it and got down on their stomach to peer inside. Even with his somehow-enhanced vision, Bob had to squint to make anything out.

Opposite the narrow, broken-window entrance, a shoddy staircase led to the first floor. Between the ingress and egress, however, lurked five bear traps, rusted, barely distinguishable from the dim, and eager to snap. The squatters had installed a secondary security measure, as well: second-hand Christmas ornaments hung from a dozen clotheslines criss-crossing the cellar.

Bob and the Mask studied the obstacle course for several minutes before proceeding.

They slid through the frame and landed on the unfinished floor. Mold crawled the walls. Dankness soured the air. Slowly, they maneuvered the trapped room. As fit as he’d become, Bob felt sweat beading up from his scalp. His breath steamed him as he bent, bowed, twisted, stepped, crouched, stretched…

They put a heavy foot on the basement landing. Grinning, they began their ascent.

(every ascent is also—)

As they reached for the door topping the steps, something jangled around their ankles.

Bodies shuffled above.

“Who’s there!?” a man shouted.

“Who the fuck is there!?” a woman shouted.

They stepped over the tripped clothesline and stood in front of the door.

The couple shuffled around overhead. They picked up tools, probably weapons, and rumbled the floorboards toward the basement. The Mask and Bob waited, knife ready. Beyond the closed door, the couple whispered and hissed at each other. The hammer of a firearm cocked. The two people fidgeted, shifting weight, moving a couple feet away from and toward each other. The Mask and Bob waited, knife ready.

Two minutes passed. Five minutes. Eight.

“Check it,” the woman said.

“You check it.”

“You’ve got a fucking shotgun jackass.”

“Maybe it was nothing,” the man suggested. “I mean, it’s been like half an hour.”

Ten minutes had passed.

The Mask and Bob stood, ready. Waiting.

After a long silence, the woman said, “Maybe it was just an animal.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Shit. This shit’s making us fucking paranoid.”

The Mask and Bob shifted their weight on the step. It creaked.

“What was that?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll check. It’s probably just a rat or something. Get me the flashlight.”

More shuffling crossed the floorboards. Ten minutes became twelve. Another whispered conversation happened that neither Bob nor the Mask could make out. Footsteps approached the closed door, one set leading and the other trailing behind. The Mask and Bob took deep, steady breaths. They held the knife ready.

The man opened the door with the flashlight in one hand and the shotgun slung over the other elbow.

Behind him, the woman screamed, lifting the barrel of her semi-automatic.

The Mask and Bob plunged the blade into the man’s chest. It cracked through ribs and pierced his lung. Left-handed, they reached out and grabbed his shotgun. With a jerk they tossed it down the basement steps. The man hit them in the side of the head with his flashlight but they barely felt it. They ripped the knife free of the man’s lung and plunged it into the softmeats of his guts instead. With their left hand around his waist, knife so deep inside of him that they could feel his warmth up to their right wrist, they stalked toward the woman.

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