Ch. 11 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Bob had had trouble finding a new victim.

A few hundred squatters and vagrants had created a sub-civilization in Squatter City, but killing the homeless felt pathetic to Bob after everything else he’d done. Every serial killer he’d heard about had either started out or ended up murdering the marginalized and unprotected, sex workers and indigents, picking off prey already cast aside by the herd, acting out the desperate animal impulse of every dumb carnivore in history. But not him, he told himself. He was different. He killed judges and wealthy suburbanites and armed police officers. He wasn’t a dumb carnivore starving for meat, he was a force of nature.

But he’d abandoned his phone and his car and had lost connection to the swirling data vortex of the internet.

Using a library card he’d found among the detritus of his newfound shelter, Bob managed to enter the Oceanrest Metro Area Public Library in Baldwin, cloaked in stolen clothes that gave him an odorous aura. Stained hood up and pulled down to his brow, he bent over the library computers and searched social media for possible victims. He found a few candidates but never dug deeper on any of them. 

That Friday morning, he’d seen a police car in the library’s parking lot and had turned around immediately. Buzzing cold adrenaline had shivered through him, turning his back on the squad car, but nothing had happened. He’d returned to his squat unharassed.

But now what?

Eating a lunch of canned tuna, canned corn, and canned beans bowled and stirred together, Bob listened to a local news channel on a battery-powered radio. Two days had passed since anyone had mentioned him or the Mask. Everyone had gone on talking about the banal, mundane violence of the everyday, the chewing maw of brutal monsters allowed to run systemically amok. Swallowing lukewarm mash, all bland flavors and textures blended together, Bob scowled. His face knit in an inaudible snarl.

He needed to cut through the static.

He had a vague sense, a gut feeling, a hunch, that if he picked the Mask up out of his lap (and when had he started capitalizing it like that in his mind?), if he pulled the Mask on again, somehow it would help lead him to his next kill. And while part of him believed this notion insane, a deeper, more profound part knew it true. 

But did he want that?

Didn’t he want to pick someone, to learn them? Didn’t he want to do it?

The radio crackled, yanking his attention.

“…police believe the victim gained control of the vehicle after the initial struggle, crashing it. She fled the crash on foot, but suspect Timothy Laclerc caught up to her in Oceanrest’s Numbered District. Clearing up earlier confusion, Chief Virgil LeDuff recently released an announcement regarding the reported similarities to the Robert Robertson, Jr. case.”

A different voice cut in through the airwaves. “We have CCTV footage of Mr. Laclerc leaving the scene, along with corroborating witness testimony. Laclerc used a similar weapon to wanted fugitive Robert Robertson, Jr., but the crimes have nothing else in common.”

A writhe of muscle crawled beneath Bob’s visage.

Someone had tried to pass of their work as his?

Bob’s knuckles flared white. He grit his teeth, crushing mashed beans and tuna into the crevices of his molars. Glaring at the radio, he felt his body tighten. His pulse rose from his chest and into his head.

we can find him.

He shoveled the last of his mashed meal down his gullet and stood, clutching the Mask in his hands. He kicked the bowl aside and turned off the radio. He and the Mask had an art. They had a process, a message. A ritual. And the notion that some angry college kid had co-opted it as a vessel for his horny-dumb rage made Bob’s musculature roll and shudder under his skin. It made his jaw tighten.

Did the Mask grin?

Bob couldn’t tell; he’d already put it on.

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