The Serial Commission

 

Emptiness… That’s what fills my head when I do my little hobby. I’m sure that people will wonder what kind of sick, twisted, thoughts I must have had while in the throes of murderous ecstasy. The truth is that there is nothing there. It all goes blank. I revert back to my most primitive senses. Everything about me becomes survival, kill or be killed – which is kind of funny considering that I am the hunter. This is a tale about how the hunter became the hunted. If you are reading this, chances are that I am incarcerated or dead, either by the state or the commission. What is the commission? We’ll get to that.

Last spring, I was still residing in a small shit stain on the California map called Tracy. Tracy California was a unique place for me to ply my trade because it hasn’t changed too much in the past fifty or so years. Sure, the town grew as all towns seem to do, but most of the historic stuff was still around, stuff that I used to my advantage. Say, for instance – the old train station, the train depot, and tons of fields and farmland. These are all places that allowed me to move unseen, get a little privacy, and provided lots of great places for disposal of annoying evidence. On one particular Saturday night in April, I found my mark and was waiting for her to get off work at a coffee-shop so that we could get acquainted.

Anyone in my line of work learns a lot of interesting things – how long the average person takes to lose consciousness after being deprived of air, for instance. I would have to say that the greatest lesson that we learned is patience. I say we, because I’m sure that the same is true for any person who gives in to their basic desires and begins to hunt the weak. There are loads of us out there to be sure.

It was a little after ten at night when she finally walked out of the coffee-shop alone, another reason that I love to work in small towns, and locked the door. I was parked across the street from the coffee-shop, about half a block away when I saw her. Excited, I threw my worn-out copy of The Long Walk, by Stephen King into the glove-box, started the white 1987 Dodge van that I’d been using for years, and drove a couple of blocks up the street before making a u-turn and heading back the other way.

When I first began my little hobby, I would creep up slowly behind my candidates, trying to be as stealthily as possible. About eighty percent of them picked up on my creepiness and took off running and screaming. I figured out over time that cool and normal was the effective way to approach them. I drove at normal speed past the woman, then hit the break and backed up to where she was walking along the sidewalk to her car. I rolled down the window and called out to her.

“Excuse me, Ma’am,” I said. They like it when you call them that. “Can you tell me how to get back to the freeway?” At first, it looked like she was going to continue along her way. I didn’t really blame her. She was toting a large, red purse that seemed large enough to fit her skinny, dead corpse into. “Ma’am,” I said again. “Can you please help me out? I’m a little lost here.”

Finally, she turned and looked at me and I knew that I had her. I’m not the ugliest person in town for sure and when they look at me, they seem to trust my face for some reason. She appeared to relax instantly when she saw my clean face and fake smile. She stopped walking and played with her dark, brown hair for a second before talking to me. I knew that she was attracted to me. They always play with their hair a little when they’re attracted to you. Try it out sometime.

“It’s on the other side of town,” she said, smiling. “How’d you get all the way over on this side?”

I pulled out the map that I always used on these occasions and acted like I was trying to figure something out.

“Damn GPS always gets me lost,” I said. “It said that there’s a quicker route to the interstate if I come through town. Thank God I keep this map handy. So, it’s kind of dark. What street am I on right now?”

She took a couple steps closer to the van as I pretended to be searching for my location on the map. Before long, she was at the passenger-side window. I laid the map down on the passenger seat and pointed my finger at a random road at the top.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“No, silly,” she said and let out a small giggle. “It’s more toward the center a bit; Central Street. See it?”

“Central Street?” I squinted at the map and moved my finger along the various, multicolored lines. “Shit, well I don’t see any Central Street.” The door was unlocked as it always was in these special occasions. She opened the passenger side door and leaned over the map until our heads were almost touching. She looked at the map for a few seconds and then poked her finger down on the paper.

“There,” she said, victorious. “You see? Central Street.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Thank you so much!” Then, I hit her with the taser. The prongs caught her on the side of the neck and, even though it didn’t knock her out, she did lose control of her body for a few seconds. Just long enough for me to pull her into the passenger side of the van and take off. The sudden jolt forward closed the van door for me. Practice makes perfect.

As always, I had already made arrangements regarding the kill location and the drop location. Prudency always dictated that one never leaves a body in the same place where it is killed. That’s just asking to get caught. Imagine all of the evidence that is readily available for the cops at the kill site. When you move the body, you make it harder for them to know what happened. I prefer to kill on a loose surface, such as gravel or small rocks. That way, when I’m finished, I can simply cover up the bloody areas. When the blood dries out, it turns a dark brownish color. Most people wouldn’t think twice if they see dark brown stuff in the rocks. They just wouldn’t. None of my kill sites have ever been processed. So, I figure that my procedure works, at least so far.

Anyway, so I get the girl out to the depot. It was late and there were no lights around the place, so was the safest bet for privacy. The ride there wasn’t too bad. She got a bit crazy at first, trying to jump out of the car once and then trying to scream her head off. When she saw my gun pointed at her, she stopped goofing around. So, we get out there and I yank her out of the van and pull her to the round building. The building kinda looked like a wheel of cheese in the daytime and still had a few old, rusty box cars poking out of some of the holes, but there were a few empty slots. I pushed her into one of the vacant slots, poking the barrel of the gun into her back. Somewhere around the center, I grabbed a big handful of her hair and threw her down on top of the bed of white rocks. My flashlight had a red lens piece in it. I would’ve preferred white light, but that could be seen from outside of the depot. With the red light, I saw enough to enjoy myself without adding to the overall risk of being captured. I pointed the red beam of the flashlight at her face and just sorta watched her cry and beg for a few minutes. I like to really get my time’s worth out of these occasions.

When I figured that she’s whined enough, I dug into my back pocket, pulled out my grandfather’s old buck-knife, and flipped the blade open. The sight of the blade made the girl scream, which was kinda the effect that I was going for. So, when I figured that my ears would burst from her yodeling if I didn’t kill her soon, I stood above her, grabbed her long hair, and put the blade of the knife against the left side of her throat. A deep breath and I was ready. I went to open up her throat and the last thing I remember before waking up tied to a chair and looking at six grim faces staring at me, was a bright flash of light.

They were all wearing black suits with white shirts underneath, even the two middle-aged women who sat at the center of the long table. If they had sun-glasses on, I would have thought that I’d been kidnapped by the men in black. They were all staring at me like they found me stuck to the bottom of their shoes. After a few minutes of extreme awkwardness, the woman on the right, the one that looked like she could be my mother, began to speak to me. She was the only one at the table who would speak to me at all, in fact.

“Mr. Bradley Chambers; born, eleven, sixteen, nineteen-seventy-eight, high school education, no arrests, no credit to speak of. I assume that you must live out of your vehicle since we didn’t find a current address or employment.”

What the fuck is going on here? I thought.

“Do you have any questions for the commission before we begin, Mr. Chambers?” The woman asked. The woman next to her opened up a legal note-pad and began to jot down notes. She didn’t look nearly as old as the woman on the right, but she still had that pinched up look on her face – perhaps her hair was pulled back a little too tight and it gave her a tremendous headache.

“Who the fuck are you people?” I asked. I watched their expressions closely to see what effect my use of profanity would have on them. At each end of the tables, the large, ape-like builds of the four slack-faced men tightened up just a bit, but the motherly looking woman only smiled.

“Are you trying to offend us?” She asked, amused. “That may work against you as we proceed, so I strongly caution against it.”

“Just tell me what you want?” I said. My heart was doing about one-twenty in my chest.

“For now,” the woman said, “we would just like to introduce ourselves to you and welcome you to our organization.”

“Organization?”

“Oh yes. You see, Mr. Chambers, we know who and what you are. Your sloppiness is well documented here and we’ve been following your progress.”

Her boldness at calling me sloppy certainly caught my attention.

“What do you mean sloppiness?” I said

“Just what I said. You leave corpses out in the open, floating them down rivers and expect that no one will ever find them. You cover up evidence at your kill locations instead of removing it. You are very sloppy, Mr. Chambers. If we didn’t have a few of our agents watching you around the clock, you would’ve taken a lethal injection a long time ago.”

“You people have been following me? For how long?”

She ignored my question.

“Mr. Chambers, I am the head of a group that brings like-minded individuals together and offers protection for our members. That said, we’ve given you plenty of protection already at no cost to you, but from this moment forward, you will have to become a full member of our organization.”

And….what if I don’t,” I said, a little more boldly than I felt. She pulled a small, black phone and pressed a single key. After a second or two, she spoke into the receiver.

“Go ahead and bring him in.”

A door opened on one side of the room and two more suited gorillas wheeled in a large, metal gurney with a man strapped down to it. They wheeled it between me and the long table and then stood at both ends, facing the panel.

“If you do not wish to be a part of our organization, Mr. Chambers, then you will cease and desist all killing in this country. You will now kill only with our authorization and we will vet all candidates as well as your plan of action, along with contingencies before you are allowed to proceed. We are the alphas, the strong, and we will not let you make us look like fools. Your actions reflect on everyone who has ever picked up a blade or an ax in sport.” She nodded to the two men and they produced knives in their hands. The first man pushed the blade of his knife into the victim’s belly and pulled it crossways, opening up a large, red gash. He reached inside the victim, pulled out a large handful of entrails, cut them free with the blade, and then shoved them into the victim’s screaming mouth. When that part was done, the second man in black opened the victim’s throat. The victim was still convulsing and twitching on the gurney when the woman at the table began to speak to me again.

“Now, Mr. Chambers…would you like to join our organization, or not? Bear in mind, that once you are a member, you may never leave.”

I looked from her to the haggard face of the man on the gurney with his entrails protruding from his mouth and then back at her again. I nodded. Hell yes I want to join! Where do I sign up for this shit?

“Good,” she said. “You are not alone anymore, Mr. Chambers. We expect you to get a job, of course, but we won’t be expecting any monetary payments from you. Your dues are to be paid in work. Every once and a while, we will contact you with a name and an address – you will kill that person for us and we’ll consider you paid up until the next job. Do you understand the provisions of our agreement?”

“I’m a hit man?” I said. “You’re turning me into your hit man?”

“Not exactly,” she said, clasping her wrinkled hands together. “You’re a serial killer, Mr. Chambers. You enjoy killing. We do too as it so happens, but seldom find the time in our busy schedules to get out on our own. We’ll be using you as our blade, our instrument of death. The same rules apply and you can kill in your own, unique style, with one exception. We want video of the kills we assign to you. Will this be a problem?”

“Hell, no.” I said. I was more than ready to get the hell out of there – away from those monsters. I know, pot-kettle, but seriously, you have to be a special kind of creepy to give a serial killer the willies.

They transported me back to the depot with a bag over my head. When the two gorillas pulled the bag off, I found myself staring down at the same spot where I had the woman on her knees earlier in the night. The two men turned around began to walk back to their car.

“The girl,” I called after them. Where’d she go?”

One of the men glanced over at me while they were getting into their long, black sedan.

“We took care of her,” he said. “We’ll be in touch.” He climbed into the sedan and they pulled away from the depot, leaving me standing in the dark, cool, nighttime air.

I did my best to stick to all of the rules that the commission had laid out for me, I really did. When it comes down to it, I’m more of a lone-wolf than a team player, at least that’s what I told myself when I killed the Gessip woman. Not only didn’t I follow the commission’s rules, I completely disregarded my own, killing her in an alleyway and leaving her body there to be discovered. Hell, I even used my finger to write come get me on the wall next to the body. It made all of the papers, even the national ones. The reporters all speculated that I was taunting the police and maybe I was a little, but the message was actually for the commission. Nobody was going to tell me who and how to kill. Some things are still a man’s decision in this country and how to kill is one of those decisions. They may as well have tried to force me into Catholicism, dammit.

It wasn’t until about a month after killing the Gessip woman that I began to randomly spot black suited gorillas in every corner of Tracy. I’m sure that they weren’t all part of the commission, and maybe none of them were, but still… I left and have been moving around the country ever since. I haven’t seen any black suits in a while, but I know that they’re out there, looking for me. They know how I kill, so I changed things up a bit. Could it be that while I’m looking over my shoulder for black suits wielding machetes that the commission simply handed off killing me to another regular Joe like myself? Perhaps… Either way, I know that at some point I will become another victim. The police will find my rotting corpse in the woods or inside my van. Maybe they’ll never find me. It is the commission after all. Perhaps I’ll just disappear like Jimmy Hoffa, never to be seen again. I’ll just vanish off the face of the earth like a fart in the wind. If so, I hope that someone will find this letter and give it to the press or police, or something. I’m no angel, believe me, but it would sure be nice to really stick it into those stuffy commission bastards and break it off.