Carnage: Short Story Read Online Free

toward the water, crashing into a wave that crashed into him. Showing the sea who was boss. It was a nice image.
     
     
    No one paid any attention to them as they passed the windows of the motel lobby, then went down a slanted brick walkway to the lineup of identical blue doors. The smell of chlorine was evident. There was a pool nearby.
    Pat worked the key and they entered. Unsurprisingly, the entire back wall of the room was window, framed at both ends by floor-length green drapes and sheer curtains.
    When Pat switched on the overhead light, Corey went to the window and closed both the drapes and curtains. The air was still and the sea was only a whisper now.
    Pat smiled at him, her heart fluttering. He wasn’t handsome in the conventional sense; it was more that there was nothing wrong with him. All the pieces fit. It gave him a kind of odd anonymity.
    “You interested in privacy?” she asked.
    “It’s one of my favorite things,” he said.
    “That why you call yourself Corey?”
    He smiled. “You guessed.”
    “It’s okay if you want to remain anonymous for a while.” She gave him a serious look. “Long as you aren’t married.”
    He widened his eyes in mock horror. “That’s something you don’t have to worry about.”
    She smiled in a way that told him she believed him.
    “I’ll throw something on and we’ll go to dinner,” she said. She wasn’t some slut who jumped in and out of bed without first at least breaking bread with a man and getting to know him.
    On the other hand . . .
    She was easy to bring down. When he drew her closer, she thought he was going to kiss her. Instead he waited until she was breathing out, then drove his fist deep into her stomach. Her breath whooshed out of her. She couldn’t inhale. Couldn’t stand up straight. Her eyes bulged as she tried desperately to draw in oxygen.
    He gripped her under both arms and kept her from curling up on the floor, the way they always tried to do. Instead he heaved her onto the bed and in no time had her wrists taped behind her back. When he was sure she was breathing almost well enough to scream, he taped her mouth. Screams turned to moans, not even as loud as the sea.
    He drew from his beach bag a large folding knife and expertly—even artfully—cut her clothes so they slipped easily from her body. When her legs were bare, he taped them together as he had her wrists. She was lying on her back, her hands behind her. She couldn’t move or turn over with her knees pressed together. He could read her thoughts: “ At least he’s not going to rape me.”
    She couldn’t guess that he wanted—would take—more than that.
    He laid the knife next to her on the bed. Then he drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and took one out. He worked one of those cheap plastic lighters and touched flame to tobacco. Blew smoke off to the side and smiled. It was not at all his usual shy smile.
    “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m a nonsmoker.”
     
     
    It was past noon the next day, and he was long gone from Nickleton, when Patricia Angelina’s tortured body was found.
    A motel maid discovered her dead in her room, taped and still on her blood-soaked mattress. The maid wasn’t the screaming type, but she did vomit when she saw the letters D.O.A. carved on the dead girl’s forehead. She had read about that killer sicko, and another wave of nausea hit her before she got out of there and told Ernie up in the office it was time to call the police. One look at her eyes and pasty complexion and he knew it was past time.
     
     
    The killer heard the news on the car radio, driving north. The mellow male radio voice said that police were still searching for clues. The killer knew they wouldn’t find anything worthwhile. He’d been careful with fingerprints, DNA, that sort of thing. He watched plenty of cop TV and knew what was necessary to break away clean from a crime scene.
    When the road curved inland, and he came to a small area of beach where