The Killing Kind Read Online Free Page A

and agonizing death. Zeb always did his best to do what he was told, although there were times when Lulu would fall silent in the middle of a killing and he would be forced to improvise.
    “Woooooo-eeeeeeee!”
    Zeb’s eyes fluttered open.
    A man was dancing in the tall grass some twenty feetstraight ahead of where Zeb sat. The dancing man was wiry, his slender, rawboned body a whirling mass of flesh that looked translucent in the moonlight, legs spinning him about in a drunken stagger, arms upraised and stretched out to his sides in imitation of a helicopter’s rotors—in this case, apparently, the rotors of a badly damaged helicopter on the verge of a flaming spinout toward the ground below. The man made chugging sounds between crazed whoops, noises meant to mimic the sound of failing rotors. Here in the dark, you could squint and almost imagine he was a child on a playground, engaged in a bit of innocent, rambunctious fun. A few things made it impossible to buy into the illusion completely. The haggard, gaunt features. The livid knife scar down his left cheek. The explosion of bushy, scraggly hair atop his head, which might have resembled a cut-rate clown’s bedraggled fright wig had it not been so irretrievably, disgustingly foul , quite likely not washed in years. But all of this only served to make him look like a career hobo. Unpleasant, yes, but hardly remarkable.
    The man’s name—supposedly—was Clyde Weatherbottom.
    Two other things distinguished Clyde from your garden-variety psycho vagrant: (1) He was completely nude. (2) Wound in the fingers of his right hand were many long strands of formerly lush (and now sticky with coagulating blood) blonde hair. The hair was attached to the severed head of an attractive young woman.
    Formerly attractive, Zeb thought, and smiled.
    The rest of her body was staked to the ground on a patch of pushed-down grass directly in front of Zeb. She’d been stripped of her clothes at the outset of the evening’s festivities. And though she’d endured a lot, her body remained a work of natural art—from the proud jut of her large breasts to the sweet swell of her hips and the tender slope of her flat but soft belly, and down to the sculpted length of her long,elegant legs. Zeb supposed the ragged and bloody neck stump would’ve robbed her of any inherent eroticism for most people. But he was not most people. For Zeb, it was just another means of ingress.
    In other words, he’d fucked it.
    This was not normal, of course. Even he knew that. It was the kind of thing crazy people did. He was crazy. Hence, stump-fucking. Fuck that politically correct BS the docs were forced to spew. Some had attempted to link his “erratic” behavior with the onset of puberty, and hormones gone haywire. Others had looked for a root cause in the ferocious abuse he’d endured at the hands of his father. All a crock, far as Zeb was concerned. He’d been stone-cold cuckoo from the beginning. He could recall watching Mr. Rogers on PBS as a toddler and thinking how he’d like to pull the man’s eyes out and eat them raw.
    So, yeah, Zeb knew the truth. He was crazy, like the regular folks said, and had probably had been born that way. When you looked at it that way, you could almost see all these killings as being the work of the Lord. Kind of. But not really.
    God was the creator, and He had made him this way.
    Crazy.
    But God didn’t make him kill.
    That was all on Lulu.
    And Lulu had always been there, whispering naughty things to him during his childhood. Things that had disturbed and excited him at the same time. Ideas about interesting things to do with knives and bricks. He would sit in a classroom and smile at a cute girl, who would maybe smile back, never imagining his thoughts. She would think he had a crush on her, but instead he would be thinking about smashing her head in with a rock. The things Lulu suggested had ignited an obsession so feverish, it was inevitable he would follow the