Douglas Allen Rhodes

Excerpt from: Sex and Murder
Copyright © 2008 Douglas Allen Rhodes
All Rights Reserved, Wild Child Publishing.

I killed my first person in an act of random choice--more on a whim than because of some preconceived plot. The man I chose did nothing worse than drive far too slow in front of me. My decision to kill him wasn't fueled by rage or anything so primal; I just accepted who I am. I was to kill him; to fulfill my role. It's what I've been trained and conditioned for my entire life. I'd learned about it in childhood, studied it throughout my adolescence, and honed my taste for it in the Marines. I am a killer. It's that simple, that beautifully non-complex. But here, I've already made a poor start of this.

Late for work, I'd turned onto a 45 mph road behind a 35 mph driver. Normally, I would flash my lights or honk my horn, but this time I did nothing. I sat back in my seat and watched the driver in front of me--a man so afraid of life and conformed to law that he was unable to even approach the upper limit of speed to which the absent authorities had granted him access. I spent ten minutes in tedious, low speed pursuit before I realized the time had come--time had come.

I decided he should die.

I eased back from his car and let another driver pull between us. (No easy task. As I said before, we were already going ten miles below the speed limit.) Keeping an inconspicuous distance away, I followed him for the next fifteen minutes of what turned out to be his drive home.

He stopped in front of his house and headed towards the front door. I drove past and parked a block away, around a corner, then walked back to his house. He lived in a two story red-brick in a nice suburban neighborhood. A well manicured front lawn and two neat little flowerbeds ran along the front of the house.

I knocked on the front door twice--hard--and stepped back to wait.

He opened the door wide, an absent-minded look on his face.

I hit him in his throat.

Gasping for air, his eyes wild with surprise, he fell to the ground. I stepped over him, into his living room, and pulled the door shut. His hand shot up to defend his face, and I kicked it out of my way. I placed my heel on his neck and took a good, long look at him.

In his forties, white, and going a little bald, his conservative appearance reeked of complacency. I pushed my foot down on his throat. He choked, sputtered, and spat out questions. At one point, he even managed several of them in a row--mainly whos and whys. Tired of hearing them, I kicked him in his teeth.

His mouth gave way beneath my shoe, and blood poured from his face. He howled and cried, alternately wailing and whimpering as the thick red of his life ran down and ingrained itself in the pastel tan of his carpet.

An excitement grew within me unlike anything I'd ever felt before. I snatched him to his feet by the front of his button down Oxford, took his mangled head in my hands--one cupping his chin, the other at the base of his skull--and snapped his neck.

He hit the ground, shivered once, and shit himself. A dark stain spread across his crotch as an erection grew, straining against the front of his slacks. His eyes lay open wide, the terror of his final second in life indelibly stamped upon them.

Drawn to those eyes, mesmerized by them, I crouched down beside the remains of his face and stared into them.

Half an hour later, I still stared into them, transfixed.

The sound of a key being inserted into the back door broke the spell.

I stood up, reluctantly releasing my study of those eyes, and waited to see who would enter. I didn't have long to wait. The sound of the door opening gave way to the heavy, flat slapping of shoes on linoleum. Seconds later, a disgustingly obese woman in her early forties walked into the room, perusing a small bundle of mail. She stopped in the doorway (almost filling it) and, as if alerted to my presence by some long unused primal instinct, looked up from her letters and right at me.

I smiled and said, "Hello."

Her small, piggish eyes looked down at the corpse and shot back up to lock on my own. She screamed, a shrill, earsplitting wail, and turned to run.

Before she made it more than five steps, I caught her.

With a fierce goose-stepping kick, I planted my foot in the small of her back and sent her sprawling, face first, onto the kitchen tile.

She scrambled to stand back up, her screaming growing louder and more frenzied. I drew a rather large and wicked-looking butcher knife from the cutlery stand on the counter and, just as she got to her feet, turned back to face her.

At the sight of the knife, all color deserted her face. She tried to scream again but managed to rasp out only a few plaintive 'nos', her pudgy hands raised in front of her in a pitiful attempt to ward me off.

With a firm grip, I held the butcher knife in the proper blade down method that would have made my former Drill Instructor proud, but, instead of stabbing her, I punched her in the face, using the knife like a roll of quarters. Her nose shattered.

She flew back against the wall, her blood trailing from my fist to the remains of her nose. Limp, her arms dropped to her sides. I raised the knife and plunged it into her throat, just above the V of her collarbone.

The warm remnants of her life splurted out, drenching my face and shirt, dousing me in the viscous orgasm of her death. My eyes widened in lust, and a tremor of furious ecstasy rolled through my body. I stood immobile, unable to do anything but shake while the woman slid down the wall and relieved herself where she landed.

The intensity of the moment passed sufficiently to let me move again. I walked to the sink and pulled on a pair of the dead woman's rubber gloves. I rinsed the knife and, after drying it, placed it back into its slot in the cutlery stand.

A quick search of the upstairs led me to the couple's bedroom. I found a nice white Oxford to replace my blood-soaked dress shirt. I cleaned up in their bathroom, washing the blood off of my face and neck and out of my hair, and dressed in my old clothes and new shirt.

The gloves and bloody shirt I tossed in the bathtub and doused with hairspray. I set them on fire and left them to burn.

Back in the kitchen, I grabbed a dishtowel and used it to open the front door. Tossing the cloth aside, I walked out of the house and down the street to my car.

I reached the restaurant where I worked waiting tables almost two hours late. My manager chewed my ass for another fifteen minutes before letting me get to work. Pretty soon, I settled into the mundane routine, and the rest of my shift sped by. All in all, it was a good night.

I made seventy-three dollars in tips.

* * * *

I arrived home late to find my wife already asleep. I sat down on the bed next to her, with just enough force to wake her up. Still sleepy, she smiled up at me, and I slid my hand beneath the covers. The warmth of her body under my hand, I began to arouse her, marveling at how full of life she was.

As she undid my pants, I kissed her on the forehead and brushed her hair back from her face. She touched me, and I looked her body over, noting several places where a hard enough strike would disable her, two places where it would kill. My eyes closed, and the scenes from earlier replayed in my mind. I watched the stabbing again and again, feeling the hot blood spray across my face.

Lust and desire overwhelmed me. I crawled on top of my wife. She moaned in ecstasy as we joined together in angry, passionate sex. Blood covered my mind, plunging me into scarlet visions of death and sending pinpoints of pleasure and pain throughout my body. Screaming my climax, I collapsed upon her.

We lay in each other's arms, breathless from our efforts. After several minutes of silence, she ran her hand over my chest and tugged at my nipple ring.

"So," she asked. "How was work tonight?"