Killing

Killing
by Alexander "KG" Hwang

I called myself Nat, then. It wasn't my real name, but a joke based on a nickname for a brother of mine.
I had been following a man with the name Mortimer Green for a while now. It was, I thought, an appropriately morbid name for what he did, but for some reason he preferred to be known as Tim. His eyes reflected his surname moderately well, and his skin was as suitably pale as his long hair was suitably dark. He was wearing a black business suit and black sunglasses, looking much like the government agent stereotype, except for the incongruous green flower sticking out of a breast pocket. Occasionally, when he reached a red light, he would glance at himself in the rear view mirror, as if to make certain he still looked the same. He was a little weird, and talked to himself sometimes.
Tim was "on the hunt", as he called it. Currently his prey was a certain Rachel Herrero, a lovely girl, aged twenty-two, who had invited Tim to her apartment for a dinner date. Tim, by the way, had other plans and was twice her age. Rachel did not know this, since Tim had seemed to be a shy and intellectual man much closer to her age named Eugene Goodman when they conversed over the internet. Rachel had these misconceptions because Tim lied to her. She also did not know I was coming.
Anyway, Tim parked outside the apartment complex. I followed him as he got out of the car and went into the building. We walked down the corridor inside, stopping when we reached the door marked 208. We both remembered the number.
Tim reached into a pocket and retrieved his knife. It was not especially long, since it had to fit in a pocket, but it was very sharp. He knocked on the door gently, and not a second passed before it opened.
"Eugene?" Rachel asked excitedly, as she pulled the door open. And I admired the way her face changed so rapidly in what emotion it depicted the next instant: starting with joy, then disappointment, then confusion, and finally fear. That last emotion likely was due to the knife Tim had set right before her mouth, caught in the act of readying to scream.
"Don't make a sound," Tim said calmly, as his other hand gripped Rachel's thin neck. "If you stay quiet, I won't kill you."
Rachel did not say anything, and Tim gently pushed her back into her apartment. I went in as he shut the door with his foot. It was important that I let him do this on his own. I would not interfere.
Tim ordered the scared girl to lie on her bed, then he shoved a handkerchief in her mouth and put duct tape over it. These things he had hidden in deep pockets. He also had strong wires, with which he bound Rachel's wrists and ankles to the bed. It was then that Rachel began to fear that Tim had told another lie. This fear was confirmed when Tim slashed her wrists and neck.
Rachel's final sounds were muffled shrieks, meaningless and purposeless. Tim was not moved by them, content to stand at the edge of the bed and watch her die. It was only right before I stepped in to finally kill her that she realized I was there. It was the last thing she knew.

"So long, Rachel," Tim murmured, after she was dead.
I noticed that he had gotten some blood on his sleeve. I said nothing.
"That makes five," Tim added. It was a count of victims. I killed every one of them, but he never thought of it that way. He did, after all, do all the work.
Tim took off his suit, under which he wore a sleeveless white shirt and thin gray sweatpants, and tossed the clothes onto the bed, onto Rachel's corpse. He found the smoke detector and disabled it. Then he reached into the pockets of the pants he had tossed on the bed and retrieved a lighter. He lit a flame under Rachel's shirt, which caught fire, and put the lighter in a pocket of his sweatpants.
This had become routine. He always started a fire after the victim was dead, and we would leave quietly as if nothing was happening. Every time we could get out before the fire spread and anyone noticed. So far, the man named Mortimer Green was not wanted by the police. I wasn't either.

It would be a few days before Tim found another victim. Her name was Sharon von Oellfen, and she was nineteen. Sharon, using the moniker "sharoniscarin" on internet relay chat, was under the impression that she had "reeled in" Frank Lin, a nerdy but attractive college freshman. It was actually Tim that she had invited to her house while her parents were out, and he was the one who had done the real reeling.
At the appropriate hour, Tim arrived at Sharon's house, dressed in a similar suit to the one he had worn to Rachel's apartment. He had, in fact, several identical suits, each containing identical tools, which he planned to sacrifice in the fire for the sake of each victim.
Unlike Rachel, and for that matter unlike every previous victim, Sharon screamed in spite of the knife, and Tim was forced to prematurely cut her throat open without the usual ritual. I still killed her in the end, though, and Tim still started the fire as he always did. He chalked this one up as a failure regardless. It was important to him that every victim feel the pain that he imagined his ex-girlfriend Zoe Ravat felt, as she cut her wrists and then her neck in a suicidal fit of depression.
There were three more victims after that, but Sharon was important because of her connections. After Sharon died, her father Saul von Oellfen hired the best private investigators money could buy. Eventually, one of them would find Tim.
The ninth victim, who Tim counted as number eight, was aged twenty and named Caridad Olivia Lange. She nicknamed herself Cari, and thought Tim was twenty-three and named Harold Joswig. She suffered the same fate as the other victims, that is, I killed her and Tim cremated her. Tim declared that Cari's was the best death so far, though it seemed much the same to me. But just as we left Cari's apartment, two policemen had arrived at the door of the apartment, backed by an Inspector Smith.
Tim was not a fighter, and he was easily subjugated and handcuffed by one of the policemen while the other found Cari's remains. The fire was hastily and clumsily put out, and Inspector Smith gathered as much surviving evidence as he could while Tim's rights were read to him. He exercised his right to remain silent, and I followed quietly.

In the temporary cell, Tim grumbled that he still had so much to do, and he wondered aloud if there was a way out of this. I had no advice to offer. I knew how this would end.
The trial was swift. The lawyer provided by the court to Tim had little defense against the expensive one hired by Saul von Oellfen, who was named Marisa Tracey. Tracey, in conjunction with Investigator Smith, assaulted Tim with a barrage of incriminating evidence that Tim's fires failed to destroy. Tim's lawyer, Nicholas McGuire, could only insist that Tim was not responsible for what he did on the grounds that he was mentally unstable. However, at this point, Tim stood and declared that he was not crazy, and that he only wanted his victims to feel what Zoe felt.
It would probably never be clear whether or not this was evidence for or against his insanity, but the jury regardless ruled against him, and that was that. Tim was found guilty of arson and murder, six counts each, even though Tim insisted it should have been eight, even though really it was nine.
Tim would have been executed a few days later, but in a few hours he was struck in the neck, fatally, by a fellow inmate named Quinn Dangcil, known for murdering murderers. Tim was not a fighter, after all. I watched Tim choke for several minutes before I killed him.

Of course, I was never convicted of anything. I only ever did my job.

My brother approached me as I stood over the body of Mortimer Green. He smiled at me, kindly and sadly at once.
"I think you win," he told me.
"How many?" I asked, wary of deceit.
"Only one," he said. He seemed tired, like he frequently was.
I was genuinely surprised. "You told me yours was responsible for the deaths of hundreds."
"Yes," my brother agreed. "But ultimately not by his own hand. The only person Danello Paul Denton directly killed was his wife Katarin, who dealt him a mortal blow as her last act. The tyrant who enslaved thousands couldn't even accurately fire a gun."
"The starving people don't count?" I asked. "You're just letting me win, aren't you Nato."
"I'm being fair," he insisted. We had to be fair. "The bet was about who would kill the most people before dying. If we let in that category those who allowed or even made it possible that others to be killed, the subjectivity involved would make any sort of meaningful judgment impossible."
"True," I conceded. "So why didn't you go with a soldier?"
"Why didn't you?"
"Honestly, I just thought it would be too easy. Mortimer Green wasn't trained to kill people. He did the things he did on his own, without a machine gun or grenade."
"Mm. I chose Danello Paul Denton because I was curious. Here was a man who could barely kill his wife, and yet could be said to be responsible for the deaths of so many people. It was an experience, seeing his motivations and the casual attitude he had regarding the lives of others..."
I laughed. "This bet was an excuse to watch an evil person?"
"Considering what we do, I don't think it unreasonable to seek a little entertainment every once in a while. But anyway, you did win the bet. Tomorrow, I will go to Hel and ask her out on a dinner date. I still don't see what you expect to come of this, Mors."
"Nat," I reminded my brother. "I call myself that now."
"What, because Mictlantecuhtli made fun of your name? You know that he only mocked the shortness of it."
"It's not that," I fumed. "I like being associated with you."
"Nat," my brother murmured, thinking. "Ah, like Nato. Your nickname for me."
"Yeah."
Thanatos hugged me, then, awkwardly and fraternally.
"Let's play again next week," he told me, as he released me. "I'll tell you how it went with Hel."
"No no, you'll tell me tomorrow! I want you to be happy like Azrael and me. I've seen what happens to people who are... alone."
Thanatos seemed about to demur, but he saw my face and I knew he recalled the person I had been following. He silently consented. We talked a little more, but we had duties to perform and eventually he left. He wasn't actually my brother, more like a predecessor. But I called him that and he never argued.
After he left I turned to inspect the ten souls I had with me. Nine victims and Tim himself. They had no power to do anything, since they had no bodies or minds now, but there was in them the faint spark of individuality. That was all the soul was, really.
"All right," I sighed, tugging on their invisible threads. "Let's go."