Posted 11:40 AM by Alfred

Berkeley. People’s Park, near Telegraph Avenue. The feel of warm blood underneath his fingernails. The cool breeze gliding up from the nearby bay. The taste of the sweet red nectar in his mouth. Looking down, looking back, Jeremy sees the body of a teenage girl, a vagrant. She stares back up at him blankly, eyes still wide open with the same trust they displayed when he first encountered her. Still whole. He’d squeezed the life out of her, squeezed her throat until blood spilled out onto his hands and arms. And then he’d, he’d… He’d carved her up. Yes. He’d cut her up quite nice. He remembered throwing her in the back of his truck, covering it with a blue tarp, and heading for the suburbs up in the Oakland hills.

It had been quite a pleasant, warm evening, midsummer, and he’d kept driving up into the hills until he was past the ‘burbs, past the people, where it could be just him and his cute little dead homeless girl, where he could redesign her, break her down into her various parts. Purify her. He knew she’d been a trashy little girl. It was about time somebody took her apart and saw what made her tick. Only she didn’t tick anymore, did she? Jeremy had taken care of that.

Looking at the body again, thrown down by a large oak tree, a little more privacy up here, the machete in his left hand, a sudden twinge of guilt, a nagging query. What the hell was he doing? What was the purpose of this? Where was this going to get him? But then, he felt her in his mind… her sweet love, and she was soothing him, guiding him, making him realize that he was doing right. The world needed purification, and he was her soldier, her number one man. By hell, he was not going to let her down. He’d finish his work, his pleasure, goddammit. Taking a deep whiff, he let the smell of the bloody corpse seep into his lungs, into his very being, and let himself be carried off into a frenzy…

---