Among the Living by Timothy Long

kill for a few months, or maybe a year?
    Until then, she will continue her double life. In fact, it may be time to start looking at Craigslist again. She has a program on her laptop that masks her IP address, and she also uses an anonymous site to mask where she comes from. Sure it’s overkill, but at least she isn’t sneaking out to libraries and writing furtive notes to her prospective victims while glancing over her shoulder the whole time.
    She will start hunting again. Soon. She will take her time and get to know the guy, get some pictures of him. The guys who send her cock shots get shitcanned the fastest. She wants the normal men who have another side, just like her. She wants the men who are husbands but “just don’t get what they need from their wives even though everything else in the marriage is perfect.” It’s such bullshit. If they have such perfect marriages, then why the fuck are they cruising Craig’s trying to pick up her alter ego?
    The movie is boring, so she gingerly sits in her computer chair and starts lurking on some of her favorite forums. She was more than a little disturbed to learn there were forums devoted to serial killers. Some require logins, so she made up an account on one of the free email sites and used that for their flimsy verification. Some are open, so she reads them and tries to understand the people who follow serial killers like they are rock stars.
    Kate has no morals, no sense of right and wrong. When it comes to taking a life, she accepts that it has to be done and lets the other do the deed. But the people on these forums seem to revel in the suffering of the countless victims, and yet she is all too aware of the paradox that comes with reviling these people even as she acts out their fantasy world.
    There is something about her wiring that let her do these things. Something messed up in all that ganglia upstairs. She wonders if it is just plain evil. No doubt a psychologist would have a field day with her, probing the relationship she had with her father. Wouldn’t they be surprised to learn that little Kate, at the tender age of fifteen and fresh from a beating, waited until the old man was passed out drunk and then held a pillow over his head? He didn’t even kick his legs or flop his hands; he just died, went quietly, much more gently than the asshole deserved.
    The police called it an accident, and she went to live with an aunt she hadn’t even been aware of. Susan had been a pain in the ass. Strict. Made her go to church, and she was never ever allowed to speak of the things her father did. She once tried to confide in Aunt Suzy, but the woman shut her down with a firm “Don’t you ever speak ill of your father. He was a good man.”
    He was good at beating her to a pulp. She ran away at seventeen and hitchhiked from Warsaw, Idaho to the big city of Seattle over the course of a few days. Along the way, she met the drummer of a band from Yakima named Madface Monkies. He had a big Suburban, and the second night she hung out with him, the bastard tried to rape her. He held her down, and when she said she liked him, that she would give in if he would just give her room to get her pants off, she kneed him in the balls and then backed up to the end of the big car and kicked him in the head until he didn’t move anymore. Then she took a gas can from the back of the vehicle and poured it all over the inside and the drummer. He begged until the flames took him. Then he screamed until they finished the job.
    She sighs at the memory and stares at the screen for a few moments before coming out of her fog.
    She changes gears and searches for information on the gas leak that is just a few blocks from her. She comes across a local forum, but they are just speculating about all the police and National Guards. There are a lot of angry people talking about their civil liberties being infringed upon. Some complain that the soldiers were cold toward them, wouldn’t tell them what