Serial Killer Z: Volume One by Philip Harris

Author:Philip Harris [Harris, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Solitary Books
Published: 2018-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 2

After the Blade

When I woke, I was still standing in front of the cage. I say woke, but that’s not strictly true. Whatever state I enter when the shadow takes over, it’s not sleep. There are no dreams, no nightmares. Just blackness, complete and endless. I simply drift through the darkness, utterly at peace. There’s no sense of time passing, and I’m completely insulated from the outside world. I’m utterly exposed until the shadow reluctantly relinquishes its grip.

As always, there were a few moments of confusion as the shadow finally receded and my brain realigned itself with reality. But the mind is an elastic thing. Memories quickly snapped back into place, and I remembered the zombie in the business suit.

I looked around at the world, the brown rock of the cave wall, the tarnished steel cage. And the black. There was so much black. The zombie was covered in it. He was naked. The suit and the rest of his clothes had been cut away and placed in the corner of the chamber, neatly folded. Blood had run down the front of his now-bare chest, drenching his legs and pooling in the metal tray I’d placed beneath the cage.

He’d been neatly unfolded. Four incisions, one down and three across, created six flaps in his chest. They were peeled back to reveal his rib cage and the organs within it. His heart, lungs, and liver were free of blood, but they were a mottled brown color, rotten.

The businessman’s arms and legs were also cut, and the resultant curtains of flesh stripped away to reveal the gray-green muscle beneath. It looked slick and wet. There was a yin and yang symbol tattooed on his right arm, at the top near his shoulder, and the shadow had left it unscathed.

I was puzzled. The work on the man’s limbs was as careful and precise as that done on his chest, but I’d seen the results of the shadow’s efforts dozens of times now. Not once had it touched the subject’s arms or legs. This was something new.

Despite the mutilation of the body, the zombie was still alive. He watched me as I investigated the damage the shadow had wrought. His jaw opened and closed slowly, but whatever hunger had driven him to attack was gone now.

I studied his face. The heavy flesh that hung around his neck was gray in the dim light of the cave. His eyes tracked me closely, but even when I leaned in, he made no attempt to attack. I brought my face close to his, my heart pounding, my nerves alert to any sign that he was going to lunge at me and tear my throat out. He didn’t. Maybe now he understood that we were the same—both killers, both driven by desires we had no control over.

The scalpel was still in my hand. The blade was slick with blood. So were my fingers and my hands. I removed an old T-shirt from the wooden crate and wiped my hands on it.

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