The Temporary Killer

The Temporary Killer

A Clive Hyde Gig

Book 1

By Scott Bray

Copyright 2012 by Scott Bray

Clive Hyde Productions

Smashwords Edition

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or dead for five minutes more or less, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. If you think any of this is about you, don’t flatter yourself.

To contact the author:

Facebook: Clive Hyde

Email: clivehydexxx@yahoo.com

To Sarah: You’re my Dream Pillow.

Table of Contents:

Prologue

1: What Now?

2: Bullets with Things Alive Inside

3: The Flix Mix, French Fries, and the State of Horror Today

4: It all Comes Down to What Scares You

5: The Spiders . . . They’re so Delectable

6: It’s a Flower Box, Guys

7: GRNEYES16

8: There wasn’t Supposed to be Two Girls in the Shower

9: The Thenthation ith Awful

10: As if the Tooth Fairy had Gone Mad

11: Maybe You’re Looking too Hard

12: How can I Help?

13: Our Temporary Killer Just Became A Permanent Killer

14: I Guess You’re a Celtics Fan, Huh

15: What Were you Two Doing?

16: I’m Supposed to Protect You

17: He was Writing the Original Sequel

18: He Shot Himself

19: The Bullet was Moving, and I could Hear Eating

20: An M-16 with a Never-ending Clip of Bullets

Is it really ‘wise’ to remove, to extract something innately smart that is mere inches from the brain? I mean, don’t you figure we, as the most flawed species on the planet, could use all the help we can get?

Scott Bray, 4:08 in the morning, rocking a fussy 2-year-old back to sleep, trying to think of a cool and profound quote. Sorta kinda failing at it. Both objectives.

Prologue

For his ninth birthday, his rich uncle had given him a green plastic gun that shot black ping pong balls. It was by far the coolest gift he had ever received. Ever. For Christmas, for Easter, for losing his first tooth, for his First Holy Communion, for any of his birthdays. Really. Ever.

His mother and father, had they been present when he received the gift (he couldn’t remember if they had been there; his father was typically absent at most family gatherings and his mother drunk in the kitchen), they might have scowled, somewhat politely conceded the gift for fifteen minutes, hoping he would then lose typical nine-year-old interest.

The gun, about two feet long and the size and weight of a fat whiffle ball bat, actually had a cocking mechanism on top like some of the guns he saw on late night T.V. After placing no more than four of the black balls in the open cavity, like a trench, on top of the gun, you then slid a lever from the middle of the gun back towards the stock. The closer the lever came to the stock, the harder it slid. For there was a spring inside compressing the balls towards the firing mechanism.

The enjoyment of the gun, as his parents would attest for most gifts, would be short-lived. But this reason was different. The gun was enjoyed so much that first and only day of its existence, he lost three of the four balls in the first hour, the spring became undependable and loose, and of course, for reasons to be explained later, the gun itself was broken in two.

After cake and the required picture taking with his other cousins and aunts and uncles, he passed the kitchen and saw his mother laugh too loudly as his one uncle kept darting his hand up her skirt (giving him a weird feeling in the bottom of his stomach). He ran outside with his one cousin, only four days older, who they had also killed a bird apparently, by celebrating his birthday, too, at this same party.

The cousin also received a gun for his birthday. This one was blue. And it shot white ping pong balls. Much farther. More accurately. And it had a speaker on the side of the stock that made firing noises every time he pulled the trigger.

Cousin was always getting the better presents. Better bike, better video games, better sneakers. All the time.

Down by the pond, he shot some of his black ping pong balls at the ducks milling about by the edge of the water.

Hey, cut it out, his cousin said. Never aim at something living. Never.

Why not? he asked, pointing the gun at him.

Cut it out, his cousin said, almost bringing up his blue gun in return.

What you gunna do? He bent over and reloaded two of the balls that he could find. He even took one of his cousin’s white balls and loaded it. He pulled the lever back, already feeling looser resistance in the spring.

Cut it out, his cousin said again.

He shot at the ducks. The first ball actually hitting a duck in the back, making it jump. The second ball missed the same duck by a good three feet or so. The third and last shot made a lame poof sound and barely rolled out of the barrel.

I said ‘cut it out’, his cousin said, bringing his gun up from fifteen feet away and firing. The ball hit him directly in the eye, and for some reason, he didn’t blink before it hit him. He saw stars and fireworks and zig-zags the color of neon orange and pink and white and mostly blue. The explosion from his cousin’s gun sounded like a tank.

His cousin marched closer and fired again. This one hit him in the bridge of his nose, and now his eyes watered. The third and fourth shots were direct hits to his forehead and teeth. The sounds from the gun progressively got louder and louder like TNT explosions. But he never moved the entire time. The cousin with the better gun, the better presents, the better house with the pond and the ducks and the swan and the koi fish and the two parents who doted and loved and ate steak and real fish like salmon and sometimes, yes, even lobsta and not fish sticks and not hamburger casseroles and he went to a prep school and a three week camp every summer coming back tan with cool white sea shell necklaces and this year his cousin told him about a girl he had kissed and-

He took the gun by the barrel and swung it like a baseball bat and the stock hit his cousin square in the mouth and he saw blood and teeth fly and there was a lot of screaming and yelling and he didn’t remember anything at all after that. As if nothing had happened after that. As if the movie simply stopped.

Now, 24 years later, he looked down into the box the delivery man had dropped off this afternoon. He had waited all day to open it and enjoy it. One might think it was something more lecherously immoral than to give him credit for. Get your mind out of the gutter, for it was nothing like that. It was just a pillow

The ad in the back of his magazine of pictures of bondage and car accident and crime scene photos promised relief to the buyer’s highest need. Voodoo dolls were passé. Potions and spells were so the seventies. This pillow would manifest the sleeper’s most wonderful (worst) nightmares.

He couldn’t get to sleep fast enough. He had had (so to say) one of the worst days of his life yet. He felt like he was at the end game. Now he had all the pieces in order. Now was the time to exact his revenge. He calmly felt under control of his life for the first time since, well, since rearranging his cousin’s orthodontia.

Drifting off to sleep on this pillow, which surprisingly for all the evil it promised, was quite comfortable and cool indeed. Yet the pillow fed off of the sleeper’s emotions and dreams and nightmares (while in REM or not, the ad promised, so there was a little awake fantasy manipulation involved too!). And so when he began to float off, thinking of disemboweling and torture and eyelid removal and Columbian neckties and piano wire through the eye and acid down the throat, and the first reaches of sleep grabbed him like a demented sandman pulling him down into a quicksand pit, he felt the pillow change shape, squirm, form, and create just what his life ordered.

One

What Now?

Ed Sherman couldn't believe he had been shot. His lone, simple thought as the flash of blue light came at him was, What now? After he had regained consciousness and realized that he had pissed and shit himself, he still wanted to believe it was all part of perhaps a role playing game, maybe Laser Tag which had been all the rage just a few years earlier.

Certainly Ed never would have guessed he had died.

For a little while anyway.

It was Sunday, around seven o'clock in the evening give or take, early December in the late 1990s, and Ed had just sent off a story to an online college magazine in Wisconsin. Ed had little hopes for acceptance of the story; its entire premise was based on a Twilight Zone-like twist at the end. All writers (all published and good writers, his literary mind reminded him) knew that you had to equate a delicate balance of character and plot for any story to be of any value. He had stumbled upon the e-magazine while online earlier in the day and figured, What the heck?--the story was collecting diskette dust (five and a quarter inch, mind you, 8-year old Hewlett-Packard, thank you so much for not making it a big deal), so why not?

Ed downloaded the story, sardonically titled, Caught Red-Handed in the Cookie Jar. He popped the cassette tape, Rubycon by Tangerine Dream into his stereo, and for the next hour and a half, turned into eight-year-old Chadwick Simms. Poor Chad had been dumped off at his wickedly insane and just plain wicked Uncle Malcolm's house for some babysitting. The inevitable confrontation black comically morphed into a double dog dare of civil (dis)obedience (metaphorically not going under the sink, listen to your elders, etc.) not sticking his hand into the cookie jar. The cookie jar, of course, as Ed was famous for (well, Ed wasn't famous for anything, but he hoped if he was going to be famous, it would be for his really should have seen that coming twists in his short stories), was full of snakes and beetles and rats, ick cetera, yuck cetera. In the heart pounding (the advance copy might read) last two pages, as the much bewildered Chad pulls his hand from the cookie jar doing a Medusa impression of snakes writhing from his fingertips, his Uncle Malcolm, insane from the war (how’s that for backstory?), chops good old Chad’s arm off at the wrist which promptly falls back into the cookie jar. Thusly: caught red-handed in the cookie jar. Q.E.D., mother lovers!

Ed sat back, Tangerine Dream synthesizers sending armies of the rotting dead clawing their way out of the muddy ground in his mind. Ed poked his tongue around in his mouth and realized he hadn't swallowed for the last fifteen minutes while reading the climax. Writing always did that to him: lose track of time and maybe even who he was. He felt the wetness under his armpits. A couple of streamers of sweat snaked their way down his back under his Buffalo Bills sweatshirt. He didn't understand why this story hadn't been accepted yet. It was good. A trifle trite maybe, not overly complex in a Tolkien sort of way--but good enough, he figured, to be accepted by a bunch of pot smoking Delta brothers at the University of Wisconsin.

With the click of a mouse, the story was sent. Ed sat back, picked his nose for a while, and thought to himself: The only difference between submitting stories through the internet and submitting them through the mail is the rejections come much quicker on the internet.

Ed sat forward and then said that out loud the second time. Then he scribbled it onto his Snoopy sticky notepad and tacked it up on his Buffalo Bills corkboard above the computer. Snoopy reminders of this great story idea and that great plot twist were tacked in all of their faded and multi-pastel-colored curling glory on his board. He played a mind game then and tried to guess fifty percent accuracy of what the five or six word phrases meant: little kid shoveling cake, last day of summer--mothers/champagne, guy can see future--one day sees black. Ed gave up after that one.

He jumped over to his Yahoo front page. He took out the Tangerine tape in his boom box (the one with the Duran Duran and Missing Persons stickers on it, you know the one, where the rewind button doesn't work, and one speaker sometimes doesn't play one side of certain tapes), and he popped in a mystery mix tape. He listened to Steven Hill explain the various artists' songs on last night's Hearts of Space Ed had taped off of NPR. Something decidedly ethereal filled his head phoned ears. He closed his eyes and floated while his modem did its job.

Sometimes Ed liked being scared. But that was easy right now since his parents were downstairs to protect him. And he knew Will wasn't around to sneak up on him from behind and scare the shit out of him, even though his bedroom door was locked. Usually the locked door didn't stop Will, because he had figured out how to pick it over fifteen years ago. Ed wondered when he was going to get around to installing a deadbolt--probably the same time he was going to turn his computer desk around to face the door so he could see if Will was sneaking into his room. And that would probably be the day Ed finally moved out of his parents' house.

With his eyes still closed, he could picture his Dawn of the Dead poster to the left of him, above his bed. To the right of that, a poster of Bruce Smith and Jim Kelly. On the next wall, posters of Berlin, of Duran Duran, of Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and of Simple Minds. Against that wall was his bookshelf with half of the books unread from six different book clubs, all to the same address, but all with different variations of his name: Ed Sherman, Edward Sherman, Ed Shermane, Ed T. Sherman, Edward Tyler Sherman, and just plain E.T. Sherman. Ed conceded he would never get around to reading them all, not as long as he kept getting new Dooms and Duke Nukem or Zork games on his computer. And he thought life had ended when he had conquered Yar's Revenge on his Atari 2600 in 1983. On his dresser was an unsolved Rubik's Cube, right next to that the Lava Lamp that shot boring orgasms of white globules in slow motion. On his nightstand were a stack of DeadWorld comic books and a Freddy Krueger model threatening a Jason model from Friday the 13th.

He jumped in and out of various chat rooms, including the girls only groups where 75% were male. He was so quick at logging in and out of the rooms that he barely had time to register two lines of text: Lick your bacon strips raw and I am that kinda girl. He quick jumped into an NFL room where fans were either lamenting or bragging for their favorite team rights as the late four o'clock games gone into overtime were now over. He checked the latest scuttlebutt on the 8 o’clock Vikings/49ers primetime game so he would seem the most informed at tonight's gathering at the Driftwood bar.

He, Ed, with his chat name, CliveHyde, asked:

Is Young playing tonite?

Somebody named Rocco44 replied:

Y Hyde. Shoulders better.

Ed asked if the cold weather in Minnesota he had seen earlier on the Weather Channel might affect the west coast San Francisco 49ers.

Ed waited patiently, then with red faced realization, and determinedly no answer from the pack, remembered that the Vikings played in a dome.

Ed as CliveHyde logged off.

He checked for any email, always a habit, always wishing that some hard up babe, (for real, no cyber-sex, meet you in a safe place in the mall, no really, I'm six four, bench press 250, hair like Yanni, drive a Porsche bullshit), but some desperate masturbatory housewife tired of her fingers and vacuum attachments looking for a man with the sperm efficiency of fifteen, well, sperm whales.

No new messages other than one spam touting your penis 50 percent larger. Guaranteed! Well, there was the other saved email that Ed kept rereading and wondered its validity. The one that began, Dear Benieficary. I am hold $45,089,000 (in U.S. dolars!) at the airport for you—

Ed pondered for a second.

Ed pushed the monitor button. The screen winked out. He took his headphones off and listened for any other noises in the house. His parents would be downstairs somewhere. Probably watching America's Funniest Home Videos during the Sixty Minutes commercials.

Ed crept downstairs. He opened the hallway closet door and pulled out his puffy blue bubble winter jacket. He hadn't been out all day, having watched both the one o'clock and four o'clock games in his room, but he hadn't been able to miss the Buffalo Lake Erie wind knocking at his bedroom window like a vampire begging for entrance.

Ed pulled a pad (this one had the scripture of From the mind of Clive Hyde written in cursive red letters at the top) and wrote wind begging like vampire at window. Ed flipped the pad shut and slid it into his back pocket. Good writers never let the good ones get away.

Eddie? his mother called from the T.V. room.

Ed winced. Yeah, ma? He stood still in the kitchen, not moving, hoping he would become invisible and they would forget about him and he wouldn’t have to have the rest of the conversation.

You going out?

Yeah, to the Driftwood for the game. I'm meeting the guys.

"You don't want to watch Murder She Wrote? I think whatsherface is making a guest appearance. The one you like from Love Boat. Whatsherface?"

Ed had never watched Murder She Wrote or the Love Boat. He may have hummed the theme once or twice before, but never watched it. No, ma, I'm going to the Driftwood. I'll be back before midnight.

Okay, honey. Be careful.

Careful? Ed thought. I'm freakin' walking the half mile like I always do.

Ed zipped up his jacket and thought, It isn’t easy living at home when you're 31.

He didn’t write that one down.

Ed left the house through the kitchen door that led into the garage. His mom's Camry was to the left and his Dad's small pick-up truck to the right. He could have asked to borrow either one, but again, the ride would have been more of a nuisance trying to cross Transit Road twice to the left, even on a Sunday