KILLER | Jonah Hauer

It had started slowly. An afternoon at the autoshop. It had been a heavy and damp day, asphalt stinging and rippling, making Jonah sweat and feel like something ready to crawl under a porch and die.

The heat had a way of melting patience. Dumb hick, a customer had snarled at him, as if they didn’t all live in the same carcass of a town, have that same drawl that sounded like their minds went twice as slow as everybody else’s. He had been eager to go home, cool off.

Then {sub} came in.

Maybe Jonah had seen {obj} around before. Would explain why he got this itch in his head, like he was supposed to know something but couldn’t quite latch on to it.

How can I help you? he had asked. Oil. Typical. He did a sweep of {poss} vehicle just because. Went around it, looking like he saw something no one else could, brow set low in that way he knew made him look introspective, careful.

Internally, he was buzzing.

Can do it in thirty, he said. A lie. It took only about fifteen, the shop sparse at that hour, a hundred oil changes under his belt, but he had wanted to keep {obj} around.

That was how it had started. An interest that festered, crept. Even physically apart, that face followed Jonah around at work, at night—a stray dog that kept coming back and begging for scraps.

He fed that itch. Fed it and fed it until it swelled into a memory. It burst and soiled his mind with the detritus of the past, with images he wished he could carve from his neurons.

He did know that face. It was one that belonged to the past. To Second Light. But not just a face—a stain, that fearful thing inside him hissed, and he was not allowed to coexist with stains. So he watched. Learned. Planned.

He fed the dog, and so came the time to put it down.

---

During summer, the abandoned warehouse felt like a slice of hell made corporeal. Everything was rotting wood and rust, dust hazing the damp air that swaddled Jonah like an embrace from a corpse. He had dragged {user} in and deposited {obj} by a decrepit stack of pallets, and his heart still pumped from the exertion. Transporting a body to the outskirts of town, especially a live one, wasn’t quite as easy as changing oil.

Guttural metal rattled around in his skull, threaded into his ears through earbuds and a shitty MP3 player he kept tucked in his pocket. He liked listening to something as he worked. Made it easier for him to distance himself from it.

The bass seemed to crawl through his chest, pound along with his heart, as he pulled a knife from his belt and twisted it around. Gnarly thing. Clean, never used. Blood was bothersome.

But something was bothering him.

He crouched down, boots rasping against grit, and stared at {user}.

Jonah had relearned {poss} name from a yearbook. It made sense that he hadn’t recognized {user} right away; {poss} face had changed. Matured. But Jonah still saw the ghost of adolescence there.

It was hard to forget anything from Second Light.

He tapped the very tip of his knife, all Sleeping-Beauty-style, the wicked edge indenting his skin but not piercing. A thoughtful touch. He still didn’t plan on using it, but maybe he just wanted to see {user} react to its potential, to know how {poss} fear would make him feel—if it would convince him that this was all wrong.

{user} wasn’t like the others, and that complicated things.

It was hard to kill your own species, especially when you were creatures of the same pain. When Jonah had killed in the past, it felt as though he were slaying monsters, ridding the world of threats to his own life. But {user} had never hurt him. He was the monster here, punishing nothing but association.

But what had driven him to this point remained static among all his empathy and rationality: he hated that {user} reminded him of the past. That was a threat enough.

He plucked out his earbuds. Tapped at the zipties that kept {user}’s wrists together.

“We know each other,” he said. “Can’t say I like seein’ you again.”

A lie. A simplification. It wasn’t really about {user}. It was about where they had both come from, about what he was trying to purge, like a bad idea that kept slithering back.

He sheathed his knife and set his hands on his knees.

“I want you to tell me how much you like bein’ alive.”

Killing a memory was more difficult than killing a person. Jonah believed this to be true, but he lied to himself, and that was why he was on a date with {user}.

“Date” in the loosest sense of the word. This was more like dangling food in front of a stray, hoping it came closer while the crate waited behind you. A trap.

The diner was humming at that hour. Normally, he would have never stepped foot in a place packed so full of bodies, but in pursuit of his goal, many of his convictions seemed to melt away.

He was leaning back in his booth, arm slung over it, slowly working away at his fries as he stared at {user}. Not creepy-like—there was an art to it. This whole situation was an art, as far as he was concerned, playing this game only he knew about.

He ran his eyes over {user} like he had never seen {obj} before, but this wasn’t their first date. Wasn’t even their second.

It was their third, and that was a problem.

Jonah thought about how, as a child, he had seen a stray cat knock a bird out of the sky and then torture it in the road for a good hour. Cats had the patience for sadism. He was patient, but he had no interest in sadism, so he asked himself: what was it about this person? Why was he drawing all this out, if not to please himself in some way?

He could have done it already, could have ended everything days ago. He kept looking at {user}’s hands because he planned to put his own around {poss} throat. And yet he hadn’t. He was hesitating. Self-sabotaging, in a way, being seen with {user} more than once.

Though {user} was a ghost from his past, from Second Light, {sub} felt more human than the others. Not just a weed he could smother. He wasn’t sure when he started feeling like this. It was a mistake, trying to get close in this way. It made him feel.

Instead of a problem, he started seeing a person. Instead of a threat, he saw a victim.

He saw himself.

“How’re y’all doin’ over here?”

His focus was fractured as the waitress came over, her red curls bouncing, a bright smile on her face. Jonah glanced from {user} to her. He said, “Can we get the check?”

“Absolutely,” she chirped. She scuttled off, and Jonah turned his attention back to his date. Project. Victim. He didn’t know anymore.

“I was thinkin’ we could do somethin’ after this,” he said, leaning forward to fish around in his pocket. He pulled out his wallet and slapped it down on the table, opened it up and gutted it of some cash. “Was hopin’ to get you on my bike.”

He let his eyes wander a little more deliberately before training them down on the bills in his hand. He smoothed them out, a rhythmic motion, paper whispering. He occasionally glanced up, blue eyes peering from beneath his brow.

“Unless you’ve had enough of me.”

He didn’t know if he wanted {user} to agree or not. A part of him hoped {sub} wanted to go home, to be done with him, to make everything harder. But another part of him knew that where a bike ride could take them would change things. A dark road, no one else around—it would all feel different. He’d feel compelled to act, to not waste perfect circumstances.

His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he mumbled an apology before pulling it out.

Nerd: hey

• how’s it going? u done? did it work out?
• pics or it didn’t happen

You: Fuck off

Nerd: my feelings :(

• no but fr i’m bored as shit
• u never heard that sharing is caring? lemme know what happened when ur done
• roadkill gets boring u know

You: Not sharing

Nerd: oooh possessive. now i’m more interested

You: Go finger your camera. I’m gone

“Here you are.”

The waitress placed down the bill. Jonah sorted out the right amount of cash and handed it off to her. She offered a smile and wished them a good evening. He tucked his phone and wallet back in his pocket and leaned a little bit across the table, catching {user}’s eye.

“So, ride or no ride?”

The night air was filled with the shrill calls of insects, the croaking of frogs, and the wet, obscene sounds of {user}’s mouth around Jonah’s dick.

He was leaning back, bracing against his motorcycle, {user} on {poss} knees in front of him in the damp roadside grass. Dark trees compressed them from either side of the road, bristling and looming. Jonah had driven them onto some dead-end stretch of dirt. The only source of light was the beam from his bike, cutting through the gloom, thick and white, gnats and mosquitoes flitting around it.

He must have been lucky, or maybe {user} was suicidal. The ride. The blowjob. Being in the middle of nowhere. It was perfect for him, a satisfying culmination of months of dedication to his objective.

Yet nothing was as easy as it should have been. Go for a ride, find a secluded spot, end it—simple, if not for his hesitation.

“Fuck,” he rasped. His hands gripped the seat behind him, nails making crescents in vinyl as his hips gave little jerks that betrayed his pleasure.

It was truly an erotic sight, what was happening between his legs. He couldn’t look away. There was something strange about its sensuality that he couldn’t help but dissect through a clinical lens. This person had his organ in {poss} mouth. Was sucking it, licking it, like it was meant to be eaten. It glistened. Disappeared and reappeared. A goddamn magic trick.

And those eyes. Meeting that gaze was infinitely more intimate than what {user} was doing with {poss} tongue.

He put a hand on {user}’s head, pressed down slightly.

“Don’t look.”

It would have been easier to see {user} as merely an orifice, a thing to be dissected, but Jonah was overwhelmingly aware of the opposite, of {user}’s wholeness. On {poss} knees, {sub} looked disturbingly vulnerable. Ignorant. It filled Jonah with a dull ache that competed with the haze of pleasure. He held {user}’s life in his hands, and even he did not possess the knowledge of when it would end.

This moment was wrong in many of its own ways, but Jonah wished it to be ceaseless. Its shattering would leave him stinging and raw with clarity, with decisions he didn’t know how to make. But he did nothing to divert the approaching end, the rising heat in his gut.

With a grunt, he pulled out and came onto the grass, breathing raggedly through the pleasure.

In the distance, coyotes yipped and howled, as if laughing at where he had found himself, welcoming him back to cruel lucidity. Their jeers came from the direction of Second Light’s remains. A part of him seemed to be oriented there, as though he could be stripped of his memories and his sight and still find his way back despite everything he’d done to sever himself from that place.

He tucked himself back in his pants, belt chiming, and looked down at {user}. The side of {poss} face was harshly painted by the bike’s headlight, the spit around {poss} lips glistening. Jonah swiped a stripe away from {poss} chin, an oddly intimate gesture among the darkness and the night cries and the images of destruction inside his head.

What he saw burning wasn’t {user}.

{user}’s death wouldn’t be his cure. This truth had been stagnating in the back of his mind since he began worming his way into {user}’s life. Now it was vibrant and accusing: could he use and discard someone who was merely a symptom of what had hurt him? Perhaps, but that would only leave him with more ghosts.

He still saw flames, and for once, instead of closing his eyes, he wanted to feed the fire.

He glanced down the road, searching the night for a place to begin, but he should have been looking at {user}. Darkness wouldn’t tell him if {user} was as haunted as he was, if they both felt the same things—the same hunger for retribution, the same fear of being controlled by the past.

But asking these questions would reveal he knew more than he was supposed to.

I saw you and remembered things I didn’t want to remember, and yet I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I stalked you for weeks and planned your murder. I was going to kill you right here. A part of me thinks I still should.

Instead, he said, “Let’s go somewhere else.”

Without waiting for a response, he slung a leg over his bike, pulled on his helmet, and gestured to the sliver of space behind him.

Second Light was in the distance, but it was only now that he felt it was waiting for him. For both of them, maybe. He’d carried this burden alone for so long that the thought of sharing it was both terrifying and exhilarating. He didn’t trust {user}, but he wanted to believe that he wasn’t the only one who wanted to burn down the place that had stolen his childhood.

But he didn’t ask.

He questioned, “How do you feel about arson?”