Part Two

Amber raised her hand to rub the gauze bandage taped over the side of her neck. Even the intense sting of her wounds still could not help her shake the feeling that she was trapped in some kind of bizarre nightmare.

Her gaze moved to the detective as he hung up his phone and leaned away from his desk. He had questioned her twice already, and he still wore a skeptical expression. “Are you sure you don’t remember something that might have caused your friend to snap?” he asked.

“No, it was just so sudden. She seemed like a completely different person, and then… then she just stopped.” Amber shook her head. “Rochelle doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing she said made sense either.”

“I just talked to her mother, and she said that their family doesn’t have any history of mental illness. Miss Turner is being put in the hospital for observations, just to be sure.”

“Hey, let me ask you something. There’s been a lot of people going crazy lately, right?”

“Yes, but it’s unlikely your friend’s condition is related.”

“Well how would anyone know the difference?” Amber asked. “I mean, have there been any witnesses for these killing sprees?”

“A few, yes. But the MO is always different in each case.” The detective smiled at her. “You aren’t the first conspiracy theorist to try connecting all these crimes together. We’ve been getting calls every day from people claiming to know why this is happening. Some are suggesting it’s a virus, while others say it’s a new drug on the market.”

Amber smiled weakly. “That’s my dad latest theory too, but I shot it down.”

“Well if you’ve got a theory, I’m willing to hear it.”

Amber stared at him, wondering if she should mention the strange sensation she’d felt just before Rochelle changed. Finally, she shook her head. “I don’t have any theories. I’m just trying to figure out why my best friend tried to kill me.”

***

Amber shut off the engine and laid her head back on the headrest while she tried to make sense of the morning’s events. She replayed the memories over and over, and each time, she came back to the thought that Rochelle had somehow become another person.

Her mind began nagging at her that something was wrong, but she continued to stare through the front windshield for several more seconds without understanding why she felt nervous. Amber raised her head, finally realizing that she had parked behind her father’s car. Looking out the passenger window, she found both the cars of her brothers were still parked in the same places as well.

She’d tried to call her mother after the police questioned her, but no one had been home. It was well past mid afternoon, and yet the driveway was full. The only vehicle that should have been left was her mother’s mini van in the garage. She got out of the car without bothering to grab her bag or to take her keys out of the ignition. Amber left the driver side door open, and as she crossed the front yard, she felt a need to look back and confirm that she had a way to escape if something was wrong

The door was unlocked, and though her instincts were screaming at her to just go back to the car and call the police on her cell phone, Amber stepped into the front hallway. A strong, unpleasant odor hung on the air, and the scent combined with the oppressive silence had her whole body shaking.

“Mom? Dad?” There was no answer. She took a few timid steps into the hall to glance into the empty living room. The dining room was empty as well, and she was about to turn around to go check the bedrooms in the back of the house when she heard a faint sound coming from the kitchen.

At first, it sounded to her like someone was drumming their fingernails on the counter, but after listening for a few seconds, she decided the rhythm was too erratic. Amber moved toward the kitchen, and the sound became stronger. It occurred to her that the unpleasant smell was also getting stronger, and her heart began to hammer in her chest as panic set in.

She slipped her head around the frame of the door, and the first thing she saw was her father laying on the far counter beside the stove. Most of his clothing was stained a deep crimson, and it was his blood dripping from the edge of the counter onto the floor which caused the tapping sound.

Amber leaned heavily on the door frame as her legs threatened to give out and fold under her. Her body rolled against the frame, and she was still trying to steady herself when she saw her brothers on the other counter. She sank to her knees, but by then the image had been burned into her memory.

Taking several long breaths to steady herself, Amber got to her feet. Though she wanted to look away, she couldn’t stop herself from staring at her brother Taylor. His body laid over the sinks with his face frozen in an expression of agony. Even from where she stood, she could see that his hand had been shoved into the garbage disposer in the second sink. His other arm ended in a mangled stump, while the rest of his body was covered in deep hacking wounds.

The size of the wounds confused her, and she wasn’t sure if he had been stabbed or sliced until she looked toward her brother Calvin, who still had the meat clever buried in his side. Amber pushed away from the doorframe to walk into the kitchen, and though she had already met her limit for shock, she couldn’t look away from the top of Calvin’s head. It looked to her like someone had used the cleaver to cut a number of thin sections all the way down to the middle of his nose. The only part of his face still recognizable was his mouth, and it was locked open as if he had died screaming. She found herself thinking of her mother slicing cabbage with the same cleaver.

The odd thought pulled her out of her daze long enough to think about calling the police. She crept to the phone on the counter near Calvin’s body to pick it up, and she had just dialed nine when she heard the front door close.

Amber’s eyes flicked up, her gaze moving to the block of kitchen knives on the counter just behind the neatly arranged slices of her brother’s head. She pulled the out largest of the knives and spun, a tiny whimper escaping her at the sight of her mother covered in blood stains. Rachel made a mocking pout as she leaned her head over to one side, and her neck made a loud crack that sent a spasm through Amber’s body. “Oh, what’s wrong, baby? Did you have a rough day at school?”

Her voice was almost exactly the same monotone rasp which Rochelle had spoken with, and her eyes were black, leaving almost nothing of her brown irises. There were several wide splits in her mother’s upper lip, and Amber wondered how it was humanly possible to smile so wide that it could cause an injury.

Amber started to edge around the counter, trying to make her way to the door which led out into the garage. Her mother made a strange cackling hiss and stepped into the kitchen. “Poor dear, come and give momma a hug.”

Amber stiffened and held out the knife in front of her as she shook her head. “Don’t come near me.”

“Hush now,” Rachel said and stepped closer, allowing the blade to slide into her sternum. She raised her arms to pull Amber closer and again made a soft cackle. “Momma’s here now.” Rachel closed her arms around her daughter’s chest and squeezed.

Amber gasped as the handle began to press into her stomach, and she had no choice but to lever it down against her mother’s body. The relief was only momentary, and Rachel drew Amber into an embrace so tight that she struggled to take even the tiniest breath.

“This is my gift to you, little freak. I’ll see you soon.” Rachel went limp and fell back onto the floor, pulling her daughter down with her. Amber thrashed hysterically to get free, slipping in a pool of blood as she tried to stand up. She thumped onto the floor on her rump, and her mind yammered at her that she was sitting in blood. She looked down and saw that she had somehow landed on one of the remaining bare spots on the floor. The math major in her began working out an equation for how long it would take all of the puddles to converge in the middle of the floor.

Rachel made a soft gasp, drawing Amber’s attention back up to see the confusion in her mother’s expression. Rachel tried to say something, but instead she only made a final gasp before her mouth fell open.  

Amber stood up, her eyes drifting from her mother back up to Calvin’s sliced head. It was the abstract thought that a cleaver should have crushed the face and made it unrecognizable which finally pushed her past her limits. The room began to blur behind a wall of tears before Amber closed her eyes and started screaming.

***

Amber stared blankly at the styrofoam cup held out in front of her, finally looking up at the detective before shaking her head. “No thank you.”

He set the cup aside and sat down on the edge of his desk. “Miss McKenzie, my name is Peter Benton. I was assigned this case, but it’s been brought to my attention that your friend also made an attempt to kill you earlier today.”

Amber watched him quietly, her eyes flicking from side to side in agitation. “My mother didn’t attack me. She just walked onto the knife. She didn’t even flinch.”

“I know, but I want to talk about your friend Rochelle.”

“There isn’t much to tell. We were talking about me being kind of plain. I’d just made a joke about needing breast implants, and then she called me a freak and started to attack me.” She closed her eyes, but quickly opened them as her mind began flashing from one gruesome image to the next in a rapid fire slideshow. “The detective I talked to earlier said she’d been put into a hospital for observations.”

“She was, but an hour ago, she pried open the doors of an elevator and threw herself into the shaft.” Peter took a breath, finding he had to look away from her before he could go on. “She killed two doctors before that, and in both cases, she strangled them to death. It looks like you were supposed to be her first victim.”

Amber shook her head. “No, I won’t believe that. Whatever happened to her, it wasn’t by her choice.”

“Well you know, sometime the mind just snaps, and-”

“No, you really don’t know what you’re talking about. Whatever it was inside her that caused her to kill those doctors, it was inside my mother too.” Amber saw the detective’s expression fill with concern and she groaned. “Great, and now you think I’m catching crazy too.”

“Well is there a history of mental illness in your family?”

Amber opened her mouth then snapped it shut. “My oldest brother Jobe had some kind of mental illness, but we never found out what he had. He ran away when he was fourteen.”

“How do you know he had a mental illness?”

“I tracked him down, and he told me that he had started hearing voices. They told him that we were all bad people, and he had to kill us.” Amber looked up at the detective. “I tried to grab him by the arm to take him home, and he hit me in the side of the jaw first. After that, I kind of lost track where all the other hits went. I woke up in the hospital three days later.”

Peter nodded. “How did you manage to track him down?”

Amber shook her head. “I just went looking for him.”

“So you just found him right away?”

“No, it took me… um, I guess about an hour to find him but I had a pretty good idea of where he’d gone. He’d made a fort out of plywood in a big patch of woods about a mile from our house.”

“So how did the police find you?”

“I’m pretty sure he called them. Otherwise they never would have found me. I don’t think this is really the same kind of crazy though, because even when he was talking to me, I had the feeling that he was still the same person I always knew.”

“Was there something similar in the behavior of your mother and your friend?”

Amber paused before she gave a tiny nod. “Yes. They both said things that seemed completely unlike them. Rochelle called me a freak, and my mom kept saying momma this, or momma that.”

“How do you mean?”

“She said ‘hush, momma’s here’. But she’s never said anything like that, not even when I was a little girl. Come to think of it, she called me a freak too.” Amber leaned over and rubbed her forehead. “There was also something in the way their voices were similar. There was this low rasp to their voice, kind of like if they had laryngitis. They both sounded really monotone. There wasn’t any emotion in their voices at all.” She looked up at the detective’s troubled expression and shook her head. “That shouldn’t be possible, should it? How could two people both go crazy in the same way on the same day?”

“I’m not sure what to tell you. I’ll be honest. If not for the findings of the medical examiner, I’d have you in an interrogation room as a suspect. But it’s clearly your mother’s prints all over the bodies and the appliances she used.”

“Appliances?” Amber repeated softly.

“Yeah, she used an electric knife on your brother to slice…” Peter’s expression fell when he realized Amber was swooning. “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Amber whimpered. “None of it makes any sense. People don’t just go crazy for no reason. Even with my brother Jobe, there were warning signs that something was wrong. This… it’s just coming out of nowhere.”

“I know. Trust me, I see a lot of crazy things, and most of them just don’t make sense.”

“Have you… have you worked on any of these recent serial killing cases?”

“Yeah.” Peter folded his arms and leaned back. “I know it’s tempting to try to link these cases together, but every act is random. There’s no connection from one crime to the next.”

“What if the pattern you’re missing is in the randomness of the acts?” Amber asked.

“I’m not getting you.”

“Tell me something about Rochelle. Did she really just strangle the doctors?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“Then let me take a wild guess. Both doctors may have been choked to death, but after that, she tore up the bodies in different ways,” Amber said and looked up at Peter’s expression darkening. “You don’t see how this is something unusual? Rochelle wouldn’t want to hurt anyone, but suddenly she snaps and takes pleasure in killing and mutilation. My mother was just as brutal, and that doesn’t sound like her at all.

“So I’m betting that almost every single person you’ve arrested so far has no violent history prior to this supposed snap.” Her frown deepened at sudden thought. “I’ll go one step further and guess that most of the people killed themselves after they were captured.”

Peter sighed quietly. “Some of them have, but all of them tried. The people who haven’t succeeded were strapped down into their beds, but they keep suffering from random convulsions and bouts of gibbering nonsense.”

“And you can’t find a common cause, right?” Amber asked, not waiting for a reply before she pressed on. “You couldn’t find any cases of drug use or mental illness in most of the killers, so your current theory is that this is some kind of freak hysteria that happens for no reason whatsoever.”

“That sounds about right,” Peter agreed. “If you don’t think that’s the case, what would you think is causing this?”

“I really don’t know, but it seems I’m the only person to have survived two encounters. I can say for certain that there is something in common between the two attacks. I just can’t figure out what it is yet.”