Touched - Part Two

Amber raised her hand to rub the gauze bandage taped over the side of her neck. Even the intense stinging of her wounds 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. He asked, “Are you sure you don’t remember something that might have caused your friend to snap?”

“No, it was just so sudden,” Amber said, “She seemed like a completely different person, and then...then she just stopped.” She tried to think of a plausible explanation and gave up, shaking her head. “Rochelle doesn’t have a mean bone in her body. It doesn’t make any sense. Nothing she said made sense either.”

The detective gestured to the phone. “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.”

Amber nodded, frowning at a troubling stray thought. “Hey, let me ask you something. There’s been a lot of people going crazy lately, right?”

“Yes, but it’s unlikely that 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.”

Annoyed by his finding humor in the situation, Amber said, “Yes, well I guess almost getting murdered today has put me in the right frame of mind to look for connections.”

The detective’s smile fell as he dropped his head to look at his desk. “We’ve been getting calls every day from people claiming to know why this is happening. Some are suggesting that it’s a virus, while others say it’s a new drug on the market.”

“That’s been my dad’s latest theory too, but I shot it down,” Amber said. “If you had found drugs in any of the cases, it would have become public knowledge right away.”

The detective nodded. “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 only trying to figure out why my best friend just 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 at her steering wheel for several more seconds without understanding why she felt anxious.

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.

Amber got out of the car without bothering to grab her bag or to take her keys out of the ignition. She left the driver’s 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 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 check the bedrooms in the back of the house when she heard a faint sound coming from the kitchen.

At first, it sounded 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. His slacks looked black and wet, and most of his dress shirt was stained a deep crimson. It was his blood dripping from the edge of the counter onto the floor that caused the tapping sound.

Amber leaned heavily on the doorframe 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 and closed her eyes, 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 lay over the sinks with his face frozen in an expression of agony.

From where she stood, she could see that his hand had been shoved into the garbage disposer in the right 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 Calvin, who still had the meat cleaver 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 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.

Amber thought of her mother slicing cabbage with the same cleaver, and for no reason, the green cabbage started to bleed.

The odd mental image 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 feet to pick it up, and she had just dialed nine when she heard the front door close.

Amber’s gaze flicked up, scanning over the counter before she stopped at the block of knives in the corner.

The block was just behind the neatly arranged slices of her brother’s head. The skin was ragged and stained with blood, and the skin and muscle had begun to sag away from the bone, creating gaps of pink in the pulpy red strips.

Amber raised one hand to cover her mouth, but even though her stomach was churning, she still walked to the other end of the counter to take a knife. She didn’t have time to forget herself.

She kept her right hand over her mouth and nose, using her left to pull out the largest of the knives. Amber heard a shuffling footstep in the hallway, and she spun on her heel, which was much too easy with a slick blood puddle under her feet.

Amber never saw it, and she had to plant her hand on the counter in another puddle of blood to stop her uncontrolled sliding spin.

A whimper rose from her dry throat at the sight of her mother covered in bloodstains. 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 Rachel’s upper and lower lips, 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.

Rachel 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 herself. Closing her other hand over the handle and her fingers, Amber shook her head and whined, “Don’t come near me.”

“Hush now,” Rachel said. She stepped closer, allowing the blade to slide into her sternum. Raising her arms, she pulled Amber closer and again made a rasping 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, as 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. It was the only thing she could do to avoid going insane after being forced to kill her mother.

Rachel made a soft gasp, drawing Amber’s attention back up. Confusion filled her mother’s expression. Rachel tried to say something, but she made a final gasp, and then 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 bones and made the face 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 to scream.

***

The homicide department was loud, and under the incredible din of the room, thinking wasn’t possible. Amber didn’t mind, because right then, she didn’t want to think about anything.

She stared blankly, her gaze wandering from one desk to the next in the open office area. Many of the desks were empty, but at others, detectives spoke loudly to be heard over each other.

From where Amber sat, most of the shouting was gibberish. But when something did break through and reach her, all she could notice was the frustration in the voices of the men and women working the phones.

The detectives were shouting, because they felt desperate to stop the flood of crime taking over the city. But there were no leads, and no matter how much they shouted and acted like bad cops, the witnesses didn’t have any information to offer. The dead ends made the police cranky, and it showed in their voices, and in their tense, restless expressions.

In spite of these shocking sprees, the other criminals had not paused in their activities. The police still had to deal with “normal” murders, where they rarely found suspects either.

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.”

The detective set the cup aside and sat down on the edge of his desk. His dark, clean-shaven face was filled with a look of concern, but the sentiment was belied by the look of skepticism in his brown eyes.

“Miss McKenzie, my name is Peter Benton. I was assigned this case, but it’s been brought to my attention that your friend also attacked you and 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 first.”

“There isn’t much to tell,” Amber said. “We were talking about me looking 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 that 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, and he had to look away from Amber when she started to shake. “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 Rochelle 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.”

Peter showed her no sympathy. He was a hardened veteran who had seen way too many similar cases in the last few weeks, and he suspected that something wasn’t right with Amber’s story. He bluntly asked, “Is there a history of mental illness in your family?”

Amber opened her mouth to say no, and then she snapped it shut. “My brother—my half-brother, Jobe—he 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, and he waved for her to go on. But she had nothing else to say, because she couldn’t remember what happened next.

She decided to lie, saying, “I tried to grab him by the arm to take him home, and he hit me in the side of my jaw first. After that, I lost track of 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 found him right away?”

“No, it took me...” Amber frowned. She knew that she was making herself look guilty, but for once, someone had asked her the right question for her to realize that there was another hole in her memory. She had no idea how long it took her to find Jobe, because once she’d really thought about finding him, her memories became hazy.

Amber said, “Um, I guess it took me about an hour to find him, but I already had a good idea about where he’d gone. He’d made a fort out of plywood in a big patch of woods about a mile from our house. Back then, we were living in Idaho.”

It was a lie, and it sounded like one to Peter, who folded his arms over his chest and asked, “So how did the police find you?”

“I’m pretty sure he called them,” Amber said. “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.”

Peter nodded, still skeptical. But he could admit there was no plausible way that Amber could make people go crazy, and if he tried to make himself believe the idea, then he was falling into the same crazed mindset of the conspiracy theorists who called the homicide department every day.

But if Amber was not the link between the two cases, what was? Peter decided to humor her by asking, “Was there something similar in the behavior of your mother and your friend?”

Amber paused to think before she gave a 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 in agitation while she went over the memory again. “There was also something in the way their voices were similar. There was this low rasp, like if they had laryngitis. They both sounded monotone. There was very little emotion in their voices.”

She looked up at the detective’s troubled frown 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,” Peter said. “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 into dismay when he realized that Amber was swooning. He set a hand on her shoulder to steady her and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Why?” Amber whimpered. “None of it makes any sense. People don’t just go crazy for no reason. Even with 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 don’t make sense.”

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

“Yeah,” Peter’s brown face filled with a sympathetic look. “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?”

Peter looked flustered as he sat up, pulling his hand away from her shoulder. He got himself under control and shook his head. “I shouldn’t say.”

“Then let me take a wild guess,” Amber said. “Both doctors may have been choked to death, but after that, she tore up the bodies in different ways.” She looked up at Peter’s expression darkening, and her frown deepened. “Don’t you see how unusual this is? Rochelle wouldn’t hurt anyone, but she snapped suddenly, and she took pleasure in killing and mutilation. My mother was just as brutal, but why did she snap on the same day as my best friend, in the same way?” Amber shook her head. “That should be impossible.”

Peter nodded his agreement, but he couldn’t say anything to her comments. He knew he should, but his mind was a complete blank.

Amber pressed on when she saw that he wouldn’t try to argue with her. “So, I’m betting that almost every single person that you’ve arrested so far has no violent history prior to this supposed snap.” Her eyebrows drew together at a sudden thought. “I’ll go one step farther and guess that most of the people killed themselves after they were captured.”

Peter sighed. “Some of them have succeeded, but all of them tried. The people who haven’t succeeded were strapped 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 it’s a hysteria, what would you think is causing this?”

Amber shook her head. “I really don’t know, but it seems like 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.”