http://pulsehead.com/951 - Peter Rabbit
http://pulsehead.com/969 - Black-eyed Susans
http://pulsehead.com/970 - Flopsy
Life moves in weird loops, it's just the nature of things I guess. It's like here I am, the only man on the planet that seems to ever find these dead rabbits. No matter what day of the week it is, what time of the morning, or where in the park...I'm always the one that comes over a hill, or turns a corner and walks into my own personal little hell.
Then again, I think about it sometimes and I start to think that it's not my hell at all, it's his. Something happens out in the park at night, and it's something more than what happens to these poor creatures. Something's happening inside this person, some sort of...battle, or...or, what's that word they use in that reality show? Catharsis. It's like this person has to get something terrible out of him. What starts as maybe a thought, turns into a fantasy, and out here, at night, where there isn't another person around, it changes. It runs out of his brain, down through his arms, and out of his hands. It's hard to think about it, but when you wake up in the morning to pick up trash, maintain sprinkler heads, and trim back bushes, and you run up against another one of his kills, it's hard not to think about it too.
Especially when he stops for almost a year, then starts again. Especially when this latest kill is only two weeks out from his last one, the one the cops are calling "The Caveman".
I was going to take some time off, when the cop had told me it would be good to, I was going to go into my boss's office the next morning and ask for a week or three, maybe even hop a plane, hit up Florida or something. Of course, life always does its little loops and that afternoon, a new guy comes in to work and the boss tells me I need to train him. I tell the boss I basically got told by the cop I had to take some vaycay, which was a lie, but the boss just asks me for three weeks, enough to get new guy on his feet then I can take as much time as I want, hell, I can retire if I want he says, just not for three weeks.
So I say okay, I'll get what's-his-name up to speed. He's a smart kid, actually went to school and studied plants, knows all the greenery outside without needing to be introduced. Trying to become a botanist. So I went easy on the kid. Not even a week went by and he already had the irrigation system down and he even took the morning walk for me once or twice. He called it my checkup, running his finger in the air like he's ticking off a box with a checkmark.
Even though there was a part of me that needed to get out of that grounds shack and take some time to myself, there was another part that just got attached to the kid. Damned if I didn't see just a little bit of myself in him.
Then, all of a sudden, I'm doing my morning checkup, and I come over a low rise that lets down into a little wooded dip. It used to be a small duck pond way before I had come aboard, and when the ducks flew south and never came back, it was drained and 'scaped. It was an awesome little stroll in the summer and fall, when the trees there would filter the light through their leaves. Even the teens that sometimes went down there on Saturday nights to drink and make out would pick up after themselves pretty good. Back when, I'd always thought about taking a little missus down there, it always seemed like the perfect spot to kick up a little romance.
When I came down the shallow slope to the treeline and saw the grass, I never thought about that little dip the same way again.
It shocked me first of all. Not really the sight of the blood, although that never gets easy. No, what really rattled me was how soon this one had happened. It was usually a month or two between these things, but this was two weeks man! Two weeks. The first thought that crossed my mind was the cop saying how he was accelerating. That's what sent the first shiver down my spine. The second was when I peered into the soft morning shadows and saw the kill. He had defiled the place, there's no other way to describe it. If the last kill was The Caveman, this one was Hiroshima. Blood was everywhere. Everywhere. It was like the rabbit had just simply exploded. Splintered bones littered the ground, bits of fur and flesh stuck to the bark of the trees, glistening in the first rays of sunlight. There were gobs of meat that were gray, and I knew those were little bits of brain, even before I saw the crushed skull poking out from under a rock the size of a football. It was so completely destroyed I only knew it for what it was because of the yellowed, broken teeth attached to it. I staggered a few steps back and leaned against a dogwood, my head was spinning and my belly was doing nasty little flip-flops. I caught sight of a little brown and white smear on another rock, realized it used to be an eyeball, and puked my guts out.
I called it into the grounds shack, and the first person to show up was the kid. He called my name before he got over the rise and so I went to head him off before he got close enough to get an eyeful. I met him at the top of the slope and stopped him. Part of it was because I didn't want him to see this and get scared off the job. A smaller, darker part was that somewhere deep inside, I felt like all the killings were for me, were sort of like, for my eyes only, even though the better part of me knew it wasn't true. When he pushed past me to look anyway, I let him go.
He came back not even a minute later, his face white as ash.
"How could a person do that?" he asked. I shook my head, I didn't know. I could offer him a cup of coffee and tell him everything I did know though, catch him up to speed. He fetched one more look toward the little dip and said okay. But first I had to give my statement to the cop.
I felt life do another little loop as we stood on the rise and waited for the cops to show.
rating: 6
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