Thriller Thursday - Excerpt from The Riverwalk Murders A Cal Jessup Novel

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT


This is from the killers point of view.

THE OTHER HALF

  She had come along so easily, almost too easily he thought, at least until he was sure that no one was following. This one was different from the others and he did not kill her right away. It felt odd to him at first, as he had never kept his victims alive for more than a few hours, and yet here he was standing next to her prone figure a full day later, and she was still breathing.

  It was also the first time he had used anything other than xylazine on his victims. The pentobarbital was something else new to him, and he worried that he had given her too much that first time, even though all the medical sites indicated one hundred to two hundred milligrams. When she had come around the first time and began to move, he hastily jammed the needle into her arm, forgetting to check the dosage. He watched her for an hour after the first injection, checking her pulse every few minutes. It would have ruined everything if she had died because of his mistake.

  He had also finally come to know what the new feeling was, and to his surprise it was not new at all, just different. It moved him in different ways than the urge did, and yet it was the urge, the other half that had been repressed for so long deep within his subconscious. The new half was much gentler than the old half, even though it still demanded a sacrifice, and he now had the perfect place to appease this new presence.

  After searching for several days, he had found an old abandoned house just south of the campus, away from prying eyes in the middle of a stand of oak trees, and yet close enough to his new hunting grounds. It was also the perfect place to keep this beauty and his future prizes. He would have to ensure his privacy, find the property owner and make a deal, or at the very worst, make the owner one of his new trophies.

  The girl moaned and he looked down at her, straight razor in his right hand. Her eyelids fluttered like delicate butterflies and his heart began to race. The other half told him that it was time. He lifted the razor and pressed it against the left side of her throat, just over the jugular. This would be its inauguration, its first blood.

  Her eyes opened and he gazed into them, drinking in her fear as he drew the blade across her delicate neck. As she began to choke on her own blood, his blood began to boil and his heart pounded in his ears, drowning out all other sounds. He lifted the blade and watched as the life ebbed from her body, flow over her shoulders and form a thick red pool beneath her head.

  He stood over her for several more minutes, mesmerized, and watched as the light went out of her eyes, and her heart beat its final beat. The other half was pleased, yet there was still work to do. He wiped the razor clean, folded it, placed it back into the bag and removed the bone shears. While he missed his evisceration scoop, a tool that had served him well, the other half did not want the eyes.

  The other half wanted a different trophy, a trophy that required this tool. He walked around the table, shears in hand, and began his task. It wasn’t as easy as slicing off an eyelid, or scooping out his prize, and yet it was what the other half told him to do. The shears were up to the job and made short work of the bone in her left ring finger. With a final snap, he lifted his trophy up and shuddered in excitement.

  There was one more thing to do before he could clean up, one more trophy to take, and then he could dispose of her. He had taken a similar trophy from his last victim, a trophy the new feeling had told him to take, before he knew its name. He reached back into his bag and removed a pair of scissors, another new addition to his tools. Her hair was soft to the touch and for a moment he almost regretted taking her life, but that quickly passed as he snipped a lock of her silky golden hair.