Posted by Weasel for Megaton on September 09, 2000 at 22:11:07:
JUST VENGEANCE by Megaton
I waited there in the dark closet, waited in the fresh smell of clean clothes, peering through the slots in the doors,
watching for Karen to come home. Karen, my best friend. Rebecca Karen Prichett was her full name, but no one called
her Rebecca. I had known her since third grade and she had always been Karen to me. Now, here we were, Meg and
Karen, almost finished with high school, almost ready to fly on our own.
Like all best friends, we shared things, confided our secrets in one another. We knew things about each other that no one
else knew. Things we would never tell anyone else. Karen, for instance, once told me she was attracted to Pam Conley,
one of the majorettes. Not that she would ever do anything, she said. She just felt...strange...around Pam. Sometimes
she wondered what it would be like, to do it with a woman instead of a man.
But she told me that in confidence, of course. It wasn’t to ever get out. Not to be common knowledge.
And I shared something with her in return. I told her sometimes I had fantasies about women, too. And men. Not just
sex. I don’t know how it started, where it began. I think I have been like this all my life. When I was twelve I used to
go through the house at night and look at Mom and Dad and Amber while they slept. Something about their still, silent
faces excited me. I didn’t know what it was called, back then. I kept it hidden, I was ashamed of what I was.
I told Karen about it. About the way I got hot when I thought about killing people. Anybody. Anybody was fair game
for my fantasies. I told her I had found some websites with people just like me on them. People who had necro
fantasies. Necrodudes and Necrobabes, they called themselves. I didn’t know that before I found those sites. Nebraska
isn’t a very exciting place.
I remember Karen’s face, the strange, strange look in her eyes. The question she asked me: “D-do you ever think about
me?” She stammered as she spoke. Like she was afraid. That was weird; Karen had never been afraid of me. Why
should she be? I was still the same, still Megan Andrea Toney, and telling her my secret hadn’t changed me a bit.
“No,” I lied. But I had, of course. Sometimes when I was walking together with her, with my friend Karen, I would
look at her, at her long white legs and long white arms and soft white neck, at her mane of blonde hair gently tossed in
the breeze, and I would feel the old shuddery, sexy feeling come up inside me, just like it did when I got it on with
Bobby. Not many girls turned me on, but Karen was one of them.
And I thought about killing her, just like I did with Bobby. All the different tasty ways to drain a living body of its life. I
had special ways for different people. For Bobby I always thought about hanging, thought about his strong, hard body
struggling at the end of the noose, that cock I loved to feel inside me sticking out straight and veined and hard, spurting
streams of white fountains in its death throes,as Bobby’s handsome face turned blue and his tongue lolled from his
beautiful mouth. For Karen, it was something else.
But I lied to her. I told her no. And I made her promise never to tell anyone.
Almost a week later I came home from school to find Mom and Dad and even Mrs. Long the youth pastor waiting.
Someone had told them all about my fantasies. Dad had checked the computer log and seen the places I’d been going.
He read some of my stories as well. And I remember my big sister Amber, I remember her coming in and standing in the
doorway of the kitchen and watching as I shouted and cried and sobbed and tried to explain. Stood there and left
without a single word. She won’t even talk about it with me. And I couldn’t believe Mom and Dad had actually told
Mrs. Long. Why did they have to bring her into it at all?
So my life became hell. And I finally realized who it was that had told them. Only one person could have. Only one
person knew. And after a lot of thought, here I was, in the closet. With something in my hand, something for Karen.
Something I’d thought about before.
Karen’s mother and father were gone somewhere, her brother Michael was probably with them. Good. It had been very
easy to sneak in, very easy to hide. And now she came into the room, my best friend. Karen, whom I hated like I had
never hated anyone in my life. The one who betrayed me, who embarrassed me, who made me look like a freak, a creep,
a monster to my own family, to people that had no business knowing. She had to be the one, she was the only person
who knew.
I peered through the slats. Karen had her back to me as she undressed in front of the mirror. I saw her reach up and
fondle her small, round breasts, saw her stretch and run her hands down her sleek sides. And I felt my heart pounding
and my sex twitching and my breath coming hard and heavy. It was time to pay her back. And I was ready.
I pushed open the door, stepped forward, in one fluid motion I threw my hand over Karen’s mouth, pulled her head
back. Exactly as I expected, she grabbed my arm with both hands, struggled in my grasp, a scream smothered in her
throat. My other hand came around her, pushed the foot of cold knifeblade into her body, just beneath that small, perky
left breast, pushing up and deep within, burying the steel in the throbbing muscle of her frightened, betraying heart.
I let go and stepped back. And watched.
Karen tottered forward, her hands now splayed across her bobbing tits, blue veins forming patterns in their soft backs.
Her fingers digging rhythmically into the flesh, trying somehow to reach the dying heart, trying somehow to make it
beat. Urine ran down the long white legs, stained the carpet at her feet. She fell to her knees and groaned, a deep,
horrible sound that sounded like it was torn from the middle of her ravaged heart. Rolled over on her side and laid there,
slowly writhing.
I stood over her, watched her syrupy slow, painful movements, watched the black hilt of the knife quiver in time with her
heartbeat. She looked up at me, struggled to focus on my face, recognized me. Her mouth moved; she gagged,
coughed and finally formed words: “Meg...get help...Help...”
“Help?” I knelt down close to her, brought my face close to hers. “I’m the one who killed you, bitch.”
Confusion on her features. Disbelief.
“Yes, I killed you. Because you told my parents. You told my parents my secret. MY SECRET!” I grabbed her by the
throat and squeezed with all the strength I had, feeling things shift and squish inside her soft white neck, watching her
face turn blue and her tongue loll from her mouth, as the knife twitched in her chest, blood pumping from the sides of
the wound with every beat of her failing heart. And I was screaming, I don’t remember what, words were just pouring
out of me. Most of all I was telling her to die. My best friend. My betrayer.
I don’t know which killed her, the strangulation or the knife. Or both. I only know that all at once someone pulled me
off her, someone held my arms in a strong, painful grip, and my kicking availed me nothing. And I saw Karen’s mom fall
at her side and touch her and check for a pulse, her tears falling on Karen’s dead face, and I heard her screaming “She’s
dead, o my God, she’s dead, she’s dead.”
I suddenly yanked forward and bit the hand that had me pinioned; someone yelled and I was free. For a second. I turned
and saw Mike bawling his eyes out in the doorway, saw Karen’s dad in front of me, saw his bloody fist come at me.
And I saw nothing else for a long time. And now I’m here in this room with the padded walls, telling this, my story.
The psychologist is a middle-aged, no nonsense woman named Dr. Childress. I want to kill Dr. Childress, but that can
wait. Yesterday she asked me about Karen, and what I did. When I told her about my secret, and the way Karen had
betrayed me, and the vengeance I had taken, Dr. Childress asked me “So do you think what you did was right? Do you
think the vengeance was just?”
But I just laughed and replied: “No. It was just vengeance.”