The Fury

THE

FURY

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Synopsis: “I acknowledge the Furies, I believe in them, I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.” —Theodore Dreiser

Author’s Notes: This story was born of a challenge posted by Brother Grimace in the Iron Chef: Angst Lord Time-Trials thread on PPMB, in May 2009: “Have any two characters in a location where circumstances prevent them from leaving or being extracted easily (although they are in no way injured), and have them engage in a relationship-changing conversation, when they discover that they’re being observed, in some way, by a great many people. Then, have them finish that conversation” (emphasis his). An intriguing and excellent idea, and thank you.

This story makes use of a free type font for the title, for aesthetic value. The font is Cornerstone Regular, which has a great dramatic punch to it. The author feels it improves the overall look of the tale. The font is available for downloading (again, for free and without viruses) at SearchFreeFonts.com or WebPagePublicity.com.

Acknowledgements: BG, you da MAN!

Vengeance is mine; I will repay.

—Leo Tolstoy, epigraph to Anna Karenina

It was five-thirteen, past time to go home and start the weekend. The elevator doors opened as he loosened his tie. When he stepped inside he noticed the strong odor of spearmint in the air. He turned and saw a gum-chewing cleaning lady in brown coveralls with a covered bucket in her gloved hand. She stood by the control panel and stared into space, chewing like a cow on a cud. “Excuse me,” he said as he reached over to press the button for the lobby. The elevator doors closed. The car started downward.

He stepped back to the corner of the elevator opposite the cleaning lady, giving her only a glance. She was twenty-something, too old to be of interest, with a long brunette ponytail and unattractive eyeglasses with large circular lenses. Someone new on the night shift? Was her gum the source of that minty smell? He resigned himself to half a minute of suffering, then looked away and began to daydream about naked young women—naked girls actually, naïve nymphets from the Far East with dark hair, slim figures, beautiful faces, and little resistance to an older man’s attentions and charm, and his money if it came to that. He dreamed of innocent girls who would do anything for him, and had. He loved his weekends.

The tired cleaning lady set her bucket on the floor. He glanced at her again as she raised a key that had been hidden in her bucket hand and stuck it into the emergency override slot on the control panel. She turned the key once and punched the emergency stop button with an index finger. The elevator screeched to a halt, almost throwing him to the floor. The doors remained shut. In the sudden stillness he heard alarm bells ring, echoing in the elevator shaft.

“What’s going on?” he said to her, but he stopped speaking because the cleaning woman had pulled a dull black pistol from a coverall pocket. She kept it close to her, causally aiming at his midsection. The weapon’s muzzle seemed amazingly large.

The cleaning lady spit her gum at his shoes, then took off her ugly glasses with her free hand and tossed them to the floor. “Did you ever finish that novel you were working on?” she asked in a deep, nasal voice.

He did not answer right away, so she repeated the question with more volume and raised the gun as she did.

“What novel?” he gasped.

The cleaning lady looked disappointed. “What novel,” she repeated with disdain, then spoke slowly and pedantically. “The novel you were writing about a sensitive, older man and a budding girl-child, woman-child, whatever. You talked about it when you were substituting at Lawndale High School seven years ago, the first time you tried to molest Tiffany Blum-Deckler.”

The breath caught in his throat. He forced himself to look away from the weapon to study the cleaning lady, to see if he recognized her. He did not. Could she be the one in the newspapers, the one that—

“You don’t remember me,” said the woman in a bland tone. “I must not have been your type.” She waited a moment longer, then added, “I was a friend of Tiffany Blum-Deckler before she killed herself. I sat next to her in our literature class at Lawndale High. I’m Sandi Griffin.”

It was her. His blood froze.

“They call me The Fury in the news,” she said. “Perhaps they still do. I don’t know, I don’t keep up with it.”

He tried to speak, found it impossible.

“You promised to keep registering with the police as a sex offender,” the young woman said. “That was actually keeping you safe. I avoid the cops. Then six months ago you took off, changed your name, changed your looks, and settled here. You still look like you did, Mister Edwards. Or do you want me to call you Ken?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking—” he began.

The gun rose. The enormous muzzle went right for the spot between his eyes.

“Lie to me again,” she whispered, “and I’ll blow a hole through your head the size of fucking Baltimore.”

His hands were raised but he did not remember raising them. His fingers trembled.

“You’re number six,” she said. “Not very many on the scorecard, but I do my best. There’s such a thin line between being a vigilante and a serial killer. Not that I think it matters with pedophiles.”

“Don’t do this,” he said. “Please, I beg you. I’m not a ped—”

“Shut the fuck up.” Her gloved finger moved on the trigger. “Don’t talk to me unless I ask you a question. And don’t argue with me about the definition of a pedophile. I am not in the mood.”

The only sound was his labored breathing.

“I talk a lot,” said the young woman. “It’s in my nature. I always talk to the people I kill. Almost always. I wish sometimes I didn’t, but that’s just me. Do you mind if I talk, Mister Edwards?”

He shook his head no.

“Good.” She leaned back against the wood-paneled elevator wall. The gun did not waver. “I didn’t talk to Tommy Sherman when I killed him. There wasn’t time to talk, it was one of those now-or-never things. He grabbed this girl I knew and tweaked her boob hard. She cried for an hour. He thought it was funny. I was cutting a class at the football field so I could smoke, I saw him coming, and I got behind this big crate he was looking at. The crate was high and broad but not very wide, finely balanced. I shoved it over on him, and the edge of the crate smashed his skull in. Splat, his head was a pink and gray mess. I ran away, threw up a few times, then went back to class. He was the hardest one to do, the first one, but he was the easiest one of all. I didn’t have to plan it or anything. I really thought I’d get caught, but the school’s principal had so many maintenance and security people running around doing this and that, trying to get old Tommy out from under the crate, they ruined the crime scene. Police couldn’t get a thing from it. I—”

A buzzing noise came from the young woman’s coveralls pocket. She looked down, then rolled her eyes, sighed, and reached into the pocket with her left hand. “Forgot I left it on,” she said, producing a cell phone. “Excuse me.” She opened it without taking her eyes off him, then raised it to her mouth. “Hello?”

He heard a woman’s voice on the other end, but he could not tell what was being said.

“I’m a little busy right now, Quinn,” said the young woman. “Can you—” She stopped talking and listened for a long moment. Her eyebrows went up. “Oh, really?” she said, and she looked up at the elevator’s ceiling: a bright metal grill covering fluorescent lights and a fan. “Are we on camera?” she said. Her gaze went back to the man in the elevator with her. “Damn.”

After another long moment, she lowered the cell phone. “We’re on a live camera and a live mike,” she said to him. “The police are watching us. An old friend of mine, Quinn Morgendorffer, is with them. She was a friend of Tiffany’s, too. The police want her to talk me out of killing you because you assaulted Tiffany Blum-Deckler when she was a high-school senior and got away with it. She killed herself later. Maybe you knew that.”

“I—”

“I asked you not to talk,” she said with a frown. She raised the phone to her ear. “How did they find me so soon? Oh. Yeah, I thought it would be the car. I should have changed license plates a while ago. Stupid of me.” She listened for a while, watching the man across from her. She snorted and looked angry. “So I can’t restart the elevator without going straight to the basement to the police,” she said. “Quinn—yeah, I know, I know. Oh, of course not! C’mon, you know me better than that! You of all people, honestly! Hold on a sec.”

She lowered the phone. “Well, that’s great. Now they have my confession to Tommy Sherman’s murder on top of everything else. Quinn said—well, the police said if I surrender quietly, they’ll cut a deal with me to avoid the death penalty.” She chewed the inside of her cheek. “But you didn’t confess to assaulting Tiffany, and if you did they’d throw it out in court because I was pointing a gun at you. This sucks. I really blew it. Some Greek-myth Fury I am.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, deep in thought. He prayed to a God he did not believe in and promised to do anything if his life would be spared.

The phone went back to her ear. “Okay, you win,” she said. “I’ll surrender. I was tired of all this running around, anyway. I know, Quinn. I know. I love you, too. I’ll talk to you later. What? No, I won’t hang up. I know they’re listening in. Hold on.”

The cell phone lowered. The gun did not. “I can’t believe this,” she fumed, glaring at him. “I really planned this one out, too. I was going to do you in here, walk out the main doors, and be on the road in three minutes flat, but someone spotted my car and recognized the plates. Probably got the number from that damn TV crime show. Figures. Everyone says TV is bad for you, and I guess in my case that’s true.”

She exhaled. Her shoulders sagged. “It’s probably for the best. I’m worn out. I can’t run anymore. I could use a long rest and three squares a day, even in solitary. It’d be a vacation from this lousy life.” She lifted her chin as she gave him a cold look. “You look like you want to say something. Go ahead. You can talk.”

“Thank you,” he said. It was the most sincere thing he had ever said. “I mean it. Thank you.”

She frowned. “For what?”

“F-f-f-for letting me go.”

“Ah. Yeah, right, sorry I didn’t catch that. Letting you go.” She looked him in the eyes for a while before she said, “Were you ever in Texas?”

“Uh . . . yes, I was, once.”

“Where?”

“Uh, Houston. I went there on business. I didn’t hurt anybody there, I swear it.”

“So you never actually lived in Texas.”

“No, no. Never did.”

“Kind of a pity,” said the woman. “My friend Quinn lived in Texas for a while when she was a kid.” She raised the phone again. “Quinn, where did you used to live? Highland, yeah. That was near Lubbock, wasn’t it? Out in the west part of the state. Yeah. What did you tell me your mom used to use to keep ants out of the house?” She listened. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Thanks.” She lowered the phone. “Spearmint,” she said. “Her mom used crushed spearmint. Ants hate it. She put it around the doors and windows so the ants wouldn’t try to get in. Ants are a real problem in Texas.”

A corner of her mouth quirked up into a smile. “Especially the fire ants. They’re a real bitch, those fire ants.”

It took a few seconds for the words to kick in. He looked down at the covered bucket by her boots.

The earsplitting gunshot was not a millionth as bad as the sledgehammer blow to his stomach that doubled him over and threw him back against the elevator wall. He wanted to vomit but had nothing to vomit from. An overpowering sensation of wrongness rose over the screaming agony in his gut. He clenched at the wound to close it, stop the life from leaking out, but warm blood ran through his fingers and dripped on his shoes and pants.

He did not notice the cleaning woman pocket the gun and cell phone, then kneel and open the bucket. When she stood up she threw the contents of the bucket at him, then tossed the bucket at his feet.

Hundreds of thousands of tiny red things spilled over his arms and face and neck, things that moved and ran through his hair and went into his shirt and crawled over every part of him.

Then the red things began to sting.

Inhuman screams rang out in the elevator. The phone line transmitted them perfectly even from the woman’s pocket. The security-camera video of a man in a business suit writhing and twisting and thrashing about on the elevator floor came through perfectly as well. Everyone in the building’s basement and at the security desk in the lobby saw it. It was a big hit on the Internet two years later when it was leaked.

The young woman in coveralls pulled on a pair of heavy gloves, then did nothing but watch the screaming man covered with fire ants for several minutes. The minty mixture in which she had soaked her coveralls the night before worked like a charm, except for a couple of bites and stings she could live with. She had injected herself with painkillers a half hour earlier and hardly noticed.

When the man did not writhe about and scream so much, she pulled out the gun. This time she did not smile. “See you in Hell,” she said, then added, “Ken.” She shot him in the lower back through the kidneys, which brought a few last screams, then fired into his head until she was out of ammunition.

With a sigh she tossed the empty pistol into the swarming crimson mass covering the late Mister Edwards. After she turned the elevator override off with her key, she leaned against a paneled wall as the elevator descended, watching the ants sting the corpse without stopping. She was done. It was time for her long-overdue vacation to begin.

Original: 05/09/09, 11/03/09, 05/09/10

FINIS