Like A Reward

The very air around the man in sunglasses seems to warp, a field of intensified color like the heat haze above summer asphalt.

“Well done, dreamer,” he says, and the car keys jingle as he slips them into a back pocket.

The man he has been pursuing is dead or dying, not far away. The man in sunglasses took him by surprise, overcame him with the same brute ease with which that man felled Will Graham. No one will be coming by this storage locker parking lot for a while, no one is going to save him; Jack doesn’t know where he is, this was never a case, this was an errand. Will doesn’t look up at his face, he doesn’t look him in the eyes, he can’t. The man has a thumb hooked through a belt loop, his body language casual, hip cocked. Blue jeans, wifebeater shirt; he’s in good shape, handsome, vain, grotesquely self-possessed to a degree that makes the hair on Will’s forearms prickle up, an instinctive recognition of predator and prey.

The man is practically on top of him now, Will a sprawl at about level with his belt, and he sinks down onto one knee and the proximity grows. His white shirt smells, disarmingly pleasantly, like sweat. It ought to be bitter. Will goes completely rigid. He does not dare shut his eyes, but he cannot open his mouth, cannot plead his own defense.

(He’s too young. This man is too young.The profile fits, but he’s been active for thirty, forty, fifty– An apprentice? A copycat?)

–and when the man in sunglasses catches him by his trembling throat (where his pulse lives, where it pounds so violently that Will feels like his heart will burst) and forces him up to look at him, compelling–

This killer hunts boys. No younger than ten, no older than twenty, he’s indiscriminate about race, about hair color, about build, at first they go willingly, he trusses them up, he plays with them a while, and then he–

Will struggles away from his own understanding, but it seizes him anyway, overcoming him like something massive and suffocating. Empathizing with this man is like empathizing with a black hole, with an empty space, with an incomprehensible nothing; it pours into his mind like a black torrent, devoid of stars, and forces everything that is Will out. There’s nothing inside of him that can be seen, no clockwork of pathology; this force just is, the primal elements that other psychopaths possess only distilled and distant from their source. In Will’s nightmares, this man is the black beast that presses on his chest, weighs him down like a millstone until his ribs split, he is the darkness split with white and bleeding mouths.

Will twists his wrists, experimental in his panic, and his bonds begin to cut into his flesh.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” the man in sunglasses says, rolling his head to work out a kink in some muscle. Will’s vision still throbs with jagged white points. “But he would have. The Choirboy, they call him? You’re not his type, obviously, but you stink like scared cop. I guess he panicked.”

Will Graham starts to wheeze that he’s not a cop, he’s not even a real FBI agent, but the man’s broad hand creeps up from his chafed throat to rest lightly over his mouth. He could press down and smother him, he could open himself up to be bitten and then pulp good Will’s brains on the midnight pavement from stung pride, he could muffle a cry, the cry that Will is not capable of making right now as stunned as he is by the starburst of sheer negativity radiating from inside his head. Not negativity as in bad attitude, he’s been in hundreds (thousands) of profoundly sick heads, but negativity as in – lack. Something dizzyingly alien. He can only look and marvel, and this man is marveling back.

His thumb rubs at Will’s lip, at his barely exposed front teeth. His hands smell like blood and salt water. (Dark Angel. The Eye Guy. A lot of other names that ultimately boil down to him killing and eating his way across all 48 continental US states.)

“You’re not for him, though,” the man says, conversationally. His other hand is swinging open a pocket knife with practiced deftness. “You’re for me.”

Will looks where his eyes should be, sees darkened glass, sees smoked mirrors.

The man in sunglasses cuts his bonds quite neatly, and rubs his hand through Will’s damp curls. That gesture is the only thing that keeps Will from sagging forward, from immediately rubbing his wrists or wriggling away; a migraine is throbbing in his head and he is shaking shaking shaking but this man’s touch has a strength to it beyond physical power. Will imagines dark eyes. Will imagines teeth.
Not far away, the frames of his glasses are being scraped forward on the ground by the toe of the man in sunglasses’ shoe.

“You’re mine, Will, and you’ve been mine for a long time now.”

“What are you?”

In his response, Will would swear there was an echo, triplicate voices laughing.