Truly, Deeply Disturbed

By Andrew Nienaber

Ever been cut off by a self-centered driver or angered by someone bringing too many items into the express lane at the grocery store, and thought "this jerk needs to suffer"? You're certainly not alone. But there's someone out there who is taking care of it for all of us without the stomach to punish those who deserve it. He doesn't wear a cape or a badge. You've never heard his name, and you never will. But he's out there, eliminating the bullies, the self-centered and the just plain terrible one by one. And he's just hit a snag in the form of a little girl named Samantha.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Post Mortem Press
• Release date: Sep 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465870599

Andrew Nienaber

Andrew Nienaber has been a professional theater director for the past decade, working primarily in opera. He wrote a brief but highly successful blog, The Ill HumorMan. His short play They Look Just Like Us, as well as his translation of Sartre's No Exit, have been performed in the United States and England. He has had short stories and poems published in various small periodicals, and Truly, Deeply Disturbed is his first completed novel.

Book preview

things.

Chapter 1

It’s funny, but we always think of the heart as pumping, as if it’s some sort of perpetual propulsion machine, endlessly spewing blood through our veins. We so rarely think of the other side of the mechanics of the heart: the drawing. Sucking. In order to pump blood, the heart must first draw blood into itself. It’s a two-step process, the ba—DUMP of the heartbeat. The next time your heart is racing – I mean really racing, like it does after an extended run, or in a moment of complete, desperate terror – spend a moment to stop and take inventory of what that feels like. You’ll notice that it’s not the pumping of the heart that you really feel. It’s there, of course, but it’s sort of in the background. What you really feel, if you pay close attention, is your heart frantically drawing blood into itself so that it has enough to pump back out again. It’s your heart playing a game of catch-up with itself. It’s demand outstripping supply.

I have plenty of time to mull this sort of thing over while I’m waiting. I don’t just charge into someone’s house like a ski-masked redneck knocking over a liquor store. I do things right, because I have no desire to be caught.

I wait patiently outside the back door, in the dark, the knife cold and glistening in my hand. I use a Lynne Sting when I kill with a knife. It’s a beautiful piece of work: four inch damask blade, perfectly balanced, giraffe bone handle. It’s slim and sharp. I’m not Jason Voorhees; I do my work with finesse. This knife set me back almost four hundred dollars, and I have never regretted a single penny.

He’s in the kitchen, putting away his groceries. I can hear the refrigerator door open, the shelves rattle, bottles clink together on the fridge door. Then I hear him walk out of the room momentarily. He left the fridge open. I can’t fucking believe it. Who does that? This man is begging me to murder him, if only for the greater good.

After a few moments he comes back in and sets a second bag of groceries down on the table. He closes the refrigerator and opens a cupboard. He’s getting closer to the door. He’s getting closer to me. He crumples up the plastic grocery bags and throws them in the trash. On principal this makes my blood boil, but I have to stay cool. I do things right, and I can’t have my righteous hatred of this brain-dead piece of meat muddling things in my head. Plus, this last bit of eco-abomination was exactly what I needed. The discarded grocery sacks topped off the trash bag. He pulls the bag out of the can, ties it off, and heads toward the back door.

I slide backward a step into the shadow. He’ll open the door toward me, hiding me from view. There’s no chance he’ll push the door open enough to hit me; nobody is that enthusiastic about taking out the trash.

The door opens. It stops just in front of my face. In front of my huge, toothy smile.

Like his shadow, I follow behind him silently. The floodlights on the garage cast shadows backward, so he has no indication that I’m here. Not a sound, not a shadow. I don’t even exist. He takes the lid off of the trash can and I swiftly and silently bring my left hand around his shoulder, quickly puncturing his trachea. The trash can lid falls to the cement driveway with a dim clatter, nothing anyone would notice. I can feel the rush of wind escaping his throat through the thin layer of latex on my hand. Business first. Make sure he can’t scream. A scream, that’s the sort of thing neighbors notice.

Of course, after the initial seconds of panic he’s going to try to fight back, so I quickly take a step back, let him turn around to face me, and bring my foot down as hard as I can on his kneecap. Like breaking branches for firewood. In fact, it’s the same sort of sound, more a crunch than a crack. It’s not the clean, vertical fracture you get when you fall off your bike as a child, but more of a splintering. He falls in a heap on the ground. Now he can’t fight back, he can’t run away, and he can’t scream. Now I can really get down to what I do.

The back yard has a high fence, the houses on this block are all ranches, and the man lives alone. There is only an extremely slight risk of someone interrupting me, so I feel comfortable taking the time to really indulge myself. Tonight’s not going to be a quickie. Oh no, I’m going to take my time. I’m going to wine and dine this man’s suffering before I put it to bed. I’m going to really enjoy it.

He’s grasping the hole in his throat, trying to keep the air or the blood, or maybe the life from leaking out. Honestly, if I were him, I would prefer it leave as quickly as possible. But humans, we’re so attached to life. We struggle to survive, even if survival means suffering and torment. It’s endearing it its way. I want him to hold on to life for as long as he can. Otherwise it’s just no fun at all.

Since he’s nothing more than a writhing heap on the driveway now it’s much easier for me to bend over him and slide the blade of my ridiculously expensive knife into his lower back, piercing his kidney. He jerks and his mouth opens wide, but no sound comes out. Only blood. A cloud of blood like the word balloon in a comic strip. Like a word balloon that says Jesus Christ, that fucking hurts!

The kidney stab, I know this will be fatal eventually. Eventually being the key word. He’ll have plenty of time to wish he were dead before he actually dies. And god knows, with all of the things I’m planning to do to him in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, it may not be the kidney stab that kills him.

When he calms down a bit, when he stops thrashing quite so much so that I can really get to work on him with some precision, I put a knee on his stomach. Of course I do this for the practical reason of keeping him still while I work, but the fact that it grinds his fresh stab wound into the pavement, pushing bits of grit into the puncture, only makes the act more pleasurable. With him more or less incapacitated (though struggling under my weight like a fish on the deck of a boat), I once again slide the knife smoothly under his skin, this time at a horizontal angle into his belly. This will puncture the colon without causing undue blood loss. I can’t have him going into shock just when things get fun.

He’s given up keeping pressure on his punctured trachea now and his arms flail wildly, vainly trying to knock the knife out of my hand, to claw at my eyes, to do both the things they teach you to do in a self-defense class and the things they teach you never to do in a self-defense class. To make me stop. He’s not yet ready to die, and I admire that. Though his throat is slit and two of his vital organs are compromised, he continues to fight, continues to hold ferociously on to his life, though his grip slackens every moment.

After a few minutes of thrashing with my knee on his gut, futilely trying to throw me off of his torso, he calms down. Calms is maybe not the right word. More aptly, the shock begins to settle upon him and he loses the ability to control his muscles to the extent needed to fight. For the moment. I know he will get this ability back at some point, and I look forward to it. Murder without struggle, what’s the point? It’s like non—alcoholic beer or softcore porn. Sure, it has the basic feeling of doing what you want to do, but it’s utterly castrated. All of the joy is missing. It’s masturbation, and not in the good way. It’s like masturbation without an orgasm. Totally fucking pointless.

When he is still again I have a crucial decision to make. I have one more good cut before he goes into deep shock and nothing will hurt him much anymore. I could castrate him, but I don’t want this to look like some sort of sexual deviance. I am not killing this man because I am a frustrated homosexual, or because I want to fuck my mother but fear my father. I am killing him because he’s a prick, and because I like killing people. I could stab him in a seriously vital organ like the heart or a lung, but that would speed the dying process along, and I’ve already spent the effort to make sure his death is lingering and painful. I could cut off a few digits, but that’s just crude. That’s the sort of thing you see in bad horror movies and United States blacksite prisons. My next move is crucial, and I really don’t want to fuck it up. I stand up for a moment, relieving the pressure on his abdomen. He starts to crawl away, feebly dragging himself along the concrete, tearing the fragile skin of his elbows. I watch for a moment while I contemplate my next move, then give him a solid kick to the nose to curtail any further attempt at escape. I always wear steel—toed shoes, so the kick delivers another satisfying crunch, and leaves him crumpled and helpless on the ground.

As my steel toe hits him, inspiration hits me. I know exactly what this man needs.

He is face down on the concrete now, lacking the strength or will to pull himself up. He loses some points with me for this – he’s already survived a cut trachea and two punctured organs, and a little broken nose is going to put him down for the count? How pathetic. This only adds to my need to truly show him suffering. What a sniveling little coward. A real man would still be fighting.

I grab him by the hair, drag him over to the garage, and prop him up against the door so that he’s sitting upright. I squat in front of him. The urge to soliloquize is strong now. I want to tell him why he’s suffering, why he had to die. But I have a rule. Justifying your actions to your victims is the kind of thing that bad movie psychos and James Bond villains do. I am above that. I prefer to think that he knows exactly why he’s here. So instead of explaining, I give him a nice, close look at the tools of my trade. I show him the knife. I even take special care to angle it so that the blade glints in the light of the flood lamp over the door of the garage. No, I won’t tell you why I’m doing this. But I will show you how. I will give you a chance to admire the exquisite blade that killed you.

He seems unimpressed. Of course his eyes go wide, but it’s not admiration. It’s anticipation. He’s not marveling at this superior, hand-folded blade, or marveling at the handle made from the actual bone of an actual giraffe. All he’s focused on at the moment is where that exquisite blade will next be inserted into his body. I find his lack of appreciation uninspiring. You can bring a whore to culture, as they say, but you can’t make her think. So the appreciation portion of our time together is now over. Next up, the horror.

I lower the blade, making sure he’s watching every movement of my hands. I make a quick motion at his neck, as though I’m going to slash his jugular. But this is just a feint, just a little cheap scare to keep him on the edge of his seat. Cutting the jugular is too easy, silly man. I’m not going to let you off the hook like that, not after all of the work I’ve done to keep you alive. Instead, I put the blade at the neck of his polo shirt and pull down with all of my might, cutting the garment from top to bottom without so much as scraping the skin of his chest. I pull the fabric aside. In this moment he gains some small appreciation of what is in store for him. I am no petty thug who wants to end his life in a flash of violence. Clearly, I want him to see. I want him to watch what happens to him.

With the shirt out of the way I once again flash the knife before his eyes, giving him one last opportunity to see the instrument of his undoing. He continues to fail to appreciate the glory of it. I hover the blade over his lower abdomen like a surgeon steadily lining up his first incision. His eyes grow as wide as tea saucers, and I slowly, precisely lower the knife. Just before I insert the tip of the blade I look into his eyes. I can see him silently begging for clemency, but I am not a merciful man. His eyes plead, and my eyes are as cold as the Bering Strait in February.

I cut him. Left to right. His left to his right, to be precise. Across the abdomen, about an inch beneath the lungs. I don’t want to puncture anything crucial. A long lateral cut to the belly. He writhes as I sever muscle and fat. That cut hurts like hell, the pain cutting through even the severe shock that he’s fallen into.

And once the lateral cut is finished, I reinsert the blade in the middle of the laceration, and cut vertically, downward toward his groin. With surgical precision I make two clean, simple slices that will free his bowels. The flaps of skin fold back under the pressure of his pent-up internal organs like the flimsy foil backing of an allergy pill. His guts – sorry, guts is such a crass word – his entrails spill forth in an eruption of steam, stench and grey-green flesh. His eyes grow wide. I believe he finally fully understands the depth of what I want him to experience. It’s not enough for me that he suffers. I want him to see the foul inner workings of his body. I want him to know that he is even uglier on the inside than he is on the outside. I want him to have the rare punishment of knowing what the organs that make his body work look like.

I want the last thing he sees before his life ends to be his own slimy, wretched, foul-smelling, mucous-covered entrails.

His digestive organs spill forth on the ground and are instantly covered in grit and dirt and small bits of crushed plant matter, all of the things that one assumes are on the surface of a concrete driveway. As far as deaths go, it’s really rather unsanitary. If you have to be disemboweled, try to do so in the comparatively clean environment of the inside of a building. For some reason, the thought of foreign matter mixed with our organs is disturbing to us in the highest. For instance, try this little thought experiment: imagine your guts falling out onto a pristine, newly-sanitized floor. You pick them up and stuff them back inside you. Now picture them falling out onto your front lawn. When you pick them up they’re covered with specks of dirt and tiny twigs and those helicopter seed things that fall off of trees in the Midwest. You push them back inside your abdominal cavity. Which scenario do you find preferable?

I thought so.

Once his colon and small intestine are on the ground, my work is done. All I have left is to enjoy the fruits of my labor. I take a few steps away from him and pick up a large green maple leaf from the lawn to wipe my knife clean with. He doesn’t even know I’m here now, his attention is entirely focused on his escaped digestive tract sprawled out on the ground in front of him. He doesn’t even try to replace them, which is a time—honored futile human reaction. He just stares at them with eyes turned down as if asking them why they have betrayed him, why they decided to make a run for it when he needed them most.

This continues for another hour and a quarter before he finally slips into unconsciousness. I have watched every moment, never taking my eyes from him, unwilling to miss even a second of the quintessential human drama: the slow and painful death. When he is irrevocably out, I walk back to the lump of flesh that was once his body, lean over it, and drive the sharp point of my knife up through his right eye into his brain pan. I can’t risk even