Path Less Taken

When I regain consciousness, the first thing I think is: Oh, shit.

This thought is closely followed by an intensely sharp pain in the back of my head. My cheek is pressed against the cold concrete ground, and my body feels contorted like a rag doll thrown carelessly onto the floor. Something is digging into my wrists, and I can only assume a pair of handcuffs adorn them. Even the slightest movement is agonizing, so I stay slumped on the floor while my mind races.

“Good. You’re awake,” a voice says, an unmistakable tremble behind the words. “I thought I actually killed you.” Was that a hint of relief?

“You should have,” I retort with as much threatening vitriol as I can muster, but it sounds watered down. Footsteps grow closer until they’re standing in front of me, just a bit out of arm’s reach. All I can see are their shoes and shins, covered by grimy jeans.

With painstaking care, I prop myself up on my forearm then look up with just my eyes to meet theirs. The girl’s jaw is clenched, her eyebrows tightly drawn. She aims the gun at my head, and even with the stability of both hands, the barrel shakes slightly. I grimace as I crawl to the nearest wall to use as support to sit up and wince as I contort my arms to reach the back of my head. When I bring my fingertips back down, they’re slick with blood.

“Why would you do this?” she quavers. Tears pool in her eyes, a mixture of fury and panic. How could I have been so stupid? I wonder how long she’d been faking unconsciousness.

“Why does anyone do anything?” I reply calmly. I have to regain my strength; I need to regain control of the situation.

“Goddamnit!” she shouts frustratedly, and it echos loudly in the small concrete room. My heart jumps, but I don’t move. She points the gun at me with renewed vigor. “Tell me how to get out or I swear to God I’ll shoot you right now!”

She’s holding the weapon, the power, yet her threats feel hollow. I don’t know her as a person, but I’d bet my life that she’d never pull that trigger. I exhale a sharp laugh through my nose.

“You think I’m afraid to die? Anyway, if you kill me, then you truly have no way of escaping. We’ll rot in here together.”

It’s true that I’m not afraid to die. I don’t mind that my reputation would be forever tarnished when the police find our bodies and discover what a sick person I was. I kind of like the idea of becoming infamous and having a viral documentary made about me, met with both praised acclaim and outraged backlash because of how it sensationalized my heinous crimes instead of highlighting the memory of the victims.

On the other hand, there is a unique satisfaction in successfully hiding such a dark secret from the world. If she kills me, I’d never be able to see my box of treasures again. Never be able to touch the ribbon-tied lockets of hair from my favorite girls, or use the artisan dining flatware set that I’d crafted from their bones. How tragic that all of these things would end up in the back of a police evidence room, gathering dust.

No. There’s a way out. If there’s a universe that exists for every possible outcome, then there’s a chance that I’m in the one where I make it out of this alive. A timeline in which this girl becomes part of my collection, as originally intended. I really need a new salad fork.

“What’s your name?” I ask with a neutral tone, attempting to humanize myself.

“Why do you want to know?” she snaps with irritation.

“My name’s Ernest,” I lie.

“I don’t care. What’s the code for the keypad? I couldn’t find a real key, so the only way out must be with the keypad,” she states with wavering confidence. Her eyes are wide and dart around the room nervously, like a caged animal.

“If I give you the code, then you go to the police, and I end up in prison. Alternatively, I escape and uproot my entire life to be forever hunted by the authorities. And if I don’t give you the code, then we both die in here. Prison, death, or banishment—there’s no winning for me in any scenario.”

“I’ll just try every combination until I get it, then,” she declares with a resolute murmur.

“A four-digit pin with nine numbers on the pad—there are ten thousand possible combinations. How many have you tried already? Are you keeping track?” I ask, mildly amused as I stare at the opposite wall, listening to the repeated piercing beep that indicates the wrong code was entered. Every once in a while, she lets out a frustrated huff.

When I first spotted her, she looked like she wouldn’t put up a fight. Thin, mousy, unassuming. My first impressions were quickly proven wrong as I expended every ounce of energy dragging her into my car while trying to stifle her screams with a soaked cloth. Her tenacity was almost impressive; even more surprising is the fact that she’s the only person to have woken up prematurely from the sedative.

“What’s your name?” I ask again, this time genuinely curious. I rub my raw, chafed wrists, resisting the urge to ask her to loosen the handcuffs—I refuse to devolve into begging. “Humor me. Do you know how much a detective would kill to have an open conversation with someone like me?”

She glances up from the keypad with a humorless laugh. “Margo,” she replies shortly. I wonder if she’s given me a fake name, too.

“You don’t look like a Margo,” I remark in a light tone.

“And you don’t look like you deserve to have a name at all,” she retorts without missing a beat.

I can’t help but smirk at her newfound confidence.

Psychoanalyzing her has been a welcome distraction from the sharp, persistent pain in the back of my head, which I think is still bleeding.

“Why did you do this? Did you torture small animals when you were a kid? Did all the adults around you ignore the red flags? Were you abused or something?” she seethes. Rhetorical questions, though she hit every nail on the head.

“Not many small animals roaming around the city besides nasty rats and pigeons, but once in a blue moon, I’d get lucky and find a stray cat,” I reflect. She looks sickened and exasperated, but unsurprised.

“How many people?” she asks somberly.

“Twenty-two. You would have been twenty-three.”

Her face is drawn and pale; I speculate she’s imagining all of the gruesome scenarios that could be happening right now. “Just women?”

“Mostly, yes. A couple of men, but those were circumstantial. Not by preference.”

“I can’t believe this is a real conversation I’m having,” she murmurs to herself.

“You know, this is a first for me, not being the one in power. Bravo, Mar-go,” I reluctantly commend. She narrows her eyes at me with disgust.

“Guns only have power if the person you’re aiming at is afraid of death,” she remarks bitterly, then looks down at the gun with furrowed brows for a minute before breaking the silence. When she looks back up, her face is expressionless. “Is sexual abuse one of your MOs?”

I let a silence simmer over us.

“Answer the question,” she demands coldly through clenched teeth. Devoid of emotion, but her eyes are sharp and venomous. A shiver runs down my spine, closely followed by irritation at my body’s involuntary reaction.

“Do you really want to know?” I ask gravely. Unblinking, she waits for me to continue, so I incline my head slightly as positive confirmation to her question.

Without a word, she strides over to me and lifts the gun before swiftly smashing the hilt across my cheekbone. Did she just pistol-whip me? I take in a sharp breath, and before I can exhale, she smashes it against my head again, and I yelp in pain. She grabs the collar of my shirt with one hand, yanking my head up so her face is close to mine. In her other hand, she presses the cold muzzle of the gun hard against my temple. I’m both taken aback and envious of her sudden burst of energy.

My eyes flutter shut for a moment in response to the wave of pain, the overwhelming stench of sweat and blood. I have a concussion, I’m sure of it. Maybe even permanent brain damage. She drops me, and I crumple into a rag-doll position again.

Margo looks like a caged animal again as she paces the room. Earlier, she’d resembled a high-strung rodent, but now she mirrors a feral lion, stalking back and forth with tense muscles and unrelenting eye contact.

“My sister went missing three years ago. They never found her body, and I’ve always had this pit in my stomach that someone like you is the reason she’s gone. Her name was Annie. She had blue hair and was wearing an orange dress the day she went missing. Impossible to forget.”

It’s hard to concentrate on her words. My mind is fuzzy, and my vision is developing a black vignette around the edges. The window for the adrenaline burst has passed.

“Was it you?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I reply honestly, “I don’t normally ask for names.”

If Margo were covered in gasoline, my words act as a match to set her aflame. She kicks me hard in the ribs twice, and I let out a series of gurgled screams, then curl into myself. To cope with the pain, I envision strangling her as she begs for her life. A request which I’d disrespectfully decline.

“You’re lying,” she hisses.

“I’m not. She doesn’t sound familiar, and I remember all of them… You’ll never believe me; it doesn’t matter what I say.”

“Even if you didn’t have anything to do with Annie’s disappearance, then what about all the other girls like her? Huh? You don’t deserve to live,” she cries, the dominance in her voice giving way to sorrow and desperation.

She grabs a fistful of my hair to yank my head upright again, then stuffs the muzzle of the gun in my mouth. I gag violently, my eyes watering as I futilely claw at her arms.

“Blink twice if you heard me.”

Slowly and deliberately, I obey with two blinks. She removes the gun and drops me roughly. I cough hard, which causes another unbearable wave of pain in my ribs and head.

“What do you want from me? I can’t change the past,” I offer, my jaw gritted in pain.

“Do you regret anything? Would you change the past, if you could?”

Without hesitation, I say: “No, I—”

The gun goes off. My ringing ears disorient me and it takes a few moments for the pain to register and for a scream to bubble up. She shot me in the thigh. I look up at her in disbelief, holding the wound to staunch the blood that’s already starting to pool.

“You won’t tell me the code, and you’re not afraid of death? Okay. I’ll make you beg for it instead,” Margo goads in a matter-of-fact tone.

I’m unable to stop her as she sticks two fingers in the bullet wound, twisting and digging into my flesh relentlessly. I howl in agony, my body contorting with pain on the concrete, making snow angels in my blood. After what feels like an eternity, she finally lets go.

“Go ahead. Tell me all the details, everything you’ve done. All the people you’ve ruined. It’ll make what I’m about to do a lot easier.”

“I’m sorry,” I croak, both to my surprise and hers. I don’t intend to say it, because I’m not sorry for anything I’ve done, nor have any intention of pandering to her to gain sympathy. I would attempt to kill Margo again if presented the opportunity.

Yet there’s something about the idea of her losing her humanity that irks me. I embrace the fact that I’m a monster. I enjoy what I do because I was born this way, but I wouldn’t want to encourage someone else to follow suit if they weren’t already rotten to begin with. It throws off some sort of equilibrium.

“You’re sorry?” Margo hisses in a low voice, thick with hatred. She crouches in front of me, searching my face intensely. What is she looking for? Remorse? I can’t imagine there’s any visible expression besides that of pain.

“I have no regrets and I’m not looking for forgiveness,” I wheeze, struggling to speak. “But you’re not supposed to become the villain. Taking a life, torturing someone, that’ll change you forever.”

“Is this a bullshit attempt at reverse psychology?” A mix of hatred and woe is plastered on her face, but a thin layer of confusion now rests on top.

“No, it’s not. I’m going to die soon either way, but you can still get out of here with your humanity intact. I’m going to shoot myself, and you can sleep well for the rest of your life knowing you didn’t take a life. I’ll tell you the passcode, and you slide the gun over to me after you open the door.”

Margo just glares at me, the gears turning in her head. Trying to decide if she can trust me. Trying to predict every outcome of my possible deception.

“What do you get out of it? Why do you really want the gun?” she asks warily.

“I get to die quicker instead of sitting here waiting to bleed out,” I admit and lift my hands to reveal the gruesome gunshot wound, weakly gesturing at the dark crimson pool I’m bathing in. She grimaces at the sight, but doesn’t look sympathetic as she looks down at my pallid face.

Every word takes immense effort, but I push forward: “I understand if you don’t think I deserve an easy death—I don’t. But I promise that killing me won’t give you the satisfaction you think it will. It’ll lead you to an irreversibly dark path. I would know; I’ve been on it my entire life.”

“What does my conscience matter to you?”

“I don’t know,” I answer truthfully, my voice now a slurred and breathy whisper following my lengthy monologue. “Impending death gives you a new perspective, I guess.”

Her eyes well up with tears. She must be thinking about her sister’s final moments.

“If Annie was taken, then I can only imagine she was a hero until the very end. What would she think if her sister took a life, too?”

I don’t know what kind of person Margo’s sister was; for all I know, she might have preferred being avenged without any consideration for her sister’s morality. But the chance I take pays off. Margo’s body wracks with sobs as she falls to her knees.

The black vignette on my vision is closing in fast. Time’s up.

“Four-two-nine-seven,” I say, projecting my voice with what little strength I retain. This immediately sobers her, and she clamors hastily to the door. A soft beep emits from the keypad as the door unlocks with a click. Margo swings it open in disbelief, her jaw slack, then glances back at me and stares for a while. My sight is blurred and useless now, so I just close my eyes and wait.

After a few more beats, I hear a scraping sound as the gun slides across the concrete. With the final burst of energy that I wished for earlier, I sit up with a pained yell and grab the gun at my feet.

No more words are exchanged. We lock eyes one last time before she flees, shutting the heavy metal door behind her. Once she’s gone, I check to make sure the gun safety is off, that everything is in working order, which takes a little longer than usual due to the handcuffs.

I press the muzzle to my temple, in the same spot Margo held it earlier. It’s okay that I won’t get to see my trophies again; I’ll see them featured on a documentary one day, where I’ll be watching from hell. I’m at peace with the fact that this isn’t the timeline where I make it out alive. The villain usually doesn’t.

I wonder if she’s waiting outside the door to hear the gunshot. I wonder how she’ll turn out after this. I close my eyes for the last time and see Margo’s face, smiling.

Taking this as a good sign, I pull the trigger.

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