The Suicide Society Read online

  The Suicide Society

  Book One of the epic horror and sci-fi series

  The Suicide Society Series

  The Suicide Society: Book One

  Rational Insanity: Book Two

  Kill It to Death: Book Three

  William Brennan Knight

  Published by Altron Services

  Copyright © 2015 by William Brennan Knight

  There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories -- comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

  -Albert Camus

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Zach Randall clutched a cup of water with both hands while trying to control his shaking extremities. He was uncomfortably cold, but perspiration lathered his body in a slick, sticky film. An acrid stench radiated from his pores and filled every cranny of the small studio apartment. Groaning in agony, Zach fell from the chair and landed with a blunt thud. Blood began to seep into the whites of his eyes as he thrashed about in the worst of convulsive seizures.

  Concentrate. He forced himself to push back at the terrible invasive vision that eroded his will. Zach tried to picture Carol and Mandy, but the apparition was punishing and relentless.

  As he inevitably gave in to the searing agony that permeated every cell in his body, the gray vision pushed his feeble defensive mental image aside. Swirling mists of steely gray slowly parted, and Zach struggled to control his ragged breathing.

  It was a woman this time. Through the haze, he saw her in his own mind’s eye sitting in an unraveled wicker chair. Her long brown hair was streaked with white, and unkempt clumps stuck to her face and forehead. A lit cigarette dangled between her index and middle finger, and her thumb flicked spasmodically at the filter tip. Her head bobbed from side to side while she mumbled incoherently. They always talked to themselves before it ended, almost like there was someone else in the room.

  As the fog continued to clear, the frames in the vision looked like an old reel-style movie. Periodically they jumped backward, and the focus was lost as small snippets repeated on an endless loop.

  Zach sorted through the murkiness looking for the means. It was often a gun or a handful of pills. Sometimes they used something more gruesome, like a shot of Drano or a wad of Sterno gel. Whatever method they chose, the end never varied. The undertaker would have another dead corpse to drain and fill in the morning.

  Zach stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed. He let out a grunt of satisfaction as he sunk into the soft cushions. The pain in his head subsided as he abandoned any further attempts to resist the vision. Like smoke spreading through a room, it continued to fill the recesses of his mind. Small blood droplets began to dry around his nose, and noticeable tremors receded into slight twitches.

  The landscape was colorless and washed out gray. The woman sat in a sparsely furnished room on a couch whose padding had long ago given way to age and the weight of its occupants. There was a kitchen table of the swap meet variety and a small range and refrigerator. Several magazines lay open, scattered haphazardly across the floor. A few unopened bills and an empty bottle of prescription medication shared space on a warped coffee table.

  Zach forced himself to pause and focus the vision on the pill bottle. It was well within reach of the flabby arm that stretched over the side of the chair. From previous experience, he instinctively knew that it was the implement of death.

  He changed his perspective back to the face of the woman as her shoulders slumped while she gasped for breath. Her head rolled to the side, and puddles of spittle began to form at the corners of her wrinkled mouth. She was dying, and Zach Randall would have an unobstructed, non-elective front row seat to the whole affair.

  With extreme effort, Zach lingered on the end table a moment. There was something else of importance nearby; he could feel it. His senses were on high alert, and he examined every item carefully. There was a creased package of cigarettes, partially crushed and probably empty. A book of matches lay next to the wrapper, and small cockroaches scurried in and out of a stale bag of Doritos. A digital clock flipped numbers and read, 9:44. A yellowed envelope balanced at the edge of the table, almost ready to fall off. He looked at it through the gray mists. The envelope had writing on it; it had an address.

  Zach grimaced and pulled himself up while concentrating his effort on the paper. Empirical evidence had never appeared in any of the previous seven visions, so this was a new and unexpected development.

  Focus—focus, he chided himself while pushing his mind closer to the open envelope. He exerted such an effort that his hands curled and seized involuntarily. The writing was in a shaky cursive, and there was a deep coffee stain ring on the face of the paper.

  Closer. He twisted his body in an effort to exert his will over the vision and control its perspective.

  Clarity was fleeting, but Zach gritted his teeth and forced himself further. The first name was Helen—no not Helen—it was Helena. Helena—Bostwick. Zach grunted, and his breathing quickened. He wiped a sheet of sweat from his brow and turned his effort to the second line.

  The numbers were relatively easy: 501 followed by an N, which he assumed was an abbreviation for North. The next word remained elusive, but he recognized its importance. Through the reverberations and mists within the hallucination, he struggled to interpret the scraggly text. The process was painfully slow.

  Somewhere in a corner of his mind, he heard a reverberating moan. The sound grew in volume as it expressed a complexity of raw emotion. Someone acquainted with the grievous mourning of the dead could recognize the sad expression of shock, sorrow, and indignation. Zach Randall knew the resonance well. He heard it on seven occasions before this evening and vividly recalled the wrenching pain of every one.

  Helena Bostwick was near death, and Zach’s voyeuristic intrusion into the last moments of her life would soon end.

  Zach’s teeth clenched as his mind filled with an intense spike of pain. Waves of agony blurred the portal and further obscured the writing on the envelope. The image of Helena Bostwick faded, and the chance to find meaning in these visions would soon be gone.

  In frantic haste, he moved his attention to the last line on the envelope, looking past the unintelligible address to the numbers on the zip code. The woman exhaled a final, heavy s
igh, and her head slumped forward. Simultaneously, the vision receded as reality encroached. In desperation, Zach strained to see the writing on the letter. As the blackness enveloped him, the numbers 60007 briefly emerged in negative relief.

  ***

  The morning light crawled slowly across the bedroom through a small slit in the vertical blinds. Years of being pushed aside to reach the latch on the sliding patio door had warped the slat, and like the whole house, it bore the subtle imprint of a comfortable, long-time occupant.

  Today would be far different.

  She opened her eyes and stared at the light. Like nearly every summer morning in Arizona, the sun was blinding and intense. Reaching over the nightstand, she fumbled for a cigarette. Too many nights filled with endless “what ifs.” Even the nightmares were less terrifying than the miserable reality within her troubled mind.

  The phone rang. The bill collectors rarely called this early, but you never knew. She waited for the second ring. The phone stopped, paused a few seconds, and then rang again. It was the secret signal. She picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Kath, it’s Tammy….How are you holding up?”

  “I’m ok—I guess. I…it’s hard, Tam.”

  “I know Kathy, you’ve been through hell.” There was a pause. “Do you have everything packed? What time do you have to leave?”

  “The sheriff said I have to be out by two, but I’ll leave by nine, so I’ll only miss a couple of hours of work.”

  Soft static interrupted the silence. “All right, Kath, just get in here as soon as you can, ok?

  “Sure…. And Tammy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I don’t know if I could hold it all together without you.”

  “Thanks, hon. I know how hard it’s been. But, we still have to talk when you get in, ok?”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  Kathy Rodgers hung up the phone and lay motionless across the silk sheets that clung seductively to the Saatva mattress.

  The sun was shining full now, and with effort, she dragged herself into the bathroom and started the shower. The water cascaded from the Barnard 14k gold fixture, and as it poured over her head and torso, Kathy began to cry. Soft and nearly silent at first, her sobs grew in intensity until she finally curled up on the shower floor in a semi-fetal position.

  Why did it happen? In just over a year, her perfect world was violated and horribly disfigured. One phone call, a New York minute and all that, and everything crumbled around her with the shock of a figurative tsunami.

  She could recite the phone conversation by heart. Doctors are technicians, and as such, their lack of compassion is almost comical in a macabre way. The words reverberated and rang hollow off the shower walls as she played the different parts through tears of pain.

  “Mrs. Rodgers?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Doctor Michaels, Ryan’s pediatrician from Ravenswood Hospital…I, ah, received the results from the tests we ran last week.

  “Yes, and were they negative?” She remembered twisting her hair while the intervening seconds passed in suspended animation.

  “Ah, there is a problem. Ryan has a 3-centimeter lesion in the fourth quadrant of his pre-frontal cortex.” The doctor paused; his breathing was rapid and audible. “It explains the dizziness, the fatigue and the sudden mood swings.”

  “A lesion? What is a lesion?” She had asked.

  “It’s—a tumor.”

  That day, the doctors had given a death sentence to her precious little boy. The four year old with the sparkling eyes was going to die in a slow, agonizing way, and there wasn’t anything on earth she could do about it.

  Of course, everyone tried. Tom quit the Prosecutor’s Office and spent the better part of the next year seeking out the country’s preeminent specialists. They went from conventional surgery and chemo to experimental treatments without success. All their effort ended on a small, obscure path of scientifically rejected potions and tonics offered up by greedy medical carpetbaggers.

  Mercifully, Ryan had died before his sixth birthday. She remembered the funeral for its small, white coffin, and flowers that looked almost artificial.

  The burial was the last event that they attended together as a couple. Their marriage had traveled down parallel paths that ultimately arrived at the same destination. No matter how far they climbed, the gravity of despair seemed to pull them back down.

  The divorce was far too civil, and as Kathy exited the shower and reached for the vodka, she realized that her drinking had started in earnest just after Tom had left. She took the bottle with a shaking hand and filled a tumbler nearly half-full. A splash of tomato juice served as the last thread of self-denial. She brought the glass to her lips and drank heartily.

  The ring of the doorbell jarred her from the indulgence of self-pity, and she donned a gray halter-top and ran down the sweeping stairs to the foyer below. As the door opened, she saw the sheriff fingering a folded envelope while shifting his weight uncomfortably from side to side. The man next to him was dressed in coveralls and a baseball cap that said Big Ed’s Movers.

  “Er, I’m sorry Miss Rodgers, but you have to move out today. You know that, right?” He offered the foreclosure eviction without making eye contact.

  “Of course, Sheriff Tyler. Let me just get my suitcase, and I’ll be ready to go.”

  She refused to let them see her cry. No matter how much it hurt, she would not give them the satisfaction. Grabbing her handbag, Kathy raised her chin, strode through the door, and nodded politely at the sheriff, who smiled and nodded back. He found no enjoyment in this part of his job.

  Kathy got into the Jaguar, and with a shaking hand, started the car. The vehicle wasn’t new, but there was still a balance on the loan. If the repo company could catch up with her, she knew it would be towed away. Pulling out of the driveway, she turned south on Scottsdale Road and headed toward the offices of Wineskin, Stein and Marshall. She would be late again, but really, who cared?

  ***

  “Please, I’ve got to get away. Please help me!” The women jerked her neck backwards repeatedly. She appeared disheveled, agitated and quite distraught.

  The trucker looked down from his perch inside the cab and shook his head slowly. He reached into his back pocket, extracted a moist handkerchief, and started mopping his neck while grinning sheepishly. “I don’t know,” he said while weighing the potential downside, “I’m on company time.”

  The trucker drove a fuel tanker, a big rig out of Phoenix, 7000 gallons filled to capacity. He made the trip several times before, taking over for Big Mike when the doughnuts, bacon, and greasy spoon cooking had finally caught up with the second-generation German immigrant. He leaned out the cab and spat a wad of chaw that landed with a wet, thick splat, and splashed a few grains on the woman’s worn loafers.

  “Please,” she repeated, this time with a hint of panic in her voice. “I said I’ll do anything…. Anything.” She looked back over her shoulder. It was clear this woman was in some serious trouble.

  He rubbed at his two-day stubble, deep in thought. “Well, yer sure yer sayin’ you’ll do anything?”

  “Yes, yes anything—let’s just go!” Her face contorted and she pulled loose strings from her fraying and faded print dress.

  “Well, climb in then; I’ll take ya out to Phoenix, but that’s as far as I go.”

  The woman bounded up the entry ladder into the cab on the passenger’s side. The smell of chewing tobacco was suffocating, and it mixed with the odor of stale sweat and rotted beef jerky. While pushing beer cans and various wrappers from the seat, her hand landed in something wet, and she recoiled from the tobacco mess that clung like stringy snot from her fingers. The driver turned toward her and grinned, his lips peeling back to reveal teeth corroded by decay and stained a burnt orange.

  The truck let out a belch of diesel and moved out on highway 96, and Sarah Johansen leaned back in the seat and
closed her eyes. She was breathless from the fear that enveloped her as the miners shanties rushed past the moving semi-tractor, their dingy, peeled yellow color forming a near continuous blur. She fought against the tears while looking away from the trucker whose greedy eyes fixed on her ample cleavage. He chuckled under heavy breath, and she shivered with the same naked fear that had become so much a staple of her everyday life.

  Looking out the passenger’s window, she was drawn to her own reflection in the large side mirror. Like Arizona itself, the landscape of her face was a rugged map of craggy lines and deep scars.

  She felt the hand lay heavily on her thigh and instinctively shuddered and stiffened. The trucker pulled back and sneered.

  “Hey, what’s with yew?” he asked. “The deal is that I git whatever I want. I’ll turn the truck around and you can git off right where I picked you up.”

  “No, you can’t,” she said. “Please, they’ll kill me if I go back.”

  The grin returned as his lips rolled back over his rotted teeth. “Then I’d git a whole lot more friendly if I was you.” The hand returned to her thigh. “You like that don’cha?” The tone of his voice was like thick, spoiled syrup.

  Sarah shook her head and forced a smile. A well-rehearsed part she played for one so vile, the trucker was Errol Flynn by comparison. Long ago she learned the best way to handle the assaults was to acquiesce. The sooner she complied, the sooner the episode would end.

  She implored him to watch the road, and while the endless miles passed, the tension between the two of them grew. The trucker calculated how to make his next move and where he could stop to achieve his ends. Sarah plotted escape routes and ways to string him along until they reached civilization.

  “Ya know,” he said as tobacco juice drizzled down his chin, “there’s a truck stop up ahead where we could get some privacy.”

  “Oh no, that won’t do at all. What kind of girl do you think I am?” It was her turn to grin shyly. “The least you can do is find us a hotel room in Phoenix.”