Rated R (The Postmodern Adventures of Kill Team One Book 1) Read online

  Lily answers with nothing but a dismissive glare. That’s bullshit. Aside from handling the porno tapes pretty regularly, she’s probably done most of the things featured in them. Amy knows that. She’s not stupid.

  “No,” Amy says, shaking her head in response. “I’m not doing it.”

  “Who else are you going to find?” Lily whines. “We haven’t had anybody fill out an application for months.”

  “You don’t know anything about that guy,” Amy whisper-yells. She looks sideways to make sure he’s not watching them. “He looks like he just jumped off a cargo train. What if he’s a serial killer or something?”

  She makes an interesting point. He’s certainly dressed like a serial killer. Lily is hardly shaken. A serial killer might be exciting . . .

  “I could use a little excitement in my life.” Lily smiles.

  “Maybe you should be careful what you wish for.”

  INT. VIDEO TIME – BACK ROOM – DAY

  The back room at Video Time is a small space with a panel ceiling and bare concrete floor. Shelving units stacked with old VHS recorders line the walls, and unused store displays lay haphazardly on the floor. Most of this stuff has been here since the nineties, when the store was still viable as a legitimate business.

  Jeremy sits quietly in a plastic swivel chair as Amy jots down notes on a clipboard. The notes aren’t notes so much as random scribbling she makes in half-ass compliance with the standard interview questions. She files them away after filling them out, and she’s certain no one ever looks at them after that. She should really just throw them in the trash.

  “So Jeremy, what kind of skills do you have?” Amy asks.

  He shrugs.

  “I can kill a man with a plastic straw,” he says, without any hint that he might be kidding. His voice is deep and unwavering with no accentuation. It has a frigid quality, Amy thinks.

  Amy laughs nervously, but he only continues to stare at her coldly. She knows he’s joking. He has to be joking, but he’s way too deadpan for her to be comfortable.

  “You have a sense of humor,” she says, awkwardly trying to coax something else out of him. “That’s a skill.”

  “I try.” He finally cracks a smile. She notices what Lily was talking about. He’s handsome in a certain way. He’s dark and confident, but there’s something hollow in that smile—something that bothers her.

  “But really, what kind of skills do you have?” Amy moves the interview along according to the form.

  “Well, I like movies.”

  “I should hope so.” It’s not a skill. It’s not even a standout trait. Everybody likes movies. Amy jots down his answer anyway and moves on to the next question. “Did you go to school around here?”

  “I did the homeschool thing.”

  “Oh, that’s cool.” It’s not. Homeschool kids are creepy. He’s creepy. “Is that why you want to work at Video Time? Because you like movies?”

  “Yeah. And I’m on my own now. I need to bring in some cash to pay the bills.”

  “Right on. Story of my life,” Amy says. Getting anything out of him is like pulling teeth. Amy skips down the form to the last question. “So where do you see yourself in five years?”

  The question seems to give him pause. He thinks about this one, seriously considering it before answering, though what comes out is just as terse as all the other things he told her.

  “Doing regular stuff,” he says.

  She looks back at him and waits for more, but it never comes. Regular stuff. That’s it. What kind of answer is that supposed to be? Then she thinks of something she didn’t notice before. He’s wearing a camouflage hoodie. It’s way too warm out for a hoodie. Amy was even a little put off by the skimpiness of the shorts Lily wore today, but this weirdo looks like he’s going on a moose hunt in the Yukon. Why is she even talking to him?

  “Okay,” Amy says. “I think we’ve got enough here. If we’re interested, we’ll . . .”

  “Amy!” Lily shouting from the front of the store interrupts her. Amy rolls her eyes and leans back in her metal folding chair to peek out the stockroom door.

  Lily stands at the counter across from a bulbous man, dressed in torn cotton shorts and a sleeveless maroon T-shirt that leaves much of his abundant back hair showing.

  “This guy wants to look at the, you know . . .” Lily looks back and forth before cupping her hand to her mouth to whisper-shout. “. . . Mommy and Daddy movies.”

  “So get them out,” Amy says.

  “But I can’t,” Lily says, shrugging exaggeratedly. “I’m only a minor.”

  Amy looks at the ghastly creature with the back hair again and it smiles at her, exposing the last few rotting teeth it has.

  “Can you have them organized by Tuesday?” she asks begrudgingly.

  “I think that can be arranged,” Lily says. She hoists the first bin of porno tapes on top of the counter, opening the lid as she grins back at Amy.

  Amy turns back to Jeremy.

  “When can you start?”

  INT. LILY’S ROOM – NIGHT

  Lily keeps looking at the poster for Edward Scissorhands hanging above her headboard. She tries to imagine herself with Johnny Depp right now, but it isn’t working. Maybe because of the scars on his face. Maybe because of the scissor hands. Those would be a problem. Of course, if it were really Johnny Depp, he wouldn’t have scissor hands, but she can’t picture him without them because the stupid poster is right in front of her.

  She closes her eyes to try harder. All she can see is Krohike. That’s frustrating. Oh well. Johnny isn’t really her type anyway.

  She opens her eyes and looks down at Krohike underneath her. He keeps squeezing her breasts, not cupping or fondling them, but twisting them sort of like a kid honks a bike horn. Chris is a nice kid, but he’s useless in the sack. He’s a scrawny ginger with a squeaky voice that cracks a lot. At least he doesn’t drag it out for hours.

  “I’m gonna come,” he says. And there it is. Lily looks at the clock on her desk. Forty-eight seconds. It’s a new record for him. Meh. She doesn’t fuck him because she likes him. She fucks him because they have an arrangement.

  Afterward, she pats him on the head and reaches across her nightstand for a Kleenex® tissue, with its gentle softness and dependable strength. He watches as she wipes herself dry, which is a little weird.

  “What does wasteland mean?” he whispers.

  He’s talking about the tattoo on her pelvis, Wasteland written in Celtic script and placed so low that her underwear usually covers it. Lily likes tattoos and she has a few of them. The largest is a half-sleeve heavy metal interpretation of the chemical wedding, an angel entwined with a demon, surrounded by black lilies between her left shoulder and elbow. She also has a cliché tribal on her lower back, and a script under her right breast which reads: Death comes with the territory. See you in Disneyland.

  “It means what it says,” she tells him, as she tosses the Kleenex® in the trash a few feet from her bed.

  “I know what the word means. I meant I wanna know why? There must be more to it.”

  “It’s personal,” she says. She throws her right arm over him, resting her face on the pillow next to him.

  “Personal?” he scoffs. His voice becomes even more high-pitched—he’s excited. He props himself up on one arm and looks down at her. “We just had sex. I came inside you!”

  “Yeah.” She shrugs. She never tells anyone what it means. “It’s personal.”

  Krohike scrunches his face in confusion. He lies back on the bed as Lily reaches for her cigarettes: Marlboro Gold Pack in a box on the dresser next to her. She shuffles through some assorted junk to find the Zippo lighter she keeps there: a Jack Skellington key chain, a paperback of Save the Cat!, and an Emily the Strange coin purse.

  “So why do you do this?” he asks.

  “Why do I do what?” She raises an eyebrow to this question as she lights a cigarette.

  “This.” He motions down at the
m, their naked bodies in the bed. “Like, with me.” He thumbs his bony chest.

  “I thought that was pretty clear from the start.” Lily inhales a breath of smoke. “I need someone to do my calc homework and you need someone to . . . we barter.”

  “I know that’s what we say, but I mean . . . you, like, you don’t—” he stammers, then stops altogether. He takes a second to restart. “You know my friend Rick?”

  “Yeah.” Rick is one of the nerds Krohike plays video games with. Lily sees them in the cafeteria sometimes.

  “Okay. He’s been Jenny Brunswick’s lap dog since we were freshmen and she doesn’t even do ‘over the clothes’ stuff with him. She’s been going out with Chad Evers the whole time.”

  Chad Evers. Varsity shooting guard. Hot. Tripod, too. Lily fucked him in a closet at Mike Wilkinson’s pool party last year. He was wearing Jenny’s stupid purity ring the whole time. Lily halts a snicker and almost chokes.

  “So?” She doesn’t understand what Chris is implying here.

  “So you don’t really have to do this with me.”

  “But that’s the deal we made.”

  “Yeah, but I think that’s sort of like prostitution.”

  “It’s not prostitution.” Lily holds the cigarette away from her face and glares at him. “It’s friends with benefits,” she says forcefully.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Are you calling me a whore?” Lily interrupts sharply.

  “No!” Krohike barks, holding up his hands.

  “Look.” Lily puts her head back against the pillow. “We’re friends, and we give each other benefits. Friends with benefits. See?”

  “I know, and they’re really great benefits. They really are. All I’m saying is: I know that you know that you don’t have to go all the way for this, but you do anyway. That has to mean something.”

  “You want me to be a total cock tease bitch like Jenny Brunswick?” Lily asks with conspicuous sarcasm. He’s not going to say yes to that.

  “No! I think you’re awesome. It’s just I wonder why you do it. I think there’s a reason.”

  There’s a reason. There’s a reason for Chris and Chad, and all the other boys—sometimes men. There’s a reason for the times she wanted it and the times she didn’t. There’s a reason. It’s just that the reason is hers alone and he would never understand.

  “Because I’m not a cock tease bitch like Jenny Brunswick.” Lily inhales a deep breath of smoke and blows it into his face. She giggles playfully.

  Krohike waves smoke away.

  “You know,” he says. “Those are really bad for you.”

  “I only smoke them after sex.” It’s a half truth. She usually only smokes them after sex.

  “Yeah. I mean, I don’t know.”

  They lie there in awkward silence for a moment after that exchange. Lily knows cigarettes are bad for her. That’s exactly why she likes them. She needs that dry, burning sensation to fill her lungs now more than ever. She imagines her body rotting and doesn’t care.

  She lies perfectly still as the insects come for her. They eat her gray decaying flesh until she’s just bones. Even the bones melt away and then she’s just nothing. Nothing might be better.

  “What’s Tokyo Gore Police?” Krohike says.

  Lily rouses from her death trance to try and figure out what he’s talking about. It’s the poster in her room, of course. Her walls are covered in movie posters. There’s Die Hard, True Lies, Monster Squad, The Evil Dead, Dirty Harry, Star Wars—the list goes on. All of them glow eerie silver in the light of the TV, the only light she typically has on in here besides that from the iMac in the corner.

  “It’s a Japanese splatter movie,” Lily answers. “The girl from Audition is in it.”

  “Huh,” is all he musters. Lily didn’t expect much more out of him. Krohike is an honor student with a full ride to Duke. He wears American Eagle and doesn’t drink. He’s not the J-horror type. He’s not even into movies. His job at the Cineplex concession is entirely accidental.

  “Oh, so get this,” Krohike says. “The Cineplex has a phantom.”

  “What?” Lily laughs.

  “Yeah. Cases of bottled water keep disappearing from the concession. So the manager thought it was one of us, except who steals bottled water? But then the cleaning crew started finding tons of water bottles in the bathroom garbage in the morning—like they were left there overnight. So Mindy had the ushers check all the theaters at close last night, under the seats and everything. They didn’t find a thing. But then Justin texted me this morning and they still found bottles in the bathroom when he opened up.”

  “That’s fucked up.” Lily dumps ash into the Bates Motel ashtray on her nightstand.

  “Casey—the AGM—swears she saw this creepy guy go in one of the projection rooms once, but when she went in there he was gone. Like poof. Vanished.”

  “What did he look like?” Lily has become genuinely interested in this now.

  “I don’t know.” Krohike shrugs. “Old fashioned, I guess. Aren’t ghosts always dressed in old clothes?”

  “That’s so stupid. How come you never hear about a ghost wearing a Metallica T-shirt or something? It’s always a lady in white or guy in a Civil War uniform.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty dumb.”

  “That’s still really cool. You know there are lots of ghost sightings, but a full body apparition sighting is extremely rare. Most people just feel cold or think they see some orbs or something lame.”

  “Look at you. You’re like a ghost buster.”

  “I just watch a lot of TV.”

  Krohike smiles.

  “I have to go,” he says, climbing out of the bed. “I’m gonna miss my curfew.”

  He leans over to kiss her lips, but she turns away just enough to catch it on the cheek. She doesn’t like to kiss when it’s strictly for business.

  INT. MOVIE THEATER – NIGHT

  In the darkness of theater ten, the hollow man is more comfortable than most places he visits. He picked this room, the least occupied theater, to avoid other people. They make him uneasy. In his position, his world, as he often puts it, any one of them could be a harbinger of death mixed in with the others, dressed in a disguise of designer shoes or T-shirts with pithy sayings. Any one of them could pull a gun or a knife, or something far more exotic. They could catch him off guard and then it would all be over.

  He tries to forget all that for just a moment. He sits in the corner of the back row of the theater, with his back to a wall so no one can come up behind him. He tries to tell himself he’s safe here, but that is probably a lie, and it goes against everything the old man ever taught him. Still, he tries.

  He focuses on the movie on the hulking screen in front of him, flickering by with its upbeat soundtrack. The man in the movie, with his unusually shiny hair, has just ridden a stolen motor scooter through New York City to catch up to the woman, who also has unusually shiny hair, just as she was about to leave on an airplane for Buenos Aires. He says he loves her and asks her to marry him.

  The hollow man does not know what any of this means. The credits flash on the screen and he can only grunt quietly to himself. Obviously it has some relevance or the normies wouldn’t watch it. It’s probably meant to spur some kind of emotional response. The hollow man does not feel anything. He never feels anything—except rage, anger, hatred. They’re all just different words for the same thing: whatever he feels when he’s killing. This is the only thing the old man ever allowed him to feel.

  He tries to remember if he was ever sad, or afraid, or lonely, or happy. Maybe once, too long ago and too early for him to recall. He remembers not wanting to stab a sleeping child to death a few years ago. That may have been the last time he felt hesitation.

  He leaves the theater and scans the hallway outside for the glowing red showtimes on the little signs outside the doors. Another showing of Endoskeletal starts in ten minutes. He understands that one. It’s about a man
with a robot skeleton who fights a man with metal skin to have sex with a pretty girl. The hollow man has seen it six times. He can recite all of the dialogue with his perfect eidetic memory.

  This is his attempt to understand and be like the rest of them—the normies, normal people who understand and identify with the loud and colorful things he sees every day. He saw the importance they placed on these movies, with the monolithic structures constructed to house and display them. He snuck into this place and began watching, and watching, and watching. For the last two months he has been coming here every day, all day, and watching these things in an effort to become more like them.

  Normies don’t have to worry about the things he does. Normies have it easy. He wants to be one of them.

  He goes to the lobby to steal bottled water. There’s a closet near the concession counter which is poorly guarded by the theater workers, who are not sentries but clerks, or maybe associates as the normies sometimes say. They rarely have eyes on the door, and the hollow man has near carte blanche to walk in and take what he wants. This time he takes two bottles, ignoring the rainbow of sugary candies and sodas stacked with the water. He only ever drinks water. That’s what the old man told him to do, and so he does.

  On his way back through the movie theater lobby, he stops briefly to observe a group of pretty young women talking on their way past the concession. He thinks they are older than him by only a few years, so maybe twenty or so. Women don’t pay attention to him at all, except to avoid him. These women are no exception. One of them seems to notice him ogling and averts her eyes quickly.

  Someone once told him there are promiscuous women out there looking for sex. The hollow man has been on the lookout for these promiscuous women ever since. So far, he has only seen them in movies.

  INT. SCHOOL – CALC 101 – DAY

  Calculus is a waste of life. Mr. Kimble is in what feels like the seventeenth hour of a lecture about triangles or something. Lily sits in the rear corner of the room with her head down low, discreetly reading Sergei Eisenstein’s Film Form: Essays in Film Theory on her iPhone.