I Am Not a Serial Killer

I Am Not a Serial Killer Excerpt

Mrs. Anderson was dead.

Nothing flashy, just old age— she went to bed one night and never woke up. They say it was a peaceful, dignified way to die, which I suppose is technically true, but the three days it took for someone to realize they hadn’t seen her in a while removed most of the dignity from the situation. Her daughter eventually dropped by to check on her and found her corpse three days rotted and stinking like roadkill. And the worst part isn’t the rotting, it’s the three days— three whole days before anyone cared enough to say, “Wait, where’s that old lady that lives down by the canal?” There’s not a lot of dignity in that.

But peaceful? Certainly. She died quietly in her sleep on August thirtieth, according to the coroner, which means she died two days before the something tore Jeb Jolley’s insides out and left him in a puddle behind the laundromat. We didn’t know it at the time, but that made Mrs. Anderson the last person in Clayton County to die of natural causes for almost six months. The Clayton Killer got the rest.

Well, most of them. All but one.

… “Did they assign a topic?” [Aunt Margaret] asked.

I kept my face impassive. “Major figures of American history.”

“So . . . George Washington? Or maybe Lincoln.”

“I already wrote it.”

“That’s great,” she said, not really meaning it. She paused a moment longer, then dropped her pretense. “Do I have to guess, or are you going to tell me which of your psychopaths
you wrote it on?”

“They’re not ‘my’ psychopaths.”

“John . . .”

“Dennis Rader,” I said, looking out at the street. “They just caught him a few years ago, so I
thought it had a nice ‘current events’ angle.”

“John, Dennis Rader is the BTK killer. He’s a murderer. They asked for a great figure, not a—”

“The teacher asked for a major figure, not a great one, so bad guys count,” I said. “He even suggested John Wilkes Booth as one of the options.”

“There’s a big difference between a political assassin and a serial killer.”

“I know,” I said, looking back at her. “That’s why I wrote it.”

“You’re a really smart kid,” said Margaret, “and I mean that. You’re probably the only student that’s already finished with the essay. But you can’t . . . it’s not normal, John. I was really hoping you’d grow out of this obsession with murderers.”

 “Not murderers,” I said, “serial killers.”

“That’s the difference between you and the rest of the world, John. We don’t see a difference.” She went back inside to start work on the body cavity— sucking out all the bile and poison until the body was purified and clean. Staying outside in the dark, I stared up at the sky and waited.

I don’t know what I was waiting for.

From I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER by Dan Wells, copyright (c) 2010 by the
author and reprinted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC