After four months of getting nowhere, his broker finally gave him a break and let him babysit a listing for a vacationing agent. The crappy little house stood in a working class neighborhood that hadn’t yet gone transitional but he dove in as deep as he could—cleaning carpets, rearranging furniture, and replacing the nicotine stained drapes. He set potted flowers on the porch and shooed the grey-faced owners out during Open House. The place sold on the second showing. The buyer, fresh out of school, had moved to town to join a local tech start-up. Derek ended up with both sides of the deal and a new computer geek friend.
Things began to move. As the city rose out of the recession on the back of the second tech boom, Derek rode his new nerd’s IT contacts. He was on his way to the good life.
Then God forsook them all.
“No, Derek, don’t.” Sara seemed to have gotten a grip on herself, probably one of those infuriating people that get calmer when you freak out at them. “We have to stay together. We can make this work.”
She may have found her calm, but that was crazy talk.
“Make what work?” Derek asked. She was spewing nonsense. Nothing here worked. “This is insane! This is death waiting to happen!” He couldn’t get any more honest than that.
Derek turned his face away from the others and pulled the bandana off his eyes. He blinked until the brightness subsided and stood to leave.
“You’re right.” Peter’s bewildered voice followed Derek out of the room.
No shit. Derek knew he was right, but life had always been death waiting to happen. The Curse just made it obvious.
Derek figured he was one of the last to know. He woke up on a regular Sunday morning, did his little workout routine—crunches, push-ups, and the six pull-ups he could manage on a good day—and skipped through the headlines on his phone while he sucked down two cups of coffee. If any news of unusual deaths crossed his feed, it didn’t register. Then he drove to the listing and set up signs on the corners in a six block radius. He sliced up a log of cookie dough and popped it in the oven—one of his colleagues had told him it made a house smell like home. He sat working crosswords for four hours. Not a soul showed.
Confused, but not terribly upset, Derek awaited the arrival of his latest tryst. They’d hooked up spontaneously when she toured him around her listing the week before. Like a moment straight out of his fantasies—they found themselves alone in an empty house and then—bazinga, bazanga, ba-boom—they lay naked on someone else’s bed. No porn star, to be sure, but a solid, suburban somebody-else’s-wife, she had ten years in the business and an appetite.
So Derek didn’t worry much about the slow Sunday. She would swing by after finishing her own open house a few streets away. Derek expected her around 4:15. He waited until after 6:00. Disappointed and angry, he strolled the neighborhood collecting signs and realized something was amiss.
Dead people on the street have a way of waking a person up.
Derek watched a kind of battle explode in front of him and realized they were downing each other with their eyes. Someone spun around and glared and another person would fall dead. Some of them were yelling things like: “You die!” and “I wish you dead.” So when a crazy-haired dude wheeled around on him, Derek yelled: “Die! Die! Kill kill kill!” The guy fell before the second ‘D.’
After that, murder came easy.
“I’m not going to let you go out there alone!” Sara called out after him as he headed up the stairs to the alley door.
“Too late now, lady.” Derek didn’t understand where Sara came from. She certainly didn’t run with the gang that killed Scott. Anya was no fool, but sometimes she just got things wrong.
The alley walls dripped with moisture and Derek hunched his shoulders against the cold. Dreary clouds left the air dim and the street awash in shadows. He lifted his face to the sky, felt the drizzle on his chin and cheeks, and relief washed over him. He’d finally left Peter’s collective behind. He spread his arms to breath in his freedom. He wiped at his nose and spit as the stench of rot and urine stung his nostrils.
Freedom always has a price.
That’s what Scott said, seconds before Derek killed him. Scott had been gushing about how Anya had finally let him down her pants. Derek didn’t want to hear it. Not because he wasn’t interested. He obsessed about sex, and about Anya, and even Phoebe. But he didn’t want to hear about Scott getting what Derek couldn’t have.
“I used to worry about getting tied down,” Scott said as they walked through the barren aisles of the supermarket. “That is definitely not a concern now.” Scott laughed, his matted hair and beard jiggling around his opened mouth. How could Anya kiss that?
“What’ll you do if we come across a pack of females?” Derek knew it was a stupid question, but he really wanted to wipe the grin off Scott’s face. Scrub it. With steel wool.
“Uh… nothing.” Scott smiled. “Look, I like women, but Anya is all I need. I wouldn’t give her up for anything.”
“Alright, bro,” Derek said. “If you want to sacrifice your freedom for a skinny chick with an accent.”
Scott looked Derek up and down, assessing him. “Freedom has a price.” He turned and walked down the aisle.
That’s when Derek picked up the magazine rack. The first swing knocked Scott onto the floor and Derek didn’t wait for a reaction before clubbing him repeatedly with the heavy base of the stand. When he stopped, Scott lay in a bloody pile and Derek panicked.
How would he explain this? Say they’d had a fight? What would they do? Kick him out of the tribe? Kill him in revenge? Then he realized he could say anything he wanted. Nobody else was there. Nobody would question his story.
As he ran back to the hideout, he rehearsed the tale about the gang jumping them in the supermarket. He sprinted, full-bore, as if he were actually bolting from an ambush. He got kind of into it, pretending the gang followed close behind. He started thinking that maybe someone was coming after him. Method acting, they called it.
Everything worked perfectly. He came in and told his story and no one even blinked. It would only be a matter of time before Anya let him down her pants.
Sara showing up was just icing on the cake. Any suspicion about Scott’s death magnetized right onto her. Anya convinced herself immediately that Sara had killed her boyfriend, which set Derek up perfectly for his role as the concerned friend, the last one to see Scott alive, the sympathetic shoulder to cry on, and then….
Everything went to hell.
He hadn’t killed Phoebe. He’d come across her early in the morning, wandering in the basement like they all did from time to time. He watched as she drifted by, her hand sweeping along the dusty surface of a dresser, touching the top of a chair. She paused in front of a strange ceramic figure, a life-sized mannequin of a baseball player from some local minor-league team long forgotten even before the Curse. Phoebe’s hand reached up to caress the face, its surface laced with cracks. The gesture stirred something in Derek and he moved forward quietly.
He slipped a hand around her waist as he spoke, gazing up at the weathered face of the statue. “He looks happy.”
Phoebe jumped and he reflexively grabbed her with the other hand.
“Let me go!”
He complied. “Okay. Didn’t mean anything.”