Chapter One: Manifesto Destinado
It was my Manifesto where I got them. Most “Why I dud it” manifestos are tedious, disjointed, rambling screeds detailing every slight the “authors” have endured and every injustice levied upon them by an uncaring reality, their justifications for the horrid things they did or intended to do all painstakingly articulated to assure that most people will never read them, but instead rely upon law enforcement and the media to feed them the juicy bits pertinent to their individual proclivities.
Not mine. I made it direct, to the point, offered no specific grievance or justification, and for maximum accessibility, I released it on TikTok. I even applied my many years of cop show-viewing to make sure I said nothing in the first twenty seconds that would indicate criminal intent or threat in my presentation, which we’re told is the limitation of Law’s legal/illegal intrusion into our electronic communiqués. This presumably would keep the piggies focused on more overt madness, my covert madness sliding under the radar until it was too late to shut it down.
I figured I might have ten minutes before getting it jerked from circulation, even five would have sufficed, just long enough for a few intrepid weblingers to copy it and send it flying around the globe with wild abandon. As it turned out, I had read my audience deftly, surprisingly even for me, and my dynamic presentation and mesmerizing copy kept it up for over two and a half hours. Go TikTok!
The top had been ripped from Pandora’s Box and cast into the Abyss where hope sank infernal: glubbity-glub-glub.
Of course this didn’t particularly benefit TikTok, a Chinese social media concern that concerned the American government, which professed that TikTok was engaged in espionage against American citizens and also influenced USNA elections. The CIA accused China of meddling in other nation’s governments, activities it felt were its purview exclusively. Monopoly with armored assault vehicles and water boarding. Go straight to Gitmo, do not collect your two hundred dollars, Scoopy.
I had crafted nearly ten versions of it before settling on the official variation now so popular among assassination aficionados. TikTok held significant appeal because it allowed me to address my targets and targeted demographic directly without the selective presentations of Mainstream Media.
TikTok also compelled me to keep it short while incorporating theatrical techniques, brevity the soul of clicks. Or something. I modified my voice and created the iconic look presently clogging interweb arteries, assuredly among the media idiogencia, who happily glom onto the suffering of strangers to perk up their mundane existences. For those who missed it:
SK
After years of painstaking
research and significant
personal expense, I have
composed a detailed List
of one hundred people I
feel are demonstrably the
worst people in the United
States of North America.
These people are responsible
for the ruination of countless
human lives. Those on top of
the List are directly responsible
for the murder of literally
millions of people. And,
instructively, there isn’t a poor
person on it. Not a one. This
is a List of the very worst of
humanity. I am going to kill
as many of them as I can.
You’ll learn who is on the
List when I have killed them.
I’ll post their names, dates
of execution, and ranking.
If someone on the List dies
before I can get to them it
will be adjusted accordingly
and a lower ranked scoundrel
will be advanced. Because
I target people of clout and
authority, not the poor and
desperate like so many
popular serial killers, there will
necessarily be some spillover.
Can’t be avoided. Meaning: If
you don’t want to be collateral
damage, don’t hang around
horrible fucking people. People
like Joseph Bronowski, a dirty,
dirty man whose vile brain I
crushed last night in St. Louis.
Joseph was number 87 on the
List. Ninety-nine to go. As this
will certainly be taken down
immediately, X marks the spot
for my List updates and
occasional pith. Thanks for playing.
I ended it with a Title Over: Robert B. Zell.
To be fair, I’m not particularly fascinated by serial killers. Most of them are pathetic, disturbed little malcontents without a modicum of consideration for those they defile. They attack the weak and defenseless, driven by poor impulse control and fueled by malicious cowardice. No, what fascinates me, inspires me upon this course, is other people’s fascination with serial killers. Particularly Americans; they eat this shit up. Doubtless why they produce by far the most of them.
My first kill, Joseph Bronowski, was as if the Universe was goading me, offering me a sacrifice of such ease that no other course of action seemed logical or even rational. Joe was a heinous fixture in St. Louis and was reported as frequenting the tony Chez Poutine near Columbus Square. The burgeoning blogosphere, combined with people’s endless fascination with celebrity (especially undeserved celebrity), provided an instructive window into the movements of all sorts of persons of interest.
I remembered the film Bandit, about a US bank robber who escaped prison and snuck into Canada where he robbed something like fifty banks while wearing disguises, making identification problematic, to the point he got away with robbing so many banks.
At least until the inevitable Bank Too Far.
If I was going to pull this monumental feat off, I couldn’t be recognized. So I hit several local theatrical makeup shops, even got the gentle people who worked in them to help me, based on the premise I was doing a live performance in some regional venue or something. With their guidance I created a makeup kit with noses, mustaches, beards, eyebrows, glasses, wigs, and physical deformities.
The deformities were my personal touch. A prominent scar, wart, mole with a hair popping out, draw any witness’s attention to it. They can’t help it. US media has taught them to focus on the ghastly and they drink it up with a glorping slurp. And that invariably is the thing they focus on in describing the suspect: the hideous, toad-like wart on the end of his nose.
In the Chez Poutine bar I was more subtle, well-suited, without facial hair but with black horn-rimmed glasses and a nose of significance, my George C. Scott. When I wore it my voice tended to gravel up and my cadence took on Scotts’ frenzied urgency and conspiratorial calm. I sat alone at an out-of-the-way table where I could see the restaurant and the restroom, drinking tonic water and appearing uninteresting. I popped in on Thursday and Friday nights, usually after nine when I became another face in the crowd. I fielded the occasional flirt, so as to not stand out by pushing pussy away, and found myself surprisingly approachable after years of perhaps self-imposed isolation.
Lisa, a forty-year-old S&M aficionado who worked at Chili’s, threatened to derail my entire plan by being so attentive and downright alluring that I considered resettling down, again, until she was killed in a freak riverboat collision, paddling her to an ironic demise while redoubling my resolve. Bronowski owned the riverboat what killed my Belle, which only moved him up on the List.
In the process of compiling the List, I Googled “evil people in Missouri,” after “bad,” “shitty,” and “corrupt people” came up relatively dry holes. While having no shortage of heinous people (compared to the US coastal states), most Missourians just weren’t worth murdering. At the bottom of the extended page I came upon a chat room, and in it one of the chatty types offered up a link. That link led me to the interviews by St. Louis police department detectives of a couple of Honduran girls, fifteen and seventeen, who had been picked up in a prostitution sting, purportedly part of a half-vast child-trafficking ring. They represented the part that was trafficked.
The girls both alleged, independently, that Bronowski operated in a managerial capacity akin to jefe, or the US sex-work version, pimp. Both girls stated he had raped them. The older girl said that she had seen him kill two people, including another girl like herself, who’d been abducted from near her home and turned out to keep profit margins as black as the hearts of those who destroy for them. Having the suck that comes from being richer than fuck, Joe had been discreetly alerted to his impending arrest, which was predicated on the girls’ legal depositions.
Which were sadly never taken when the oldest abductee was found sunk in a car in the muddy Mississippi, the day prior to her deposition, and the youngest never was found. As a result, no charges were filed, and Joe trafficked in places less inclined to impede his cash flow with the crocodile tears of surly allegators.
Thursday night, at nine-fifteen, on my sixth visit to Chez Poutine, Joe walked in with some well-used dame, who pushed as much cleavage as she could legally muster to maximize her effect on the local hickish denizens, who responded appropriately droolingly. Joe couldn’t have cared less; he bought and sold women like her, and she was but one more in an endless chain of empty sex – disgustingly hot, empty sex.
I had considered placing a towel over my arm, all waiter-like, and approaching his table with menus, making nice, then stabbing him repeatedly with my emergency stiletto. But Joe was a big guy, way bigger than he looked on TV or in print, and it seemed I might not get a sufficient number of punctures to induce fatality before cooler heads stopped me before I even got started.
But Joe got a call and decided to take it to the bathroom, not twenty feet from where I perched channeling my inner Buck Turgidson. He walked past, oblivious to me, as I looked away nonchalantly, as if neither of the forces soon to crash headlong into each other existed within the same universe. After a minute, I got up to take a leak.
“What the fuck do I care? Listen, I’m gonna eat and I’ll be over there around eleven.” From within the stall his words were punctuated by a horrific defecatory explosion, causing the fellow at the urinal near me to tremble with revulsion, then shake his head smilingly. He glanced at me, standing there trembling and fighting the vomitous urge, and I smirkingly glanced back. Though we expressed much in this exchange, our eyes never met, enforcing the unspoken rule that when you’re holding your dick in public you never make direct eye contact with other guys. Just don’t do it.
“Yeah, I’m taking a shit. What about it? I’m about to eat. Gotta make room.” The other pisser had completed his urinary ministrations and ineffectively washed his hands, then fled the chamber before the olfactory poo-nami assuredly released by Bronowski could drift thither. That left us alone.
“Listen, run dem through a car wash or something before I get dere. I mean it Pedro, I’m getting tired of dese dry cleaning bills.” Joe would be a class act to the bitter end.
I continued fake-peeing, having moved closer toward the door and farther from Joe’s brownout, as he exited the stall and walked to the sinks on the opposite wall behind me. “Yeah, right.” He hung up his phone and pocketed it, gazing at his imperiousness in the mirror while adjusting his jacket. I began to wonder if he’d bother to wash his hands and considered the public health bonanza his demise would represent.
“Really?” I looked at him at the sink, clearly reflected in the polished marble wall before me, where he still refused to wash his hands and was now fixing his hair. He scowled at me in the mirror contemptuously: Who dared impose on his self-adoration?
“What the fuck do you want?” He had returned to admiring himself. I was nobody. Just another mouthy pisser.
“So close to the baptismal, so far from grace,” I muttered in disgust. “I’m in collections.” Joe glowered at me. I was talking gibberish and even my best George C. Scott couldn’t compensate for being such an annoyance.
“Well den, collect your ass da fuck outta here.” Convinced that his brilliant yet menacing riposte was sufficient to resolve any further outstanding issues, Joe returned to the pressing business of Joe, I but a gnat he had crushed with his mighty woids. So I turned and clubbed him down with the empty champagne bottle I had brought in with me. In his amour-propre, he never saw it coming.
My silent smack-Dom caught him behind his right ear and cracked his skull, the bottom edge of the thick bottle ripping through his flesh and causing a gush of blood (which kindly avoided me), knocked him face first into the sink, the ornate spout and handles breaking his nose and teeth as more blood squirted from his violated face. Collapsing with a flatulent grunt, he toppled back onto the unforgiving tile floor, his head snapping back and hitting it hard, blood leaching everywhere. It was a mess, really quite grisly.
Disgusted by the utter disregard for hygiene on display there, I deposited my bottle in the trash receptacle and left. Chez Poutine had become an unacquired taste.
Chapter Two: The Cream is Tainted
To add to the sense of the Universe, Great Magnet, or Satan Itself hastening me along this crimson course, Joe further aided me in a way I hadn’t anticipated. When his unconscious head hit the marble tiles, splaying him all squirty/leachy on the impressive bathroom floor, his $14,800 Versace Borecho Silhouette Bomber Jacket flopped open, revealing a 9mm Walther PPK in a shoulder holster, which I quickly liberated along with two additional magazines and what appeared to be a silencer – all vital accessories to the great work I was engaged in. Well, after a thorough decontamination. No sense risking infection during my homicidal rampage.
To kill the worst people in the United States of North America required a greater armory than I had amassed, though as my present operating capital was less in cash than what that asshole’s jacket cost, it was decidedly less ostentatious as well. The wisdom of gathering as I went along appealed to me as more than mere economics. I could kill one rapacious, genocidal cunt with weapons gathered from other rapacious, genocidal cunts and then use those weapons to implicate still other rapacious, genocidal cunts. Recycling and reusing: a delightfully ironic way to dispatch the world’s most profligate waste.
As so many, when I was young I imagined the arts or entertainment media to be a place where I could at long last be recognized and appreciated for the captivating expression of my innate brilliance and scintillating talent. But as it turned out, one needed innate brilliance or scintillating talent to crack that nut, so I went into the service of my fellow human instead and left show for those who were more innately captivating.
After two failed marriages, two thoroughly disinterested children grown to childish adulthood, and ignominious dismissal from the dubious car dealership I had given thirty years of my life to, I needed a change. The marriages, the kids – I wasn’t surprised or even necessarily disappointed they were the dead ends they ended up as; we were too average. Boring people don’t often sire fascinating ones. We all did what we were supposed to do, what we were programmed to do. We were the citizens they made us to be.
Our global dynamic changed drastically after the USA attempted to sneak into Russia in 1952 through North Korea’s back door. Still recovering from the genocidal fascist entreaties of the 1940s, the USSR, People’s Republic of China, some of Southeast Asia, and Iran formed the Union of Socialized Asia, which caused the USA to sue for acronym infringement. Their mocking ridicule at the United Nations compelled them to drop the unenforceable suit and led to the creation of the United States of North America through the purchase of Canada and military takeover of Mexico and Central America.
Unsurprisingly, labor leaders across the continent pushed for the North American Union, but, as expected, the industrialists who owned and operated the people who ran the nation roundly rejected anything with the word “union” in it, offering up the North American Cooperative, the United States of Lucre, and Empire Inc. as viable alternatives before settling on the USNA.
And even though the check to Canada bounced, twice, they remained in the USNA because they had already changed all their flags, official stationery, and theme song. And once the Pentagon had installed its eight-sided annex outside of Ontario (Octagon, eh) in 1957, it seemed pressing the issue would be perceived as bad manners. Of course, all this is standard curriculum to those who remained conscious during History class. Those Ritalined few.
After the draft ended in 1975, I no longer felt the adolescent compulsion to military, though I supported all the people who told me to support all the people the US had dispatched to dispatch all the people the people in the US supported dispatching.
The USA is terrified of everybody. Felt like time for them to be afraid of me. But I couldn’t be just good at my evil. I had to be exemplary, the model for evil to come. I couldn’t make mistakes. Especially as stupid as the one that had gotten me fired nearly two years ago.
I had been working as a service writer at a major auto dealership in one of the Great Plains states for most of my adult life, made enough to give to the ex-wives when they left, leaving me leavings of a life with nothing left to show for it. Just another pointless guy in a nation overflowing with them, lives spent building colossal monuments of nothing to nothing. A dung pile was all most of our lives represented – made mostly of used Amazon boxes.
Darlene Flendersnoot drove one of the manufacturer’s most popular cars, the less fuel-hoggy SUV (which shall remain nameless to keep lawsuits focused upon all the killy shit). She had purchased it new; it was for the most part a fine vehicle. But the problem was that in the sun, it fucking melted. An automobile manufactured in the 21st century and the son of a bitch melts when it gets hot out.
Sadly, the parts available to fix it were for another model, so even though the Service department said they’d install them, at Darlene’s expense, the Parts department refused to sell her parts to a different model and she went round and round while the cruel assholes in Service and Parts fucked with her. Employmental recreation: the customer is the game board.
As Darlene was at the register paying for a factory recall on that momentous day (the melting roof apparently leaks in moist conditions), because of my embarrassment, I offered her a free bottle of fuel treatment, by no means compensatory, yet still something to perhaps ease her frustration. After explaining it would enhance her fuel performance she asked those fateful words: “Do I stick it in myself?”
“You can, but it’s better if you stick it in the car.” Then hearing the awful grunts from my stupid gob, I recovered. “It goes in your gas tank. I can get Jimmy to put it in for you.” The free product, coupled with the offer of free service, made my comment slip past dear Darlene, but I had a nemesis at the dealership, and this gave him what he needed to get me out. I was able to negotiate a hasty retirement as opposed to an outright firing, but the little cocksucker ended up working out of my office. For two months. Until his “accident.”
But that’s another story.
Killing Bronowski made me understand that, given the gravity and sheer scope of my endeavor, I needed to do more than disguise myself. Had I been a waiter walking into that restroom, Joe would never have looked at me twice. And I’d blend in among the other wait-staff there. It seemed clear that if I were the same guy in costume, they could trace it back to me. But if everybody who was killed from my List were killed in a different way, by a different person of a different age or a different gender, in a different place, they’d never know whom they were really looking for. Making me difficult to catch.
Each place I would work would have different requirements and I would never work the same place twice. Well, unless I wanted to. When engaging in certain unconventional activities, randomness is a decided boon. Predictability would put me out of business. Some places I could access better as a maintenance worker; others, as a CEO. The wisdom of such existential adaptation, especially when adapting others to nonexistence, is undeniable. As serial killing isn’t a job-specific avocation – it can be done by CEOs and maintenance workers alike – I had to be whatever the circumstances required me to be. Kind of a karmic chameleon.
Unlike hit-persons, who get paid for their serial killing, I was effectively engaging in a recreational activity. I was a homicidal hobbyist, so to speak, and I saw the wisdom of having fun with it. I wasn’t necessarily mad at these people; in fact their natural repellence acted as an impelling force for me to finally make something of myself, on top of leaving me a decided lack of hesitation or remorse when dispatching them. Their awfulness gave me something of virtue to do. Just as they viewed all those they killed and ruined in their clambering to the upper crust, they were merely the cost of my big picture – the high price of success. As well they knew: Dirty Business can get messy.
I considered some of my advantages: as I had never served in the military, worked for the government, or even been arrested, the various systems which exist to cow us into submission had no practical record of me. No arrest fingerprints, blood samples, DNA, no current photographs (beyond the DMV) or recordings. They had no file on me because I had never given them a reason for one. As a remarkably unremarkable white guy, nothing about me really stood out. Pretty much average height, weight, physical demeanor, without even a fucking parking ticket, I had done nothing of consequence with my life.
As I knew the basics of the crime-solving process – thank you Law and Order and every copaganda show and film before and since – I took active steps to counter them. Like gathering hair and other physical remnants from different places and leaving them where they who would try to stop me would look for my own. I shaved my head so I wouldn’t shed. Always wore gloves. Always. Joe gave me reasons I hadn’t previously considered.
Which reminded me of my primary advantage: I’m not crazy. Sure, sure, a serial killer offering a notion of sanity and ethical probity is, at least to reasonable appearances, likely the craziest of all. I mean, I’m killing people here. Reprehensible people, yes, but people nonetheless, while threatening those in their spheres. Every crazy person figures those they dispatch are bad. Or deserving.
But I’m not Hell-bent on revenge or seeking perverse, sexual gratification; I’m not getting back at Mommy or Daddy for their poor child-rearing skills; I’m not offering a primer on the US educational system. I know what I’m doing and doing it for a very specific reason, so I know what to avoid. Law enforcement, mostly, though some of these cunts would unleash private security orgs and embittered family members against me, private dicks, hell, ex-lovers. I did not imagine myself inviolate.
Just ahead of the curve.
I headed from St. Louis to a little place outside Houston I had secured for my next challenge. I hadn’t anticipated such a quick success with Joe, so I was a little giddy when I sent out the TikTok Manifesto from my phone in East St. Louis before disposing of it in the muddy Mississippi. This vocation would require a fuckton of phones. Nice they make them so cheap and accessible.
Everything I owned had been disposed of, sold, or stuffed into a shack I’d rented in Skidmark, Missouri, not far from the old McElroy property. Other than my cars. Working in a dealership has some perks, and while I didn’t sock away much money, I had four, running, legal vehicles, all registered to different owners (all dead), all in different locations, all safely parked inside, to avoid thievery.
And melting.
Leaving the restroom at Chez Poutine had given me no problems: no one walked into that vile space for well over a minute until after I had left the building, and the first assessment was that Joe had suffered a stroke and caused his own injuries in the fall. Foul play – such a fun term, like ducks and chickens frolicking – only presented as a certainty after my TikTok Manifesto became known to the local constabulary, which made them sad because they’d be expected to investigate the well-known pedophile’s demise and not dump it into the “Nobody’s Fault” file, as they would have much preferred.
By the time they began investigating Joe’s death in Missouri, I began researching my next target, Buddy DeCade, former CEO of Quaker, Indigo & Crown, a driving force behind every US foreign invasion since the 1950s. While Buddy was head of the economic behemoth, QIC made over one hunded billion in profits and created upwards of forty-seven billionaires while laying waste to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name but three.
Buddy was one of the billionaires those tens of millions of dead and mangled and ruined lives had made, but he had maintained his status as a below-the-radar flier and traveled light, often with no security, so he offered ease of use. Even though he was retired, he still worked out of his private firm in Houston, and that’s where I began tracking him.
His building, the Morbux Colossus on Graft Street downtown, had enough security to make a direct assault infeasible. But even watching him a few days revealed some behavioral patterns I could exploit, especially his tennis-at-2:00-p.m. daily routine. For that, his limo driver parked in front of the building and opened the passenger door for Buddy when he emerged, racket in hand.
I had timed out a walk-by on Tuesday and it seemed so direct I decided to go for it on Thursday, one week after Joe had kicked things off for me. Because we were in the business district, I again wore a suit, and because they tend to be less threatening on their face, I made myself look like a 75-year-old geezer.
Just another vile old businessman out for a stroll.
I approached from behind the parked limo as the driver hopped out the door and scurried around to the back, Buddy already impatiently waiting for him at the curb. Because he showed up late, the driver, Jimmy, rushed his process, leaving the driver’s door ajar and the car running. He gave me nary a glance as I passed. “Good afternoon, Mr. DeCade. Hope your day’s going well.”
Buddy responded contemptuously, “Well, up to now.” By the time Buddy scootched into the back seat, I had passed the car and crossed in front of it; behind me, the distressed driver, whose back was to me, sounded contrite.
“I’m really sorry, Mr. DeCade.” As I heard the back door close, I flung open the driver’s door, slid in, popped it into gear, and sped off, leaving a very displeased ex-limo driver unemployed in the street and his positively furious passenger flopping about in the back. I hit the door locks, then continued driving erratically to keep him ungrounded as I headed through the bustling downtown streets.
“What in the hopping fuck!?” I could hear him sputtering back there, though I had closed the screen between us in case he was armed as well. It was Texas, after all. He screeched while flailing with the locks, “Do you know who I am!?”
Barreling up Capitol Street, I cranked a wicked right on Crawford and sped toward Elysian and our first stop, Jimmy Butt’s Park. “Not here for the car, Buddy-boy, though it is appreciated you’re paying for the gas.” I could tell by his silence he was bracing his position, but my sudden left onto McKee flung him hard and I could hear him thlumping around in the back.
“Son of a bitch!” I didn’t let up, pulling off McKee and driving through the park toward our featured destination, the Buffalo Bayou, hitting every bump, bench, or rock I could to make sure Buddy’s final ride was one of terror, not unlike the millions of final rides his fortune had cost others, though significantly less incendiary. Finding my straight run, I locked up the brakes, Buddy crashing forward against the privacy barrier, then lowered the screen between us.
“This should be much worse.” I pointed the silenced Walther at the terrified and battered old fuck, then fired into his legs, crotch, stomach, and spine. Then, with cruise control set, I dropped the limo into gear and hopped out behind some bushes as it sailed into the nasty Buffalo Bayou and sank, the engine roaring, Buddy DeCade bleeding out and drowning in the back. I pocketed the pistol then made my way out of the park, now as a homeless old fuck walking away from the ruckus.
No one looked at me twice.
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