Ryan Green - Obeying Evil: The Mockingbird Hill Massacre Through the Eyes of a Killer

It was a crisp winter's morning in Arkansas. Sunlight was just starting to peek over the treetops. Behind the car, a trail of vapour streamed. The air was still, a little slice of the Peace on Earth that was the perennial promise of this season. The world was in its usual pre-Christmas lull, the dead time where nothing much happened except the building excitement of children who still thought too much of it all.

Ronald Gene Simmons, in all his years as a father, had never enjoyed it. He preferred for everything in his household to be calm. To have order. There was no order to this time of year, with people coming and going at all hours. Traitors. That was what they were. Traitors who would abandon their own flesh and blood if they were given half a chance. They were all against him. After this, there would be no more wayward sons or wayward daughters. There would be no more wayward wives for that matter. His mind slid away from thoughts of family and home. He knew the cost of distractionyou had to keep your mind on the task at hand. Not to mention the way that thoughts of them made the corners of his eyes prick and itch. He squeezed tighter on the steering wheel of the car and bit back a sob. Even his own body was trying to betray him. This was enemy territory; he couldn't afford to show weakness. Not even for a moment.

The people in the town were all against him, too. That bitch of a secretary who had cost him a good job shuffling paper around. All those liars and penny pinchers at the store who wouldn't pay him a fraction of what he was worth. He saw the way that they looked at him eyes void of respect. They thought that they could treat him like he was nothing. Like Ronald Gene Simmons wasn't a man to be reckoned with. Well, the reckoning was coming now. All the traitors were going to pay for what they had done to him. Every last person who had betrayed him was going to learn what the price of crossing a real man was.

From outside the car, the turbulence within was invisible. He drove along the Interstate to Russellville, carefully abiding by the speed limit. He slowed as he came into town, taking the time to look out along Main Street at all of the Christmas shoppers, scurrying about their business, trying to find the perfect gifts for their friends and families. Ronald already had the perfect things picked out for his children, for his wife, for the others who were coming around with them. He had given Becky permission to put up a tree without his supervision. He had given her the last of the money he had earned from odd jobs, bar the skinny bundle of bills in his wallet, to buy everyone presents, too. She should have been happy, but the more he lavished on her, the more he felt her drawing away. It wasn't Becky's fault of course. Becky was too simple to come up with anything like this for herself. Becky couldn't wash a dish without him there to hold her hand the whole way.

Becky was being led astray by the other one, by the foul temptress who was dragging them all down to Hell with her. She had been the start of it. The temptress had poisoned them all against him, sent them off wandering through the desert on their own without their father's hand to guide them. It was enough to make a grown man weep. When he pulled into the busy Walmart parking lot, Ronald had to steer around the bustle of bodies, stopping and starting, until he found a space. He sat for a time in the car with the engine still running, trying to force his white knuckles to loosen their grip on the wheel. He had to be calm. Now wasn't the time to be emotional. He knew his mission. He knew what needed to be done to complete it. Anything other than that was just going to hurt him, and he had been hurt enough for one lifetime.

He turned off the engine and hauled himself out into the cold. It wasn't a long walk. Even the biggest store in this small town didn't justify more than a few rows of parking spaces, but he had to brush past the other parents to get inside. They didn't look at him. They very deliberately didn't look at him. It was a small town, so it was no surprise that they knew him. None of them were fool enough to try greeting him, of course. Here in town he willingly suffered their stares so long as there were no whispers. Back in New Mexico, there had been whispers and worse. That was what drove him up here into the biting cold. He didn't even trouble to look at them. They had no respect, but they feared him, and that was close enough in a pinch. They wouldn't cross him if they could avoid it. Not like the traitors and the tricksters and her.

Inside the store, he practiced every courtesy that he had ever been able to fake. Smiling to the sales girl, chatting away calmly to deflect any questions, counting off the dollars and pressing them into her hand, ignoring the flinch as his dry fingertips brushed over the soft skin of her palm. Savouring that flinch, too. He took his package back to the car in a bubble of silence. The time was drawing closer now. The pieces were all in place. As it came closer and closer to the final moment, Ronald found the rest of the world falling away. There must have been more stares, carefully averted, as he walked away. There must have been more soft-faced mothers rushing to spoil their children and blank-eyed fathers rolling their eyes at every purchase, but as he walked back to the car he could not recall a single one of them. He slipped himself back behind the wheel, set his present down on the seat beside him, and carefully fastened his belt before drawing in a steadying breath.

All the false cheer and decorations might not have brought any fondness into Ronald's heart, but that little parcel beside him drew him back into happy memories. Back to that brief window, the good years, when everything made sense and people respected him. He had his medals, still squirrelled away in his room up on Mockingbird Hill, where prying eyes and thieving hands couldn't find them, but the medals didn't mean half as much as the memories. In those days, one thing followed on from the next naturally. There was no need for jarring pauses to weigh up his options. There were no fleeting ghosts. There were his orders, and there was order. He followed his own orders now, made his own rules, and followed them strictly, but it just wasn't the same. Ronald quickly double-checked his mirrors and his seatbelt then pulled away. That happened all the time now, that juddering pause as he had to stop everything and check that he was following the right routine. He knew why it happened; it was her. She would distract him if she could. She would make him forget to do the things that he needed to do. Ronald had a plan in place to take care of that little problem along with every other one. Ronald had lots of plans. It was still only barely morning and all of his errands were run. That was what order, efficiency, and planning ahead could do for your life. With a satisfied nod, he headed for the safety of home.

The bubble of silence started to fade by the time he hit the highway. When he was acting or planning, it was like a switch was flicked. He was safe from all the chaos, safe from her. But in these quiet times with nothing to do, it was all that he could do to hold back a scream. The traitors had wounded him in a way that he had never believed he could be hurt. It wasn't just that it was so unexpected; it was like they had chosen the one place where he was softest to dig in their knives. His grip tightened on the wheel again as static on the radio drowned out the Christmas carols. Ronald was surrounded by the static as he drove. That prickling chaos drowned out the whole world beyond the ragged sound of his own hot breath, the only warm thing in this godforsaken place, beading droplets on his moustache hairs.