He was one of the better guitarists the band had had in the last few years. He had skill - his fingers moved across the strings without any hesitation, plucking and sliding to produce the sounds that made up the largest part of their songs, aside from the lyrics. And he had looks - youthful and boyish, with a careless, laid-back attitude that could have amounted to a bad-boy image had he put a little more effort into it. But he was lazy, preferring to lounge on a couch and play with his guitar and talk with his friends and bandmates rather than stand in a corner with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and offer an occasional biting comment. No, he was not one of those kinds of boys, but rather much like a college student who hadn't completely grown out of his youthful innocence and childish light but still realized what the world was that he was about to enter was like.
Regardless, he practiced with them, he played with them, and when the lights hit the stage he was Medy, the guitarist who played with his eyes shut and his guitar practically laying across his lap instead of supported by his shoulder.
He was, of course, an attractive young man. Hardly past twenty years, he was a regular at the gyms in the towns they stopped at, leaving him lithe and with all the corded muscle a musician could ever need. His hair, dull brown and which could have easily been styled into a mohawk had he cared enough to do so, tended to look ruffled no matter how he turned his head and under what conditions. His eyes were a bright, glaring blue-tinted-green that glittered manically in the multicolored lights that flashed on the stage or gleamed like polished stones in still, unmoving light. He smiled often - after all, as he said, what use was there to living if you didn't enjoy the time you had? - and it was a smile that could stun a person where they stood and make them wonder if, perhaps, there was something else they could be doing, rather than going through a life so repetitive and dull that they didn't even realize they were stuck in a rut. And of course he wore the casual, ripped and torn and utterly worn clothes of a rocker, sleeveless shirts layered in three colors and a jacket with more pockets than it could ever need and two belts that didn't need to support the blue jeans above the sockless, sandaled feet.
Medy wasn't their shining star, but he drew just as many fans as the other band members did. He had boys who envied his skills and asked him, after the show was over, to give them tips, to tell him how he did it, anything. Girls did, too, but they were more often than not the fans who crowded at the back door, waiting to get in after everything was done to try and ask him if maybe, just maybe, he'd like to spend a little ... alone time with them. Less frequently were the boys who did the same, boys with sunken cheeks and heavily-masacared eyes, boys that looked more like girls than some of the biologically female people that asked him for a moment (an hour) of his time.
And, of course, he was human. Hardly a day passed that he didn't spend at least a few hours with a girl, locked away in his room. Nobody ever minded, because it was completely normal for a young man like him. He'd escort one into his room behind the scenes, offer her a drink (did he ask her age?), maybe a hit, and within minutes she'd be naked and he'd have his pants off and the bed would wind up a lot dirtier than it had been before. Sometimes, though, when they were on the road and the groupies weren't around, the five boys would sit in a single hotel room and pass around a bottle or a bong and talk about their ex-girlfriends (and he'd had more than his share of them, because girls got so emotionally attached so quickly) and after about half an hour one of them would made a suggestion - did he want to make out? And Medy was never opposed, so within minutes there were two of them getting very busy on the floor and the other three watching or making comments or asking to join or doing the same with one another.
But more often than not, there were groupies. Girls with long eyelashes and lovely hair and glowing skin, wearing just enough to show off a false modesty that some boys found utterly arousing. Medy didn't ever really care what they wore; instead, his focus seemed to be on their lives. It was almost genuine. Some of the girls he would sit down with and just talk to for hours before having sex with them, and sometimes, they didn't have sex at all. His bandmates teased him about it (you're such a nice guy, Medy, you should just get a girlfriend and settle down!) and he laughed with them, knowing he was too easily distracted by the next pretty face or moment of fancy to ever really have a steady relationship.
There were girls, sometimes, who he would talk to for those long hours about their futures. And most of them had very little in the way of a future, so he discovered: many of them were runaways. Left home too young, walked the streets when times got bad, hung out with not-so-much-friends and did drugs and drank (sometimes he wondered if his bandmates were really his friends), and when there were bands in town - the bands they liked, the ones they followed as often as they could - they got dressed up and bought tickets and waited for the moment when they would get to meet one of those handsome, suave stars on the stage.
Those girls, when he slept with them, didn't seem to enjoy the sex as much as other girls (or other boys, although with boys ... ). It was almost like they did it because they had to, so they could advertise the fact that they had Slept With Medy. (How do you prove that?, he wondered.) There was one girl in particular (small, dark-haired, fair-skinned, glowing green eyes and a sexy saunter to every move she made) that told him she was never going home again, that she hated her parents and everything she'd had, that she never ever ever wanted to go back to that horrible life, no matter how nice it might have been. He remembered how she'd put her hand down his pants, caressed him almost lovingly, kissed him with those soft, tender lips and pulled off her top so he could run his hands intimately over every curve of her body. He remembered her feel, her smell, her taste.
And he remembered that in the few moments after he'd first entered her, he'd picked up a knife and stabbed her in the stomach.
He did that. Killed them. Indulged himself in their smooth, sensual bodies and then ruined them in one sharp movement. They never saw it coming (the knife, the blood, the pain) and those little squeals they let out made him laugh, because really, it was kind of funny. A quick, high-pitched noise of shock, surprise, horror, hideous torment - and then they started to writhe and buck, trying to get the knife out out out while he watched the blood pool in the crevices of the sheets underneath them. It was so dark and so red, and it smeared - he wondered if they used to use blood for the red color in paintings, way back when. Sometimes he just stabbed them, once or twice or three times, leaning over to run his tongue along the splatters of blood as he thrust in and out of them. By the time he finally came, they were almost always dead - or at least on the edge of it, and ramming the knife home in their hearts usually made everything stop.
The bodies were still warm afterwards, and Medy spent time examining every bit of them - the flaws, the perfections, the little things that didn't matter. He drew patterns on their skin in their blood, little swirls and circles, before cleaning himself up and wrapping the body in the sheets they'd ruined. Then he took the body out back and found somewhere to put it (a dumpster, a hole in the ground, a ditch) for the police to find later.
But would the police ever find it? After all, nobody knew who she was (who he was) (who they were), and nobody would report the absence. Sure, the body might be found, but without any I.D., who would ever know where she'd been or where she'd come from?
(Multiple stab wounds to the abdominal area; the killing blow was a stab wound to the chest, penetrating the heart.)
With boys, it was just the same - he laid them on their backs and entered them and teased them and stabbed them, watched their faces contort in anguish and despair. But did it matter? After all, it wasn't like anybody knew them. It wasn't like they had a future, they'd said so themselves. So who cared if they died? He was practically doing them a service, ending their lives. Things would only get worse if he'd let them live.
Nobody knew what he did. He loved watching those utterly still bodies, seeing the blood flow like water from the open wounds. When he cleaned up, standing in the shower under water so hot it turned his skin a light pink, he imagined them still alive, squirming and writhing with the blood spilling across them like little streams. He'd look at the droplets of water running down his chest and think: they're so similar! I wonder why that is ...