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Where was it? Major got down on his knees and looked under the bed. He even swept his hand underneath the bedside table. No dice. "Ravi," he muttered under his breath. If his roommate didn't stop stealing his toenail clippers … Clearly, he knew what was going in Ravi's stocking next Christmas. Maybe a dozen pairs would be enough. No, two dozen.
Grumbling to himself, he went into Ravi's room. The clippers weren't on Ravi's bedside table, either. Major looked under Ravi's bed, pushing aside a full paper bag to see if the clippers were there. They were, but Major barely noticed, too distracted by the envelopes that spilled out of the bag when he moved it. Envelopes addressed to Major Lilywhite.
"What the hell?" He grabbed one, sliding his finger under the flap and removing the single sheet of paper that was there. "Oh." Well, now he knew why Ravi was hiding these. It was a drawing of Major, crudely done, and with damage to enough vital and sensitive places drawn in slashes of red to make it clear what the artist thought of people who kidnapped other people and left them in Max Rager's basement. The legend "Chaos Kiler Sucks!" across the top was hardly necessary.
Major pulled the bag out from under the bed and carried it down to the kitchen, sorting through envelopes and packages, all addressed to him, all expressing the strongly negative feelings the citizens of greater Seattle had toward him.
He grabbed a couple of handfuls and carried them back up to his room, spreading them across the bed, where he could go through each of them at his leisure, wallowing in each well-deserved epithet, each crudely drawn picture, each vivid and detailed death threat. So. The Chao$ Killer lived, and had lots and lots of angry haters. Typical. Also, it appeared that many of his haters were women. Beautiful women, to judge from the photos captioned "You'll never get to see these". Major ignored the fact that he was, of course, seeing them now via the pictures, because the underlying message wasn't lost on him. Human women didn't want him, and he couldn't get near zombie women.
His door opened suddenly and Ravi rushed into the room, wincing visibly when he saw the letters strewn across the bed.
"Heyyy," Major greeted his roommate. "You know that stealing mail is a Federal offense, right?"
Ravi lifted a finger to indicate that Major's assessment of the situation was slightly off. "I was hiding mail. Why are you—?"
"Opening my hate mail?" Major finished for him. "Better question: Why were you hiding it from me?"
"Because I'm kind and … empathetic."
Major ignored that one. "And you know, I used to do all right with girls."
"I suppose I can believe that."
"The only girls who don't avoid me completely these days are the ones out at Fillmore Graves. And they're zombies, so that doesn't do me much good. I may never be loved—or have sex—again … unless I move to some backwoods civilization that doesn't consume news. Like Pullman." He grinned. "Oh, sick WaSU burn."
"WaSU?" Ravi echoed.
"Washington State? Share my cultural touchstones!" He pciked up one of the letters, a personal favorite. "Ah, listen to this love letter. 'When they make a Chaos Killer TV movie, I hope you watch it in hell with your pal Ted Bundy'." Dropping the letter on the pile, Major sorted through, looking for another gem to read out loud.
"But you didn't actually kill anyone," Ravi objected. Which wasn't entirely true, but it was mostly true.
"Yeah, joke's on them," Major agreed. "I'm not pals with Ted Bundy, either." He retrieved another letter, this one written in red marker, scanning it. "Ah, this one wishes I had been blown to bits in the Max Rager explosion." And another. "This one wants my future family kidnapped so I know how it feels."
"Enough, Major! Stop torturing yourself."
Major ignored Ravi and opened one more. "This one says, uh," he frowned at it, "I didn't do it."
"Really?"
"'I know how crazy it must be to get a letter like this from a total stranger'," Major read. "'But I was also accused of something I didn't do. If you ever need a sympathetic ear, I've got two. Shawna.'" He and Ravi looked at each other, wondering if this could possibly be on the level. But—what were the odds? Major shook his head. "Monster. She must have done whatever she was accused of." He dropped the letter and searched for another one, while Ravi picked up Shawna's letter and the envelope it had come in.
"Well, she included her phone number," he said. "And this." He took a photo out of the envelope. "She's cute."
Major looked up at him. "Come on. You can't be serious."
"I'm just saying—are you really in a place where you can afford to let an opportunity like this slip by?"
"What, a kidnapper groupie? How quickly we've gone from kindly and empathetically hiding my hate mail to trying to set me up with one of the writers. You must be so bored."
Ravi rolled his eyes. "Right. Trying to resynthesize the cure without the tainted Utopium, looking into how we could find the missing vials and get them back, and, oh yeah, going undercover with the zombie truthers and trying to keep them from kidnapping and torturing zombies. I miss being bored."
"Well, we could always go drown our sorrows in killing some zombies."
"Sold. I'll call for Mexican food?"
"You really do know the way to my heart."
Ravi dropped Shawna's envelope on the bed as he left the room, and Major picked it up, looking at the photo. He had to admit, she was cute. He hesitated a moment, then tucked the envelope and its contents into the drawer of his bedside table. A man never knew when he might need a sympethetic ear, after all.