"There," said Ken to Vivian. "Parental duties fulfilled."

* * *

Ken and Vivian sat up in bed, watching television. Vivian reached under the covers and slid her hand over his crotch.

"Looking for something?" he asked.

She smiled. "I bet it'll get easier to find in a minute."

Vivian rubbed on him for far more than a minute, but nothing was happening. It wasn't that she lacked skill—she was, in fact, quite talented with her fingers. And he recognized that she was still attractive. She kept in shape and was only about ten pounds heavier than when they first met. (She'd been quite a bit heavier at their wedding, but she'd been eight months pregnant with Jared.) Vivian was attractive in a purely objective sense, just not attractive to him anymore. It was like that thing he'd seen online with a half-naked, absolutely gorgeous girl on her hands and knees giving a come-hither look to the camera, with the caption, "No matter how hot she is, somebody out there is tired of putting up with her shit."

He was tired of putting up with Vivian's shit.

Had been for years.

But, points for trying. She was, after all, initiating sex. And it wasn't worth the trouble of saying that he was exhausted, or just not in the mood.

He closed his eyes and thought of the women in cages.

Thought of the first one to die, who had very little skin left now.

Thought of Regina, who might no longer be breathing.

Thought of poor Olivia, maybe the only one left alive in that room. Hanging in a cage with all those rotting corpses. So scared. So pretty. All of them were beautiful.

"Now that's more like it," said Vivian.

They got completely undressed and he mounted her.

Ken fantasized about emaciated, caged women as he fucked the shit out of his wife.

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FOUR

"You won't believe the dream I had last night," Gertie told Charlene the next day, as they got ready to begin their shift.

"Was I in it?"

"Yes."

"Was it kinky?"

"No."

"Was I a mermaid?"

"I should probably just tell you."

"That might be better."

"We were walking the streets of Hornbeam Ridge together. You kept saying that it was a bad idea, but in the dream he'd kidnapped your sister, and—"

"I don't have a sister," said Charlene.

"In my nocturnal landscape, you had a sister."

"Okay."

"You kept saying it was a bad idea, but then you said the reason we weren't finding him is that we weren't looking in scary enough places. And it made sense. If we were tracking a psychopath, we wouldn't look in well-lit areas, we'd look in scary places."

"Dream logic."

"And you said there was this door that everybody in the neighborhood knew about and nobody knew where it went. So you led me there, and there were trees with messed-up faces all around it, and we could hear people screaming on the other side."