“Abstract Cuts” is an experiment blending abstract horror, slasher, and splatterpunk, as well as a collection of stories aimed at reaching twenty short tales by the end of the year, all centered around the lore of the most frightening serial killers in history. I thank in advance anyone who wishes to follow the development of this project by subscribing to MUNDUS - the metalogical newsletter.
A new story translation comes, injecting abstract fuel into a brutal slasher engine.
What if the highway killer had stepped straight out of a Ballard novel?
It is seven in the evening when he comes upon a line of cyclists proceeding alongside the guardrail. All four are wearing the typical brightly colored wetsuits of those who claim to be serious, the kind with team and sponsor names on them. He passes them carefully, unhurriedly, peering through the rearview mirror. Put all together they will be two hundred years and counting. If a sponsor really decided to bet on them they would end up looking like shit, unless they were a doctor's office specializing in prostatitis.
He wonders if there is, somewhere, a hidden cemetery where old cyclists go to die.
The off-roader glides along the roadway like a marble on an inclined plane. He obeys the speed limit in the same way his father obeyed Sunday Mass-a good habit that keeps you out of trouble.
He reaches out a hand to reach for the pack of cigarettes from the crater that opens in place of the car radio, pulls one out, and lights it. Smoke fills the cockpit, burning his nostrils. Sunset is a line of fire burning on the horizon. On the sides of the road trees, trees and more trees. The simulacrum of a prehistoric landscape makes the hairs on his arms stand up in excitement.
From the mirror he casts another glance at the cyclists who are getting farther and farther away, smaller and smaller. Tiny mammals struggling to survive in a world populated by seven-quintal giants whizzing by at a hundred and eighty kilometers per hour.
He resists the urge to turn around in the middle of the roadway. He lets that frightening energy grow inside him and build up in his chest, his arms, his legs. A tension that almost threatens to break him from within.
Nature is a vortex that punishes and crushes everything that is slow, fragile, vulnerable. When he thinks about it, he always has the same image in his head: a mangled cat, flattened like sun-dried chewing gum, its intestines scattered here and there on the hot asphalt.
He continues to smoke and drive in silence until the sun begins to fade behind the curtain of trees.
He stops at a diner he found on the Internet. At the entrance, a fat old man, perhaps the owner, rails against Arabs and Africans with a rapt-looking obese young man, who listens to him, nodding. He takes a seat at the table opposite the entrance, takes off his cap, unbuttoning his flannel shirt. The warmth inside is almost unbearable, making him feel tired, hungry.
A frazzled-looking woman comes off the counter, pulls a pad from her apron pocket and asks him if he has decided what to order yet. He takes tagliata, baked potatoes, a quart of wine, apple pie, and coffee. Scattered here and there, at other tables, are sleepy truckers hunched over their phones; a family with a small child playing with a plastic airplane. The big screen hanging from one corner of the ceiling is blaring a soccer game.
Halogen lighting and darkness crowding the stained glass windows make the room resemble a limbo suspended in a vacuum.
For meat and potatoes, he should not wait more than a quarter of an hour. He eats leisurely, occasionally spying the front door. The family gets up, pays the bill and leaves. He watches them maneuver and vanish into thin air in an obscene red minivan. For a moment he is lost in imagining the little family on the road: the music neither too loud nor too low; the child looking out the window; Dad driving in silence and Mom resting by his side, the back of her head reclined on the headrest. The car skids over something - a lump of asphalt, crushed stone fallen from a truck, a last remnant of morning ice - and slams against the guard rail, pierces it like the tape at the end of a run. It flies off the cliff. Red outside, red inside. A sculpture of metal, plastic, vulcanized rubber, flesh, speed, terror. A hymn to life that consumes itself and rises to the sky in the form of black smoke.
The wine has begun to take effect. The accumulated tension dissipates through the cutlery, onto the surface of the table, into the grease-covered linoleum floor. It has become a kind of immense lightning rod, assimilating every conceivable catastrophe, metabolizing it and unloading it mercilessly on the world. Its existence was already inscribed at the fateful moment when Karl Benz sold his first automobile in 1888.
When the cake arrives, the front door opens and a girl in her 30s enters the restaurant. She is wearing a pair of hiking pants, a hoodie with "Wilderness Adventure" written on it in big letters, and a pair of light-framed round glasses. She is beautiful, tall, dark-haired. She drops her army green backpack over her shoulder, nods to the waitress, and sits at a table at the back of the room.
He watches her as she brings her fork to her mouth. She downs her coffee in one gulp and gets up to go pay.
Outside the restaurant it has begun to cloud over. The cold wind forces him to button his shirt again. A few meters away, the highway is a strip of darkness bathed in a silence that spreads in waves.
The old man has disappeared but the fat man with the rapt look is still there, sitting at a small table with his beer, smoking a big, stinky cigar, his left hand abandoned on the package of his rumpled jeans.
He sits at arm's length with phone in hand, smoking one cigarette after another. He felt something in the air as he entered the clearing, an electric tremor, a feeling that something was about to blow up at any moment. It could wait, even all evening if necessary.
About forty minutes later the girl comes out of the restaurant. She has her backpack dangling from her right shoulder and is moving fast. She wants to avoid the storm. She is not in time to cross the porch that the fat man sprints to his feet, more agile and determined than one might expect; he goes after the girl at a brisk pace, carrying the bottle, to which he takes one last, mighty swig, before sticking his hand in the back pocket of his jeans. She is oblivious, continuing to walk in the direction of a short, squat city car that looks like a toy from the future, rummaging through her backpack for her keys.
That was what he was waiting for. He gets up slowly, rubbing the legs of the chair on the floor, and walks behind the other two, without stopping smoking. He controls his breathing, suppresses the sense of threat leaking from every pore of his body to make himself invisible, inescapable.
He watches the girl reach the car and unlock the lock with the remote control; he sees her realize the fat man hurry to get into the driver's seat, his face pervaded by a twinge of panic. She sees the other lean forward and block her door with his hand. The beer bottle falls to the ground, the clink of glass on the asphalt echoing across the forecourt. From the fat man's pocket pokes out the long, thin outline of a hunting knife. The girl screams, calls for help, but the other has already got his hands on her, her torso sunk into the passenger compartment of the small car as if in an open wound.
They are so engrossed that they have not even noticed him.
He grabs the fat man by the scruff of his shirt and pulls him out of the car like a snail out of its shell. That one ends up crawling beside the bottle, rooting and trying to get back on his feet without injuring himself with the knife.
She is now on top of him, so close he can even make out the drops of sweat dripping down his neck. With all the calm in the world, he draws his gun from the holster behind his back.
The fat man is pulling himself up, clumsy as a clown with his pants full of sponge. When he notices the gun, he finds it pointed in his face. She hears him let out a choked groan. Two point-blank shots, two thunders preceded by two flashes of dazzling light. The fat man slumps in slow motion, slipping slowly on his own blood. The girl screams loudly, clamps her fingers on the steering wheel, and begins to cry and squeak like a mouse; her glasses have fallen somewhere under the seat.
He waves her hand to get back on the road, a dry, imperative gesture. Then, he turns around, drops his cigarette, and walks back to the off-road vehicle. The doors are open, the key is attached to the dashboard. He places the gun on the passenger seat, next to the license plate, retrieves the ski mask from the glove compartment and puts it on.
The girl is already maneuvering. Every single movement of the vehicle is abrupt, steeped in terror.
He starts the engine only when he sees her turning onto the highway. He could not do otherwise. The first two lines of that old Lion King song come to his mind:
Here comes a lion, father,
Oh yes it's a lion.
It begins to rain.
Below them the state highway is a gun barrel steeped in violence.
The little car stumbles in the rain, swinging left and right, drunk, tossed about by the wind.
He always wondered why they didn't make them a little more aerodynamic.
The off-roader bites the night like a shark, devouring meter after meter, getting closer and closer. It would only need to barely brush against it to send it straight into the guard rail.
When he is just under twenty meters away from the city car, he turns on his high beams.
The final phase, the one most fraught with risk and uncertainty, begins: the culling of the prey. He presses down hard on the accelerator. The roar of the off-roader hums in his gut, saturating his consciousness in an ecstasy of fire and adrenaline.
High beam light floods the small car, which swerves until it encroaches on the emergency lane. A wounded animal, blinded by fear, seeking safety where the stench of death is most intense, most dazzling.
At first contact with the off-road fender, the city car writhes in seizure. It shakes its nose left and right. The squeal of brakes on the wet asphalt is a cry of pain rising to an empty, opaque sky. The side rubs on the barrier in a riot of sparks, until the little car slumps, exhausted, waiting for the coup de grace.
He turns on his double blinkers and pulls up a few steps away from the city car lying in a whirlpool of smoke. He makes to get out but remembers the gun on the passenger seat. He reaches for it but cannot find it; it must have fallen during the chase. He bends down to look for it on the floor mat, under the seat. Nothing. He snorts in annoyance.
Behind him, a rumble of thunder spreads, followed by a sharp barb. He pulls himself up and sees it crashing down on him through the rear windshield: forty tons of light and steel huffing and screeching, drifting on the thin layer of rainwater. The father of all crashes.
The truck overturns, encroaching on all lanes like a tidal wave. The trailer runs right into the off-road vehicle.
His body is a pincushion for velocity vectors. Immense forces impinge on his stomach, his lungs, his brain. He implodes like a planet struck by an asteroid. He is one with the beast, one with the vortex.