CHAPTER 1

I haven’t touched a human in three years. That seems like it would be a difficult task, but it’s not. Not anymore, thanks to the Internet. The Internet that makes my income possible and provides anything I could possibly want in exchange for my credit card number. I’ve had to go into the underground world for a few things, and once in that world, I decided to stock up on a few fun items, like a new identity. I am now, when necessary, Jessica Beth Reilly. I use my alias to prevent others from finding out my past. Pity is a bitch I’d like to avoid. The underground provides a plethora of temptations, but so far, with one notable exception, I’ve stayed away from illegal arms and unregistered guns. I know my limits.

The UPS man knows me by now—knows to leave my boxes in the hall and to scrawl my name on his signature pad. His name is Jeremy. About a year ago, he was sick, and a stranger came to my door. He refused to leave the package without seeing me. I almost opened the door and went for his box cutters. They almost always carry box cutters. That’s one of the things I love about deliverymen. Jeremy hasn’t been sick since then. I don’t know what I’ll ever do if he quits. I like Jeremy, and from my warped peephole view, there is a lot about him to like.

The first shrink I had said I have anthropophobia, which is fear of human interaction. Anthropophobia, mixed with a healthy dose of cruorimania, which is obsession with murder. He told me that via Skype. In exchange for his psychological opinions, I watched him jack off. He had a little cock.

While I may go out of my way to avoid physical human interaction, virtual human interaction is what I spend all day doing. To the people I cam with, I am JessReilly19, a bubbly nineteen year old college student—a hospitality major—who enjoys pop music, underage drinking, and shopping. None of them really know the true me. I am who they want me to be, and they like it like that. So do I.

Knowing the real me would be a bit of a buzz kill. The real me is Deanna Madden, whose mother killed her entire family, then committed suicide. I inherited a lot from my mother, including delicate features and dark hair, but the biggest genetic inheritance was her homicidal tendencies. That’s the reason I stay away from people. Because I want to kill. Constantly. It’s almost all I think about.

Over the last three years, I’ve learned how to optimize my income. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. I use a site called Sexnow.com, which has a clientele of mostly Asians, Europeans, and Australians. From 6 p.m. to 11 p.m., I’m on American turf, on Cams.com. In between shifts, I eat, workout, shower, and return emails—always in that order.

Whenever possible, I try to get clients to use my personal website and also make appointments. If they go through my website, I make 96.5% of their payout, plus I can hide the income from Uncle Sam. The camsites only pay me 28%, which officially constitutes as highway robbery. I charge $6.99 a minute. On a good month, I make around $55,000 and on a bad one, about $30,000.

Camming makes up seventy percent of my income; the rest comes from my website, which allows men to watch my live video feed. I broadcast at least four hours a day and charge subscribers twenty bucks a month. I wouldn’t pay ten cents to watch me masturbate online, but apparently two hundred and fifty subscribers feel differently.

The $6.99 a minute grants clients the ability to bare their sexual secrets and fantasize to their heart’s content, without fear of exposure or criticism. I don’t judge the men and women who chat with me and reveal their secrets and perversions. How can I? My secret, my obsession, is worse than any of theirs. To contain it, I do the only thing I can. I lock myself up. And in doing so, I keep myself, and everyone else, safe.

Sometimes I allow myself to be delusional. To daydream. At those times I tell myself that one day I will be happy—that I am banking all of this money so I can move to the Caribbean and lie on the beach. But I know that if I did that, the sand would be covered in blood soon enough.

I try to sleep at least eight hours a night. Nighttime is when I typically struggle the most. It is when I thirst for blood, for gore. So Simon Evans and me have an agreement. Simon lives three doors down from me in this shithole that we all call an apartment complex. He has, over the last three years, developed a strong addiction to prescription painkillers. I keep his medicine bottle filled, and he locks me up at night. My door is, without a doubt, the only one in the complex without a deadbolt switch on the inside.

I used to have Marilyn do it. She’s a grandmotherly type who struggles by on the pittance that is her social security. She lives across from Simon. But Marilyn stressed out too much; she was always worried that I would have some personal emergency, or fire, or something, and would need to get out. I had to find someone else. Because I worried over what was coming. At night, my fingers would start to itch, and I would come close to picking up that phone, to asking her to unlock my door. And then I would wait beside it, wait for the tumblers to move and my door to be unlocked. And when I opened it, when I saw Marilyn’s lined and tired face, I would kill her. Not immediately. I would stab her a few times, leaving some life in her, and wait for her to run, to scream. I like the sound of screams—real screams, not the pathetic excuse that most movies tried to pass off as the sound of terror. Then I would chase her down and finish the job, as slowly as I could. Dragging out her pain, her agony, her realization that she had caused her own death. I had gotten to the point where I had picked out a knife, started to keep it in the cardboard box that sat by the door and held my outgoing mail and various crap. That was when I knew I was getting too close. That was when I picked Simon instead. Simon’s addiction supersedes any concern he has for my well-being.