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Orion’s second victim, Bobby O’Callahan, raped his girlfriend’s daughters, five and three. He served four years and was released on probation.
Orion buried him up to his neck behind the farmhouse. He woke up that way, and she’d never forget the laughter it brought her, as if they had just been transported into a Looney Tunes cartoon. But there was nothing Saturday morning about what she did to him.
She duct taped his mouth, poured milk and honey over his head, and left him there. Scaphism, she had read, translated to “anything hollowed out” in Greek, and she learned why when she returned after a few days. The bugs and the birds and whatever else wished to feast upon him, had taken Bobby’s eyes, and his lips, and his nose. She had almost vomited upon seeing the remnants of his face, and she hurriedly covered him completely with the backhoe.
Muhammed Hosseini brutally raped and sodomized six girls between the ages of seven and eleven over the course of five years. His twenty-five-year conviction was overturned three years later, after an appeals court found his trial had been delayed beyond statutory requirements.
Orion crushed every joint with a sledgehammer—his knees, his ankles, his wrists and elbows. By the time she got to his face, he was barely breathing outside of the gurgles. And then she made his face disappear.
Allen Randell was a cop, St. Louis PD back before he was caught by a Dateline NBC show called To Catch a Predator. A search of his home turned up a terabyte of child pornography, and it was discovered that he had visited Thailand seven times over the course of his ten years as a police officer. They connected him to a brothel there where they specialized in girls under thirteen. He worked out a sweetheart deal and only served eighteen months.
He was risky for Orion, being an ex-cop and all. But he was a short man, out of shape by that point, and he lived a secluded life.
After capturing him, she tore his limbs off one by one with a rope and the backhoe, until he laid there, just a bloody torso, his face grey and twitching. She could feel herself wavering, changing, as she buried his pieces beside the others. Each kill fed her just a little bit less and made things just a little bit more complicated.
It all happened too quick. She knew that. Doing this too often increased the risks. Increased the chances of getting caught. This was all logic though, and Orion’s need for revenge did not know logic. The acid underneath her skin did not understand it.
She had hungry beasts living within her, and one was ravenous for a semblance of a normal life. For Maddox, for love.
The other craved pain, death, and retribution.
Wasn’t life all about the beast you fed?
It said a lot about her that she found it easier to kill pedophiles than to have a relationship with Maddox.
She was willing to bury dead bodies in the middle of the night rather than brave a physical relationship with the boy she used to love and the man she was falling in love with.
Orion had dreamed of many versions of life after The Cell, each vision changing after the years in chains passed her by. Eventually, she stopped with the visions all together. But even her most morbid ones didn’t include this.
That was life.
Fate, maybe.
And fate was shining on Shelby, who was late meeting Orion at a trendy coffee shop in downtown St. Louis.
She had texted to say her flight was late.
Shelby was coming from New York, where she’d done a segment on Good Morning America, promoting her book. On her own. No parents. No Orion—though she’d offered and had been relieved when Shelby said no.
Orion had never been on a plane before. Now, she had the money to fly anywhere in the world if she wished. It would be the smart thing to do. To buy herself a one-way ticket to New Zealand, disappearing into a small town where no one knew her name and she had no troubles.
But that was the thing. Troubles and demons alike didn’t need money to follow you around the world. They didn’t need plane tickets either. She was either too much of a coward or too brave to get on that plane. She suspected it was the former.
Orion was daydreaming about her next kill. She’d chosen him already. Alan Stephens. He was in his forties, overweight, and liked little boys. He’d been given a light sentence because he was rich. She was beginning to see a trend. The more she researched these monsters, the more she realized money talked loudly in the justice system.
He was going to be slightly harder than the others. She’d chosen the others because they smaller in stature. Skinny and out of shape. Loners. Not many people would miss them. But Alan had money, which meant he had a wife that stuck by his side, and the golfing buddies who “never believed he could do such a thing!’”
