Auribus Teneo Lupum
"You feel the last bit of breath leaving their body. You're
looking into their eyes. A person in that situation is God!"
- Ted Bundy
It was almost 7:30 in the evening. Yet another uneventful day in life of the residents of apartment 24/D was coming to a mundane end. Most of the housewives were already back from the little obscure joggers' park beside the parking lot where they gathered for their daily gossips and small talk. Kids were either watching TV or playing games on their computers. Four young teenage girls from the second and third floor were playing badminton on the service road that was the lifeline of five more identical apartments on the block. The wind was not calm anymore and if the roaring phalanx of dark dense clouds on the horizon was of any indication, it was going to rain for hours before midnight.
Amidst all this chaos was a shadow on the terrace of the fourth floor – almost invisible, if not for the unmistakable pair of red eyes, like two bright little glow-worms in a rain-forest bat cave. It hadn't moved even slightly for almost an hour now and its gaze was fixated on one of the girls playing with others down the road. Unaware of this shadowy presence of a secret admirer, she kept playing for a while, until his cold piercing eyes caressed her neck lovingly. Her tender body shivered in reaction and she turned her head around expecting someone familiar – only to find none but bitter winter wind. Then, all of a sudden, a thought crossed her mind. She looked up and smiled mischievously at the giant patch of murk that somehow resembled a tall and well-built man in his mid-twenties. He lit up a cigarette and disappeared into the lingering darkness of his apartment.
She was a 19 years old beautiful and bright young girl. A student of finance at one of the most prestigious colleges of the city, she also worked at a famous BPO office during night shifts. A decidedly hectic schedule left her with little time for worldly joys of a girl's life. Still, she would hop onto abundant opportunities at her workplace and college to fill her emptiness with lively moments of love, intimacy and bursts of careless laughter – even if not as real and true as she would have liked. Her expensive phone played a catchy tune aloud. She was still taking a hot shower in her bathroom. It rang again. The door slammed open and she came out in a hurry, draped only in a towel – her flawless skin glistening with glittering droplets as they departed her dark hair like fallen angels. It was her manager on the other end. She nodded with a shy smile on her pretty face as his voice tickled and played with her shapely ears. They were going out for a dinner tomorrow night.
She wasn't really in love with her manager. Even if she was, she couldn't really tell. He was a nice handsome man in his late twenties. There was something mysteriously attractive about him – either his suave dressing sense and gentlemanly manners or that he didn't talk much and kept to himself most of the times. There were rumors that he once dated their CEO's wife when they were in college together. She never had a clue or the nerve to ask him why he liked her so much when he had so many beautiful and willing girls working under him. And then, the alarm shrieked in pain. Her cab was to arrive by a famous sweet corner a couple of blocks across. She barged out of her apartment and almost ran to the place where two of her friends, who also happened to be her workmates, were waiting anxiously. One of them winked and complemented on her looks. She made a face and started writing a message on her mobile phone's touchscreen.
There was not much light in his room, save for what appeared to be coming from two large LCD monitors and a laptop on his desk. Almost half of the room was full of books and journals of all kinds, shapes and sizes. Stacks of videotapes and optical disks infested his shelves. The humming sound of multiple hard disks working in a tandem roared and pierced through the eerie calm of silence and darkness. He was sitting there in a corner, punching keys on his favorite tiny black laptop. From time to time, he would pour some scotch and thick red liquid, which was probably some exquisite red wine, into a glass and finish it off. A few minutes later, he SSH'ed into one of the servers for program testing and left it running there with some test data and its output piped to another system running some kind of a data analysis program in console. After finishing his drink, he powered on a stylish desk lamp and picked up a heavy book. It was Gray's Anatomy.
By the time she was finished with the painstakingly long call, it was already 1:30AM. She looked around. Most of the employees were busy listening to customers cribbing into their earpieces. It was one of those boring, repetitive and tiresome desk jobs, but it paid well. And she needed the money for her personal needs and to finance her higher studies in near future. Full of ambitions and energy, she was proud of her academic records. A pat on her left shoulder almost made her squeal.
“Oh, it's you!”, she smiled.
“You look tired.”, he was worried. “Why don't you take a break?”
“It's nothing.”, she murmured. “I only ...”
“Cab-7 will take you home.”, he cut her short.
It was still raining outside. Not a single living soul was anywhere in sight in this wet winter night of December. An unpleasant shrilling sound of screeching tires disturbed the uneasy silence of the estranged night. She quickly stepped out of the cab, tightly clasping the raincoat around her slender, shivering and fragile body. Now she had to endure a three hundred meters solo walk to her apartment in this severely unpleasant weather. Streets were flooded with water and mud by now and walking in a pair of stylish tennis shoes wasn't much of a help either. She covered her head with the waterproof handbag she had bought last month. It would take at least fifteen minutes to get there, she figured.
A pair of shrewed eyes were keeping a keen watch on the girl as she waved back to the cab driver and crossed the road carefully. He put on black latex gloves and a ski mask. In pockets of his long overcoat were a couple of syringes filled with Propofol and Nembutal, a pair of handcuffs, a 7” bowie blade and a small saber-tooth pocket knife among other obscure items. As he locked his car door, it was evident that he was carrying a revolver and a baton as well. He moved swiftly as the girl took a turn to left. Lights were out and visibility was extremely low. Distance between the two was decreasing faster. The girl stopped for a moment and looked around her. None in sight. “Must be a rabid dog or something”, she thought. She was about to take a right turn down the street ...and then something hit her from behind. A mild “thud” sound was all she could hear before she blacked out instantly.
He had swung his baton just above her neck. A limp, frail body of the girl was now lying on the dark cramped street. The only girl he regarded so high and desired so wrongly. The only girl to have invaded his solitary dreams so violently. He couldn't sleep, he couldn't dream and he couldn't fantasize without. She was the most perfect image of the first one in his life. The same eyes, the same hair, the same smile. The only girl ...worth dying for ...worth killing for.
“Water!”, she pleaded. A bowl touched her lips. But she couldn't move her hands. Those were handcuffed to the arms of an old rocking chair she was resting on. “Drink it.”, a husky voice echoed in what looked like an ages old basement that hadn't been looked after since forever. She wasn't fully conscious yet. A cursory blurred look around didn't reveal much. A man dressed in black was preparing an injection. What seemed like a dirty, disorganized basement room before now appeared to be a Gothic dungeon – a slaughterhouse to be precise. She wanted to scream on top of her voice, but couldn't. She was still under the effect of all those chemicals injected intravenously. It was time for another. She tried to resist, but in vain.
This was one of those abandoned old mansions in another part of the city that no one cared much about. The owner had died years ago and left this property in the hands of his only son who was too busy abroad to take a good care of his ancestral home. She was feeling dizzy and the repugnant smell in the room was nauseating. A table in the corner looked like one of those in operation theaters – full of medical equipments. There were some plastic sheet rolls and a large commercial refrigerator only a few feet away. She had been sedated heavily and any attempt at crying for help was an exercise in futility. She felt like vomiting.
The look on his face revealed none of the emotions he had hidden underneath. He slowly undressed and lay her on the table. A music system was playing his favorite Bach track. He proceeded to clean up her body with formalin. The feel of her warm flesh against his excited him more and more with every passing moment. He could only get intimate with people that didn't react to his movements. Unconscious motionless bodies could never reject his cold pledges and advances. Every time he moved in her warm flesh, he realized how inviting and willing she was. Her silence melted in his ears. The music was getting intense and so was his love for the girl of his dreaded dreams. His muscular body shivered with violent spasms of pleasure. He kissed her deeply. Her breathing was inconsistent, but mellow. He wiped her body clean, and his – again.
This was undoubtedly one of the best experiences he'd had in years. Her face was glowing with pleasure she had denied herself all her life. He was her savior, her lover and her liberator. He was proud of what he had done to one too many girls so far. Her had offered them his immortal love and affection and he had liberated them all of their miserably pitiful lives. He caressed her quivering body, kissed her neckline and sweet sullen lips and held her tight against his own. There was a sad smile on his face. Probably the only expression and emotion he ever knew. His sadness and an eternal longing for true love. It was time to say goodbye. He clenched his fists in desperation and hopelessness. He laid her down on a plastic sheet. Her eyes were open and she was looking at him, but there was no movement in them. She reminded him of many a dolls he had dismembered and buried in his childhood. But she was different. She was more precious than any of them before. Her beauty deserved to be immortalized forever. He put her unconscious body in a 7' fiber-glass barrel that was lying there unused, and then emptied all the formaldehyde he had there into the same. Her body reacted violently as the preserving liquid started to fill her lungs up. It took only a few minutes worth of unconscious struggle before she turned herself into a sleeping goddess. He stared and marveled at the beauty of his creation. He had immortalized his love and his passion. She was his, now – and forever. No one could take her away from him.
He had to document his wildest night in years. This was the only way he could relive it over and over again. He took out a voice recorder from his pocket and started dictating to it: -
“It was almost 7:30 in the evening. Yet another uneventful day in life of ...”
Auribus Teneo Lupum 
The very last line is the real twist. 
The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds;
