Free Death List by Donald Goines

come out to meet him. The woman was able to carry the child just as well as he was, and if it was as serious as she said, she would have been waiting for him at the door.
    As he ran across the well-kept lawn he noticed the front door was cracked halfway open. He jumped up on the porch and didn't stop until he had burst through the front door. Then he stopped abruptly. At first he couldn't believe his eyes. His mind didn't want to accept what he saw. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, only to find the sight still there when he reopened them. The first thing that came to his sight was his baby daughter, her pen pushed in front of the front door so that whoever entered would have to walk around it to get into the front room. The small child lay out on the clean mattress, clean except for the dried blood around the slit in her neck. Other than that, it was as if the little girl was sleeping.

    Even as he stumbled over to her pen, his mind told him that it had been done with a razor. He started to reach down and pick up the child, but again his mind informed him that it was a useless action; the baby was dead. Tears blinded him as he staggered around the pen.
    Then he saw Mary. She was tied to the end of the marble coffee table. Her throat was cut, too, and she had cuts across her face as if she had tried to fight until the end. But the dead children lying around the room showed how useless it had been. His three-yearold girl was lying close to her mother, only her throat was not cut. The madman had deviated. Instead of the razor, he had strangled the little girl with her own pigtails.
    Sam dropped on his knees beside the three-yearold, praying that there still might be life in the small body. His brain screamed over and over again, Who could be responsible for such a monstrous act? This wasn't the work of a sane mind. Whoever had committed these insane acts had more than just enjoyed them. He must have received a certain macabre fascination from such grotesque butchery. To be able to kill an adult was one thing; to kill children was another. But to be able to butcher a baby was yet another kind of murdering beast, one who needed to be destroyed at once.

    For the moment though, Sam was too stricken even to think of revenge. He wanted to make whoever did this pay, but his mind was too shocked. Could this be some kind of payback for the killing Kingfisher had ordered? It was hard for him to reason that out. He thought he was dealing with men, and even though he knew they were violent men, it had never occurred to him that they were insane, and that was the only explanation he could come up with for whoever had done this gruesome work.
    Then suddenly he heard it. It was low at first, but as he listened it grew. The low laughter began almost below the range of his hearing, then it picked up until he could pinpoint the source. He turned toward the sound. He hadn't tried to visualize what the person might have looked like, but now as he turned and saw the bloody human apparition standing behind the fulllength window curtains, he knew at once that this debased human was responsible for the destruction of everything he loved in this life. As he stared at the human riffraff, an almost imperceptible hatred increased inside his brain until it was a full-blown desire to destroy this thing.
    The sound that came from the man's mouth didn't even seem human; he was enjoying every moment of this. He loved the sight of the grief that had overcome the big heavyset man. It seemed to bring him joy to watch the expressions that flashed across Sam's face.
    Sam wanted to kill and destroy, and yet he also wanted to know. "Why, man? Why the kids?" he asked as he moved slowly across the room, unaware that he had even taken a step. The same question kept coming from him as he stalked the grinning Creeper, who watched him approach with a twisted smile on his face.

    The enveloping blackness that invaded Sam's mind stopped him from thinking, or even