Free Transcription by Ike Hamill

wiping off his hands and heading inside. That was about sunset.
    Back here, I didn’t have any choice. I couldn’t take the night off to go monitor Ron, I had to sit down, record the next terrible story, and just hope that everything would turn out okay for my friend. It seems crazy to think now, but maybe the reason I couldn’t convince him was that I really didn’t believe myself. There’s a world of difference between what lives in your heart during the day, and the shadows that creep in after sunset. Unfortunately, Ron learned that for himself.
    He probably tried to go to bed. He was dressed in his boxers and a t-shirt when he left the house again. I’m guessing that he was conscious of what his body was doing, but he was helpless to stop it. Ron drove his motorcycle. It was still running rough—I assume that he didn’t finish all the repairs he had been working on. He got on the highway and headed west, towards the foothills.  
    I don’t know how he found the place. Maybe he had run across it at some point in the past, or maybe the strange infection that controlled his mind was drawn there. Ron pulled up in front of the old folk’s home just before midnight. The orderly thought maybe engine trouble had caused him to stop. He expected Ron to come in and ask to use the phone. He said that if Ron hadn’t killed the engine, it sounded like it would have died in a few seconds anyway.
    Ron didn’t come in—at least not right away.
    Instead of heading for the front door, Ron walked through the parking lot until he found a truck with unlocked doors. He then located the tire iron mounted under the seat. Ron took that and used it to snap the lock on the side door of the building.
    Once inside, he moved with stealth. The desk at the end of the hall was staffed with two nurses. One was filing case reports for residents, and the other was preparing medication to be dispensed. Neither saw a thing as Ron moved into the first patient’s room. The woman there was eighty-nine years old, and suffering from a bad case of dementia. At the time of this writing, the police haven’t released her name. I have a good idea what she looked like—I saw her when I wrote the story.  
    She opened her eyes and smiled when Ron entered her room. In her mind, she was a little girl, and Ron was her father, coming home from second shift at the mill. She worked her arms free from her covers and held them up, so her daddy could give her a goodnight hug. Ron swung the tire iron and brought it down on the side of her head. The thin skin covering her skull was covered with fine, wispy hair and a network of blue veins. It split wide open. Her skull shattered. The murder happened so quickly that she still had a smile on her face as her life was extinguished.
    The door finished its slow swing shut and Ron was in the dark with her. The slanted streetlight coming through the blinds banded the scene into strips of gore.
    Ron used his shirt to wipe the blood and hair from his weapon. He reached into the old woman’s head, scooped a handful of brain tissue, and jerked it back. He slopped her brain onto the floor before he turned back to the door.
    Across the hall, an old man moaned softly with each exhale. He was waiting for his next round of pain medication. Inside, his body was hot with cancerous tumors. Ron plunged the sharp end of the tire iron into the man’s gut. He punctured the man’s stomach and severed his spinal column. The old man’s feet twitched and danced in the bed as his bladder and bowels evacuated into the sheets.
    Ron pulled his weapon free and then stabbed it back a little higher. It punctured one of the man’s lungs, but missed his heart. After four more punctures, the man finally stopped twitching. Blood seeped from the corner of the old man’s mouth.
    The room featured an eyebolt in the ceiling where a traction device could be hung. Ron stepped up on the bed, fed the end of an electrical cord through the eye, and then