Free I Kill in Peace by Hunter Shea

speed limit, the stack of logs on the flatbed threatening to topple off. We had the park to ourselves, then went home and played Frisbee in the back yard.
    Later that night, Candy and I again tried to make love, but it just wasn’t happening. She said all the right things while I brooded in our darkened bedroom.
    I fell asleep feeling like a hollow man. It wasn’t just the fact that I couldn’t get it up that had scooped out some vital part of my being. That strange, telltale heat reddened my palms and legs as I tried to force sleep to come. I’d just had a near perfect day. After being a desk jockey for years, the amount of physical exercise I’d engaged in should have wiped me out.
    Something had been missing.
    My stomach lurched when I peeked into the black corners of my mind. I knew exactly why I was feeling unfulfilled.
    I hadn’t killed a single person.
    And it was eating me alive.

Chapter Fifteen
    I took a trip the next afternoon to the library to do some job hunting after lying to Candy that I couldn’t find the iPad. She packed a legal pad, two pens, highlighter, and a bag lunch. “Good luck, honey,” she said, the look in her eyes filled with hope that my finding a job would ease my issues…down there.
    Like the streets and shops, the library was empty save a young librarian with hair dyed pink at the tips. There was a growing tension not just in Bridgton, but it seemed everywhere. When you’re a fledgling killer with impotency issues, you tend not to pay attention to very much outside your crumbling self, but it was getting impossible to avoid.
    â€œDo I need to reserve time on the computer?” I asked.
    The librarian looked around the room with an arched eyebrow. “It’s all yours. You’re the first person that’s come in here all week. I don’t even know why I’m here. Things are getting kinda scary, you know? I just keep telling myself that nothing bad ever happens in a library.”
    I wondered if she’d ever read Stephen King’s It . Of course, that was fiction.
    I snagged copies of The Bridgton News , the town’s weekly, and The Portland Press Herald before settling behind the library’s computer. The monitor was big and boxy and out of date by about a century. While I waited for the desktop to boot up, I scanned The Bridgton News .
    The normally idyllic town had become a nest of crime. Between the main articles and the police blotter, I counted four homicides, three suicides, and seventeen assaults. This from a place where the biggest crime was usually people speeding off from the gas station without paying. The paper said the State Police were going to assign several cops to the town to assist the locals.
    The Herald was much the same thing, though it encompassed a wider swath of towns.
    â€œJesus H. Christ,” I muttered, fumbling through the pages.
    There, on page three, was my handiwork.
    MANHUNT STILL ON FOR ACCOMPLICE IN POTENTIAL SCHOOL SHOOTING
    It appeared that the Saco police had come to the conclusion that the crazy ass kid I’d killed must have had a partner in crime. Said partner either had second thoughts about laying waste to the school, or wanted all the glory for himself. Police were busy interrogating every student in the high school, which was leading to some serious unrest with the kids and their parents. Who the hell were the cops to come barging in, assuming their kids were stone cold killers?
    To my utter shock and surprise, I felt a world-class hard-on tenting my jeans. My groin area was stoked so hot, I could have fried an egg on the tip of my dick.
    What the hell was wrong with me?
    In fact, the more stories of murder and mayhem I read—and they were everywhere—the hotter and harder I got. Mixed in with police reports were more stories about a potential Ebola outbreak in Nebraska. Also, some kind of flu epidemic was sweeping through San Francisco at a time when no one should