Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite, Deirdre C. Amthor Page B

thoughtlessly. But how many people had experienced an actual
need to murder,
a need to
appreciate
someone else’s death?
    Some may think killing is easy for men like me, that it is a thing we murderers do as casually and callously as brushing our teeth. Hedonists see us as grotesque cult heroes performing mutilations for kicks. Moralists will not even grant us a position in the human race, can only rationalize our existence by calling us monsters. But
monster
is a medical term, describing a freak too grossly deformed to belong anywhere but the grave. Murderers, skilled at belonging everywhere, seed the world.
    Thumbing through Sam’s wallet on the train, I had a nasty flash of alarm. My plan had been to visit the automatic bank machines at the airport, withdraw the largest cash advancesSam’s three credit cards would allow, and use the cash to buy a ticket on the first flight that caught my fancy. But as I handled the stiff plastic rectangles, I remembered the Barclaycard I’d had in my other life. A machine would give you all the cash you liked—as long as you’d memorized your four-digit access number. That was what kept people like me from knocking you over the head, taking your card, and withdrawing all your money.
    I could hardly go back and ask Sam what his PINs were. I supposed I would have to buy a ticket with one of the cards, but if Sam’s body were identified and his death connected with me, there would be a perfect record of where I’d gone. Of course, I wouldn’t stay where I landed. But it would give them a place to start looking for me. I didn’t want them to have even that much.
    I tipped the card marked
Visa
back and forth in my hand, making the hologram of an eagle flutter and take wing. I rubbed my finger across the nubbly raised letters of Sam’s name, trying to absorb his identity, his memories. I thought of his brain dying back in the loo, the cells turning to rancid slush, the cells that held the knowledge I needed. Just this morning I’d been dead too. I wished there were some sort of information interchange beyond the grave, some ghostly data bank listing the vital statistics of no-longer-vital souls. But if there was, I hadn’t stayed long enough to tap into it.
    I would buy a different ticket with each card, I decided, and use some of Sam’s cash if necessary. At least that way they would have to start looking for me in four places instead of one.
    Heathrow Airport just before midnight is a cacophony of shoving, hurrying travellers, disembodied voices, stroboscopic lights. There are breakfast bars and snack stands, rocklike sticky buns collaborating with tea of inferior vintage to mount an assault on the taste buds and the stomach lining. There are bookstores and caviar kiosks and luggage carts and escalatorsand duty-free zones. And everywhere there are boards announcing imminent departures, exhorting you to go any of a thousand other places, anywhere but here. Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world. A flight leaves every forty-seven seconds. No one can watch them all.
    Bangkok. Zaire. Tokyo. Salt Lake City. The names whirled and clicked about my head, tempting, confusing, seducing me. Tangier, I knew, was full of adorable young boys lounging on soporific sands, begging to be interfered with. Singapore was the gourmet capital of the world, but had a brutal police system. Anyone could get lost in the backstreet mazes of stinking Calcutta. And this was only one terminal.
    In the end I bought tickets to Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Cancün, and Atlanta. All four flights left within the hour. Whichever gate I arrived at first, that was where I would go. Once I had the tickets, I went into a men’s loo and shoved Sam’s credit cards deep into a rubbish bin. They were of no more use to me. Then I took the cassette from Drummond’s tape recorder, pissed on it, and flushed it.
    I walked past a news vendor and glanced at the