Love in a Murderous Place - Chapter 1

Diana was bored. She was bored when she woke up and got ready for work. She was bored making expense reports and filing paperwork. She was bored driving home from her meaningless job to her stale apartment. And she was bored spending her weekends tricking hapless suckers into funding her wild, sleepless drug-fueled, boring benders. When Diana slept, she would dream of projectiles whizzing by, mere inches from her head as she wove through dense forest, of crouching in underbrush, heart hammering and breath held while some armed and half-remembered relative of Desmond’s searched for her, of watching in satisfaction as her plans bloomed into deadly fruition. She was bored of that, too.

At first, everything that had happened had left Diana shaken. The days following her survival had brought sleepless night after sleepless night. Her eyes would close, weariness would start to overtake her, and just as unconsciousness tugged at the corner of her mind, the primal urge to keep on living would fling her into wakefulness. More times than she could count, Diana had found herself snapping awake, choking a blanket, or on the floor and wrestling with her pillow. Slowly, with begrudging therapy and a lot of medication, a sense of normalcy began to creep back into her day to day life. She could sleep, she could work, she even started to miss Desmond—that is, the Desmond she’d thought she knew before everything went bad, not the Desmond who had sided with his family when they’d decided they wanted to eat her—all of it was frankly dreadful.

Aside from continuing in her grueling efforts to carve out some semblance of a crushingly mundane life, there was ultimately nothing Diana could do in her early days on the road to normalcy but accept a harsh truth: never in her life had she felt so alive as she had during that single terrifying, painful, exhausting weekend. The adrenaline, the fear, the sense of purpose, nothing in all her days had compared to that primal thrill of turning the tables on her hunters, and surviving. Six months after what she’d begun to refer to in her head as simply ‘the incident,’ Diana cut the orange tip off an airsoft gun, drove to the next town over, and held up a drug store.

Hours had been spent meticulously fretting over every contingency, every movement, every word, everything that could possibly go wrong. In the end it had been unsatisfyingly simple. She walked in, showed her ‘gun,’ asked for the money, and left  two hundred thirty-seven dollars richer. For  three days and three nights, Diana hid in her apartment, waiting for a loud, authoritative knock. It never came. She spent the money on losing lottery tickets, three bottles of liquor, and, tragically, a box of Marshmallow Peeps.

Ever since, Diana had chased the high. She started small, with things like party drugs and casual sex, but that spiraled quickly. By the time a year had passed, Diana was obsessed with seeking out and narrowly avoiding trouble. Regularly she would look up city-wide crime reports to spend the occasional evening walking through the most dangerous parts of town by herself. She’d begged a hookup to choke and whip her until she passed out after learning that could make her climax harder. For an entire week, Diana had studied medical journals just to trick some cop into believing that she was an actual doctor, then deliberately gave terrible advice. After hearing about an upcoming political rally, she had found and followed a group of neonazis for five blocks, yelling about how she would do everything in her power to ensure not a single white baby was ever born again. There was also the time she gave up flossing for a week, but found that not at all exciting; it mostly just wound up causing her to stress over her dental health.

The thing Diana did most of all was cheat people out of their money. Hustling, con artistry, even occasional pickpocketing were new pastimes of hers. Her preferred targets were wealthy men, partly because she could use her feminine charm on them with a much higher success rate, partly because she may have developed a bit of a vendetta on account of the whole old-money cannibal family thing. She’d even spent a good three months shacked up with some stock-broker type, milking what she could from him. There had been a few times during that whole stint where she’d actually started to feel bad and considered coming clean. Without fail, though, the guy would prove to be a vile creep without an ounce of empathy time and time again. At least she had a reason to take advantage of people, not to mention a far greater need for that money than he’d had.

Running cons and the like was one of the few things left that still scratched that itch for Diana. They challenged her in ways nothing else had since that weekend. A battle of wits, Diana versus the mark, her ability to lie, to improvise and plan for every contingency against their ability to sniff out her bullshit. To con someone was a living, breathing game with no real rules and a completely unpredictable opponent. She had to think ahead, anticipate her mark’s concerns, adapt and improvise when things veered off script, and carefully, methodically dismantle their each and every reservation.

At first, she’d stuck to the tried and trues: the antique violin, the lucky investment opportunity, fake collector’s items and sick, dying mothers. After a time, she started to engineer her own, losing sleep as she meticulously engineered a practiced web of enticing lies. They didn’t have that same tightness, cleanness. She failed more often that way, but when it worked, Diana felt like a goddess.

For a time, chasing danger, abundant sex and the process of aquiring, then using ill-gotten gains to fund fancy hotel stays, expensive food and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol was all she’d needed to fill the void. An abundance of fear, thrills and artificially gained good brain chemicals kept Diana from feeling as though she were constantly deteriorating. It didn’t last. The highs became less high, the scares became boring, even the lows grew static, dull. And so Diana became bored. Even the cons were starting to lose their luster. They weren't yet completely bereft of charm; once in a while she’d still feel that spark deep in her soul. But it wouldn’t last, Diana knew that.

Worse still, somehow her memories of and feelings toward ‘the incident’ itself even began to feel mundane. All it had been was danger. She’d fought for her life, sure, but for no other reason than that she’d had no choice. And, after nearly two years of recklessness, that ultimate thrill seemed hollow. Over and over again Diana had felt that rush, felt the fear, fought and crawled her way through the shit with slow, methodical ambition time and time again for the sake of chasing a feeling. Hell, so much of her her entire life had been a push to keep her head above water. Eventually, it lost meaning, it lost importance.

So, as that two year mark crept ever closer, and life grew increasingly dull, Diana found that she didn’t crave excitement, or danger, or even the rush of her brain releasing some positive neurochemical or other; what Diana wanted was a reason to care at all. She could have her fun with her scams, and she did. But that’s all it was, just frivolous fun to get money that would fund even more frivolous fun. It was temporary, a distraction. Meaning was a word people threw around a lot; Diana supposed that was what she craved. Or, if meaning was too much to ask for, something to make a lifetime of mundanity sound like less of a death sentence. Before her little unplanned life or death wilderness excursion extraordinaire, Desmond had been the one who made that possible.

Three times since that oh so fateful weekend, Diana had tried to allow herself the indulgence of earnestly dating someone: three men, three dates, three decisions to never, ever do that again. As it turned out, trust was a rare commodity after one’s boyfriend of a year and a half turned out to actually be a sadistic cannibal. And that wasn’t even Desmond's worst trait. Honestly, what kind of loser had an axe stuck in their back and gaping, bleeding holes all the way through their shoulder and gut? Regardless, Diana was at the point where, to admit that loneliness was the problem would feel like defeat. She simply couldn’t let her guard down anymore. Or, at the very least, she couldn’t do that with anyone who fell within the definition of ‘boyfriend’, or potential boyfriend for that matter. Her showerhead, and longest running boyfriend was the one shining exception. At least it could make her cum.

It was that exact notion—the reflections on loneliness, not her showerhead's ability to give her orgasms—which lingered at the forefront of her mind as Diana sat slumped over a bar table, making a half-hearted attempt to act as though she were paying any attention to whatever Laura was prattling on about. In her defense, a half-hearted attempt was all Laura needed. She cared less about being heard and more about the appearance that her words were being heard. What Diana loved about Laura was that neither had the misconception that either truly liked the other. They were friends because they had known one another since they were kids. Laura was vindictive, shallow and ultimately ambivalent to those around her in such a way that Diana could so effortlessly drop any pretense of them being best friends due to anything but convenience. And it was convenient. Laura was wealthy enough, and, despite her huffs and eye-rolls, more than happy to indulge in the occasional two-person con with Diana if it meant a few extra bucks to fuel her vanity.

They made a good team, caring about one another in that special way which only two people who exclusively hung out because they secretly needed to not be alone and had nobody else to spend time with could. Once upon a time, Diana had had many friends; through her isolation, self-destructive behavior, and bitterness, she had pushed them all away. All save the one person Diana knew who was even more unbearable than she was. And so, two or three nights a week, Diana and Laura would get drinks, or watch some movie neither of them cared about, or go to some club. Diana, so she could fulfill her need to not be alone with the mind numbing boredom, and Laura, to stroke her burgeoning but delicate ego by showing the world that she had a friend who was almost as conventionally pretty as she was and at the very least pretended to care about her enough to sit and listen to her talk endlessly. Honestly, the two were made for each other.

Regarding the aforementioned endless talking, the apparent topic of the night was singles cruises. Boats the size of small cities, just perfect for people whose ideal vacation was eating their weight in bad food, making sad drunken small talk with strangers, and pretending anything would come of any on-ship relationship besides forgettable sex and morning regrets. Laura didn’t seem to look on them so disfavorably, though. Perhaps she was more the target audience to begin with. Diana was in the middle of picking apart the very concept when, out of the blue, Laura said something that completely derailed her thoughts. “So, do you wanna go?”

It took a moment for Diana to fully process what she’d heard; when she finally did, all she managed in reply was a baffled “What?”

Rolling her eyes, Laura huffed, “This stupid boat or whatever. Do you wanna come or not?”

Diana scoffed at the notion. “I don’t have money to waste on some lame ass cruise.”

A look of thoughtful annoyance, but clear disappointment crossed Laura’s face as she looked away for a moment, sighed, then exhaled a frustrated groan. “Are you seriously gonna make me buy your fucking ticket for you?”

Hardly believing her ears, Diana looked around almost expecting the reveal of some kind of joke. “Are you kidding? Why do you want this so bad?”

“Cause this town sucks, alright? I wanna do something. I wanna go somewhere nice and meet some good looking, well-off guy to fuck for a week or so while he buys me things. And I am not going on a cruise by myself.” She paused, and grumbled for a moment, averting her eyes and drawing inward a little. “Besides, it’s not like I really care or anything. I mean, destroy your life if that’s what you want. But you living alone in the same apartment you shared with your dead murder-cannibal boyfriend or whatever probably isn’t good for you. You’re totally falling apart and I’m not gonna have my only friend wind up in a psych ward… it wouldn’t look good.”

Strangely, Diana found that modicum of genuine concern masked by a mountain of open hostility surprisingly touching. “Aww, babe.”

“Oh, shut up. I’m not paying for your plane tickets and all that crap. But I’ll buy your ticket onto the ship if you come with me so I don’t have to fake smile my way through boring personality-less men all by myself.”

“Alright, sure. Maybe wasting away in a bar and scamming strangers on a boat will be more fun than doing it here."