[ WP ] Two serial killers stumble upon each other while hiking . Both find the other to be the perfect next victim .

The trail was only two miles to the top. The mountain was short and fat, and with that shape it offered thirty-five different trails to the top. Most were two to three miles apart, at least. The average distance a scream can actually travel, when bouncing off of the dense trees of Northern California, was barely a mile. 
 
 6:00. The perfect timing for someone to find a companion, a friend forever or kinda forever. The trail offers many friends on the way up. A pair of hippies that offer him some trail mix. A middle aged couple, trying to escape the office but clearly annoyed with prolonged exposure to each other. They will break up soon. The last of the downers descended, a trio of high school girls in athletic shorts and revealing tank-tops. He undressed them with his eyes, and moved along to find someone who wanted to stay the night with him. Well, stay the night at least. 
 There were no friends that he could find, and boy was he lonely. Usually there is a bum or two in the summer months, sleeping off their loneliness in a poorly erected fort or a cardboard box. The box was a shape he looked for often. Its concrete angles screamed for attention among the contorted branches. But there were no cubes among the obtuse today. It was getting dark, and boy howdy was it getting lonely. 
 
 A friend! He rejoices furtively into a tree, scratching beard into bark and breathing heavy heaves into the air. A tent, and one tent, too small for someone who already has a friend. It must be someone who is lonely. 
 
 He stares for about twenty minutes, until the sunset lost its sheen and purple night crept over the mountain sight. Friend had taken a piss and smoked a joint in those twenty minutes, probably eating afterwards before lying down to sleep. 
 
 By now my feet are going numb, so I do n't crunch the leaves. It has been an hour since friend has gone to bed, and he seems awful quiet. I am his guest, and he is being rude as hell. My trench rustles, and underneath torn sweatpants that usually show my genitals but I wore my jockstrap today because I wanted to make a friend. 
 
 The tent is smooth. The man locks the drawstring of his sweatpants into place and licks the tent, and it is smooth. It tastes like music sounds, vibrations shooting into his tongue and rousing his heart into audibility. He twists his thumb between his right hand, and the urge to bite through the tent is too much. 
 
 The yellow of my nails stripped the zipper naked, until the veil was deveined and the sight was before me. My friend, my new friend who I just wanted to love and be friends with and talk to, had somehow decapitate himself and placed his own dick in his mouth. The blood seared through his camper blanket and it turns out my friend did not do this to himself, because, while I knelt, I felt steel rend flesh and canvas. 
 
 A thin rod of steel had been gouged through the man in the trenchcoat and sweatpants, spit rod style. It exited through his body with a plop and ripped the zipper cleanly off of its frame. The culprit was clear. the culprits were clear. 
 
 I saw them, those demons. Three faces weaving in between the moon and going dark where the trees blocked light from the backdrop. white faces shadowed by night, jagged teeth carving white nodules in midnight, lips bound to a smile and dragging the teeth into a caricature of happiness. They were depraves faces, arms scalped of fat with bone fingers tapping at the air, at nothing or crawling over each other's shoudlers. They shoved the rod into me, and with every push it became more lucid. Movements motivated by supernatural puppetry, jerking limbs towards me with no itinerary. legs heaved, weaving in and out of the three until it was a crab reverberating through leaves with popcorn snaps and cracks. Pig tails and cheap makeup, doll-like and porcelain, with small movements and their faces oh god their faces, they eyes, before I blacked out I could see how alive they were with absentness. Bags underneath shattered the illusion of beauty, and housed wrinkles that maintained themselves in plentiful scrunches around the otherwise unblemished statues. Finally, the smiles stopped, and the allure of breasts under white tanktops and athletic shorts was rendered terrifyng. and her and her and her breaths were spitting into my ears, rasping the words. 
 
 `` We saw you walking up the mountain, and looking at us. Do you wan na be friends?'' 
 
 They cackled until they roared and clawed into his eye sockets and teeth sank into his nose until he too, screamed. In the Northern California mountains, on some and especially this one, the trails are far apart. A scream can only travel a mile, at best, through the dense canopy.
