Authors: Melissa Simonson
FORTY-FIVE
Jack shifts his Camry into park once he’s rolled into our assigned space.
He’s out of the car and around the passenger’s side before I’ve gotten my seatbelt off. “You are
not
carrying me,” I warn through the window. “I’m pregnant, not an invalid.”
That I’m not crippled doesn’t seem to sway Jack any. I know it
’s ungrateful or illogical, being irritated people are concerned, but I don’t deserve concern or a doting caretaker. Nothing happened to me. Nothing physical.
One of his hands
curls around the inside of my elbow as he steers me up the flight of stairs to our front door. He waves at two men sitting in an unmarked police cruiser as we pass a bed of brittle flowers with black veins.
“You know them?”
“Aaron and Brett. They’ve been on the six a.m. to two p.m. shift, watching since you’ve been missing.”
Tough gig. A painful ass and a crick in the neck from surveillance can’t be fun.
The keys jingle when he unlocks the door and holds it open. Stripes bolts off the couch and winds through my legs in frenzied gray figure-eights, yowling like he does every morning when he wants breakfast.
“He missed you.” A sad sort of smile tugs Jack’s mouth at the corner. “I never thought cats cared about much of anything, but he slept on your pillow every night. I swear he actually looked sad, too.”
I missed him more than he’d missed me. I got him a year ago at the Humane Society. He’d already been named and neutered, which made him an easy sell. Jack pretended to be allergic and annoyed, but I’d caught him snuggling up to Stripes more than a few times. Men.
Jack closes the door. The deadbolt tumbles and the security chain rattles when I stoop to pick up my loud fuzzball.
Stripes squeaks when Jack crushes the pair of us into his polo. “Do you want to go to bed?” His breath is hot against my hair, and he squeezes me so tight it’s hard to tell where he ends and I begin.
“I’ve been in bed for the past thirty-six hours,” I mumble
into his chest. “I want to sit on the couch with Stripes. Watch TV.” Maybe
Law & Order: SVU
will stamp Abby and her fourth-degree burns from my mind.
He follows me the couch, hovering like an aircraft as he arranges a blanket around me. “Are you hungry? Do you want me to make you anything?”
“Have you been to the grocery store?” I ask as Stripes bumps into my open palm over and over, begging for attention.
“No,” he says sheepishly. “I’ve been living on coffee and the occasional
Xanax. I haven’t slept much since you’ve been gone.”
“I’m not hungry anyway.”
His brow creases.
Wrong answer.
“Maybe we can go to the store tomorrow,” I offer. “I don’t need anything right now. My appetite’s been nonexistent.”
Another wrong answer, clearly. Jack drops a sack full of rattling prenatal vitamins to the floor. “It’s not just you now. The baby needs proper nutrition.”
“Do you think I’m too stupid to realize that? I know I’m not a doctor, but
fuck.
You
try barfing for days and tell me if you’re in a hurry to eat.”
He slides onto a bar stool in front of the kitchen island
across from the couch. “If you write a list of things you want, I can hit the grocery store. Antacids and Saltines to settle your stomach. Gatorade to replace lost electrolytes from vomiting.”
It’s annoying when Jack speaks Clinical Doctor, so I acquiesce before he gets momentum. “I’ll do it later.”
He fixes me with his pale blue gaze while I nuzzle Stripes and pretend not to notice. He’s deciding what to say, I can tell, but I don’t want him to
say
anything. Talking is exhausting. Dreaming up appropriate, non-scary responses taxes my brain, which already feels like a wrung sponge.
Jack must catch the hint because he cracks open a book on the counter and buries his face between its pages.
FORTY-SIX
John had his phone in hand as he pushed open the lobby doors of the precinct when a call from Stacy streamed through. He answered on the first ring.
“John.”
He couldn’t remember the last time she’d used his first name, let alone heard her voice shake. It was enough to stop him in his tracks on his way through the parking lot. “What is it?”
She stumbled over words, her pitch higher than normal. “
I think I’ve found it. The website.”
“Good.
Can you find a location?”
She was on the verge of tears, he could tell despite
the phony coughs she uttered to mask her wobbling voice. “I can’t trace it since it’s hosted on an anonymous blogging platform. Probably used a burner email to register for the url, and the platform doesn’t have access to any of their blogger’s identities. I broke through the first layers of encryption and found a recent video. You’ve told me about things like this, but seeing it—actually watching it—is worse than anything I imagined. I know why the girls killed themselves now. There’s no way they could have a normal life after that.”
“
People are more resilient than you think.” He grappled for the car keys in his pocket and punched the UNLOCK button as he approached the black SUV he’d borrowed. “Which video did you watch?”
“The most
recent—a girl being burned over and over. He uses night-vision. It’s green and black, but the quality is high-tech. At first it was two girls sitting in a room. It was time-stamped, so I fast-forwarded until something happened. He’s got three vantage points and toggles between them. Two from the corners on the ceiling and a camera on him—I’m guessing it’s on his face. Glasses cam or something. His face never shows on camera. I threw up all my coffee. Now I have to get more.” She sniffled and cleared her throat.
He let her
finish collecting her composure and settled himself behind the wheel. “Are you okay?”
“Do I sound okay? Can I shut this site down, please?”
“We can’t do that. We need the guy running it to think nobody’s onto him. If I let you shut it down he’ll just get another one up in a few days, and he’ll be angrier than normal. Probably take it out on whoever comes next.”
“
I don’t see evidence of viewers paying to subscribe and watch the videos, either. Looks like it’s strictly personal, especially because of the encryption. Can you give this guy a kick in the nuts for me when you find him?”
“If somebody doe
sn’t beat me to the punch. The fact Brooke’s still alive hasn’t slowed him down? I thought the suicides might have served a purpose, given him a time frame or something. It’s hard to believe they’re not important.”
“I have
n’t spent a lot of time looking around. I called you right away.”
“Can you tell if he streams video live?”
“Not unless he’s streaming live at the moment I check. He probably uploads the videos after the fact—makes it easier to encrypt.”
He drummed the thumb
of his free hand on the wheel. “Send me those files.”
“You don’t want to watch that stuff.”
“I have to watch that stuff. I’m not excited about it.” John fumbled with his seatbelt and started the car. “I’m sorry you had to see it.”
“Hazard of the job, I guess, huh? You’ll have the file in a few.”
It’s said that the first high will remain the best. Every time that follows will fall just short in terms of pleasure.
I crave control too dearly to use
or abuse alcohol or drugs, but this has made me a different sort of addict.
You asked once about the jewelry. They remind me of you. They sustain me when you aren’t around. I put them in new boxes—her eyes light up when she sees one on her pillowcase.
It’s incredible. She would weep if she knew. But you love me
because
you know. You’re the only one I don’t have to hide from.
We’re outsiders, on the periphery. Going through life pretending to be like everyone else, but knowing we’re not. The most we could hope for is to hide in plain sight and hope nobody works out the kinks.
It won’t be long, now.
Saturda
y at 3:47 p.m.
IP Address: 75.84.67.69
Sent via contact form by an anonymous viewer on your website
FORTY-SEVEN
The laugh track mocks me. One voice in it sounds phonetic: HA HA HA. I want to kill that guy, not Abby.
“Please, Brooke.” It sounds like she’s calling from across an ocean. Muted and ethereal. Some weird reverse Siren who wants to be annihilated, not the other way around.
Her hand trails my leg from ankle to thigh and back again. I press my knees harder against my ears and shake her hand off.
“I need you to do it.
You
need you to do it. It’s what’s best.”
I can’t imagine what would be best, and I can’t think of anyone who’d know.
Her fingers tangle in my hair. Vaguely I realize, as it falls about my neck, it’s not my natural color. I can’t bring myself to wonder why he dyed it. Does it matter anymore?
“Please.”
I lift my head. Her face is distorted, a mass of wobbly white skin and blurry blonde hair. “I’m not a killer.” I’m a fucking waitress slash actress, for the love of God.
“Only you can decide if putting a tired, sick woman out of her misery is murder.” She heaves a shuddering breath that makes me shudder, too.
She’s going to harp and nag and wheedle until I relent, I know this much. I also know it won’t be long until He chimes in as well.
Does Abby care what this will to do me, my conscience? It’ll relieve her pain, but all of it will transfer to me the second she’s gone. Once it can’t feed off her any longer it’ll occupy the closest living body. Me.
He’s bang on time. “Come on now, Brooke. She’s not bleeding and begging just for attention.”
I stand, eyes raking the walls, the bullet holes and blood. Girls have been here before me and Abby. We’re no virgin kills.
“She’s so convincing for someone playing a role she didn’t choose, isn’t she?”
She is. It’s all there. The important props for the character she’s been assigned. Blood, tears, decaying flesh, stumps of bone protruding from flayed, blackened skin. If fire is purifying, Abby’s pure as fresh-fallen snow. The least severe burns expose sinewy, stringy muscle tissue stretching across raw skin.
The hammer glitters in that ocean of old blood, promising freedom.
Get me the fuck out of here.
“That’s it,” he says approvingly. He’s my director now. I forgot this is his show. “Give me anger. Men like when women are angry at something other than them. It’s sexy.”
I feel like the furthest thing from sexy on the planet.
“You want to kill me, don’t you? Not her. That look says it all.” A flashbulb renders me blind for a second. “Couldn’t resist a photo op. You’re going to be the new face of failure. Prettier and younger, but sadly, no better off.”
“Don’t listen,” Abby croaks. “He’s only trying to make you mad.”
He’s not trying, he’s succeeding.
Abby scrabbles toward me with nail-less hands, legs dragging like broken doll limbs.
“You’re making our hearts pump faster, here.
Will she? Won’t she?
Will there be tears? Screams? Or will she play Stoic Hero and hold her emotions in check?”
“It’s okay,” Abby says, her ruined shirt falling off her shoulder. White bone glitters
through a puckered burn to her chest. “I’m ready. Get it over with, so you can go home.”
And that
is
the only way I’ll get there. If I don’t, I’ll wind up slowly rotting next to Abby’s gaunt corpse until I’m lucky enough to die, too. Not from torture, but starvation. A slow death. I believe wholeheartedly that he won’t touch me. It was never me he wanted. I’m only here in an interactive audience capacity. A tool to employ at curtain call.
“Stop s
talling. You can’t charm your way out, Brooke. You’ve sat here talking a real big game, but you don’t seem capable of backing those words up. Is that all you are? Talk? Flapping gums? You don’t have much else, now when we’re down to the wire, under the gun, ten minutes to closing.”
Abby lifts her hand to bat away a stray lock of matted hair
. It bounces right back in her eyes, but I catch a glimpse of tears streaking clean rivers through dust and dirt caked on her face.
One more second and my head will explode, painting the walls with my brains right next to the bullet holes and gore of other Abbys murdered by different Brookes.
The hammer’s two steps away. I snatch it from its bed of blood and whirl around. “I’m not doing this for you,” I shout at the camera’s red light. “I’m doing this for her.”
“You and your nobility,” he says. “It’s saccharine. Though
it’s nice to see you surrender with so much poise.”
Abby’s eyes flutter when I come closer. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to the look she wears is when a female porn star falls against blankets with a heaving chest as an orgasm that may or may not be staged wracks her body. It’s relief, almost. All that build-up has to come to fruition eventually or she’ll combust.
The hammer slips in my sweaty grip, and she smiles weakly, flaking lips pulling back from bleeding gums.
If anyone needs a mercy killing, it’s her.
“Thank you,” she says, choking on blood dribbling onto her shriveled tongue. “You’re doing the right thing.”
She needs to stop talking. I might change my mind.
“We’re on pins and needles, Brooke.”
And Abby finally looks sated, because I’ve drawn the hammer back.
But then, it isn’t Abby.
It’s me
, wearing the pajama’s I haven’t had since I was fifteen, soggy with blood between the legs.
“Please don’t,” the me that
can’t be me begs. “I can’t tonight. I have a math test in the morning. I need to—”
***
Stripes’s whirling whiskers wake me when they prickle my cheek. I pull myself upright on the couch as the gavel from a rerun of
Law & Order
blasts through the living room. The blankets slip from my body, slithering to the floor, and Stripes almost does too, but manages to hang onto my shirt by the tips of his claws.
Jack looks up from
East of Eden
. He snaps the book shut as he walks over, and sinks on the cushion beside mine. “Are you okay?”
I nod, clutching the cat to my chest. His purrs
are surprised until I knead his furry neck with two fingers. “How long have I been asleep?”
Jack checks the clock on the microwave. “About fifteen minutes.”
A whole fifteen minutes. Better than my record at the hospital. Maybe later I can work up to half an hour.
Jack brushes hair off my face and presses a trail of kisses down my throat while Stripes turns in nomadic circles on my lap.
He kisses my earlobe and rests his head on my shoulder. “Do you want to get in bed?”
Our open bedroom door taunts me. So does the
light blue comforter and ruffled bedskirt. The lamp from IKEA that always breaks sits beside the nightstand from IKEA that’s always losing screws. It’s comfortable and warm, but I think the only place I’ll find genuine comfort is at the bottom of a vodka bottle, since it always seemed to work for my father.
Not An Option now that I’m with child.
What a loaded question,
do you want to get in bed
. I
do
, but he might come with me. Am I comfortable with that? Logic says yes, considering he’s the man who managed to impregnate me. But Logic has no place in my head. Nothing’s made sense for weeks.
“Let me put you in bed if you’re tired
.”
I shake my head and burrow back beneath the blankets. “No. I’m fine right here.”