Victim 18 post 24

“Well, Hacker is dead so I don’t have to worry about being identified. Plus I have an added benefit that they—like Hacker—think it’s the work of a rival gang.”

She finishes her sandwich and soda then heads back to her bike. Quickly braiding her hair she puts her helmet back on and is off.

It looks as though it is going to be a nice day and Wren, still wound up tight with adrenalin, decides to take the bike a bit further.

On down highway one hundred she goes toward Washington. She chuckles to herself as she passes all the people going the other way to work somewhere in the city. Glad she had quit her day job and anxious for a response from one of the dig sites or museums she has applied to.

In Washington she makes a right at highway forty-seven and heads on out across the fast muddy Missouri. A tugboat strains to move upstream against the current below her as she speeds along on over the bridge. She takes curvy highway ninety-four to highway nineteen and right to highway seventy and back toward St. Louis.

Returning home late in the morning, she strips off her clothes and falls over the bed in exhausted sleep. Her mind tormenting her with dreams and memories of the raping, over and over it plays out the entire seen, honing in on her evenings victims.

She awakes late in the afternoon in a cold sweat, shaking with fear and anger. Walking into the kitchen she picks up the phone and orders a pizza. After a quick hot shower she slips into a pair of jean shorts and a tee shirt. While waiting for the pizza she goes out and checks the mail.

“Nothing but junk”

The pizza delivery guy arrives while she is out and she carries it inside. Setting the pizza down on the kitchen table she pulls out the laptop.

“Oh this is nice he doesn’t have it set to ask for the password. So first things first set a new password.”

She carefully and methodically goes through the system file by file deleting the junk of a teenage boy as she goes. Halfway through the files and most of the way through the pizza she finds what she is after.

“Accounting 101, an interesting way to hide this. Who cares about the name though as he stupidly has all the addresses, phone numbers, car descriptions, photos, employers and gang account information. What a goldmine! It also lists all of their victims, and how much money they got from each of them. I guess this means I don’t have to go to any more of their meetings. Now I can not only find them when I want, but can also Identify them by their pictures.

This would be so simple if I could just follow this list straight through. But, if I did that they would catch on and get me. So I need this to be completely random. Now how do I do that?”

She sits contemplating how to make it random or at least appear random when she sees an old game sitting on the closet shelf where she forgot to close the door.

“A roll of the dice simple, effective, random.”

She pulls down the box and gives the dice a roll. Three and five another roll, six and three again. One die rolls six again.

“Well three and six make nine so the victims are three, five, six, and nine.

No, those will come later. First I have to save a mother who doesn’t even know she needs saving. So the next one is the one who got me into all of this in the first place Rachel Winslow. Then Juliana Brown and I think I’ll send them some special invitations to a party of my own. From the look of their addresses I’ll only have time for them. But, I don’t have to hurry, I’ve got nothing but time.”

Wren finishes her pizza and gets out her clothes for the night. Her ensemble is as usual basic black from head to toe.

“When all this is over I’m never wearing black again. It may go with anything and it might be slimming but yuck, I’m so sick of it already.”

It’s an overcast evening and with a new moon all is completely dark. If anyone was to look out a window they would probably never notice the shadowy figure moving up through the yards. It slides up to a fence silently giving the family dog a special treat made just for him not to kill, but just to sleep for a while. Predictably he takes it and swallows it almost whole. Then the shadow moves back behind a shrub out of any chance of sight waiting for the sleeping pills to take effect.

The dog settles down to sleep and the shadow is already on the move. Now Wren silently slips over the fence and carefully almost unnoticed slides across the yard. Carefully and with agonizing patience she moves up to a darkened window, and peers inside, through the surreal glow of the goggles nothing can be seen moving. The thin blade of a hacksaw is pushed in-between the two windows and the slow cutting of the latch begins. After what seems like hours of cutting the window slides up and open. With a quick hoisting by her arms Wren disappears from the yard and the window slides back down.

Once inside Wren becomes just a darker spot in the darkness of the house. She creeps through the dining room and into the kitchen, then into the hall that leads to the front of the house and past the family room. With a slight start she is surprised to see the family still up and intently watching a movie. Up the stairs and she starts looking for the right room. She knows the right room when she enters it and finds the computer that used to be in her own apartment. She knows it’s hers because how many people would have their case painted to match their desk.

She goes to the window, unlatches it and pushes the screen up then looks out to find the front porch roof just a few feet below and pulls the window down. She moves to the closet to wait for Rachel—the one that started her in this, and the one who with the help of Juliana is planning another victim already. She’s bored but hot with rage constantly feeling the smooth metal of the gun in her hand waiting for who knows how long.

Finally she hears footsteps in the hall and people saying good-night. Still she waits and listens as the light turns on in the room and she recognizes two voices in the room. Could she be so lucky as to have both Rachel and Juliana in the same place? The answer is very clear, yes they are.