move toward it, careful not to walk within the camera’s view.
Laura lowered herself onto me. Her warmth spread across me like fire, banishing the cold of the night. The wetness I feared was precluded by her own. My drugged body responded with fierce joy, and I involuntarily bucked against my bonds, arching my back high and pushing my head backwards. Laura gave a startled, honest, shout of pleasure. She leaned forward and gouged at my skin with sharp nails.
Jenny paced around us, filming the action and wearing an incensed, leering smile. I could hear her heavy panting over the patter of rain and Laura’s own, heaving breaths.
So far I had been lucky. The nearest drop had been the one near my left hand, but the rain was picking up as it washed away whatever dam held it in the sky. It was only a matter of time before one of those drops struck me, and, even though a lot of boys would dream of going out the way those three planned, I had no desire to die. I might have complained about my life—I might have even fleetingly thought about suicide—but with my death so near at hand I realized that I still enjoyed being alive. I was only seventeen. I had gotten through the worst of times. The best was supposed to be ahead—the part I could actually control—this couldn’t be the end. It couldn’t be.
Laura rode me hard, scratching at my chest with her nails and periodically leaning forward to kiss my forehead. She looked like she was having one hell of a time, and I wondered if she was being genuine for the first time or simply acting for Jenny’s probing camera. She shuddered suddenly, and scored my skin with long nails.
And my luck ran out.
The drop was big. Huge. It slammed onto the top of my bound foot. Pain roared through me, and I screamed around the gag. My body bucked again, trying to curl onto itself. My arms strained at my bonds and my abdominals clenched. My body responded with the same strength as the pain. Adrenaline flooded my system, giving me near superhuman strength. The wooden pentagram creaked, and I thought for a second that it would snap into pieces.
Laura screamed in delight, throwing her hands over her head and raking her hips on mine. Mitch, however, looked concerned about the integrity of his pentagram and walked toward us. But the strength left me as quickly as it came. The pentagram held and Laura kept right on working.
The drop sank deep into my foot, searing tendon, muscle, and bone. The pain was perfect and absolute. I felt nothing beside it. It consumed me, driving the sight from my eyes.
Then the second hit came. This time on my shoulder. Fresh pain flared, but I didn’t feel it as I sank into the numb embrace of shock.
Another drop and another. My right arm. My stomach. I felt each one land like one of Mitch’s heavy punches but the subsequent pain was lost in the white fog of shock.
The bottom of the cloud fell away, and the rain came thick and heavy. Within seconds, the rain covered every inch of me not shielded by a rope or Laura’s writhing body.
I was unconscious a millisecond after a drop hit above my eye. Five seconds later, I was dead.
The cause of death would be forever unknown, since my body washed away completely. Perhaps my heart had gone first. Or maybe a drop had wormed its way through my skull and into my brain. It doesn’t really matter much, now does it? The simple fact is that I died, and within moments, the torrential downpour erased every memory of me.
Laura felt my body shudder and sink under her. The part of me she had kept safe from the rain shrank when it was no longer connected to anything. It fell to the ground when she stood, and the rain dissolved it within seconds.
It was clean, absolute, and had been without blood. There was now just a wooden pentagram depressing the grass, loose chords of rope tied on four of its arms.
Jenny turned off her camera after getting a close up of the empty wooden frame and Laura’s flushed face. Mitch ambled over, rain dripping from his nose, and picked up the pentagram.
“That was incredible,” Jenny whispered, tucking the camera under her coat to keep it safe.
“Tell me about it,” Laura replied, invigorated from her work and still breathing heavy.
The crushed grass retained the impression of the pentagram clearly for a few minutes, but the rain soon leveled out the lawn. It hadn’t lain there long enough to kill the grass. There would be no trace. Rain covered all.
Laura went back into the house and changed back into her normal clothes, while Mitch loaded the pentagram back into his truck. Five minutes after I died, they had left the house, confident that no one would ever know exactly what had happened to me. Their confidence was well founded; they had disposed of every piece of evidence that had survived the rain. The pizza boxes were burned, the beer cans collected, and the sheets taken. If it hadn’t been for the fact that they had dealt with a mystery nobody understood, they would have gotten off scott-free. But maybe that’s why there are great mysteries in the world: to keep you honest.
The three of them reunited twenty minutes later at the house they had rented upon coming into town five months previously. Jenny quickly downloaded the video from the camera’s memory card onto her computer and copied it onto three flash drives.
“That was the easiest job we’ve ever done,” Laura said, taking the memory stick Jenny offered her. “He cleaned himself up.”
“Easy?” Mitch scoffed. “It took months to set up. Did you forget that? We had to hack a pizza website, wait for his parents to go on a vacation when it would rain, and then hope he ordered a pizza like he normally does. What if he had decided on Chinese?”
Laura patted him on the shoulder. “Point taken, Mitch. You worked your butt off.”
“Not everyone can use theirs for the job,” he joked and slapped her mentioned body part.
She laughed and wandered into the dingy kitchen to fetch the bottle of champagne they had chilled for a celebration. This really had been the hardest job they ever pulled; it was simply the euphoria of the past few hours which made it seem easy in retrospect. They had been planning to do it for years, and the final, exact plans had taken months to form and put into action.
It had been one of those shows I so despised that let her know I even existed. She had been watching daytime TV one dreary day after pulling three jobs the night before. My peculiarity had sparked her interest like it did with so many others; hers, obviously, had been quite a bit more malicious.
The three had worked together for four years by that point. They had met by chance, each of them stalking through the darker sides of the internet. When they finally met in Seattle, they realized that they shared a common interest, one that could be quite profitable with their skills.
Laura was twenty three when she delivered herself to my doorstep, but she was one of those gifted and cursed with looking a half decade or more younger than they actually were. She used that perceived innocence to lure the victims. Mitch would do what he had done with me, provide the muscle and preparation, while Jenny would usually act in the films as well, providing the sinister touch that set their genre apart. It was my good fortune that she hadn’t been needed to fill her usual job. She delighted in her role, utilizing whatever strange tool she could think of—hammers and nails, saws, anything goes. Compared to most, I had died well.
They lied to themselves sometimes, saying that they did it for the money. Oh, the money was good, people with a lot of cash wouldn’t hesitate to part with it for such rare entertainment, but the three delighted in their work for much simpler, darker reasons.
Their fame grew in the underworld that brought them together, and they were prolific beyond imagining, churning out videos by the hundreds. Their off shores bank accounts were huge, but the film they were about to let loose into the world was worth a million times more. They probably wouldn’t gain directly from it—I would be mainstream news and thus off limits—but their legends would grow and at little risk. The authorities would never be able to pin a murder on them without a body. And even if they did, the three would be long gone by that time, living in some Eastern European Mecca of their talents, wher
e money could buy safety from police. The police here wouldn’t even know that I had died until the footage was released. Was there not a book sitting on my desk detailing my displeasure with my current circumstance? It would probably be thought that I had just wandered off. Maybe they would think I had died, but by accident instead of malice, perhaps simply caught in a freak rainstorm.
Champagne bottle and flutes in hand, Laura returned to the living room. Her two accomplices joined her in the center of the moth eaten carpet.
“To us,” she said, popping the cork and pouring each of them a tall glass.
“To us,” the other two repeated, taking the flutes and clinking them together.
“To justice,” I whispered, walking into the room.
Laura had delivered me many a shock that day—first good and then bad—but the shock that fell on her was heavier, by far, than any that had fallen on me. The champagne flute dropped from her hand, landing hard on the floor and spilling its contents.
Jenny’s eyes widened to an astonishing height, and her glass eye dropped out of its socket, bouncing when it hit the carpet.
Mitch responded better than his female companions. His eyes widened, but his hand shot to his back and returned with a pistol. He leveled it at me and pulled the trigger.
The crash of the gun was magnificent, and the