The childlike woman with the angry-looking mouse on her shirt lived for the night. She cloaked herself in its colors, dyed her hair to capture its essence, created herself in its image, felt at one with its shadows and never thought she’d fear it.
Then she felt its eager claws.
They reached out for her hair, her body, scratching, digging, almost frantically trying to sample a piece of her, with a hunger she had never known. It made her tremble, recoil. She bolted, down rain-soaked corridors, looking for any means of escape. She jumped over a cat crossing her path, which was also black. It hissed. She skidded and stumbled.
“Uuuffff!” The drop punched the wind from her air sacks. Her yelp echoed, bounced to infinity. She cursed, got to her feet and with every last ounce of flash in her blood, she struggled to get away, up one lifeless street and down another to escape their touch. She felt trapped by the night, the endless thick of it. Her stomach knotted. Helplessness took hold. But she didn’t scream, didn’t call out for help, because Corinn Michaels never had any reason to trust anyone.
She turned into an alley, a damp concrete pit, one of society’s back stages, a realm where anything could happen, stuff not written into the routine aside from taking out the trash. A little bit of neon glow touched down here and there, purple, cool-looking, seedy, otherworldly. It reminded her of the lavender gel lighting in classic Italian horror movies. A gust of cool hit her in the face, blew her hair around her shoulders, made her twitch her nose. Acrid.
She turned, saw nothing, thought she’d lost them. The first flutter of daybreak was way off. Just over the wind she heard a scream. Then several, a few blocks away, like the peal of an ambulance siren, but with feeling. She wondered how long she could keep this up. She tried to calm herself, closed her eyes, took a breath, let it out, took a breath, let it out. She swallowed hard and reached deep within herself, hoping to find the nerve to keep it together. But in the bottom of the cookie jar of her soul she found only crumbs. “Great.”
Over the clap of her foot falls, she heard the hiss of the sewers echoing up from a grate just a few feet to the right. The water rushing under the street ran strong, then stronger, sounded like a waterfall, then a storm.
“The hell?” She cocked her head, half expecting to see a rush bubbling up. When she saw what it was her eyes widened in disbelief.
Reinforcements from the underground. Their death-cold bluish fingers tickled the metal bars as they poked up and wrapped around them. Then with unearthly force they pushed their way out, sending chunks of concrete flying.
This symphony of madness peaked with a dull cymbal crash, as one punched off a manhole cover and started sliding up. Corinn noticed the color of its eyes, sometimes white like pearls, sometimes iridescent rainbow like oil spilled on a parking lot and tainted by the rain.
More leapt down from windows and jumped out from behind fences and cars ticketed for illegal parking in the danger zone. A horde turned the corner, arms reaching, mouths open. They covered the alley like a shade, eclipsing the moonlight.
She didn’t know them. She wasn’t sure how they knew her. Panic tingled through her as more and more shadows approached and she had less and less hope of getting out of that mess. She swallowed the harsh reality with a very audible gulp. There was nowhere to run. She considered the ridiculous, trying to reason with them.
But the ravenous force turning the corner made its intentions quite clear. A darkling snatched something from the damp ground, a stuffed toy, a white kitty with black rings around its green-button eyes. A dozen spidery digits split its head in two. Sharp claws ripped out its fluffy brains. Then something in this black mass of want devoured them with a chomp.
Corinn’s brown eyes widened. She backed away. Her heels bumped into something. She accidentally stepped on whatever it was, stumbled, struggled to regain her balance, arms flailing as she collapsed. “Fuck!” Then she saw a face without eyes, a smile without lips.
“Oh jeez!”
It was the remains of the last person to cross these carrion crows. She couldn’t tell the sex. There was hardly an identifying mark, hardly a drop of blood.
Terror grabbed hold of her like an abusive father on a drunken tear. Her heart pounded her chest like a sledgehammer. She didn’t know what else to do but keep running. They were two seconds behind her, ready to surround her, take her. She couldn’t run fast enough. Her system went into slow mode, as if she was under the influence of some kind of depressant. She swallowed her tears as she propelled her fear-frozen legs.
“C’MON!”
She grunted, forced them to move, move, move, came to an intersection, made a split decision and turned left.
“WHOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAHHHH!”
A contingent had headed her off at the pass. They had her, hundreds of cold and hungry claws. There had to be at least 20, then 50, pressing in. She felt like she was being run through one of those old-time washing machines, the ringers. They ripped at her hair, penetrated her mind, found their way into the places no one had ever gone, every locked closet and black book in her memory. But they wanted so much more. They grabbed her by the front of her jeans, stripped off her leather belt, pulled at the front tab and pop went the button.
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!”
She bolted up. Forced her eyes open. Shivered as she detected a hand between her legs, then realized it was her own. Shadows still surrounded her but they weren’t trying to score. She pulled the covers closer but didn’t have it in her to breathe a welcome sigh of relief.
It was a cool April night at her Georgetown flat. The 26-year-old with two-tone hair was still in bed, her stuffed kitty lying next to her, its head still in one piece. The blue light of her radio clock indicated it was 3:34 a.m. Shit. She’d have to brave a few more hours of shuteye before the buzzer went off at 9.
Corinn dropped back onto her pillow. She wasn’t sure how she was going to sleep. The little girl inside wanted to call out to mom or dad for a little reassurance. But mom and dad were long gone. She tried not to think about that. She sat up and reached over to her bedside table, behind her alarm clock, and picked up her side-folding pocket knife. She clicked it open and snapped a little blue pill in half.
That ought to do it.
But she doubted some discount sleep-aid would make her forget the visions haunting her subconscious. She was no stranger to bad dreams. Awful memories from her college days brought one about every so often. But the dream about the pack hunting her down was something relatively new. She’d only experienced it a few times, but wasn’t sure why.
Guess I got a lot on my mind.
Maybe it was finally sinking in. She was a fugitive, one of the criminal minds behind an online business which was selling murder contracts for $1,000 a head. A hacker with a record, she’d been hired by the contractor who was pulling the triggers.
In March, the underground business started up and it immediately made headlines across the country and the world. Law enforcement officials were reportedly having problems shutting down the site. And the body count, now in the thirties, was rising. The other day the contractor turned a pool hall in Chicago into a war zone. Corinn was surprised he made it out alive.
He was tall, dark and rakish. He had a slight accent and looked a bit like an Italian actor she saw in a film made back in the 1970s, a police thriller. While he came off a bit like a stale B-movie secret-agent, Corinn had a feeling Colin Reeves was anything but.
When he hired her, he refused to reveal his real name. He preferred to be some kind of enigma. She didn't figure out who he was until she rooted through the drawers at his headquarters, a cabin home in the thick woods outside Somers, Connecticut. An old passport revealed his true identity.
She had no idea where he hailed from or what he did before this. She wondered time and time again, as she studied the imperfections on his chiseled facade, including the 3-inch scar on his neck. But she knew something burned deep within him. There was a fiery determination in his hazel eyes, an unflinching desire to see this thing through. And she had no idea what was fueling it. Revenge? Bitterness? Guilt? Self loathing?
She thought he was crazy, suicidal. Yet he fascinated her, made her believe in the unthinkable, that something called The .40 Caliber Mouse could exist, even make a difference.
Early in the game the contractor took on a partner, a madman armed to the teeth who looked like a reject from the 80’s slasher sweepstakes. And Mazz was exactly what he seemed. Behind his black-rubber gas mask was a mind that worked like a machine, without any regard for humanity once it was turned on. A crazy who had it out for the world of plastic cash, he was known as “The Minnesota Charge Card Killer.” The contractor thought having the fiend on board would attract media attention, and he was right.
Corinn met the contractor on a cloudy morning in February. He showed up at the screen-printing house where she worked. He said he’d found her name in a file containing a list of Internet criminals. He asked her to create the website to advertise the business. A credit card and identity thief who served some time, she knew a lot about the Internet and how to infiltrate it, steal things from it and abuse it. She whipped up a monster, nothing the Web police had ever seen. She was also an artist, good at painting with oils and sculpting computer graphics. Inspired, she crafted the site’s logo, an angry-looking mouse with a gun.
Since the eye-catching design had been talked about in news stories and message boards, Corinn decided to anonymously upload it onto blogs, allowing T-shirt makers from around the globe the opportunity to use it at no cost. She was thrilled when she saw pictures of people in Paris wearing her symbol on their chests. Even though the contractor had warned her about drawing attention to herself, she’d eventually put “Lucky the Vicious” on more than a hundred T-shirts and sold them at the embroidery shop she worked at. Black was the popular color.
As part of her deal, she’d asked him to off three of her former college chums. They shook on it. But a few days ago at a D.C. coffee shop, he expressed second thoughts. He said something about wanting to protect her, told her to get her life together, to run. She responded by turning over a table and dousing him with cold coffee.
He doesn’t get it, how I just wanna blow their brains out.
Corinn was completely taken by The .40 Caliber Mouse. She approached it as if it were her calling. To her it was a super hero come to life, a new freedom, something she could finally believe in even though it was clearly insane. While she hardly ever considered the potential consequences, the dark visions haunting her sleep made her wonder.
Is that what it is?
Was she suffering those nightmares because she liked snacking on raspberry jelly and crackers before lights out? Or was her subconscious trying to tell her something?
She wasn’t sure, but couldn’t kid herself.
As the webmaster for The .40 Caliber Mouse, she had much to fear. She was afraid it would all catch up with her. She was afraid of going back to jail. She was afraid of the possibility that someone out there wanted to hunt her down and tear her apart. Or worse.
She pulled up her wine-red sheets as she looked at the clock again.
It was 3:37 a.m.
Still not ready to close her eyes, she picked up the phone and called the only person she could talk to about it.
After two rings, the contractor picked up. His voice was deep, unemotional. “Hello?”
“I wake you?”
She had. “It's all right.”
“I can't sleep.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“I'm sorry too.”
“'Bout what?”
“That you didn't listen to me.” She was referring to her suggestion that he lay low, rest, heal and stop doing high-profile kills. She wanted him to read his e-mail and try to help real people in need.
He exhaled a laugh, somehow amused.
“You don't want to talk about it.”
“Not really,” he said.
She changed the subject. “Stupid question.”
“All right.”
“You ever been afraid, like, of the dark?”
He said “sure” as if it were a given.
“Ever get the feeling like somebody's out to get you?”
“'Course.”
“You ever worry about tomorrow?”
“Sometimes.”
“And which way this thing's gonna go?” Of course, she was referring to The .40 Caliber Mouse.
He remained silent.
“That the worst is yet to come?”
He still didn't answer.
She took that as a yes. “Ever lose sleep over it?”
Again, he let out a hint of a laugh.
So did she.