19 #AvengingAngel

Baby Angel @BabyAngel

(to Geoffrey Schroeder @GeoffreySchroeder)

Do you want to know where BH is going to be?

Geoffrey Schroeder could remember with great clarity the moment it had happened. He’d been in two minds over his next move and was browsing through his timeline as usual, when he received the tweet just moments after he’d been notified he had a new follower. The Twitter user’s profile didn’t give much away. There was a picture – or avatar – of a newborn baby, along with a short profile which made for ominous reading: God’s assassin. My mission is to destroy all baby killers.

It came as something of a surprise to Schroeder as he only had around a dozen followers, and most of those were spam accounts promising thousands of followers if you signed up to their service. The others were from the dwindling handful of friends he still had left. But Geoffrey followed thousands of other tweeters, all related to pro-life and pro-choice groups, or those connected with the medical profession who carried out abortions. He’d spend hours each day sifting through the various posts.

He was also one of Bryce Horrigan’s ten million followers. Geoffrey had read all of Horrigan’s messages, of which there were many as Bryce was a serial tweeter. The chat show host was constantly bragging about what famous person he’d met and what they had said to him, and how they’d become such ‘great mates’. Even someone of limited intelligence like Geoffrey Schroeder knew a phoney when he saw one. But from the fluff of the showbiz world, Horrigan would work himself up into a rage online over the latest attack on some abortion clinic, or he’d speak in the defence of whatever doctor had had his life threatened for carrying out terminations.

Geoffrey scrolled back through Horrigan’s many thousands of messages to the first time the presenter had voiced his pro-choice opinion. It was as if the seasoned broadcaster was dipping his toe in the water to gauge the temperature, to see what sort of response he’d get. His retweets and replies seemed to spread like wildfire across Twitter. The torrents of abuse he received from pro-lifers were unanimous in their condemnation. It didn’t seem to deter him at all. On the contrary, Horrigan decided to ramp up the rhetoric.

But Bryce hadn’t known what it was like to have his heart ripped out of his life; not like Geoffrey had. Horrigan had never suffered real pain and loss… until he went to Baltimore, that is.

Bryce was dead, just as Schroeder had fantasised. But now he had to carefully plan his next move if he was to escape capture.