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When Kelcie arrived home from teacher training college, she pushed the door and heard her breath snag in her throat. She surveyed the remains of the room. It looked less as if she’d been robbed and more like somebody had deliberately smashed every one of her possessions. Somebody? Looking at the destruction, it appeared as if an entire football team had stampeded through her cabin.
At her feet lay the contents of her underwear drawer and a selection of jars and tubes from the refrigerator. Mayonnaise and dark sticky syrup she couldn’t identify had been used to daub all her panties. A tub of cookie ice cream was upended beside them. There was a footprint in a mound of crushed cereal that looked as if it had been left by a rubber sport sole.
All of the cheap rental property picture frames had been swiped from their hooks, their fragmented glass scattered about the rugs. The walls had been smeared and Kelcie guessed what had been used to do it. The aroma reached her then, but there were other alien scents mixed with it – cigarettes and male sweat.
She listened for signs of movement, but heard only the familiar sound of faraway traffic, louder than usual. She stepped over the ornaments that had been mashed into the carpet and peered through the buckled and split passage door to the bedroom and bathroom beyond.
The bathroom window was wide open. That was how they’d got in. Why had they targeted her shitty cabin? It trespassed on the edge of the expensive new housing complex on Four Mile Drive, but was scarcely as attractive a proposition. Surrounded by brush, she was an easy target, though. Her nearest neighbour was a good five-minute walk away.
She inched into the bathroom. The cabinet mirror was shattered and the glass and its contents lay in the sink. The shower curtain and its rail had been tugged down She pulled her cell phone out of her bag and dialled the police. They told her they were sending a patrol car right over.
She hurried to the bedroom to get her M1911 pistol from behind the nightstand. It was gone. So were her laptop and external hard drive.
Nausea spiked and a void of dread slowly expanded in her chest.
Her world was in her laptop. But even though she had friends in every corner of the planet, all she really wanted now was somebody to hug and tell her the intruders weren’t coming back. Kelcie couldn’t think of anyone else to call. Her parents were visiting friends in Minnesota. Who else was there?
She cleared the debris off the couch, shakily seated herself there and waited for the cops to arrive. Should she use her trusty iPhone to snap photographs of the damage and the shit that had been smeared all over her home?
Kelcie told herself the culprits were probably just kids, opportunistic thugs with too much spare time on their hands. They wouldn’t come back, not if she’d called the cops.
Then she became aware of breathing behind her.
She turned and there were three of them standing in the doorway. They’d slunk back in through the open bathroom window. Kelcie was right. None of them was older than twenty. Their faces seemed familiar.
“Don’t I know you guys?” But with the question came the instantaneous realisation that they didn’t care if she did.
She turned and made for the door. A club with six nine-inch nails in it was embedded in her scalp before she could reach it. The room turned blue then black as she was struck again.
