Don't Shoot The Harbinger

by Ryan Green

  Maybe I am starting to get too paranoid, I think to myself.

  I continue to check out, I pay and throw everything in the trunk of the car. I hadn’t noticed anyone coming out behind me or sitting in their cars paying any attention to him. I'm starting to wonder if these people have access to security cameras or traffic cameras and that’s how they have been following me so closely.

  I turn the GPS on my phone back on and head west towards Elm street. Then it dawns on me “Fuck I’m using my GPS, they will for sure know where I’m heading.” I try to memorize the directions and I shut the location on my phone off.

  I pull onto Elm Street and I am driving slowly looking for the address. Even numbers are to my right and odd numbers are to my left.

  6760, 6758, 6756, there it is 6754.

  I make a couple passes by the house to get a better understanding of the layout before I park a few houses down.

  It is a typical ranch style house. The gate is on the right side of the house and there is a small fence to the left. The front of the house is covered in bushes. It looks like he pays a good amount of money to ensure that the property is kept properly.

  There are no cars in front of the house or in the driveway. The garage is set back behind the house about thirty feet, it’s possible that he stores his car in the garage. The lack of visible cars doesn’t mean that no one is home. I start to wonder if the man has a wife or children that could be home right now.

  I get out of the car and I walk up to the house. I rang the doorbell and I realized what the hell I was doing. “Did I just ring the fucking doorbell?!?” I jumped off of the porch and ran around the left side of the house and jumped over the fence.

  I stand at the side of the house waiting to see if anyone comes to answer the door.

  I wait and wait but I don't see or hear anything.

  There is a window above my head I stand on my tiptoes to look into. The room is empty except for a desk and computer chair, but no computer in sight.

  I keep walking until I get to the next window, I look in it and it is the bathroom. The bathroom is empty except for a toilet, a shower and a sink. There’s no toilet paper in sight, no hand soap, no towels, the shower doesn’t even have a curtain on it.

  I walk around the backside of the house and there is a sliding door. I give the sliding door a pull and it is unlocked. I slowly enter through the door and immediately scan the area. I am in the kitchen, the kitchen has no tables, no food sitting on any of the counters, no paper towels or pots and pans sitting out. I open up a couple of the counter drawers and they are completely empty. I open up the fridge and it is empty as well.

  To the far left of the room next to the fridge is a staircase going downstairs to a side door and beyond that the stairs continue to what looks like the basement.

  Straight ahead looks into the living room. I walk straight forward into the living room making sure to be as quiet as possible. The living room is mostly unfurnished except for a small couch in front of a big bay window where the blinds are closed.

  Down the hallway to the right are three doors, one door must be the room with the chair and desk and the other must be the bathroom. I opened both of those doors just to confirm what I thought and I was correct, just an empty bathroom and an almost empty bedroom.

  I open up the third door and inside of it is what looks like a makeshift photo studio. There is a camera, a bunch of backdrops on the walls and a green screen. There is a large box full of different props. This must be where they produce some of their filth.

  I exit the room and head back into the kitchen towards the basement. I hear noises coming from the basement, I inch down the stairs and slowly and softly as I can and I peak my head around the corner. It was him and he was unknowingly walking towards me. I head back upstairs and stand around the corner.

  The man climbs up the stairs and as he gets up to the last step I step around the corner and I ball up my first, I cock it back and I muster up all of my strength as I swing it forward at the man and my punch hits him square in the nose. The man stumbles backward trying to regain his balance on a piece of flat ground behind him that doesn’t exist, instead he finds the gap of air between the two stairs and he begins to tumble down the stairs. I run down the stairs behind him and as the man stops his downward descent suddenly the back of his head hits the concrete block wall. At nearly the same time as his head hits the wall I lift my foot and with nearly as much force as the punch I threw I stomp down on the man's head.

  The combination of the hard cement wall and the heel of my boot leaves no room for his head to move as the shockwave of force travels through every inch of his brain matter and skull. Although externally his head doesn’t budge an inch, internally his brain is sloshing around back and forth in his skull, the blunt force trauma most likely causing a concussion and rendering him to lose consciousness.

  I deliver a few more blows to the man's face starting with my feet. Soccer kicks to his face with the point of my toe, downward thrust kicks to the side of his head with my heel then alternates to my fists. I drop down to my knees and I wrap my hands around his throat and I squeeze as hard as I can for a few seconds just to be sure that he stays unconscious.

  I ran up the stairs and out of the side door of the house to my car as quickly as possible. I open the trunk and I grab the rope, duct tape and the razor knife and run back into the house.

  As I am running back down the stairs to the basement I see the man moving his arms and legs. He braces himself against the wall for stability as he is starting to regain a little bit of awareness and consciousness and tries to get to his feet. I jump on his back and wrap my arms around his neck with my forearm directly over his Adam's apple and squeeze as tight as possible. I wasn’t completely sure if this would work but I remember seeing this on TV as a kid and I do my best impersonation of professional wrestlers like ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin and all of those actors and MMA fighters as best as I can. My technique must be decent because the man slips back out of consciousness fairly quickly.

  I bend down and tape the man's hands together behind his back. I then tape his feet together and put a piece of tape over his mouth and eyes.

  I stand up and walk around the basement looking for a chair to tie the man to. At the bottom of the stairs to the right is a large room with a washer, dryer and a laundry tub. There are a couple steel folding chairs with piles of folded laundry sitting on them. I throw the laundry off of one of the chairs and bring it out.

  I set the man up on his butt, I squat behind him and lift him up onto the chair. I grab the rope and tie him to the chair. I’ve never done this before so I make sure that I use more than enough rope for the job. Just to be extra sure I go around the man several times with duct tape as well.

  I continue to walk around the basement to get a better understanding of where I’m at. There is a large bed, a computer desk, a couch and a flat screen TV in a corner of the basement. This must be where the man spends most of his time. A fat, balding pedophile who spends all of his free time in his basement, what a cliché.

  I walk back to the laundry room and grab another steel chair. I sit down a few feet and I wait for the man to regain consciousness.

  The man starts to wake up and he tries to speak but his mouth is taped shut. He tries to move and he realizes that he is tied and taped to the chair. He tries to look around but his eyes are taped shut.

  “Hi, do you know who I am?” I said to him.

  The man tries to mumble something but he can't speak.

  “I’m going to take the tape off of your mouth but if you try to bite me or spit at me I will put it back on do you understand? Nod yes if you understand” I explained to him.

  The man nods his head yes.

  I stand up and walk over to the man and remove the tape from his eyes.

  The man squints as his eyes adjust to the light and they immediately focus on me and his pupils grow. I remove the tape from his mouth.

  “I don’t know an
ything!” the man exclaims.

  “Shut up, I didn’t tell you to talk” I told him.

  “Why are you doing this to me??”

  I stand up and pick up my chair. I fold it up and I swing it as hard as I can at the man's face.

  CRACK!

  The man’s chair tips backward and he falls to the ground. The man’s nose immediately begins pouring out blood. The man is spitting blood out from his mouth and he is trying to speak.

  “I said shut up” I yelled at him. “Why the fuck have you been following me? You came to my house, you came to my work, you have been following me for the last 24 hours and I want to know why.”

  I stand the man’s chair back up so that I can speak to him face to face.

  “I haven’t done any of those things. I swear it.”

  “Wrong answer. I saw you. You were on my porch. You were in my bedroom. I saw you on camera in the parking structure. You followed my car. You followed me. Now tell me why.”

  “It wasn’t me” he sarcastically responds to me.

  “I can see that it isn’t going to go anywhere at this pace.”

  I grab the razor knife from the floor and walk over to the man. I grab the man’s ear and I begin to cut at it until it is completely removed from his head. I remember seeing this from a movie and it got a cop to tell a bunch of things, surely it has to work on this guy.

  The man is screaming in pain and blood is pouring from the brand new opening in his head courtesy of me.

  “You have another ear, you have a nose, you have a tongue, you have fingers and I have nothing but time. Now tell me why.” I scream at the man.

  The man is beginning to hyperventilate, breathing harder and harder until he can muster up enough strength to say “Fuck you, I will never tell you anything. You were supposed to be the chosen one. You were supposed to lead us and now look at you, you are nothing. You are a coward, you could have been great” the man tells me.

  “What do you mean I was the chosen one? I was supposed to lead you? You are just a group of sick perverted freaks. You exploit children, you profit off of them and their pain. Those children have families and futures and you take all of that away from them. From the looks of your little movie studio you do more than that too.”

  “You are so naive. We are bigger than that, we are more than that. That isn’t even the beginning of what we’re capable of. All you’ve seen is the tip of the iceberg. Now you are fucked, now you are dead, you are dead just like your parents are dead.”

  As the man said those last words I lunged forward and lodged the razor knife into the man’s throat and he began gasping for air. I pulled the knife out and reinserted it into his neck and face a handful of times before I was able to regain control of my mental faculties.

  I kick the man’s chair over and watch as he starts choking on the blood. The man’s blood was spraying from his throat, from his mouth, from his nose, and from his eyes until there was no blood left to leave from his body.

  I walk over to the man’s computer modem and I pick it up. I walk back towards the stairs and out of the house. I threw the computer modem in the front seat of my car. I open up the trunk of my car and I tear off several pieces of plastic from the roll of drop cloth. I place them on the floorboard of the driver's side of the car as well as the driver’s seat.

  There has to be some important information on here if that man was willing to die for it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Blaine stops talking and he looks intently at Megan to try and gauge a reaction from her. He is surprised that she isn’t a lot more bothered or squeamish by the information he just told her.

  “Well, how do you feel about me now?” Blaine asks Megan.

  “I promised you that I would hear you out and try not to be too judgmental. You killed a child sex predator, that is a little surprising but that is good I guess. At least now I know if we have children in the future there is one less of those kinds of people out there that can hurt them” Megan reassuringly tells Blaine to make him feel better.

  The waiter approaches the table and Megan and Blaine both stop their conversation and look up at him. “So sorry to interrupt. Are you ready for the main course?”

  They both look at him, they look at each other and nod in agreement. “Yes, we’re ready” they say in unison.

  “Great, very well, I will be back shortly.” The waiter grabs their used plates and disappears to the back again.

  Blaine takes what’s left in the bottle of wine and pours it evenly between both of their glasses and continues with his story.

  “Where was I?” Blaine asks Megan.

  “You had the modem in your car and you were covering everything in plastic and I’m assuming you were about to start driving home to check what was on the man’s computer.”

  I drove home and now I am feeling more paranoid and anxious than ever. I had a million thoughts racing through my head. I just killed someone, I just committed manslaughter, that has to change you. If there was ever a reason for this group of people to start following me, that was definitely it.

  But they don't know what happened in that house. If this is the guy that's been following me everywhere and tracking my every move then I'm in the clear now. I took care of that problem. He had to be the mastermind behind everything and If I got rid of him and I took his computer then that would just have to be the end of everything.

  I check my rear view mirror, I check my driver side mirrors and I don't notice any suspicious vehicles around me. I can finally start to feel relaxed. I know that these people know where I live but I should have some time before they find out what I did. I had at least enough time to get home and wash the blood off of myself, enough time to throw my soiled clothes in a bag and look through the computer.

  I foolishly and sophomorically think to myself Hell, maybe then if they find out what I did they'll finally leave me alone. Maybe then I can go back to my salad days before I found out what a human being looked like in their last moment of life. Before I found out that there was a supposed group of elitist pedophiles and human traffickers living all around me.

  I pull into my driveway, get out of my car and walk around to the passenger side door. I open the door and grab the man's computer out of the car and carry it inside. I look around me to see if anything out of the ordinary catches my attention.

  I bend down and set the modem by the front door.

  I walk back outside and remove all of the plastic drop cloth pieces from inside of my car. I take the plastic pieces into the bathroom and throw them into the bathtub to clean off when I get the opportunity. I don’t know if there is a more damning piece of evidence than plastic sheets covered in human blood.

  I walk back into the living room, take the modem and set the computer modem on the dining room table. I grab my laptop and run an Ethernet cable between the two. I plug the modem in and turn on my laptop. The modem is now displaying onto my laptop screen as it loads up.

  I head into the kitchen and grab a trash bag from underneath my sink and carry it with me to the bathroom. I set the trash bag on top of my toilet seat and I get inside of my bathtub and begin to undress. I turn on the showerhead faucet and take every article of clothing off and place them in the tub. I grab the pieces of plastic from the tub and lift them up to wash off as much blood as I can. I turn off the water, I reach out of the tub for the trash bag and I place the plastic and the clothes inside.

  I get out of the tub and I tie the bag up and walk it to the side door of my house and set it just outside of the door.

  I walk back to the bathroom and turn the shower on. I stepped into the shower and the scalding hot water didn't seem to bother me. I need the burn of the water to help scrub away the filth of that man's blood. I grab the bar of soap and I scrub and scrub until my hands start to cramp.

  I don't feel the need to do it because I want to hide the evidence, I just need the disgusting pig's blood washed away from my body.

  I finish in the shower
and I go into my bedroom to get dressed. I close my bedroom door and I look at myself in the full length body mirror hanging on the back of my door.

  I didn't look physically different but I felt different. I felt evolved, I felt elevated, I felt powerful and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was in charge.

  I put on a pair of gym shorts and a white undershirt and I walked back out to the living room. I take a seat at the dining room table and I try to mentally prepare myself for what I am about to see.

  The man's computer doesn’t have a password to access it, that’s sort of curious, maybe it was actually more idiotic on his part but I don't really give it too much thought. He probably was so egotistical he never even imagined the day where someone would catch onto his sick game.

  That man didn’t seem like he took his computer anywhere and there definitely weren't any friends or family coming over to his house. Maybe a password wasn’t exactly a necessity in his life of revolting immorality.