Ch. 6 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

Bob had taken time to select a second victim. With the police already looking for a killer after the hanged judge, he had to avoid anyone directly connected to himself. Still, he wanted to paint the picture, create a narrative that felt obvious in retrospect. Even with a VPN, he’d done most of the research on the new victim at the library, tape covering any in-built webcams on the terminals. He’d first found her through a photo sharing app, tracked her down using two social networking sites, and dug up her home address from an e-vite event several years earlier, one she’d probably forgotten about, one she’d probably made before she’d known about privacy options; maybe before such options had even existed.

Five days after he’d hanged the judge, Bob crept through the forestation clinging to the peninsula’s westernmost edge. Two miles behind him, his car waited in a public parking lot. Half a mile ahead, his second victim waited in her house. 

When he got to the chain link fence separating the forest from suburban backyards, he shrugged off his backpack and knelt in the moon-cast shadows. Besides the moon, occasional streetlamps glowed down on sidewalks and indoor lights still burned in a handful of houses. Otherwise, darkness prevailed.

Reaching into his bag, he retrieved the Mask. He turned it over in his hands reverently, inspecting it.

There was something to the Mask. It changed him when he put it on. It gave him courage. Hadn’t some famous Victorian said something about masks and truth before the bear-trap mores of his era had snapped around his life? Maybe, but Bob couldn’t quite recall it.

He lifted the Mask to his face. It made him feel like Bruce Wayne, Michael Myers, Iron Man, Jason Voorhees, all of them. Any force of nature needed its anonymity.

He pulled it on and felt New.

They climbed over the fence and crossed into the first dark lawn on the path between them and their quarry. Bob felt powerful. He and the Mask went over another fence, this one wood and white, and padded along the edge of the property. Kitchen lights glowed out over a deck but didn’t reach the yard. The crew of up-late teenagers crowding the table inside didn’t even glance out at them.

They reached their victim’s backyard unnoticed.

She had some statistical similarities to Bob’s ex Veronica, dark hair and blue eyes, but otherwise looked different. Bob and the Mask watched her watch TV in her family room, drinking a glass of something-with-ice. She and Veronica shared a similar height. But Veronica was slender and this woman, curvaceous. Veronica was 39, this woman, 49. Veronica had sole custody, this woman had shared custody.

The differences seemed stark enough.

Their victim’s children were both with their father that weekend. Bob had made sure of that. He’d checked social media posts from every family member to confirm it, finding all of them linked on each other’s profiles—provided a person actually looked for the links.

And they had.

He had.

Like so many other properties in the area, this house had an attached deck. Bob and the Mask stepped up onto it, coming just short of the lambency filtering out from the glass back door. They watched the woman wander into the kitchen. She walked by the paneled glass, ten feet from them, and turned off some lights in another room. She returned to flick off the kitchen lights and turned to leave the area.

Bob and the Mask rushed forward and plowed a gloved fist through a doorpane.

The woman stopped walking but didn’t seem to register what had happened.

They took the momentary shock as an opportunity to reach over and unlock the knob.

“Back door open,” a Malleus alarm system intoned from somewhere in the house.

She turned and saw them. Her face blanched, whiter than white, and she stumbled backward. She banged into a chair, almost tripping, and threw it down in front of Bob and the Mask out of instinct. They stepped over it easily.

“Call 911!” she screamed.

“What? What’s happening!?” an upstairs voice yelled back. A male voice.

Whose?

Her son’s?

Bob and the Mask walked swiftly. They didn’t run. They caught up to the woman on the staircase leading to the second floor. The Malleus alarm system beeped a countdown. Bob and the Mask grabbed her ankle and pulled. She flopped teeth-first into a stair, breaking a shard of bone loose with a shout. They sliced at her calf as she kicked at them, shearing the cloth from her pajamas and putting a long red trench in the muscle. She kicked again, freeing herself, and scrambled on all fours up the stairs.

Bob and the Mask followed.

Some commotion happened in the neighborhood outside. It didn’t matter.

At the second floor landing, Bob and the Mask caught the woman’s arm and threw her against the wall hard enough to bust the plaster. She rebounded and they grabbed her hair, yanking. She screamed, strands tearing away from her scalp as she lurched forward away from them. “Help!” she yelled. “Somebody help me!”

At the other end of the hallway, a teenage boy stood with a pistol shaking in his hands.

He fired and missed, blasting another hole in drywall and plaster.

Bob and the Mask got a hand on the back of the woman’s neck. They wrenched her back and shoved their knife forward at the same time. It pierced her flesh with a sickening pop and slid inside. They moved their free hand from the back of the woman’s neck to the front; they wrapped their elbow around her throat. A spurt of crimson sputtered from between her lips.

They used the knife to help drive her forward.

“Mom?” the teenager shouted. “Mom!?”

The Malleus alarm started wailing. The teenager pulled the trigger as if in response, barking a bullet into his mother’s chest. She seized, another jet of blood spitting out of her, and Bob and the Mask let her go. They threw her into her son’s shaking arms.

The kid dropped the gun, unbalanced. His mother tried to push herself off of him and Bob and the Mask speared her with the knife again for her trouble. Even as she wailed, however, she shoved herself back, buying feet for her son.

He grabbed the gun from the floor. They threw his mother on top of him again. This time, they didn’t hesitate—they rushed in blade first. The knife caught on something that felt like a rib and went skittering through skin. The kid screamed. Blood poured out of him.

Bob—

The Mask—

—the next thing Bob remembered, he and the Mask had the kid by the leg. They dragged him toward the master bedroom windows.

“Who are you!?” the kid begged. “Who are you!?”

Bob peered down at him.

no, a surge of something shouted through his nervous system. we don’t talk yet.

we don’t talk until the end.

Bob nodded for the Mask. He continued dragging.

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