Chapter 130: Today: A Thoroughly Terrible Mistake

Chapter 130 Today: A Complete and Utter Mistake

The first to be dealt with was "Nest Guardian," who, as Sheriff, wielded real power and was sly as a fox—the trickiest of the three. If we didn't take him down first and he caught wind of something off, he could talk his way out of it and sic his officers on Everly and her group, making things disastrous.

Dealing with "Nest Guardian" was tricky, but also simple—depends on how you slice it.

As the saying goes, "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Misha, the total social butterfly, had swapped numbers with a few female cops from the city police during the earlier school shooting. Everly asked Misha to quietly fish around for who had it out for "Nest Guardian" Charlie. Misha came back quick with a name: Sheriff Shawit.

The police chief was planning to retire next year, and both Shawit and "Nest Guardian" were strong contenders for the position, so those two had been butting heads lately.

[Sheriff Shawit felt Sheriff Charlie was all talk and no action, and he looked down on him. But the whole department liked Sheriff Charlie better, since Sheriff Shawit was too stiff and by-the-book...] The female officer complained to Misha.

Okay, cool—Shawit sounded like a straight shooter.

Of course, you can't judge a book by its cover. Everly then had Orff search online and found that Shawit wasn't well-known, but he was one of the few cops who actually did real work. So she decided to recruit him.

She had Orff find Shawit's contact info, then used a virtual number to call him, telling him she had dirt on "Nest Guardian" Charlie—enough to bring him down—and told him to find a way to keep Sheriff Charlie busy for the rest of the day.

"As long as you keep him tied up till midnight tonight, all that dirt's yours... I can give you some info as a 'down payment' first."

With that, Everly clicked off the voice changer and had Orff pull together everything he'd scraped off the dark web, putting "Nest Guardian's" file right on top—including the intel that he was cooking up a murder—and fired it all off to Shawit anonymously.

—Sure, they'd said "just a teaser" upfront, with the rest to follow after, but in reality, they held back nada and dumped the whole load on Shawit.

Time was short, and Everly didn't have the luxury of picking and choosing what intel would help Shawit most. They say your enemy knows you best, and those files would do the most damage in Shawit's hands.

And Shawit, not knowing what else they had, would go all out to bury his rival and deliver.

Just like that, without Everly or her crew lifting a finger, the "Nest Guardian" problem was handled.

Although the info about the "execution" event on the dark web had been sent to the police, given how painfully slow American cops are to respond, Everly couldn't count on the cops nabbing the other operators before today's execution wrapped.

So the other two operators still had to be dealt with by concerned citizen Everly.

Of the two, Everly figured "Butcher" Michael was the bigger threat.

Michael had super-male syndrome, so he was way stronger than your average guy, but the catch was he wasn't too bright—had some intellectual disability.

You couldn't take this guy in a fistfight; you had to use modern guns, and use them smart.

Everly drove Misha and Orff to the birch forest mentioned in the intel. Once they were close enough, she told the other two to stay put in the car. She threw on a snow-white camo net, then hiked in, using the satellite images, and found the ranger's cabin.

By now, Abel and the sheriff were both handled, and nobody had texted Michael—the guy lived like a hermit. So even as Everly drove up to the edge of the birch forest, Michael still had no clue their prey had gotten out of the school.

He was standing at the cabin door, bored out of his mind, in that leather apron he always wore in the videos, hacking away at a half-dead deer strung up from a tree.

His build and the scars on his hand matched the hulking guy in the snuff videos—no doubt about it.

Having confirmed the target, Everly found a good spot on a hillside a few hundred meters out, got prone, and took slow aim with her sniper rifle.

Unlike the school shooting, this time she had all the time in the world to prep, so when the shot rang out, Michael's left eye exploded in a spray of blood, and he flopped backward, face-up.

Clean shot.

But horror movie survival rule #15: always double-tap.

"Bang!"

"Bang! Bang!"

Even though she'd nailed him in the head, Everly kept pumping rounds into his head, chest, and limbs, making damn sure he was dead before she got up and walked over.

This was Everly's first real kill—Gary didn't count, since Gary couldn't die—but because the snuff videos were so brutal, she didn't feel a shred of guilt looking at the body. If anything, she felt it was too easy—this soulless butcher should've suffered like his victims did.

After checking the body, she eased into the cabin, keeping an eye out for traps. After disabling a few bear traps and crossbow traps rigged along the way, she found the basement door and stepped into the snuff film set.

The setup was simple: a wooden board backdrop studded with nails, with knives, saws, hammers, scissors, and all kinds of other "props" hanging off it—all crusted with blood, some still carrying bone chips and chunks of flesh, stinking to high heaven.

In front of the board sat a heavy metal chair, and jammed in the armrest was a broken nail with a star painted on it, studded with rhinestones. Everly knew that nail. When Misha got her job, she'd taken Barbara out for pizza, and Barbara had shown off her custom nails. It was a dead ringer for Barbara's.

It was proof Barbara had been tortured here.

Dangling from the ceiling above the chair was a big, gleaming iron hook. The chair and the floor under it were caked in blood. Just looking at it, Everly could picture Barbara strapped to that chair, strung up on that hook like a toy, like an animal with no rights, put through hell.

A black video camera sat on a tripod facing the board, switched off. Beside the camera was a table with an old laptop on it.

Everly walked over, grabbed the camera's memory card and the old laptop, and stuffed them in her backpack.

Right next to the set was a cage where the kidnapped girls had been kept. The place was a nightmare—a filthy blanket so stained you couldn't tell its original color, a dog bowl of dirty water, and some rotting food. That was all those girls ever got.

In the corner by the cage, the missing girls' stuff was piled up like a mountain. Backpacks, jewelry, clothes, shoes, busted electronics... dumped like garbage in the corner, just like their owners, slowly fading from the city's memory.

The cage was empty now, and Everly figured it was because the site had crashed, so they couldn't stream and hadn't bothered to snatch anyone new. Sadly, there was no sign of Barbara, who'd been tortured to the edge of death in those videos.

Everly had a gut feeling Barbara was dead and her body had been gotten rid of. Because, no question, these cold-blooded butchers wouldn't have patched her up.

Everly felt sick to her stomach.

But she couldn't stick around.

It was already 4:30 PM, and "Undertaker" Mark Callaway was still on the list.

After wiping down the scene a bit, Everly headed back to the Grand Cherokee parked at the tree line. By then, Orff had already hacked the funeral home's network and pulled up Mark's schedule.

"He's single and lives alone. Schedule says he's off today, didn't clock in. Here's the route to his place." With just one last step to go, Orff was hyped.

Everly took the directions from Orff and drove to Mark's place.

Mark lived at 25 Tombstone Lane. Aptly named, the street sat right beside an old, sprawling graveyard.

Since it was on the edge of town and right next to a graveyard, hardly anyone lived here—just old folks and broke renters.

Mark's house sat at the very end of the lane. Past his place, maybe a dozen meters out, over an iron fence, was the empty graveyard.

Something was seriously wrong at Mark's place.

The front gate was locked from the inside. Peeking through, Everly saw the doghouse in the yard was trashed. A black dog had been ripped to shreds by something—flesh, fur, and guts scattered everywhere, blood staining the snow bright red.

Weird thing was, even though something clearly killed the dog, the snow around the doghouse was totally smooth—no footprints anywhere, which was weird, since the blood was still seeping out, meaning the body was fresh—it couldn't have been killed before the last snow.

Past the doghouse, Mark's front door was shut tight, but looking closer, blood was seeping out from under the door.

At that creepy sight, Everly's heart started hammering.

That was her danger sense screaming at her that coming here, right now, was a complete and utter mistake!

But the warning came too late.

As Everly spun around to bolt back to the Grand Cherokee, ready to peel out, Buddy started barking like crazy—and that thing appeared.

"That... what the hell is that..."

Misha's hands trembled as she pointed at what was ahead of the car.

You know those anatomical models you see in labs? The kind with one half normal and the other half with the skin peeled off, exposing the fascia, tendons, bones, and even internal organs beneath.

What appeared before Everly and the others looked like the skinless half of that model. It had no skin, no hair—from the crown of its head to the soles of its feet, everything was a raw red where the skin had been peeled away.

However, unlike a skinned human, if you looked closely, you could see that its body wasn't one solid piece, but rather pieced together from countless small red chunks of flesh.

At the seams where the chunks met, thin threads of different colors, stitched crookedly, held the pieces together. The outside of the flesh was also covered in a pale yellow, jelly-like substance—part jelly, part glue.

Even the thing's eyes were mismatched. It had a blue iris in its left socket and a brown one in its right. They sat like two randomly placed buttons, embedded in deep, hollow sockets—one rolled up, one angled left, unable to focus at all.

Below the eyes were two pitch-black circular holes that served as nostrils, and below that was what Orff found most horrifying—the mouth.

The thing had no lips, just bare white gums. Teeth sprouted from them. All molars—so they couldn't have come from one person. Dozens of molars, all different colors and shapes, packed tight and jostling—like cockroach nymphs bursting from an egg case, like maggots writhing on a rotting corpse. They sprouted from the yellow-white gums, clattering and clicking as the thing drew closer.

In the first second, it appeared before the trio's vehicle.

In the second second, white snow-like static flickered across its form, and like a specter, it passed through the completely intact window glass, suddenly materializing before Orff's eyes.

In the third second, a mist of blood burst before Orff's vision.

In that searing pain, Orff's eyes snapped open.

The alarm clock by the bed clearly displayed the current time: 8:25 AM, December 18, 20X4.

Amid agonized screams, Orff welcomed his twenty-third loop.