8Eye of the Storm
Chapter Eight
Rationalizing
...
Erik was going to die.
Stop that, Carol told herself. You're jumping to conclusions.
Fine, her brain countered. Erik is going to be alone with a serial killer. Want to take your own guess at the outcome?
Shut up.
But Erik wasn't like her. Kyle liked Erik, so he was safe, right? Kyle wouldn't let Dodger do anything to his friend.
She made herself focus on the sound of her footsteps as she paced the wooden floor of the forest house. Outside, a woodpecker trilled. None of this managed to slow the speed of her thoughts.
She wasn't like Erik. She didn't need to be popular. And though the thought of getting a confession from Dodger was exciting as a fantasy, she couldn't truthfully say she wanted this party. Her happiest moments were alone in her room, lying on her back in the dark, thinking of nothing but the sound in her headphones. Or with Erik, sitting on the roof in the forest, laughing about bad movies and playing Gameboy between the trees.
Now Erik was always busy with Kyle, or talking about how great Kyle was or how awesome the party was going to be. He seemed more excited to be helping host a party than by the prospect of catching a murderer; so excited that Carol knew she had no way of backing out. She wanted him to be happy.
But it had been weeks since she'd been able to listen to music without panicked thoughts intruding on her peace. And she couldn't even bring herself to go up to the roof anymore. Not when she knew what was in the attic she would have to climb through.
...
Dodger hadn't played computer games in years, but the controls were easy to figure out.
First person shooter. Of course it was. But the ammo meter in the side of the screen alerted her she only had a single bullet. Interesting twist.
Kyle McDermott had rendered the halls of Westlake with meticulous accuracy, despite the blocky graphics of the game – the information section in the file indicated it had been released three years prior.
Unlike many of her students, Kyle had an attention span.
A few details were off. Randall's piercings on the wrong side. He sprawled on the ground in the dark room, covered in the blood she knew was really a mix of corn syrup and food colouring.
She raised the gun and blasted a hole in his chest, and he slumped forward. His whole body curved as though the wound had its own gravity. Fake blood mixed with real (no, digital, it's all fake, she reminded herself) and shone black in the darkness.
Game over. Restart?
This time, she hung back in the shadows. The Owen character walked through the hall, arms vibrating with what must have been meant to be panic.
She watched as the brown-haired boy removed the gun from the desk, and she watched as Rich walked in to find him. The two engaged in an argument, entirely silent – there was no sound in the game. But when Owen fired, the noise of the shot seemed to reverberate inside her, an echo from across years.
The screen went black and gave her the option to play again.
This time she shot Owen. He bent down to open the desk, then collapsed forward in a broken mess of blood.
She looked at the real Owen, seated beside her at the computer. His eyes were fixed on the screen, but his expression betrayed nothing. His hands were folded on the table, perfectly still. He could have been watching a laundry detergent commercial for all the emotion he displayed.
Restart.
She shot Rich. She shot a stranger in the hallway. She fired randomly in frustration, bounced the bullet off a trophy case and killed her own character.
Restart, restart, restart.
Then she noticed, during the close-up of her own death, something behind her. This time she turned around, waited for the thing to draw nearer. It was a figure.
A girl with red hair.
And she wasn't following Dodger's character, but like Dodger, was following Owen as well.
That part he'd got wrong. Dodger would never have risked implicating herself, would never have been so close to the scene – no matter how much she'd wanted to see it. (Had she wanted to see it? There seemed to be a difference between wanting someone to die and wanting to be there when it happened, but she wasn't sure why there should be. It wasn't like her, not logical, thinking this way.)
But the rest was disturbingly accurate. Whereas the other character's features were rough approximations, the representation of Dodger was painstakingly detailed, from the shape of her eyes and nose to the colour of lipstick she'd worn in those days.
Dodger clicked. Her doppelganger's knees gave out as a dark hole blew through her chest, crumpling her against a wall. The doppelganger let out a ragged breath – it took Dodger a moment to place why this disturbed her. It was the first sound in the game.
Her eyes were still open, still the exact shade of blue as the real Dodger's.
The camera zoomed in. Dodger's wound was a focal point – even her inides had been rendered in extreme detail. A tide of blood swelled with each heartbeat. Then nothing.
Zoom out.
For the first time, the appearance of the player character became visible. A boy in his late teens with curly brown hair stood above the body of Dodger Allen and smiled.
...
"Can't say I'm surprised," said Dodger.
"So someone did believe me," said Owen quietly.
"No," said Dodger. "He doesn't care about you. He knows how I think."
Still quiet, Owen said, "Did you love him?"
Dodger's mind gradually recovered from the nonsequiter and figured out who "he" referred to.
She had never been easily emotional, nor sentimental in the least. She got a thrill out of being the best at things, and for most of elementary school, she'd studied hard, or at least, she'd studied. Pulled As in all her classes. But by the time middle school hit, she'd lost interest - she knew she could easily place highest, so what was there to prove? Nevertheless, she retained information well, and continued to score high marks, though less conspicuously.
Not that she had lost interest in being the best. She simply took an interest in less academic areas.
As a teenager, she had always been popular. She was good at talking, able to pick up on her conversational partner's interests and appeal to them. She and her friends would break into abandoned houses to play games and tell ghost stories - they never scared her, but she enjoyed their reactions to her own tales. They spent nights in construction sites, talking in the splintery rafters until dawn spread red ink over the horizon. She loved staying up late. Exhaustion tilted her perception just a bit off-kilter, so that her skin hummed and her eyes clung to colours so bright they stung. She felt invincible. And yet, at the same time, exhausted was the only way she felt like she had anything in common with the people around her.
Rich was like that - another thrill. Lighting her up with points of energy the way only something forbidden could. He was the first person she'd kissed where she'd actually felt something, a wave of enjoyment coming over her body and taking her over. All her other kisses had been pieces of plots, steps in a plan, but now she wasn't thinking of the future.
In a dark classroom with the sound of footsteps outside, for one of the few times in her life, she was happy.
The other girl shouldn't have been a shock. Rich was like her, after all, going after what he couldn't have, chasing after excitement. But she disliked the irony - all her life, she'd wanted to relate to other people. Now she finally found someone like her, and rage blackened her insides every time she thought of the bastard. And she couldn't stop thinking about him. She dreamed about him, woke up with the wave of his energy subsiding from her, hollowing her out. He came into her thoughts when she saw a man with blue eyes, when someone with similar posture passed her in the halls.
She was so angry all the time, and he didn't even know it. He pressed himself against her in his car as though nothing had changed, on the outskirts of town where city lights couldn't touch them. She watched the grey ceiling of the Toyota and fantasized about digging her nails into his back until she saw blood.
At least rage was better than emptiness.
"No," she told Owen, knowing she could gain nothing by answering otherwise. "It was exciting, that's all."
His eyes were on the window. Streetlights glowed around the neighboring houses, fogging out the stars with light pollution. "You definitely do think differently."
"How so?" She was genuinely interested in his answer, and why he'd decided to tell her this now.
"I thought if I understood what you did, maybe I could forgive you. But you never lost control, did you? You wanted him dead, and you planned it out - you don't regret it, do you?"
She didn't answer.
"You're going to die if you go to this party."
She shrugged. Her insides felt even blanker than usual.
"Are you still going to go?"
"Of course."
"Why?"
She kissed him on the cheek, to confuse him, or for some other reason she didn't understand. "I don't like losing control."
...
"You're awake."
Carol's mother looked up from the refrigerator at the sound of her daughter's voice, smiled from underneath her tangled hair. "You're home," she said.
Carol didn't answer. She kicked off her shoes and left them askew on the floor. The way her mother used to hate, when she still had the energy to hate things.
Her mother ignored the shoes. "How was your day?" Ignored the fact it was no longer any time close to day.
"Fine."
She began to walk from the room, and her mother called, suddenly. "I think the new medicine's working."
"That's good."
She heard the older woman walking towards her, but didn't turn around. "I was wondering if you wanted to do something tomorrow? We could go to the mall, or maybe watch a movie, like we used to?"
"I have a party tomorrow."
"Oh." Her mother's voice was hurt. Carol glanced at her; she was still doing her best to smile. Her eyes were red-rimmed and the colour of shallow water. Carol quickly looked down at her own socks, instead. "Whose party is it?"
"Just some friends'."
And she walked to her room, finally resolved that she would be at the forest house tomorrow.
...
"Hello?"
"Hey, uh, is Erik there?"
"This is Erik."
"Oh. Hey, it's Darren."
Pause. "Sorry, who is this?"
"Darren. I used to, uh, go to your school."
"Sorry man, I'm not -"
"You're Kyle's friend."
Pause. "What's your last name?"
"Julian"
"How did you get this number?"
"The phonebook, asshat."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Wait, wait - I'm sorry. Wait. I haven't got out of the house much lately, my social skills got shitty, I'm sorry."
"Why are you calling me?"
"Well... so, this guidance counselor came to my house yesterday, wanted to talk about what happened -"
"You mean you planning to kill everyone?"
"How many times do I have to fucking tell you guys -" Deep breath. "Look. Kyle's not a good guy, okay?"
"And I should take your word for this."
"I was his friend too, okay?"
"He never mentioned you."
"We weren't friends in public, okay? Just like you are with him."
"How did you know we were friends?"
Darren pauses, this time. "I looked online. There were message boards with him and two other people. Carol had her name listed on one of them - I tried calling her house first, but no one answered. I figured the other guy had to be you."
"Um... I'm sorry, man, but I'm not sure -"
"The Westlake Prep boards! All that fucking murder shit you guys are all obsessed with!"
"Okay, okay, stop yelling, relax. Yeah, Carol and I hang out there. And we did talk to Kyle about that stuff. But he never told us he had an account."
"WestlakeWolf, remember?"
"...That was him?"
"Yeah." Darren breathes loudly on the other end, coming down from his previous explosion.
"He never mentioned that."
"It's him."
"I believe you."
"Really?"
"Yeah."
"Damn. Didn't see that coming." Pause. "No one seems to believe me much, lately."
"Would you be able to tell me what happened with him?"
"Yeah." A single laugh, more like a choke. "Man, I'd be fucking honored."
...
Friday morning, students noticed that, for the first time they could recall, Ms Allen looked tired. Her hair had been pinned back in a bun, and her cover-up failed to fully hide the circles under her eyes.
When the bell rang, Kyle made a show of very slowly filling up his bag. Barely a second after the last other student had left the room, he approached her desk. "I hope we're still on for tomorrow."
"I wouldn't miss it," said Dodger. She smiled for the first time that day.