Authors: William Hertling
Tags: #Computers, #abuse victims, #William Hertling, #Science Fiction
Kill Process
WILLIAM
HERTLING
liquididea press
Portland, Oregon
Kill Process
A liquididea press book / 2016
UUID# 2C9C571B-7E30-410D-BE5F-FB7079B6DD1E
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Copyright © 2016 by William Hertling
Cover Art by Mike Corley
Please Note: This novel is about a survivor of domestic violence. I have minimized explicit abuse in the novel, but the story deals at length with the aftereffects, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
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PRODUCED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Definitions
Tomo:
noun
- The world’s largest social network, with more than two billion users.
- Japanese for friend.
CHAPTER 0
T
HE THING YOU
have to know about me, to understand everything that’s coming, is that I kill people.
It’s ten-thirty at night, and I’m hiding in the bushes across the street and two doors down from a two-bedroom, two-story home. It’s midsummer in Portland, and the temperature dropped after sunset, but it’s still too hot for the dark, long-sleeved hoodie I’m wearing to reduce my visibility. Tomorrow morning I’ll pay the price for crouching for hours on forty-five-year-old knees.
Inside the house are Cathy and Dave. According to their Tomo profiles, Cathy is twenty-four, and Dave is twenty-nine. They’ve been together for five years. Six months into their relationship, Cathy dropped out of college in Boston and they left together for the West Coast. They rent. Cathy takes temp work, and Dave’s in construction.
Learning these details is painful, ripping open old wounds every time. Echoes of the same story, my story, recurring with consistent frequency, like a drumbeat punctuating life. I want to bury my head in the sand and drown out the sound, but I can’t escape it, no matter how hard I try. Every case is different in the particulars, the same in the patterns.
Cathy’s been on Tomo compulsively, visiting her best friends’ profiles. However, she’s not updating her status like she usually does. She goes through periodic gaps in posting, and when she manages a small post now and then, text analysis shows negative sentiment.
In the social media frenzy of the last twenty years, the tech industry invented dozens of new ways to analyze tweets, Tomo posts, and blog posts to determine the mood of the poster. Originally used by corporations to measure their customers’ perceptions of their brands and products, the profiling tools now help me find the depressed.
I wonder what my own sentiment scores would be, although I don’t possess much of an online profile these days. I keep my thoughts in my head. They’re too dangerous to let out. Fortunately no one has invented the mind police yet, although the day is coming.
The lights upstairs blink out, and suddenly I can’t take a breath. I’m clenching my hand so tight I’ll find lingering fingernail bruises in the morning, but right now I don’t feel a thing. Terrible things happen in the darkness.
It takes a long minute before my body forces me to breathe, and with a sharp inhale, the spell breaks. I’m not in the house. Dave is not my demon, even if he is Cathy’s. I’m an independent agent, in charge of my own self.
The black nylon bag weighs heavy against my right side, the tools inside enabling me to do my job, and in the worst case, take personal action.
I know better now than to consume liquids less than an hour before the stakeout. I don’t chew gum, smoke cigarettes, or carry anything I could leave behind or forget. I wait another hour to be sure they’re deeply asleep. Everything is quiet in the house.
I’m wearing men’s Nike sneakers (20 percent market share) I bought at FootLocker (most popular shoe retailer). I’m wearing men’s Levi jeans (best-selling brand, and a different material makeup than women’s jeans). Sticking to the most generic possible shoes and clothes reduces the chance the police will profile me. At 5′6˝, I fit into a lucky middle ground: a bit taller than average for a woman, still a passable height for a man.
DNA evidence is the kicker, of course. So I did the usual before I came out tonight: thorough shower first, clean clothes that went through two rounds of extra hot wash in a public laundry. My exposed skin got a liquid bandage product that helps prevent skin cells from flaking off. My shoulder length dark brown hair, courtesy of my Italian parents, received an extra-sticky spray that decreases the number of loose strands I’m likely to drop. The residue each product leaves is still better than shedding DNA.
At the back door, I withdraw my lock picks from a shirt pocket. A geek rite of passage with a long history in computer science departments dating back to MIT, lock-picking was something I mastered in my first year. Of course, it’s considerably different with one hand instead of two.
Amputees can be divided into two types: those that measure themselves by what they’ve lost, and those grateful for what they’ve got.
Who am I kidding? Every amputee is both.
Me, I’m grateful for my stump. In fact, I’ve got everything up to but not including my elbow, and that’s enough to apply pressure on the torsion wrench to hold the lock in tension, while I work the pick with my left hand. With a subtle click I feel
—
not hear
—
the last pin lift into place, and the wrench shifts. I grab with my hand and complete the turn. The deadbolt opens.
I take a deep breath and try to ignore the growing pit in my stomach. Time for the real work.
I
SCREAM.
Not some girly scream. A full-tilt, blood-curdling yell like I’m being murdered.
There’s movement to my right, and someone touches me. I lash out, my fist hitting something hard.
There’s a cry of pain, then a groan. “Angie, it was a dream.”
I shake my head, trying to make sense of the world. I reach for the lamp, miss, and knock the alarm clock to the floor with my stump. Damn it.
Light blossoms as Thomas turns on his lamp. He slept over. Shit, that was Thomas I hit.
He’s lying on his back, holding his face.
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically, still focused on the night terrors.
“It’s my fault, I shouldn’t have touched you.”
His tone, carefully even, plainly disguises inner frustration. I glance over at him. Maybe I’m reading too far into it. He could merely be in pain.
I curl my arm around my knees and rock back and forth. I want to take it all back, starting with the years leading up to my mistake. Sweat covers me and my muscles tremble from the adrenaline rush. Five years and still the nightmares come.
I dip my head onto my knees and close my eyes. I wish I could be unbroken. I wish these dreams didn’t come. If I do nothing, I have nightmares about being the victim. If I kill an asshole, I get nightmares about what I’ve done. I don’t know which is worse.
The bed shifts as Thomas sits up. “May I touch?”
I nod without lifting my head, and he puts an arm around me. Bless this man, I don’t know how he puts up with me. He’s a saint, and somewhere deep inside I love him for that, although I can never tell him.
* * *
I drive to the office early, stopping briefly at Coava for a pour-over with enough caffeine to wake an entire team of software developers. It barely makes a dent in the exhaustion I feel after last night’s minimal sleep.
At this hour, the traffic across the Willamette is non-existent, and I make it into downtown in a few minutes.
Our Portland offices are in the Big Pink, everyone’s nickname for the U.S. Bancorp tower, where Tomo has six floors. I’ve worked at Tomo, the world’s largest social networking site, since 2002, way before my ex-husband, and I still work there now, but everything has changed.
When I arrive at the security door on our floor, I’ve got the coffee in my good hand, my computer slung over my back, and now I’m out of hands, because my stump is no good for swiping my badge.
