I was speeding down I-70 at something like two in the morning when I got a call from Kevin. Now, Kevin was always prone to, say, negative interpretations of the world around him, and this coupled with the timing and that his girlfriend of eight months had just broken up with him made me think, “Oh no. This is it. This is the ‘thanks for everything’ call.” I don't know how to talk people down. I can barely order at a restaurant. I had to try though, he was one of my best friends. So I picked up, fully expecting to hear him kill himself. The first thing I heard was this ridiculous laughter, like a cartoon scientist had just successfully tested the death ray he was planning to kill the protagonist with. Kevin was snorting, snorting from laughter.
The first thing I thought was that he must've gone insane. He wasn't just suicidal, his mind had totally snapped. I was even less cut out for that. I tried anyway.
"Hey, Kevin, man?"
Continuous laughter.
"Look, I know you thought Bailey was going to be the one and all-"
"Bailey? Forget Bailey! I got something way better!"
"Oh- really? What do you got?"
"I was just sitting around, and then I looked at my computer and get this- they just got their locations up on the internet!"
"Wait, what?"
"There's one in my building, you know! A pedo! On the floor above me, and he's worth five hundred! I got a bright red duffel bag, man, I'm goin' up there right now!"
This hit me hard enough that I swerved the car and almost crashed it into someone nearby.
"What the hell are you talking about?"
And then I remembered- the Keaton Act. Which would've gone into effect about three hours ago.
"Man, I can't lie to you, I was about to do myself in until I found this out. God bless America! All hail Charlie Keaton!"
"Hold on a minute, are you actually serious? Kevin!"
"I'll sign whatever they want me to! Hell, he can have all the terms he wants! I'll vote for him every time!"
"Kevin! Can you hear me? Kevin!"
"Anyway, I just wanted to talk to you in case this guy gets me or something. I don't think he will, he has no idea what's comin'! See you soon, Cullen."
He hung up.
**
To my knowledge, the fact that President Charlie Keaton is crazy has never been considered. Andrew Jackson was crazy. Ronald Reagan was crazy. Trump was crazy. Keaton is batshit out of his mind.
When he was campaigning, he promised he would solve the most pressing domestic issues, which at the time were the growing crime rate and immigration. He had a beautiful act in mind, something that would tackle both issues at once. What he left out was that his grand plan consisted of surgically implanting tracking devices into every person who entered a major prison since he took office two years ago, and then making their locations public so that the average person could take matters into their own hands. He even added rewards to sweeten the deal. When he publicly revealed what the act contained two days ago, there was a near riot and, of course, many questions. One of the few he actually was asked was what this had to do with immigration. Simple, any immigrant hoping for citizenship could get a tracker themselves and then go out as a government-sanctioned bounty hunter. When asked if this was only letting one murderer into the country to replace another, his response was, and I quote, "That's why we're having each one take out multiple targets. To help keep balance."
The Keaton Act was the last thing on my mind on the day of its enactment. Truth be told, I wasn't in a much better place than Kevin. I was at this point in my life where I didn't know what to do with myself. I had no real career or aspirations or anything that might give me purpose. I was just stumbling through life blind, looking for something.
I guess that's what I was doing out there on the day of the Act. Searching for meaning. For something I could hold on to. Maybe I was hoping to find it broken down on the shoulder of I-25. A kindly old man in a busted Acura or something. And when I stopped to help him change his tire, it would turn out the old man was a genius testing the goodwill of humankind, and since I was the only one who stopped to help he would grant me a wish. Except I wouldn't have been able to put what I wanted into words.
I didn't expect my life to be a fairy tale. I just wanted to do something that felt meaningful. Go on an adventure. It didn't even have to be an adventure that had a happy ending. I would have liked to fight a monster, and if I died in the process, that would still be better than whatever life was facing me. It all just seemed so boring.
Why is it that everyone always says things like, be careful what you wish for, but no one ever understands or listens?
Twelve hours after Kevin's call and fourteen hours after the Keaton Act became law, I was at home, trying to clean my bathtub. On my way home I had seen all kinds of things, people protesting, supermarket parking lots packed with people who were trying to get their hands on as much food as possible, and then some lunatics walking around with their guns out in broad daylight. It was the apocalypse, more or less. America was in the process of collapsing into a lawless wasteland. At first I was worried too, I started hunting for food in a Circle K. But when I saw people fighting over the slushie machine I realized that I was too lazy for this kind of thing. Clearly it was survival of the fittest now, and I was far from the fittest. I would not be able to sit there in a little bunker in my apartment, subsisting off canned foods and holding my own with a shotgun. I accepted that I was going to be dead by the end of the week, grabbed what might've been the last hot dog that Circle K would ever sell, and went home.
The main chore I had planned to do was clean the bathroom. So that's what I did all day. It wouldn't have taken as long if that wasn't my third consecutive day without sleep and my only way of staying awake was copious amounts of energy drinks. At around two PM I was working on the bathtub. The windows were all open and the air conditioning was on, but I still felt like I was suffocating in there from the chemicals.
Someone started ringing the doorbell. I didn't answer at first. Ignoring it was very difficult, because they kept pushing it over and over again. They must have been in a hurry. I decided they were running from someone, and trying to get into my house as a desperate last resort to hide. If that was the case, I wasn't about to open the door. I went on cleaning the tub, thinking that at any moment now I would hear a scream and a gunshot, and then no more ringing. But they kept at it for another five minutes. They only stopped because the doorbell seemed to break and stop making sound. I could hear them clicking the button to no avail, before they switched to knocking.
At that point I decided to accept my fate and just open the door. I combed my hair first, because it would be best to go out looking at least a little presentable. This is how it ends, I thought as I walked out of the bathroom. They would find me lying in a puddle of blood, wearing my Joy Division shirt and sweatpants. And that would be all.
I stepped up to the door just as my guest finally got tired of waiting and kicked it down. I didn't have the dead bolt in, so the door snapped in and hit me in the face. I fell down. My vision spun for a moment, but I saw the intruder's face, and that was so surprising that I didn't even notice if I was hurt. Kevin was on the other side, wearing a manic grin and holding a bright red duffel bag.
"Cullen! Why didn't you open the door?"
"Kevin? What the hell?"
I could not form words at the sight of him. His eyes were bloodshot and sunken deep into bags, and there were drops of red on his cheeks. Blood dripped off a plastic poncho he was wearing over his clothes. I could see a gun handle sticking out of his pocket.
The reasonable explanation was that he was here to kill me, though I didn't know why he would want to. As far as I could remember I had been a decent enough friend. I knew I had never treated him poorly, at least.
He extended a hand wrapped in a blood-soaked glove. When he saw my face, he made an attempt to wipe it off on his clothes before offering it again. That just made it worse, but I took it anyway. He helped me to my feet.
"Sorry about your door, man. But you just weren't opening, and I thought something happened."
"Um, that's okay. What are you doing here?"
"Hold on, I'll tell you in a second. I'm hungry. You got any food back there?"
He pushed past without waiting for an answer. I followed after him into the kitchen, where he dropped his duffel on the ground and started rooting through my pantry. The bag hit the ground with a thud, and I could hear metal objects clattering around inside it. A whole bunch of bloodstained tools he would've used to torture the guy to death. I wasn't an idiot, I knew full well what had happened. Kevin had found his man, and it seemed he'd taken his time with him. I'd been wondering if Kevin had the capacity to do it, and I had found out. Now the question was if it was really Kevin tracking blood through my kitchen, or if it was somebody else now. And also, what any of this had to do with me.
I didn't know what to say, so I kept quiet. He found a box of cereal in my pantry-
"Aw, Fruity Pebbles? This is good stuff. I can't tell you how long it's been since I've had these."
He proceeded to pour himself a bowl of cereal, without even taking off his gloves. I stood there like an idiot, trying to come up with a good response to this situation. Kevin had gone insane. His breakup had more of an effect on him than I thought, and his mind was now shattered to the point where he was able to murder an actual human being. I decided the only thing I could do was play along. After he'd sat down and eaten for a little bit, I said,
"So, uh, now that you've eaten a little bit, can you tell me why you're here?"
Kevin chuckled a little bit. I broke into a nervous laugh.
"Cullen, my man! No need to be so scared! I just came here with a business proposal!"
He proceeded to open up his duffel bag and toss out all of its contents. I saw everything I expected, pliers, a hammer, a handsaw, a scalpel, all covered in dried blood. There was now almost certainly all kinds of diseases festering in the blood on my kitchen floor. At the bottom of the bag, Kevin let out an "Ah-ha!" and took a mason jar that was as bloodstained as everything else and held some sort of small off-white blob. He gestured for me to come closer. I complied.
"See this?" He stuck it in my face.
It was a piece of some sort of oddly shaped bone, glistening with drops of blood.
"This is a vertebra of Terry Ames, a convicted child molester, who up until a few hours ago lived in my apartment. Look closer. Do you see the chip?"
It took me a second to understand what Kevin said. Accept that he was holding a piece of someone’s spine. So I didn't, I just went right along with it, squinting at the bone until I noticed a little grayish object partially buried in it.
"That's the tracker. That's how I found him. I'm not totally sure how it works since this is my first time, but based on what I've read, it knows he's dead and it's reported to whoever's in charge of this. I don't know how that works, so don't ask me. Now, what it doesn't know is who killed him, so it can't reward me until I bring back proof of death to a designated government facility. When I do that, they'll give me five hundred dollars for bringing in the bounty. Are you tracking?"
I nodded.
"Now, five hundred dollars isn't a lot for all my trouble, is it? Especially not in this economy."
I nodded again.
"But see, I have a plan to double, maybe even triple that amount. Could you hold this for a moment?"
He handed me the jar. I tried to ignore the moisture on the outside as he dug into his pocket and took out his phone. He held it out so that I could see the screen. There was a picture of a man tied to a chair and a blindfold pulled over his eyes. His mouth was wide open with blood streaming out of it down all the way to his neck. He seemed to be missing teeth.
"I guarantee you that there are people who'll pay good money for these."
He started scrolling through his gallery. It was full of pictures of the same guy. In the first few pictures there were occasional flashes of Kevin's hand holding a pair of bloody pliers, shoving them into the man's mouth. One image was a close-up of the pliers holding a flabby red bit of flesh that seemed to be a tongue. It got worse from there. Kevin seemed to have gone at him with a hammer. A picture of his face, unrecognizable and destroyed. His hand, up close, with all the fingers bloody and broken. All the while Kevin was scrolling and narrating it like it was a vacation he'd taken.
"I had to do his mouth in a hurry because I didn't want him to make too much noise, but I'd say that was my favorite part. I can see the appeal of being a dentist now, haha. Oh wait, here comes the video! Watch, this is why I came here."
The video opened with the camera all up in the man's face. I could hear him groaning and Kevin mocking him. There was a thud and the camera jerked up to the ceiling-
"I punched him"-
The man groaned a little bit louder. As the camera stabilized on him again, he was gurgling blood out of his mouth. Kevin took the camera away again and propped it up somewhere where I could see both him, the man, and the dingy interior of an apartment. It looked a complete dump, but maybe the puddles of blood on the floor made it seem worse. Kevin walked away from the camera, and there was a rustling noise that was probably him looking through his duffel bag. He returned with a steak knife. He winked at the camera. And proceeded to stab the man. Again, and again.
"See now, I got too carried away. I should've gotten footage of me sawing off his legs while he was still alive. But that doesn't matter now, watch this-"
As Kevin butchered, the phone fell from its post. The horror became a carpeted floor.
"You see that? That's why I need you!"
Kevin tucked his phone away and grinned at me.
"What? I- uh, I'm not following."
"I have a wonderful idea, Cullen! See now, like I said, five hundred dollars isn't that much, but I have an idea to make some additional cash from this. Think about it, these people, no one cares about 'em! In fact, people want them dead. They want to see them suffer. So my idea is to record what I- what we'll- be doing to them, and then post it. I'm sure there's plenty of sites dedicated to that already. I haven't checked, but I'm sure there are."
"Maybe we could even just put it up on YouTube. I figure we'd make a lot of money. And uh, since we're friends and all, I thought I'd extend the offer of a partnership. After all, I need someone to hold the camera."
Kevin punctuated his insane statement with an even bigger smile. His eyes were those of a stray dog. I gave him a blank stare.
He was completely serious. He meant with all his heart that he planned for us to go on a killing spree and film the torture like it was internet porn. I took a step back from him.
"Give me a second," I said.
"I need to think it over."
"Sure thing. I'm gonna finish my cereal."
I met Kevin junior year. We'd both been going to the same high school since we were freshmen, but I never talked to him. We had a mutual friend named Stephen, but we had no direct interactions for a while. This one time we were planning to hang out as a group for someone's birthday, so we met at the school on a Saturday. We were wandering around when we rounded a corner at the back of the school to find this one kid named Jayden Murry vandalizing the wall with spray paint.
I don't remember what he was painting. Jayden was a senior who intended to go out in a blaze of glory. He was not happy to see us. Everything was fine, none of us were planning on snitching. We just watched, made a few suggestions to make it better here and there. When the time came, we left.
The next Monday they lined all of us up in the office. Everyone who'd been there, including Jayden. They caught us on camera. Apparently, not saying anything about it made us complicit and therefore guilty. We were in trouble right along with Jayden. Not as bad as Jayden, I think they might've prescribed him forty lashes or something because I never saw him again. The rest of us had detention for the next three weeks.
The only one of us who didn't get in trouble was Stephen, because he was late that day. It was him we were waiting for. So I was stuck with Kevin. And over the course of those three weeks of staying after school to vacuum the halls and pick up all the trash, we became pretty decent friends.
Kevin had no plans to go to college. His thing was music, and he was pretty talented. He knew how to play about six different instruments, more than I think I would learn if I spent the rest of my life trying. He ended up with this stint as a teacher at a small music school. It wasn't very much, but I think it was the place for him. He was doing more than I was anyway.
He met Bailey two years after graduating. They were together for a while, long enough for Kevin to get in over his head. I think he might've even intended to propose someday. The day they broke up he called me. Over the phone he called himself a bum with no future. Maybe that had some hint of why she left him. I knew he was in a bad place. I should've gone out to see him and tried to help.
When I looked at him then in my kitchen, I could not see the Kevin I'd known before. There was nothing behind his eyes. His face had become a slack slate of something unreadable. I didn't know who I was looking at, but I knew Kevin might as well have killed himself.
And I wondered if I was any different. Unlike Kevin, I had never had anyone. I didn't live for anything. I wasn't going to survive out here for very long by myself. And if I said no, what would I do? Finish cleaning the bathtub? To be sure, I didn't think I would live for very long down this road too, but at least this way there'd be something to do except wait for death. There was a hint of some kind of sick adventure.
Part of me didn't believe that we would actually do what he said. Another part still thought he was going to kill me if I said no. But I think the real reason was just that I was bored, as disgusting as that sounds.
So I shook his hand. Mine got some blood on it that I don't think I'll ever wash off.
I moved out of my apartment that day. I grabbed the most important stuff in a suitcase and left, never to return. One more regret in the stinking heap weighing on my soul is that I never finished cleaning the bathtub.
On the way to the bounty drop-off Kevin laid out his vision: an actual film camera, the best and most cruel "devices", maybe if we really made it we could have a whole studio. Until then we would hide out in a new apartment, maybe we could even use one of our victims' homes. We needed to study up on medieval torture techniques just to keep things fresh for our audience. He came up with the bright idea to sell off our victims' remains and cursed himself for not thinking of that earlier. He never stopped talking. I never said a word. Every once in a while I nodded and gave him a half-hearted smile every time I thought he wanted a response. At some point his rambling turned to the Act itself, which was good in some way because I had some questions about it.
"Since I called you, man, I've done my homework. I read every word of that act twice, you know. I know it in and out. It's like the Bible to me now. I'll read it every night before I go to sleep. I'll get it memorized soon enough. Believe me, man, I'm serious. This is the first day of the rest of my life, of the rest of our lives! Trust me, you won't regret this."
As part of the Keaton Act, every single state-owned prison and penitentiary had been converted into a Facility of Justice Against Crime, called FJACs, or Keaton buildings, or sometimes just Ks. Terminology that had apparently materialized overnight at the same time as the Act. The facilities had been transforming little by little behind the scenes, where small sectioned-off areas would've become the surgical rooms for tracker installation. Anyone who had passed through a prison that had such a room and had committed one of a number of crimes deemed serious enough would have been marked. The prisons had been emptied thirty minutes prior to midnight, which was also how much time had to pass before you could legally kill someone who just had the tracker installed. Now that each prison was empty, they were converting the whole space so that all of it was for installation and handling the collection of bounties.
The place we went to was FJAC #11558, or FJAC of Jefferson County. When we got there they were still changing the sign. The parking lot was full of unmarked trucks guarded by soldiers. People were hauling equipment from the trucks to the building. There were temporary signs set up everywhere that said variations of "This building is in the process of conversion to a People's Facility of Justice. Forgive us for the inconvenience. All operations are still running." Then there were arrows indicating where to go: "Bounty collection ->, <- Apprehended drop-off."
Kevin sauntered over to bounty collection with the jar in bubble wrap he took from my kitchen.
They turned the room where you would usually speak to prisoners into a waiting room. Each glass divider was now a little reception area. We were the only ones there, and there was a single bored-looking woman behind one of the desks, scribbling something on paper. There was the sound of people walking, power tools running somewhere in the background.
"Hello again. I'd like to turn in a bounty," Kevin said, walking up to the clerk.
"Can I see your license?"
Kevin produced a tiny red card and slipped it under the divider. While she looked it over, he whispered to me:
"That's one thing I forgot to tell you. You're gonna need a license for this. I only found out and went here after I killed the guy, but don't tell her that."
"Sure." I was thinking that if he'd been wearing the same bloody clothes all day no one would have to tell her anything.
"It's cheap, don't worry. And you have to take a test but it's not that hard. So long as you have a relatively clean record."
"Can I see the evidence of your kill?"
There was a bin next to the divider that Kevin put the jar in. The lady pushed a button and the bin switched over to the other side. She picked up the jar and started unwrapping it.
"Sorry, I forgot to take that off."
"You're fine." When she got through the bubble wrap she gave the spine fragment a once-over and stood up.
"I'm going to take this back to the lab. Please wait here." And she smiled like there wasn't a chunk of human in her hands.
I slumped down on a vomit-green-colored chair in the lounge and closed my eyes. I thought about pinching myself. There was no way any of this was real. How had he passed it? I was no political expert, but part of the Act had to be unconstitutional. None of the political parties would ever back this up. Was Charlie Keaton a rogue member of the Illuminati who was using his complete secret power over the world to cause as much damage as possible?
My life had become an ill-thought-out dystopia. Not much worse than it was before, where I was just existing and not far from suicide myself. Again I told myself, at least this way you have a purpose.
The woman returned with Kevin's money and an empty jar.
"There you go. Will that be all today?"
"Actually, my friend here would like to get a license for himself."
"We can do that."
Kevin looked at me and gestured to the woman. I stood up.
The day I destroyed my soul I woke up in a Motel Six to a spider crawling across the ceiling. Kevin had picked a pretty disgusting place to crash. There had been a cockroach on the mattress when we got there.
Kevin wasn't there that morning. He left a note on the nightstand, next to my new license: "Getting breakfast. Be back soon." And he drew a smiley face below his message.
He got back shortly after I brushed my teeth. He brought a ham and cheese croissant with him but I told him I wasn't hungry. No worries, he said, and left it on the nightstand as we went out. For the roaches.
His plan for the day was to go around searching for all the supplies he'd talked about yesterday, and then sometime in the afternoon we would use them. I already decided I wouldn't have anything to do with the actual killing. I would hide behind the camera. That way, I was a little bit less guilty.
The day panned out how Kevin had planned it. We went to a hardware store first. Kevin already had quite the arsenal of stuff but somehow he wasn't happy yet. He felt our viewers could really get behind something motorized. His vision was a hand-held circular saw. On such a day when we had a home base, he wanted a stationary miter saw. The hand saw didn't work, he said. He didn't have the patience to get all the way through the bone.
"But if it's someone they would really wanna see suffer, we could use the handsaw for extra effect, don't you think?"
Buying something turned out not to be that easy. Most of the places we went to were empty, of people as well as products. I didn't see a single person walking around outside. Everyone must have thought it was the apocalypse. Kevin assured me that everything would calm down. Once it became normal and most of the criminals were dead, people would start walking around easier.
We settled on a screwdriver, a few box cutters, and luckiest of all in Kevin's eyes, a nail gun. He put in a digital order for a circular saw and we went to get the film equipment. His actual vision, studio lights and everything, was also out of reach. Most of the big electronics chains were locked down. We drove all around town without success, until we found this one small local place where we got a camera and a tripod, and a phone gimbal too just in case.
By then it was late. We stopped for food at Subway. I remember exactly how the meatball sub tasted. I could only just get it down. It felt like I was eating a final meal before execution. In a sense, I was. Not my execution, I told myself. But I knew that I was going to kill a part of me as much as we were going to kill our victim. I kept trying to reassure myself that Kevin was the one who would take all the blame. He was the killer.
But I couldn't fool myself.
As we were eating, Kevin was on his laptop looking at the official tracking website. I heard him mumbling people's names in the same voice you would hear from a homeless man on drugs as he stumbled around and ranted about something. I was tuning it out until I heard him swear so loud that the employee, the only other person in there with us, screamed.
"Well I'll be damned! Look at this, Cullen, look at it!"
He flipped his laptop around so that I could see the screen. It was a GPS of the surrounding area, with dozens of little multicolored dots spread around.
"Do you see that shit?"
"See what?" All I saw was the dots. He glanced at the screen.
"Oh, I clicked off it, my bad."
He flipped the laptop back to himself, then seemed to think for a moment, and got up and sat down on my side of the table.
"I should probably tell you what all this is."
"Sure."
"Ok, so you see the two green dots right next to each other? That's us, or rather it's our licenses, cause those have trackers built into the cards. The blue dots are law enforcement. The orange dots could be either other people with licenses or they could be immigrant bounty hunters. Immigrants have the trackers built into their bodies, other people don't. The big green triangles are FJACs. You see the red dots? Those are targets."
There weren't any red dots in our immediate area, but they were everywhere else. They were the most plentiful color by far. Kevin started scrolling across the map to some place Downtown.
"I hope this is the right one... yes!" He clicked on a red dot and a little box appeared with information about the person. My heart almost stopped. There was a mug shot of a very familiar face, only with its eyes more wild and bloodshot than I remembered them to be, and it had the general look of a wild animal. The difference was great enough to almost convince myself that I had never seen this person before, and the familiarity was a coincidence. But the name read "Schwartz, Stephen, 23." DOB: 3/7/2009. Below that, his convictions: "First-degree murder."
"There's no fucking way," I said.
Kevin clicked on his conviction. It led to a different box with specifics. Tried and convicted of the murder of Amelia Axel. "Axel and Schwartz were in a romantic relationship, during which time she filed a restraining order against him. Shortly after, Axel was found dead in her apartment. The cause of death was ruled to be blunt head trauma. Fingerprints on the scene linked the murder to Schwartz, her former partner, who was apprehended and found guilty-"
There was a picture of Amelia. I recognized her better. Our last names both started with A. We were right next to each other in the senior yearbook. Two rows below, Kevin, and then skipping two pictures to the right, Stephen.
I looked at Kevin. He was staring at me with his eyes wide, not from terror, but some kind of insane animal rage.
"We knew her, Cullen. Remember how nice she was?"
"...yeah."
He stared at me for a little longer.
"I think we should get going. We don't want him to get very far."
After we graduated, Stephen sort of drifted away. He and Amelia had been together since homecoming of junior year. Out of all the relationships, I expected theirs would survive the longest. I expected that Stephen had the brightest future out of all of us. They were both going to the same college. He had a scholarship. If I was jealous of anyone, I was jealous of Stephen. The last time I talked to him in person was almost five years ago. He seemed so happy. So ready for life, unlike me. What happened? I guess I'll never know. When we found him, Kevin wasn't interested in finding out.
All the way, Kevin was shouting and grumbling like a rabid dog. It was like the first day except so very angry. If the insane way he was driving didn't kill me first, then I was afraid he would rip me into pieces. I could feel his anger burning on my forehead. It made me sick. It was like sitting next to an atomic ready to explode.
"She didn't deserve that, she didn't! That little fucker! I should have known. You know he called me a little while back. He was all drunk, he couldn't get his words out right. They never show signs, they never do. You see, this is the miracle of the Act, Cullen! The prison wouldn't do him right, not like we're about to. People know better than anyone else what fuckers like him deserve, don't we?"
And it went on and on. He had his phone out in one hand. The tracker was leading us right to the little dot that was Stephen. There wasn't anyone else around him.
Soon enough, we saw him. A figure walking down the sidewalk just outside a suburb in a black hoodie, eyes on the ground. He seemed unaware, or maybe he'd accepted it. Did they even tell them if they put a tracker in them?
Kevin slowed to a crawl and crept some distance behind him. We followed for a little bit, until he turned around and saw us. There was a terrible second when Kevin stopped the car. Stephen did a double take. His face was overgrown with hair, and very pale. Nothing like the person I had known before. Kevin rolled down the window and waved.
"What's up, Stevie! Long time no see!" He shouted. Stephen was confused. He glanced from Kevin to me, and his confusion grew.
I heard him say our names.
Kevin was standing on the gas pedal with a smile all over his face. He was laughing. My stomach lurched as the car sped up. Stephen's confusion didn't even have time to become terror before there was only about ten feet of distance between us and him. He had no shot at running away. I remember the noise very clearly, but I would never be able to describe it. It was like a crunching thud. Kevin had gotten up to about thirty-five. Stephen flew back and slid across the grassy ground behind him. Kevin threw the car into park and jumped out. As Stephen lay there, conscious but with his eyes wide in visible shock, Kevin grabbed him and flipped him on his stomach so that he could zip-tie his hands. Stephen squirmed, but was too shocked to do anything. Kevin dragged him back to the car, pulling him by his feet. Stephen regained some control right as his face started scraping against the road. I heard screaming and Kevin laughing. The trunk opened. There were a few soft thumps. Stephen retched after being punched in the stomach. Another thump. The sound of tape tearing. The screaming stopped. The trunk slammed shut. Kevin took his place in the driver's seat and, without looking at me, started driving again.
After frisking Stephen down we found the key to his apartment. On the site, we found his last known address and took him back home. He was still unconscious when we lugged him into his room and tied his legs to a rocking chair. Then we made our preparations, lugging the tools upstairs in Kevin's duffel bag. Somewhere along the line Kevin had the bright idea to boil some olive oil for later use.
"Get some candid shots of this," he said while turning up the stove.
"We can release a behind-the-scenes episode later, ha!"
He had me film the rest of our setup. Since we didn't have light fixtures we had to make do with Stephen's desk lamps to make the room seem as bright as possible. We put up the tripod. Kevin had us both put on ponchos and ski masks. We finished just in time, when Stephen woke up.
The impact had broken his leg and his ribs. The whole time I could hear him gasping for air.
He asked what was going on a lot. Kevin never said anything besides mocking him throughout the torture.
I was silent. My mouth was numb. I didn't think I would ever be able to speak again. I won't go into details about what he did, because it doesn't take a genius to figure out what happened. And I'm hoping that if I don't talk about it, the memory will fade someday, though that's not likely. Isn't it funny that the only reason I signed up for this was boredom? I can guarantee that my life is anything but boring now. Kevin was right- the video did numbers. We made four hundred plus the bounty. Everything we've done since makes more and more. We do livestreams now, in our splatter studio, as Kevin likes to call it.
It's not my place to decide if they deserve it. If you ask me, I don't think they do. Kevin always says that we're avenging the souls they've claimed. Lives like Amelia's deserve to be given peace. I think he enjoys it, and that's just an added bonus. He's sicker in the head than most people we've done so far. Maybe it's a good thing he does this, otherwise he might shoot some innocent people up. But by some standards, am I not an innocent person?
I'm emptier than I was before. I watch these things, and I do nothing. I could strike him when he's not looking. I could stop him. When you see something you could prevent, but don't, you are twice as guilty as the person who commits the crime. Religious folks call it the sin of omission. Doing wrong by not doing what is right.
We killed Stephen and the others only once, but the footage can be replaced. They die over and over and over again, sometimes millions of times with how popular our videos have been getting lately. Each viewer kills them again, pulling out their eyes, cutting open their wrists, slitting their throats themselves. They're right there with Kevin, driving the knife in with every incision. And by every standard, aren't our faithful viewers also innocent people? All they do is sit behind a computer screen and stare.
Do the murderers and the rapists deserve it? I don't know.
I can't speak for anyone else, not even Kevin, but I know where I'm going.
Kevin might be able to get out on an insanity plea before God, but these eyes may not ever be allowed to look up upon him.