The young man, in his early twenties, went outside to the mailbox and pulled it open. He reached inside and gathered what meager offerings it held, before shaking his head and heading back up the walkway to the front door, totally unaware of the teenage girl watching him from the car just a bit down the street. Kelly jotted something down in a notepad, then exhaled. She reached over, picked her coffee up from the cupholder and sipped it before starting the car again and pulling away.
The thing she'd noticed most while doing this was how little people realize their surroundings. They just go about their day to day business, never once bothering to take in what changes there might be or what differences - mundane or worrisome - might just show up nearby. It was like they were oblivious to such things. Kelly thought that was a terrible way to go through life, so completely unaware of what was happening just around you. This is why people vanish. Why they go missing. Why they get kidnapped. Because, to her at least, they were simply too stupid to prevent it otherwise since they just. never. looked. up. *** Jason was sitting on the couch in the lovenest, eating breakfast he'd gone out and gotten from a nearby diner with some cash Kelly had left him when he heard the front door open. He heard the sound of her heels walking behind him, but he stayed focused on his scrambled eggs and hashbrowns and bacon, his eyes glued to the news on the television when suddenly a report caught his attention. "We've just picked up this story about a young woman who had the worst celebration imaginable. In a freak turn of events while celebrating her college acceptance, one miss Lana Plummer caught a firecracker to the side of her face, resulting in the loss of her ear. In the trauma ward for a week, Plummer has since stated that she-" Jason shut the TV off and leaned back on the couch. He knew exactly who the girl was, and exactly how she'd actually lost her ear. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair as he set his plate down on the little table to the side of the couch while Kelly pulled the fridge door open and pulled out some celery sticks and peanut butter. As she started to put the two together, humming to herself while spreading, Jason looked over at her. "Don't you have school?" he asked. "I go to a private school, Jason. They don't care about attendance so long as my father continues to writ them big fat yearly donation checks to keep their other wings open," Kelly said, "I should go, yes, but I had something to do today." "Yeah, what's that?" "Keep an eye on someone," she said, biting into one of the sticks and chewing for a moment. Once she was finished she continued, "now get your shoes on, I have something for us to do." He hated hearing those words. *** "So who is she?" Jason asked, pulling the binoculars down from his eyes and handing them back to Kelly. They were sitting on a park bench, watching a somewhat older heavyset woman play with two little boys on the nearby playground. Kelly shifted, crossing her legs and tossing her hair. "I'd think the less you know the easier it'd be to get this stuff done, wouldn't you agree?" "Hey, if I'm gonna do this, I need to know they deserve it," Jason said, "I'm not gonna just do this because you tell me to. There's need to be some common ground here to alleviate my guilt, alright?" "Okay, fair enough. Her name is Shauna. She was my nanny growing up," Kelly said, "She was a very good nanny. She helped me with homework, she took me to therapy, she did my laundry and cooked dinner for me. This was back when my folks were working a ton, which they don't do so much now. The workload has kinda evened out. Anyway, she was excellent at her job." "So...why doe she deserve grievous bodily harm done unto her?" Jason asked, raising a brow. Kelly paused. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, then she turned and looked Jason square in the face. "Because one night, when asking for a pay raise, she told my mother how bad she was at being a mom. How she was never around. How she didn't seem to care that she had a child she should look after. That's never sat well with me," Kelly said, "Then, a week later, she left and never came back. Never said goodbye, never explained her absence. She was just gone. That stung. I don't like being abandoned." Jason was starting to see that she happened to be targeting people who'd specifically done her parents an injustice, and thusly by extension, herself. This wasn't as random as he'd been led to believe. There appeared to be some sort of method to her madness. He leaned back against the bench and took a bite from the pretzels they'd bought at the cart in the park, chewing. "So," he asked, "how we doing this?" Kelly smirked. It was nice working with someone so easily pliable. *** Shauna Myers was exhausted. She'd just spent hours watching over two little boys, ages 5 and 7, and all she wanted to do now was to get home, kick her shoes off, drink wine and watch TV. As she pulled into her driveway and parked, she didn't even notice the random car parked down the street, as nobody ever seems to. She got out of her car, gathered her bags and headed into her house, while Kelly and Jason watched from the car. Kelly pulled on her leather gloves and adjusted them as Jason prepared his little toolkit Kelly had put together for him, consisting of a pair of pliers, a screwdriver, and various other tools and instruments. "They never notice," Kelly said. "What?" Jason asked. "Nobody ever notices when things change around them," Kelly said, "They go about their lives, never once blinking an eye to, say, a random car parked on their street that's never been there before. They simply don't question things, because questioning things makes them paranoid and let's face it life is stressful enough without that added issue. So they go about their lives, not noticing people who may be watching them, then acting shocked when they're suddenly abducted seemingly out of the blue." "...you're not wrong, and that's what's sick. I did the same thing. I went through my day to day life, never once looking up and seeing the cracks slowly forming in the facade," Jason said, "I just...one day everything was different, and suddenly I didn't have the life I used to have. The life I took for granted." "At least you're aware of it." "Yeah, only after the fact." "That's still more in tune than most people will ever be," Kelly said, reaching into the backseat and pulling a small bag to her lap, adding, "By the way, I picked us up some masks. This way it'll be harder to identify us, if some sort of accident occurs where we get sloppy." She pulled out two plastic masks, one fox and one rabbit, and she looked at them, smiling. "Got a preference?" she asked, and Jason shrugged. "I guess I like the rabbit," he said, "When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time on my grandparents ranch, and they had a rabbit hutch. I was always partial to bunnies. Never got to have one as a pet, but I got to spend a lot of time with them there, so that kinda made up for it." Kelly nodded, then handed him the rabbit mask, which he pulled on over his face. Kelly did the same with the fox mask, and then they looked at one another. She took a deep breath, then snapped her fingers and away they went. They went around the side of the house, finding the side door leading from the garden into the kitchen unlocked, and Kelly twisted the knob slowly and quietly. The door slowly swung open, and they crept inside, but Shauna was nowhere to be seen. They could hear water running, and Kelly assumed she was in the shower. "Perfect," Kelly whispered as she and Jason entered into the living room. They could hear the shower running down the hall, and Kelly leaned against the wall, sighing. Jason stopped and looked at the photos on the wall. Shauna and her parents, Shauna as a child on vacation, and then one photo stopped him in his tracks. He pulled it off the wall and walked to Kelly with it. "Look," he said softly. "What?" she asked, taking the frame in her hands and examining the image, "...so she kept a photo of us together, so what?" "So she clearly felt bad about leaving," Jason said, "I don't think she deserves this." "That doesn't mean shit. Like you said, it only alleviates her own guilt. She let me live with abandonment for years. She made my mother feel like shit. She doesn't deserve to get to live in peace just because she kept a photo for herself while I had to go to therapy to deal with being left behind," Kelly said, almost snarling. Jason sighed and placed the frame back on the wall, just as the shower water turned off and they heard the bathroom door open. Shauna came out, in a robe, and walked into the living room. She stopped and looked at the frame hung slightly askew on the wall and furrowed her brow. Had that been that way for a long time and she simply hadn't noticed? She didn't even hear Jason come up behind her, choking her out. When Shauna Myers came to, she found she was sitting tied to a chair. She looked around, but it was dark. She couldn't make heads or tails of her immediate surroundings, at least not until the light flickered on. That was when she realized she was in, what appeared to be, a cellar. She saw the two people standing nearby - one in a fox mask, the other a rabbit mask - and she started to feel like she was in a nightmare of some kind. After a moment or two, the fox masked person approached Shauna and pulled the rag from around her mouth and then stepped back. "What's going on?" Shauna asked. "Your entire career is based around watching over children," Kelly said, her piercing eyes looking out through the mask eyeholes as she added, "and yet you let some children live with believing they weren't good enough to keep you around. What do you think that does to a childs self esteem?" Shauna's eyes widened, shocked at this question. Who was she dealing with? What even was going on? "I...uh...what?" Shauna asked as Kelly pulled a stool across the floor, the wooden legs scraping against the dirt and concrete, and then sat in front of Shauna, mask still over her face. "How do you deal with knowing that a child thinks less of themself because you left, when your entire job was to be there for them?" Kelly asked, "Children already are so fragile, they're already so...so very scared of the world. Confused by the actions of the adults that surround them, and yet...here you are...just leaving without a word." "Sometimes it isn't my choice," Shauna said, "Sometimes the parents require me to leave without saying anything to avoid a scene, or because they think the child is becoming more attached to me than the mother. If it were up to me, I'd never leave without saying goodbye." Jason started to pace in the back of the cellar, unraveling his toolkit onto a table and scanning the items available to him. Kelly snapped her fingers and then held up her index, indicating she wanted a number one. Jason nodded, pulling a pair of pliers from the belt and walking it over to her. He put it in her hands, and she thanked him, then turned back to Shauna as she put the pliers up to her nails. "For what it's worth, you're a good nanny," Kelly said, pressing the nail between the ends of the pliers before adding, "but you're never better than a mother" and then tearing the nail from Shauna's hand, making her scream. *** Shauna Myers was left in the cellar until she passed out from the pain, and then they left her on the side of a usually busy road so she'd be found by someone. After dumping her, Jason and Kelly went to get dinner at a little bar and grill. Sitting in the bar and grill, sharing a large chicken salad between them, Jason couldn't help but feel sick. He still wasn't adjusted to this line of work, no matter what he'd told himself. After a little bit, he looked up across the table at Kelly, who smiled at him and cocked her head to the side. "Yeah?" she asked. "How do you do it?" he asked, "How do you stand doing something so despicable?" "I don't think about it," Kelly said, "Everyone has their price, and everyone is capable of doing horrible things, even if they think they aren't. But when pushed against a wall or into a corner, everyone goes down fighting. I just am better at ignoring my actions than most." "I feel awful," Jason said quietly and Kelly sighed. "I'm sorry, I know it's hard to get used to, but you will eventually, trust me," Kelly said, "David said the same thing." Jason just raised an eyebrow, then ignored it, stabbing another piece of chicken and eating it. He chewed for a bit, swallowed and then took a very long drink from his root beer before looking back at Kelly. "I can't stay in the love nest forever," he said, "I mean, I'd love to, it's wonderful, but eventually your dad's gonna show up and I don't wanna be squatting when that happens." "I'm already working on that," Kelly said, "and we'll deal with it this week, but for right now I don't wanna talk about things. I just wanna eat. This really builds up an appetite." Jason nodded, picked his fork back up and continued eating, even though all he could see when he shut his eyes was Shauna screaming as he nails were pulled, one by one, off her fingers. That was a sight he wouldn't soon forget. After Kelly took Jason back to the love nest, she went home and headed upstairs to find her mom in bed. As she entered the room, her mother looked up, setting her book down in her lap. "Hi sweetheart," her mother, Stacy, said. "Hi mom," Kelly said as she climbed into the bed and snuggled up to her mothers side. Stacy stroked her daughters hair and then kissed the side of her head. "How was your day?" Stacy asked. "...pretty good," Kelly replied, smiling.
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A rich teenage girl befriends a desperate man in his thirties to kill people that get in the way of her or her family happiness and fortune. Slowly, the mans guilt eats away at him, while the girl ego rises to dangerous heights. Archives
July 2023
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