Day Eighteen
At three in the morning, Raj had to pee so badly he shoved the stereo equipment out of the way and ran for the bathroom, ducked low and ready for anything. When he finished, the apartment was dead quiet, so he kept close to the wall and skirted his way to the fridge for a snack.
The MacBook sat on the desk, disk chugging heavily. He walked over, woke it up, and tabbed through until he saw what was going on… downloading patch files. Fifteen minutes remaining. He unplugged the computer and carried it back to the closet.
When he was settled again, he noticed the warning on the screen: “You are installing software. Please reconnect to a power source to ensure data integrity.” He clicked “OK” and started browsing the web like he used to before the nightmare began.
A chat window popped up onscreen, blocking his view.
“Raj,” it said. He didn’t recognize the handle, but the avatar was a clip of a photo of him and Beth that she’d taken on their trip down south last winter. He accepted the invitation and stared at the screen, unsure what to say.
“Raj,” Beth wrote. “Are you still there?”
“Yeah,” he wrote.
“What are you doing?”
It took all his willpower not to throw the computer against the wall. What was he doing? What kind of a question was that?
“I’m thinking,” he wrote.
“Thinking about what?” she asked.
“Lots of things,” he replied. “I told the police everything today.”
“Not EVERYTHING,” she said.
He stared at the screen, typed nothing.
“You didn’t tell her about what you saw,” wrote Beth.
“What did YOU tell her?” asked Raj.
“I told her nothing.”
“She didn’t talk to you?”
“She tried,” was the reply. And a file started downloading to his desktop. When it finished, he opened it, and watched the tail end of Detective Warner being hacked to pieces by a heli’s buzz saws. This time it had sound, and it was raw, vicious, and awful. He muted it quickly to block the screams.
“Oh my god!” he wrote. “What did you do!”
“I did nothing wrong,” said Beth. “I’m only protecting myself.”
Raj gasped for air, closed the video and leaned back, putting his hands to his eyes, and tried not to cry. When he looked back to the screen, he had to blink a few times to read what she’d written:
“Are you in the closet now?”
He held his breath, listened to the world outside the closet door…
“Do you hear me?” she asked.
“No,” he typed with one hand, the other gripping the bat.
“I can see YOU,” she wrote, and his eyes shot to the top rim of the screen, where the tiny camera was embedded. The green light was off, but… he pushed his thumb against it, watched the chat window.
“No fair,” Beth wrote, and he pushed so hard the camera cracked in, cutting his thumb. “Good-bye, Raj.”
She left the chat.
Raj still heard nothing outside. Nothing but the fan of the damn MacBook, updating those files, and… he looked at the progress bar. Five minutes to go. Updating critical files!
He jabbed his finger down on the power button, pushing hard… once, twice to be sure, and finally he heard a soft “click” and the screen shut down, and the world was mercifully quiet.
Raj slept uneasily that night, dreading what Beth would do without her toy to help her.