13 Jul Do You Love Her?

I’m on the lookout for a new job, but I think it’s time that I got a job that has nothing at all to do with IT.  I mean nothing.  No computers.  No keyboards, mice, motherboards, wired networks, wireless networks.  Definitely no PEBKAC (look it up; you’ll laugh).  And, most importantly and most absolutely, definitely: No backup tapes.  Degauss them, burn them in a fire and piss on the smoldering ashes.  Your monthly fulls and nightly incrementals can go to hell.  Oh, what’s that?  You want your most precious files safe, up to the minute?  Tough.  Don’t look at me.  Not anymore.

Would it surprise you if I told you I lost my job last week?  Right, I know.  Probably not.  But it’s not what you think.  I quit.  I had no choice in the matter, really.  Sorry if saving my own ass from a psychopathic boss ranks higher in importance to me than my next paycheck.  A paycheck that helped keep the beer fridge and herb jar full and my penchant for pizza and gaming satiated.  I’d be fine if that was all I had to worry about funding these days, but since my folks booted me out of the hole in their basement — after what happened — I have to add rent to that list.  Utilities.  And a car payment.  And, damn, gas!  Otherwise, I’d be fine not working at all.  No job is worth dying for.

One reason I’m having such a tough time finding work is because not only did I quit a paying job with an okay career outlook, I left the next gig — the one I quit the first one for — after only one day.  I know, I know; I sound like a spoiled brat, and I wouldn’t know a hard day of work if it hit me square in the jaw.  “Ooo, boo hoo!  You had to live inside the basement of your mommy and daddy’s mansion.  How dreadful!”  But you know what?  Screw you, if that’s what you say.  You have no idea what kind of life I’ve led from a few words out of my mouth, so keep your preconceived judgment out of this and hear me out.

There really are very good reasons for both of those employment — well, unemployment decisions.  You may not believe me, and hey, that’s your prerogative and all that, but at least I’m laying it all out on the line so that some considerate soul might see that I’m not BSing here.  If it gets me a decent job — again, not in IT; please God, not IT — talking about all of this again might be worthwhile.  I may, you know, die a horrible death and all that from telling the world about this, but I’ve got little choice.

Back about a year ago, I graduated with a BA in Comp.  Sci.  Out of BU.  About a month before graduation, I had landed an intern-like job with a law office out of Cambridge.  I say ”“intern-like”  because, unlike an internship, I got nothing in the way of college credit for it, and the pay was about what you’d expect.  The office had recently lost their sole desktop support admin, and they needed to quickly fill the role until they could find someone permanent.  I didn’t ask what happened to the last guy, and I didn’t all that much care.  I was just thankful he was gone and left the opening there for me.

The typical workday was pretty much your run-of-the-mill desktop support-monkey stuff: Making sure printers were kept full and unjammed, dealing with malware, an overabundance of spam, wifi issues — that sort of thing.  I also had to make sure the tapes from the backup server were rotated out every night.  This meant removing the previous night’s incremental backup tapes, storing them in the off-site delivery storage container, and placing fresh tapes back into the jukebox for the next nightly incremental run.  Except on Fridays — that was the scheduled full-backup run.  My boss, Don Huber, Esquire, insisted on not reusing older tapes on account of stricter guidelines for data retention in the law office or some-such.  The office was on the small side — about twenty-five people, all of them with desktops.  I kept them all working and clean, inside and out.  And all of them got backed up, including the on-premises email server.

Toward the end of the last month of my employment there, Huber — who, I should mention, is one of the three partners of the firm — called me into his office.  Let me tell you this about Huber: I feared that guy.  I’m not a small man myself, and I don’t tend to intimidate easily, but this guy gave me the creeps.  He towered at least six-seven, thin as a rail.  His sixty-something-year-old face was gaunt and pale, except for the swollen nose that the man couldn’t stop blowing into that godforsaken, crusty handkerchief he kept in his pocket.  And his breath; dear lord, his breath.  I swear to God a cloud of that crap lingered around for an hour after he left the office.  And despite his constant coffee binging, he always looked tired and uninterested in anyone, never smiling past those bloody gums of his.  God forbid he ever look at you with his two piss holes in the snow.

“Jonathan,”  he said.  My name is Jonah, but I was not about to correct him.  “Close the door.”  That breath.

Huber continued, in his draw-out, tired way.  “Jonathan.”  But that’s all he said.  Was the guy trying to make me correct him?  I didn’t take the bait.

“Yes?”

“Backups.  You make sure all of our computers and the email are backed up.  Every evening.  Am I right?”

I nodded.

“And the old backups are stored out of the office by that…Something-Mountain place?”  “Yeah,”  I said, “they’re taken every night, about five o’clock.”

“And about how many years of backups would you say they have?”  “Wow.  Um…all of them?  Say, about seven years worth?”

He considered this a long moment.  “I have an important assignment for you.  It’s going to take some time.  A bit of overtime work.”

Wonderful.  “Okay,”  I said, hoping to sound more disappointed than pissed-off.

“Will that be a problem?”  he asked.  Alright, so I sounded pissed-off.

“Nope,”  I said.  “Let me know what you need.”

Huber glared at me.  There was no fooling this guy.  I mean, he’s a lawyer for crying out loud; I am not.  But I don’t think he gave a crap about my feelings, except for making sure that I was sufficiently terrified of him and uncomfortable.

“I’m working on…a case.  It’s one that is very personal to me.  So I need to trust that you will keep the details of what you are doing to yourself.  Do not speak of it to anyone else, inside or outside of this office.  Do you understand, Jonathan?”

I nodded.

The details of Huber’s task were pretty simple, but the deed itself was not.  Our nineties-era email server stored file attachments on a local file server, separately from the messages.  Huber laid out a rule long ago that the attachment storage had to be cleaned out of everything on the first of every month.  Every month!  You had to have any documents you wanted to retain printed and filed, then allow the system to purge automatically, probably as part of some sort of legal thing.  Don’t ask me; remember, I’m not a lawyer.  Now he needed me to go through the past year to retrieve all of his files for this ”“case”  of his.  That meant retrieving a bunch of tapes, then spending hours — make that days — restoring both the full and incremental backups of every system.  A major pain in the ass.

“And Jonathan…do not under any circumstances view the files you are retrieving.  It is of important…legal procedure that you do not view them.  Is that understood?”

“Yep.  I mean, yes.  Understood.”

With that, I’d say he was as satisfied as he was going to be.

The following Monday, two crates of eight-millimeter mag tapes filled the desk in my butthole of a back-room office, and I got to work.

Probably most of you have not worked with these old backup-tape jukeboxes.  Well, let me tell you: they suck.  They’re a pain in the ass to load, and the robotic arm for rotating tapes in and out of the drive is dog-ass slow.  I also had to perform the file restores early in the morning, after the nightly backups ran, since I only had the one unit to work with.  This is three, four in the morning we’re talking, mind you.  It was either start then or never get anything done for the people in the office all day.  You can be sure as hell I was logging all that overtime and strolling into the office later than usual.

At first, the file restores were pretty run-of-the mill crap.  Thousands of Word documents and PDFs.  Images, probably photos of crime scenes.  There were some audio files here and there, too, most likely from testimony recordings and the like.  And just like Huber the uber creep asked, I didn’t open any of them.  That is until the video files started to dump out.

It’s like this: Boring does not begin to describe those nights.  Brain-numbing.  That works.  If I was in law school, maybe I could dig into the tomes in the office library, read up on some old cases, something like that.  Even then, I was barely able to keep my eyes open, so my head wasn’t so much ready for soaking in knowledge at that hour.  The firewall — one that I, sadly, still did not control — blocked access to anything you’d consider fun to watch or read, managed by some third party or something.

And now there are these videos I’m seeing restore back onto the fileserver.  Mind you, videos aren’t something seen very often within email attachments at that place.  I’m not sure they knew how to operate the cameras on their phones, let alone transfer files from one; they weren’t the most technical bunch.  It was coming on two in the morning, I was bored, and I now had something that could pose as entertainment.  So, I double-clicked the first one, and I watched.

What popped into the video player window was…messed up, to put it mildly.  A heavy-set woman, in about her late-fifties.  She was bound and gagged, tied to a chair, in what looked like some kind of dirty basement.  She was dressed in a soiled, white nightgown, her greying hair laying wet and matted against her face and forehead.  At first, I thought this was just some disturbing crime scene evidence, that the woman was dead and the camera operator took video rather than stills.  Only no one else was in the room.  No cops.  And the woman was not dead.  She appeared to be asleep or passed out, as you could clearly see she was breathing.  The person working the camera rotated around the seated woman, making no sound other than the occasional footfall upon the concrete.

The video turned to focus on the woman’s right thigh, where a smear of blood ran down it from a small wound.  The camera came to a stop and clicked into place, presumably into a tripod.  A hand came into view then, wearing surgical gloves, holding a syringe.  It jabbed into the woman and plunged whatever liquid it held, then pulled away.  Some shuffling off-camera, and hands were back again with another needle.  Only this one…this one was huge.  He inserted this long-ass needle into the woman’s leg, right about at the bleeding wound.  The hand moved away, and I could see it was a blood-drawing needle, filling something I couldn’t see.

About a minute later, the needle was withdrawn.  More blood trickles down the woman’s leg.  A bag of blood swung into view, with ”“#000”  sloppily written on it in Sharpie.

A click, and the camera was raised up again, focusing on the woman’s face.  There was a soft kissing noise, and the gloved hand came into view again, pressing two fingers against the woman’s lips.  The video ended.

I closed the video player window and couldn’t have gotten out of that place faster than if it’d been on fire.

The next morning, I called in sick.  It wasn’t exactly a lie; I really didn’t feel well.  Add a sleepless night to what I’d just watched, and I felt like complete garbage.  I was told Huber wasn’t happy about my being out, personally asking about my work on his ”“special project.”  Rather than risk getting outright fired, I told them to let him know I’d make it in that night to make progress.

I wasn’t sure what to do at that point.  I had no idea the context of that video, and I didn’t know who it belonged to.  As they’re stored on the attachment server, they aren’t labeled with what email message they belong to.  Without the accompanying email itself, the attachment is just…there.  I’d have to restore the old emails as well if I wanted to match them up.  If I let Huber know I was touching those files, he’d can my ass in a heartbeat.  For my own sake of sanity, I just assumed it was disturbing evidence for a case long since closed and went back to work that night.

Around about 1:00 A.M., more files were restored from the tapes — I was more than halfway done at that point.  I took a look at the progress and the expanding list of files.  More videos.  I wasn’t sure I wanted to chance another one, but of course, I did.  I was a dead cat like that.

The video I opened this time was yet another bloodletting.  Same woman, same place, only this time the woman was much thinner, and her leg was not looking good at all.  The wound looked infected and festering, and there was a lot more dried blood.  This time, she’s not so passed-out, but close enough to it.  She mumbled something behind the cloth blocking her mouth, while the unseen cameraman went to work.  This time, the bag he filled is labeled ”“#011.”  I wasn’t watching them in order.  Dear God, there were ten more of these?  Maybe more?

I opened another video.  This time the window filled with something much different and definitely much more disturbing.  The camera faced Don Huber’s unoccupied desk.  The old man came into view, holding a steaming mug of coffee and a brown paper bag.  He sat at his desk and calmly opened the paper bag, removing one of those bags of blood!  He held it up to the camera.  It was half-full, with the label ”“#008”  written on it.  And the old man smiled.  He freaking smiled!

That’s not the most disturbing part.  Huber took this bag of blood and squeezed about a half cup of it into his coffee mug.  He sealed the bag back up again, put it into the paper bag.  He stuck his index finger into the cup, swirled it around, mixing it all up.  Then, in a big gulp, it went down the hatch.  He swallowed down what must’ve been half the mug.  When he lowered his arm, his lips and teeth were stained red.  He looked at the camera, and he smiled.  Then he laughed.  It’s not just a chuckle; it’s a full-blown cackle of insanity.  Tears streamed down the man’s face, the laughter becoming more maniacal.  He took another swig.  Another, until the mug was drained dry.  Again he smiled, and again he laughed.  He wiped tears from his face, then walked from behind the desk, off-camera.  The video ended.

I’m not sure how long I sat there at my desk in silence.  I couldn’t get the sound of Huber’s insane laugh out of my head.  I couldn’t erase that bizarre image of him sucking down that concoction and finishing it off with a bloody grin, enjoying every last drop.  And there were more of them.  With the files that continued to restore onto the fileserver were more videos.  Lots more.  I’d like to say that I refrained from watching them.  I mean, that’s what a sane, rational person would do, right?  That person would have seen quite enough.  He’d stop right there, maybe go to the police with that.  He might get fired for being wrong, and then for opening files he was told outright not to open.  But if he was right?  Some imprisoned woman is maybe saved, and that…vampire gets locked up.  I’d be a hero, one who broke the trust of his employer for justice.

Yeah, that worked out well for everyone else who’s blown a whistle.  Didn’t help I was barely out of college.

The remaining videos were more of the same.  Bags labeled anywhere between “#000”  and “#021”  were filled, then later consumed.  Always with the laughter and smiles.  Now it made sense why Huber’s breath was so goddamn bad.  As I watched the old man cackle in another video, I felt I could smell the rancid odor through the screen.

No, I actually could smell it.

“Jonathan.  How is the project coming along?”  It was Huber.  There, in the office.  It was three in the morning, and I was alone with that blood-guzzling freak.  I nearly crapped myself.

“Uh, Mr.  Huber!  Hi!  Yeah, I, uh.  Yeah, the restores are still, uh, chugging along.  Should be done in another day or so.”

The old man pursed his lips and nodded slightly, not taking his bloodshot eyes off me.  He was carrying a coffee mug.  The coffee mug.  Dear Christ.

“Just got off the phone with my mom,”  I lied.  “Told her where I was and that everything’s good, and I’ll be home soon.”  I thought telling Huber I’d be missed would keep me from becoming another one of his blood supplies.  His lack of reaction told me he didn’t seem to care.

“Uh, so, what brought you around here so late?”  I asked.  “Or is it early?”  “Late.  High-profile corporate litigation I’m working on.  Couldn’t sleep if I tried.  This’ll be my home for a while.”

“So…Mrs.  Huber — your wife — she doesn’t get upset at you being away?”  Huber narrowed his eyes.  I must’ve touched a nerve.  Now I wished I had called my mom.  Thankfully, it didn’t take long for his look to soften.

“Lydia – Mrs.  Huber – is…she’s not well.  Bedridden.  Has been for months.  I have someone taking care of her while I’m…occupied with this case.”

I nodded and mouthed a silent “ah”  of understanding.

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re still here, Jon.  I’m going to head out now, but I need you to print out a list of the files you’ve been able to restore so far and leave it on my desk.  I’ll leave the door open.”

“Uh, sure!  No problem!”  Thank the good lord; I wouldn’t be alone with him anymore.  I hoped the elation in my voice wasn’t too apparent.

Huber left, taking most of his dragon breath along with him.  Before leaving myself, I got the file listing printouts and brought them into his office.  It’s not often I go into that room.  It’s kept locked when Huber’s not around, and somehow he’s kept his PC out of technical trouble, which meant little need for me to enter.  And that’s why I’d never bothered to notice the photo sitting on his desk before.

It was the woman in the videos.  The bloodied, tied-up woman in the chair.  Huber’s wife.

The papers fell from my hand.  I gathered them up as quickly as they’d fallen, threw them on the old man’s desk and got the hell out of Dodge.

I went over the whole thing in my head as I sped home.  Huber — that sick son-of-a-bitch — had his wife tied up in his basement, draining the poor woman into blood bags and chugging her down like some sort of macabre breakfast drink!  And then the smiling.  The laughing!  Tears of laughter, drinking every goddamn drop.  What the hell was he?  And why in God’s name was he taking videos of the whole process?  He had to be emailing them off to someone.  But to whom?  And why?

The sun was rising by the time I walked in the door at home.  Needless to say, I wasn’t much ready for sleeping.  Rather than dwell further on what I’d just learned about Huber, I got to work on the most logical thing I could think of: My resume.  I was getting out of that office as soon as possible.  Either Huber would be caught and taken to jail, causing the whole firm to crumble and all of its jobs along with it, or that vampire would find me fit to fill more blood bags.  No thanks.

Having sent my resume off to as many IT support job postings as I could find and fit into, I finally passed out on my keyboard at about ten in the morning.  By the time I woke up early that afternoon, I had a voicemail from a recruiter from one of the jobs I’d applied for.  I called them back, set up an interview for the following day, and headed back to work.  I had a little skip in my step, knowing it may not be so long before I wouldn’t be going back there anymore.

Inside my office, the printouts from the previous night sat on my desk.  A Post-It note stuck to the top of the pile had Huber’s handwriting on it.

Continue project.  MOVE all files ending in .M4V onto USB storage.  DO NOT OPEN THE FILES!

The video files.  Of course, that’s what he wanted.  The crazy asshole wanted to keep them all for posterity or something, then probably take the tapes and have them destroyed.  Sure, I wanted to get the hell out of that job, but I did not want to let Huber get away with what he was up to.  I decided that not only would I copy those videos to a USB key for Huber, I’d make a copy for myself, along with the emails they attached to.  I just needed to complete the file recovery that night, then restore and save the emails from the same time period with my own copy.  With that, I could send it all off to the cops anonymously and hope they nail that creep and save his wife before she’s nothing but dry flesh and bones.

I managed to avoid Huber that entire day.  I swear to God, I thought I heard his cackling laughter from behind his closed door on a few occasions.

That bony finger swirling around in his mug.  That blood-stained grin.

As the next dawn crept up on me, I had completed restoring the last of the incremental backups.  I had fifty or sixty videos stored onto two USB storage keys: one copy for Huber, one for me.  As planned, I restored all of the old emails for myself as well.  I left Huber’s copy on the desk in his office, which was thankfully unoccupied, and left for home to get some sleep.  I had an interview to rest for, for a job I hoped I could start ASAP.

The interview was for ten that morning.  After about five hours of shut-eye, I downed a pot of coffee, primped myself up and arrived with a little time to spare.  The job was for an IT consulting business that had set up shop within just the past six months.  Business was taking off, and they needed to fill some entry-level remote tech positions to keep up with the onslaught of demand.

I nailed it.  They made me an offer on the spot, and I snatched it right up.  I’d only met with a couple of the lead techs, but I sufficiently impressed them enough to fill one of the spots.

I strolled into my old office that afternoon to find the storage containers — all of the backup tapes — gone.  I knew it.  Huber got in early; got rid of them all.  He was covering his sick and demented ass from being found out.  Likely he was toasting another mug of his vile brew to whatever fire melted the tapes down to a nondescript heap of plastic.  That night, while Huber was re-watching and reliving his gory glory days of sucking down the blood of his wife, I’d be working to match up my own copy of them to the emails he sent and shut him down.

I used my time at the office to type up my letter of resignation.  I threw it onto Huber’s unoccupied desk and checked right the hell out of there.  On my way home, I got a call from the new job.  It wasn’t one I was expecting.

“Hi Jonah.  Hey, this is Steve Paige, from ‘Puter Pros.  You seem like a cool dude, thought we might meet up tonight for a couple of cold ones with some of the team, welcome you aboard.  What do you say?”

“That sounds fantastic,”  is what I said, and that I’d head out that way after their office closed, about seven o’clock.  Meanwhile, I had some videos and emails to deal with.

When I got home, I flopped onto the couch with my laptop and threw on some TV.  I plugged the USB key with the videos and emails into the laptop, copied everything off, and got to work.  Opening the email files was pretty straightforward.  All that was left was to match the filenames and dates to Huber’s outgoing emails, and I’d have the bastard by the balls.

After about an hour of searching, I found what I was looking for.  Make that half of what I was searching for.  I was able to match Huber’s outgoing emails to only half of the videos, those of him doing the blood drinking.  And the laughing.  There was no email subject.  Nothing in the body of the message.  Just the video and one recipient: ppkg@gmail.com.

It was when I searched Huber’s inbox that I found the messages attached to the other half of the videos.  Huber wasn’t sending the videos of his wife — he was receiving them.  From someone else.

Unlike Huber’s outgoing messages, these emails did contain a message.  They were all sent from the same address he’d been sending to.  I read only the first:

Subject: Do you love her?

Hello Donny.  Or should I call you Soulless, Bloodsucking Lawyer Don, Esquire?  I like that name better.  You should change it.

I’ll keep this short because I know you’re a busy man and have a lot more bloodsucking to do.  And now I don’t mean that metaphorically, as you will see from the attached video.

You may remember that when you took me into your employment, part of that deal was the promise of your firm finding help for my wife.  You and I had a gentleman’s agreement.  In return for free assistance from me for your office, you would assist us in suing the company responsible for the accident resulting in my wife’s handicap.  That is not what happened.  Instead, after several years of my free services to your firm, you turned against me and my family.  You saw that there was more to be gained by representing the other party, turned around and counter-sued us on their behalf.

They won.  You won.  I lost nearly everything.

Last night, I lost my wife.

It’s time now for you to lose something.  It’s up to you for how long.

For your Lydia to remain alive, your instructions are simple.  Firstly, do not forward this message or its contents to the authorities, nor make them aware of it in any way.  I still control your firewall and know what comes in and out of there at all times.  I will know.  You could, of course, copy the files and send them some other way, but know this: Your wife is kept alive only by my administering her with the basic nutrients to stay that way, so if I were to, say, be killed or go to jail, she’s as good as gone.

Don’t worry, Donny.  You won’t be without your wife entirely.  I will be sending you that bag of her blood, one every few days or so.  In return, you will be required to drink it.  All of it, like the bloodsucker you are.  And how will I know?  You will record a video of yourself doing this and email it as an attachment back to me.  But — and here’s the most important part — you must show me how much you enjoy it.  Show me how much you’re enjoying every last drop of it, you bloodsucking backstabber!  I don’t care how many cupfuls it takes or what the hell you mix it with, but you will drink that bag dry.  And you will smile, and you will laugh, and you will convince me you love it!

Your first delivery comes tomorrow morning.  I expect your first video within four hours of that.

Tell no authorities.  Tell no one.

Oh, and I quit.

Enjoy your breakfast,

The Kenster

The Kenster.  I knew I heard that stupid nickname somewhere before.  Was it at the office?  Yeah, that was it.  First day of work.  One of the delivery guys who sometimes picked up the backup tapes once asked where “The Kenster”  was.  I had no idea who he was talking about.  Now I knew: He was the IT guy I replaced.  Before he left, he’d cleaned up anything and everything in the systems about him.  Everything gone.  Almost everything gone, I should say.

I still had the restored email.

I checked the time.  Seven o’clock.  Late.  Dammit.

Drowning my shot nerves in alcohol sounded like a decent plan at the time.  I called a cab and met up with Steve Paige and the other ‘Puter Pros at a bar across town, about a half-hour later.  After a couple of hours of us chatting about all-things geek, I was happily on my way to becoming plastered and forgetting about the whole nightmare with Huber.  That ended right quick.

Steve said, “Don’t worry if you get stuck with a tough client on the job, Jonah.  We’ve all had our run-ins with ‘em.”

“Pssh!  Remember that old bat who insisted on me reinstalling Windows 95?”  another Pro named Andy said.  “Ninety-freaking-five!  I had to torrent and burn some old ISO of the thing.  I hoped it wasn’t teeming with a hidden North Korean malware party.”

Steve gave him a punch on the shoulder.  ”“Jesus, Andy!  Seriously?  You don’t do that.  Anyway, Jonah, if you get stuck with a nut like that, you come talk to me, or you find the boss.  Because if you can’t do it …”

They all said in unison: “The Kenster can.”

I choked on my last sip of beer like I was drowning.

“Sorry…The – The Kenster?”  I managed to blurt out between coughs.

“Damn, you okay?  Well, yeah, man.  He owns the shop.  Ken Graham.  Goes by ’‛The Kenster’  in the nerdy circles, like with us.  He’s the real pro at ’‛Pros.  Knows how to deal with all types.  You go to him with the difficult-to-please ones, and he’s got you covered.  He’s…a little quirky, I guess you could say, but you’ll love working for him.  Y’know, I wonder what’s holding him up…”

“H-Holding him up?”  I asked.

“Yeah, he was supposed to show up tonight.  Guess he wants to meet you, in particular.  I showed him your resume, and I’ll be damned if his eyes didn’t light right up.  Looks like your past experience at that law office paid off.  You’ve already got his eye, big guy!”

Steve tried to give me a shot on the shoulder, but I was already beelining for the door.  There was some confused yelling from behind me as they followed me outside.  Most likely something to do with my skimping on the tab.  I threw myself into the nearest cab and shot home.

That was a week ago.  So I guess saying I quit my last job wasn’t so accurate after all.  In truth, I hadn’t even started yet.  I bet there aren’t many people who’ve done that, not without a backup plan on deck at the time.

I have no clue what Huber has planned for those videos he had me restore.  Not really sure why he’d have them destroyed, either.  If he turns them in, his wife’s likely a goner.  Maybe she’s dead already?  Maybe he doesn’t care and just wants to stop the blood drinking, making sure he’s got what he needs to make sure The Kenster pays for what he’s done.  But the news has been quiet.  No reports of a missing or dead Lydia Huber.  No arrests of ‘Puter Pros owner Ken Graham.

Me?  I’m keeping hold of my copy of those files and emails.  That insurance at least helps me get a few winks of sleep every night.

My parents, of course, haven’t understood my unemployment, so I’m out on my ass and basically paying for this dump out of what little savings I have left.  That’s not much.  Not anymore.  I’ve tried calling my mom for the past couple of days, basically to beg for her to let me back into their basement, which, believe me, is a vast upgrade from this place.  But she’s not picking up my calls.  It never took very much to disappoint her.

Hm.  Getting a text message.  God, I hope that’s her.  You know, I’m still sometimes surprised she even knows how to send one.  Especially…one with a video?  Why is she sending me…

Oh…oh, dear God.

Do you love her?