I shouldn’t have responded. I really shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t stop myself from typing, Are you watching me right now?
Maaaybe, he said, followed by a wink emoji.
I ground my teeth, trying to ignore the fact that, for a stalker, he seemed more cute than creepy in our exchanges so far.
You are breaking so many laws, I wrote back.
And you don’t even know the half of what I’m up to, he replied.
Listen, you, UGH, I don’t even know what to call you!
How about boo? he wrote back. You know, because of the – this was followed by three little ghost emojis meant to represent his mask.
Damn it, I was not going to smile right now. Not when he could see me do it. It was bad enough that he’d made me laugh yesterday. Curse Dad for passing his dark sense of humor on to me. The urge to laugh always overwhelmed me at the absolute worst moments.
I am NOT calling you boo, I said. I’ll stick with ‘asshole’ TYVM. And don’t you have anything better to do than spy on me at work?
Not really, he said. Insomnia is kicking my ass this week.
I blinked, feeling bad for him for a second before I checked myself. He deserved insomnia for his behavior.
I saw your comment on my video, he added. Looks like everyone else did, too. You’re real popular right now. He tacked on a laughing emoji to, I assumed, provoke me.
I swiped back into my app and cringed. So far, there were over a hundred responses, and people were out for blood tonight.
I blame you for this, I told him.
You’re the one who left the comment, Aly.
Oh, no. You’re not pinning this on me. I made a bad choice by leaving it, but it would have gone unnoticed without your interference. You knew damn well what would happen when you liked it and followed me.
I have no regrets about publicly claiming you.
Claiming me?
Oh, god. No, vagina, do not quiver at that. Damn it. Not you, too, ovaries.
Conscious that I was still being watched, I went completely still and fought the urge to squirm. His declaration was oddly reassuring. Here was a digital record that tied me to him, so if he did wind up murdering me, there would be a hundred thousand witnesses online who could point to him and say, “The boyfriend did it.” He might not have actually been my boyfriend, but they didn’t know that. For all intents and purposes, he’d just insinuated he was.
Was this his way of showing me he didn’t pose a threat?
I shook my head. No, I was not going to be softened by this. He’d filmed me. He was watching me even now. He could have lied about how much he saw the other night. Hell, he might have recorded me. There could already be a video of me fucking myself with a vibrator on a revenge porn site.
I didn’t know this man, and I’d be an idiot to trust him.
I still don’t forgive you, I said.
I’m not asking you to yet, he responded. Meaning, he would later?
I lifted my head and stared at the camera, my thoughts churning like an angry tide. I needed to end this. Tell him to fuck off to space. So why couldn’t I bring myself to do it? Was some deranged part of me actually enjoying this?
My torment must have shown on my face because he texted me.
Just tell me to stop, Aly, and I will.
My thumbs hovered over the screen. I needed to do this. It was the healthy thing. The right thing. Sure, the idea of a man breaking into my house to fuck me was an appealing fantasy, but it was just a fantasy. Real life had shown me there was only one logical conclusion to this madness, and that was my eventual assault or murder.
I managed to type the letter S before my pager went off. I looked down, and all thoughts of the Faceless Man fled from my mind.
Ambulances were pulling up with multiple gunshot victims. There’d been a mass shooting at a nightclub.
I threw my phone into my locker, slammed it shut, and raced into the hall.
Brinley lurched out of the bathroom door as I passed it, and we nearly collided. I slowed down enough to steady her before we took off toward the ambulance bay together.
“On your left!” Tanya yelled, sprinting past us.
“Jesus, she’s fast,” Brinley wheezed as we hauled ass after her.
“She’s a cardio queen,” I told her. “Does three marathons a year.”
“How bad is this going to be?” Brinley asked.
I sent her a sideways look. “The truth?”
She nodded.
“As bad as it gets,” I said.
Twenty hours later, I stumbled out of the hospital. Nearly the entire nursing staff was called in to help with the shooting, and many of my co-workers showed up before we even got to their numbers. When tragedy struck, we knew to come here.
We’d only taken a fraction of the victims. The rest had gone to other ERs and trauma units across the city. Six people were dead, another fifteen had been shot, and twenty more were wounded during the stampede to the bar’s exits.
According to one of the cops collecting witness statements, the shooter had been killed by a heroic bartender. She’d popped up from behind the bar not long after he opened fire, hit him with a baseball bat, and kept hitting him until his head looked like a pulped pumpkin.
She’d saved a lot of lives, but we had at least three people who might still succumb to their injuries. Sadly, this wasn’t even the worst mass shooting I’d seen. Last year, a man had gone to his ex-wife’s place of employment, killed eight people, and injured countless others before a SWAT sniper took him out.
I managed to sleep an hour or two here and there between rushing from one room to another, but it wasn’t enough to combat the fact that I’d been awake for almost forty. This was why I left Fred with so much food and water. My vet kept telling me not to open feed him, that he was starting to get chubby, but I’d rather Fred be overweight than starving every time I got stuck at work like this.
I took the elevator up to the third floor of the parking garage, tugging my heavy winter coat tight when the doors opened, and an arctic blast rushed in. A glance to my right stopped me in my tracks. It was snowing again, coming down in big, fat flakes that the wind blew sideways. Great. Hopefully, the roads weren’t too bad.
I was tempted to turn around and go sleep in one of the bunk rooms reserved for long-shift work, but if I did that, I’d probably only get another hour or two before someone woke me up looking for help. Saying no in those situations was a problem for me, and I knew myself well enough to know that I needed to go home to avoid self-sabotaging, even if that meant taking a taxi or car service.
I just needed to get a few things out of my car first, and then I’d go back inside and order an Uber. It was stupid of me to think I could drive right now. The last thing anyone needed was for me to fall asleep behind the wheel and cause another emergency.
I pulled my gaze from the snow and ambled toward the corner of the parking garage where I’d left my car.
It was running when I got to it.
I stopped fifteen feet away, staring in confusion. I didn’t have an automatic starter that might explain this. Was I so tired I was hallucinating?
I glanced around, looking for someone else so I could ask if they were seeing what I was, but there was no one nearby. It was three in the morning, and this level was the employee lot. Everyone else was hunkered inside the hospital, trying to save lives.