Easy Prey

Following her home was easy.

I usually like to scout my targets for a week or so before making my move, but today I acted on a whim. When I saw that porcelain skin stretched tightly across that slim physique, just begging for me to ease its tension with a swift swipe from a blade, I began my process.

Quietly, out of sight, I tracked her movements. Her silken black hair swayed back and forth in rhythmic pace with her walking, an almost hypnotic motion. As I ducked through back ways and alleys, shifting from building to building but always in her direction, not once did I ever see her turn back towards me.

Once out of the shroud of near-contiguous buildings, I kept my distance. Fortunately, as she approached the suburb in which she resided, I could trail her from such a distance that she could have looked directly at me and not have suspected a thing.

I watched her enter her home. The houses on this street were spread apart more than normal, separated by foliage and fences. Obviously a neighborhood for those that don’t care for neighbors.

I waited for the cover of night to make my move. No one else had entered the home, and she had never left. I tried the back door first. It wasn’t even locked. Too easy. The lights were mostly off inside. Just enough light reflected off walls for me to move through the house without making a sound.

I was halfway up the stairs to where I had hoped to find her asleep in her bed when I heard a scream so emphatic and pained that it caused me to stumble a few steps down. The screams rapidly turned into desperate pleas for death. The voice was male, and in his ensuing sobs, a woman’s laugh could be heard faintly in between his breaths. And then the screaming began again.

It has been three hours, and though the screams have become weaker, they have not stopped for more than five minutes at any point, that same playful woman’s laugh audible in between every break in the shrieks of terror and torture.

I’m hiding in a closet now, hoping she doesn’t find me, or that I at least die of dehydration before she does. I should have taken the usual steps, scouted before jumping for this target. There is no escape from this den of despair.

The doors, painted as wood but made of metal. The windows, not glass, but a thick plastic, unbreakable by anything I have thrown at it when the sound would be drowned out by the wails of unimaginable agony.

All of them locked from the inside.