Headsets For Fear

PRESENT 03 : NORA

Three days after

Ever since I was young, Andrew told me that I was special. No one else really took a lot of notice, except my parents when I dissected an entire computer to understand how exactly it worked. They were highly pissed off, and rightly so. Andrew just patted my head and laughed.

Andrew was an FBI agent, just like me. He used to work for the IT department, preventing foreign hackers from invading into the American defense system and stuff. Stuff which, to him at least, seemed to be a piece of cake. Except one case. That both made and broke his career.

That was the case in which Octavio's brother Jonathan was killed, but it didn't have a lot of resemblance with the current murders.

Six years ago, when I was still in high school, mysterious disappearances started happening all around New York. And then, it began to spread around all the states. People seemed to vanish in thin air, and were found a week or two later, in front of their houses. Dead. Rotting away. And with their bodies, there used to be attached a small bag, which contained some tapes. Perfectly clean tapes, without a single fingerprint or hair sample that could used to find the killer. And what did they contain? Voices of the dead. Being tortured by some unknown agency. Begging for rescue, for mercy. Fear quivering in their voices, like they were waiting for death.

Andrew used to bring some of those tapes to his house, and both of us used to listened to them. Those were some of the most terrifying moments in my life, but I never skipped listening to them. Because somehow, those voices intrigued me.

I was disgusted with myself. But I didn't stop. I was more interested in finding out what the source of fear was, instead of empathizing with the people who were going through it.

After listening to them, Andrew used to look at me and say, "This isn't normal human behavior, Nora. Do you understand that? It's provoked. Forced."

I didn't understand back then, but I pretended to.

"Someone is controlling their minds, and bringing them to this level. Showing them the things that they hate most. So that they feel that there is nothing in their lives except those things. And end it."

He said every sentence slowly and carefully, as if he thought I wouldn't understand the darkness of the situation if he didn't.

"How do you know all this?" I used to ask.

He never answered me. "I'll tell you someday, but not now."

And finally, they caught the criminal who had been doing all those murders. However, they considered her to be a normal serial killer, the regular bloodlustful psychopath. Andrew never told any of his colleagues that she could control brain. Hack into their brains. Because frankly speaking, they wouldn't have understood.

But he did tell me all about brain hacking, and how he came to be associated with it, a few days before his death.

The biggest mistake I did was not bothering about it until now.

●○●○●○●○

If Rick was a stalker, he would've been a really successful one.

When he said he would come with me, I never thought he meant accompanying me to my house. Without letting me know he was following me.

So I drove home, unsuspecting of anything, and saw him standing like a coconut tree in front of the gate.

I hadn't realised how tall he had grown before he came and stood right beside me. I was pretty damn proud of my height, but he stood a good three or four inches taller. He smiled at me.