You've Been Tagged

2:39 pm

2:39 pm, September 10th, present year.

 Hunter and Terri were sitting at the table, discussing something. Riley was still sitting there, and he hadn’t made a sound for an hour or so.

            Hunter stopped talking and said to Riley, “Go sit over there by your parents.”

            Riley silently, but quickly, got up and ran over to us. He jumped Mom’s lap and hugged her.

            Suddenly, there was a lot of commotion outside. Terri and Hunter got up from their chairs and stared out the window. All the attention was fixed on them now turned to the little girl. I couldn’t see exactly what they were doing though.

            “What are they doing? What’s happening?” Hunter started to panic.

            “I don’t know,” was Terri’s reply.

            Hunter ran away from the window pointed his gun at me. I obediently stood up we walked to the front door. He threw it open, and with me in front of him, started shouting, “What are you doing?”

            Now that I was outside, I could see what was happening. Myrene had her gun aimed at the girl, and another female cop was pulling out her handcuffs. The girl had her hands in the air, but didn’t seem scared. And I knew the girl.

            It was Juliet Madyson! Why was she here?

            “What are you doing?” Hunter insisted again.

            Without taking her eyes away from the girl, Myrene replied, “Why does it matter to you? This is unrelated to you.”

            “I want to know! Tell me now!”

            “We just got a call in that there was a body found in Fahlstown, where Juliet resides as a homeless girl. Not far from the body was a knife, with fingerprints belonging to Juliet. We have no choice but to take her back to the station. Sophie, cuff her.”

            Sophie took a step towards Juliet, but a loud cry from Hunter stopped her. “Don’t touch her! Do not lay a hand on her!”

            “Sophie, cuff her!”

            “No! Don’t touch her! She’s my daughter! Get your hands off her, or everybody in this house dies!”

            “Your daughter? Juliet, do you know this man?”

            She shook her head.

            Hunter was furious. “I’m her father! Don’t touch her, she’s not yours!”

            Myrene nodded to Sophie.

            Sophie placed the cuffs on her yanked her into a squad car. Then, Sophie opened the driver’s door for another cop to get in. In a few minutes, the car was gone, and Sophie and Myrene stared at us.

            “No! You’ll pay…you’ll pay.”

            Hunter violently pulled me back inside.

*          *          *

            Myrene may have let it go too far. But now at least she was out of this environment.

            Hunter’s daughter? He’d never talked about his family before.

            If Hunter made it out of here alive, she just might let him see his daughter. Although she was oblivious as to whom her father was.

            Maybe it would be better if she never knew.

*          *          *

            Hunter’s mind was very simple. Search and destroy those who were against him, protect those who were close to him. A natural thought process.

            But he took it too far.

            When he saw his daughter been cuffed and lead away, something in his mind snapped. The process of protecting and destroying melted into one. Suddenly everybody had to die. Everybody, except Terri and Juliet. Everyone else was involved some how in the abduction of his daughter and need to be destroyed.

            Logically, he knew that he wouldn’t be able to see his daughter again. She was taken away, driven to a place where it would be impossible to get back. Everybody would know who he was, and the odds of him getting through the front door were close to none.

            So instead, kill everyone who was responsible.

*          *          *

            Hunter threw me back on the couch. He was fuming and was pacing in three step intervals in front of us.

            Juliet was his daughter? That was unexpected. So did that mean that Juliet and I were somehow related? My half-brother having a kid?

            Hunter was scaring me now. Before, he had been meticulous and careful in everything did, but now he seemed undone, like a wire had been cut in him. Now unpredictable, no longer driven by precise movements and calculated risks.

            He was a wild man whose daughter had just been taken away from him. He was an animal.

            It was clear to me. The only thing that kept him sane was his daughter.

            Hunter halted his pacing and spoke to all of us.

            “You’re all going to die.”