Death Stories with Zoe

Streaming Bloody Murder

**Trigger warning: This story includes mention of a home invasion and violent murder. If you think this may trigger you, please do not read it.**

@Fay3dd Better known to her friends IRL as Angelina, never thought when she began Twitch streaming that within months she'd be the most popular streamer on Team N3rdStr0nG! and have on average over seven thousand viewers. Part of her popularity on the platform was because she liked to put on a good show while streaming, with wild hairstyles and elaborate makeup. The rest of her popularity was due to the fact that she was hands-down one of the best Call of Duty First Person Shooter players on the entire platform.

She had a small group of devoted supporters who regularly tipped and made financial donations to her stream and was making more money on Twitch than she'd previously been making as a coffee barista. Every few days, she'd unexpectedly receive an unusually generous tip that allowed her to redecorate the gaming corner of her home office. She'd grown to trust a few of her regular fans, sharing her mailing address with them through the platform's double-blind security system so that they could ship gifts to her. Through that method she'd received a very expensive Aeron chair and top-of-the-line Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

She was saving money to get her own apartment and move out of the place she shared with two roommates. Twitch was changing her life; it was elevating her to stardom.

What Angelina, aka 4ng3l1n3, didn't know was that she'd caught the eye of someone dangerous. And that person was someone she never would have expected might cause her harm, or that he would ever track her down IRL. She never would have shared her real identity or things like her email address and mailing address with her followers, but she thought that her own teammates were probably safe. After all, she'd lurked on Twitch for a while to get a sense of which Battle Royale teams were the best, and she'd nagged the captain of Team N3rdStr0nG!, a guy who went by the handle Touc4nS4M, to let her join the team.

So naturally, when Touc4nS4M had team t-shirts made as part of a major gaming sponsorship deal he'd secured for the team, Angelina had provided him with her mailing address. Which also just happened to be her home address.

And one Friday night in October, Angelina's roommates just happened to be out late at a concert when she decided to stream for a few hours.

Because she had her Bose headphones on to focus intently on her gaming, she didn't hear Touc4nS4M lift her living room window. She didn't hear his footsteps growing closer as he walked down the hallway past her roommate's bedroom, past the bathroom, and right up to her bedroom door. She didn't hear him jiggle her bedroom doorknob, or unscrew the screws holding it in place after he discovered it was locked.

In fact, she didn't even hear him as he crept up behind her and placed a strong hand over her mouth. She tried to scream, but noise couldn't escape from his grip. He spun her around so that she could see him. "Do you know who I am?" he asked.

Terrified, Angelina nodded. She didn't need to hear him say his name to know that he was Touc4nS4M. He'd once told her that he lived all the way in Seattle, Washington, but here he was, in her bedroom.

"I knew when you asked to join the team that you were going to be a problem," he snarled. "You're never supposed to outshine the team captain, don't you know that?"

It was then that Angelina knew he'd broken into her apartment to kill her. She'd heard about guys on Twitch being overly sensitive about female gamers being better players than them, but she'd thought everyone on her team was chill.

She squirmed in her chair and tried to break away, but Touc4nS4M was over six feet tall and very strong. He wrapped his strong hands around her neck and squeezed, seeming to take pleasure as she gasped and turned blue. Finally, when her body went limp after a five minute struggle, Touc4nS4M realized that her webcam had been on the entire time.

All of her Twitch followers had just watched her grisly murder stream.

But it was too late for Angelina; she was dead long before Touc4nS4M fled her apartment and hid from police for weeks before being found and tried for her murder.

By then, her body had been laid to rest in its grave, light as a feather, stiff as a board.

Light as a feather, stiff as aboard.

Comment below if you'd like for me to write a death story for you, and I'll select several (un)lucky readers throughout the month of October! Check out my book, Light as a Feather, available from Simon Pulse on October 9, 2018, and watch the Hulu original series inspired by the book on October 12!      

And welcome to Wattpad,