Exsanguinate (17 page)

K
haldon suggested
shots of Crown with the bloodwine. I grabbed the bottle and two glasses.

“You wouldn’t by chance have any O Positive stashed away?”

I looked at him. “Nope – fresh out. It’s not like I’ve been to the local farmer’s market and picked up a couple pints lately.”

“So, ExsanguiNation is your brain child? I love that RPG. I play it all the time. It’s so much fun to watch humans trying to be vamps and werewolves. Gives new meaning to playing with your food. Give me a minute to boot up and we’ll hop in.”

“Playing with your food? Gah – Khaldon that’s gross.”

“Perhaps, but I was born this way, so to me it’s all the same.”

I handed him a glass of the good stuff and poured a double for myself. I questioned giving him root access to our MySQL database, but there wasn’t enough time to set up specified file permissions. I could always change the passwords later.

“Okay, Khaldon, try scanning the externals or see if you can identify anything that looks out of the ordinary. We don’t allow any subscriber’s peripherals to run on the simulators, so that is most likely what he’s doing.” I ran back to my seat to resume the searches.

Khaldon turned to look to me, “What’s your Avatar’s name so I can friend her?”

I typed in the public chat window. [My Avi’s name is Lady Cazenove]

“Okay – got her – sending over the friend request now. You want to meet at a central place in the sim?”

“Yep – I got ya, but let’s search separate sections inside the simulator databases. Hopefully we’ll cover more ground.”

“Sounds like a plan. Just relax, we’ll find it. Could Dakota’s reference to GC89 be relevant inside the game?”

“I’m not too familiar with her own personal sim environments, but that’s definitely a great place to consider if we don’t find this haunted barn.” I looked at the atomic clock on the wall. “We have only twenty-five minutes left.”

I logged into the game portal with my other consoles under different avatar accounts, each searching a different set of keyword values. I continued to run searches for the haunted barn, GC 89, and any parallels that might help make an association. “If you need to export the data finds, we’ll use a pivot table to filter out any extraneous data.”

Desperate, I continued to search, broadening the parameters to include synonyms of the words red, haunted, and barn. I tried synonyms of both the verb and the adjective meanings. Words such as obsessed, frequent, besieged. Nothing but gibberish came up in the results.

“Khaldon, are you seeing anything relevant in the peripherals?”

“From what I’m looking at over here, there aren’t any barns, especially nothing haunted. I have found some haunted cornfields though. I wonder if this guy is using an external hard drive to run this file.”

I peeked at him over my monitor. “Ludovic would’ve had to have access into the mainframe. But how would that be possible? Our servers are on 256 bit encryptions. We have the same security as NASA. There’s no way it could be hacked. Unless …”

“Okay got it, there’s a barn here in the haunted cornfield. The script is running under a cloak. It looks as if the barn is by an ancient, abandoned silver mine in South America. You ready for the virtual transport to my location?”

“Yes, send it.” The first real lead, my fingers felt frozen to the keyboard.

“Unless what?” Khaldon steered me back to my think out loud moment.

“Unless Dakota was showing off one night and gave Ludovic access from her console.”

“Oh crap. That would be serious bad!”

“Yeah, seriously, not good.” I chugged my Crown and blood. My mind raced to compartmentalize this epiphany. It was as if my brain was set on defrag and just opened up an immense amount of space inside my biological hard drive.

“I swear, if I get her out of this mess, I’m immediately changing her password!”

I clicked on the invite sent from Khaldon to the simulated environment where the barn was located. My monitor screen instantly went black to the space realms during the transport. My avatar, Lady Cazenove, virtually teleported onto another area on an external simulator. It was one I had never seen before and realized Khaldon was right. We must be playing on Ludovic’s hard drive. Lady Caz landed with a thud on the external simulator.

“Khaldon, are you coming with me?”

“In a minute. I’m trying to work out a reverse IP on this external. If we can locate it, then we can find your sister’s geo location. Then we can go kill the bastard in real life, real time.”

“That sounds way too easy.”

“Ever watch that TV show
World’s Dumbest Crooks?
”

“Okay – you’ve got a point. I’m spawning at your location.”

Inside the game simulator, Lady Caz walked along the dark woods. The ground seemed mushy, and it as it like her feet dragged through boggy mud.

“What’s the deal with the lag here?” Khaldon asked. “I can barely move. I don’t see anyone else here on the map with us to cause such a slow down. We shouldn’t have anything on this sim to slow us down.”

“No, I don’t see anyone else either. I checked the simulated environments overhead and underground before I walked to this point, and it was clear of obstacles. Ludovic must have written a script to slow us down intentionally. Let’s try turning off our automation overrides and see if that makes any difference.”

We both shut off our animator overrides -AOs, the scripts that allowed us to walk like normal people within the game. Without them, we called it the duck walk. We waddled toward the barn at a frustrating snail pace.

I checked the clock. We had only ten minutes to get in and get the information. We finally reached the barn door. As soon as Lady Caz’s hand touched the handle, a horrific scream blasted out over the speakers. Not just any scream, but Dakota’s crying scream. Uncontrollable tears ran down my face.

Khaldon jumped up from his chair and came over to see what was on my monitor. We watched as my avatar rolled the hanging barn door off to the side. Lady Caz grabbed the lantern hanging on a rusty nail and lit it. Punching a hole in the utter blackness, I gasped at the sight revealed by the light. No amount of horror, scary movies, or haunted house research could have prepared me for I saw behind that door.

“Unholy hell … NO!” I stood up and held onto my face. “Khaldon!”

He grabbed my shoulders behind me.

Inside the barn were rows upon rows of women, tied up and shackled into body harnesses. They were imprisoned on their bellies hooked up to milking machines, their breasts pumping into stainless steel container vats. Many of them were prone inside hammocks with their swollen pregnant bellies ready to bust.

I couldn’t talk. I stood there with my hands over my ears mimicking
The Scream
by Edvard Munch. I could only stare at the horror of what I saw in my monitor.

“What kind of sick bastard is this guy?” Khaldon squeezed my shoulder.

I moved my avatar forward, looking at all of the women trying to see if any of them were Dakota or Sheridan. There was a yellow lamp light at the far end of the barn. I continued to walk Lady Caz past row after rows of these helpless women. Another scream set my hair standing on the edge of my skin. Sheridan’s crying, begging voice erupted out of the speakers. I outwardly sobbed, my hands shaking uncontrollably. I couldn’t control the keyboard to move my avatar any longer.

Khaldon sat down in my seat and pushed the arrow keys walking Lady Caz forward for me. We came up to a support beam holding up the roof of the barn. Attached to it was a piece of a parchment nailed to it. It read:

Khaldon moved my avatar around to see if there were any other clues in this barn. We tried speaking to the women. They all seemed catatonic. None of them responded. Their names on the clipboards had been fuzzed out. It was if the script scrubbed out their names on purpose, making the visual animation blurry. The constant sloshing chug of the milking machines pierced through the silence. A light came on about twenty feet from where Lady Caz stood in the barn.

Khaldon looked up at me. “Do you want me to move Lady Caz over to the light to get a closer look?”

I took a deep breath, holding my arms around my waist now, and nodded. He cautiously moved my avatar forward to the other side of the stall where the light illuminated the pitch night.

Nailed to another beam, we found a graphic picture. A real picture of Sheridan inside one of these cocoon contraptions.

“Oh my God! No!”

Naked, she looked unconscious, but she had an IV tube in her arm. Utterly defenseless. A hooded man stood between her legs, erect and holding her hips. I cried out at the sight of my sister’s torture and rape. My hands flew to the monitor to try to block out the mental image. I just couldn’t bear to believe this HELL was her current reality.

“There’s another note. Want me to read it?”

I nodded and pulled up another chair. “Quick, hit print screen.”

Khaldon let out a slow whistle.

I looked at him. “What? Khaldon, what happens between a human and a vampire?”

His eyes grew wide as he rubbed the back of his neck, but didn’t answer when he looked at me. His pained, silent expression clued me to believe whatever it was – it couldn’t be a good thing. I remembered Roxas explaining something …

He continued to read:

Khaldon blew out a heavy sigh. “Bloody hell. I hate this douche.”

The parchment disintegrated in Lady Cazenove’s hands and vanished. The whole building dissolved around her as if it had never existed. Everything gone, the women, the sound of the milking machines, the barn, that horrific image of Sheridan being raped. Gone. I had no proof to take to anyone except the print screen. Lady Caz now stood in the middle of a lonely, dark cornfield surrounding by nothing but the haunted melodies of the wind rushing through the dead corn stalks.

After viewing the incomprehensible horror in the haunted barn, seeing those women savagely hung from life support harnesses with their swollen, pregnant bellies – I just didn’t know what to say. Was this the fate of my sisters?

Bright red, bloody tears oozed from my eyes. In a few hours, I would be challenged to solve puzzles and play Ludovic’s stupid games. They were going to be tortured even more than they had already been if I failed them.

Khaldon stood up and pulled a few Kleenex out of the box and gently wiped at my tears. He put his arms around me. His face seemed just as shocked and stunned as mine to gawk at the horror we just witnessed. He leaned against the counter and pulled me closer into his chest. I finally lost it. I was flat out scared of everything that had happened to me and my family. I succumbed to the grievous pain over the past week. I ached at my sisters’ misery. I mourned my own mortality. I sank to my knees and he followed. He held me, rocking me back and forth on the floor.

Moments seemed like eons, and all I could do was pathetically weep. I begged the Goddess for answers that weren’t coming.

“Why did this have to happen to me? What did we do to deserve such ridiculous crap served up to all of us?” I sniffed and wiped at my face. “Maybe … we’ve been cursed for setting fire on top of ‘Ole Man Flannery’s headstone? It was only a simple séance to tell him that the new owners of his ranch were real jerks, and he needed to come back and haunt them.”

As slow as the decent was into my own self-pity and grief, I ascended out of it in a flash when I realized the immediate danger of Ludovic’s last words:
you’ll soon find other loved ones missing as well – if not already.

Roxas!

In an instant I was on my feet, pounding at the keyboard. Recalling his words. “Khaldon, Ludovic said he would be hurting more people I loved if I didn’t comply. How do I know he hasn’t already started?”

I was at this jerkoff’s mercy, and he knew it. Trying to catch my breath, to calm myself down with my father’s breathing techniques, I found it hard as anxiety spooled around my rib cage tighter than a corset on a beer wench. I tried again in vain to find Roxas online. Panic overpowered me steamrolling me into submission.

Khaldon stood up off his knees and sat back down in front of his computer. My fingers smoked the keyboard searching for any possible place Roxas might be logged on. “Roxas never signed off without saying goodnight to me, Khaldon. Never. He wouldn’t have left me. He would have called, texted, Skyped, or something.”

Khaldon looked at me and bit his lower lip.

“My chat logs recorded our last conversation the night before the attack. Everything else is server side.” I checked my messages once again for every conceivable place Roxas communicated. “The last entry was the afternoon I left the hospital. I can’t find another data log from that point.”