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Amanda Petrie stopped dead in front of the skeletal wreck of a creature stumbling toward her on legs like knotted spindles. The woman looked to be in her sixties, bruised, wounded and terrified. She was dressed in a faded blue nightgown draped no differently than if it was on a hanger in a store, except that it was caked in filth of all kinds, and it stank like something inhuman. Her matted gray hair grew between bald patches, she was missing teeth, she was hollow-cheeked, she was a shell.
Amanda dropped her cell phone, didn’t even notice how it bounced and cracked and spat out its battery, how the binder she’d been holding struck the ground, broke open, sent loose pages from magazines sliding across the concrete.
From the awful silence that followed, Amanda began to hear something – a soft pit, pit, pit. She looked down. A bright photo of a rainbow-themed garden party had floated from the binder and landed between the old woman’s dirty feet. Maggots were dropping onto it – pit, pit, pit – from under her nightgown.
Amanda turned away, heaving. She pressed her hand tightly over her mouth. Her eyes bulged and watered. Slowly, she turned back to the woman.
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘Are you OK? I mean … do you need help? Obviously you need help …’
The woman stood before her, wide-eyed, not a blink. And from this desolation, Amanda noticed eyes the most incredible shade of blue, and was suddenly struck with an image of a baby girl in a bassinet smiling up at her parents, innocent, expectant, hopeful, years from this.
‘Where did you come from?’ said Amanda, looking around. They were on a quiet road in an isolated part of Sedalia, sixty miles southwest of Denver, Colorado. She was there only to check out a venue for her sister’s surprise fortieth. She had just crossed it off her list.
The woman didn’t reply.
Amanda took a step away from her, then crouched down to gather the parts of her phone, putting them back together with a shaky hand.
Kurt Vine was driving along Crooked Trail Lane, in his 1984 cream and brown pickup with the camper shell, radio off, cigarette burning down in the ashtray, running through the events of the previous night. He was on Level 9 of Hufuki, a video game with a great Japanese-sounding name that all the players understood was really an abbreviation of Hunt, Fuck, Kill. You just couldn’t say it out loud. Kurt had hunted down, raped and murdered forty-two victims to get to Level 9 out of 10. It was getting exciting. He had missed a few obvious traps in the last session. He should have known better. Some twelve-year-old kid in Ohio had beaten him. It was embarrassing. But Kurt was undeterred – no one had officially reached Level 10. There was a rumor that once you unlocked that world, real girls played the victims. You chased their avatar, but the screams were real, live, and you could see their faces in the right-hand corner of the screen, see their fear. Whether anything was being done to these girls to elicit these reactions was not something Kurt Vine
