"Everybody cried."
Neon John 11:35 (Unified Standard Edition)
- - -
Hitomi was following in IncelRevenger's footprints - in reverse, she guessed - trying to backtrack and discover how he had gotten into the building and where he had laid traps.
She needed to get out of the building before an American SWAT team started sweeping the building. Her theory was that the basement connected to a parking garage and she was proven right when she stopped in front of a set of brass-colored elevator doors and examined the "In case of Fire" emergency map embossed next to the fire alarm handle.
On her way up she had purposefully ignored the elevators, figuring that the bloated domestic terrorist had wired them up with bombs - it's what she would do.
Wait.
"It's what I would do?" she said softly to herself.
Since when had she started thinking like this?
Hitomi wasn't a violent girl. No, wait, no - she was. Her mind filled with an image of Keiko's chest erupting in a bloody spray and the pure agony that had coursed through her body. How a red haze had filled her mind and brought her running here to exact, well, if not revenge, then... a reckoning?
She stared at her dull reflection in the shiny metal doors and thought about everything that had happened to her.
Hitomi felt like... a weapon.
But who's?
No. Stop. No time to get upset. You need to get out, Hitomi. Get out.
"OK..." she said to herself, breathing as calmly as she could, hefting Mr. Pipe over her shoulder, "OK. Alright. Elevators probably definitely trapped. Stairwells too. God. That's a lot of bombs. How did he even set up that many? How did he..."
Her eyes widened in surprise before her mind could process what she was seeing in the hazy reflection of the brushed metal surface of the elevator doors: a dark shape right behind her, a blob of motion that was getting larger.
Hitomi turned, trying to swing Mr. Pipe around just as the pounding sound of shoes on carpet caught up to her.
There was a sharp pain in her abdomen and then suddenly her world was fire.
Her entire body convulsed as spasms of electricity clenched every muscle. She nearly bit her tongue off and Mr. Pipe went skittering against the elevator door, tapping it frantically as she twitched in agony as a Taser released 50,000 volts into her small frame.
She couldn't even scream.
Was it the police?
Her eyes tore themselves upwards even as her body began collapsing in a puddle on the ground.
Her power... why? Why wasn't it working?
She stared upwards at the man, no, the boy, standing over her in the hoodie.
The 911 operator had asked if the shooter was alone.
No. Mystery solved. He had help.
Darkness circled around her vision, and then wordlessly the teenager leaned down and put the Taser to her chest, pushing the trigger again and silencing any further thoughts she might have had.
- - -
Something poked her in the chest.
Hitomi woke with a giant breath of panicked air, gulping awkwardly one lungful, then another.
She tried to wrap her mind around her surroundings.
It was dark, but there was a distant orangish glow illuminating the cramped space.
Her wrists hurt: they were tied behind her back to her ankles, which also hurt.
The boy in the hoodie was squatting next to her, prodding her with Mr. Pipe.
"Oh, good, awake now?" he asked casually, leaning back.
Where the hell was she? She tried to scoot herself up to a sitting position but the boy smacked her across the shoulder with her own steel pipe, not hard enough to break any bones, but enough to make her cry out in pain.
"Yeah don't move, you're mine now," he said smugly, waving Mr. Pipe around, "And don't scream. They're not here yet, so no one can help you."
Who's they? The police?
Belatedly Hitomi realized she was in the back of a large van with tinted windows. He must've brought her down to the parking garage. Oh. OH! This is how they had gotten all the bombs here.
Hitomi tried to say something, "Who are you? Why are you -" but he interrupted her by shoving the pipes blunt end into her stomach.
"Keep your voice down if you don't want me to smash this across your face. Shit. I can't believe this. You screwed up the whole plan. So now you get to be part of the plan. OK? Nod your head."
She nodded her head.
"Man," he looked exasperated, as though this were all just an inconvenience to him, there wasn't a hint of panic in his voice. He wasn't scared, or concerned that he was kidnapping a young girl, or that he had participated in a mass shooting.
An involuntary shudder went through her body.
"Man," he repeated, "I thought you were like, special forces, or something, when I saw the stream." He accentuated his statement by pulling out his phone, spinning it around to show her a screencap of her shooting his partner in the knee.
"I'm... not," she offered carefully, trying not to get another jab of the pipe to her belly, "He killed my friend."
He looked at her with surprise, his mouth an open O-shape, then asked, "Wha? Wai- wait, seriously? Like, in the office? It was mostly empty except for those fuckers running their board meeting. Who? Shirley?"
Hitomi was confused, "Shirley?"
"The bitch in the boardroom. She begged Incel for a half hour not to kill her, man, wow, he strung her along so good. He got a shit-ton of likes and follows for allowing the audience to vote on how he did her. Both ways. Ha, damn, I didn't even get a turn," he mused.
Her mind spun for a minute. "Incel?"
"Ah, it's his screenname. I'm Redrum. Meh. We made some sort of mass shooting suicide pact," he said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "So, not her huh? Who then?"
Hitomi started to explain, "We were on the highway-"
"Holy. Shittttt, what? You were on 66? That's... that's... wow. Just wow, damn. You got to him from all the way down there? That's kinda..." he looked over her body again, "Damn, that's kinda hot actually."
She squirmed in her bonds and he waved Mr. Pipe at her meaningfully.
"So look, here's the deal," he tapped her cheek with Mr. Pipe again, "You're my hostage. Incel kinda messed up the plan by killing that girl, but now you can fill in for her. Can't blame him though. He was high as a KITE."
He really bit into the word "kite": it sounded really sharp on her ears.
"W-why are you doing this?" Hitomi couldn't help but ask.
He stared at her, all expression leaving his face, then answered: "Because I can?"
She stared back.
"Do you know what a sociopath is?"
Of course she did. "Yes..."
"I'm a highly functioning sociopath," he said, as though it explained everything.
"What does that... even mean?"
"Hmm... hey, you have an accent, are you like, Japanese for real or something?"
Hitomi was starting to lose track of the conversation due to the pounding feeling of blood in her wrists and ankles and the confusing shifts in topics.
"Y-yeah, I'm Japanese. An exchange student."
"Sweet. That's hot. Anyways. So look, I don't really feel anything like pity or sadness or empathy or any of that stuff. The doctors taught me since I was a kid how to play pretend so I could get along with everyone else. So that's me. I'm just in it for the lulz."
What the... he said it all so blithely.
"I thought about just killing you when you were passed out, you know."
She had figured. She waited for the follow up, but he just kept staring at her. She knew he needed a hostage - he had just said that. Hitomi realized that was why her powers weren't activating: he wasn't planning to kill her. Then her mind began running through all the terrible scenarios of what he could do to her without killing her, especially after she saw the remnants of his friend's horrendous assault on the poor woman in the boardroom.
As though he could read her mind the teenager stood up, hunched a bit to avoid the van's roof, and swung Mr. Pipe into her belly: hard.
"URGH!" she cried out, trying desperately to scrunch herself inwards to protect her stomach and failing thanks to the way he'd tied her wrists to her ankles.
He did it again.
"ARGH, STOP!" she yelled.
He sat back down and she wheezed painfully, "Why?"
"No reason," he said, "Just wanted to see what you'd look like when I did it."
Good god. He was treating her like an ant under a looking glass.
He put Mr. Pipe down on the van's metal floor and scooted in close to her, lifting her up so she was on her knees.
"Did it hurt a lot?"
"Yesss..." she gritted out.
"I figure if I hurt you enough you'll be good, right? I checked you for a knife or anything, all you had is this dumb pipe. You didn't even have a gun like you did when you offed Incel."
Hitomi said nothing.
"So, does this hurt?" He punched her in the stomach again and she lurched forward.
"Yes!" she ground out.
"OK. Do you want me to stop?"
"Yes!"
He punched her again.
"Do you REALLY want me to stop?"
"YES!"
He stared at her, his eyes flicking all around her face and upper body, then he smiled coldly.
"Would you do anything I wanted? To make it stop?"
She struggled against her bonds. "You need me. You said I was a hostage."
He shrugged.
"I can do lots of stuff to you and you can still be useful to me as a hostage. I could break each of your fingers. One. By. One. And you'll do. Whatever. I. Say."
As though to illustrate he reached behind her and tapped her knuckles to accentuate his words.
"Besides, I don't have to untie you to get your pants down."
Hitomi's mind ground to a halt. Was he going to assault her too? Of course he was. This was all just a sick, detached game to him. And her powers wouldn't work because he was going to put her in the passenger seat when he was done and drive them both right past the police, hoping she'd work out as his hostage.
She needed her power to activate.
She needed him to try to kill her.
He didn't feel empathy.
Could he feel anger?
Hitomi cast her mind back to school and the epic verbal carnage that her friend Diamond dished out on the baggy underwear-showing boys who called her a slut that one time during lunch.
"You're a limp-dick, pathetic, loser," she said.
He backed off, looking at her with surprise: "What?"
"I said, you are a limp-dick. You're a loser. You... what? You signed up with some random guy on the internet for a suicide pact and then you bailed on it like a little cowardly bitch?" Whoa. Come on inner-Diamond, keep finding words to spew! "Who cares if you're a sociopath? You're weak. Weak. Look at you. Wearing a hoodie in a dark van? What kind of idiot does that? Incel was obviously the brains of the operation, huh? You're just a pathetic little tag-along -"
He seemed amused at first until she had gotten to saying that his friend was the smart one.
"Shut up. I'm the one who got all the military surplus. I'm the one who planned the raid."
She ignored him.
"I bet you didn't even do any of the work. I bet your friend did it all and that's why HE got to do the livestream while you hid in a cubicle like a -"
"SHUT UP!" he yelled at her, "You don't know anything!"
"I know you weren't in the room when I killed him, I know all he trusted you with was an itty-bitty-Taser! Ha! He didn't even trust you with a real gun, let alone a camera, I bet -"
"I SAID SHUT UP!" he yelled, ranting, "I'm the one who planned everything! I set up every single claymore! I'm the one! Me!"
"Uh huh, suuuuuure you were," she said with as much sarcastic agreement as she could muster.
"FUCK YOU YOU STUPID BITCH!" he screamed in her face, flecks of spittle landing on her cheek.
"Wimp."
His eyes lit with inarticulate rage and he reached down towards Mr. Pipe.
And then a not-Hitomi appeared in front of her even as the real Hitomi leaned back, painfully rocking her arms at a harsh, perpendicular angle that instantly snapped the zip-ties he had laced around her wrists. The pipe went swinging through the empty air as the not-Hitomi flickered out of existence, blood exploding from the not-Her's temple.
The teenager's hoodie fell backwards off his head, exposing a matte of dark black hair, slick with grease and sweat. He looked surprised, his face morphing from fury to confusion.
Hitomi's hands - her real hands - had swung around in arcs with the flats of her hands extended, clapping the sides of the teenager's now exposed head.
He obviously hadn't ever been in a real fight, she thought ruefully, as his hand flinched open and Mr. Pipe dropped in her now waiting palm. Her body had taken over completely by her defensive power and the length of steel went swinging around, smashing him in the neck.
He dropped to the floor of the van with a metallic thud.