CHAPTER 9After spending a weekend holed up in my girl cave, being sullen and reclusive, and watching old David Brennan episodes of Mister What—my British sci-fi guilty pleasure—come Monday morning I’m able and ready to become Jennifer Donner again. It’s nice to actually have a weekend to myself when on assignment. There have been times where I couldn’t take off at all, and those are always some of the hardest jobs.Bethany picks me up at six thirty. As usual, she spends the whole drive talking. Turns out she went on a date with Tim Collins, the P.E. teacher I’d seen her flirting with at orientation. In addition to being more than reasonably attractive, Bethany says he’s also really sweet. As you know, sweet guys bore me, but I’m sure that kinda guy is right up Bethany’s alley. They went out for drinks at a local bar. She let him kiss her goodnight, but nothing more.“Gotta make him work for it, after all,” she explains with a giggle.I don’t bother to point out if he really is as
CHAPTER 10The last period of the day is a free period for Bethany and me, dedicated to correcting class work, revising the syllabus, and preparing assignments for the rest of the week.As we head out to leave at the end of the day, we pass Principal Davison in the hall. He briefly makes eye contact, and then quickly averts his gaze and nervously shuffles off to his office. I roll my eyes and shake my head. Oh well, I’ve had to work with worse.When we get back to my apartment, we order pizza, and then begin to discuss our observations of the day. Aside from Bethany being slightly more tolerant of the Plastics than of the Goths, for the most part our observations line up. There’s actually little that Bethany missed for me to point out, which is relieving. It means I won’t actually have to spend the next six months holding her hand the entire way, which I had been worried about.“So, what’s our next step?” Bethany asks, swallowing a mouthful of bacon and cheddar pizza.“Next, we ob
CHAPTER 11Bethany and I spend the next few weeks surreptitiously watching and studying Derek Johnson and his friends, trying to learn as much about them as we can. It’s still too early to have a comprehensive profile of our Herring, but we have been able to determine that—based on a number of t-shirts we have seen them wearing—they are Rob Zombie fans. We make the safe assumption they are fans of both his music and his movies. It’s a small start, but it’s a start.For research, we spend a Saturday night—a Saturday night that Bethany is not spending with Tim ‘the Soccer Coach’ Collins—watching Zombie’s movies. A little too close to torture porn, for my tastes, but Bethany seems to be eating it up like the orphan Oliver at an all you can eat buffet. I’ve always preferred the classic slasher films; Friday the Thirteenth, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween. Cut a guy’s head off with a machete. Drive a pitchfork through a couple in the midst of coital throes. Hack someone to pieces with
CHAPTER 12“Craziness about that killer on the loose, isn’t it?” Michael Harris says, pulling up a seat next to us in the cafeteria, at lunch.“Yeah, crazy,” I say, trying to stay in my Jennifer Donner character, but also really not wanting to talk about this topic right now with anyone—especially not Michael Harris. With every week that passes, I can sense him getting closer to garnering the courage to ask me out. Ugh.“It feels like something out of, I dunno, Silence of the Lambs, or something,” Michael says, completely oblivious to my disinterest.“I sure hope they catch him soon,” Bethany says, shooting me a pointed look and an under-table kick to my shin.“This kinda thing always fascinates me, psychologically speaking, I mean,” Michael continues, oblivious to the silent argument raging between me and Bethany. “What is it that drives a person to do something like this? Childhood abuse? Drug use? Societal pressure? Violent media? Or is it just simply Evil making its presence k
CHAPTER 13As discussed, we spend the next several weeks stalking Christy Lee Spinner like a zombie stalking a group of addled college students.For the most part, her days are fairly routine. The only thing that separates her school-time actions from the rest of the class is that, as class president, she spends more time in the principal’s office for meetings than a straight-A student would normally be expected to.Every day, after school, she goes to cheerleading practice, after which Johnny walks her home. As both her parents work, the couple then has a few hours alone with Christy’s younger sister, Sally. I would like to believe they actually act responsibly and watch over Sally as opposed to fooling around, but they’re fucking teenagers so my hopes aren’t high in that regard. Johnny is always careful to be gone from the house by 5:15, when Mr. and Mrs. Spinner usually return home from work. His eagerness to disappear only furthers my suspicion that he and Christy get up to more
CHAPTER 14“Okay,” Bethany begins, as we briskly make our way through the dark woods, “this isn’t easy to say, but I’m not a PSK trainee.”“Yeah, surprisingly enough I figured that out after seeing your little dance-off with Jackie Chan back there,” I snap.“Yeah. Right. I’m already a fully trained operative for THEM—as an assassin.”Figures. That explains why I hated her so much when we first met. Have I mentioned that I hate assassins? I should have trusted my first instincts.“So why the whole fucking charade?” I ask. “What’s going on here?”“Well, it all has to do with that serial killer from September. He’s not a random psychopath. He’s Ninja.”Fuck. My fears confirmed. Ninja was the code name of Nick Jin, a former PSK who went rogue and was therefore turned over by THEM to the Feds. He was known as Ninja because, prior to joining THEM, he used the disguise of a ninja and used various samurai weapons to murder his victims. If Nick Jin really has gotten free and is on the lo
CHAPTER 15I didn’t intend to sleep with the IT guy. Really. As you should probably have figured out by now, your stereotypical IT guy is not my type of man. But . . . well . . . let’s put it this way. When you wake up at eight on a rainy morning and answer the door—wearing little more than a silk bathrobe, mind you—to find a man who bears a striking resemblance to Mister What’s David Brennan waiting outside your door to ‘come into your apartment and look for espionage devices,’ certain things are just going to happen.I’m sorry, don’t ask me to explain it, but there is just something irresistible about a man who, in the midst of a battle for the fate of human civilization as we know it, breaks into reciting The Lion King. I know, I know. That kinda thing would normally be a turn-off for me. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the British accent. Unfortunately, the IT guy doesn’t have a British accent, which kinda ruined the illusion, so there was a lot of me telling him to just shut up every t
CHAPTER 16It’s so surreal, walking through the vacated halls of an empty school. If I were the superstitious type, I’d be convinced there were ghosts around every corner, hiding in every shadow, watching us, waiting. As it is, I just get a minor case of the heebie-jeebies, which for me says something.We know Davison is here. We saw his car out front in the parking lot, lonesome in the parking lot on Sunday afternoon.As we draw nearer to Principal Davison’s office—the click, click, click of Bethany’s heels echoing back and forth across the haunted hallowed halls—we can hear voices coming from the principal’s office. I slow my pace, and motion for Bethany to stay back. The clacking of her heels will give us away, and something about the tone of voices makes me want to investigate first, before making our presence known.Heart pounding, I creep closer to the principal’s office door. As I draw closer, I recognize the voices of Davison and Christy Lee Spinner, but I can’t make out wh