He'd become aroused again as he'd watched the knife pierce the skin of the wrist on the screen and had pulled his seat in closer to the desk, slipping a hand inside his flies and massaging his burgeoning erection.
The screams and the pleas of the soon-to-be amputee whet his appetite further. Then came the bargaining, the part he loved. He himself had been offered money, power and sexual favours by some of his victims. This one offered...
...a passcode.
The camera panned to the face of the bargainer as he tried to speak, an extreme close up that filled Spiderman's screen with lips and nostrils.
“Eight, two, eight...” The final number was lost as a hand clamped over the trembling lips on his monitor.
Crackling audio followed as the phone from which the footage had been sent was placed on the ground, revealing a view of the early morning sky through the branches of the trees towering above. A minute or two of screams, shrill and arousing, were followed by the sound of birdsong and wind through branches. Spiderman began to lose his erection.
The perspective of the camera changed as it was plucked from where it lay. A voice.
“Spiderman, old chum. The padre here has a message for you.”
A hand, two fingers performing the Agincourt V, filled the screen. The fingers wobbled as the hand shook, disappearing from view to be replaced by the image of the Scottish Guv'nor, lashed to a tree with his head lolling forward and a bloody stump in his lap.
The momentum of the monitor as it flew across the plush office tore the cables that had tethered it to the tower beneath the desk from their sockets, reducing it's velocity and altering it's trajectory in doing so. The monitor struck the wall, it's plastic casing exploding noisily.
Spiderman seethed. Standing behind his desk with his shoulders hunched and his teeth and fists clenched he tried to see past the red rage that clouded his thoughts.
Still lost in his rage, he didn't react as he heard the vacuum cleaner cease sucking. He breathed deeply and heavily, his shoulders rising and falling as he turned his head toward the door when the click of the latch alerted him to the turning of the handle.
“Are you o... oh” The cleaner's voice tapered off as she saw him. His trousers were unfastened, the remnants of a once fine erection still clearly visible beneath the material, and pieces of shattered office equipment lay scattered around. She stared, wide eyed and with her mouth gaping as that lovely man from the big office approached.
She'd have screamed, had she not been so busy pissing on her nice, clean floor.
____________________
Mick rummaged through the glove compartment in search of a charger for the phone. He found a lightning cable and plug, though there was no adaptor to charge it from a vehicle's cigarette lighter.
The phone still contained power, roughly a quarter of it's capacity, and he had the option of charging it further via the USB port on the laptop, but that would be at the expense of that battery. He turned off the phone and placed it into the palm of the lifeless hand that sat between the driver's seat and his own, absentmindedly arranging the fingers.
There were a lot of videos saved to the hard drive. Mick couldn't bring himself to watch any of them for very long, though his partner in crime suffered with no such sensibility. He scanned through them for clues as to the whereabouts of the other competitors.
More than one of the videos under the name of Spiderman and his partner, Thieftaker, had clearly been made in London England
The editing of the later videos was of a far more professional standard than that of the earlier clips. Now, scenes faded in and out seamlessly, the volume of the backing track dipping at the appropriate moment so as not to obscure the sounds of the suffering. There were even credits at the end, though they mentioned only the usernames of the competitors.
“Frank, it'll be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Then we'll just have to throw ourselves into the haystack and roll around a bit, we'll soon feel the prick.” Donald smiled at his witticism, though Mick remained oblivious to it.
The laptop's recycle bin was empty, though nothing on a hard drive is ever truly lost until it's been written over. Mick opened up a DOS window and began interrogating the hard drive from within. He found video files, marked as deleted by this more basic operating system and ignored by the less basic and more user friendly operating system.
“There's another team.”
“What?” The minibus swerved a little as Donald snapped his attention from road to friend.
“Another team. Another two of the sick bastards. They've not uploaded anything in ages though. Oh, for fuck's sake!” The familiar sound of a laptop dying had brought forth the profanity, “I don't suppose you picked up the charger, did you?”
____________________
Thieftaker wasn't happy.
Spiderman was his apprentice, his subordinate and Thieftaker didn't appreciate having been kept out of the loop.
"So where are they now?" Thieftaker spoke into the iphone he had clamped to his ear.
"I've no way of knowing at the moment, the laptop must have died." Spiderman spoke into the iphone that lay on the edge of the bath as he washed his hands in the sink.
"What about the phone?"
"No, the app I installed on it makes that pretty much impossible."
"You didn't write a back door into it?" A back door, a way the writer of the code could bypass the security and piss about in that fashion that writers of code like to piss about in.
"I intended too, I was still developing it but it was a fluid situation, I thought..."
"Thought? Thought? You don't get to fucking think yet, why the fuck didn't you run it all by me?"
"All I can do is apologise, Guv, I should be able to get a fix on the phone's signal though, eventually."
Spiderman's apology was insincere. His provision of the communications system had cemented his place in this ever dwindling group and, he was sure, it would only be a matter of time before he took his rightful place at the very top of the food chain, but for now he'd play the part of sycophant. It was all part of the longer game.
On the other side of the window to the bathroom in which Spiderman began drying his hands an ambulance blasted it's emergency siren as it approached a junction. Spiderman smiled.
"We need to meet, turn this thing around. They're on the offensive, we can't let them be in control." Thieftaker barked the words.
"Fine," Spiderman opened the window to watch the ambulance turn left and blast it's siren again, "your place or mine?"
____________________
"Fifty fucking quid that cost me." Donald complained as he tossed the box onto the table at which Mick sat eating burgers. Mick pushed aside the box containing the remains of his meal and opened this newer cardboard container.
He ducked beneath the table and pulled the safety device from the three prongs of the plug socket, handily situated to provide electricity for the big, noisy floor polisher the cleaner had to push around at the start of each new day, replacing it with the universal power supply that Donald had begrudgingly bought with some of the money he'd stolen from a dead pervert. He banged his head as he sat back up.
"How long before you can turn it on?"
"I dunno. A few minutes." Mick selected the correct adapter for the laptop's charging port and installed it on the end of the cable before plugging it in, "We shouldn't use it for long while we're stationary though, just get it fully charged and get on our way."
"And you'll be able to find this other bloke then?"
"Of course I fucking will." Mick looked genuinely hurt. While he was still in the forces, before he'd become less than nothing, he'd had a reputation for hacking and tracking that was second to none. His had been a bright and promising career, until...
Mick shook his head clear, though not in time to prevent Donald picking up on the look of distress that flashed across his face.
"You okay, Mickey?"
"Ah," he ignored both the question and the use of the wrong title as he spotted the little orange light on the front of the laptop's casing turn green, "right, let's have a root through their bin."
____________________
Owen wolfed the food down greedily. Mashed potatoes, sausages, onion gravy, peas and carrots.
"My, you've brightened up a bit." The nurse smiled as she approached, "you were at death's door last night.
"I'm feeling much better, thanks." He pushed the plate away and dragged a bowl of green jelly and evaporated milk toward him, barely glancing at her as he spoke.
The wound on his forearm had been cleaned and stapled. A tube running from the cannula installed on the back of his hand to the bag that the nurse was in the process of changing provided Owen with a continuous, carefully metered flow of antibiotics.
"I'll come back in a minute to take your obs, I don't want to get between you and that bowl." This time, Owen looked up.
She had a warm, round, friendly face and a Rubenesque figure to which her clean, crisp uniform clung in an unflattering way.
"Where are the other two? The nurses that were here when I arrived?" Owen was struggling to remember the faces of the ladies that had looked after him, but he knew they'd been beautiful. So beautiful.
"Vince will be back later for the night shift, but I think Jules is on his days off now."
"No, the girls. Dark hair, proper fit, white uniforms."
The nurse laughed.
"You were burning up when you arrived, young man. I think you might have been hallucinating."
"No, they touched me."
"I bet they did," she laughed again, "but you'll not find a white uniform on a nurse around here, I'm afraid."
Owen was disappointed. He longed to see those ladies. whose faces he was now unable to picture, again. He knew the nurse in blue was telling the truth, he knew she was right but he didn't want to know these things. He pushed the bowl away.
"Finished? I may as well take your obs now." She plucked the chart from the foot of the bed. "Oh, we've no name yet, I don't think you were in a talkative mood. Name?"
"My name?" Owen began to panic, though he wasn't sure why.
"Yes, your name."
"Frank, I'm Frank."
"Surname?"
"Erm," He looked around him, searching for inspiration, "Ward. Frank Ward."
____________________
They sat in the minibus, flicking through still photographs and video clips looking for any clue as to the whereabouts of the men they'd made it their mission to find and to punish.
Many of the videos that Mick had recovered from the hard drive related to a third set of competitors. Donald recognised some of the landmarks the images revealed. Buildings and streets from his pre-death period, shop doorways in which he'd sat and slept in his postmortem days.
A door filled the screen, pushed open by the spare hand of the man holding the camera. The spare hand wore a leather glove and was holding a set of car keys. Beyond the door lay darkness and squalor. Litter lay strewn across the floor. Then a man's voice, echoing around the enormous room in which the footage was being taken.
"Whit-woo, what a gorgeous apartment..."
Donald's ears pricked up.
"Deja vu," he said as he reached out a finger to the mousepad, manipulating the cursor and dragging the little box on the video's timeline backwards.
"Whit woo, what a gorgeous apartment..." He rewound again, "Whit woo, what a gorgeous..."
"Deja deja vu vu, I know that voice." Donald's brow was furrowed as he replayed the words again then scrolled back a little further, to the hand on the door.
The car keys with the BMW fob.
"You sure?" Mick asked.
"I am," Donald closed the video to continue the search, "I voted for that cunt."
____________________
Thieftaker stood on the platform with his phone clamped to his ear.
He wasn't taking or making a call, but the only security camera at the little, local station was situated at the bottom of the platform in order to capture the faces of everyone passing through. He was employing the hand and arm that held his phone to obscure his face.
He was aware that he'd be captured on dozens of other cameras before he even arrived at his destination, but a change of clothes in a toilet and some back tracking would be enough to fragment the evidence trail he was leaving. He wasn't being especially careful, he was always this careful.
He'd be following the same pair of steel tracks that his quarry was, according to a little, red circle on a screen in Spiderman's apartment, currently traveling along.
They had clearly pinpointed his apprentice's location, that's why they were heading to London
But where, Thieftaker thought, would be the fun in that?
____________________
Her body had made quite a mess when it had landed.
The cleaner had screamed for the entire duration of her free fall from Spiderman's balcony. He'd wrapped the electrical cord from the hoover around her, more tangling her than tying her, and had thrown both the cleaner and her noisy tool over the handrail. She'd managed to scratch his face as she lashed out in her desperation, then that final scream had begun.
He'd watched her tumble through the air as she'd plummeted earthwards, the scream becoming lost in the early morning London
There were witnesses. A screaming woman falling from an office block tends to draw the attention of all those around. The police would be here soon, and shortly after that would surely call at his house, though no one would answer the door. No one else lived there.
It was an overly large residence for a single man, but what was the point of earning obscene amounts of money if you couldn't even own a little Victorian mansion in the heart of the nation's capital?
And an apartment in Notting Hill, although his was ostensibly owned by a chap from Kuwait and paid for with money siphoned from a thousand or more bank accounts belonging to people clever enough to earn a nice nest egg and greedy enough to click a link on a spurious email. Unlike the mansion, no bills arrived bearing his name. The apartment in which he now sat, watching a dead murderer's murderer's progress down the west coast mainline via the signal on the iphone he carried, had nothing to do with him.
____________________
Since last he'd visited this place, more of the roof had collapsed onto the floor, partly burying the locker Donald sought. He and Mick made short work of clearing away the rotten timbers and tiles.
"It fucking stinks, Frank."
"Yeah, they've been here a good while, they'll be well ripened now."
Donald hadn't been sure the bodies would have remained undiscovered where he'd left them or even, given the ever changing skyline of the city, if the building would still stand. But standing it was and stinking they were.
The two men heaved, struggling to turn the cabinet over. Once they'd managed to turn it through forty degrees the lock gave way and the doors fell open, spilling the contents of the tinny tomb onto the dusty ground.
The dead competitors putrefied bodies made wet slapping sounds as they landed on the floor. Dust and the effluvia of the bloated and blackened bodies filled the air and both of the living men gagged. They looked at one and other, both silently questioning the sense in what they were about to do.
They'd gleaned as much information from the hard drive as they could and still had no idea where the two competitors that hadn't been dispatched were.
It had to be assumed that their targets would also be targeting them, and that they were more than capable of locating them given the streams of data they'd already exchanged. Mick hadn't been able to pinpoint Spiderman's location, but he assumed Spiderman would've put a back door into the security on the system and would be watching their every move. The laptop could be disabled by removing the battery, but the iphone was an altogether different matter which was why, once it had been backed up using iTunes on the pervert's laptop, it had been placed in a plastic bag along with a dismembered hand (minus it’s thumb which would be necessary for restoring the backup) for ballast and dropped onto the roof of the Manchester Piccadilly to London Euston train as it passed beneath a nearby bridge.
Donald had used some more of Stationmaster's cash to purchase a used iphone from an independent shop and, when they were ready, the back up would be restored to this new phone.
"Mickey, Mickey, M..."
"Fuck off", Mick snarled, pointing a finger in Donald's face.
"Sorry, Mick, 'e needs to be more over there, in that beam of light."
Mick squinted at his smiling friend.
Mick squinted at his smiling friend.
"I see what you did there, but pack it in. How would you like it if I got your name wrong every fucking time, Frank?"
"I wouldn't, I'm sorry." Donald smiled at the irony of which Mick was unaware.
The two men positioned the bodies side by side in the centre of the beam of light that fell through a missing portion of the roof, laying them on their sides as if they were two lovers spooning. Donald took a lump of concrete and used it like chalk to draw a speech bubble on the floor, appearing to come from the mouth of the smallest spoon. He added a few words, admired his masterpiece and took his photograph.
Paradoxically, the long dead Donald felt very alive.
____________________
Attention to detail, Thieftaker knew, was the key to any successful operation.
He'd placed his phone to his ear before stepping off the train and had kept it there until he was well away from the station. According to the little map on the other phone he carried, his destination was slightly over three miles away. Public transport wasn't an option, given the number of CCTV cameras installed on the vehicles, so he placed one foot in front of the other and set off, it would only take an hour or so.
He'd arranged to meet Spiderman at what his apprentice described as his "safe house". Normally, the two met at neutral locations, preferring to keep their ordinary lives at a distance when playing the game, but circumstances had forced this deviation away from the usual protocol.
He loved coming to the nation's capital, if only because he loved to complain about the megalopolis when finally he returned home. Thieftaker paused across the street from the dome beneath which waxwork effigies of the notable and powerful had disappointed many a foreign tourist and checked the digital map on his phone's screen. He was getting closer, it was time to dispose of the phone and drop off the grid.
Thieftaker crossed the street, holding the phone up high and taking photographs of the tourist attraction as he did. Once among the crowd he placed the phone in his jacket pocket and folded his arms, smiling and pretending to admire the building before him. A young lady brushed past him, knocking his shoulder. She apologised quickly and Thieftaker smiled at her as he felt the fingers' of the young ladies accomplice in his jacket pocket, removing the phone and, in doing so, providing him with the perfect camouflage should someone be tracking his movements.
Paranoia, Thieftaker knew, was only paranoia if no one was out to do you harm.
____________________
No answer.
He dialed again, but this time the call was cancelled. He waggled a finger on the mousepad of the laptop that sat on the kitchen counter alongside the clippers he'd recently employed on his once lustrous hair and watched the red dot gently pulsate on the map.
Regent's park, somewhere near the duck island. His Guv'nor must be taking the scenic route.
Except, why would he? The dot on the screen was static, the phone wasn't moving. What the actual fuck? This wasn't the time for eating ice cream in the fucking park, he was up to something. Spiderman ran a hand over his stubbly hairdo and grabbed his phone. He left the apartment, slamming the front door behind him and, in doing so, missed the ping of a new competition entry having been uploaded.
____________________
Donald threw the bald tyre he'd dragged from the tangle of nettles outside onto the little pile of dry timber and waste paper he and Mick had constructed on the landing that led to the locker room/macabre photography studio on the third floor of the old mill.
The fire they then started wouldn't be devastating but would bring the emergency services. The emergency services would find the decomposing bodies of the missing perverts and all hell would be let loose, especially once someone took a look at the laptop currently resting on the mouldy knee of the corpse sitting at the bottom of the musty, draughty stairwell. Then, hopefully, someone with access to greater resources than those the old soldier and one-time butcher had available would surely be able to find the last two competitors...
...should Donald and Mick fail to find the prick in that haystack known as London.
...should Donald and Mick fail to find the prick in that haystack known as London.
____________________
Spiderman put a hand down the back of the tee-shirt he wore and scratched vigorously, the hair from his impromptu haircut irritating him.
He stood on the little bridge, his phone in the hand that wasn't currently stuffed down the back of his shirt. He watched the red dot as it approached with no further plan than to wait here and surprise his Guv'nor.
The dot got closer and closer, any second now Thieftaker would wander into view. Spiderman ceased scratching.
A young couple appeared, examining a phone and laughing. He craned his neck to see beyond them and was briefly aware of a crackle and the scent of ozone...
...as he bit off the tip of his tongue.
____________________
Again he’d held the phone to his ear.
He'd watched the couple buy ice creams and followed them here. They'd crossed the little bridge to enjoy their frigid snacks in the company of water fowl, and they'd have to return the same way eventually. In the meantime, he appeared to enjoy an overly long telephone conversation while sat on a park bench.
Thieftaker had spotted his apprentice, even without his hair. Focused on the screen in his hands and with his head down, Spiderman had walked by completely oblivious to the man he sought. Thieftaker shook his head. Youngsters, so reliant on technology these days. And so ignorant of it's shortcomings. He slid the battery compartment on the back of the phone he held down, revealing a red switch that he flicked before replacing the cover.
He kept up the pretence of a phone call as he followed his apprentice, matching his pace and halting when he too had halted. Spiderman didn't look around, he just continued to stare at that infernal phone.
Thieftaker approached his apprentice from behind as the young couple who had recently worked so well together in liberating a northerner's pocket of it's contents on the busy pavement outside Tussauds came into view. He took the phone away from his ear and placed it against the base of the spine of the man staring at his phone, pressing the circular button set in the centre of the arrow keys and smiling as he heard the crackle and smelled the ozone. Thieftaker then heard something Spiderman hadn't.
That being the splash of a recently tazered adult male falling face down into a river in a Royal park.
____________________
The minibus wasn't built for speed. Unfortunately, it wasn't built for comfort either. Donald mulled over his options as he tried to get some sleep in the passenger seat.
They were no longer in possession of either the iphone or the laptop, the killers they sought knew nothing of their identity and Donald was dead anyway. There was a pile of cash still large enough to purchase a small house with in the glove box. The world was his oyster, Donald could have so easily changed character and gone in search of a far less dangerous adventure...
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