Threat

Part 2 Now, when my life depends on it, it’s very easy to get the key out, easier than inserting it with a shaking hand into the keyhole. I undo the cuffs and get up unsteadily - either it’s the aftermath of the electrocution or I’m feeling the oxygen deprivation already. Ah, the fingerprints! I grab the revolver and thoroughly wipe its handle and trigger with a dry and crusty dishrag found in the sink. Where else did I leave my traces? Basil’s phone - it’s got my pics now, I have to take it with me. Oh, I need clothes! Basil took off his shirt, he doesn’t need it now. I open the door and run to the back room. The shirt is hanging on the wheelbarrow handle, still wet but long. Fortunately, Basil was a big man. I button it all the way down and hope to pass for a decently dressed person from some distance away. There’s my bag of toys, as well as my phone and apartment keys, I grab them too. One more lap around the house wiping every surface that I remember touching: door handles, the table, the window frame. Don’t forget to pick up my timer lock in the garden and wipe fingerprints from both buckets. ...

Part 23: May and the Hard Cases May finds it so wrong, to deny the obvious, and live in such pain. “Duke, my love, I’m getting tired, and my brain is getting crispy around the edges. I’m not at the top of my game anymore, so can we go home and do something to recharge me, like you tying me up, beating me, and then letting me pass out in your arms, please?” ...

story continued from part five Part 6: The Birthday Treat We drove for a while, my disorientation rendering time and distance as mere abstract concepts. Eventually the smooth road noise changed to a gravelly crunch for a while before the car drew to a stop. It was raining even heavier, quite torrential. I felt the heavy drops hitting my rubber shell as if I were stood beneath a particularly powerful shower. ...

Story continued from Part 3 Chapter 4: Old Bonds By AmyAmy, based on an idea by John Hynden At the division headquarters Patrice parked her car around the back, where it would be a while before people noticed it had been abandoned. She left the keys in the ignition, she wouldn’t be able to use it again. He almost certainly had a tracker on it, and even if he didn’t, he might be able to get data from the cameras, or have his own drones spot it. ...

The Informer Part 1 It was a cold wet late winter afternoon in a quiet middle class inner city suburb. Molly was walking back to her home in a narrow, almost deserted street. She was a slim narrow waisted young woman in her late twenties with an attractive face and lustrous black shoulder length hair. She was not of European background like most residents of the locality in which she lived. Instead, she one of the indigenous race that had once inhabited the country before present settlement but were now very few in numbers. Like many of her people she was fit, athletic and very dark complexion. As a rule they were not discriminated against, not in the city anyway. ...