“Uh, Hudson. What did you do to Gabe?” Riley asked, inching closer to her friend. She couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not.
“I injected him with a tranquilizer. He’ll be fine. But I am not happy that I had to go off plan. You are ruining everything!” He glared at Riley.
“Is this a friend of yours?” Chelsea asked Riley.
“No. I think he’s here for you,” Riley answered, noticing a small package sitting on Chelsea’s welcome mat.
“Is that the glitter bomb?” she asked him.
Hudson pointed the gun at her. “It most certainly is. And now it’s going to go to waste since I have to kill both of you today,” he complained.
“You arenotsetting off a glitter bomb in this house,” Chelsea said, putting her hands on her hips.
“Maybe don’t antagonize the guy with the gun?” Riley suggested.
“Shoother.” Chelsea shoved Riley in front of her. “But take her outside first.”
“I don’t want to shoother,” Hudson said with a stomp of his foot.
Riley thought she saw a flicker of movement in Gabe’s trapezius muscles.
“Then why are you waving a gun around in my house?” Chelsea demanded.
“I don’t really want to shoot you either. I’m on my lunch break, damn it! I had much more dramatic plans. But a good vigilante adapts. I’ll do what I have to do,” he insisted.
This was not good. This was very not good. Nick was going to kill her…if, by some chance, she survived being murdered by Hudson.
Gabe was definitely at least breathing. That was a good thing. But she didn’t need him coming out of his tranquilizer and scaring Hudson into shooting them all.
“I’m sorry for ruining your plans,” Riley began. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”
“Make it up to me?” Hudson repeated, looking at her like she was the village idiot. “Do you know how long I’ve been planning this? How meticulous I was with my research and organization? And then you come along and, instead of incapacitating her and throwing her into the mountain lion enclosure at the Hershey Zoo, I have to skip straight to the grand finaleweeksahead of schedule.”
Oh, boy.
“You were going to throw me into the mountain lion enclosure? Why?” Chelsea demanded with not nearly enough fear in her tone.
“I’m glad you asked,” Hudson said, throwing the syringe over his shoulder and pulling a folded sheet of paper out of the back pocket of his neatly pressed khakis. He cleared his throat. “‘You’re a horrible mother. You deserve to be left for dead and eaten by mountain lions for putting your child in danger.’”
“I stand by my statement,” Chelsea sniffed. “A good mother would have driven home and made her husband put gas in the car. She certainly shouldn’t have left her baby strapped in while she was pumping gas. Ofcoursesomeone stole her minivan with the baby in it.”
“Seriously?” Riley asked Chelsea.
“You see what I’m dealing with?” Hudson said, gesturing toward Chelsea with the gun.
“So you were monitoring the comments?” Riley asked him.
“Armand didn’t know a Facebook page from an Instagram account until I offered to help. I was just being nice. Something all those commenters know nothing about,” Hudson explained.
“That’s why you want to kill me? Because I posted a completely valid truth online?” Chelsea scoffed. “That’s stupid. You’re stupid.”
“And you’re trying to stop me?” Hudson said to Riley.
She shrugged.
“Because I made a comment online,” Chelsea repeated, clearly missing the point.
“Because you have no empathy, no regard for your fellow human beings. What about when you told a mother to put her family out of their suffering and kill herself?”
