Opening my mouth, I was about to tell her as much when she turned her attention to the masked man blocking the exit.
She whipped out her N-phone with one hand and brandished her keys at the intruder with the other. Her chilli pepper key chain swung between her fingers, and the man went deathly still.
“I’m giving youone chanceto walk away,” Melanie snarled, holding her phone up to her ear. “You have no idea who you’re fucking with right now.”
The man stepped closer to us, absently clicking the safety off his handgun as he approached.
“Wait… stop, no one needs to get hurt!” I stammered, my eyes bulging as I watched him lazily raise the gun and point it at Melanie’s head.
“I know exactly who I’m fucking with,” the man said calmly. He nodded his head to the phone she was gripping so tightly her knuckles had gone white. “I know everything about you, Melanie Larson,” he purred. “And I’ve wanted to do this for a very long time.”
I could hear the ringtone going off in her ear over and over… but whoever she was calling wasn’t picking up.
Why hadn’t she called freaking 911?! Who the heck did she think would be more helpful than the literal police in this scenario?!
“You won’t kill me. It would be suicide. Do you know who I work for?” she hissed, though her face was getting paler and paler with each step closer the man took.
“I know exactly who you work for,” the faintly robotic voice rumbled from behind the black, expressionless mask.
The muffled ringing from Melanie’s phone ended, and the faint sound of a voicemail recording sounded off, indicating that Melanie’s call had gone unanswered.
“You’ve reached the voicemail of Sebastian Stevens, please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you when I can…”
Melanie swallowed, and my heart was beating so hard I was sure they could hear it.
“No answer, hmm? How strange. It’s almost as if you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
The faceless man took a final step closer, and the desperate need to scream rushed through my chest as he pressed the tip of the silencer against my best friend’s forehead.
“I told you to kill me. You should have listened,” he hissed, leaning down slightly so his masked face was inches from hers.
“Wh-what?” Melanie stammered, her eyes widening in horror as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger. He chuckled softly, and I knew it was over before he even pulled the trigger.
“Goodbye, Ms. Larson. Please consider this your official notice of termination.”
The gun went off… and I still couldn’t seem to scream.
Blood and fragments of skull exploded out of the back of Melanie’s head in cinematic slow motion.
The scream that had been building in my throat rolled in the back of my mouth as I watched my best friend’s head literally explode in front of me.
I choked on the unspoken sound as I struggled to process what I was seeing.
The intruder’s white hoodie was now completely splattered in crimson blood. Thick, dark chunks of brain matter slid down his black mask, making an obscene ‘splat’sound as it hit the bamboo floors.
Melanie was clearly dead, but the man still fired another silent round into my friend’s body where she lay crumpled at his feet.
No… no, no, no, no!
The stranger calmly crouched by Melanie’s corpse, and I watched helplessly as he tugged her keys out of her limp fingers. The pressure in my throat built higher and higher, and a disorienting ringing began to sound in my ears.What was freaking happening right now?!
As if he had all the time in the world, the man calmly slipped his murder weapon into the front pocket of his hoodie. He then expertly removed Melanie’s signature chilli-pepper key chain from the key ring before tucking it into one of the many pockets on his tactical pants.
I wasn’t able to deliberate on how strange it was that he kept a two-dollar keychain while discarding the fob to a luxury N-car that probably cost close to half a million dollars.
All I could think was that what had just happened couldn’t be real.
This had to be a nightmare.
