#MurderTrending

by Gretchen McNeil

  Dee tightened her grip on the spork. She might be a marked girl on Alcatraz 2.0, but she certainly wasn’t going down without a fight.

  IT TOOK A COUPLE of hours to booby-trap her house, but when Dee finally sat down on the sofa, she felt, if not exactly safe, then at least satisfied that she wouldn’t be taken by surprise.

  After changing into a pair of teal pajamas that consisted of harem pants and an off-the-shoulder tank top, disturbingly like a costume from Aladdin, Dee had snatched the dental floss from the bathroom and sporks from the kitchen and constructed her first line of defense. She painstakingly tied a dozen of the plastic utensils to a length of minty green floss, then strung it across the front door, securing it to a curtain rod on one side and the door hinge on the other. She realized that the cameras were capturing her every move, but she didn’t care. Even if The Postman’s killers knew about her alarm system, they’d still have no way of getting inside without triggering the plastic chimes. If she slept on the sofa, the noise would wake her up and give her a head start to escape through the opposite side of the house.

  Next up, the windows in the living room and the two bedrooms, and the sliding glass door. Trickier, since they slid open horizontally instead of vertically. But the dental floss came in handy there, too. She found a stash of cardboard coffee cups in a kitchen cupboard, and after poking two holes in each with a spork prong, she threaded the floss through, then secured its ends to each window handle. Next, Dee filled the cardboard cups with whatever she could find: the rest of the sporks, lip-gloss tubes and eye-shadow palettes from the bathroom drawers, an ugly beaded necklace she found paired with one of the princess dresses. If anyone tried to slide open a window or the glass door, it would pull the attached cup, spilling its contents onto the parquet floor and making enough noise to wake Dee up.

  Or at least she hoped. She couldn’t have been the first inmate to think of creating their own security system, and The Postman probably had a contingency plan in place for such situations, so Dee couldn’t exactly sleep soundly. Instead she sat on the floor of the living room, leaning against the front wall with that ridiculous plastic spork clutched in her hand.

  Was Griselda sleeping? Or Ethan? Or Blair? Were they sitting up like Dee, waiting for the danger hours to pass before they caught whatever z’s they could before work?

  Dee flinched as she heard a noise outside. Crunching, like soft shoes on a gravel path. Was that Cecil B. DeViolent coming for her? Looking to avenge Prince Slycer’s death? She held her breath, ears straining against the silence, expecting any moment to hear one of her booby traps triggered as a serial killer entered her house.

  Tears welled up in her eyes. This is how it would be. Every night, the same paranoia, the same exhaustion. How long could she keep it up? How long before she didn’t care if a Painiac murdered her or not? How long before she gave up trying to find Monica’s real killer?

  As Dee sat in the darkness, her goal of proving her innocence felt soul-crushingly futile.

  Dee wasn’t sure exactly when she’d broken Blair’s third rule and fallen sound asleep, but she was pretty sure she was dreaming.

  It was a nightmare, one she’d had many times before, where she was trapped and fighting for her life. So exactly like her current reality. And this recurring nightmare, just like Alcatraz 2.0, was real.

  Or had been. In the dream, Dee was eleven years old again, waking up in a stark white room with smooth metal walls and no door. She screamed for help until her vocal cords were raw. She pounded on the walls until her arms and hands ached. She cried until she was too exhausted to sob.

  That was when she heard the voice. A girl, just like her. Nearby, but muffled.

  “Hello! Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  The air vent high in the corner near the ceiling.

  “H-hello?” Dee said, her voice craggy.

  “You can hear me! Oh my God. I’ve been so scared and alone.”

  Scared and alone. Where was she? What had happened? She’d been at the library, doing homework after school, like she did every day until her dad picked her up. She’d gone outside to wait for him and someone had approached her from behind. That was all she remembered until she woke up in the room.

  “Where are we?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “You don’t remember?” The girl paused. When she spoke again, her tone changed. She was no longer hopeful, just angry. “You’re one of them, aren’t you? Do you think I’m stupid? I won’t trust you. I’ll never trust you!” Then the voice fell silent.

  Dee didn’t remember what exactly she said next, just that she was begging the girl at the other end of the air vent not to disappear, not to go away and leave her alone.

  The dream shifted. Dee wasn’t sure how long she’d been in the white room—hours or days—and she was so hungry and weak, she could barely stand. But she’d come to trust her new friend: Kimmi, the girl in the air vent.

  “Dolores,” Kimmi said, her voice like a lilting song. “Are you awake?”

  “I’m so scared, Kimmi,” Dee repeated for what felt like the millionth time. “Am I going to die?”

  “I can help you,” Kimmi said.

  “Help me?” Dee pushed herself to her feet, tears streaming down her face. This time, she was crying from hope, not from despair.

  “Yes,” Kimmi said. “Hold on.”

  There was movement from above, the sound of metal warping out of place. Then fingers appeared through the air vent, pushing it out, twisting it to the side, and pulling it back into the duct.

  Dee held her breath as a girl’s face appeared in the open vent.

  Kimmi’s skin was pale, practically white, as if she hadn’t been out in the sun for years. Her long blond hair dangled down in perfect ringlets, and her blue eyes were wide with fear.

  Dee realized later that the hair should have been her first clue. Kimmi was clean, well-groomed, perfect. Not a captive who hadn’t eaten or showered in days.

  “I have something for you, Dolores.” Kimmi held up a bag. It had a fast-food logo emblazoned across the front.

  “I’m so hungry!” Dee cried. “How did you—”

  “I ASK THE QUESTIONS!” Kimmi’s voice boomed through Dee’s cell, pinging off the shiny white walls. She dangled the bag over Dee’s head. “And you’ll answer them correctly if you want this.”

  “But—”

  “So we’ll start with an easy one.” Kimmi’s voice was syrupy sweet again, her rage vanished. “Do you want to be my sister?”

  DEE OPENED HER EYES. She wasn’t in the white room anymore. Nor was she lying on the cold concrete floor of Slycer’s maze, wearing a Cinderella gown. Instead she was dressed in frilly pajamas, curled up on the floor in her strange new home.

  She sat up, eyes blinking against the flickering light from the TV. The main feed had stopped replaying Jeremy’s death and was cycling through the various Barracks. Dee watched the feed for a moment, registering the different inmates. She didn’t recognize any of them except for Ethan, who was doing incline push-ups off his coffee table, and though the sound was still ever-present, Dee had already gotten used to it, like white noise in the background.

  Dee yawned, stretching her aching limbs as she teetered to her feet. A dim light permeated the vertical blinds, so diffuse that it left no shadows of the individual slats. It could have been dawn or noon—hard to know through the blanket of fog that had descended over the island the night before—but Dee knew one thing for sure.

  “I survived my first night on Alcatraz.” She said it out loud, as if hearing the words made them feel like an actual accomplishment instead of dumb luck. She should have been dead by now, and it probably wouldn’t be long before The Postman and his band of crazies rectified that situation.

  She glanced at a camera in the corner of the living room. Its never-blinking eye must have watched her sleep, along with however many nut jobs had subscribed to her personal feed. Had they heard her boast about surviving? Were the rooms wired
for sound as well as video? Safe to assume so.

  Fine. Whatever. She already had a target on her back, so flying under the radar wasn’t an option. She wasn’t going to watch what she said. Freedom of speech was one of the few things still in her power.

  A shower and change of clothes further improved her mood, though the camera behind the bathroom mirror was unnerving. She hung a bedsheet over the curtain rod so her dedicated fans couldn’t see her showering, but as she stepped out of the tub, towel already wrapped around her body, she remembered Griselda. Should Dee be playing to her fans, too? Should she let them see…everything? Was that a surefire way to stay alive?

  Dee stared into the mirror for a moment, then pulled out the bathroom drawer full of sparkly pink cosmetics. This is what the fans want to see. This is what The Postman wants from me.

  She slammed the drawer closed. The thought made her sick. Dee was not a toy, and Alcatraz 2.0 was not a game. The Postman could try to control her every move, but there were still some things she could do to rebel.

  Dee marched into the bedroom and stared at her wardrobe. The “princess casual” daywear, which had thoroughly demoralized her last night, suddenly felt empowering. Instead of pulling a predetermined outfit from the closet, she paired a lavender Rapunzel top with a pink Sleeping Beauty peasant skirt, then donned a not-so-subtly racist Pocahontas fringed jacket and matching suede ankle boots. Maybe this princess thing wouldn’t be so bad after all? They were strong girls who defeated seemingly insurmountable evils. #CinderellaSurvivor could do the same.

  But her newfound optimism took a bitch slap as she descended back into the living room. The monitor above the fireplace now played a rerun of Slycer’s maze, and even though it had been hours since the encounter, the Postmantics were still commenting by the thousands. The stream in the sidebar scrolled so quickly it was hard for Dee to read.

  Monica used to be like that, glued to her screen after a kill video, commenting frantically as she tried to keep up with the feed, using her MoBettaStylz screen name. Monica, who’d had aspirations of being a stylist for film and television, had been obsessed with Gucci Hangman and the way he used fashion as an accessory to murder. She never missed one of his videos, praising him for using last season’s Prada fad for Pucci-inspired prints in his execution of a former runway model who’d been convicted of murdering a rival in order to obtain her spot in an upcoming fashion-week show, or critiquing Gucci’s use of a chain-handle purse to slowly asphyxiate a former YouTube beauty vlogger, while demonstrating the real-time use of highlights and contours on a strangulation victim.

  Not that Monica was a blind follower. Every now and then, she had doubts about her Postman devotion. “It’s okay because they’re murderers…right?” she’d ask Dee.

  Dee was never sure how to answer. Was subjecting a killer to a taste of his or her own medicine morally acceptable? On paper, sure. That was how the president had sold the country on his outsourcing of the criminal justice system. And though this kind of justice made Dee’s skin crawl, she was clearly in the minority. Hundreds of millions of people watched The Postman—they couldn’t all be wrong, could they?

  “It’s the law,” Dee would respond, in a totally noncommittal way. It was the best she could muster, and it had seemed to satisfy Monica’s doubts. At least temporarily.

  Secretly, Dee thought it was dangerous to appeal to the most vulgar instincts of humanity, to normalize something as horrific as state-sponsored serial killers. But that’s what you got when a former reality TV star was elected president.

  Monica had acquired a small fan base for her commentary, and that had come out during Dee’s trial as one of her motivations. Dr. Farooq, the court-appointed psychiatrist, testified that Dee was suffering from a deep-seated jealousy of her stepsister. Which wasn’t true at all. The last thing Dee wanted was notoriety.

  Now, in an ironic twist of fate, #CinderellaSurvivor had gone viral, surpassing any popularity MoBettaStylz had ever gained. Would Monica have been impressed? Excited? Proud of her stepsister? Or would she finally have realized the true and dangerous nature of The Postman?

  Hard to say. Monica was sweet and bubbly, the kind of girl everyone loved, but introspection wasn’t her strong point. She probably would have been terrified for Dee’s safety while simultaneously composing commentary aimed to up her own following.

  Of course, Monica was dead. Dee had found her body strangled on the floor of her bedroom. The panic of that moment was still palpable: the immediate realization that something was horribly wrong, the desperation to help Monica, fighting back the wave of nausea as she tried to revive her dead stepsister, the overwhelming ache of pain and anger and loss when she knew it was too late.

  Dee could recall the details of that moment as if it had happened an hour ago. The bulging glassy eyes staring straight up at the ceiling fan, open but unseeing. Monica’s outfit: a tunic shirt cinched with a wide belt over leggings, the brightly colored pattern ironically vivid and alive. Monica’s shirt was torn at the neck, probably in the struggle with her killer, and a heart had been carved into the flesh of Monica’s bare shoulder.

  The image of that carving was branded in Dee’s memory. The broken skin, jagged and torn, a thin line of coagulated blood oozing up from beneath. The lines of the heart were sharp and irregular, as if hastily done, but the shape was still easily recognizable, and wholly disturbing.

  The prosecution had intimated that this carving was a sign of Dee’s jealousy of her prettier, and more popular, stepsister—a theory that was backed up by the “expert” psychiatrist, Dr. Farooq, who, aside from one hypnosis session, had never asked Dee a single question. Dee and Monica were the same age, in the same class at school, and the prosecution played up the stepsibling rivalry to make it seem like Dee was psychotically envious. And though the police had never found the weapon used to carve the symbol, forensics experts had testified that it was probably a thin, sharp object like a needle or an earring stud.

  Or a pair of point-tip tweezers, bright pink with white polka dots, not to be too specific: the exact pair Dee had found stashed in the top drawer of her dresser when she went for her Xanax after calling 911. The blood on the tip wasn’t even dry.

  Dee didn’t know how they’d gotten there—who had put them in her dresser and why—but she instinctively knew she had to get rid of them. Which she did, by flushing them down the toilet. But even without that evidence, a jury had convicted Dee—primarily on the strength of Dr. Farooq’s testimony. So, in the end, it hadn’t mattered.

  Dee was the only one left who believed in her innocence, the only one who could find Monica’s real killer. And to do that, she needed to stay alive.

  Dee’s stomach rumbled, reminding her that in order to stay alive, she was going to need to eat something. She had no idea how long it had been since her last meal, but her body was officially protesting.

  She headed for the kitchen, where she could still hear the TV audio from her time in the maze, the clomp of Slycer’s footsteps echoing throughout her house, but at least she didn’t have to watch herself on an endless loop. After zapping the lasagna, she carefully pulled back the plastic cover, noting with some satisfaction that its seal had remained intact. Just like Blair had told her—make sure the seals on your food haven’t been tampered with. She’d gotten lucky meeting Blair and Nyles so soon after her arrival on Alcatraz 2.0. Even bitchy Griselda and airheaded Ethan. Though she would never allow herself to trust them, at least she could use their experience to help her stay alive as long as possible.

  There are people who’ve been surviving here longer than you realize.

  It was the way Blair had said it that made the comment stick in Dee’s mind. As if she was hinting at a secret. Was there actually a place on the island without cameras?

  If so, Dee needed to find it. No cameras meant no murders.

  Exploring the island by herself was probably in the Top Three Stupidest Things to Do on Alcatraz 2.0. She would ask Blair about it first
, as soon as she arrived at I Scream.

  Dee finished the lasagna, then dumped the tray unceremoniously into the trash bin under the sink, and though she was still hungry, she decided to save the apple for later. She could have killed for a cup of coffee—literally, perhaps, if killing other inmates wasn’t against the island’s rules—but decided some fresh morning air might do the trick instead, so she threw the lock on the sliding glass door and wandered out onto her patio.

  The sun was above the horizon now, tingeing the gray fog with a yellow glow, and already Dee could feel its warming presence as the wet blanket slowly began its retreat. Blair was right: things did look brighter when the sun was shining. Literally and figuratively.

  Well, except for the lawn furniture. The wicker had a thin layer of moss or mold (or both) growing on its surface. Yeah, Dee wasn’t going to be doing any sunbathing on those nasty things. She sighed, turning to go back inside, and came face-to-face with a pair of green eyes staring at her through one of the gaps in the fence.

  Like Griselda, Mara appeared to be a few years older than Dee. She wore jeans and a green corduroy blazer buttoned over a plain pin-striped blouse. Her auburn hair was swept back into a low braid, and her green eyes were even more vivid in the daylight. She kind of looked like a prep-school student, and Dee was instantly jealous of her jeans and sensible outerwear.

  Instead of darting away the moment she made eye contact like she had last night, Mara just stared. Was Dee supposed to say something? Introduce herself? Blair had said Mara was kind of standoffish, but the silent stare was starting to creep her out.

  “I’m Dee,” she said. “I just got here yesterday.”

  Mara cocked her head to the side as if to say Duh, everyone knows who you are.

  Right. Cinderella Survivor was the new celebrity on Alcatraz 2.0. Great. “And you’re Mara.” Who did you murder to end up here?