My eyes grew wide in horrific understanding.
“Cheyenne, GC 89 – we’re alive!” Dakota screamed into the phone.
Bile crawled up out of my stomach and creeped into my throat as my hands covered my face.
“Please, hold.” The phone filled with oldies Muzak.
As fast as Dakota’s voice emerged, it was gone again.
Oh my God – they’re alive! Did I hear her right? GC 89? What does that mean?
I jumped out of bed and paced back and forth in the room. The hold music turned off, and Ludovic came back to the line.
“Please let me talk to her. Please don’t hurt them!” I cried into the phone, “I’ll do whatever you want. What do you want, money? Just give me till tomorrow afternoon and I’ll get it.”
“Thank you for holding, Miss O’Cuinn. I don’t need your money. I want you in exchange for your sisters. Be at the red haunted barn in one hour or you’ll live with their deaths on your bloody hands the rest of your pathetic existence.”
My mind raced for comprehension. It had been a little over a week since the attack and Ludovic was just now contacting me. How does he know I’m home? Are there any cameras in my house?
I’m bugged!
“Padme, awake!” My computers instantly came online. Logged in into the portal, I typed ‘red haunted barn’ into the search field of the game. No results returned.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
“Padme, mute!” I thought for a moment. “Padme, are there any external cameras added to the system? Any hidden communication or transmission devices?”
“Scanning. Negative. I detect zero unauthorized sensors.”
“Padme, unmute.”
“Ludovic, how did you know I was home?”
“Wouldn’t you love to find out, my pet?” his voice slimed over me.
“There aren’t any haunted barns coming up in the search engine parameters.”
“Have you checked for any external worlds that aren’t on your simulators?”
“You hacked into my game? You fecking ... hacker ... you.”
“Tsk tsk tsk. Such foul language from a lady. Keep it up and you’ll lose another ten minutes.”
“What do you mean lose another ten minutes? You said I had an hour.”
“You’ve taken enough of my time today. To answer your question however, good news travels fast through the grapevine. Oh, and one more thing. Don’t bother calling your dear father or the cops. If you’re not careful, even more loved ones will be joining your sisters. Goodbye, Cheyenne.”
The phone went dead.
“Wait! What? Hello, hello? Ludovic!”
Dammit!
“Padme, run a reverse lookup on that number and dial it back.”
“Locating.”
Lightning crashed again as sheets of rain pummeled the windows. The palm fronds on the trees outside looked as if the wind were at least a hurricane Cat 3. The power inside the house flickered on and off.
“Unverifiable.”
Dammit to hell!
I grabbed my cell phone off the charger and called Harris. He was the only person I could trust.
Damn voicemail!
“Harris, call me back as soon as you can. I’ve been contacted about Kota and Sher. Please call me as soon as you get this!”
I paced back and forth a few moments.
Breathe. Use logic to figure this out. You can do this.
Okay, so what did I know?
Ludovic knew I was home.
I’m not bugged.
He knew my house line.
Dakota and Sheridan are alive.
Dakota yelled out GC 89.
Ludovic hacked into my game.
I grabbed a picture frame of my mother and hugged it to my chest.
THINK!
Who can help me track this guy? I need another hacker.
I swallowed hard and pulled Khaldon’s card out of my pocket.
I sure hope he plays video games.
Khaldon answered on the third ring. “Cheyenne, is everything okay?”
“How did you know it was me?”
“I don’t give out this number to just anyone.”
“No, everything is not okay. I just got a call from Dakota’s boyfriend.” Khaldon’s calm voice pushed me over the edge. “He’s the one who kidnapped them. He’s holding them hostage.”
“Okay. Hold tight. What can I do to help?” His voice was smooth and collected.
“He wants me to play, inside my game, to find a haunted barn where I will find further instructions. I was hoping you could track server side to determine his location. I have less than an hour to find it, or he said he would start sending body parts in the mail.”
“I’ll be right there. The storm has erupted into a torrential flood of biblical proportions. I’ll get there as fast as I can. I might need an ark to get there.”
“Hurry. Please!”
“In two shakes of an umbrella.”
I hung up on him and went back to my command center. Determined to find this psychopath I checked again to look for Roxas online. Neither he nor Briggs was logged on.
Dammit to feckin’ hell! Where is everyone tonight?
I tried the search function again in the game, this time from the navigation bar in the advance tools section. I turned off the debugging features to fade through any online chatter and looked for anything termed haunted. Haunted house, haunted mansion, haunted tree, haunted shack, but nothing with barn. Then I tried just barn and all its synonyms. Shelter, shed, stall, stable. Over a thousand entries for the words. I even got a result for the screaming shack. Someone must have built a wizarding university sim.
A few minutes later, a knock pounded at the door. I flew through the house, praying it was Khaldon. I checked through the peep hole and let him in.
“Thanks for coming so fast.” I closed the door behind him. “He said he’s vampire. His name is Ludovic. My sister Dakota was dating him. He’s been here to my house. He’s watched movies with all of us. I’m sure they thought nothing about being at the park with him. They wouldn’t have suspected he was a Nosferatu, let alone a kidnapper.”
Khaldon left his umbrella in the hallway stand. He shrugged out of his overcoat and hung it up in the foyer closet.
“Okay, take a breath, Cheyenne. Relax. Remain calm.” He placed his hands on both my shoulders forcing me to look him straight in the eyes. “We’ll get to the bottom of this. Did he say anything else? Did you hear anything in the background such as water, sirens, or anything?”
I snapped my fingers. “Yes, I heard Dakota shout out to me. She said that they’re alive and a number. GC89.”
“GC89? What does that mean?”
I shook my head. “Knowing her, she’s trying to tell me something about where they are.”
Khaldon looked at the painting again. “This is nice. Where on earth is this?”
I blinked at him a couple of times.
“That’s it, Khaldon. A clue.” I clapped my hands. “She’s telling me where on earth they are. Dakota is referencing one of our geo-caches!”
“Geo-cache? You mean like treasure hunting?”
“We use to make them all the time. Now most of them are virtual.”
Khaldon squinted. “So where is GC 89?”
I shook my head. “I dunno. I never recorded the cahces the way Dakota does. I wonder if she has a notebook or log file where they’re listed.”
“Come on, we can talk about this in a minute. Let’s get me logged on. What game are we playing?”
I showed him my office. “Our company gaming portal – ExsanguiNation.”
“You gals run that company? Are you serious? I love that game.”
“Excellent. Glad you are familiar with it.” I smiled at him despite the circumstances. “That saves us a lot of time.”
“Do you have anything stronger we can mix with that bloodwine?”
“I’ve got tequila and Crown, I think. Why?”
“Hold on
tight. I think you’re gonna need the extra shot of inspiration tonight.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Khaldon suggested shots of Crown with the bloodwine. I grabbed the bottle and two glasses.
“You wouldn’t by chance have any O Positive stashed away?”
I looked at him. “Nope – fresh out. It’s not like I’ve been to the local farmer’s market and picked up a couple pints lately.”
“So, ExsanguiNation is your brain child? I love that RPG. I play it all the time. It’s so much fun to watch humans trying to be vamps and werewolves. Gives new meaning to playing with your food. Give me a minute to boot up and we’ll hop in.”
“Playing with your food? Gah – Khaldon that’s gross.”
“Perhaps, but I was born this way, so to me it’s all the same.”
I handed him a glass of the good stuff and poured a double for myself. I questioned giving him root access to our MySQL database, but there wasn’t enough time to set up specified file permissions. I could always change the passwords later.
“Okay, Khaldon, try scanning the externals or see if you can identify anything that looks out of the ordinary. We don’t allow any subscriber’s peripherals to run on the simulators, so that is most likely what he’s doing.” I ran back to my seat to resume the searches.
Khaldon turned to look to me, “What’s your Avatar’s name so I can friend her?”
I typed in the public chat window. [My Avi’s name is Lady Cazenove]
“Okay – got her – sending over the friend request now. You want to meet at a central place in the sim?”
“Yep – I got ya, but let’s search separate sections inside the simulator databases. Hopefully we’ll cover more ground.”
“Sounds like a plan. Just relax, we’ll find it. Could Dakota’s reference to GC89 be relevant inside the game?”
“I’m not too familiar with her own personal sim environments, but that’s definitely a great place to consider if we don’t find this haunted barn.” I looked at the atomic clock on the wall. “We have only twenty-five minutes left.”
I logged into the game portal with my other consoles under different avatar accounts, each searching a different set of keyword values. I continued to run searches for the haunted barn, GC 89, and any parallels that might help make an association. “If you need to export the data finds, we’ll use a pivot table to filter out any extraneous data.”
Desperate, I continued to search, broadening the parameters to include synonyms of the words red, haunted, and barn. I tried synonyms of both the verb and the adjective meanings. Words such as obsessed, frequent, besieged. Nothing but gibberish came up in the results.
“Khaldon, are you seeing anything relevant in the peripherals?”
“From what I’m looking at over here, there aren’t any barns, especially nothing haunted. I have found some haunted cornfields though. I wonder if this guy is using an external hard drive to run this file.”
I peeked at him over my monitor. “Ludovic would’ve had to have access into the mainframe. But how would that be possible? Our servers are on 256 bit encryptions. We have the same security as NASA. There’s no way it could be hacked. Unless …”
“Okay got it, there’s a barn here in the haunted cornfield. The script is running under a cloak. It looks as if the barn is by an ancient, abandoned silver mine in South America. You ready for the virtual transport to my location?”
“Yes, send it.” The first real lead, my fingers felt frozen to the keyboard.
“Unless what?” Khaldon steered me back to my think out loud moment.
“Unless Dakota was showing off one night and gave Ludovic access from her console.”
“Oh crap. That would be serious bad!”
“Yeah, seriously, not good.” I chugged my Crown and blood. My mind raced to compartmentalize this epiphany. It was as if my brain was set on defrag and just opened up an immense amount of space inside my biological hard drive.
“I swear, if I get her out of this mess, I’m immediately changing her password!”
I clicked on the invite sent from Khaldon to the simulated environment where the barn was located. My monitor screen instantly went black to the space realms during the transport. My avatar, Lady Cazenove, virtually teleported onto another area on an external simulator. It was one I had never seen before and realized Khaldon was right. We must be playing on Ludovic’s hard drive. Lady Caz landed with a thud on the external simulator.
“Khaldon, are you coming with me?”
“In a minute. I’m trying to work out a reverse IP on this external. If we can locate it, then we can find your sister’s geo location. Then we can go kill the bastard in real life, real time.”
“That sounds way too easy.”
“Ever watch that TV show World’s Dumbest Crooks?”
“Okay – you’ve got a point. I’m spawning at your location.”
Inside the game simulator, Lady Caz walked along the dark woods. The ground seemed mushy, and it as it like her feet dragged through boggy mud.
“What’s the deal with the lag here?” Khaldon asked. “I can barely move. I don’t see anyone else here on the map with us to cause such a slow down. We shouldn’t have anything on this sim to slow us down.”
“No, I don’t see anyone else either. I checked the simulated environments overhead and underground before I walked to this point, and it was clear of obstacles. Ludovic must have written a script to slow us down intentionally. Let’s try turning off our automation overrides and see if that makes any difference.”
We both shut off our animator overrides -AOs, the scripts that allowed us to walk like normal people within the game. Without them, we called it the duck walk. We waddled toward the barn at a frustrating snail pace.
I checked the clock. We had only ten minutes to get in and get the information. We finally reached the barn door. As soon as Lady Caz’s hand touched the handle, a horrific scream blasted out over the speakers. Not just any scream, but Dakota’s crying scream. Uncontrollable tears ran down my face.
Khaldon jumped up from his chair and came over to see what was on my monitor. We watched as my avatar rolled the hanging barn door off to the side. Lady Caz grabbed the lantern hanging on a rusty nail and lit it. Punching a hole in the utter blackness, I gasped at the sight revealed by the light. No amount of horror, scary movies, or haunted house research could have prepared me for I saw behind that door.
“Unholy hell … NO!” I stood up and held onto my face. “Khaldon!”
He grabbed my shoulders behind me.
Inside the barn were rows upon rows of women, tied up and shackled into body harnesses. They were imprisoned on their bellies hooked up to milking machines, their breasts pumping into stainless steel container vats. Many of them were prone inside hammocks with their swollen pregnant bellies ready to bust.
I couldn’t talk. I stood there with my hands over my ears mimicking The Scream by Edvard Munch. I could only stare at the horror of what I saw in my monitor.
“What kind of sick bastard is this guy?” Khaldon squeezed my shoulder.
I moved my avatar forward, looking at all of the women trying to see if any of them were Dakota or Sheridan. There was a yellow lamp light at the far end of the barn. I continued to walk Lady Caz past row after rows of these helpless women. Another scream set my hair standing on the edge of my skin. Sheridan’s crying, begging voice erupted out of the speakers. I outwardly sobbed, my hands shaking uncontrollably. I couldn’t control the keyboard to move my avatar any longer.
Khaldon sat down in my seat and pushed the arrow keys walking Lady Caz forward for me. We came up to a support beam holding up the roof of the barn. Attached to it was a piece of a parchment nailed to it. It read:
If you want to see the O’Cuinn sisters
before you meet at the pearly gates,
then it’s time to Exsanguinate.
Khaldon moved my avatar around to see if there were any other clues in this barn. We tried sp
eaking to the women. They all seemed catatonic. None of them responded. Their names on the clipboards had been fuzzed out. It was if the script scrubbed out their names on purpose, making the visual animation blurry. The constant sloshing chug of the milking machines pierced through the silence. A light came on about twenty feet from where Lady Caz stood in the barn.
Khaldon looked up at me. “Do you want me to move Lady Caz over to the light to get a closer look?”
I took a deep breath, holding my arms around my waist now, and nodded. He cautiously moved my avatar forward to the other side of the stall where the light illuminated the pitch night.
Nailed to another beam, we found a graphic picture. A real picture of Sheridan inside one of these cocoon contraptions.
“Oh my God! No!”
Naked, she looked unconscious, but she had an IV tube in her arm. Utterly defenseless. A hooded man stood between her legs, erect and holding her hips. I cried out at the sight of my sister’s torture and rape. My hands flew to the monitor to try to block out the mental image. I just couldn’t bear to believe this HELL was her current reality.
“There’s another note. Want me to read it?”
I nodded and pulled up another chair. “Quick, hit print screen.”
Meet my breeders. Aren’t they lovely? Dakota is next in line to become a mommy if you don’t find her in time. We all know what comes of a human mother and vampire father now don’t we?
Khaldon let out a slow whistle.
I looked at him. “What? Khaldon, what happens between a human and a vampire?”
His eyes grew wide as he rubbed the back of his neck, but didn’t answer when he looked at me. His pained, silent expression clued me to believe whatever it was – it couldn’t be a good thing. I remembered Roxas explaining something …
He continued to read:
From here on out, you will play the game my way, on my terms, and when I tell you. You will be tested and challenged both physically and mentally. If you fail, as I have expressed before, body parts will show up on your doorstep. Don’t try any reverse IP lookups. I’m mobile using a proxy server. You won’t find me.
Khaldon blew out a heavy sigh. “Bloody hell. I hate this douche.”
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