Consume

It was dark. Of course it was dark. Things like this always happened at night. Abductions happened during the day, but espionage happened at night, everyone knew this. Akemi, known to the Hidden Blades guild by the name Sweets, had been tasked with discovering a mole in a company they had recently worked with. Getting into the nitty-gritty on things like this was the most fun for her, as it provided an exercise for the mind rather than for the body. The body stuff would come later.

She had asked for access into the Richmond company mainframe to suss out their stray little lamb and now she sat atop the building, buried in shadow, scrolling through her iLac. She had activated a small feature which projected the screen against the lens of her suit, which allowed her to simply scroll through what she could see, moving her hands in an altered reality type feature to search for files or dismiss them as necessary. She would have done this at home except the access she had been given wasn’t remote. She needed to stay on the building grounds in order to access the Richmond Ltd mainframe.

She spoke to herself aloud, but since the mask she wore had a noise cancellation feature, she merely muted her external mic and heard only the reverberation to herself. Which was perfectly fine, really. She loved the sound of her own voice. “So we’re looking for someone who has access to the prototype…” She typed through a few different queries and eliminated a mass of suspects, continuing through the necessary eliminations to narrow down the suspects to a handful. “No one paid more than eight hundred and twenty thousand jewels a month would risk that limited one time buy-out. We know the issue wasn’t a moral one, so amoral people can’t be excluded this time. However, this project could have lead to other research opportunities meaning anyone who had the opportunity to further their career would have been stupid to sell.”

“And,” She continued to type through until her prospects were lowered to just three possible candidates, “We’ve got three people left.” Two young men and a middle aged woman. It was here that she switched systems and tapped through the Richmond Ltd mainframe into the Rune Knight database. It was an old backdoor that hadn’t been patched through yet, which looked like a systems diagnostic that had decided to analyze the same file over and over. If it was caught and closed, she’d have to find a new way in. That part was fun anyway. A quick search through before the diagnostic was complete found that none of them had any history of gambling or illegal activities. And that left just one possibility.

She swapped over to local hospitals and searched through the names of all listed family members of the remaining three suspects. And bingo. She found that the woman had a daughter in critical care due to a long term illness. Due to her extensive research into poisons and illnesses, she was aware of this particular illness. Rare and painful, there was, of course, a potential surgery that wasn’t covered under medical insurance.

“And what better way to pay for expensive surgeries than with a big one time payment like this.” Sweets finished her story, leaning on a metal table that was covered with various surgical tools intended to poke and prod, spill blood and gape wounds. “Am I right?”

The woman she had discovered was the only member of her audience. In fact they had an entire warehouse to themselves. It was filled with a mishmash of car parts, ship parts and train parts, all rusted and useless. She, the financially constrained woman, was also physically restrained now with the metal clasped into her arms and legs, keeping her from moving. She had been taken in the middle of the day from Richmond Ltd with permission from the company itself. She simply came down with a stomach ache and never returned from lunch, as far as her coworkers knew. Then she’d been left in the warehouse until night time, just to put the fear in her. Now, the woman stared at Sweets through tear-stained eyes, her mouth covered by a strip of tape to keep her from screaming. She didn’t nod or shake her head, so Sweets walked around the table and grabbed one of the scalpels.

“They want me to use these to torture you,” She said, twirling the scalpel between her fingertips, “And I easily could. These things cut nice and clean as long as they’re kept sharp. But then you’re cut. And you bleed. And you cry.” She pressed the scalpel against the woman’s cheek. The woman shirked away from it, closing her eyes in fear and anticipation. “But I’m not going to do that,” Sweets said, shaking her head.

She instead brushed her fingertip along the woman’s neck and said, “What do you know about Latrotoxin?” The woman shook her head. She kept her fingertip on the woman’s collar bone. “It’s fine. It’s not a biology test. It’s what you find in a black widow spider’s bite.” The woman’s eyebrows furrowed in fear. “It’s not deadly like people think it is. It causes painful muscle spasms and sweatiness. Unless... it’s administered in greater doses.”

She hadn’t removed her finger. The woman’s leg jerked against the metal braces. “Looks like a muscle spasm to me.” She reached over and pulled the tape off of the woman’s mouth.

“I had to do it. They were going to take her off of life support and I couldn’t afford the payments. My husband walked out six months ago, he said he couldn’t afford the pressure. Th-they just called me out of nowhere and what was I supposed to do?”

“Shhh shhh shhh,” Sweets whispered, “I understand completely.” She turned and looked behind her. “Do you have everything you need?”

“Yes,” Said a shadowy figure from a screen propped on an old car hood. The red dot signaling the recording camera went black and the figure said, “Get rid of her.” Then the screen went black as well.

“I have some good news,” Sweets said, turning back to the woman. “Your daughter’s medical bills have been paid for by an unknown beneficiary. She’s going to be fine, and the foster home will take great care of her.”

“What? Unknown beneficiary? F-f-foster home?”

Sweets didn’t answer. She placed the tape back on the woman’s mouth. The shadows began to accumulate throughout the warehouse. As Sweets walked out of the warehouse she simply said, “I'm sorry, dear. The Fear will have you.” From the darkness uncoiled a massive snake with scales that were different shades of green and eyes that seemed to devour the darkness. Its maw gaped wide revealing far, far too many teeth.

The woman struggled to scream against the tape.