Moonlyte - part 3

Author's Note: So APPARENTLY the deadline for this is a lot sooner than I thought. Let's hope I make it on time. Or maybe get an extended deadline to finish it....

Anyway, as before, this is NOT PORN. It is a non-erotic horror/crime short story in the process of being made by me. If you didn't read the original story that this is a prequel to, you can find it here.

Also note that these are all early drafts, so if you have suggestions or criticisms now would be a good time to give them, as none of this is currently set in stone and will likely be subject to changes.

[story] [horror/gore] [non-erotic]

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‭My stomach full but still churning, I stagger up the steps back to my apartment, leaving Lindsay Alexander behind to continue her... whatever the fuck it is she does. It’s getting lighter now, though heavy gray clouds threaten to piss all over me from the heavens. Feels about right, today.

I unlock my apartment door and head inside, and almost consider turning the lights on, then decide against it. The chance of someone seeing that I’m awake and/or alive inside isn’t worth being able to adequately see -- the light from my computer monitor will be plenty. Kicking my shorts off I dump myself back into my gaming chair, reaching for the bottle of gin I’d left earlier. Almost empty. This day keeps getting better and better.

I’ve got work to do anyway, I guess. Having my real name scrubbed from criminal records, assuming Lindsay follows through, will make this all hopefully worth it. Setting a pair of heavy, neon-blue headphones over my ears, I shuffle through a playlist of music I’ve been pirating and find something to listen to. Something without lyrics. Need to focus. Now if only Lindsay had given me more actual evidence to go off of.

Exhaling through my nostrils as slow, lo-fi jazz starts to echo through my brain, I go over what little evidence I have. I start to kick myself for not asking for the locations of the murders, but then remember that those only work in shitty mystery movies about satanists where the locations always form a pentagram on the map. Anyone who did that kind of kitsch bullshit in real life would have to be too stupid to pull off a crime the FBI struggle to crack. That leaves me with the code that Lindsay gave me. Not much, but... it’s a lead, I guess? And I already have a guess as to how to decode it.

Base64 decryption is one of those things that’s only difficult to do if you’ve never heard of it. If you have heard of it, of course, it’s easy like sunday morning -- I pull up a clearnet website and put the stenciled code in, waiting an instant to get the results, and... oh, great. The gibberish translates to what looks like another code, “y0g507h07h.” Makes about as little sense to me as the first one, but there do at least seem to be patterns in it. I type it into a search engine, get nothing. Typing it into a deep web index gets me the same result: no matches found.

I take a deep breath, swishing around what little gin remains in the bottom of my bottle and slamming it down. Okay. I’m gonna have to ask for help.

An encrypted URL leads me to another deep web site, hidden beneath a search index and requiring a sequence of passwords that, by now, I know by heart. As a budding cyber-criminal myself, one of the first things I looked for when I started diving deeper into the internet was a group of like-minded people. One lead led to another, then another, and after some extremely extensive searching I finally found Silence -- Robin Hood types like me, though usually better at it than I’ve turned out to be. Hackers, thieves. Rob from offshore corporate accounts, transfer funds into cryptocurrencies on the dark web, then either funnel the money into charities or whatever the fuck else it was they did with it, and tell Panama to suck their fat, greasy dicks. I know at least some of these guys are scum who keep most of what they take (kinda like me, I guess) but some of them are good people.

Well, I mean. Chaotic Good people I guess.

I input the final password and my monitor turns to static snow, like an old TV set. Now is when I wait -- the site’s set on a twelve-minute timer after entry to scare off normies who think they can hang with big boys, even if they get the codes right. I slide out of my chair and go to the freezer to fish out some frozen fishsticks. I got time, after all.

With my headphones left on, I can barely make out the soft, tinny sound of the music I had playing as I busy myself with dumping the icy yellow logs onto a plate and shoving them into my filth-encrusted microwave. I’m not really hungry, but I need something to occupy my mind. Something to take my thoughts away from the thought of two kids, raped and dismembered and left with a calling card in Base64. I’m glad Lindsay didn’t show me any pictures.

I try not to think about the fact that the same thing happened to eight other kids around the U.S. Arms and legs I can... get, I guess? I’ve been to enough ero guro sites when I was a teenager to know that sick fucks like girls they can fit in briefcases.

But why their eyelids?

Why did they have to watch?

What did they have to watch?

Ding.

The sound of the microwave jars me from my far-staring daze, and I pull the hot plate of fishsticks out. I squeeze out a pool of mayo and hot sauce to dip them in and flop back into my seat. I’ve successfully used up about two of the twelve minutes I have to wait. Fucking bullshit.

I slip the headphones back on and eat while I wait, slowly bumping my head back and forth. Finally, the snow on my screen flickers and a website fades in -- the whole thing’s designed like shit but hey; we’re anarchists, not designers. Aesthetic isn’t really the point, right? Besides, the janky, homebrewed vibe does kind of give me a nostalgic feeling for the times when it took half an hour to load a single picture of two anime guys kissing.

Navigating to the forums, I first search to see if anyone’s been talking about y0g507h07h. It’s a long shot, but worth the ten seconds it’ll take me, and ensure that I don’t look like a complete fucking idiot if it ends up being common knowledge among the people here. As expected, I don’t get any results, so I open a new thread in the unorganized sea of forum topics. I take a second to try to come up with a snappy title that might draw people in.

Chance to do some good?

Breathing in, I go down to the topic below and start typing.

Cop friend (don’t ask) says there’s this fucked up case with a bunch of dead kids and shit. Seriously morbid. This code was left at the scene and I ran it through Base64, which came up with ‘y0g507h07h,’ never heard of it and not getting any hits on search engines. This look like another code or URL any of you guys know? Maybe an organization? Fragments you recognize?

I try to think of anything else to add, but my mind eventually goes blank and I submit what I have so far. An instant to process, and the question’s up, with my avatar of a ghostly-white digital face at the side.

I sit and stare at the page for a long moment, then refresh the page. No replies yet in the whole forty seconds I’ve been waiting. I breathe out my nose again and stare at the screen. A watched pot never boils, but whoever came up with that saying had never sat and waited for a reply to a question on a forum post. Should sleep, I guess.

My eyes flicker down to the time at the corner of my computer screen. 9:51am. So I’ve been up for like... three hours?

Yeah, I’d say that constitutes going back to sleep.

Or I could sink a few dozen hours into World of Warcraft....