Page 71 of Antihero

A horned-goat-skull tattoo glistened on the sweaty pectoral of the biggest man. One of the others had a sunken chest and a tat as well, low-quality work that looked like a blue blob. The third man was wolfish and muscular, a triangle of manscaped chest hair, eight-pack definition suggesting steroids or heavy supplements. He was the definitive leader, silently directing movements and setting the tone in all its hideous variance. The last guy cackled like a jester, repeating himself frequently: “My turn! My turn!”

Evan modulated his breathing, his heart rate. He took in data, noted details, assessed what might be useful. But then he felt it skittering at the edges of his thoughts, biting at his perception, tugging it out of shape.

Emotion.

Body temperature rising. Sweat prickling his eyes. He armed his forehead, refocusing, but it just came on stronger, hurling itself against the door, thudding to get in.

Don’t let it, he told himself. Do not let it in.

He looked for distinctive marks and scars, listened for spoken clues, noted cadences of speech, read posture and body language.

Goat-Skull Tattoo made only vowel sounds, unbridled id unrestrained by the alphabet.

Don’t let it in.

Eight-Pack grabbed a piece of Anca’s anatomy, made it bulge for the camera.

Evan hit PAUSE, took a moment to catch his breath. He needed Joey on digital forensics ASAP but could he subject her to this? She’d asked. She’d asked to come along. He emailed her the file, hesitated, and then sent it to Naomi Templeton as well. The progress bar showed he was only fourteen minutes into the recording. There was another hour and fifty-seven minutes. It felt intolerable to watch any longer. And yet Anca had actually endured it.

He resumed.

The men shifted her sluggish body around on the bed, adjusting her as they pleased, feeding on her, off her, shaking her in the fangs of their depravity. There was nothing she could say or do or be to make it stop. She floated through the dimmed twilight between cognizance and oblivion, between life and death, suspended in a drugged purgatory.

Don’t let it in.

A compulsion nearly overtook him, to erupt to his feet and hammer his fist through the wall. But there would be damage. He would break a finger or dislocate a knuckle and healing time would be costly in the execution of his mission.

Don’t let it in.

The level of psychopathic detachment in the assailants was not unfamiliar to him. He had encountered it plenty and even embodied it himself when a situation demanded reprisal of the become-a-monster-to-hunt-monsters variety. Manny Llorente had learned as much. But right now, even as his eyes registered what was happening on the screen, his ability to observe it objectively began to slip. Fighting to hold emotion at bay, to keep himself in check, to hold everything out except what he needed to note operationally, he’d—

—slid forward off the bed, taking the comforter with him. Crouching, gangster low to the carpet, coiled like a snake. The mattress was against his shoulders and the video kept on unimpeded and it didn’t show merely a victim and her assailants, it showed Anca Dumitrescu, the woman he’d come to know and admire, a woman who kept a stuffed-animal penguin from the Bronx Zoo and made jokes about holy water and clasped her tiny hands when she was distressed. Without knowing it, his guard had lowered, and he had to take her in as her full self. And now he was watching the violation happening to her specifically, to Anca, experiencing what she had experienced as a whole person with dreams and pain and fears and choices, not as an object being ravished or a victim to be analyzed or an ideal to be avenged, but a human subjected to the ultimate degradation and brutality, and he felt, he felt her.

His RoamZone was out and he had dialed Joey and she’d already answered and when he could find words, he said, “The video of Anca, it was uploaded to RedLite.”

Joey’s breath left her as if she’d been struck in the gut. “RedLite? They’re the parent company for, like, a kabillion porn sites.”

“I need you to find it, Joey. Do you understand?”

“You want me to—”

“Search it out there and everywhere it has been reposted online.”

“You want me to—deep-dive into that—see them, her like that? That’ll be awful.”

His cheeks were wet. “You are the help. Right now, for this, you are the help that is coming.”

“I understand,” Joey said. “I will. I will do it.”

“Erase every trace, take it down, hit it with a DDOS attack, anything and everything. I want this shit expunged. Period. Every IP address of everyone who watches it, downloads it, I want their device shredded. A worm or virus that infects any computer that touches this piece of content. A digital fucking STD.”

“Got it. I’ll—”

“Devine will have whatever RE or exploit tools you need. He’s got plenty of green-badged friends at the agencies. Wipe that footage from every corner of the web. Every viewing is another violation. There can’t be a single trace of what she went through out there. For more miscreants to watch and … and…”

“You okay, X?”

“Identify those four animals. Gait biometrics, voice recognition, every single angle. They’re still out there. They’re out there and they will do this again. This is what they do.”