Violence in Darkness

Jennifer stepped wearily up the worn steps to the front door of the Siddons family house. The fiery curls of her hair were matted against her cheeks and forehead. She could hear laughter from behind the door as she fumbled in her purse for her keys. To her surprise, the door opened.

“Jennifer!” called Don Lavelle, clearly drunk. “Where have you been? Where’s David?”

She didn’t answer.

Don Wroblewski hugged Lavelle from behind, his tie undone and sporting the biggest grin on his face. “Come, come,” he said. “We have much to celebrate.”

Jennifer shrugged and walked inside, into the hallway decorated with porcelain busts of England’s greatest explorers. Wroblewski spun round and kicked the door shut with a dance. “We have just completed the biggest business deal.”

“More money for the project,” smiled Lavelle, rubbing his thumb against his middle and index fingers. “We’re heading out to celebrate. You’re most welcome to join us.”

Jennifer smiled and rested her hand on Lavelle’s shoulder. “I’m tired. You boys go out and have a good time.”

The two men laughed like naughty schoolboys and skipped out into the warm summer’s evening air, slamming the oak door behind them. Jennifer sighed and sat on the second step of the main staircase. She’d had another argument with David, and laughed-coughed at the reason. They’d argued about a group of alien robots. A group that they’d pinned all their hopes on for saving their world, a group that didn’t want to help. She balled up her fists in anger. If only we knew where the Axalon was, she thought. We could go there ourselves and retrieve the spark they are looking for, and use it to deal.

A smile reached her lips as she noticed something in the purse that she held tightly. It was a picture of her and David, taken a few weeks after they met. She flipped the picture over and read the word FERT. She laughed. Him and his stupid tomatoes. “Oh, and we need more fertiliser,” he always said when they were shopping. Tomatoes and gadgets, that’s all he cared about. What did she ever see in him?

The battery to Jennifer’s mobile phone had died, and she needed to make an urgent phone call. That was the only reason she went into ‘The Four Horsemen’ pub the night she first met David. It was 1998, and only a few weeks since his father had died. He’d taken to looking for women on the Internet in some kind of attempt to fill the void. (‘Bigtool4U’ was his username, she later found out.) On this occasion, like so many others, his date had stood him up. He lay there, spread out on his back, obviously under the influence. She tried to step over him to use the phone at the bar, and that was when he slurred those unforgettable first words.

“Nice legs. What time do they open?”

Jennifer immediately sunk the heel of her right-hand knee-high leather boot directly into his stomach. He wheezed and sat upright. “I knew I’d ruin these boots by treading in a lump of shit,” she said.

It was love at first sight.

“Axalon, Axalon, Axalon,” Jennifer muttered to herself as she opened Don Wroblewski’s personal laptop. It was locked in a chest under his bed, but she was a dab hand at breaking-and-entering. It had kept her in leather boots all those years.

As the computer booted up, she made herself comfortable, curling one leg under the other. She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and nonchalantly bypassed 12-bit encryption protocols. She was surprised to see David’s own operating system being used, the two Dons had always complained of all the bugs.

There must be something here, she thought. Jennifer never truly trusted Wroblewski and Lavelle. There was something not quite right about things, about their stories of the Axalon. Paranoia, David called it; she called it woman’s intuition.

A sudden tremor rocked the old house. Barely noticeable, but with the thought of global catastrophe playing on her mind, it worried her. She looked out of the window and thought of Fire Convoy. Prick.

The hard disk chugged quietly as she scrolled through screens of directories and filetrees. She paused suddenly and double-clicked the mouse, the name of a directory caught her eye: NATHAN.

A little after midnight, Wroblewski and Lavelle returned home. As they tried to negotiate the steps it was apparent they’d shared at least three bottles of champagne. Wroblewski dropped his keys and Lavelle made an over-the-top “ssh” noise. “Jen must be asleep, the lights are all off,” he said.

They stumbled through the doorway into the main hall. It was silent and pitch black, even the moon was switched off. Lavelle tried the lights. “The power’s gone.”

“One of David’s gadgets lets us down again,” Wroblewski quipped. He walked forwards to get a torch from a nearby cabinet. He noticed a dull red light at the top of the staircase. It seemed to follow his movements. It was Jennifer’s O.R.B.

“You bastards,” she hissed. “You absolute, fucking bastards.”

The red light went out and Wroblewski heard earnest footsteps come down the stairs and straight towards him. There was the sound of leather rushing through air followed by a crack as he was hit in his left temple. Wroblewski stumbled backwards and then felt a leg against the back of his knees. His legs were pulled out from underneath him and he fell to the floor, face first. There was a sickly crunch as he broke his nose against the wooden floorboards.

“What’s going on?” Lavelle called into the darkness. He gasped suddenly and felt a hot hand envelop his neck. Sharp nails dug into his skin, and he coughed through the stinging pain.

“How could you do this to David?” Jennifer asked with clenched teeth as she squeezed harder. She turned round abruptly, seeing Wroblewski get up with her infrared vision.

There was a blow to Wroblewski’s stomach followed by one to his sternum. He doubled over, spitting out blood and gulping for air. He heard Jennifer shuffle as she spun around and dealt a roundhouse punch to the side of his head, in the same place as before. He saw white spirals in the darkness and felt shards of his skull cut into his brain. She punched him again, further embedding the bone.

He collapsed limply to the ground and held his head, widening his eyes and breathing loudly. Jennifer rested the heel of her boot on his neck, just below his throat.

Lavelle wrestled the front door open. Jennifer turned to watch him scamper like a wounded fox into the night, but she stayed with Wroblewski, twisting her heel down. He grabbed her foot, using the last of his strength to push it away. But it was no use.

“You murdered David’s father to get the money to fund your project,” she said, pushing down on Wroblewski’s throat and killing him.