| Fan Fiction |
by x.shuang.dao.x
A Cloying Addiction [Chapter 10]
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He waited for a while more to see if there would be any adjustments in placement of the guards. The three guards stayed downstairs. But they weren’t doing their job anymore, they were chatting in low voices.
Kale now had two options. He could take out all three of the guards at the same time and hope he wouldn’t be found out. Or, he could attack the second level right away. To minimise the trouble, Kale would have chosen the second option. But if he chose the second option, he wasn’t going to be able to have much fun. It wasn’t hard to decide.
He measured the distance between himself and the nearest guard. He was going to have to attack from the outside, no matter how risky that would be.
The three guards were standing so if one connected them together in straight lines, they would form a somewhat equilateral triangle. The one he was taking out first was the guard who had appeared unexpectedly.
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When they saw their colleague falling to the ground, they rushed to his side in an unprofessional reflex action. They didn’t even know what hit them when they, too, toppled over like he did.
Kale smirked; he had a fantastic silencer, and the security level in this house was lax to the max. Pushing the glass panel of the window out of his way, Kale hopped through it and landed softly on the carpeted floor.
If he were to be whiny about it, Kale would have been irritated by the fact that he spent so long trying to plot a route into the house when the whole security system was about a kazillion times lousier than what he had thought it out to be. But he wasn’t one to dwell on such things. After all, he had already wasted enough time as it was.
Skimming across the ground level, he got to the bottom of the stairs. To his great annoyance, the stairs creaked. He took only one step to find that out and kept quiet for a while to see if there would be any reaction from the one remaining guard. There wasn’t. Kale supposed he might have just fallen asleep. All the better. He wanted to spend his time playing with his main prey, not the unimportant pawns.
He was right. The guard was snoozing right beside the door, while standing up. If no one looked closely, he wouldn’t even be found out. So much for attempting to have high security in the house, Kale thought. He stuck a pocket knife into the chest of the sleeping guard, whose eyes fluttered open. He gave a few sputters and gaped at Kale. Kale caught him as he fell; then let him down slowly onto the floor.
Keeping silent, Kale listened.
Then without warning, he kicked the wooden door open.
Robert Strong stared out at him in shock. “Who are you?” He demanded.
“My name’s Kale. But you won’t remember me.” Kale said in a voice that sounded strangely innocent and creepy at the same time.
“What do you want with me? You want money? I can give you any amount you ask for!”
Kale shook his head as he moved towards Robert Strong, who was trapped in the cane armchair. “I’ve got too much money.” He noticed that Strong was quivering very slightly. Oooooh, he foresaw that he was really going to have some fun.
Strong froze when Kale’s fingers grazed over the gun he had revealed.
“Don’t kill me, please! I will give you anything you want!”
A dying man’s plea to be let off, Kale thought, it sounded so SO weak.
Kale didn’t use his gun though. He saw that Strong was watching television… Sleekly he grabbed Strong out of his armchair and rammed his head into the television. Strong cried out in pain but was helpless.
“PLEASE! I’ll give you anything! ANYTHING!”
“It’s okay, really.” Kale reassured him. “I don’t need anything. I’m just wondering how best to report to my boss.”
“Who is your boss? What does he want with me?” Strong gasped, his body in an awkward position as Kale held on to his head.
Kale glanced around the room, then spotted a letter opener. “What do you need a letter opener here for anyway?” He asked, though it was a rhetorical question. Picking up the letter opener, he told Strong, “My boss… He’s a very important person. So important… You have to remember him forever.”
With that Kale started carving William Koo’s name, onto Strong’s left forearm. Strong screamed. Kale basked in satisfaction. As he worked on Strong’s temporary tattoo, Kale spoke. “Since you’re going to die anyway, I suppose I can tell you some stories.”
Strong was weeping by then, unable to withstand the pain of each stroke of the letter opener on his arm.
“I always wondered why people like you exist. Such… Snobs. People who think they’re the best but are in fact, far from it. If not for people like you, I wouldn’t even have to waste my time.” Then Kale shrugged. “But, hell, do I like doing this.”
“Why! You creep!” Strong managed to shout amidst his wails.
“It gives me satisfaction, to see that a tyrant is finally able to have a taste of his own desserts. Desserts… In another way. It is even more fulfilling, when I rid the Earth of irresponsible, despicable and unscrupulous pieces of shit,” Kale paused for a while, looking Strong in the eye with a perverse expression, “like you.” He put a lot of emphasis into those two words and let Strong absorb them.
Strong heard what he had said, but did not comment.
Then Kale didn’t speak anymore till he finished his masterpiece. He stood back for a moment to admire it while Strong attempted to raise his arm to decipher what Kale had written. But it was too bloody and mangled to make out what the words were. Kale did the favour of passing him a bottle of water and a towel.
Strong glared up at him. “What’re those for?”
Kale gestured to his arm. “I doubt you can read it with all that blood there.”
Strong hit away the two items with his free hand. “I don’t want to know! I don’t need to know. You’re still going to kill me anyway. There’s no point.” His tone was bitter.
Kale fished out his camera from his pocket and snapped away. “My boss wants to see my masterpiece.”
Strong seethed but could not retaliate. He had no more strength left in him.
Then while Strong was not concentrating on him, Kale grabbed a bunch of ball-point pens from the table and stuck them into his left leg, in one neat row from his heel to his knee. Even Kale himself could feel the pain as he stabbed each pen into place. Kale accomplished that task in no more than half a minute and realized the pens were all thrust into Strong’s leg unevenly, for some of the ends were jutting out more than the others. He wanted to adjust them till they were all of equal height but frowned in sudden realization.
Strong was surprisingly silent. Kale looked at his face. He had passed out. Damn.
There would be no more fun in continuing to torture him then. How sad.
Kale saw the bottle of water he had passed to Strong just now and he decided to empty it all over Strong. Then he snipped off one end of a wire before attaching the plug into the power-point. He turned on the switch, and aimed the naked wire at Strong.
The last anyone ever heard from Strong was an ear-piercing scream that resonated through the night.
Not far away, a pack of hyenas scattered at the high-pitched noise.
Kale let the plug fuse, then he picked up his camera again and shot more photographs. It was true that William Koo wanted to see what Kale did to Strong. But Kale wouldn’t expect that William Koo was looking for something as bloody and unpleasant as this. Kale did not find this task troublesome though; after all, he did like being able to admire his masterpieces again and again. He very seldom kept evidence of his works though. He was not as stupid as that.
Kale covered his tracks and left the house. There was not much to do anyway. Kale usually operated in a ‘there is no time to waste; I don’t leave any tracks’ way because it was not always that he would have time to retrace his steps and check for places where he might have accidentally left prints or something. He would, of course, ensure that there was not a single trace or clue that might lead to him when he had plenty of time. Just like now.
Time to check on the monkey, which he would finally dispose of in the afternoon. As for Robert Strong… He doubted anyone would find him soon. By then, he’d have rotted and perhaps the vultures would spot him through the open window.
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The sun was already at its highest point in the sky when Kale woke up. He had made a couple of adjustments to his plan, and so he was going out to get rid of Monkey first before he attended his posh dinner and spa. The highlight of his trip, would be today.
Monkey was unconscious when he got to him, and he had quite a hard time trying to move him.
In half an hour Kale was speeding away in his jeep.
The landscape stayed pretty much the same as Kale moved along a dusty road that was overgrown with weeds and other plants. To someone who had never experienced the vast outdoors of the wild African land before, it would be very easy to get lost. But not Kale. True, he wasn’t a native, and he did not explore the plains often. That was why he always had a trusty old-school compass and a topographical map. That was on top of the GPS installed in the jeep, which Kale switched off most of the time. Of course his trained eye helped a lot too.
Kale regularly turned to check that Monkey was still asleep. If Monkey were to awaken then, he could probably take Kale out unawares as he was in a position of advantage at the back, even though his hands and feet were still bound at the moment.
The drive was pretty much uneventful and in fact, it was rather quiet and peaceful. There were no big elephants to cause detours, no vultures to bother them with their loud squawks, no big cat to endanger them within the vicinity. The sun was the only one thing that annoyed Kale quite a little, for the heat was sweltering; a situation that was too familiar to the African plains. He knew that very well, but continued on for the sake of completing his job.
In another hour, he had reached his destination. He could see the cheetahs coming back from their hunt though it was still rather early. They were dragging a big bulk back to their nest. It seemed to be a good kill, big enough to fill all their kitty stomachs.
Kale contemplated looking for another big cat family that was starving and desperately needed a kill to satisfy the many growling stomachs. After all, there seemed to be no point in leaving Richard Xie at a place where no animal would care about making him dinner anytime soon. But Kale reckoned there wasn’t enough time. Each cat’s territory was huge, and getting out of one to travel to another might take a lot of time, especially since Kale wasn’t too familiar with the plains and all the animals that lived on it.
Besides, there weren’t much sedatives left. He had calculated enough for any problems that might delay his schedule, but not by so much.
So, he braked at a shady position at the edge of the cover of the huge crown of a big tree. Then he got out of his jeep and then set to heaving Monkey out of it. He managed to drag Monkey to a spot under a tree and he left him there.
Monkey leaned against the wide tree trunk in a sitting position, but still unconscious. Kale reckoned he should regain consciousness in a couple of hours. He looked down at Monkey, feeling a brief pang of guilt because he had never intended to kill him or anything. Then he reminded himself that Monkey was the huge obstacle that stopped him from getting Ashley. When it came to matters of the heart, it didn’t pay to be soft-hearted and selfless.
Love was just like murder. It had to be ruthless and unscrupulous, if you wanted to finish it beautifully. If you were to falter and be magnanimous, then there was no doubt that everything would only end in failure.
Kale gazed out at the plains where its edge met with the sky. It was a fantastic place to die in. Then he turned back and looked at Monkey.
“Good-bye, Richard Xie. Ashley’s mine now.”
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Ashley’s left eyelid throbbed violently as she was running a check for one of the many unsolved murder cases. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to make it go away, but it didn’t. She slumped backwards in her chair and sighed. Her eyelid had finally stopped throbbing, though.
Owodog was just on his way to get coffee when he saw Ashley looking really tired. He left his office and stopped by her desk. “Are you alright?”
Ashley opened her eyes. “I am. I’m just wondering what’s happened to Monkey and if he’s all right. And if he’s even alive.”
Owodog didn’t know what to tell her or how to reassure her. Because common sense told him that Monkey had probably been ripped apart and fed to the sharks or something like that. In fact, Owodog hoped that Monkey was already dead, because if he was still alive, and in Kale’s hands… It would be worse. But Owodog’s sixth sense told him that Monkey wasn’t dead. And that Kale was coming back… To strike again.
He didn’t know as yet who would be the next victim, but for some reason, Owodog intuited impending doom that was close.
Absent-mindedly, he twirled his cell phone around in his hand, flipping it from back to front, twisting it from upright to upside down, from side to side. Naturally, he was asking for problems. Because his cell phone slipped and tumbled to the floor, hitting it with a loud plasticky thud and spun across the floor till it hit the wall and came to a stop. Owodog stared at the distance his cell covered and thought that would be the end of his cell. But as he got up from his chair to go pick it up, it started ringing shrilly.
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->shuang.dao
WHOOO i apologize for not having this up earlier. didn't have time or inspiration to write. but anyways, ENJOY! the next chapter... might be in a month or so but after that it'll be quite regular again cos school's ending in a month's time. MUAHAHS.
and... do leave a comment if you're reading eh. :D
EDITED ON 26.02.08
hi all, due to my carelessness, the previous update of this chapter was not complete. the one you see RIGHT NOW, is the completed version. (: