Page 59 of Choose the Bears

“I know.”

“Stealth in a video game is different from real life.”

“I know that too.”

He nodded slowly.

“OK, show me what you’ve got.”

We walked down the cracked footpath, but the noise from the street made clear that we didn’t need to be that careful. Hooting cries, a scream, then a ragged cheer competed with the sounds the wind made rustling leaves in the trees as we reached the front gate. Asher tested it, freezing when the hinges screeched and jumping over the fence instead. We followed suit behind him, the sound of our feet hitting the ground swallowed by the long grass. I heard a low hiss from somewhere, making clear we had serpentine company, but one look from me had the python shrinking back, looking for far smaller prey.

Sometimes it felt like abusers announced to the world what they were. The state of the house, the way the gutters sagged and the whole yard was a ferocious obstacle course, filled with rusting junk, it felt like its decay was an externalisation of the rot in his soul. Scott had grown up in this, at risk of getting tetanus the moment he went outside. Charlie, the toddler, would’ve had to be watched every second and no doubt Mary was the one to do it. By creating a rat’s nest of rot, it both kept her down and kept her too busy to walk free of it.

“Fucking hell…” Kyle hissed as we picked our way through the mess, finally arriving in the backyard.

It was worse here. Car bodies fought with weeds for space, yet neatly pegged up on the clothesline were a line of kids’ clothes. Mary would’ve put them out the morning when Phil turned on her, then Scott. I wanted to collect the clothes up in my arms, neatly fold each one, and bring them back to her, but instead we sidled up to the backdoor. Asher produced a long knife, the moonlight shining on the blade and the side of his face as he slid it in between the door and its rotting frame, wiggling a little before popping it open.

The smell was what hit me when we got inside. Sour sweat, mould, dust, it was the stench of despair. That would’ve been what Mary felt every time she walked around the house, each attempt to tidy or clean feeling more and more hopeless. That was enough for me. I wanted to rip Phil’s head right off his fucking shoulders, but that wouldn’t be happening here. The place was empty, I could feel that in my bones, but we checked the rooms anyway.

“Not here,” Asher said grimly. “I’m calling in the foxes.”

“We’re gonna owe them our first born at this rate,” Kyle said, but Asher just stared through his lame joke.

“There won’t be any children to barter,” I replied, “not if Imogen isn’t safe. It’s like by taking Mary away, he needed to find another victim.”

“Makes sense.” Kyle’s face fell. “We’ve seen it often enough. The woman doesn’t matter, and they usually find someone else to take their shit out on if we get their wife or girlfriend free. They need someone to beat down, take out all their petty frustrations on.”

“Someone to hold down so they don’t have to face that fact they are small, pathetic little boys,” Asher snapped, right before he grabbed his phone out.

“You call the foxes.” I drifted forward, spying a laptop buried amongst all the shit piled up on the dining room table. “I’ll take a look at his computer.”

I wish I hadn’t.

This was the part of the job I fucking hated, using the skills I’d picked up in some less-than-savoury places on the internet. As a kid, the idea of white-hat hackers entranced me, their actions that of real-life superheroes, using technology to bring down fuckers who deserved it.

But just like all things in real life, the reality was far more grim.

Sometimes I’d been asked to do this, getting remote access to an abuser’s computer to find evidence that could be reported anonymously to the police, but I’d had to delegate that to contractors fairly early on. The kind of shit I found… It stayed in my mind, burned there as I struggled to accept what was there on the screen. My hands flexed as I opened the laptop, seeing at least it still had a charged battery. My gloved fingers would leave no trace as I ran through the usual passwords that way too many people used.

His name, her name, the kids names, it was none of them, but password? Yep, he’d really used that. The computer was old and sluggish to boot up, but then I saw it.

Fuck…

I prayed then, really prayed, to the bear gods or the human ones, that the boys never caught sight of this shit. Porn clips littered the desktop, and even by the thumbnails, I knew I wouldn’t like what was in each one.

“What’s…?” Kyle’s voice trailed away as the first one started. No preliminaries, the crying, tear-streaked face of the woman in the video appeared straight away, her pleas for help cut up seconds later. “What. The. Fuck.”

His brows drew down, his face turning to thunder, but it was my turn to educate him.

“This is what most of them watch. Violent porn performed by consenting actors is the best option.” I held his gaze, watching the pupils blow wide. “Non-consenting isn’t even the worst.”

“Rape porn…?”

Something seemed to die inside him as he realised that was a thing. The product of a healthy, happy bear shifter family, his parents had so much love they’d adopted Asher when he was brought back to the community. It made sense to me that he didn’t know, but I…

I’d romanticised the actions of lone wolves and vigilantes, imagining myself striding with the same kind of cool Batman did the shitty streets of Gotham, but the comic book writers pulled their punches. What lived out there in the shadows was beyond something the artists could draw. Far darker, far more horrific, and worst of all, far more common than the Machiavellian plots of the Penguin or the Joker. There was a whole industry full of people putting out this shit for people to wank to. I jerked my keys out of my pocket, inserting a flash drive I kept attached toit, and then downloaded a copy of the prick’s entire hard drive onto it.

“The foxes will meet us in a nearby park in twenty,” Asher informed us. “What did you find?”

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