Chapter 31: Massacre Highway: In the Eye of the Hurricane
"The LORD shall fight you; don't hold your peace."
Neon Exodus 14:14 (Unified Standard Edition)
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They were dead.
The killer.
His victims.
All dead.
Hitomi had, without thinking about it, swung around and scrapped the livestreaming video camera that had been feeding the mass-murderer's audience its sick entertainment.
Mr. Pipe was resting against the conference room wall, leaving a smear of blood slowly creeping downwards as it penetrated the taupe-colored plaster.
Hitomi had checked each of the bodies in the conference room for signs of life, but no, they were all either shot execution style in the back of the head or had been killed while trying to flee or defend themselves against their killer.
The way the skirtless woman had died would haunt her.
For a moment Hitomi had wished the sick bastard had lasted a little longer underneath the flailing of her pipe.
But the rampage was over and the room was full of quiet.
And fury: the wind outside lashed the broken out window frame and ruffled papers and the clothing of the corpses in the room. Sirens and megaphone shouts were lost on those same gusts - she could barely make them out.
After a few moments she finally turned her back on the room, fetching up Mr. Pipe with one hand and nestling the pistol she'd acquired deep in her hoodie front pocket as she left the room.
She had been so focused before that she hadn't noticed the bodies in the cubicles outside the boardroom. Internal office windows were shattered and she could see more of his victims strewn haphazardly around the fifth floor she was on as she made her way to the staircase, gingerly stepping over the tripwires she remembered.
Hitomi wasn't an explosives expert. She couldn't disarm everything.
Idly she hoped the SWAT team or whoever came next into the building wouldn't get killed by the numerous bombs the killer had set up.
As she walked she saw a smear of blood on the carpet that, in fits and starts, wound its way around the outer edge of the cubicles. Unable to stop herself Hitomi followed it, eventually finding a bathroom door: the women's.
The blood led straight inside.
She... knocked.
The door was solid oak and seemed super heavy, but didn't have a lock or access control panel on it.
"Hello?" she called, hesistantly.
There was no answer.
"Hello!" she yelled, knocking again.
No answer.
She pulled the door handle and started to step inside, but the door was stuck. Maybe a survivor had barricaded themselves inside? Hitomi pushed harder, still calling out: "Hello!? It's safe! It's over!"
The door began to give, inch by inch, and she pushed her way inside, thankfully her small thin, frame making it easy to slip into the small amount of space the door was able to open.
Oh.
The survivor had managed to make it to the bathroom... but had died with her body crumpled up against the door.
Hitomi's eyes watered as she imagined this woman's last moments. There was a cell phone in her hand, open, and the call was still connected!
Suddenly the speaker on the phone came to life.
"Hello? Is someone there? Mrs. Parks? Is that you? Are you there? I heard someone yelling, hello?" the voice on the other end of the phone questioned. It was a worried voice, but professional - Hitomi realized the woman must've dialed 911 before she'd passed away.
Carefully she reached down, taking the phone from the still and cold fingers of the woman, who, now that Hitomi could see her more clearly, had a splotch of red around her belly where she'd taken a bullet.
"Hello?" she said to the dispatcher on the other end.
"Mrs. Parks!? Are you OK? Did you stay awake like I asked? What's happening?"
Hitomi squatted down on the cold, white tiles of the bathroom floor near the sinks, far enough away from the victim's body that she didn't have to stare at the bloody trail leading into the bathroom.
"I'm sorry... Mrs. Parks didn't make it," Hitomi simply said, "But the bad guy is dead."
There was a moment of shocked silence on the other end before the dispatcher started speaking again: "May I ask who this is? And how do you know the shooter is dead? Was there only one?"
Hitomi nodded as she spoke, "My name is..." She paused, thinking about it, what good would come of giving her name? "I... uhm, I saw his body. He had a lot of guns, he killed everyone in the boardroom but somebody else killed him," she prevaricated, "but miss, the police outside, they have to know about the bombs!"
The voice on the other end seemed startled: "The response team knows about the bombs in the parking lot and the entrances, are there more?"
Hitomi nodded again, holding the phone close to her as she spoke: "Yes, many bombs, with, what are they called? Wires? That if you touch they explode? All over. Especially the stairs. I see dead people all over."
"OK, are you safe? Can you stay where you are?"
"... Yes," she said, but Hitomi had no intention of staying here.
"We have a special bomb disposal unit on the way, right now, they're going to begin entering the building in less than a half hour, so you just need to sit tight. Are you wounded?"
"No..., I... I got away, but couldn't..." What should see say? Should she pretend to be an employee?
Hitomi looked around. No. She had told the police what they needed to know to be safe. She didn't need to be rescued. Her abilities would get her out of the building.
Oh. Crap. The building was probably surrounded.
She ended the call with a flick of her thumb and placed the phone on the ground.
It almost immediately began ringing again from a local number. A man's face appeared.
Oh. God. How sad. It was the woman's husband? He had kept calling this whole time, trying to reach her?
The tears started to come again, but she pushed them back.
She needed to focus.
If Hitomi stayed there and was rescued by the police they'd immediately know she was the one who rushed into the building and killed the killer.
Would there be a trial? She hadn't exactly stopped hurting him when he was disabled: in her despondence over Keiko's death she had taken an excessive amount of time to keep beating him with the pipe until he had finally stopped whimpering.
Mr. Pipe rested on the ground next to her.
She'd killed before with it: in self-defense. Was this time self-defense? She'd already disabled the killer with her gun. Quite cruelly.
When she had seen the ruinous remains of his one victim's lower half... she just... everything had gone red. It had felt... right. Good. Wrong.
Her mind spun in circles.
She tried to focus.
She felt sick.
Hitomi scrambled over to a toilet stall and vomited, trying to pull her hair out of the way as she did so. It took her a minute to regain her composure. Her teeth ached. Her throat was raw. God. Was this what it was like for Sakura when she found out about the North Korean collapse?
Everything tested like copper and acid. Her eyes throbbed.
She walked over to the large glass mirror in front of the sinks and began washing her face, then the tips of her hair that had been slightly splashed by her digestive fluids. She pumped the soap canister, then washed her hands.
The blood didn't completely come off. It left pinkish splotches, like berry-juice, on her skin up to her wrists.
She scrubbed again.
Again.
AGAIN.
It wouldn't come off.
She looked up at herself in the mirror. She looked... terrible. There was blood all over her hoodie.
She looked so weak.
Hitomi's face hardened as she stared at herself with her hands frantically rubbing themselves raw underneath the now steaming hot water.
"You need to be strong," she told herself. Hitomi had promised herself she would learn to be stronger back at the embassy. Her ability would keep her alive, but at what cost?
"Stronger," she said to herself out loud.
Hitomi pulled her hands out of the water and stared at them.
"Think," she commanded herself.
What was her goal? The government of Japan already knew about her ability. Several other nations did too, by now. She needed to get back home, safely.
Being detained meant the American government getting their hands on her and her ability.
That was unacceptable.
That meant not getting "rescued."
She needed a plan.
First things first: time. Hitomi had less than a half hour before the building was stormed and she was "rescued."
Second: evidence. She mentally checked off the list of everything she'd done since she came into the building. Hitomi pulled the pistol she'd stolen from the museum display case downstairs and put it into the sink. She quickly grabbed a sheef of paper towels from a touchless dispenser and poured soap all over the gun. Then she began scrubbing every part she could find with soapy water hoping to destroy her fingerprints.
Hitomi picked it up in the paper towels and went to the stall she had vomited in. She lifted up the back of the toilet lid and dropped the gun into the tank. Would that be enough? Hitomi just needed "time."
They'd figure out who she was, eventually, but if she could delay them long enough...
Bullets. She had fired bullets. That meant casings.
She quickly looked around the room and began wiping down everything she thought she'd touched with soapy paper towels, including the phone, which she placed back in the dead woman's hand.
Hitomi took a moment to clean off Mr. Pipe as well, but left the bloody water splashed around the sink. Would that muddy the trail? It was the killer's blood, after all.
She grabbed another punch of paper towels and left the bathroom, heading straight back to the boardroom, using the paper towels to open doors and touch things as she went, stuffing the unused ones in her hoodie pocket.
It was louder than ever inside: there were a lot more sirens and flashing lights outside, so she ducked down and kept a low profile as she searched the carpet.
No, this was a terrible idea. A total fool's errand. There were thousands of bullet casings on the carpet.
She'd have to trust that it'd take too much time for them to find hers, pull fingerprints, and match them up against her residency documents. Hopefully she'd be on a plane by then.
Hitomi was just about to leave when she heard a series of strange sounds - digital pops and pings - coming from the conference table. She saw that the camera had been hooked up to the killer's laptop, and that despite the camera's destruction the laptop was fine and thus the livestream was still running.
She couldn't help it. Morbid curiosity made her look at the chat channel with its dead video feed.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of emojis were flying upwards from the bottom of the screen. There were more than a hundred thousand people in the chat.
"Incel got rickety-rickety WRECKED SON!" one message claimed in bold before disappearing in the flurry she could barely read.
She was so tempted to type something.
His account was named: "IncelRevenger."
Incel? What did that mean?
"Who was the hottie with the pipe!?" another message said.
Oh shit.
"ONLY SAW DAT ASS YO!" another responded.
Thank god. The camera had been behind her before she destroyed it; they hadn't seen her face.
"Dat ass? Dude. Dat pancake. Flatttttttttt."
She ground her teeth.
No, OK, Hitomi was done. She needed to get the hell out of there. Every minute she spent in the building was a minute closer to being caught by the authorities.
She couldn't exit the ground floor, but what about the basement?
Weekly Power Status
-- Power
Ranking 
-- Power
stone