A DAY EARLIER

The alarm shrieked out its grating, electronic roar.

As usual, Carey Walsh was in no mood to get up. He snoozed the alarm, slept for fifteen minutes, then snoozed it again and slept for fifteen more. Finally, groaning like a TV-show zombie, he dragged himself out of bed and did what he always did first thing in the morning.

At 7:42, Carey loaded up Reddit on his computer and checked his inbox. No replies. He began surfing his home feed. A user, obviously female judging by her idiotic username and even dumber question, had posted the following on a gaming subreddit:

Can u recommend a hack n slash game not super hard (like Dark Souls) for my BF?

submitted 10 hours ago by PrinzssPiich29

He clicked on it and read on.

He loves Dark Souls but he keeps dying lol and I want to get him something less frustrating but just as fun so he stops throwing the controller across the room lmao. He also likes Assassin’s Greed but has played all of them already :(

“What a dumb-dumb,” Carey said, shaking his head.

In a flurry of movement, fingers clicking expertly across the keys, he formed his response. It seemed to gush like gasoline from his brain into his keyboard, a quick, hot injection into the vast, vapid belly of the internet.

He pressed enter—the spark that would ignite this morning’s act of cyber terrorism. Hey, if they couldn’t understand the humor, they had no business posting like idiots.

“Take that,” he said with a chuckle.

[-] DrollTroll69 1 point just now

Hey Princess, first off lose the Super Mario reference in your username, your obviously about as knowledgeable of video games as an eight-year-old Mormon child-wife on 900mg of Adderall trying to pick a lock with a shovel. Second, Dark Souls is an action RPG with a deep learning curve that requires hours of trial and error to learn how to strike at the exact right moment to defeat your enemies not some mindless “hack n slash.” Third, it’s Assassin’s “C”reed not Greed you nincompoop. Tell your little boyfriend to grow a pair. Dark Souls is a game for men. Maybe if he plays enough, he’ll become one someday!

Smiling, he set his laptop aside and sat back in the darkness of his cramped living room in his tiny one-bedroom apartment, which cost him $825 a month here in crappy Manchester, New Hampshire. It pissed him off how much the place cost, considering the empty heroin needles he often found in the dog-poop-ridden front lawn of the creaky old colonial in which his apartment took up the second floor.

But the location couldn’t have been better. His office was only a three-minute drive down the road, right on the corner of Elm and Bridge. Speaking of which, he was going to be late for the board meeting again if he didn’t hurry his ass up.

No, he wasn’t a member of some prestigious board of investors. “Board meetings” were literally just that—awkward meetings his team of recruiters held every morning and every afternoon. While standing at a whiteboard with their stupid daily activity numbers scrawled across the surface.

Time to go to work, not that he felt like it at all. On his way to the front door, the feeling only intensified, as he happened to glance at the teetering tower of dirty dishes in the sink, the empty boxes from the pizza and Buffalo wings he’d ordered the night before, a conspicuously empty whiskey bottle atop a pile of crushed cans of Guinness in the trash, and finally, the questionable, slightly yellowish stain on the tile floor in the corner between the kitchen cabinets.

Had he pissed on the kitchen floor? He’d definitely blacked out, didn’t remember passing out on his bed, but... Jesus. The thought made him slightly uncomfortable, aware of himself in a way he usually was not, as if a vile, sickly smell had entered his kitchen, which he’d just discovered was coming from his own ass. He was Irish (at least both sets of his grandparents were), and Irishmen were supposed to be able to hold their liquor. They sure as hell didn’t call in sick for work—which he desperately felt like doing—just because they were hung over.

He stepped outside. At least it was a nice day. Sunny and not too cold despite it being November. As he went to lock his apartment door, his phone buzzed.

A notification from Reddit.

u/PrinzssPiich29 replied to your post in r/patientgamers

“Sweetness,” he said, unlocking his phone with a few taps. The dimwit’s response made him laugh out loud.

You are a dumbass nerd who can’t even spell “you’re” correctly. My boyfriend is a Marine and I showed him your comment. He says to come over and call him that to his face loser but YOU’RE probably too much of an illiterate little bitch.

DrollTroll69 replied in the only way he knew how.

For YOUR information, PrinzssBitch, my last girlfriend who I loved died three months ago from cancer, so who’s the bitch now?

It was a lie, of course. He’d broken up with his last girlfriend, a chunky redhead named Iris Hennecker—with huge knockers—about eight months ago, after she complained about the amount of time he spent playing GTA V—that’s Grand Theft Auto V for those too busy hiking and eating avocado toast and doing other lame hipster crap instead of playing the greatest installment in the greatest video game series ever made.

Why he’d felt the urge to lie like that… Who knew? Sometimes, he said the weirdest stuff online. That was the beauty of being anonymous on Reddit.

Immediately, his phone buzzed.

Already?

A reply from PrinzssBitch.

If that’s true about your gf then I really am sorry but that doesn’t change the fact that YOU’RE a coward hiding behind YOUR anonymous profile spitting hate cuz it makes you feel better. If YOU’RE sad maybe talk to a therapist cuz hate ain’t cool. PP out.

Carey thought for a moment, grinning. Finally, he settled on the following:

PP out?!?! Lame. How about I take my PP out and show you a real hack n slash??

On his way to his car, he kicked aside what must have been a dozen crushed cigarette butts scattered across the walkway. The assholes who lived downstairs liked to smoke and talk outside at all hours of the night, pitching their butts all over the place like worthless white-trash hicks.

His phone buzzed again. More from PrincessBitch? That girl just didn’t give up!

Nope.

This was someone else.

Message from u/uknowit73vip in “You’re gonna reap what you sow, Carey Walsh.”

The message preview read:

The internet could use one less troll...

Carey unlocked his phone and tapped to read the full message.

The internet could use one less troll...Enjoy your cubicle day! Because it’s going to be your last. If I were you, Carey old buddy, I’d draw the shades and keep those Christmas lights on alllllll night long. Still won’t see me coming.

“Christmas lights,” Carey whispered. “How the hell...?”

Clicking on the name “uknowit73vip” didn’t provide much information about the person’s identity. It was a dummy profile, obviously. No other comments, no posts, no profile picture to replace the default Reddit alien or whatever that little creature they used as a mascot was.

Who is this? he wrote back.

When there was no immediate response, Carey tried Googling the name to no avail. There was no apparent history between him and whoever this stalker was, which meant the guy must have stumbled across Carey’s profile, seen his collection of trollish comments, and decided to target him.

But how did he know my real name?

And the Christmas lights. That really freaked him out.

How does he know about the Christmas lights?

***

Carey went through the motions at work, trying to seem like a calm and normal recruiter as he picked up the phone and cold-called software engineers like the one he used to be, in what felt like another life.

Yet it felt as if a time bomb was ticking inside of him.

At 4:45, he finally couldn’t take it any longer. Conscious of his manager’s inquisitive glare, he crossed the office “bullpen,” which was what they called what was essentially a standard cubicle farm, and slipped through the exit door. He would have to make up some excuse tomorrow, but at the moment, Carey couldn’t give a damn what his manager thought.

My name, my good Christian name...

And the friggin’ Christmas lights...

When he arrived at his apartment, the first thing he did was throw on the Christmas lights strung around the living room. His friends were big fans of those lights and raved about them when the group got together in this room to smoke pot. They added a nice, multicolored effect to the haze and made the place feel dreamlike.

He went straight for his gun.

“Come get me now, bitch,” Carey said, removing his Glock 19 9mm Compact from his underwear drawer. A dependable firearm weighing only twenty-one ounces, equipped with steel sights and accessory rails below the barrel where a light could be attached (he had one of those, too), this little weapon was Carey’s most prized possession.

I’m ready for you, loser.

Gun loaded, he pulled an armchair across the room and parked himself in the corner, where all access points into the living room were visible.

His phone buzzed. A call coming in.

The Old Man and the B, it said on the screen, an old nickname he reserved for the landline in his parents’ house.

He immediately silenced the incoming call and laid the phone on the armrest.

“Good riddance,” he said.

A tiny voice shouted up at him.

“Is that right, Carey? Good riddance?”

“Aw, crap.” Carey put the phone to his ear. “Dad, I was talking to someone else.”

“You mean, you meant to hang up on me and accepted by mistake. Idiot move, boy.”

His father sounded pissed, as always.

“Well,” Carey said, “you can’t really hang up these phones, them being cell phones and all.”

His attempt at humor failed miserably. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard his dad laugh.

“I called you twice last night and texted you,” his father fumed. “Your mother wants to know if you’re coming up for Thanksgiving, and I don’t know what to tell her. How dare you keep me waiting like that. I raised you better than to be an asshole.”

“Sorry, I was busy last night. I was...on a date.”

“Don’t give me that malarkey. You were drunk last night. I can hear it in your voice. How do you get anything done at work through a constant hangover? You know, when I was your age, I’d already started a profitable company.”

“Uh huh.”

“And you—what do you do? Recruit software engineers like the one you used to be? You practically got a perfect score on your SATs, for chrissakes! You could have gone to any college, been whatever you wanted. Instead, you partied for four years at a state school with your retarded friends…”

Carey bit down a surge of anger, thinking of what to say next. But tonight was not a good night to fight with the old man. Not with some crazy stalker potentially standing outside his apartment, gazing creepily up at his window.

Yet he couldn’t deny his father’s logic. Maybe his life could have been different. He could have gone to an Ivy League college, been the founder of some cool internet startup, or a videogame development studio, like the one he and his best friend had begun building in their spare time, before the accident that changed everything.

It was true. Carey’s life hadn’t exactly gone as planned. But it wasn’t entirely his fault. He had majored in Computer Science at the University of New Hampshire, though his GPA had gradually sunk from an A- to a C+ over the years as he started caring less and less about going to class. A girl he dated briefly said he was depressed and should try Prozac, but he was from an Irish family. Among his people, psychiatrists were considered quacks. Myths like depression and anxiety were just excuses made by people who didn’t want to get up on time and go to work.

So, he went to work. His first job, which only lasted two years, had been as a junior software developer for a small marketing company in Nashua. The money had been embarrassingly bad—$42k plus a small annual bonus of $2-5k depending on the company’s profits, with no 401(k) to speak of and crappy benefits. But Carey had tried to make the best of it, devoting himself to side projects, creating a portfolio of simple web apps in his spare time, and eventually starting FlameFyre Studios with his best friend, Ben Lukas, whom he’d met at school.

He’d even been in the process of researching potential employers in Boston—real development companies creating cutting-edge web and smartphone apps—and had formulated a plan with Ben for the two of them to move down to the city, find better jobs, make more money—get hot girlfriends, of course—and invest more time and effort into Pixel Revenant, the retro first-person survival fantasy game they’d begun planning.

Then the accident happened… and Ben…

Carey didn’t want to think about that now. It would only make him feel worse.

“Son? You still there?” His dad sounded calmer now—a little concerned, even. “Look, I’m sorry I blew up. You know that Irish temper I have. Got it from my old man. You’re lucky you’re calm as a cucumber. But your mother and I aren’t happy with the way you’ve been neglecting us. You’re our only child, and we devoted everything to raising you. And this is how you treat us? It’s hurtful and unfair, and frankly, we’re disappointed. Sometimes, your mother even cries into her pillow at night.”

“I know, Dad,” Carey said.

“That’s it? You’re not gonna buy me off with an ‘I know, Dad.’ That malarkey might work on your community-college-educated sales manager, but it won’t work on me.”

“Nah, he hates it, too.”

Carey glanced at the 9mm gripped in his right hand and imagined firing a few rounds, then screaming into the phone that he was under attack, being shot at from all sides. He wondered how his dad would respond to that. He’d probably just call the police before pouring himself a glass of Scotch and parking his ass on his favorite chair in the living room to wait and see how Carey got out of this one.

“This isn’t a good time. I have to go.”

“Kiddo, don’t you dare hang up on me. Or I swear to God the Almighty Father, I will come over there and knock you straight into the Dark Ages—when people actually did hang up their phones!”

“Fine,” Carey said, clenching his teeth. “I’ll be there for Thanksgiving. You can tell Mom. Bye.”

He ended the call, breathed a sigh of frustration, and went straight for the kitchen cabinet where he kept whatever liquor was left over from the weekend’s partying.

“Thank God,” he said when he saw there was enough whiskey in two different bottles to get him sufficiently buzzed. One of them was that disgusting salted-caramel flavor of Canadian whiskey that had been in there forever. Almost made him puke into his mouth just smelling it.

Screw it. Booze was booze, and tonight, he would need something to steel his nerves.

An hour later, sitting in his armchair under the slightly reddish glare from the overhead Christmas lights, Glock in hand, Carey drank the last drops of his last bottle, wishing he’d stopped at the liquor store on his way home.

But that’s why they invented smartphones. He opened his favorite delivery app, pulled up “Recent Orders,” and replicated a previous request for a pint of whiskey from the local Liquor & Wine Outlet and a steak-and-cheese sub from his favorite Greek place, Andino’s.

Twenty excruciating minutes later, Carey took the two bags—one plastic, one paper—from the delivery driver and tipped him a five-dollar bill. He never tipped in advance using the app because that just gave the delivery person leeway to mess up and still rest assured he’d get a decent handout. For that reason, Carey always kept cash on hand and chose “Custom Tip Amount.”

The whiskey was Jameson, his favorite. He took two swigs, aware that he should pace himself and not get too drunk—he was, after all, armed and expecting an intruder—but all this waiting was taking its toll, and the whiskey did a great job calming his nerves. He tore into the steak-and-cheese sub, eyes rolling back in his head, tastebuds awash in greasy ecstasy.

“Good lord, that’s tasty.”

The sub vanished much too quickly, but at least he still had three-quarters of a bottle of whiskey left. His elbow caused the Glock to slip off the armrest.

“Oopsie.”

He picked it up and set it on the windowsill so he could grab it at a moment’s notice. Tapping his fingers against his thighs, Carey scanned the room for something to do. Turning on the television would be too distracting and noisy. He was about to pick up one of his coffee-table books—some enormous tome about the warplanes of World War II—and flip through its glossy pages when he remembered what was lying on his desk in the bedroom.

That’s right!

It was a VR set he’d purchased the past weekend, the new AugerZT model, which offered a never-before-seen level of freedom. It didn’t need to be plugged into a computer to play its modest library of games, which meant Carey could turn his entire living room into a sweet play area.

Virtual reality had never been his thing, but a new role-playing game had come out for the headset that resembled Carey’s abandoned project, Pixel Revenant. Part of him wanted to see if maybe, someday, he could return to Pixel and convert it into a VR game. These headsets were all the rage right now.

As he rushed into his bedroom, awash in drunken excitement, Carey told himself the stalker wasn’t serious, just some harmless goon who’d found one of his old profiles online.

Facebook. Yes, that was it. He’d found Carey’s Facebook page. It hadn’t been updated in months—but wasn’t there a picture on his profile of him and the guys hanging out in the living room with the Christmas lights on?

As for the matter of associating Carey’s anonymous Reddit tag with his Facebook page...well, there were a lot of savvy nerd-virgins out there living in their parents’ basements who had the time, when they weren’t spanking it to tentacle hentai porn, to get all sorts of information off the dark web. All Carey had to do was lie low for a couple of weeks, go easy on the trolling, and this would all blow over soon.

Ten minutes later—standing in the center of his living room with the table pushed aside, a sleek black headset covering the upper half of his face and a controller in each hand—Carey found himself in a spooky cave, approaching a deadly trio of giant spiders that had just descended from the ceiling. He took aim with his bow and fired a few rounds, then switched to his sword and shield for a more personal encounter.

His eight-legged enemies finally vanquished, Carey paused the game, tossed the controllers onto the seat of the armchair, and took off his headset to locate the bottle of whiskey. He deserved a victory drink.

A stranger was sitting on his couch.