“Dude, you really need to get out sometime. Find you a girl or something.”
“Hey! I’m serious!”
There are far worse things in the world that could happen, I thought.
“The nerd rage is strong.”
“Screw you!” Shadow giggled, looking slightly embarrassed by his overreaction. “So can I depend on you to help me? I don’t mean right now — later on, if you don’t get caught, thrown in jail or killed that is.”
“Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence.”
Shadow grinned. “Don’t worry, I have faith in you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I’m waiting for an answer, Razor.”
I sighed. “Provided that I make it through this, yes I’ll help you.”
Shadow smiled widely. “Good, ‘cause you owe me. Big time.”
Chapter 17
Carly
I fucking hate him. I fucking hate his guts.
I was pacing the living room the next morning, my eyes red from having cried the entire night away.
I felt horrible, like a worthless pile of shit.
How could Mason abandon me like that after we had just shared something so beautiful together? And the way he left really bothered me, sneaking off while I was asleep and leaving a stupid letter behind to explain himself.
How cowardly. How fucking cruel. If he was going to leave, he should’ve at least given me the chance to say goodbye.
I had a phone number, but he told me to only call it if it was an emergency.
I’m not going to call him and leave a message, I thought. He doesn’t deserve to hear me crying and begging him to come back.
What I needed to do was forget Mason, forget that he ever waltzed back into my life and forget the feelings I thought I felt for him.
Except that it was easier said than done. Especially after I’d just given my v-card away to him. And I saved it just for him too, and he took it and left. Just like I’m sure he’s done with plenty other girls.
It made me feel like a used soiled rag.
“I need to get my mind off of him,” I muttered, sniffing. My nose was stopped up from all the crying and it was never going to get better if I didn’t stop.
I needed something, anything, to change my focus. I didn’t want to give Mason another second of my time.
My eyes fell on my laptop. Mason told me stay away from it, at least for the time being. But he was gone now, and I didn’t have to listen to him anymore.
Besides, I’d been itching to log on to see what my blog looked like ever since the video was uploaded and see what the general response was.
I sat down at my desk and logged onto my laptop. For a moment, I felt a twinge or foreboding at going against Mason’s orders, but I pushed it away. I wasn’t going to live in fear no matter what happened. I’d done nothing wrong in helping Mason expose a fraud and a murder, so I didn’t fear the police. If Anonymous wanted to get to me, well, if people in the organization were as good as Mason, me logging on won’t matter and they’ll find me anyway.
I typed my blog address in the address bar and got this:
404 ERROR – Sorry the page you were looking for was not found.
WTF, I thought.
What asshole took down my blog? I suppose I should’ve been expecting it. It could’ve been any number of people. But after what we saw on the news, it had to be everywhere by now and it didn’t matter.
“Damn it!” I yelled, banging on my laptop keys in anger.
I began typing in the search bar, “Mayor Bradley murder video” to see if it was anywhere else on the internet and images of a screen capture of the footage came up in the results, but when I tried to go to any of them, I was met with the DMCA notices and 404 messages. I tried every sort of video site, YouTube, Livestream and a few others, but all had the same results.
“This is ridiculous,” I muttered. “They’re really trying to cover this thing up.” As mad as I was at Mason, it only went to show how right he was about the corruption that was rampant.
Eventually, I found a place where the video was still being circulated, on Reddit of all places. The sentiment there was as I expected. People were calling for the Mayor’s head and complaining about a mass coverup and only a few gave him the benefit of the doubt.
After I had my fill of reading comments, I checked my e-mail inbox. The screen froze for several moments before it loaded.
“Jesus,” I whispered at all the results. My inbox was almost completely full, two gigabytes worth of mail from people who were interested in talking to me for posting the video on my blog.
There were even offers from news stations who were willing to pay me in exchange for an interview. Some even offered me a job.
Normally, this type of news would have filled me with joy. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a far cry from what I’d been hoping for when we released the video. Hell, I’d been looking for a serious journalist gig since graduating college. I should have been over the moon.
But I felt nauseous. Sick to my stomach.