Despite the whispers, the three kept a fair contact with the two third-year girls they had met under the orange neon of the bar. Through short, superficial conversations by the library lockers, they had learned that the tall girl in the trench coat and her blonde companion belonged to the upper-division humanities department— unknowingly carrying Bill's tiny, magnetized alloy at the very bottom of a canvas tote bag.
The Saturday morning broke with a heavy, grey mist that smelled of river clay and dead leaves.
Molly loved the early hours_She was out for her morning jog, her gray sweatshirt damp with the heavy condensation that rolled off the limestone ridge.
Her boots made a steady, sound against the gravel paths as she cleared the western boundary of the engineering block and turned toward the boundary of the North Quad.
She stopped where the path died into the brush.
Before her lay the yellow tape line. It had been an entire month since the incident in the brush—since the local coroner had pulled the teeth from the soil and the precinct had established its initial digital safety net. Now, the plastic ribbon was faded, whipped by the wind until it was greyed and torn, sagging against the wet bark of the elder trees like an old cobweb.
Molly looked around. The quad was completely silent, the distance to the nearest dormitory block marked only by the faint, yellow blur of a single security lamp through the trees. It had been a month. Surely, she thought, the architecture had settled. It wouldn't hurt to explore the deeper woods once again, if only to see if the stone fissures had shifted since the curfews went live.
She lifted the sagging tape with her forearm and stepped into the tall, wet grass.
The interior of the woods was darker than the path, the canopy of oak and pine holding the mist like a sponge. Molly walked slowly now, her breath rising in short, white puffs as her boots sank into the black leaf mold. She had gone no more than fifty paces when the texture of the silence changed.
"Snap"
It was a heavy sound—the clumsy lurch of a large frame shifting through the brambles.
Molly froze, her hand going unconsciously to the small pepper spray canister at her waist. Through the grey cedar branches, a man came in sight.
It was Bill. He didn't wear his white linen shirt or his tailored tailoring apron today; he was dressed in a rough, oversized canvas coat that smelled heavily of boiled linseed oil and stale tobacco, his dark baseball cap pulled low to hide his bloodshot eyes.
He had been lurking around the perimeter for hours, his gaze fixed on the digital terminal in his palm, tracking the slow loop of the tracker he had dropped into the third-year girl's tote bag. He was monitoring the moves of his prey, checking how close their path came to his subterranean fissures.
In his frustration, he wasn't looking at the ground. With a sudden, heavy lurch, he collided straight into Molly, his thick shoulder catching her arm with enough force to spin her around.
"Hey!" Molly snapped, her voice sharp with immediate irritation as she stumbled back against a wet cedar trunk. She straightened her sweatshirt, her eyes narrowing as she took in his rough, leathery skin and the distinct, aggressive twitch in his left cheek. He didn't look like a researcher, and he certainly didn't look like an administrator. "Watch where you're going."
Bill didn't answer. He froze, his large hands curling into fists inside his pockets, his jaw tightening until the bone clicked. His bloodshot eyes stared at her from beneath the shadow of his cap—angry and filled with a sudden resentment that she had broken his pattern.
Molly felt a cold prickle of fear run down her spine, but her pride as a university student overrode her caution. This man was suspicious. He was moving through a restricted zone without an identification badge, his clothes smelling of the tannery and old river mud.
"Who are you anyway?" she demanded, her voice rising into a sensitive pitch.
"This sector is under curfew regulation. Let's see your ID. You shouldn't be moving around back here without one."
Bill looked at her, his expression shifting from anger into disgust. He didn't have an ID that could clear a student's inquiry; his signature belonged to the Columbus registry, not the campus terminal. Without a second thought, he reached down and grabbed a heavy, broken oak tree branch from the dirt, his rough fingers crushing the bark as he turned his back on her, attempting to walk away into the deeper brush to preserve his trail.
"Hey! I'm talking to you!" Molly shouted, her temper flaring as she pulled her smartphone from her pocket. She held it up between them, her thumb hovering over the mechanical keypad. "Don't walk away from me. I'm calling the campus cop right now if you don't show me your permit. They're already tracking the line."
The word "cop" hit the spot of Bill's temper and soon lost it.
He spun around with that deceptive, speed of a seasoned veteran of a larger predator, his rubber boots tearing up the wet moss as he closed the distance between them in half a step.
Before Molly could even register the movement, his large, square hand shot out from the canvas sleeve, his fingers wrapping around her neck with a great, suffocating strength that instantly crushed her windpipe.
"Ah—"
The sound was cut off before it could leave her throat. The smartphone slipped from her hand, dropping into the soft leaf mold with a dull, wet thud, its screen still glowing with the unselected emergency number.
Bill lifted her entirely off her feet, his thick thumb pressing deep into the soft tissue beneath her jaw, completely blocking the ingress of air into her lungs