The rest of Wednesday went quietly. Thursday started off the same way. Morning routine, some online work, then I was off to visit a client whose email had stopped working up in Claremont. After fixing the guy’s server settings, all was good.
Then I noticed that a message left by someone with a tech emergency, someone named Alice, so I called her right back. Seems her laptop would no longer boot and she absolutely had to rescue a PowerPoint presentation for work from it immediately. I gave her my rates for emergency work, which she said she would happily pay even with no guarantees that the file was recoverable, so I got her address and headed there.
She lived in Lempster, in a backwoods rural area – pretty common for this part of New Hampshire, with almost as many dirt roads as paved once you get off the main routes. But Google Maps is king and I soon found myself pulling up to her house at the end of a rough, almost class 6, road.
I grabbed my laptop bag with all my tools, headed onto the porch, rang the bell, and also knocked for good measure. A few moment later a frazzled and frumpy-looking woman in perhaps her late 50’s opened the door for me. “Thanks for coming; it’s right this way” she said, obviously stressed.
Alice took me though the quaint rustic house to her den. A laptop sat on the desk, next to a desktop PC. “If you can rescue my presentation, we can put it on my other computer, right?” “Yep”, I replied.
I sat down at the laptop, tried booting it, but of course it did not. “Could be power, or maybe the motherboard.” I said, “but let’s pop the hard drive out of the system and see if we can pull your file off of it.”
I got out my toolkit, and flipped the laptop over.
Then a bang and the lights went out, as if someone had shot me in the back of the head.
Suddenly and unexpectedly in my astral form I saw my body slumped on the desk with most of my head blown off and splattered all over the desk and wall. Alice literally held the smoking gun. Her body language and expression no longer played the part of frazzled middle manager; instead she moved with precision and focus as she began disassembling the handgun, exiting the room quickly. I followed astrally and invisibly behind her.
She was met by a man I hadn’t yet seen, tall, thin and balding. “Is it done?”, he asked. “Yes.” she replied. “Good,” he continued, “we’ve got another contract from the outfit, target’s in Florida, let’s go.”
I hesitated, unsure of what I should do next; then thought “Screw it” and re-incorporated – I can only assume the mess in the den disappeared at the same time.
To say “Alice” and her friend were shocked would be an understatement.
“Now, what are- ” I began to say when the man whipped out his own handgun and shot twice me in the gut – I instinctively ditched my body again rather than stay and suffer the pain.
Again astral and invisible, I watched the thin man spin toward “Alice” and intensely say, “I thought you said you got him, Joyce?!”
She replied, “Kev, I splattered his brains all over the study!”
The man apparently named Kevin retorted, “What, is this his twin then?”
Joyce ran back to the study. “I don’t get it! I blew his head clean off!”
Kevin followed her. “Then where’s the body?”
While they took a moment to ponder that, I positioned myself next to Kevin, and re-incorporated as I plucked his weapon from his holster, stepping back from them.
They both looked at me with disbelief, eyes wide open.
I felt cocky and snarky – my prerogative I thought, since they had just killed me twice in as many minutes. “Don’t worry,” I smiled, “it takes some getting used to.”
Apparently Kev was more of an action not words kind of guy; he lunged to tackle me. As he and I struggled over the gun, Joyce ran past us, and didn’t come back.
Kev was a professional, that much was sure, but he was also facing something he didn’t understand, which made him hesitate, doubt, fear. He started to turn the gun towards me while simultaneously trying to prevent me from pulling the trigger in the meanwhile, as it still pointed into his midsection.
I locked eyes with him as he bent the gun more and more towards me, and I became quite furious. Perhaps because I knew that even if he succeeded it would be but a momentary annoyance for me, I was increasingly outraged at the pair of them. But in the end his strength and skill won out, and the gun started to come up in my direction.
I looked deeper inside him, at his own astral self, and if looks could kill, he would have died.
Which was how I learned that my look could kill. I simply felt my will reach forth and push this man’s astral self – his soul, spirit, whatever you want to call it – right out of his body.
And freed of his body, it evaporated into nothing. Kevin was dead.
I heard a car start outside, and the sound of tires spinning in dirt. I ran out the front door in time to see a small Honda zoom back down the rough road, away from me, Joyce at the wheel.