People who know me also know how much I live for murder. Not murdering my own kind, or any kind, but the fact that some human beings have the ability to draw life from another. The first book series I ever read was the Women's Murder Club series, and I adore mysteries and crime thrillers. When I graduate from college, I want to work with the FBI.
To help mentally prepare myself for the job, I downloaded a game on my iPhone called Cause of Death. In the game, you get to play as an array of different cops, FBI agents, data analysts, criminals, and even victims that are about to be murdered. You must make choices in parts of the game, and making the wrong one can kill you, so you have to start from a certain checkpoint and try again. I've probably sunk $50 into the game, buying all the cases.
One case in particular I always wanted to get was the case titled Your Case: The missing child. I saw that the download price was only $0.99, so I figured to myself "Why not?"
In the case, you get to enter your name and hometown and actually become a cop in the game. As the cop, you have to solve a case where a little boy has gone missing from his deadbeat mom's apartment. In the end, it turns out that the boy was about to be taken away by child services, so the drug-addicted, asshole mom left her son with her new boyfriend, a convicted child molester, so that they could all move down to Mexico and hide out. If all goes accordingly, the pedophile gets arrested and you get commended.
But, a lot of shit can go wrong in the game. One thing that could go wrong is you can shoot the little boy's father, a suspect, that is a drug dealer (kid's got a lotta positive role models). I played through the game a few times, and I knew you aren't supposed to shoot the guy, but I decided to anyway, just to have some fun with the game. I also ended up getting shot by the child molester and killed, and I saw a lovely cut-scene of people speaking at my funeral. I decided that was enough Cause of Death for one day, and I closed the app down. I opened up my email on my phone, since I was expecting an important message from my best friend, and I saw an email from someone, and there was no address. I looked at the text line, and saw that the subject was 'vengeance is always so sweet'. Thinking it was a joke, or maybe some sort of spam, I decided to open the email and look at it. The words shook me to my very bones.
Dearest Madison,
I know what you did to that drug dealer. Did you not know that when you killed him, you also killed a person somewhere in the United States? Did you not know that Cause of Death is a game that actually kills an innocent person for every dead criminal? I doubt you did. Now, listen up. I am going to offer you a choice. Either you click the link below this text and download the file, or you can die. The file will download, and nothing on your machine will change. Once the download is completed, a sniper on a rooftop in your city will murder a person you love. I will send him a notification. If you do not download the file in the next 36 hours, then you will die. Make the right choice. And oh, Madison? Sweet Dreams.
No one signed the email. The download link was entitled "IKnowWhatYouDid.vbs" and when I logged onto my email on my laptop and scanned the link with my antivirus software, it told me the link was safe. And now, here I sit, one hand on my mousepad, wondering if I would rather die than have someone I love die. It has been 35 hours and 57 minutes since I got the email. I can hear total commotion on the other side of the house, panicked voices. I can hear a voice call out for me, and I'm not sure if it's my own voice or the voice of my killer. All I wanted was to solve mysteries, and I guess that was my ultimate downfall.