Читать книгу No Harm Can Come to a Good Man - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 8

Laurence Walker presses play and the video begins.

On it, he is standing in a seemingly blank room. He is looking straight into the camera lens, or the facsimile of him is; a broken version, created from photographs and screen grabs. It looks like him, but only barely. There is something about the version of his face that the software has created – so blank and expressionless – that makes him feel sick to his stomach. Behind him he can see similarly wrong versions of his family, of his wife and daughters. This created version of him isn’t looking at them, his body language barely even acknowledging their presence. He wonders why they are so scared. Deanna and the girls are huddled together, clinging onto one another, terrified, backing away from him. Their faces are approximations of what that would actually look like: twisted and distorted and not at all real.

In the background, he hears a noise, a rustle that he cannot put his finger on; and then another noise, quieter in the mix. Sobbing. And then, finally, he notices that the version of him is holding something.

It’s a gun. He knows the thick black metal. The digital version’s thumb is on the trigger. The screen version of Laurence seems to shudder. More than a shiver: it seems uncontrollable.

Then the video cuts to black and a noise rings out that he knows can only be one thing: the crack, solid and sharp, the sound of a bullet leaving the chamber of a gun. The sobbing stops and turns into a scream, ringing through the darkness.