Free WEBCAM by Jack Kilborn

of screen capture?
    Kendal Googled it.
    You can’t ignore me, Kendal. I’m your destiny.
    Who r u?
Kendal typed.
    Some call me Megaera.
    What do you want?
    What all people want. I want the righteous to prosper. And the wicked punished.
    Kendal quickly read how to print a picture of your computer screen. All she had to do was press one key, PRTSCN . But where was that key?
    Whores need punishment. I can give you Penance for your sins.
    How do I know you’re real?
Kendal typed.
    You’ll know I’m real when I stick the knife in.
    Kendal spotted the PRTSCN button, above the INSERT key. She pressed it.
    Nothing happened.
    She went back to the Google page, and realized she needed Photoshop or something like it; some art or picture program to paste the screen capture she took. She clicked on the Start icon and began to search Windows for art apps.
    What are you doing?
    She clicked on the Accessories folder. There! A program called Paint.
    Stop it, Kendal. I’m warning you.
    Kendal opened Paint, clicked on Paste. A screen shot of the chat filled the page, and offered her a choice of format options to save it as. Kendal chose jpg and—
    Her computer switched off, leaving Kendal to stare at a blank screen.

CHAPTER 17
    Joan stared at the blank screen, then switched on Tom’s laptop. As it whirred to life she sipped the swill that passed for coffee in his house. His Mr. Coffee was ancient, with more scales than a komodo dragon. It wasn’t a water issue, because she used bottled. It wasn’t a coffee issue, because she bought the coffee. It was strictly a machine problem. Every time Joan visited, she fought the impulse to buy a new one. But this was Tom’s place, and men didn’t like their cave messed with. Usually, she could subsist on Starbucks, but Joan was hungry, and if she went to the coffee shop she wouldn’t be able to resist getting a scone, and that would spoil her appetite and ruin her upcoming dinner with Tom, which she hoped would still happen despite all signs pointing to him cancelling. So it was drink sludge, or go without caffeine, and Joan needed caffeine like scuba divers needed oxygen.
    Tom had given her permission to use his computer, but it still sort of felt like she was spying on him. They’d been dating, exclusively, for years. Because it was long-distance, there was still an intimacy gap that would have ended had they been living together. So Joan was in his small house, drinking his shitty coffee, sitting at his lumpy sofa, with his laptop, which was eight years out of date and had a WiFi connection slightly slower than the Pony Express.
    On the plus side, the place smelled like Tom, which she loved. And she certainly loved him.
    But she didn’t love living apart from him, and didn’t love Chicago, and didn’t love his job, which was worse than a mistress because mistresses usually came second, and Tom put his work first.
    Joan knew she also put work first, but she made ten times the amount of money he did, so she allowed herself the double standard.
    After dealing with a few emails that would have been a pain responding to on her phone, Joan noticed a folder on Tom’s desktop called SNIPPER .
    Without thinking, she clicked on it and the pictures began to flash in a slideshow.
    Big mistake.
    Joan had produced several horror movies. She’d even done a sequel in a franchise about a serial killer who built his own unique weapons, which the liberal press gleefully dismissed as torture porn . And Joan, herself, had dealt with violence in the past, at the hands of some people who were the worst of the worst that history had to offer.
    But she’d never seen anything, in movies or real life, that even came close to the atrocities in those pictures. They were beyond obscene. Those poor women had been butchered like… well… meat. Horrified, Joan couldn’t look away, even as one photo after another was branded onto her brain. By the time she’d managed to close the folder, Joan had seen things