Chapter 8.

“HQ, the hostage has been secured. I repeat; the hostage has been secured.”

“Good work Team Alpha.”

“There appears to be a problem with the hostage though, he’s been rather unresponsive and in a daze. We think he may have a form of PTSD.”

“Sorry, I’m fine. I was just a bit lost in thought just now recalling a few frightful memories just now.”

“Say so sooner, you just stood their blankly without responding to any of our questions.”

“Well, it’s not every day a psycho ex-girlfriend comes after your life.”

“Ex-girlfriend? You mean to say, you’re her ex-boyfriend, Diogenes Genovese, the one who reported her five years ago and got her sentenced to a lifetime in a mental asylum?”

“Eh? You actually know who she is?”

“Of course, I recognized her the moment I burst through your window and restrained her. You are pretty lucky I recognized her and didn’t mistake her to be the hostage by accident. When I first saw you holding a fork up to her mouth I was about to take you down until I took a better look and realized who she was.”

“Haha, that would definitely be awkward if you took the wrong person down, wouldn’t it? But there’s no way an experienced SWAT member like you would not notice the knife in her hand, right?”

“Well, she could have been holding it up in self-defense to try and resist you.”

“Isn’t it discriminatory to assume the female is automatically the hostage?”

“It’s a tough world out there. Deal with it.”

Where’s the so-called equality women like to fight for when you really need it?

“Men, take her away.”

“Kid, you should probably move. To be honest, even we don’t know how she escaped. You never know if there could be a second time.”

“Yeah, moving was my intention.”

I didn’t know how she escaped, but if she could do it once, then it really wouldn’t be surprising if it happened again.

“Darling, I’ll see you next time.”

I felt a chilly sensation when I thought that the possibility of us meeting again really might be plausible when I saw her calm confident eyes despite being restrained.

As such, when everyone was gone, I immediately called a moving company and had all my things put into a storage locker temporarily. I also got in touch with management for the building, explained the situation, and immediately terminated my lease. They were understanding of my circumstances and I wasn’t charged any penalties for breaking the contract early.

I immediately contacted my workplace and handed in my resignation letter in fear my ex-girlfriend somehow located me through social engineering by discovering where I worked and extracting it from a loose-lipped coworker. It was a real pain to quit since it was a well-paying job I’d been with for a while, but I didn’t have much choice in the event she miraculously escaped again.

With the assistance of a realtor agent, it only took a month for me to find a new apartment. The place was dirt cheap at only $200 a month. I was happy it was cheap, but I knew there definitely must have been a reason. When I asked why it was so cheap, they just told me that someone had recently committed suicide in the room and people were too scared to live in it in fear of it being haunted by the ghost of the previous tenant. 

They were really vague about the previous tenant’s death, but I didn’t question it much since it wasn’t any of my business how another person chose to die. Luckily for me, I was an atheist and skeptical of ghosts to begin with, so I wasn’t too worried about things like it being haunted. Rather than ghosts, it was real people that scared me the most, so it wasn’t a big deal for me to stay there.

Like that, I moved in without giving much thought to it since I was still spooked by my run-in with my first ex and I wanted to get out of my old place as soon as possible. The place still had the old tenant’s belongings inside, but I was told I could do whatever I wanted with it. Nobody wanted to take on the job of clearing out the place since everybody was too spooked thinking they would be cursed if they so much as stepped into the place.

When I settled into my new apartment and all my possessions were brought out of storage, I immediately searched for a new job. At first, I figured I’d stick with something temporary. I didn’t care too much about what I did and I didn’t really care if it was a high paying job. Luckily for me, with a decent resume and good references, I landed a job as a senior electronics repair technician at a local electronics repair store that had branches in various cities across the country. 

It was a position at their head office as well which was nice. I was a bit nervous using my last workplace as a reference though, so I requested that no records were left regarding the call my new workplace made to inquire about me.

Once things calmed down, I had some time to relax a bit. When my stirred emotions had settled and I wasn’t on edge anymore, I went through the previous tenant’s belongings and cleaned up the place a bit. During the cleanup process, I stumbled across a rather peculiar item that sparked a memory from a recent event. It was an old VCR player along with a lone VHS cassette tape.

Despite not believing in ghosts, I was still nervous when I remembered the rumors circulating on the web about the alleged ghost girlfriend. I’ve had more than enough psychotic women in my life; as I absolutely wanted nothing to do with it, I did the smart thing that any sane person would scream at the cast to do in a horror movie situation. I put on a pair of thick rubber gloves, doused the VHS tape and my rubber gloves in salt, bought a grabber arm, and used it to toss it straight out the window.

Like hell am I letting another psychotic woman into my life. Hmmp!

It wasn’t too hard for me to put two and two together with the discovery of the VHS tape and the timing of the death. The tenant was discovered dead three weeks ago. They were likely an outcast from society and they stuffed themselves up in their room for the majority of their time. It likely wasn’t until a neighbor smelled a rancid odor originating from the previous tenant’s unit that the body was discovered. This would likely explain the slight delay between the forum post and when the death was discovered. From what I heard, the tenant had no family, nor did they have a significant other. The cops came to the natural conclusion it was a case of suicide and as such, they didn’t dig any deeper into it.