Page 101 of Antihero

Tyler’s lens swung around some more, showing a small backyard with wooden fencing, a trampoline, a chicken coop, and an aluminum-framed aboveground pool centered on a square of grass. In front of him, a golden retriever wriggled and barked. “I still don’t have those pictures I asked for, Kenzie. I really want them. I really like you. I feel like you’re stalling me.”

“I can’t just take them wherever.”

Tyler leaned down, his phone leaning with him as he picked up a tennis ball. He threw it into a stand of bushes in the corner of the yard, and the dog shot off, tail wagging. A voice shouted in the background, “Tyler Joseph, you’re gonna get Cooper covered in burs again!”

“Mom! Shut up! I’m on a call!” Tyler focused again on the FaceTime, adolescent outburst forgotten, that tight little grin resuming. “You got a bathroom, Kenzie. That’s privacy.”

“I just haven’t been … able to…” She was hyperventilating, jerking in tiny breaths.

Is She Sleeping? 994k views.

Heat had crept across the back of Evan’s neck. His grip had tightened on the RoamZone. Easing the laptop lid shut, he gathered his things into a rucksack.

The conversation continued: “So now I think I’ll have to ask for something more. Something … better.” Tyler struck a theatrical pose, gripping his chin in his palm, one finger elongated to tap his cheek pensively. “Maybe I don’t want pictures anymore.” A sadistic pause. “Maybe I need you to send me vids.”

“Videos?”

Across decades of operations, Evan had seen countless faces of cruelty. But casual brutality seemed to be growing more widespread every day, quickening algorithmically.

“Just for me,” Tyler said. “Me and you. Or?” He paused by a rusty tricycle in the weeds, his dog returning the ball and waiting pantingly. “I have your school’s official Insta all teed up. I friended it yesterday. So I could just start posting your JPEG in the comments…”

Evan was outside now, walking briskly. His truck waited at a well-fed meter up the block.

“Please don’t? Just—please, please, please? I’ll do it, okay? I’ll do it tonight. I promise.”

“But Kenzie, I haven’t even told you what I want yet.”

What He Wanted! Evan thought. Tyler Russell’s personalized caption, waiting to gather views.

As Tyler explained his desires in elaborate terms, Evan slid into his driver’s seat, reopened the laptop, emailed himself a chunk of the current footage, rewound to when Tyler had leaned down to pick up the tennis ball. At one point, the front panel of his baseball cap caught the light and Evan froze the screen. The logo was a bulldog head, baseball bats crossed behind it like swords on a family crest. Evan dragged it into image search and Google spat out Burbank High School baseball team. In the DMV databases, Tyler Joseph Russell, Burbank CA yielded precisely two profiles, the first featuring a bearded guy with a Class B commercial driver’s license.

The second had the right face and an address on North Lincoln.

“I don’t know…” Kenzie’s words sputtered off.

“You don’t know what?”

Her face twitched. With the pressure at full blast, she’d forgotten to play along. “If I can do that.”

“Which?”

A horrified whisper: “Any of it.”

“You can do it for me. Just for me and you. Tell you what, Kenzie. I’ll give you until midnight.”

The FaceTime call disconnected.

Evan called Kenzie back.

She snatched up the phone on a half ring, answering in a near shriek: “What?”

“It’s me.”

“I can’t. I can’t do any of that. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” She’d moved into a fall of light now, and Evan could make out her palatial bedroom, a fireplace in the background.

“You won’t have to.”

His voice was utterly emotionless. The Fourth Commandment. He couldn’t let anything personal bubble to the surface. Not Joey at the club with drunken men spinning around her. Not Osman, Manny Llorente, Goat-Skull Tattoo, or Anton DeGrado with his screaming video captions and millions of views. Something had been building inside him since the moment Anca had collapsed in his arms in her hallway and he’d had nowhere to direct it.