Screening The Competition

I had recently been married and my wife and I had decided that we would make Friday nights our ‘special’ night – as a way to relax after a long week at work, we would catch a movie and have dinner out at some fancy restaurant.
One night, a few months ago, when Nikki went and purchased the tickets for the film, she came back laughing and, after asking what was so funny, she explained to me that the young girl behind the counter had admitted to her that she found me cute and sexy. Nikki thought this was a laugh-riot and we thought nothing more of it. Over the following weeks, though, we started seeing this girl everywhere we went; the movies, obviously, but also in shopping centres, bus stops, garages and the cafe where we usually had lunch on a Sunday.
Nikki told me not to worry about it, that it was just a teenage crush and that it would soon fade as her attentions would become focussed on someone else just as quickly as they were on me.
Last week, I got home from work to find Nikki in an agitated state. I thought something was wrong but she quickly told me that she had gotten herself a new job. She wouldn’t tell me where it was, but seeing her so excited was infectious so I didn’t press her for details.
Last night, we saw on the news that the young girl who worked at the cinema, the one with the teenage crush, had been brutally murdered in the back office and the movie theatre.
Last night, I discovered the usher’s uniform in the bathroom pantry.

Cornered

She stood beneath the streetlamp, eagerly searching for the bus that would take her from this dark, squalid street corner to her home in a vastly brighter suburban neighbourhood. She had been keeping tabs on the stranger across the road, watching him intently in the darkened doorway. His Yankees cap was pulled down low and she couldn’t see his eyes; his hands were in his pockets, perhaps from the cold, but her mind pictured something else entirely. She glanced around, hoping to catch sight of other late night commuters but she was seemingly alone on the deserted street. Alone, that is, except for the stranger.
Finally, the bus appeared in the distance and she found that she had been holding her breath and, exhaling slowly, she dared another fleeting look at the man in the shadows, only to find him making his way across the street. As a single passenger alighted from the bus, she felt the stranger standing directly behind her, touching her, rubbing himself against her and it took all her will to stop herself from screaming in disgust. A sudden agony gripped her chest as she turned and found the passenger unhurriedly removing a blade from her chest, dripping her sanguine fluids onto the pavement. Her knees buckled, her vision starting to blur, her determination gone as she screams; shrieks of pain and fear and of sudden understanding. The last thing she sees is the two men standing over her, rifling through her belongings and the stranger smile and say “Same time tomorrow night over on Jackson?”