Chapter 4.

I peeked over at my gaming laptop and clicked on the icon to open up the list of local Wifi networks available. Disappointingly, there were none, much unlike how it normally was. I found it strangely bizarre when I thought about it more carefully.

There was no way she’d be able to take down all modems in the vicinity, would she? When I turned my gaze towards my old laptop and similarly clicked on the icon to show the local Wifi networks available, shockingly they were all there. There were about ten networks available, but unfortunately, they all required passwords.

Puzzled by the difference between the two, I picked up my gaming laptop and examined the edges closer. Upon inspection, I realized there were traces of the dust that was originally gathered along the edges missing. It was evident that it had been opened up recently.

Holy shit! Did she actually take out the Wifi card from the motherboard? But by this point, there really was no point being scared of the creepy stalker level shit she’d pulled off while I was asleep. I couldn’t afford to panic and I could only accept the reality of the situation and move on.

Deep breaths. Stay calm. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. I could potentially take the Wifi card out of my old laptop and put it into my gaming laptop, but that still wouldn’t solve my problem of not knowing the password to any of my neighbor’s Wifi networks.

I do have some cracking programs that could potentially get lucky on one of the ten networks, but unfortunately, it’s on another one of my USB flash drives in the living room. Since I was never in a situation where I didn’t have access to the internet here, I never bothered to crack their passwords. In the good old days, before I moved here, I played around with cracking Wifi passwords for “educational purposes” of course. Yes, good old educational purposes that starts with the letter p and ends with orn.

It was only when my eyes wandered aimlessly in the direction of my old laptop that I noticed a particular icon on the desktop screen named brute force.

Ah! That’s right!

Back then I was still young and immature and coded up a brute force program for this very purpose. Ah the good old days where brute force was slow but still somewhat plausible, I was such an amateur back then. After I made it and tested it out, I easily realized how idiotic the endeavor was due to the pathetic processor on my old laptop. However, isn’t this just perfect for my present situation? Don’t I have just the right piece of junk in the closet? It’s about 500-1000 times faster than my gaming laptop, which is already a far cry ahead of my old laptop, right?

With such thoughts in mind, I unplugged the flash drive that was plugged into my gaming laptop, then inserted it into the old antique and transferred the required programs onto it. After I finished copying the files, I opened them up on my gaming laptop that was far superior speed wise. I modified the code a bit so it would work properly on my homemade mini supercomputer. Naturally, parallel processing was a course I’d taken in university, so it didn’t take too long to modify the code; in fact, the entire process of editing the code only took about ten minutes since I still had some old projects where I could essentially just copy and paste it then use the find and replace feature to change a few of the variables in the code to suit my needs. Once I was finished, I transferred the new files back onto the flash drive after compiling the code into an executable.

By the time I finished, altogether, forty minutes had passed since she began cooking and I was really getting nervous. I was running out of time and I presumed in the best case, I had at most twenty minutes until she finished cooking. My head was spinning from the precarious situation I found myself in and I was sweating buckets right now.

I approached my neglected mini supercomputer and turned it on, it only took thirty seconds for it to finish booting up unlike that antique failure of a laptop of mine. I plugged in the flash drive and ran the brute force program on the ten different available Wifi networks simultaneously. Once it managed to connect to one it would trigger the program to cease brute-forcing the other networks. I’d also modified the code in the program to immediately broadcast an automated SOS emergency message on police radio frequencies which would provide them with my exact geographic coordinates to ensure they would be able to easily locate me.

When everything was set up and running as intended, I stepped out of the closet, grabbed my old laptop, and powered it off. I then tossed everything I’d taken out back into the closet to avoid raising her suspicions when she returned. I moved over to the window by the table where my gaming laptop was positioned and took a long breath of cold air in. I then slowly exhaled at a constant pace, once again trying to calm the rampant chaotic mess of emotions running amok inside my head.

It was an arduous battle, but I, at the very least, managed to create a small possibility of survival after this run-in with my psychotic ex.

I’d done what I could and now I could only wait and pray that my efforts weren’t in vain. It was difficult to believe just how prepared she was for this though. I couldn’t help but strengthen my belief that women really were dreadful creatures when their love became twisted and warped.

After twenty excruciatingly long minutes passed, I finally heard footsteps slowly approaching from the other side of the door. I closed my eyes and simply waited patiently. I already knew after searching earlier that I didn’t have anything in my room that I could effectively use as a weapon.

My laptop was a no go. I’d cry too many tears of blood if I went and broke it like a brute. I’d probably fail even if I tried to use it as a weapon. Adele was far too fast and agile, she was far more athletic than I was. At times she reminded me of an experienced trained hunter, and it was far too difficult for me to actually pull anything off.

The clunky chair in my room was metallic and heavy. It was a single metallic piece for the base that couldn’t be deconstructed without any of my tools which I’d already confirmed were missing. I was also not strong enough to wave the chair around like a clown in a futile attempt to keep her away from me. My bed doesn’t have any legs either. It’s just a mattress on the ground because I was too cheap to pay for a proper bed frame. My room was barren of any other furniture since I didn’t have any real desire to buy anything unrelated to computers.

This was the one time I cursed my frugal lifestyle more than anything else in my life. Any of the few weapons I purchased and stored away for times of emergency like this were all missing, similar to the tools that I kept in the closet. She really was far too thorough.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

With three strong kicks, the door behind me flew open rotating around the hinge as it slammed against the wall.

“Darling, your last supper is ready.”

I didn’t really want to look, but I needed to stall for time, so I opened my eyes and turned towards the door. My eyes immediately landed on the skinned roasted rat laying on a silver platter. I didn’t pay much attention to it before, but there were holes all over its body. When I finally realized what they were from I wanted to vomit.

On the left side of the platter beside the rat was a small pile of disgusting yellow mush. To the right of it, I found the shells of what were once parasitic botflies. I gagged reflexively when I thought about the fact that she really expected me to eat something on this level of disgusting.