framed photographs of friends and girlfriends. There was even a little Nerf basketball hoop mounted to the wall.
It didn't fit the profile he had created. There were no moody posters of melancholy musicians. No black fingernail polish or the matching clothes heaped in the corner. The room was in a precise state of order. Everything had its place. It reminded Jared more of his own room than that of someone preparing to end his life.
Surely someone about to die wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether or not the bed was neatly made!
At the back of the room there was a desk beneath the lone window with a computer atop it. The screen was still on...the cursor flashing.
Beside the keyboard was a stack of handwritten notes on yellow legal paper. Atop them rested an old- fashioned looking tape recorder that appeared to have a phone jack that entered to the left side, and connected it with the hand-held unit resting on the cradle to the right. A handful of tapes were scattered across the desk without their cases.
Jared snatched the phone from the cradle and the tape recorder immediately began to whir, recording the dial tone.
He slammed the phone down and ripped the cords from the sides, stabbing the 'Play' button with his index finger.
'Hello,' his own voice spoke back to him.
'I didn't think you'd answer,' that same voice responded.
'I was starting to think you wouldn't---'
Jared pounded the machine with his fist, popping the cassette hatch open and jarring the tape loose.
What the hell was going on here?
He leaned forward toward the monitor and dragged the scroll bar on the side all the way up to the top.
The Myth of Compassion: The Generosity of Strangers
Jared heard the door to the room open inward with a slight squeal. Through the small gap he had left the closet door ajar, he watched the person pass on their way back across the room to the computer.
He slipped a tie down from the rack beside him, rolling it tightly in each fist. With a snap, he jerked it taut.
'What the---?' that voice he knew nearly as well as his own gasped.
When Jared emerged from the closet, the guy had his back to him. To either side he held out one of the severed phone cords.
'I was a test subject!' Jared snapped.
'Holy Christ!' he spat, whirling around and grabbing hold of his shirt above his heart. 'You scared the living hell out of me, man!'
Jared recognized him immediately. He didn't know the guy's name, but he had seen him before. They had shared the same General Psychology class freshman year, Behavioral Evaluation lab only last year.
'All of these nights...talking to you...'
'I'm a psych major. I was just working on my thesis!'
'I was your thesis!'
'Calm down, man,' he said, backing away and throwing his hands up in front of him.
'What about my thesis!' Jared railed.
His eyes flashed red and his arms rocketed from his side.
Before he left, Jared gathered the audio tapes and the equipment, and erased the entirety of the paper from the hard drive of the computer. When Andrew's roommate came back after the weekend---finding him hanging from the pipes along the ceiling by one of his own neck ties with his face blue and swollen---he was able to tell the police all about how he had heard Andrew on the phone several nights in a row, talking to someone about wanting to kill himself.
He had thought Andrew was working on his thesis.
Professor Witt had confirmed that Andrew was indeed working on a project where he pretended to want to kill himself, trying to solicit compassion from the person on the other end of the randomly dialed phone. He supposed in his lauded professional opinion that the entire design of the thesis should have been a clue into the inner workings of Andrew's mind, a heavily-veiled cry for help.
Jared received a B minus on his paper, as---after everything Professor Witt had been through in dealing with the tragic suicide of a beloved student---he was of the opinion that Jared's paper didn't capture the essence of the anguish and despair.
'It was too clinical,' he had said. 'Too clean.'
Jared had stared at his feet.
'As a phychologist, Mr.Danner, you can't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.'
'I'm going to kill myself,' the man sitting in the couch across from him said, averting his eyes.
Jared looked up from the yellow notepad sitting in his lap, and offered the man the hollow, placating smile he had groomed to perfection in medical school.
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BURIAL GROUND
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Prologue
The screams were more than he could bear, but they didn't last long. Panicked cries cut short by wet, tearing sounds, and then finally silence, save the patter of raindrops on the muddy ground. From where he crouched in the dark recess of the stone fortification, hidden from the world by a screen of tangled lianas and the sheeting rain, he had listened to them die.
All of them.
The signs had been there, but he and his companions had misinterpreted them, and now it was too late. It was only a matter of time before they found him, and slaughtered him as well.
Hunter Gearhardt donned his rucksack backward, and wrapped his arms around its contents. He'd managed to grab a few items of importance once he'd recognized what was about to happen, and he needed to get them out of the jungle. More bloodshed would follow if he didn't reach civilization. With their inability to access a signal on the satellite phone, there was no other way to deliver the warning. It was all up to him now, and his window of opportunity was closing fast.
His breathing was ragged, too loud in his own ears, his heartbeat a thudding counterpoint. He couldn't hear
