Laughing to himself about the idea of Matt Webb, one of the most low key, albeit quirky guys he knew being a premeditated murderer, he shook his head and keyed open the front door, stepping inside the house and closing the door behind him. Josh dropped the keys and his sunglasses onto the hall table, as was his usual routine, except when he forgot and somehow managed to lose them - through no fault of his own, he would insist if asked. He shrugged out of his black leather jacket and slung it across the hook on the wall after sliding his phone into his hip pocket and dropping his wallet next to his keys. "Stay," he ordered all three of the inanimate objects, hoping they'd still be there the next time he looked for them. In his life, there were no guarantees.
Josh yawned and made his way into the kitchen to grab a soda from the refrigerator, hoping for a bit of a caffeine kick. He may not have been at the studio any longer, but that didn't mean he didn't still have ideas running through his mind that he wanted to jot down before it was time to attempt sleep for the night somewhere around his usual bedtime of two a.m.. As he leaned back against the counter and uncapped the bottle, tipping it up against his lips, he heard a muffled sound coming from somewhere inside the house. Odd. He lived alone and the two cats and dog he had as pets were currently staying at a close friend's house due to the long hours he was spending working at the studio lately, doing his best to write and record a new album in its entirety with his band before the end of the year.
He hadn't locked the front door behind him when he came in, he realized. Maybe Matt had come back to tell him something and had let himself into the house. That had happened more than once in the last fifteen years that they had known each other. "Matt?" he called, walking back out of the kitchen, through the living room and into the hall where he could get a good look at the front door. Josh gripped his soda bottle tightly in his hand as his eyes searched the empty hallway. No Matt. No sign of anyone.
Maybe he'd just imagined it. He must've. It was probably nothing. Just one of those strange house settling things he'd always heard about. He wasn't very used to being completely alone without his stereo cranked up as loud as he could get away with, so maybe he'd just never heard...
Thump. Again. There was a shuffling sound, as though someone was quickly flipping through paperwork and tossing stacks of things aside. Fuck, fuck, fuck. He was still trying to convince himself that it was nothing to be afraid of as he took another tentative step. Josh pocketed the small black cap, but refused to put the bottle down. It made for a really shitty weapon, he knew, but at least it was something if he needed it. And he hoped to hell that he wouldn't need it.
The singer crept as slowly and noiselessly as possible along the wall, stopping only briefly to listen for more sounds. Of course he heard another loud thud coming from the next room over. It was a spare room that he'd turned into an office of sorts. It housed almost all of the musical equipment he kept at home, including several electric guitars, a couple of small amplifiers, an acoustic guitar or two, the upright piano that had moved from house to house just as many times has he had over the course of the last decade, a keyboard, some low-level recording equipment, and a computer for a bit of mixing. That room was where he spent most of his time writing and testing out new ideas that came to him at three o'clock in the morning when sleep wouldn't come as easily as he had hoped and he didn't feel like driving all the way across town to the studio. In a sick twist of irony, that's where he was planning to spend the next few hours.
If he was a smarter man, Josh would have left the house and called the cops rather than investigating for himself, but in the moment, he was the bravest idiot he knew. He spent a minute debating over whether or not to open his mouth and say something, but he figured that even the stupidest of people wouldn't come out with their arms raised and admit to being caught rifling through someone else's belongings.
Just as Josh was about to lean around the corner to peek into the room, a dark blur that felt like a sack of bricks rammed into his chest and slammed him hard against the wall. The back of the blond's head bounced off the drywall and the soda bottle fell from his hand, rolling across the floor and layering the hardwood in sweet syrupy liquid. He whined and slid down the wall to land on his knees, reaching up to put a hand against his head. The powerful impact had caused a small explosion behind his eyes, throwing bursts of colour across his vision that still sparked along the periphery. "Fuck," he moaned, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain. "Fucking shit, that hurt."
"You think that hurt? Just wait," came a foreign deep voice that the singer couldn't recognize. It was raspy and gravelly in a way that Josh had never heard before, except in auto-tuned "Batman" movies. And he highly doubted that Christian Bale had flown all the way to Vancouver just to rough him up.
Josh ducked his head, but otherwise didn't move until the man standing in front of him spoke again. "Open your goddamn eyes."
Slowly, he did as he was told, squinting against the low afternoon sunlight that ricocheted off the wooden flooring slightly off to his right. His world was spinning and he was dizzy as hell. He hadn't felt this bad since he'd had that bout of vertigo several years ago. To keep from completely losing his balance, Josh put his other hand flat against the floor and stared at the stranger's shoes until the world started to steady just a little more. "Wh...who are you?" he managed to ask haltingly. He was going to be sick. He knew it. Taking a deep breath, the blond tried to sit up a bit more, but that only caused him to break out in a clammy sweat and he could feel his last meal starting to rise in his throat.
The singer's question was met with a swift, brutal kick to the stomach, driving him backwards for the second time. "Shut the fuck up." The second he hit the wall, the blond lost everything in his belly, coating the floor and the man in front of him from the knees down. Josh choked, gasping as he tried to pull himself to his feet, but the stranger, dressed from head-to-toe in a black mask and matching clothing, stopped him by delivering one more sharp kick to the chest. The wet snapping of bone separating from bone was horrifying, and one he'd never experienced before. He felt nothing but pain, and it was a high enough level to send cold shivers through him as his mind tried to accept the fact that things weren't right in a lot of ways. Josh's vision distorted on impact and he wasn't sure how much more of this he could take before his body simply gave up on him.
"Jesus Christ! What the fuck did you do that for, you fucking asshole? Get up!" the man demanded gruffly as he stepped back out of the way in case Josh vomited again. He leaned forward and reached down to grab the singer by the back of the collar, hoisting him roughly up onto his knees while Josh instinctively tried to raise his hands to his face, whimpering quietly as his ribs shifted and jolted, grinding against one another under his skin. He hoped to whoever was listening that the man would soon get tired of this and leave.
Josh wasn't putting up much of a fight, even though, instinctively, he knew he probably should, but in his new condition, he couldn't. He'd originally been caught off guard by this man, which left him ill prepared to begin with, but now that he knew he needed to strike back, he was in an immense amount of pain and he was having trouble functioning. This man had the upper hand and he knew it. He was taking full advantage of that fact.
"Shit, now what the fuck do I do with you?" the intruder asked angrily. He stomped back and forth for several steps after letting go of Josh's collar and allowing the singer to slump back down to the floor with his shoulder against the wall. Josh tugged anxiously at his hair, first shoving it out of his eyes and then pulling it back down in front of him, just as he did any time he had to deal with something he was unsure about. And this was about as unsure as he'd ever been in his entire life.
Josh sighed quietly, leaning forward slightly and putting the heel of his hand against his forehead as he gripped at his hair a bit, shaking horribly. "Just g-go," he stuttered, unable to get his brain to connect the words he needed to say to his mouth as quickly or coherently as he wanted to. "Take what you...what you want and go."
"No, now I have to fucking do something with you, you asshole. You weren't supposed to come home and find me here. Why couldn't you have just stuck to your goddamn routine? I should have had at least another hour. I coulda done what I needed to do and gotten away with this shit, but no. You just had to be a fuckin' jerkoff and come the fuck home. I can't just leave you here." The stranger made a quick move that Josh couldn't follow with his eyes. The world was still rotating and he was so much dizzier than he'd been even minutes earlier that he thought he would throw up again for sure, if he had anything left in his body.
Josh tried to take several deep breaths just to calm the nausea, if nothing else, but all he could do was wheeze after being kicked in both the chest and the stomach. Those goddamn flashes of light behind his eyes were back as he struggled to draw in air. Maybe he was dying. It felt like what he imagined death could be. It was all almost more than he could take, and dying might be a welcome change just to avoid any more of the abuse. "Just go," the singer panted, repeating the request as he dropped a hand to the floor to avoid collapsing completely.
The stranger reached out and backhanded Josh across the mouth as hard as it seemed like he could. The blond raggedly drew in a breath at the strike and felt a warm trickle of blood running down his jaw. His lower lip had been split wide open against his front teeth and all he could do was use the sleeve covering his free arm to uselessly dab at it. "Please go," Josh begged for the third time, slowly lowering his arm back down away from his face.
Another crack of the man's hand against Josh's face felt like a broken nose and he went down for good that time. That was the final straw, and he could feel the sticky blood that already covered his face as well as the thick liquid as it dripped down the back of his throat causing him to cough, gurgling, gagging and spraying a fine crimson mist across the wall in front of him.
"Maybe... Hm...maybe I'll just kill you. That would solve my problem, wouldn't it," he said matter-of-factly, rather than questioning the potential solution. The man's boots fell heavily on the floor as he took two steps to his right, lifting his arm. The move that Josh had missed earlier became obvious right away. Josh would have kicked himself for not noticing that if he wasn't already ironically getting his ass handed to him. But now, the click of the safety and the resounding noise of metal on metal as the man cocked the pistol were the only things that broke through the panic.
"Don't...," Josh slurred, unable to continue to vocalize the rest of his thought. He was unsure whether his inability to speak properly was due to some kind of fun new brain injury he couldn't afford to have, the distress he was in, a broken jaw, or something even worse. His vision was dimming drastically and he didn't think he had strength enough to move. If this man decided to kill him, that was it. He was a fucking sitting duck and there would be no fanfare ending.
"Say goodbye, rockstar," the stranger threatened, raising the gun a little higher, taking better aim at the singer.
Josh had tried to make himself as small as possible by pulling his knees up to his chest and tucking his head down, but he couldn't breathe. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong, but his main priority was getting out of all of this alive, so he did his best to try to take slow shallow breaths...until he looked up and saw the silver metal object inches from his body. The man was pointing it directly at him and he knew he didn't have a prayer of surviving if he didn't do something to help himself.
Twisting his body, Josh summoned energy that he didn't quite have and tried to drag himself across the floor, recoiling and fighting against the inability to properly draw in oxygen. He'd only managed to pull himself several inches away before the man in black spoke again. "That's it, I'm fucking done with you and this shit," the stranger declared coldly.
"No!" Josh huffed, falling back down to the floor and ducking his head again while simultaneously flinging his arm across his face. As if that would stop a any projectile at point-blank range. Seconds later, white-hot pain tore through his upper body and the world went dark. He never heard the bullet.