Patrick’s eyes were wide and staring, and his mouth had formed an O. Without a word, he held out his phone to us. A video was playing of an obviously dead, furry alien being loaded into a chest freezer while an off-screen female voice made a comment about mobsters.

“Okay, but you took that video,” Nat said. “What’s the—?”

“This is on Twitter,” Patrick said, his voice shaking.

I gave him a look of disbelief. “You didn’t … ”

Patrick screwed up his face. “Of course I didn’t. TimJay666 did.”

“And that would be … ”

“The shrimp. Timothy J. Jordan. My soon to be very, very dead little brother.”

“But how?” Nat said.

Patrick sighed. “He got into my private folders once before on the family cloud storage. I’ve changed my password several times since, but I’ve always wondered if he had a hack of some kind to get it in the first place. Looks like the answer’s yes.”

“Has he posted anything else?”

Patrick poked at his phone for several moments. “Doesn’t look like it. Not on Twitter, anyway.” He poked some more, then put the phone to his ear and walked to the other end of the barn.

I fired up Twitter and did a search. I quickly found the post and watched the attachment. Fortunately, it was only an excerpt. Nothing more than a comment from Patrick about the body being heavy, my response, and Nat’s question about putting it in a chest freezer. And a shot of the corpse as it was being tossed into the freezer, of course. But there was no way to identify the voices or the location of the video, unless you knew the people speaking.

Patrick’s voice rose in anger from across the barn—not quite enough to make out entire sentences, although individual words sometimes floated above the general noise level. And one phrase, repeated several times: “fucking dead.”

Two minutes later, Patrick came stomping back across the barn. His expression was still one of rage, his complexion flushed. “He’s going to take it down. I gave him one minute, and told him I would knock a tooth out of his face for every extra minute.”

Nat chortled. “And he bought it?”

“I meant it, Nat. I’m pretty sure he could hear that in my voice. I haven’t beat up the little prick since I was fourteen, but I think he got that I was serious. I’m still going to have a very pointed conversation with him later.”

I looked down at my phone just as the post from TimJay666 changed to ‘This video is no longer available.’

“It’s down,” I said. “I hope it stays down.”

Patrick’s only reply was a cold, angry glare that I admitted to myself didn’t bode well for Tim’s future.

“We have to get rid of the freezer,” Nat said.