The Mimosa Effect 2

This whole paranoia thing is starting to wear thin, and I’ve only been at it for a couple of days.  I couldn’t stay at the apartment last night.  Every time I jumped at some stray noise, Zoë would look at me like I was clearly going insane – either that, or I’d turned into some kind of crack-head junkie.  Sleep was out of the question.   Couldn’t go to the police, not with a whacked out story like that.  Hell, I wouldn’t believe me. 

So here I sit, in a dingy west-side hotel room, looking out at the neon sign flashing me from the roof of the strip joint across the street.   I brought the phone and the laptop, but I’ve been avoiding turning them on.  Stupid, I know.  I’m pretty sure the phone doesn’t need to be turned on for them to track it.  I’d have to yank the batteries, disable the computer’s wireless connection – make both machines essentially useless, dead weight.   Not that the phone’s much good right now.  Who would I call?

–

Had a bad moment there, when someone knocked on the door.  Turned out to be the janitor, wanting to know if he could come in to fix the light in the bathroom.  I couldn’t help hovering around him the whole time he was here, wondering if he was some kind of plant, sent to keep an eye on me.  Sounds totally moronic now, in hind sight.  After he’d left, I decided I was being a little over-the-top in the suspicion department.  I took a chance and ordered a pizza (under an assumed name, of course, ditto the hotel room). 

The laptop didn’t explode when I opened it.  I got online fine.  Nothing seems to be acting buggy, no weird clicks on the phone.  Although I don’t know if it does that on cell phones, anyhow.  There were two messages waiting for me (yeah, I’m that popular).  Zoë, reminding me the rent was due at the end of the month (in case I was planning on high-tailing it out of the country), and one from some anonymous Hotmail account.  Would have nuked it as spam, except that the header read: “CASEY CARLYSLE: READ THIS!”  All caps – always the sign of a sane, stable individual.   Not many people know my full name; fewer still have my email address.  It’s hard work, staying under the radar in the digital age, but I thought I’d mostly managed it.  Until now. 

The message managed to be both short and to the point, and maddeningly vague.  It said: “I’ve got your boy.  You want answers, meet us at”… followed by what looked like a meaningless string of numbers.  As I stared at it, trying to figure it out (too long to be co-ordinates, definitely not a phone number), the numbers flickered, then morphed into what looked like some kind of machine code, before resolving into a time, date and address.  I’ve never seen script like that embedded in an email before – unless you count cheesy eighties sci-fi movies.  I grabbed the courtesy hotel notepad from the bedside table and scribbled down the info, in case the next step had it turning back into gibberish.  I finished just in time to see my screen go blank. 

When I re-booted, not only was the message gone, but the email program had stopped working, and the internal modem seemed to be fried.  There was a new notepad file sitting on my desktop, that opened as soon as I moused over it.   It read: “Sorry.  Will explain later.”

Who the hell is this guy?  And what does he mean, “your boy”?  Not “the guy you’re looking for”, or a name.  It’s like he assumed we were in a relationship.  If he means who I think he means.  Which is ridiculous, considering we’ve never met face-to-face.  Dozer probably doesn’t even know I exist.  But this guy does.  I don’t know why I’m so sure it’s a guy, but for some reason the whole thing has loser geek hacking from the safety of his mom’s basement written all over it.  Either that, or he’s one of those truly crazy people, who spend all their time creating websites to show that there really are aliens living on the moon, and they’ve already infiltrated our earth government.  Either way, it can’t be a good thing.

Oh, and the time?  Tomorrow night, exactly 24 hours from when I first opened the email.  As if he knew exactly when I’d find it.  Or maybe I really have lost it, and I’m imagining all of this.  Either way, I’ve got 24 hours to try and prepare for a situation where everything aside from the geographical location is a completely unknown entity.  I’d say wish me luck, but aside from the fact that you’d have to be reading this long after the fact, I don’t want to jinx it.

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There will be two Chronicles posts close together this week (Tues/Wed. Thurs.*), then we’ll be skipping ahead to next Wed. (author doin’ the road trip thing this weekend). After that things should be back on schedule.

Flash forward to two days ago. I made the mistake of going for a walk, on a sunny day, alone. It’s not that sunlight triggers it, so much as sunny days make me happy. The brightness and heat tickle my hind-brain and tell me I should be basking on a rock somewhere, forgetting the cares of the world.

Worse still, I went walking on East street, when the Saturday farmer’s market was in full swing. In my defence, I had every intention of getting into something dangerous. The East street market is a pickpocket’s dream come true, even in January, when the produce mostly consists of used books, bad folk art and home-made pies. It may be bereft of tourists this time of year, but little old ladies, soccer moms and clueless hipsters abound. Then there’s the local B&E ring who like to use market days as a convenient distraction.

Usually Saturdays on East street were good for at least one innocent-plus-thug encounter, and the ensuing rescue by an anonymous stranger – which, up to that point, I’d always managed without either the perpetrator or the rescuee ever getting a good look at my face.

But on that day, the neighbourhood seemed to have signed some universal peace treaty. I didn’t see so much as a heated argument break out. I should have taken all the excessively mellow vibes as a warning sign, but I didn’t. One minute I was watching the light turn green, then something caught my eye – a bird, maybe – and I was looking up into this deep blue sky, whisps of cloud like coffee foam swirled across it, turning into a slow-motion whirlpool.

Next thing I know, I’m sitting in a parking lot somewhere, back to a wall, head between my knees, someone talking a mile a minute beside me. My ears were ringing, like they do after a loud thunderclap, and for some reason I was thinking that there should be broken glass everywhere, and people running, but the parking lot is empty except for me, some parked cars, and Trevor.

Trevor was looking, if possible, even more squirrelly than ever – hair stuck out every which way like he made a habit of trying to pull it out of his head, hands in constant motion, eyes trying to look everywhere at once. He hadn’t lost the shoulder twitch.

Trev used to hang with us back in the day, before the last of his marbles skittered free. It started with him following us around like a kid brother, probably because we were the only ones who didn’t tell him to get lost. He always had a camera with him. Even the other AV geeks thought he was a weirdo. It was his idea to bring the video camera along, the first time we jumped off the Kitchitaw Bridge.

One summer Trev went off to join Greenpeace. See the world from the point of view of a whaling-boat-ramming Zodiac, kind of deal. We never saw him again. At least, not the Trevor we knew. We thought he’d come back a long-haired, vegan hippie freak with a steady smoking habit. Instead, what came back was this crazy, wild-eyed conspiracy nut claiming to be Trevor, who seemed to have forgotten how to shave or wash. No one knows what happened to him out on the open ocean, or if he even made it to the local Greenpeace headquarters, for that matter. Nothing he’s said since that fateful return has made any more sense than a dog barking.

Now here he was, sitting beside me, talking about black helicopters and tooth implants, like I’d been listening all along.

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*March 17 update: Long gig tonight; next installment will be up by Thurs. p.m.

Theme: Penultimate

Words/Phrases:
green
full
swimming
traces

Sorry it’s late this week, life got in the way. This will be the second-last Sat. Scribes post for the forseeable future. After next week’s, the writing prompts will be going on hiatus for a while. You can, as always, feel free to use any of the old prompts (from this site or the old Scribes site) if you need that extra little bit of inpiration to get you going.

New to Saturday Scribes? Guidelines can be found here.

…has taken over my life (or at least, big chunks of it).  The next Nyx & Dozer installment and the Saturday Scribes prompts will be posted sometime between Sunday and Monday this week. 

Eventually we’ll have furniture in the new room.  For now, there are many, many lots of piles of paper, all neatly organized, awaiting the next phase. (They’ll be waiting for a while… I have fun things to attend to, tonight and tomorrow afternoon.  Girl’s gotta take a break sometime!)

What’s even more unbelievable, is how I got away.  I’m starting to wonder if it really happened – and I was there.

When HeroNo1’s henchmen couldn’t get the info they wanted out of me, they decided they needed to take me to see No.1 himself.  Never mind how many times, and in how many ways, I tried to tell them that I had no clue what the hell they were talking about.  Maybe they thought I was being brave.  To tell the truth, after three days of the worst good-cop, bad-cop parody ever, I was starting to wish they’d just torture me and get it over with.

At least the back seat of the giant black boat they insisted on calling a car was more comfortable than the creaky old cot that smelled like moth-balls and cat pee.  I was getting more than a little tired of being tied up, but it could have been a lot worse.  They could have followed true movie protocol and tossed me into the trunk.  As it was, I had the back seat to myself, and eventually managed to squirm around into a mostly-upright seated position – just in time to get thrown against the window as the car swerved wildly to the left.

It happened so quickly, I had to replay what I’d seen in my head to make sense of it.  Amazing how slowly time crawls by when the car you’re in is careening off the road towards a bus stop full of people.

They had swerved to avoid a kid who was standing in the middle of the road.  Not walking, not running, just standing there.  The snapshot of it was crystal clear on the back of my eyelids.  The kid had his eyes closed, his face raised towards the sky, as if basking in the mid-day sun.  He wore a black T-shirt over a grey long-sleeved shirt, as if he’d temporarily forgotten it was winter.  I knew that face.  It had been staring back at me from my computer screen for days.  And he was wearing the same stupid back-turned ball-cap he’d had on the day he broke into the safe.  My safe.

Then we were smashing through metal and glass, and people were screaming, and then everything stopped really suddenly.  It took me a while to realize it wasn’t me that was upside-down, but the car.  Took a bit longer to realize that the wall that had stopped us was attached to the sprawling brick edifice we in these parts like to call City Hall. 

Considering how the two thugs in front weren’t doing much at that point besides groaning and twitching, it seemed like a good opportunity to leave.

After a few enthusiastic blows with both feet, I came to the conclusion that it was a lot harder than it looks to kick open a locked car door.  I twisted around so my bound hands could reach the lock, and pried it up, then managed to contort myself enough to reach the door handle – after which I kind of tumbled ungracefully out the door onto the ground.  Everyone around me was in full panic mode, far too busy running around and yelling to notice me.  The broken glass of the car windows provided another moment of serendipity too good to pass up.  I nicked my wrists a few times cutting through the rope, but it finally fell away and my arms swung free.  You think pins and needles from sitting cross-legged too long are bad, try hours spent with your arms wrenched behind your back. 

I looked around once before I ran, making a mental note of the only two things that seemed worth registering: First, there were no bodies littered around the car, which hopefully meant that the folks at the bus stop had seen us coming, and got out of the way in time.  Second, the kid was nowhere to be seen.

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Will Nyx & Dozer finally meet face to face? Find out in episode 13!
(Which will be posted on Thursday this week. Blame the cats, they had us pinned down.)

It was like being taken over by some kind of alien presence. I felt my legs pushing off, my feet leaving the hard surface. My body launched itself forward, into a front flip, the kind we always did off the towers at the pool. I felt the wind catch my open jacket, spreading out like wings. I landed rolling, ending in that classic mutant hero stance, crouched down, feet flat on the ground, one hand outstretched, the fingertips of the other resting lightly on the pavement, the coat-wings settling at my side. I hoped the thud my boots made on impact hid the sharp crack that shot up my left ankle into my shin.

I stood up slowly, ignoring the pulsing hot white spike of pain my left leg seemed impaled on. The dog was behind me, cowering next to the trashcans. The thugs were in front of me, caught in a comic frozen tableau, mouths hanging open. I brushed the dust from my jeans, put on my best tough-guy glower, and pulled my new butterfly knife from my pocket, flipping it open. First time I’d managed it, without fumbling the damn thing.

“I think you might want to leave now,” I said.

The Cro-Magnons looked at each other, then back at me. They shook themselves out of their stunned stupour, attempting to regain that casual, menacing slouch that all bullies spend hours perfecting.

The tallest one shrugged, curled his peach-fuzz-stained upper lip, and twitched his head sideways to spit on the ground. “Yeah, whatever. Freak.”

The other two chuckled grimly, then they turned around and left, kicking viciously at garbage bags and stacked up shipping pallets on their way. The leaving part was a really good thing, because I would have been completely useless in a knife fight – or any real fight, for that matter.

I waited until they’d turned the corner, then let myself collapse, the post-adrenaline-rush shudders taking over. The clanking, clattering sound in the background turned out to be Reeve, shinnying down the drainpipe in record time.

“Dude,” He said, breathless. “That was epic!”

I would have answered him, but the pain lancing through my leg was making me feel kind of sick. The world seemed all swimmy and unreal, like the buildings beside us were just cardboard cut-outs.

Reeve went on for at least a minute about how awesome the whole thing had been, before he realized I wasn’t moving, or saying anything.

“Hey man, you okay?” Belatedly, to say the least.

I managed to grind out a few words from behind gritted teeth. They went something like, “Forget the Chinese food. First we get the dog to the vet. Then we get me to the hospital.”

Reeve shook his head, blinked, then nodded. I think he’d finally realized it was a miracle me and the dog were still alive.

“Usual rules?” By which he meant, by taxi (or borrowed car, if the cab wouldn’t take the dog), no calls home, the usual cover-up story.

All I could do was nod back. The dog had slunk forward a little, and was sniffing my hand. Reeve grinned down at me.

“Sounds like a plan,” he said.

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Theme: Impossible Things

Words/Phrases:
rolling
expanse
discover
condemned

New to Saturday Scribes? Guidelines can be found here.

Seems we had some stainless steel rats chewing on the wires for a while there.  Back online now.

—

Back from another unscheduled break, helping with laundry. Apparently folding sheets is easier with two people, although I think my mom was hoping to weasel some kind of confession out of me. She knows I’m up to something, just not what, with who, or how serious it is. I thought she’d stopped being interested in what I did, given up maybe. Not sure what it was that tipped her off this time. Going to have to be more careful from here on in.

The three-legged dog was in the alley out back of Ed’s Car Wash and Billiards Room. Me and Reeve were on the roof. We’d recently discovered the essential difference between doing back flips on a trampoline, and doing them off a wall onto concrete. Reeve was still whining about his dislocated shoulder (we tried to fix it they way they do it in the movies, which didn’t quite work), and I was discovering a new ring of hell, or a particularly perverse Murphy’s law. Which is, as soon as the cast is set, is when your wrist starts itching. Pencils are too short, almost everything else is too thick. Reeve suggested chopsticks, but neither of us had any kicking around. We were on our way to pick up some Chinese (Minh’s on East and Vine is the cheapest, and fast when you’re in a hurry). We’d spent some time messing around on ledges and fire escapes, and were contemplating the sheer drop into the alley, wondering whether the rusted old drainpipe bolted to the bricks would hold our weight.

The dog ran into the alley, hunched and whimpering. Only two of its legs seemed to be working right, one sort of dragged. How it managed to move that fast on two and a half legs I’ll never know. It was followed a few seconds later by some throwbacks from the Neanderthal age, who seemed to find it funny that the dog couldn’t dodge the bottles and cans they were throwing at it. What would’ve been funnier, is if they’d tripped over their ridiculously oversized baggy pants and drowned in one of the rank-looking puddles by the trash cans. You could smell the reek of cheap cigarettes, bad pot and Johnnie Walker two stories up.

You know those moments, when the world kind of stops, and everything inside you slows down, and you imagine a million scenarios inside a single second? This wasn’t one of those times. I didn’t think about what I was doing at all. I’d practiced this kind of thing a hundred times, hadn’t cracked my skull open yet.

It was time to fly.

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…for a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. (If you hear a drawn-out high-pitched tone while reading this, it’s only in your head.)

Due to various unforeseen circumstances (which may or may not involve bug-eyed telepathic aliens and a steel glove that can resurrect the dead), this blog is being temporarily put on hold. We’ll resume normal programming on Wednesday, March 3rd, with the next installment of the Nyx & Dozer chronicles.

To our two or three loyal viewers, thanks for sticking it out. We’ll see you again in four days’ time (if the world doesn’t get sucked into a space-time vortex loop between now and then).

p.s. – To K: We left some blueberry pancakes on your back porch, but we think the orange stomach that walks like a cat may have gotten to them first. Better luck next time!