Nyx’s Journal: Jan. 17
Posted on March 18th, 2010 by desert ratPosted in Chronicles, prose | No Comments »
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.
There will be two Chronicles posts close together this week (Tues/
What’s even more unbelievable, is how I got away. I’m starting to wonder if it really happened – and I was there.
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.
Seems we had some stainless steel rats chewing on the wires for a while there. Back online now.


