Authors: Mark Leslie
Having been pricked by poppies hundreds of times over the years, Scott rubbed at his shoulder, confused. His shoulder hurt far more than any poppy stabbing he’d ever experienced before.
“What were you doing leaning so close to me?” Scott asked, still rubbing his shoulder, considering taking the long sleeve shirt he had been sleeping in to see if he was bleeding. But the subtle puffs of his breath in the air reminded him of the intense cold, a cold that was already starting to seep in now that he had been sitting up and out of the cocoon of his sleeping bad.
Strange
, he thought,
that the poppy could poke through not only my shirt, but also my sleeping bag
.
“The flashlight was stuck between the mattress and the canvas wall,” his father said. “I had to lean in really far to get ahold of it. Looks like I really stabbed you good.”
“You did that all right,” Scott said.
“Sorry.” Lionel closed the tackle box and shoved it under the bench desk he was sitting at, in the small kitchen area of the pop-up trailer. “Well since you’re up, we should get out on the lake. It’s almost five-thirty.”
Today
After hustling quickly into the nurse’s room on the second floor of Digi-Life’s Liberty Village office, Scott slowly closed the door behind them, careful to ensure the latch didn’t click too loudly. Then he carefully engaged the lock before turning back to Gary.
His friend had a concerned look on his face.
“You’re freaking me out, Scotty,” Gary said. “What’s going on here?”
“I wish I knew,” Scott said. “I’m really not sure what is going on or why it is happening, but Herb is trying to kill me.”
“Herb Canter?”
“Yeah.”
Gary’s face took on an odd expression, a look Scott recognized immediately – it was the one people normally reserved for when a crazy person cornered them on the street or in a shopping mall. It was a combination of a subtle “deer in the headlights” lift to the eyes combined with the quick eye-darting that suggested the person, feeling backed into a corner, was looking for any opportunity to escape the situation. There was no fight or flight about this; it was all pure flight, because they prey understood that there was no rational way of defeating this foe in the “hand to hand” combat of normal socially acceptable conversion. No, the crazy person was following a specific agenda, performing a script that nobody else had access to, and would take you down the pre-determined path they controlled entirely. Usually, the crazy person, completely oblivious to normal social convention, would never pick up on the subtle nature of the terrified and cornered person’s eyes; they would, if they even noticed anything much in the face of the person they were speaking to, in the bull-headed following of their precious script, would likely have interpreted the wide-eyed look to be that of genuine and unabashed interest.
That is what the look on Gary’s face told Scott.
“I’m not crazy,” he said, doing his best to speak in a calm and rational voice. He knew, having put Gary into that ‘Oh no, I’m speaking with a person who has lost their marbles’ state, that it would be difficult to navigate without everything sounding a little bit crazy to him.
“I was working at my desk on the fourth floor,” Scott said, “when Herb called me in to his office. He at first seemed normal, but there was a strange glazed look on his face, and a very subtle almost robotic tone to his speech.
“I didn’t think much about it at first. I mean, it is still early, for all I knew, Herb hadn’t had his morning cup of coffee and was still working off one too many the night before.
“But he tells me to close the office door, and the next thing I know he’s taking a shot at my head.”
“He what?”
“He fired a bullet at my head.”
“With a gun?”
“Yeah, a handgun of some sort.”
“There’s no way. I would have heard it. Those things are loud.”
“It must have had some sort of muffler or silencer on it, because it didn’t make a loud noise, just a strange sound. Because I had my back turned, I thought the sound was Herb smacking a thick plastic ruler down hard on his desk – you know how as a student you used to hold it down firm with one hand, but with the other hand, slowly pry and bend the ruler back so it would snap down hard against the desk.
That
is exactly what it sounded like.
“So there I am, shocked by the sudden hole punched through the drywall beside me and the dust and smoke, when I hear this sound. I turn and duck at the same time, and see Herb is holding a gun.”
“No way,”
“Yeah, and he says, in this strange, robotic voice: ‘
You won’t get away. You cannot evade us.’
”
“Us?”
“Yeah. So I figure Herb has lost it, worked way too many sixteen hour days. I mean, my work is pretty solid, so there’s no way it was a performance issue.”
Gary issued a nervous laugh into the room.
“But I figure he’s whacked. So I duck down and half-crawl half run out of the room, run around the corner, eager to get the hell away from there, when I see this security guard coming down the hall toward me.
“Safe, I figure. I’m safe now.
“But do you know what he says to me when I tell him about Herb?”
“What?”
“He says: ‘
You won’t get away. You cannot evade us
.’ In that same robotic tone. As his eyes are just as glazed as Herb’s were.
“No!”
“Yeah. I figure, holy crap, I’m in a bad sci-fi thriller now. But I know, immediately, that I’m toast, so I run from the guard. Soon enough both Herb and the guard are after me, repeating that line again and again.”
Scott then proceeded to explain the rest of the story to Gary. As he told the tale, he injected bits of humor into it, like he had about the work performance joke when Herb shot at him. Given their jovial relationship and the way they liked to make fun cracks at one another, he knew Gary would realize he wasn’t crazy if he told the story, as unbelievable as it was, with a bit of a sense of consistency for their relationship. Gary was an analytical person, he knew – he would believe even a difficult to accept story if all of the elements that, otherwise, made complete sense, lined up.
So, though Scott didn’t have all that much skill as a conversationalist, being a hacker, someone used to guiding a program through logical steps; particularly logical steps that, while deviating from the original outline and intent of the program, still seemed normal and not at all out of place, was just part for the course.
“Do you think it’s just the two of them?” Gary asked, when he got to the point of bumping in to his friend on the second floor. “Or could there be more. I mean,” he pulled out his mobile phone and they both glanced down at it, “should we call 9-1-1?”
A sound outside the door, the scuffle of footsteps, startled them both.
Thirty Years Earlier
“A lock, Dad?” Scotty had said, with the perfectly blended inflection of despise mixed with the emboldened question of authority that one expects from virtually any fourteen year old.
“Fishing lures are expensive,” his father replied without turning his back.
Lionel Desmond had been sitting at his workbench and puttering with one of the gigs with a pair of needle-nose pliers and a stretch of fishing line when his son, moping around from room to room, bored during the March break, stood behind his father and watched him work. Scotty had been there a few minutes, curious to see what his father had been doing, but bored with being bored, and noticed, not for the first time, that the tackle box sitting on the right hand side of his father’s workshop bench had a small lock affixed to it.
“People steal fishing lures?” the tone of his voice suggested he was speaking with an idiot. It was a tone that had come natural, and often, from the young man, and not just when speaking to his father, but when speaking to virtually anybody. Not that, unless he was called upon in school, he spoke much.
Mr. Prescott, his computer teacher, might have been the only person Scotty regularly spoke with where he didn’t use that tone. Heck, Prescott might have been the only person Scotty would have considered a friend.
“Yes,” Lionel said. “They do. People steal fishing lures all the time,”
“Losers,” Scotty huffed.
“I have close to eight hundred dollars of lures and other fishing accoutrements in this box.”
“Eight hundred?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you made a lot of the lures yourself.”
“I do. But even the parts can cost a lot of money.”
“Really?”
For the first time in months, the tone in Scotty’s voice changed, and Lionel Desmond immediately sensed it. The query wasn’t layered with contempt and ire; it was a genuine element of interest and intrigue.
Lionel turned from what he was doing and looked his son in the eyes. It had been years since Scotty had taken any sort of interest in anything his father had to say. He sat a bit more straight on the stool in front of his workbench, his shoulders back and his check poking out.
“Yes. Have a look at this one here. I special ordered it through Ramako’s in Sudbury. It cost me about one hundred and sixty bucks. I took this painted agile crankbait, combined it with a monster grub I ordered through eBay and added my own layers of reflective tri-color paints. The total cost comes to just over three hundred."
“Wow.”
“I know. Who would have thought fishing could be such an expensive hobby.”
The temporary lifting of the bile in Scott’s voice fled, as he considered something and again challenged his father with another question.
“So people might break into your truck and steal the tackle box. Okay, I get that. But why do you keep it locked when it’s in the house? It’s not like Mom or I would even care to peek inside.”
Lionel Desmond’s shoulders sank back down a little as he realized the interest and lack of despise was just a fleeting thing.
“It’s just a habit, I suppose,” he said.
Today
The door handle to the first aid room turned. First left, then right. Something, most likely a shoulder, bumped up against the door. But it was locked, and wasn’t going to budge.
Scott raised a single finger and placed it vertically against his pursed lips.
Gary shook his head, the look on his face saying,
Are you nuts? Do you think I’d be stupid enough to make any sort of noise?
The door handle turned, one more time.
The vent immediately above the door suddenly came on, sending down a stifling blast of head right onto Scott’s forehead, the noise and warmth startling him so much that he almost let out an audible yelp.
As he watched the doorknob turn, he flashed back to one of many scenes from
The Walking Dead
, an AMC television program that he had gotten hooked on a few years back. Set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been over-run with some sort of zombie virus, a few remaining survivors do their best to stay alive, trying to stay one step ahead of the mindless flesh-eating resurrected dead, known by the main characters as “walkers” but also trying not to get killed by the other survivors.
It was in one of the very first episodes that the main character, Rick, who had been in a coma while the world had been going to hell, was taken in by a pair of strangers, a father and son team. In the night, the time when the zombies were most active, they had stood near the front door to their house, panicked looks in their eyes as a zombie on the other side of the door tried their door.
As Scott watched the knob turn, he couldn’t help but flash back to that episode. Although, admittedly, thought there were no zombies outside the door, there was something much worse. One of the two men who had been trying to kill him.
That was far worse than any imagined creature on a network television program.
Sweat leaked down Scott’s brow and into his eyes. He couldn’t be bothered to try to wipe it away.
Damn heating in this building
, Scott thought, realizing that being closed in with another person and having the heat pumped in like that was extremely uncomfortable. Of course, the fact Scott had been running didn’t help matters; not to mention the danger he had been running from.
No, not
running
.
Evading
.
The words of both Herb and the security guard echoed in his head.
You cannot evade us
.
The knob stopped turning and the footsteps shuffled away.
Scott reached up, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and looked back at Gary, who was quietly staring back. He hadn’t bothered to wipe the sweat from his own eyes.
The footsteps moved to the second door down this short hallway, to the supply closet, a room the same size as the first aid room; a six by twelve foot room, this one filled with various office supplies – paper, pens, folders, whiteboard markers, and other office paraphernalia. Scott knew the office was kept locked before nine and after five in order to maintain tighter control on what Digi-Life termed “unnecessary shrink” – employees taking additional office supplies for use, not in the office, but in their homes, as part of their children’s school supplies or for other non-work related needs.
Scott and Gary remained quiet as they listened, imagining the person was trying the supply room door; it too being locked.
Then the footsteps shuffled off back towards the kitchen area.
Seconds later, a second pair of footsteps could be heard approaching to join the first pair. No voices, just the footsteps moving in unison.
Eerie
, Scott bemused.
Ho
w very much like zombies
. He shook his head.
He had imagined that Herb and the security guard, if that’s who these two were outside the door, had split up and each taken a different path on the second floor. With one of them taking the hallway to the left, and the other to the right, they would end up coming at Scott either of the two ways he might have run.