Graham

“The money is gone, Graham. Solaris took it all back when they folded and returned it to Eclipse.”

Returned it. Returned. It.

They…

Returned it.

Returned… Reeeetuuurned…

It.

Returned the money.

The words echoed in my head long enough for Skyler to notice that I’d been silent for multiple seconds.

“Graham?” she said, the sound barely passing through my ears.

“They returned it.”

“Yes.”

“Returned the money.”

“Yes.”

“To Solaris?”

“No, to Eclipse.”

“To Eclipse.”

“Yes!”

“And… it’s gone.”

“Y—” I hung up and set my phone on the dirt I was lying on.

“What was that about?” Ahmad asked.

The words that came out of my phone were finally starting to make sense in my head. I felt a little nauseous at first, then angry, then furious, then severely irritated, then depressed, then achingly tired.

I picked up my phone again and tossed it out in front of me. “It’s all on us now.”

Our whole process of locating the real estate QAnon guru had already been completed half an hour ago, primarily thanks to Korey’s landlord Daniel being so quickly accommodating to us robbing his estranged father of the $900,000 he was given, and his house sitting less than an hour away in the middle of a cornfield. Now here we are, five people perched on a dry grass hill a few hundred feet out like a pack of snipers spying on a dusty oversized WWII-era halfway-reclaimed-by-nature wooden shitshack, also known as his house.

Percy, Adrian, Eliza, and Ahmad were all casually sitting down like we were having a picnic while I was down in the dirt, making the only effort to appear stealthy since, you know, this guy is fucking QAnon and isn’t going to think a group of people on a nearby hill is anything other than government spies. The fact that I’m the only one who thinks this is a good idea when we have a logistical veteran like Eliza on our team was insane to me.

“Yo, she’s calling again,” Ahmad said, looking at my phone on the ground.

“You answer it.”

Ahmad scooted across the ground and tapped the screen to answer the call. “Sup.”

“Graham!” Skyler yelled from the speakerphone.

“Yeah,” I dully replied.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“That we need to find three and a half million dollars under a QAnon nut’s mattress in rural Medina? Yeah, got that loud and clear.”

“Dude, what are we going to do?”

“Find three and a half million dollars under a QAnon nut’s mattress in rural Medina, obviously.”

“Graham, we can’t afford to screw this up.”

“Pfft, we’ll be able to afford anything once I find that three and a half million dollars under a QAnon nut’s mattress in rural Medina.”

“Please take this seriously.”

“That won’t get us the three and a half million dollars under the QAnon nut’s mattress any faster. Let me do my job.”

I motioned for Ahmad to hang up the call, but he hesitated when Skyler kept talking.

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know, read a book,” I said while continuing to motion at Ahmad. He just kept looking at me, confused. “Go to Cedar Point, visit the beach. Your part of the job is over. But if it’s money you’re so concerned about, rob a bank. Rob a liquor store, rob a gas station, rob a—” I started swinging my arm around at Ahmad, who was still failing to heed my command. “Dammit, rob a fucking… I don’t know. Just….”

I leaped over to my phone and hung up the call. “What the hell did you think flailing my arms at my phone was supposed to mean?” I told Ahmad.

“You were still talking, dude! I didn’t know what you were doing. If you hang up mid-sentence, you’re just gonna get called back again.”

“Yeah, but then I can just ignore the call and say my phone died. Easy fix.”

“Do you do that often?”

“It doesn’t—it’s not important. We have a house to surveil, so let’s… surveil.” I crawled back into my laying position and grabbed my binoculars.

3:11. The guy’s pickup truck is still sitting pretty in his fenced-off driveway, but all the windows are covered, so I can’t see if he’s home. I can see a faint glimmer in his porch light, but the broad daylight makes it impossible to be sure. And sunset is gonna be at 5:00. Awesome.

“Hey, how long are we waiting here?” Percy asked.

“However long we need to,” Eliza replied.

“But, like… does this require all five of us? I just don’t like the idea of sitting on a hill for several hours when our time is this short. A couple of us could be out doing something else right now.”

“Like what?” I said. “All the scattered Solaris money is gone, so that’s my whole job gone in a puff of smoke. There isn’t shit else we can do that would be even remotely useful.”

She sighed. “Eclipse already retrieved a bunch of the money they lost, yet they’re still hounding us to pay them back. This is bullshit.”

“It’s either that or certain death. Pick and choose your opinions carefully here.”

The group went back to silent from there. There was the sound of the wind to fill the dead air, along with the occasional wave of dust to blow in someone’s face, and that was it. To put it mildly, it got boring fast.

Ahmad broke first. He jumped off the ground, said, “This hill sucks ass, I’m getting a chair,” then walked down to the car sitting beside the road behind us. He came back a minute later, slapped down a lawn chair facing the group, and fell back on it. Ahmad stared me directly in the eyes, seemingly basking in superiority as I was lying flat on the ground while he was comfortable in a chair.

Another quiet minute passed. I remained fixated on the house in the hope of any sign of the owner. Other than his American flag flapping in the wind, there was no movement.

“What are we waiting for?” Percy continued. “He doesn’t plan on going grocery shopping, is he?”

“We don’t even know if he’s there,” I also continued. “And I for one am not eager to go find out.”

“And if he comes back and doesn’t leave?”

“He has to leave eventually. Unless he smuggles his food from the cornfield he’s surrounded by, in which case we call the police.”

“We’re on the clock here, we can’t just wait for that to happen.”

“Of course we can. There’s still less than 24 hours until the exchange, and 24 hours is a long time to not leave your house.”

“I’m not sitting here for 24 hours.”

“Hey, car’s right there, town’s down that way. Go buy some M&Ms and a smoothie if you want, nobody’s stopping you.”

“Graham, this is stupid.”

“Would you rather walk up to his doorstep selling Girl Scout cookies and get obliterated with a shotgun? I mean, nothing’s off the table here.”

Percy groaned and fell silent once again—for about five minutes.

“What if I just go walking by his house? I’m not on his property or interacting with him at all, I just walk down the street and peek at the house, then come back. That’s it.”

“That is gonna be a long walk,” Eliza responded. “If you go down the hill and into the street, he will most likely notice that. He will also notice if you go back up the hill after passing. Both cases, our cover is blown.”

“We’re on a hill in plain view, how could our cover be any more blown?”

“The point of this is to look natural. Walking down a hill, strolling down a highway, then walking back up the hill is not natural.”

I cut back. “And this is QAnon we’re dealing with. He probably already thinks you people are agents for the deep state sent to snipe him when he pokes his head out. But no, don’t hide on the ground out of view like I am, that would be too suspicious if he could see us. Which he can’t.”

“There is no way you could know that.”

“We’re hundreds of feet away! He would—goddammit, I’m not doing this. I’m the one actually spying here, do whatever the hell you want.”

I resumed my surveillance of the house.

…

Goddammit. This is taking too long.

I was starting to feel like a water tank punctured by a scorpion, slowly leaking out on the ground, draining all my patience and sanity. Draining, depleting, deflating, whatever adjective you wanna use. My body was descending into sensory overload, feeling every bit of dead grass poking at my legs, every pebble that my elbows were dug into, and the vibrations from my jacket after each little bit of dust blew into it. I wanted to punch nature for being such a dick, but nature is like a celebrity; it doesn’t give a shit about me, it probably isn’t aware I exist, and nothing I do or say is ever going to have the slightest impact on it unless I’m setting it on fire—in which case the climate starts acting like a bigger asshole, and I have to endure a 90-degree day in October and four feet of snow in April. Fight back against the stupid natural order, and it drags you to hell with it. It’s not fucking fair.

My eyesight was glued to the window by the front door. I couldn’t tell if it was a curtain or an old towel that was blocking the view inside, but it looked disgusting. Now it was the window I was pissed off at. I wouldn’t even have to be sitting here if I could see inside this stupid fucking house. We would already know if he’s there, we would already be inside the house, and his fucking ass would be somewhere else. I halfway wished for my binoculars to turn into a sniper rifle so I could blast the pane open and get this shit over with, but that wouldn’t solve the curtain. No, a sniper that shoots flaming bullets would do the trick. He would leave the house if it was on fire. And who’s going to bother tracing it back to us? There will be no criminal investigation on who committed arson on some guy’s house in the middle of nowhere. But I don’t have a sniper, so I instead tried to use my sheer willpower to swat the stupid curtain away from the window, but telekinesis is unfortunately not an ability that humans have unlocked yet.

The more I stared at the house, the more I utterly despised it. I wanted to smash it to pieces, but I couldn’t while there was money inside that we needed. But if there wasn’t… I began imagining all the ways I could pulverize his piece of shit home. Burning it down would be too slow and unsatisfying, but seeing it collapse at the end would be nice. Blowing it up is where the money is at, though. I could make like an ISIS bomber and throw a bomb backpack through his window. I could steal from a military base and fire a Tomahawk missile into his bathroom. I could go old-fashioned and throw two-dozen sticks of dynamite through the windows. Or I could steal a semi-truck and smash it through the walls like we did with Korey, only this time it would finish the job. Oh-so many ways to bring a satisfying end to this bullshit operation. If Skyler can break into people’s houses and wreck shit all the time, I should be able to destroy them every once in a while.

I suddenly snapped awake from the euphoria of picturing how I could obliterate this man’s home. It felt like an hour had passed, but it was only 4:04. Now I really wanted to punch something.

Percy had brought out a deck of cards and was playing something with Adrian. Eliza was reading The Iliad. Ahmad was still in his lawn chair with sunglasses on, probably napping. I had been lying flat on my stomach for almost an hour, and it hurt to adjust my back.

I started thinking about Aiden. His stupid secret is why we’re here anyway. And that meltdown back at the base… what the fuck was that for? And what does he know about Orion? Why did the prospect of us having anything to do with him freak him out so much? How does almost nobody else know why? Adrian has known Aiden for over half his life, how did he not know anything? And why in the everlasting fuck is nobody else questioning this? In what fucking galaxy does any of this not make everyone lose their fucking minds?

I couldn’t see what I was looking at through the binoculars anymore. Time was dragging its feet at the worst possible moment. Every single law of physics I wanted to punch in the face. Every object, every molecule, every goddamn piece of solid matter within a mile of me I wanted to crush into pieces. If something doesn’t happen in the next 45 seconds, they will hang me for the atrocities I will commit.

Luckily for me and everyone else in the county, Percy finally spoke up. “Guys! I have an idea!” Everyone glanced at her. “What if I show up at his door to ask for help? I could tell him that my car is broken down and lure him away from the house if he’s there.”

“You want to go knock on his door?” Eliza said. “Are you sure about that?”

“Would you rather sit on this hill for another hour?”

“If it will keep one of us from being put in a near-death situation, then yes.”

“We’re not waiting another hour,” I suddenly shouted. “We have to figure out if he’s there at some point, and that point better be sometime in the next ten minutes.”

Eliza glared at me, then looked back at Percy. “What exactly is your plan of attack with this?”

Percy set her cards down. “Alright. So, I’m driving down the road here, and I’m about to run out of gas. I have an extra can in the trunk, but I really don’t want to use it since I’m bringing it to my dad’s farm a few dozen miles away, and I don’t have any money to go to a gas station. The car runs out of gas around… there, where the tree is. Pretty far away from the house, it wouldn’t be a short walk back and forth. I show up at his front… gate and shout at him for help refilling my car. If he agrees, then that’s 20+ minutes away from his house, giving you a good window to sneak in and find the money. If he doesn’t agree, then we do that diversion plan you were talking about in the car. And if he isn’t there, then you just sneak in. It’s perfect.”

“Hm. Perfect aside from the fact that you risk getting shot at.”

“If it gets us the money faster, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. Besides, look at me; am I somebody that would seem threatening to some old divorced man in the middle of nowhere?”

“Do it,” I said immediately.

Eliza, Adrian, and Ahmad exchanged looks, and once Adrian gave his approving head-nod, it was settled.

“Alright,” said Eliza. “But put on your extra-innocent face before arriving. This cannot get screwed up. And keep your radio with you.”

“Don’t worry a bit.” She leaped off the ground and sprinted down the hill towards the car.

Once they heard the car start and drive off, Eliza stood up. “Like hell I let her go down there without any protection.”

“What does that mean?” Ahmad asked.

Eliza walked to her backpack sitting a few feet behind us and started digging through the front pocket.

“What are you doing?”

They pulled out some funky-looking mechanical piece that looked like a cyberpunk train whistle, a smaller blue-ish piece that looked like a bump stock from a Nerf gun, a really long piece that could either be a bunsen burner tube or a gun barrel, then some curved piece that looked like an ammo clip, then another piece with a trigger, and… and those are gun parts. Eliza is building a sniper.

“Holy shit, you actually brought a sniper with you?”

“I am not an idiot, Ahmad. Of course I brought a gun with me.”

“This is a sniper, dude! I didn’t know you were planning on fucking assassinating the guy!”

“Maybe you should have. Anything can happen, so be prepared for anything.”

They finished putting the rifle together and perched on the ground in the same position I was in, tucking in the sniper under their stomach. Oh, so now we’re trying to be sneaky?

Within five minutes, Percy’s roundabout around the hill was complete. 4:19. The car turned onto the guy’s road at the intersection, speeded down it for about five seconds, then coasted for another 15, coming to a stop directly next to the tree she pointed at, roughly 600 feet away from the house. I looked down at her from my binoculars while Eliza pulled the sniper out and surveilled the house from the scope.

Aside from the dust blowing in Percy’s face, there was no disturbance as she walked down the road. I thought about looking over at the house for any sign that the guy was there, but I had already worn myself out imagining my bombardment of it that I couldn’t stand gazing at it for one more second.

After a minute of watching her, I got bored. I set my binoculars down, and in the same moment, Eliza said, “Keep watching Percy,” not even looking away from the sniper scope. It was hard to resist the urge to throw my binoculars at them.

“I can see her figure just fine from here, thank you very much.”

Their head creaked toward me. I looked back through my binoculars.

Percy broke into a jog at the halfway point and finally reached the house within over a minute. Now I had to look at it again. Her performance turned on, and she started awkwardly wandering around the wooden fencing surrounding the entire property, trying to peak over. She found the gate on the left side of the fencing and lightly tugged at it. It looked like she was trying to shout something to the house, but the sound didn’t travel up here. She resorted to banging on the fence.

Eliza’s grip tightened around the sniper. I watched keenly at the windows for any sign that the owner was watching, or even there at all. The flag kept blowing, the pickup truck kept rusting, the windows kept… existing… and the door shot open.

A 70-something-year-old man popped out, decked out with a stained wife beater, green underwear stretching to his knees, a transparent brown cap, and a massive shotgun he’s hiding behind the door while shouting at Percy.

“Oh, shit,” Eliza nervously mumbled. They aligned him directly in their sights and readied around the trigger.

“You’re going to blow our cover with the entire town if you pull that,” I warned.

“The tradeoff to that is Percy getting killed. Would you make that decision?”

I snorted. “We’re all going to get killed by Eclipse anyway. Might as well end our misery now.”

“Exactly why you are not holding the gun.”

The guy continued shouting at Percy from across the fence. She shouted at him back. They exchanged arm gestures that neither of them could see for almost a minute, and it looked like his hand was easing off the hidden shotgun a bit. Percy turned around, and the guy whipped back into his house and slammed the door. No gas can was brought out, nobody escorted Percy back to the car.

“Did you learn anything?” Adrian said into his walkie-talkie, startling me. He had been sitting quietly out of view for so long that I forgot he existed.

“I learned that he’s a giant asshole,” Percy said back. “I know he’s been stockpiling gas in there since prices started rising. He’d just rather be a selfish bitch about it.”

“I’ll admit, coming home from the army, QAnon was not one of the things I expected I would learn about. It’s a very interesting world.”

“You have a lot to learn.”

“Excuse me,” Ahmad interrupted. “Does this mean we’re doing the diversion thing now?”

“Yeah,” Eliza sighed. “I guess so.”

Ahmad leaped in the air and started running down to the highway behind us. “Fuck yes! Get that damn car back here, Percy!” he shouted to Adrian, who wasn’t pressing the mic button.

---

“This is Alpha Hotel Mike Alpha Delta. Can confirm that I am, in fact, in the ideal position to Need For Speed this bitch and alert every living organism within a mile of me. Over.

“This is Golf Romeo Alpha Hotel Alpha Mike. We are ready to proceed with our… Mike Alpha Sierra Tango Echo Romeo Papa Lima Alpha November, Alpha Sierra Alpha Papa, India November Sierra Tango Alpha November Tango Alpha November Echo Oscar Uniform Sierra—” Percy slapped my walkie-talkie out of my hands. I used my feet to press the mic button again. “—Lima Yankee. Over.”

“Confirm: are you, in fact, Romeo Echo Alpha Delta Yankee Tango Oscar Romeo Oscar Lima Lima?”

I was about to extend my feet out to respond, but Percy kicked my leg. I almost kicked her back.

“Okay… but you guys are ready?” Ahmad awkwardly pivoted.

I glanced at Percy, then slowly bent out of my lawn chair to pick up the walkie. “Yes, we’re ready, we just—” I got interrupted by something slapping the back of my neck. I slapped back thinking it was Percy, but even more annoyingly, it was a stupid cornstalk blowing in the wind. I tore off the leaf that poked me and crumpled it up. “Just waiting for the wind to change directions, then we’ll start.”

“Epic. I’ve been ready for 15 minutes, but y’know, take your time and all.”

I set the walkie in the chair’s cup holder. “The wind has been blowing towards the house this whole time,” Percy muttered.

“What?” I shot my hand in the air above the cornfield to check. “Seriously? Then what the hell have we been waiting for?”

“For your comedy duo with Ahmad to shut up.”

“Whatever.” I grabbed the walkie-talkie. “Eliza, get your eyes ready. Adrian, get airsofting. We’re about to start.”

Within nanoseconds of that message, the sound of an airsoft pellet hitting a window on the other side of the house echoed all the way out to our position in the field. “Damn,” I whispered. “No way that’s going unnoticed.”

I pulled out one of the slips of paper from my coat pocket. On the front, I had written in pencil, “This is boring as hell. This guy hasn’t moved in hours. Starting to think this is a waste of time.” On the back, Percy wrote, “We’ll be out of here at 5, be patient. Let’s move positions so we can talk. Text Paul to tune into 822.75.” I held the paper in the air.

“Got eyes on me, Eliza?” I said into the walkie.

“Yup.”

Once the wind picked up, I let the paper loose into the air. Within two seconds, it fell down and caught onto a cornstalk a few feet in front of me.

“Your paper got stuck,” Eliza instantly informed.

“Yeah, I see it.”

I grabbed another slip out of my pocket. The front of this one read, “Liam is having trouble with the car engine. He’s trying to radio in Paul but his frequency is wonky,” while the back read, “Text him it’s 822.75. He needs to move fast, we’re out of here at 5. We can’t leave the car here and wait for another agent to pick us up.” I folded the paper in half and threw it in the air. It spun in circles aggressively until flying out of view.

Eliza updated us almost immediately. “That one did not work either.” I was about to pull out another slip, but suddenly they cut me off a second later. “Wait, that first one you threw is coming loose. I think it might… there it goes.” I saw the paper through tiny cracks between cornstalks as it flew higher in the air. “It is going… pretty high, but it should reach. Wait, I see the guy is coming outside! I think he will…. The paper is coming fast… he is looking around… it is almost over the fence.” A few seconds of silence passed. Percy and I exchanged looks. “He sees it! Percy and Graham, get out of there. Adrian, is the tripod camera set up?”

“Yes,” he monotonously replied.

“Get to the car with the others.”

Percy folded up her chair and immediately ran off. I had to carefully lift myself off the chair to keep my back straight, seeing as every time it bent slightly out of the position I kept it in for an hour on that hill made a jolt of pain run through my entire body. I folded my chair and lightly jogged behind Percy.

“He read the note and ran straight inside,” Eliza updated. “Keep going, and don’t give your position away.” I had already been making a point to avoid bumping into any cornstalks, but mainly because I hated them poking me.

After two slow-paced minutes, I finally reached the empty patch at the edge of the field where Ahmad was parked, the setting sun making everything reflect orange and extending the car’s shadow across the highway. Percy was already sitting in the passenger seat. I threw my folding chair in the trunk and hopped into the back seat behind Ahmad. I pulled out my walkie-talkie and said, “Adrian?” but Ahmad’s walkie was sitting on the center console inches away from mine, and the overlapping feedback made the speaker screech violently, startling all three of us. “Fuck! Turn that shit off!” Ahmad snatched his walkie and smacked the power button.

“I’m not far,” Adrian replied. “Go on with your secretive conversation. I’ll text you when he tunes in.”

“Shit.” I stepped back out of the car, making sure to stay 15 feet away for good measure.

Ahmad started after turning his walkie back on. “So… government spy shit…. Hey, you visit Area 51 recently?”

“Can’t. Too many Jewish space lasers have been malfunctioning recently. It’s tough business making mechanical repairs on the moon.”

“I hear ya. But that can’t be taking nearly as long for you as finding good lizard food for Nancy Pelosi takes for me. She’s extremely picky.”

“Oh yeah, Fidel Castro—”

My phone vibrated. Eliza sent a text simply reading, “Stop.”

“Uh… anyways,” I continued. “Did, uh… you get the car fixed up yet?”

“Definitely, definitely. All shiny and new. It’s got a brand new muffler, LED headlights, flamethrowers that activate when you honk the horn, and an engine that runs on the bones of dead babies.”

“If only that girl who drove through here earlier had an engine like that.”

“Yeah, what was her deal anyway? Her car breaks down a whole block away from the house, then she comes back ten minutes later and drives off? What the hell was that?”

“Yeah, and she—”

My phone vibrated again, this time from Adrian. “I got a blip on the RF meter,” the message read. “He’s listening.”

Shit, I gotta backtrack. “If… only that girl who drove through here earlier had an engine like that.”

Ahmad took a second to catch on, “Y—yeah, what the hell was that about, anyway? Whose car breaks down in the middle of the road and then works perfectly fine when you come back to it ten minutes later?”

“I wish it was us who sent her down there. We could have learned something useful from her. It beats just sitting here in a field waiting for him to do something.”

“Yeah, man. This job is boring as hell. They aren’t paying us nearly enough for this. By the way, Paul, what time is it?”

“It’s… almost 5:20. We should’ve been out of here a while ago.”

“Damn. Well, I got the car ready if you wanna head back.”

“Of course I wanna leave, I have a home to go back to, and more… dead… babies, and….” My arm dropped. Jesus, we should have rehearsed this. “Yeah. I’m heading over.”

“Cool.”

I stuffed the walkie-talkie in my pocket and rushed back to the car. Ahmad rolled down the driver’s seat window and whisper-yelled, “Dude! Where the fuck is Adrian?”

“I don’t know.” I pulled out my phone and called Eliza on speaker. Once they answered, I yelled, “Eliza! Are you seeing anything?”

“He has not gone anywhere yet. Get the car started up; let him know where you are.”

“And Adrian? Where the fuck is he?”

“Oh, he—” Adrian burst out running from the cornfield. “Yeah.”

“Get in the damn car!” I shouted at him. “We’re getting the fuck out of here. Ahmad, start the bitch up.”

Ahmad turned the key in the ignition, and the now-unmuffled exhaust pipe roared into action, deafening every other sound in the surrounding area. Adrian and I crawled into the back seats while Ahmad revved up the engine, amplifying the sound and stirring quite possibly every creature within half a mile.

The sound of my phone was vibrating in my hand, but I couldn’t hear anything coming out of it. I turned off speakerphone and pressed it against my ear. “What?”

“The guy is coming!” Eliza yelled. “He is going to his truck right now! Go!”

“Fuck!” I punched Ahmad’s shoulder. “Fucking go!”

Ahmad kicked the car into Drive and floored the gas pedal, leaving us loudly skidding idly in the dirt before changing gears and launching the car out into the street. The three of us in the back got propelled into the seat as it tore hell for leather through the dampening sunlight, and I caught one last glimpse of the pickup truck pulling out of the house before Ahmad hit the right turn around the hill.

“Woo!” Ahmad yelled over the engine. “We need to do this shit more often!”

“Celebrate when we’re not getting chased down!” Percy yelled back.

As we neared the turn towards the backside of the hill, Ahmad killed the engine at nearly 80 miles an hour to stop the noise. He veered left, almost going off-road, and then whipped right at the turn, sandwiching me between Percy and Adrian as we careened left. After a half-mile of coasting through the hill shade, we approached the spot on the side of the road where we had parked initially. There was no sight of the guy behind us.

“Did we seriously lose him already?” Ahmad leered, his eyes fixed on the rearview mirror. He slowed down and pulled over to the side. “It couldn’t have been that easy.”

My phone was vibrating again. I was still on the call with Eliza. I put the phone back up to my ears to hear them scream, “Graham!” directly into them.

“Fuck! What?”

“Are you guys safe?”

“Yeah, we’re… right back at the parking spot. He didn’t follow us.”

“I saw him take that first turn towards you guys. Are you sure you did not see him anywhere behind you?”

“Not down this way. He might have turned left.”

“Damn. Tell everyone to get up here.” They hung up.

“I guess we’re going back up the hill,” I told the group.

We collectively exited the car and started the long walk up, routinely glancing at the road to make sure we didn’t miss him. After five long minutes of treading uphill through dirt and dead grass, no sign of him in any direction emerged. “Man, I swear, if he went back to the house….” Ahmad grunted.

We reached our spot at the top of the hill, where Eliza was taking the sniper apart and stuffing the pieces back into their bag. “Are you happy now, Ahmad?”

“Absolutely!” he exclaimed. “That’s what happens when you don’t hijack control of the planning process.”

“When I am in control of the planning process, things tend to go more subtle than that. You will be exceedingly lucky if he buys that you four government agents were actually that stupid.”

Ahmad shrugged. “He’s QAnon, it doesn’t matter. Did his ass go back to the house, though?”

“No. He is long gone.”

“Shit. Then how do we know where he went? What if he comes back?”

“Trust me, he would be insane to come back to his house after that stunt you pulled.” They loaded the sniper barrel in the backpack and zipped it shut. “But still, we have to look around to be sure.”

“Look around?” I asked.

“Yeah. We split up down both ends of the hill, spy the roads for a minute, then, if nobody finds his truck hiding anywhere, begin the operation. We will not need more than one person on each end of the road, so a couple of you can guard up here in the meantime. Ahmad can stay down by the car and watch that road, but as for the three of you—”

“I’ll go,” Percy cut in. Goddammit.

“Okay. Graham, give her your binoculars.”

The second I pulled them out of my coat pocket, Percy tore them from my hand and walked out to the left side of the hill.

Ahmad snorted. “You bring me all the way up the hill just to send me back down? Fuckin’ lame.” He started back down to the car.

Eliza zipped open their backpack, pulled out the detached sniper scope, and tossed it to Adrian.

“Won’t you be needing this?” Adrian asked.

“I have binoculars of my own. Besides, it is more useful in your hands.”

“Pretty sure I was never officially a sniper, but alright.” He sat down and put the scope up to his eye like a pirate with a spyglass. Eliza left for the right side of the hill.

Fuck. Now I’m left alone with Adrian. I had made such special efforts to avoid any circumstance where I would be alone with him again, especially after that bizarre betting competition at Korey’s, and now thanks to Percy, it has just imploded in my face. Why would she leave him here anyway? They go everywhere together.

I wanted to go back to lying in my original surveillance position, but that’s only a few feet to the left of Adrian. But if I lay down farther away from him, he will notice the marks on the ground I left in the original spot and realize I’m avoiding him. But if I just plop myself down that close to him, it’s going to look fucking weird. I internally groaned, and fell down at the original spot uncomfortably close to Adrian, burying my knees and elbows in the same little holes in the ground as before.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Being back in the spot was already giving me Vietnam flashbacks from an hour ago, so maybe this was a mistake. Goddammit, if I did just sit farther away from him, I would’ve had a perfect excuse. You’re a fucking idiot, Graham.

I started awkwardly clamming up. Adrian’s scope was on his right eye, leaving me in the peripheral vision of his left eye. I kept my own vision ahead and away from him so we wouldn’t meet eyes if I looked at him, but now I can’t tell whether or not he’s looking at me. Neither of us had spoken a word, and with the wind dying down, every sound we made was audible to the other person. I tried to carefully adjust myself on the ground whenever an arm or leg got antsy, but I couldn’t do it quietly. God, this is fucking miserable.

I was already getting extremely uncomfortable. I looked at my watch to see that only two minutes had passed. My body started getting jittery, but I couldn’t move around without Adrian hearing and being aware of my existence. My back was gradually caving inwards far worse than it had before. I wanted to hit my head on the ground, but less so as a show of frustration than an urge to knock myself out and skip having to experience this moment.

But before I could make an attempt, Adrian suddenly spoke up. “We’re not going to find three and a half million in there.”

“How do you know?” I said casually. “There’s plenty of room.”

“That $900,000 transfer for the house wouldn’t have been done in cash. No money transfer that large is ever done through cash unless it’s between cartels. Have you ever tried to withdraw hundreds of thousands of dollars from a bank account?”

“Not legally.”

“Exactly. This guy is former military, and paranoid. He’s smart enough to know how to keep the police out of his business.”

“Former military? How do you know that?”

“That shotgun he was holding. It’s not legal for private citizens to own, but you can get it smuggled out of the army.”

“You can identify his shotgun from that far away? Actually, don’t answer that; of course you fucking can. But what if he just got it off the black market?”

“A guy like that would shoot at black market dealers, not buy from them. Smuggling things yourself is cheaper. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Hm.” I forgot what his initial point was, so I let the conversation’s roadblock pass. Then I thought about it for a moment and realized something. “Was this Percy’s idea? Splitting up so you can talk to me alone?”

“No. It was mine.”

Great. Now it just got twice as weird. “W—why?”

“I know you’ve been avoiding me.” Goddammit! Fuck, where the hell is Percy and Eliza? “You’re somewhere in the realm that Finn is. Don’t know what to think about me, don’t want to find out.”

“…Keen observation.”

“We weren’t exactly close buddies before I left. You probably don’t remember what I was like back then. I don’t either. And now I show up out of nowhere and end up leading you all into a rabbit hole that almost kills Finn and Percy.”

“Mhm. That did happen.”

“The truth, the whole truth, is that I don’t know any more about what’s going on than you do. I’m following wherever the current goes right now, and I’m not sure what the hell I'm doing. I may not know you, but I wouldn’t set you up. I wouldn’t set Percy up.”

What the fuck. “I can’t help but feel like you’re trying to coerce me into taking your side in advance of something else.”

“I don’t care about what you think about me. Continue being weirded out by me all you want. But I don’t want any question about whether we’re on the same page.”

“The ‘same page?’ What are you talking about? What’s the point of this?”

“My second tour of duty in Syria didn’t go well. It started out a lot like right now. Everything began business as usual, a minor disruption came along, we tried to get it over with as quickly as possible, but it went wrong, and that minor disruption exploded into something far worse.”

“And you think that….” Good fucking Christ, what the hell is going on? Why does this have to be my cross to bear?

“We’ve already lost more than half the money we need. That house isn’t going to have it. We’re going to return to the base without what’s needed, and there are two ways that can go down. One: we don’t show up to that meeting tomorrow, and Eclipse realizes we duped them and starts hunting us down, beginning with Lakewood. Two: we steal the money from the bank under Brice’s nose and smooth things over with Eclipse using that. Brice will eventually find out, though, and how do you think that will play out?”

I don’t know if I wanted more to scream, punch the ground, punch Adrian, or all of the above, but I was ready to do something. “Can you just… let’s just hold onto hope that the money is in the house, alright? We’ll cross that whole hypothetical bridge if we go there, but let’s keep our eyes on the prize. We can’t… dwell on that right now.”

“You said it yourself in the car, Graham. The nuclear option may be our only way out of this.”

“Don’t quote me on that. The nuclear option is a terrible idea. I never mentioned that.” I buried my face in my arms on the ground, but then thought of one more question. “Why are you telling me this? What did I do?”

“You’re the ringleader here, right? You’re the one who plans ahead.”

“This is our plan. We don’t need to think ahead any further. Now can we… shift topics or something?”

The topic we apparently shifted to was silence. Adrian looked back through his sniper scope; I looked back at the house. Now I could only dwell on whatever the fuck Adrian just went on about.

Round of fucking applause, everybody. Leave it to Adrian, the guy who looks like Lex Luther undergoing chemotherapy, to make everything in my life just that one bit more fucking miserable. Worse, he even chose to fucking do it. He told Percy to leave us alone here so he could go on some arbiter-of-doom monologue when we’re on the verge of solving the fucking thing that we came here to solve. There are plenty of other more experienced militia members out here, but he had to put this shit on my shoulders above all else? Is he fucking serious?

I don’t need to worry about Brice anyway. What the fuck is he even going to do if we swipe a couple million dollars from the bank? Fire us? We’ll be using it to save all of our asses from annihilation; he’ll be throwing roses at our feet eventually. He has to. We may not be full members of the militia yet, but we’re still important to him. I’m still important to him. Briefly going behind his back to avoid catastrophe won’t change that.

And it’s not like he even needs to find out regardless. I can keep a secret, and I’m sure the others will do just fine as well. I guess the only one you could reasonably worry about is… Lennox. Fuck, what is he going to do about this? He clearly wasn’t in support of paying off Eclipse, but would he sell us out to Brice in response? What would he do to us if we had to steal from the bank? Goddammit, if he just hadn’t been on that fucking floor during the Eclipse attack, or if that guy just pulled the trigger….

And what the fuck would stealing from the bank even look like? Laundering money into a bank account is one thing, but we need hard cash. We would have to break inside the bank, and I don’t even know what actual bank vaults look like. Even with the top members of the militia helping us, it would be a long shot if we could plan and execute a robbery like that in less than a day. And with the two-hour drive to the spot in Cleveland…. Goddammit. God fucking dammit!

The others have to have a plan for this if it’s our only option. Even Eliza wouldn’t let their loyalty to Brice endanger the rest of us. Somebody has to know what we’re doing if this doesn’t work out. Maybe Karan does; he’s always on top of these things when it matters. If he’s bold enough to drag me around the Eclipse HQ with him after I nearly died, he’d be more than bold enough to have a plan for swiping money out of the bank. And what about Aiden? If he’s the one who initially went behind Brice’s back, he would have thought of something like this years ago. If the rest of them care so much about Aiden’s secret, they won’t let this go to shit. And what was it Eliza said in the car? “If things end up going south, we can consider doing it, but we are not leaping straight to it.” Yeah, I’ll just… let them take the lead here, and the rest of us can take a step back. All will work itself out, like usual.

I saw Eliza jogging back from the corner of my eye, and the sound of their footsteps soon caught up. I looked to the left to find Percy much farther behind, casually walking. Don’t worry, Percy. Take your time. We’re having very productive talk over here.

“Did you spot him?” Adrian shouted to Eliza.

“Unless he hid in somebody’s garage, there is no sign of him or the pickup truck anywhere.”

Both of our eyes then moved to Percy, who’s still at least a hundred feet away. Her silhouette in the distance made me realize how dark it was getting, and I checked my watch to see that it was 5:58. Jesus. A hint of sunlight was still creeping out of the horizon, but the half-moon hovering over the house was mainly what kept things visible, albeit colorless.

Percy’s arrival to our spot took a hot minute—actually, two—but once she was within earshot, Eliza shouted, “Did you find anything?”

“No!” she shouted back.

“How the fuck is that possible?” I wondered. “Did he really drive himself out of town chasing a nonexistent car?”

“It could’ve been to a hotel,” Adrian said. “His house was just compromised, after all.”

“Wherever he is, it is a long way from here.” Eliza set down their backpack once Percy joined the group. “So? Get going.”

I looked between Percy and Adrian. “All of us?”

“Yes. I will stand guard up here and alert you if he comes back. Keep your radios on.”

“Alright. Cool.” I gave a brief but stern look to Adrian, then led the march down the hill to the car. Right away, the wind picked back up.

The cover of the moonlight didn’t reach this side of the hill, so I was walking blind searching for stable ground to step on. Every other step was miscalculated, nearly making me fall over from my foot going lower than I expected or hitting the ground earlier than expected. I also stepped on a streak of mud that sent me sliding downhill for several feet, making my back flail around in disruption of the straightened position I kept it in, before suddenly stopping. I held still out of shock (and severe back pain) long enough for Percy and Adrian to walk past me, but I hopped past them a few seconds later.

The car became more visible as we reached the bottom, but I couldn’t see inside. It was facing to the left this time, so Ahmad must have gone driving again. “Is Ahmad still in there?”

“Probably sleeping,” Percy yawned.

“It’s barely 6:00, don’t pass out now.”

Percy fell silent again.

With just a little bit of distance left to cover, the sound of wind stopped matching up with what was blowing in my face. I was feeling less, but the sound kept on growing. I looked at Percy behind me to the left to see if she was noticing it too. Her facial expression was blank as usual. Then I turned my head to the right to look at Adrian, but something else caught my eye midway. My head turned back to face it.

“Oh no.”

Less than a quarter-mile away to the right, the vague figure of a particular pickup truck was cruising down the road towards us with its headlights off.

Adrian and Percy caught onto it after, and all of us stopped.

“You can’t be fucking serious,” Percy quietly fumed.

“Does he see us? Should we hide behind the car?”

Adrian continued walking downhill. “No. He definitely sees us.”

“Um, I don’t….” I quickly stepped forward to try and stop him, but then froze when I noticed the truck pulling off-road.

Percy started sprinting down as the truck drew closer, and I followed closely behind her.

The truck coasted past us, made a U-turn in the middle of the road, and came to a stop a few yards away from our car just as we made it down the hill. He flipped on the truck headlights, putting a massive spotlight on us. Adrian walked up to confront him with Percy at his side while I stuck behind.

The door flew open. The tip of the military shotgun peaked out first, then the rest of the man’s body. He elbowed the door shut and walked forward, turning him into a silhouette behind the headlights. The gun was pointed directly at Adrian.

“How many more o’ you are there?” he barked.

Adrian and Percy looked at each other, and Adrian spoke first. “Look, whatever it is you think this is about, we’re—”

“Spare me that ignorance bullshit, Honey Bunches. Who’s that little leprechaun dipshit hiding behind you?”

Percy moved aside, giving him a clear view of me standing idly like a child getting caught by his parents. I couldn’t formulate any decent response for him, so I blurted out the only word that was in my mind. “L…leprechaun?”

The guy took a step forward, shotgun aimed still. “Y’all think I’m fucking stupid? I served three goddamn tours in the U.S. Army, do you really expect I wouldn’t see that you were fucking setting me up?”

Adrian leaned towards him, holding his hands up. “Okay, but you don’t know why, do you?”

“I don’t give a fucking shit why, now back your ass up! If you wanna break into my goddamned house so bad, then do it while I’m there. Fight me for it! None of this pussy shit you’ve got going on here.”

“Goddamn, you are full of surprises. This could be a good lesson against stereotyping if it didn’t involve a fucking shotgun pointed at us.” Fuckshit, I said that out loud.

“Man, shut your fucking mouth! I don’t wanna hear any more garbage from you asswipes; now tell me what the fuck you’re doing here!”

“He tried to,” I blurted while pointing at Adrian. “But you cut him off twice.”

The guy suddenly marched forward next to our car; Percy and Adrian backed up accordingly until they were beside me. The gun was pointed at me this time. “You don’t have to die today, Cheeto-head. Don’t push your luck.” Jesus Christ, I should be taking notes off of this guy.

He pointed the gun at Percy. “You. You’re that same bitch that came screaming outside my house earlier. And that’s the same car too.” Of course he was fucking watching. Good lord.

“I was just trying to get your attention,” Percy explained. “The car was low on gas, and it just seemed like a good opportunity.”

“Bull—shit. You didn’t put any gas in that fucking thing. You went and drove right the hell off. Don’t play me for an idiot.” He pointed back to Adrian. “And what’s this ‘opportunity’ garbage about?”

“Well,” Adrian once again continued, “we are private contractors who got hired by the government some time ago to help with a human trafficking investigation. We—”

“Fuck off. Do you really expect me to believe that horseshit?”

“Let me finish. We got word that a fugitive in the case was being harbored somewhere in this area, but we were ordered strictly to surveil the house, not to break in. The fugitive’s name is Nehemiah Kilgore. We have a photo of one of his known associates, maybe you would recognize her.” Wait, what?

To my surprise, Adrian slowly took out a printed photo from his pocket, took a step forward, and showed it to the guy. He lowered the shotgun and snatched it from Adrian.

After getting one good glance at the picture, he visibly tensed up and shoved the gun barrel in Adrian’s face. “This is my fucking wife! Where the fuck did you get this?!”

Oh no.

He jabbed Adrian in the chest and knocked him back. Percy and I scattered away from him. While backing away, my foot caught onto a clump of dirt and I nearly fell back, disrupting my back’s positioning once again and amping up its already-seething pain.

Adrian jumped back before the shotgun could hit him again. “It’s just what they gave to me! I don’t have anything to do with it!”

The guy stopped. “You’re full of shit! All of you are full of shit! This photo was taken 17 years ago, nobody else could have gotten ahold of it! Not you, not the CIA, nobody!”

“Come on, the government spies on people all the time! They tap into cameras in people’s fucking Xboxes! We’re just looking for somebody she knew, that’s all!”

“Well, I’ve never heard of this Nehemiah character before, and she definitely hadn’t either. Nobody is being ‘harbored’ anywhere in my goddamn house, and you’re not searching fucking anywhere!”

“Maybe… you didn’t know your wife as well as you thought.”

That one sentence instantly set him off.

“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” He smacked Adrian in the shoulder with the butt of the shotgun and stepped back. “You don’t know jack fucking shit! Give me one goddamn reason I shouldn’t blow your fucking head off right now!”

Percy jumped in front of Adrian. “Hey! Calm the hell down! He’s just doing his job!”

“I don’t give a single shit what his fucking job is! All o’ you are fucking liars! You come to my home, steal my photos, and then tell me that I don’t know my own fucking wife good enough to tell whether or not she’s involved in some sex trafficking scheme?!”

The pain in my back started flaring up, beyond what I could fix by readjusting. I immediately doubled up and grabbed at my lower back where it was the worst, and the guy noticed.

“Hey! Keep your goddamn hands up!”

“I can’t,” I painfully grunted. “My fucking… God!”

He stepped up to me and waved the gun at my face, making me stumble backwards and screw up my back even worse. I stuck my fists into my lower spine to dampen the ever-increasing torment, alarming him further.

“Hands up! Now!”

“No! It’s not… fucking lord!”

“Do what I fucking tell you, asshole!”

“Fuck—shit! I—motherfuck! Help!”

“I’m not saying it again! Now!”

Before I could process what was happening, a thundering gunshot broke out from across the dark expanse. The barrel of the shotgun he was waving exploded right in front of me, splitting into five chunks and dropping dead on the ground. The remaining half of it fell from his hands and he leaped back in shock. In the same moment, Ahmad suddenly jumped up from inside the car and started the engine, and Adrian pounced at the guy and shoved him in front of it. The car launched forward, and rammed straight into him. His body went limp and hit against the windshield before the Ahmad slammed the brakes and sent him flying eight feet through the air.

I, however, in the midst of all this, tripped and fell onto my back.

I had blacked out for a second from the extreme jolt of agony in my spine. I don’t even want to imagine what my face looked like. I was woken up by someone shaking my shoulder aggressively, and I opened my eyes to see Ahmad hovering over me, yelling, “Graham! Are you okay?”

“Ugh… I think I have fucking scoliosis now.”

He sighed and let go of my shoulder. “That’s why you don’t lay in one position for two hours. Now come on.” He pulled me up by my arm, slowing down midway so my back didn’t bend forward again.

Upon standing up, I got a view of the scene at hand. The guy was sprawled out in the dirt, probably unconscious; the shattered pieces of the shotgun barrel were scattered in front of me; the truck headlights were blaring in my eyes; our car was a few feet farther ahead than it was a minute ago; and Eliza was standing by Percy and Adrian, holding their fucking sniper.

“What—the FUCK!” I screamed. “What are the bullets in that fucking sniper made out of? You were planning on using that against HIM?” Eliza awkwardly shrugged. I pointed at Adrian next. “And where did you get that fucking photo from?”

Adrian pulled the picture back out of his pocket. “While you were rushing to the car in that cornfield, I found an opening into his house. This photo was the first thing I saw that could be used to explain ourselves based on that conversation you and Ahmad had. You didn’t make my job easy, by the way.”

“You planned for this? What the fuck?”

“Yeah. Maybe you should have too.”

I looked at Ahmad. “And you! You were hiding there in the car while he was waving a fucking shotgun in our faces?”

“I just saved your life, dipass. Come back to me when you’re feeling a little more grateful.” Ahmad tossed the car keys to Adrian. “Alright, now you guys get out of here and find the money. Me and Eliza will take care of… this.”

“Goddammit,” I mumbled. “This shit is never going to end.”

“Soon,” Adrian said while climbing into the driver’s seat. “Now, let’s go.”

Percy rushed into the passenger’s side, leaving me lone in the backseat. The car speeded away, giving me only a brief glance back at Eliza and Ahmad dragging the man’s body to the truck. God, why is it that this is what it keeps on costing for us to keep the “peace?” This is fucking stupid.

---

Adrian coasted us up to the house and stopped in the dirt driveway on the left side. The guy apparently opened the gate, drove his truck out, and then shut the gate before driving after Ahmad.

“Where is this opening that you found?” Percy asked Adrian.

“It’s around the back. It’ll take a bit of squeezing, so I hope you’re on an empty stomach right now.”

“I vote we just drive down the fence,” I butted in. The two of them blankly stared at me and then shut the engine off.

They stepped out of the car, retrieved their gloves from the trunk, and walked to the back of the fencing while I stepped out and inspected the gate. There was an iron lock holding the latch closed in the top corner, but all of the pieces, including the gate, looked old and rusty. I could probably break it open if I had any hard object, but sadly, Adrian’s skull isn’t currently usable.

I grabbed my pair of gloves and followed them around to the back. Adrian was aggressively shaking some of the wooden fence pickets loose. “These things—are decades old—barely touching the ground—very easy to loosen.” Once three of the pickets were dangling off the rail enough, he lifted them slightly up from the bottom and pushed them forward. “And look at that. We’ve got crawl space.”

Adrian crawled under the gap first, scooting under it on his back so he could hold the pickets up. Percy went next, lying down underneath the pickets and then rapidly kicking herself forward into the backyard. I knelt down to open the gap, then laid flat on my stomach and pulled ahead with one hand while holding the space open with the other. The pickets slipped out of hand when I made it halfway through, and I had to drag myself into the backyard as the splintery wood scraped against my back and legs. It got lodged on my feet, so I rotated my upper body around and lifted the gate up in a painful posture to free them.

“Nice job,” Percy remarked as I stood up and dusted off my clothes.

The man’s backyard was like a wasteland. There was no grass, a small shed with a caved-in roof, and the only object anywhere to be found was an unmarked cross grave made of old sticks of wood sitting by the house.

Adrian was checking the screen door on the left corner, the window of which wasn’t covered, but it was chock full of so much rust and mold that seeing through it was impossible anyway. Adrian planted his foot against the wall and pulled back on the handle, eventually busting it open with bits of rusted metal dropping to the ground. “He left this unlocked a while back. I guess a lock wasn’t needed anyway.” He flung the door open and led us inside.

We entered a closed-in patio that doesn’t look like it’s been touched in years. A plastic folding table sat against the left wall with a PC from the late 90s and scattered dusty paperwork. An unplugged white fridge was on the opposite side next to a trash bin covered in a variety of stains. Percy took a step forward and splashed her foot in a brown puddle. A crack in the ceiling was directly above it. She jumped over it and opened the fridge, and after one glance at the rusting beer cans and the puddle on the bottom dripping onto the ground, she slammed it shut. Her eyes moved to the inside of the stained trash bin, which instantly made her jump back with a tiny shriek and kick it. The bin fell over, making her jump even further back, and dumping out another trove of rusted beer cans infested with spiders and a cockroach.

I bleated, “Nope, fuck that,” and jumped past them and through the next door inside the house, which surprisingly had no lock.

Down a hall to the right, we were led into the kitchen, where the light was left on. Counters lined all three walls ahead with breaks to fit the fridge, oven, sink, and door to the garage in the far right corner, along with a passage in the back left corner to the living room, also with a light left on. For a place supposedly belonging to a QAnon maniac, everything looked aggressively normal⁠—but still like it’s been uninhabited for the past 25 years. The floor’s white tiles were browning on top of the plethora of colorful stains that had long been seeped into them. A larger plethora of crumbs and dried chunks of food were swept in all corners.

As I walked along the laminate countertops, I traced my finger down the thick coating of dust on them, and it only took a couple inches for it to pile halfway up to my nail. I creaked open one of the cupboards above to find a stash of cooking supplies buried in a swath of cobwebs. One particularly large spider was sitting in the upper corner, so I slammed it shut. The microwave was sitting up between the cupboards, one of the only things around not blasted with dust. The counter space below it was severely discolored, with some food stains around it turning chalky or gelatin-like. The paneling on the edge of the counter was dented or peeling off. Several framed pictures were against the wall directly below the cupboards, all buried in more dust that fogged up the photos. An empty frame was lying flat with the backing removed, presumably where Adrian’s picture came from. The frames were dated decades ago, the latest one being from 2006. They all seemed to be of the guy’s wife, but none included him.

Adrian and Percy explored into the living room while I continued searching the kitchen. I looked down at the sink in the middle of the center wall. About a week’s worth of dishes was stacked inside, all of them looking in bad shape. Some of the bowls were cracked or had missing chunks, and one of the plates was split in half. Mold was growing in the leftover food at the bottom. The porcelain sink itself was layered with grime, as was the faucet. One of the covered windows was behind it. An old brown curtain was duct-taped to the top of the window sill, and behind it was a construction-glued piece of cardboard that was damp around the edges.

The top of the gas stove on the left wall was rusted to the point that you could snap pieces of it off with your bare hands. Water was leaking below the refrigerator and running down the side of the floor, harboring even more mold. Upon opening the fridge, I discovered that the water leak was actually coming from inside it when a puddle spilled out onto my shoes, making me jump back and kick it shut. And with that, I was done with the kitchen.

Along the passage to the living room, large paintings of either an ocean or an island in the ocean lined the walls, a couple of them sitting in a rusted picture frame. A relatively small piano was built into the left wall, while a small table sat against the right wall, holding a landline phone, a yellow notepad, and a pencil holder, all of which were covered in dust. “Jesus, this guy doesn’t touch anything in here,” I said to the others. “What does he do all day?”

I entered the living room, my wet shoes sloshing on the carpet. The walls off to the right were lined with two couches and an armchair. On the left, a slightly large early-2000s TV sat on a black stand without any drawers, and to the left of that was a passage into the side of another hallway. The center couch’s fabric was tearing on the left and right cushions, while the black paint in the middle one was rubbing off. The leather couch on the right wall had cobwebs in between the cushions and was covered in—surprise, surprise—a coat of dust.

Adrian was searching around and under the couches, while Percy must have been somewhere in the hall. I walked in next. The whole thing was less than ten feet long with a door ahead, two doors on each end of the hall, and a stairway facing behind. I opened the door ahead to find a cramped bathroom. There was six feet of narrow walking space ahead and a bathtub on the right. An outline of where the mirror used to be was left above the sink. The medicine cabinet above the toilet had dated prescription bottles and makeup tools, but judging by the browning layer of dust everywhere, none of it had been touched since at least the beginning of the last decade. I opened the shower curtain to find the tub littered with tools and broken tiles from off the wall, with the removed showerhead and faucet sitting on the edge. The sink, toilet, and bathtub were grimy and stained brown and worse than the kitchen sink. Jesus, dude. At least use some fucking Lysol.

I stepped out and walked to the door on the right end of the hallway. The door creaked open to a puff of dust flying in my face. I looked inside and flipped the light on to find an ages-old bedroom, everything in sight covered with enough dust to make another human. A king-sized bed was in the center of the left wall with a wooden dresser on the wall in front of it. Two nightstands were on each side of the bed, each with a bulky alarm clock and an old telephone. Another TV like the one in the living room sat on the dresser with another computer desk in the corner beside it. The bedsheets were blank white and freshly made, but like everything else around here, had been untouched for more than a decade. At least it was well-preserved, though.

I heard Percy’s footsteps creaking down the stairs behind me, then the door on the other side of the hall opening. I walked further into the room to get a better look around. A LaserDisc DVD player from at least 1999 and an oval-shaped radio were next to the TV. Under the left nightstand, a pair of leopard print glasses were placed on top of a book too dusted to read the title. Two suitcases and a duffel bag were peaking out from under the bed. Curious.

I turned to the dresser. The drawers on the left half had hand marks in the dust on the handles. I slid open the drawer in the top right. A stash of women’s underwear and socks was inside. Good God. What the hell happened here?

I turned to leave the room but noticed that beside the door was a barely-visible framed portrait of a couple in their 30s, dated 1966. Their faces bore a slight resemblance to the owner, and the quality of their photoshoot looked professional. They were even decked out in fancy two-piece suits. Are those his parents? They’re clearly richer than him, was Korey’s place originally owned by them?

Upon stepping out of the room, my eye was caught in the room ahead that Percy entered, specifically its flashy pink wallpaper. I walked down the hall and inside and felt a chill on the first step in. Whatever I was expecting the room to be, it definitely wasn’t a kid’s bedroom.

A toy drum set, a two-foot LEGO house, a bin full of giant toy blocks, massive stuffed animals, and a swath of LEGO characters and vehicles were scattered everywhere. There was a shelf full of colored bins probably holding more shit, a dresser with a lava lamp and coloring books, and messy paintings on paper taped to the wall. The cardboard covering the window had partially come loose and was blowing in the wind, explaining the lack of compounded dust around.

Percy was kneeling down at the bunk bed in the back corner. The bottom bunk had a comforter designed with all the time’s Disney princesses and was littered with more stuffed animals, most of which were Disney characters. Percy held up a tiny stuffed Stitch with a keychain on its head. After a few seconds, she jumped up and said, “Well, this is depressing.” She put the Stitch in her coat pocket.

“No shit. What do you thi—”

“Guys!” Adrian shouted. Percy and I bolted into the living room. Adrian was sitting by the center couch that was flipped on its side, holding a strap of cash. “The guy left a hole in the bottom to slip his money in. About ten of these things were hidden, and they’ve got to have at least $5,000 each.” Fuck, that’s right. The money.

“That can’t be all of it,” said Percy. “Where is the rest?”

“You two check the other couch. I’ll look under the armchair.” Adrian bundled the ten stacks in his arms and dumped them on the glass coffee table. Percy dragged the left couch back and loudly flipped it over on her own. She felt around the bottom cover until her hand slid through a tear in the fabric. She dug inside, pulling out more stacks of $50 bills one at a time, her gloves becoming increasingly smothered with spiderwebs. After one last swab around the inside of the couch, we ended up with seven stacks, official bank wrapping and everything. Adrian pulled two out from a sleeve in the armchair.

We collected the money onto the table. “That’s 19 straps of $5,000.” Percy whipped out her phone and checked the calculator. “Five thousand times nineteen, that’s… 95 thousand dollars! Holy shit!”

“That’s not even three percent of what we need,” I said.

“Then let’s find more! Where do we look next?”

She looked at Adrian. Adrian looked to the drawer-less TV stand. “That.”

The two of them rushed to each side of it and pulled back, the stand proving to be much heavier than they anticipated. They scooted it back a few inches before the TV started rocking, and Percy jumped away to hold it in place. Adrian dragged it back for a foot, then after glancing behind the stand, proceeded to pull it out even further. Once he moved it to a 45-degree angle against the wall, I slid over to get my own peek at the big hidden space.

“That’s… a lot of dollar bills.”

Adrian wrapped his arm around the pile of money and swept it all out onto the floor, a cloud of dust wafting out with it. At least a couple dozen stacks were inside. “Gotta be $100,000 or more in there.”

All of us stared in awe between the two piles. Fuck. So this is happening now.

“Alright,” Adrian said while standing up. “We’ve got a lot of space to cover here. I suggest we split up and search for more. Any stash can be hidden anywhere around here. Check for loose panels in every drawer or cabinet; under, behind, and inside every piece of furniture; under every rug or carpet; behind every photo and poster; and down every air vent or hidden corner. Most of this place hasn’t been touched in a long time so that $900,000 will be somewhere he’s recently been. Percy, what was upstairs?”

“Just his bedroom and some guest room.”

“Perfect. You check the guest room. Graham, search his bedroom extensively. I’ll scrounge around down here.” Great, I get to look at more depressing shit.

Percy bolted to the hall and back up the stairs while I uneasily walked behind. The stairway was barely three feet wide and the stairs were uncomfortably narrow, not to mention uncarpeted. I slowly trodded my way up, tightly gripping the handrail so I didn’t misstep and crack my skull open. There was only a tiny space at the top with the two rooms on the side, Percy being in the left one. A thin desk was against the wall between them, holding only a metal lamp, boxes of shotgun ammo, and a picture dated 1998. It shows the man’s wife again, only this time standing next to two kids. The boy must have been Daniel. A quarter of what looks like their grandpa is cut out at the right edge of the frame, and slight tear marks are vaguely visible on the photo.

A drawer below was creaked open. I slid it all the way out. A torn-open piece of mail sat on top of a dusty collection of paper supplies and small tools. It looked fairly recent compared to everything else. I took it out and reopened the envelope. It was just a basic printed letter, probably typed in a default document on Microsoft Word.

“Luther,

I didn’t want to be the one to write this, but nobody else was willing to. Don’t take it as a sign.

Grandpa died yesterday in his room while the aids were gone. Doctors are still working out the cause. It was most likely something brain-related. He refused for months to talk about what we should do with him once he died, but his aids say that he did write a will at some point. No one knows where it is though. He had about 26 million dollars in assets. He was only told about the family a few days ago, long before the will would have been written. I’m only writing to say that you should expect to appear somewhere in it whenever it gets found. Someone else will update you.

~Daniel.”

Daniel. That was the name of Korey’s new landlord. That property must have been passed down to Luther once his father died. And he had $26 million… was the house all that Luther got?

I entered Luther’s room on the right. I felt around the walls for a light switch, but nothing came up. I resorted to using my phone flashlight, revealing no light source anywhere in the room. His bed sat in the far left corner with only one white sheet as a blanket. There was a little nightstand next to it littered with tiny boxes of either ammo or cigarettes, and a massive pile of laundry further right with a circumference of at least eight feet, but notably no dresser. I pointed the light down a bit, revealing a cluster of spilled bullet casings and gun extensions of every variety all across the carpet. Extended barrels and clips, silencers, scopes, grips, bump stocks, and braces covered every square foot of the floor, many of them not even legal. A giant safe was perched on the wall directly to my right with an eight-digit combination lock. That could either be for gun storage, or it’s the money trove. I need to get the combination first.

I checked his bed first. The top sheet was crumpled in one spot, so I ripped off the fitted sheet and tossed it to the laundry mountain. The mattress was less than six inches thick, and a torn-up and stained foam topper was placed on it. I looked underneath both to find nothing. There was no hole or zipper on the mattress, but it crunched when I pressed on it. I searched along the floor for something to use, and remarkably, an unsheathed tactical knife was casually sitting upright against the wall. I tip-toed over to grab it while watching every step closely and carefully carried it back. I flipped the mattress on its side, stabbed into the bottom, and dropped the knife aside. I turned my phone camera on and slipped it inside the hole. It showed multiple disgusting mold blotches lining the fabric and several broken springs, but no money. No three and a half million dollars under a QAnon nut’s mattress in rural Medina. Lame.

I dropped the mattress back down onto the cheap metal bedframe and threw the bundle of sheets onto it. Now for the laundry. Fuck. With my gloves tucked in under my coat sleeves to keep anything from contacting my skin, I began taking apart the mountain of laundry.

One hand held my phone flashlight and the other did the laundry work. The top of the pile was all blank shirts that smelled like beer and sweat, and I shook out each of them to see if any secret hint for the safe combination fell out. It was only after removing eight of them that I finally saw a pair of jeans, possibly meaning Luther has been going pantsless for all of the past week. I dug through all of the tobacco-scented pockets, taking out far too much lint but not finding anything useful. There was one crumpled-up dollar bill, dirty nail clippers, a disfigured paperclip, and lots and lots of lint. I only briefly shined the flashlight inside the pairs of underwear before throwing them aside. The socks couldn’t be seen into, requiring me to feel up each one extensively for any casual slip of paper containing the combination. A leather jacket appeared halfway down the pile with over a dozen little pockets and a powerful stench of cigarette smoke. It held one bottle cap and a reeking sense of insecurity.

Percy’s silhouette barged into the room as I was reaching the final layer. “Find anything yet?”

“Lots.” I threw aside a shirt with weeks-old barbeque sauce spilled on it. “We can make plenty of money from used clothes and illegal gun parts if you find the right homeless guy.”

“Gross.” She walked away.

The bottom of the pile was progressively damper and more repugnant, and some of the clothes needed to be peeled away before I could search them, but I could care less about the searching part at this point. With only one pair of pants, two shirts, and at least eight socks left at the bottom, I gave up early, scraping them all together into a sloppy bundle and throwing them at the bed. The wind it generated blew into my face and made me break into a coughing fit, but once I calmed down and rubbed my eyes, I finally glanced at what was hidden below the laundry. On the floor ominously laid a torn picture with a half-full cigarette box next to it. I picked up the photo and shined the flashlight on it. Wait, that’s….

I bolted out of the room and snatched the picture frame on the table. The torn family frame and the damp laundry photo were two halves of one whole, revealing the other side of the old man and a young Luther right next to him. What the hell? Luther ripped himself out of a family photo and then framed it?

Fuck, the money. I need to focus on the money. Wait, maybe… I snapped the wooden frame in half against the table and took out the photo. Holding the two halves side to side, I turned the picture around. It was just as I suspected. Written in pen on the back of each half of the photograph was the eight-letter word “AMARANTE.” I opened up the letter keypad on my phone to decode it.

2… 6…. 2… 72… 6… 83! The combination is 2627263!

I bolted back into the room and jumped towards the safe. My right heel landed and cracked a hole in the wooden floor below the carpet.

…What the fuck.

I held perfectly still for a long moment. I kept holding until my foot became cramped due to my heel being inside of the floor. The foot slowly lifted up, leaving a heel-sized dent in the carpet. I grabbed the tactical knife sitting under a pair of jeans by the bed and walked back. I slit two feet across the carpet behind the hole and tore up. Below the carpet, there was a snapped 2x2 wooden square plank covering a hole in the floor. I reached through the hole I kicked in and tore the plank out. About a dozen straps of money were directly below in a space about ten feet deep.

“Guys. Something is here.”

I lowered my legs down the hole and dropped in, crashing onto hollow wood flooring. I swiped away a cloud of dust encompassing the cold room. The flashlight was pointed to the ground, showing the few cash straps I saw from above. But the further I lifted my phone up to see ahead, the more stacks that appeared. Percy’s footsteps creaked from above and into Luther’s room, and it took a second of looking for my light’s reflection before she ran above and jumped down into the space.

Once she landed, I had illuminated a five-foot-high mountain of stacks of money in the center of the room. They had the same wrapping as the cash from the living room, and hundreds of them were thrown haphazardly into the pile. The entire mass stretched nearly wall to wall horizontally, save for a dozen storage boxes labeled “Ohio City” stacked in thirds in the corner.

“Oh my God,” Percy clamored.

The sound of Adrian running up the stairs echoed throughout the room. Percy and I remained silent until he jumped inside behind me.

“My God,” Adrian repeated. He sank his legs into the money mountain and dug through it, supposedly trying to count how much was there. “Is this the money Korey’s landlord gave?”

“No,” I said, struggling to keep my breath. Jesus Christ. The letter, the money, the Ohio City business, Daniel, the untouched rooms, his wife, the grave marker, the protectionist fencing and guns… all of it is starting to make sense now. “This is a multi-million dollar inheritance for his family.”

Adrian stood up. “Multi-million? As in ‘more than three and a half million?’”

Percy walked to the pile and sifted through the money. “Holy shit. We can end it all with this.”

“Maybe. We still need to count it all.”

“Adrian, look at this! If that little pile we made upstairs was three percent of the total, how much do you think this is?”

“Alright, maybe it is enough. But how would we deliver it all?”

“Uh… we could just load it all into the trunk of a car and let the Eclipse goons take it.”

“That would take forever. We need the money to be in something they can carry.”

“We can condense it too, maybe. We could have the bank swap us out for $100 bills instead.”

“If they had $3.3 million worth of $100 bills, I would be astounded.”

“Is there any briefcase large enough to hold that much in 50s? The stacks aren’t too thick.”

“We would need suitcases, and more than one.”

“What about boxes? Do we have any cardboard in the car?”

“No. There’s probably an attic or a basement somewhere around that would have boxes, though.”

As they went back and forth, I was standing frozen in place, shining the flashlight at them. I couldn’t shake off how mortified I was feeling enough to move any part of my body. For the first time in my life, I was at a complete loss for words.

“Did you find anything while you were searching downstairs?”

“Nothing obvious. I briefly looked in the garage, there might be a hidden storage room in there. Were there no boxes in the guest room?”

“Nada. It was mostly empty aside from the trove of clothes and dusty ass sheets in the closet.”

“No, wait a minute, there are boxes there in the corner. What’s in those?”

Percy rushed to the stack of Ohio City boxes and tried to pull down one at the top but struggled to move it. “Dude, these things are fucking heavy.”

Adrian rushed to assist her and pushed at the box from behind, tipping over the stack and sending it crashing to the ground between them, shaking the floor. The one on top burst open, dumping out another trove of wrapped money.

Percy let out a little shriek of excitement after seeing it. “Holy shit! This has to be the landlord’s money. We’re fucking set for life!”

“We might not even have to take anything out of our savings. This is perfect.”

No, don’t… you can’t just….

“These things are almost 20 pounds. How are we getting them out of here?”

Fucking hell, just stop for a moment!

“There has to be a boarded window somewhere in here. Graham, light?”

No… no, no, no… “No.”

I had barely spoken loud enough for them to hear me. They kept talking like normal.

“And how is the car going to hold this? The sheer amount of weight is going to kill our gas mileage.”

“If we could borrow that guy’s pickup truck, that would be useful.”

My fists were clenching enough to break my phone in half. Adrian started speaking something I couldn’t hear over the sudden ringing in my ears, and I finally snapped and screamed, “NO!”

Their heads whipped towards me. My phone slid out of my hand and landed flat on the ground, the light pointing up and dimly illuminating the room.

“No… we can’t do this.”

Percy marched towards me while Adrian quietly glared at me. “What are you talking about?”

“This—this doesn’t… it can’t… we….” My heart rate was spiking sharply. So many words were flooding my brain, but they all tried to escape my mouth in a chaotic jumble.

“Dude, just spit it out!”

My arms started shivering, and my eyes were locked on the pile of money. “Goddammit, we can’t take this!”

“Why?!”

“IT ISN’T FUCKING OURS! Do you not understand that?!” Percy stepped back in shock. I took a deep breath. “This house goes beyond some stereotypical conspiracist mania, and this money isn’t just a product of sheer paranoia. He didn’t make millions living in a shitty house like this, much less living alone. He had a family. He had children and a wife. His father saw that, however many years ago, and this—this was just an empty wager. You saw the bedrooms downstairs. You saw all the family photos from 15 years ago. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Those millions of dollars were meant for the kid who sold him out to us. They were meant for his wife or daughter who’s buried in the fucking backyard. Those decades-old rooms and dusty cabinets… they were kept that way on purpose. And those fences outside kept them away from everyone else. And all he ever got in return was a fucking mountain of cash he can’t do anything with. And if we take that away… then what the hell are we?”

“We’re people trying to survive. And if he doesn’t need it, then what’s the point?”

“Is that all we fucking are now? Is our only objective to stay safe at any cost? We’re supposed to stand for something bigger than just self-preservation. We looked out for little people like Luther who are ripe for exploitation. Solaris didn’t make us some savior of the working class little guys getting swept up by corporate hacks; it just made us a little richer. And now you want to stoop to the same level we’ve been railing against for most of our adult lives? This isn’t who we are, and this isn’t why we started. It was never supposed to matter what the risk to us would be because the risk was always greater for those lowest on the ladder. They had no choice but to follow their leader, so we got rid of the leader to see that the innocent people under their wing had a way forward. And to now steal millions of dollars from those same innocent people who haven’t done a thing in their lives? We’re individuals. We aren’t forced to do anything by any higher-ups or executive boards. And if we choose to go home with this and leave Luther a hole in his only home… you will never live it down.”

Adrian stared at me with a grave look in his eyes. “These are difficult times, Graham. Sometimes they require hard decisions.”

“It doesn’t require that we sacrifice ourselves. Look me in the eyes and tell me you can end somebody else’s livelihood to protect yourself and then go home with any semblance of confidence that you can take the morally correct pathway ever again.”

“I lost that ability a long time ago.” Adrian glanced at the stack of money he was holding, then dropped it back in the pile. “But the rest of you don’t have to.”

Percy’s head dropped, and in the faint lighting, I almost saw her tearing up. “What are we going to tell the others?”

Adrian walked back under the hole to the bedroom. “Tell them we didn’t find it. Nobody needs to know about this place.” He jumped, grabbed onto the sides, and pulled himself back inside.

Percy looked up at me and whispered, “Graham, you know what this means, right?”

I sighed. “Not what it leads to. But I guess we’ll find out soon.”

I grabbed my phone and we both climbed back into the bedroom. Adrian was waiting by the stairs. I noticed the mess I left with the sheets and laundry, along with the torn-up carpet.

“Should we at least clean up after ourselves before leaving?” I asked.

Adrian checked his watch. “No. It’s almost 7:00, and we have a two-hour drive back. He still has everything that he had before, so there’s no reason the cops would get involved.”

Percy and I silently agreed. We made our way down the stairs, past the open bedrooms, the pile of money in the living room, the water leak in the kitchen, the spilt trash can on the patio, and into the backyard.

The two of them walked ahead to the fence posts we entered under while I took one last look at the cross grave. I shined my phone flashlight at it, and on the tip was the etching, “AMARANTE & LUTHER MERRICK, 1969–2006.”

I powerwalked behind Adrian and Percy, dropping on my sore back and scurrying away until I was finally free from that fucking house. We walked nearly blind through the dirt Luther used as the driveway, his tire marks from earlier still visible.

We stepped back into the comfort of the car, where Adrian turned the engine on and drove us away in silence.

---