Percy
I stopped banging my head against the window once I heard the elevator finally open. I had been scared that the man walking out was going to be one of the guards dragging Finn by the ear or some shit, but to my—and I assume everybody else’s—surprise, it was the other way around. I could barely see Finn through the room’s blinding white lighting, but I could tell it was him. I got a more complete view once he made his way up the mini-stairs, but when he did, I sensed that both of us were definitely fucked.
Through his obvious panic that was thinly disguised in the most pathetic version of heroism I’ve ever seen, he shouted 15 feet away, “What the fuck is this supposed to be?” to nobody in particular.
The guy menacingly sitting on the table attempted to respond, “You—”
“Was that guy in the elevator supposed to kill me? Or was that whole stunt just to bring me here?”
“H—”
“Was he supposed to kill me, and if it didn’t work, then try to bring me here?”
“Sh—”
“And what the fuck is all this supposed to be? You got all your fucking goons with guns surrounding the area like I’m here to speak to a 17th-century king. You even have all your royal advisors beside you with a casual prisoner hanging out in the corner. This looks fucking ridiculous.”
“SHUT UP!” the guy screamed. He sat up off the table and took two steps towards Finn in such an intimidating manner that it felt calculated.
Finn backed away and held his hands out as if to say, “No worries, man, it’s all good.” What he ended up saying out loud was, “Wow. You’re not the CEO of this place, are you?”
“No.”
“Then what the fuck are you supposed to be?”
He didn’t respond to that. “You tried to break in here. Why is that?”
“I have a better question: why the fuck did you have the guy in the elevator try to kill me? And I’d also like to follow that up by mentioning that he didn’t kill me, he’s still lying in there probably unconscious.”
I wanted to scream at him so bad that I had to physically restrain myself. That is, more than I have already been physically restrained with these stupid zip-tie handcuffs, the most pathetic excuse for restraints that have ever existed. The whole situation was so unbelievably ridiculous that I couldn’t help bursting out into insane laughter, drawing everyone’s attention and shutting down the conversation.
“Someone shut her the fuck up,” the bad guy said.
Using every ounce of self-control I had to restrain myself and keep relatively composed, I told him, “No, please, I’ll help myself.” I backed against the window again and continued hitting my head against it.
Finn decided to open his mouth again, turning his fake heroism into fake smug confidence. “So, what is your name supposed to be?”
The bad guy glared at him for a moment and answered, “My name is Jax.”
Now Finn was the one who burst out laughing. “Jesus Christ! Man, you have to be fucking with me. There is no way ‘Jax’ is your actual name.” He continued cackling like a middle schooler. “What’s the name of the guy next to you? Rigs? Skullcrusher? Fury?” Finn kept listing off names in a mocking tone, and he couldn’t seem to stop cracking himself up.
Jax didn’t join him. He simply made a head motion to the guy Finn was making fun of, who then walked up to Finn, swiped a taser out of his pocket, and jabbed him in the stomach. He promptly collapsed to the ground, making his best attempt to scream in pain through his finally-shut mouth. The guy walked back casually.
After it wore off, Finn shot up and screamed, “Fucking shit! That wasn’t very nice of you, Jawbone.”
At that point, I couldn’t keep quiet. “Finn! Shut the fuck up!”
“Sorry! I didn’t mean to call you Jawbone, that was stupid and immature of me. Thrasher is obviously your real name, I apologize.”
Yelling at him might have been a mistake. The Trasher/Jawbone guy whispered something in Jax’s ear, Jax told it to someone else, and the guard to my right was suddenly dragging me out towards Finn. I was pushed next to him, and the guard walked around behind us.
“You’re a fucking idiot, Finn,” I whispered. The guard then dragged Finn away down the hall and through one of the doors on the left.
“Don’t worry about him," Jax said as he sat back on the table. "He’s just gonna wait there for a moment. Now, why don’t you answer my question, Percy? Why are you here?”
There wasn’t much point in lying to him, but I also didn’t want to give any more away than I had to. “Well… we heard a few rumors a while back that you guys in Eclipse were doing some secret project or operation using government money. We wanted to learn more about it, but because so little is known about the company, there wasn’t much we could find without, y’know, seeing it for ourselves. So Finn snuck in disguised as a repair guy and I squeezed in through the air vents, all so we could plant a couple of mics on some computers in storage. And it obviously didn’t end up going very well.”
“Right. So your goal was to just sneak in and somehow find evidence of a government conspiracy, is that it?”
“That’s rather dumbed down, but… pretty much, yeah.”
“Just two everyday suburbanites who decided it’d be a good idea to break into the HQ of a tech giant based on a rumor they heard once?”
Suburbanites? Was that just an insult, or does he actually know where we live?
“I mean, you’re just a tech company. We weren’t really expecting that any of this would happen.”
“Alright, and where did you hear these rumors from, exactly?”
Now I have no choice but to lie. Probably set myself up for that. “Um… somewhere online, I think. I don’t really remember where; it was a long time ago. I think there were some people on Reddit talking about it, and a couple of our work friends. We didn’t hear too much about it before we started investigating for ourselves.”
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He sat quietly for a moment glaring at me. “Alright. I’ve heard enough. Bring the other guy out.”
A guard went to knock on the door, and another came out of the room with Finn, dragged him down the hall, and pushed him back next to me. The guard didn’t walk away, though. He just stood next to us menacingly, holding a police baton.
“Let’s try this again. Finn, why don’t you tell me what it is you’re doing here?” Shit. Please don’t fuck this up.
“Okay, I guess I’ll tell you. But first, how the fuck do you know my name?”
“Answer the question.”
“I will. Once you answer mine.”
“You are not in a position to make demands of me. Now answer—the fucking—question.”
Finn said nothing.
“For fuck’s sake. Orion?”
The guy Finn made fun of walked back to him with the taser. “Oh shit, your name is Orion? Well gosh, thank you for clearing that up, I really—” Orion tased him once again. He collapsed onto his knees shaking uncontrollably, yelling every swear word he could think of through gritted teeth until it wore off. He flung his head up dramatically. “Ow. You know, I thought we had all learned from the CIA that torture isn’t an effective means of getting—”
“Answer—the question!”
“Alright, alright. Why are we here?” He lifted himself back up to a crooked standing position, still shivering from the taser. “Well... it all really started when… a secret informant who works for your company… leaked evidence to us of… a secret conspiracy with the Russian government… to assassinate the new governor of Virginia. And take over Afghanistan again.” You stupid motherfucker.
When I noticed the look of intrigue in Jax’s eyes, I cut in. “Finn! Tell them the truth.”
“The truth. Right. Because that wasn’t true. The truth is… the informant wasn’t actually an employee, he’s an investigative journalist for Breitbart News. And he’s not even human, he’s a squirrel with a top hat and bow tie. He’s very professional.”
Whatever self-control I still retained had dissipated in that one moment. I had to get hauled away by two guards to keep me from choking him to death and punching his arm.
I was thrown back to my spot by the window, where I resumed the process of tugging at my hair while smacking my head on the glass.
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11:34. After spending 15 hours getting Adrian reacquainted with the city—checking out restaurants, touring the Southpark Mall, going to that mall’s movie theater, driving around Cleveland, and visiting Medina—we finally made it back home. I was ready to pass out as soon as I opened the door, only for that spell to be immediately broken by Finn screaming at me to shut the door. Adrian and I slipped inside before Graham ran over and slammed it shut.
“Graham, what the fuck is going on?” I yelled.
He said with his breath half gone, “Loose bird. It can’t fly, but it’s trying to. Please help us find it.”
“How the fuck did a bird get loose in here?”
“There isn’t time for this, just help us find it!” Immediately after he said that, we heard a flapping sound in the kitchen followed by something falling on the ground. I rushed in first to make sure nothing broke, but Graham butted past me. A plump little American redstart was standing on top of the oven. It lept to fly away but instantly dropped to the floor.
Finn poked out from the other side of the kitchen. He crouched down and tip-toed towards it. Once the bird was a couple of feet away and facing the other direction, he pounced at it like a cat. Between the sound of Finn flopping on the ground and the aggressive flapping, it was hard to tell who was winning until Finn jumped up with the bird in his hands and screamed, “Yes! Somebody get me the shoebox in the bathroom!”
“Which fucking bathroom?”
“Upstairs!”
Adrian was beside the stairs, so he ran up to grab it first.
“What the hell is this?” I asked Graham.
“The damn bird flew straight into the window a couple of hours ago, and in Finn and Skyler’s attempts to rescue and release it, it escaped from the box they kept it in and went loose in the house.” Adrian ran downstairs with the shoebox and held it open for Finn to stuff the bird back inside and shut the lid. “Sweet fucking mercy,” Finn said, letting out a huge sigh of relief.
“You're keeping it in a box?”
“I was confused by it too, but that’s apparently what you’re supposed to do with an injured bird.”
Finn grabbed the box from Adrian, and I mused, “Dammit, I’m the birdwatcher in this house. How did I not know that?”
“Because you’re not a veterinarian. But we’re good now. It’s over.” He set the box on the counter.
“What are we supposed to do with it now?”
Graham answered, “Under ordinary circumstances, we would call a professional who could care for it or bring it to an animal shelter. But neither of those things is exactly a viable option for us. Unless any of you guys got tired of remaining anonymous, that is.”
“So we have to keep it?”
“If it can’t or won’t go back into the wild where it came from, then… yeah. I guess we will have to keep it. I’m sure Skyler will be happy to hear that once she gets back.”
“Oh, she already left?” Adrian asked.
“Yeah, like an hour ago.”
“I told you she would be gone before we showed up,” I reminded him.
Adrian glared into space for a second and said, “Right,” monotonously. “When will she be back?”
Graham answered. “Well, it’s an hour-long walk there and back, and she shouldn’t take any more than 15 minutes in the house, so I’d say about….” He took his phone out to check the time. “About 1:00.”
“An hour-long walk? Couldn’t you just drive her?”
“We couldn't take any chances with any watchful neighbors or the security cameras on their block. Have to be as bulletproof as possible if the feds get called. Walking the whole way would have looked more ‘escaping a domestic dispute’ than ‘preparing to commit a felony.’”
“Would anyone even notice if the cameras caught it?”
“Oh, this is an upper-fucking-class neighborhood, my friend. People are watching those cameras.”
“Oh.”
“Well, we should have just a few minutes left before Skyler is finished. I’ll be waiting downstairs for the update if any of you want to tag along.” Everybody volunteered.
“I’ll go look outside for a minute,” said Finn, “find a couple of worms or something to keep the bird from starving. Then I’ll head down.”
We all went to sleep as soon as the update from Skyler came, and we woke up the next morning with $780,000. Except for Skyler, who didn’t have to wake up as she never went to sleep. She had gotten straight to work on taking care of the bird after coming home, and drove straight to the nearest pet shop to get it food, water, and a cage, and stayed up all night with it to make sure it didn’t die.
Graham went straight to work on upgrading the house’s security. He bought a screen door that has a trick handle you would need to push up to open instead of down; he bought an alarm system that, when activated, would ring out if any of the doors or windows opened and could be deactivated from the outside with a five-digit code (which he suggested being 80085); and he bought six hidden cameras outside our bedrooms to be turned on at night/when we’re away, and would set the alarm off if there was movement. They can record for up to 48 hours, but Graham swore he wouldn’t watch them unless something suspicious happened.
Finn bought building materials for the treehouse he started working on before the Solaris operation started. I guarantee he’s starting that again now to have a new getaway area from the room he’s sharing with Graham. He also ordered a small A/C unit to put on the wall, another decision that can be traced back to him sharing a room with Graham.
I wasn’t sure what to do with my cut. I thought about buying new clothes until I remembered how much I already have. A new jacket would be nice, but I’ve gotten a new one after every operation, and they’re starting to add up. I mainly wanted better security, but Graham already covered that. In the end, I just decided to set aside the money for later, either for our next operation or whenever I think of something to use it on. I just hope it doesn’t turn out like my jackets and sits in a corner for four months until I forget it exists.
But hey, you never know.
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