I don’t know what you were doing on the days that preceded our world going to hell in a hand-basket. With the uber-sophisticated technology that allowed whatever unknown and unseen alien hosts to augment reality, not to mention their obvious penchant for blood-soaked reality TV, I’m sure those days were engraved into your memory forever.
I know they are in mine.
It was early evening when things kicked off in earnest. If you lived a life that resembled my usual day-to-day, you might’ve just been settling down to a glamorous Kraft dinner. Maybe on the sofa. Maybe while you watched the most recent episode of HBO’s latest divisive fantasy series.
That sounds about right. That sounds wholesome. That sounds nice.
But before the world went to hell, I was about to begin the very first day of a job I really shouldn’t have taken.
What’re you doing here, Dev? I thought as I stepped inside the back of the unmarked van. What the hell are you doing here, man?
It was not the first time I had asked myself that question. It wasn’t even the twentieth time. I’d questioned the wisdom of my decision a hundred times since the nondescript blue van had pulled up outside the Sir Sub-a-lot sandwich shop on South Higgens Avenue.
Ever since I’d found myself owing my uncle one big favor and a hell of a lot of cash after the debacle concerning the online poker games—my last get-rich-quick scheme—I’d been making fairly dubious life choices. But that was the annoying thing about holes; the obvious thing to do was to stop digging, but it was harder to put down the shovel than you’d think.
I questioned my judgment when the door slid shut behind me and I saw that the windows had been inexpertly blacked out from the inside. I started to question my sanity when I looked around and saw the pale, nervous faces of what passed for the most skilled computer hackers in Missoula, Montana.
I recognized most of them. Missoula is home to about seventy-five thousand people. Most of the inhabitants work in the agriculture, forestry, mining, and energy production sectors. There’s not a massive call for highly computer-literate men and women who are more comfortable than they should be with bending the occasional cyber-security law. The pool of talent, so far as that went, was small.
And it looked like Nico Gaspari had hired as many of us as he could. I’d had no idea there were this many hackers working for Nico—I knew I had some other colleagues for the task at hand, but not eight of us.
I started wondering if it would be better to throw myself out of the moving van as we drove south past Campbell Park, then turned west, presumably in the direction of Southgate Triangle or Franklin to the Fort. It was hard to tell with limited points of reference.
We were sitting, idling at what I presumed was a stoplight, when I heard a strange be-dong sound. It was the purest and most crystalline chiming that I had ever heard. I noticed a few of the other hackers flinch or jump. Clearly, they’d heard it too.
Whatever it was, it was soon forgotten in the haze of anxiety and trepidation.
No one in the van spoke the whole twenty or thirty minutes we drove across town. Not a peep. It was a pretty mild May day for Montana, must’ve been an easy sixty-five degrees outside, but the windows were all wound up tight. The inside of the van soon smelled of stale sweat and nerves.
My internal debate continued as the sound of traffic became less pronounced and the van turned more frequently, as if we were winding through tighter streets. Then my stomach lurched as the vehicle tilted forward and we cruised down a ramp. The van disappeared into the shadows under some large building before the driver parked it and we were hustled out of the van.
We were standing in the starkly lit interior of a parking garage-cum-makeshift computer lab. Nico Gaspari’s professional henchmen stood all around us.
“Take out your phones, switch ‘em off, and put ‘em in this bowl,” one of the henchmen said. “Then stand against that wall, nice and easy like, hands up on the concrete. Some of the boys are going to give you a friendly little pat down and make sure that none of you are carrying.”
As much as I had tried to avoid ‘conventional jobs’ throughout my twenty-eight years of life, this was the most disconcerting thing someone had instructed me to do on my first day.
“Carrying what?” asked one of the other young men, trying and failing to keep the tremor out of his voice.
“Carrying a little excess weight, kid,” sneered the skinny bearded man as he shut the massive garage rolling door behind us and locked it. “What do you think we’re talking about, eh? Now, up against the wall and spread ‘em.”
Someone nudged me, and not gently, in the back. I turned and found myself eye-to-chest with a guy who was the epitome of a meathead—his head literally looked like it had been carved out of a side of beef. My eyes slid down the barrel-shaped body, and I noticed the handgun wedged into his belt.
Standing in front of that stereotypical mafia goon, I realized that I might have strayed off the path commonly referred to as ‘the straight and narrow’.
“Phone,” the meathead rumbled. “In the bowl. Now.”
I did as I was asked. As I turned it off and dropped it in, I tried my hand at a winning smile and a bit of witty repartee.
“Usually my dates ask for my name before trying to get my number,” I said.
The giant beefcake only blinked slowly at me. He didn’t look amused. He didn’t look anything, really. His face was devoid of emotion. I got the impression that the only thing that might bring a smile to the brutish face was the order to punch me until I went limp.
He licked his lips and blinked again. “Wall. Now.”
I turned to face the dank, scarred cement of the basement floor of the abandoned parking garage. I raised my hands and pressed them to the cold stone. There were a couple of chunks missing from the section of wall right in front of my face. The pockmarks almost looked like they were bullet holes. I hoped fervently that they weren’t.
Shit, I thought. I’m in way over my head here.
Little did I know how much of an understatement that thought was.
I’d thought Uncle Johnnie had been overly apprehensive when he’d mentioned this idea. I didn’t care. Without giving you my whole semi-pitiful backstory, I’d needed the money. It was as simple as that. And good ol’ Uncle Johnnie, the lovable rogue of the Russo family, knew how to get money fast—or, at least, he’d know a guy who knew a guy who could give you the rough location of a bar that employed a cousin who would be able to point you in the direction of someone who had a scheme to make said money. I hadn’t thought the cousin had looked all that tough.
So yeah, that’s how I ended up sitting at a foldout trestle table in the middle of a basement under a dilapidated parking garage, the jerry-rigged halogen tube lights flickering above me, the sound of my fellow hackers tapping away at their keyboards and the whirring of computer fans the only background sound. After all, I had bills to pay, and they needed paying fast.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Shortly after we arrived, Gaspari filled us in on why we were here. He came strolling into the dingy underground space, dressed in an immaculate suit, and looking every inch the mob boss. I was a farm kid by upbringing, having been raised on my family’s small ranch near Whitefish, some two and a half hours north of Missoula. My knowledge of men’s fashion stretched about as far as the blue jeans, boots, plaid shirt, and waxed jacket that I had on, but even I could tell that the outfit cost more than my rent.
Before I could take in anything else but the perfectly pressed blue suit, diamond studs, and knitted silk tie, the dapper man strode casually toward where me and my coworkers were now sitting at our workstations. He was smiling. It wasn’t the kind of smile to make anyone feel happy, in my opinion. It was a smile that might’ve been found making its way through tall grass toward a lost villager in the middle of a forest, fixed to something with stripes and with jaws powerful enough to crush a human skull. It was the kind of smile that said, “Congratulations, you’re alive. As to whether you stay that way, well…”
Gaspari made the rounds, greeting each hacker as if they were long-sundered kin from the old country. When he got to me, he proffered his hand. I took it. His fingernails were manicured. Yet his palm was calloused.
“Good to meet you, kid,” he said.
I doubt a less sincere sentence had ever been uttered.
I looked up, caught the man’s eye, nodded, and looked away again. That second was all I needed to understand the warning my uncle Johnnie had given me just before he made the call to his contact. Standing in a room with Mr. Gaspari was about as close as you could get to paragliding over the opening of Hell.
My fellow hackers and I had then been tasked by the head of the Billings-based Syndicate to hack into the secure servers of a local real estate company, which was apparently a front for a gang of Italian-Americans of the mafioso persuasion who were in direct competition with Nico Gaspari. Judging by the efficacy of the firewalls we had so far failed to break through, this company was most certainly not interested solely in real estate. The only time I had seen more advanced detection software was when I’d been drunk and bored one day and tried my luck at cracking into the Missoula Sheriff’s Department databases to see if I could find out which old classmates had ended up with criminal records—my money had been on Stacy Chalmers for solicitation.
Before he left to some other adjacent room, Gaspari told us quite casually that the building we were in was under surveillance.
“Well, not specifically this building,” he said, “but being the bunch of coglioni that they are, they’re scopin’ out this section of town. This is why nobody’s gonna be taking a stroll out in the fresh air ‘til the job is done, capisce?”
So, not only had I put myself forward for this morally dubious bit of work, but we had now been told, for all intents and purposes, no one was leaving until the job was done and the police knew something was awry and were sniffing around.
Great, I had thought, feeling a bead of sweat slide down the back of my neck. Just great.
For two days, we stayed in that windowless room. We slept on military-style cots and ate out of a basic kitchen in one of the adjoining rooms. I was wearing the same clothes I’d been in since I arrived, as none of us had been told this job would include a sleepover.
And for that whole time, every two hours on the hour, I heard that same chiming be-dong sound. At first, I thought that the stress of my situation had gotten to me. But then it happened again. And again. I just could not figure out what the hell was making the sound.
“What is that goddamn noise?” one of the goons demanded from one of the others the fifth or so time this noise had chimed out. “It’s like… It’s like it’s a goddamn bell sounding in my head, you know.”
“Sei un cazzo di ritardato, muori male pagliaccio,” one of the other men snorted. “It’s coming from outside on a speaker or some shit. You know what they call this town, don’t you?”
“What?” the first man said.
“Zootown,” the other henchman said. “On account of all the damn university kids throwing parties and running wild.”
This seemed to placate the first of Gaspari’s subordinates, but I wasn’t so sure. I’d lived for years in Missoula, and I’d never heard anything like this constantly recurring sound. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that it reminded me of a countdown timer, or warning sound in a game or movie.
“You. Russo, ain’t it?”
I gave a little start. Standing next to me was the wiry man with the big beard that had been so friendly to me and my fellow computer hackers when we had arrived.
“Yeah,” I said, my voice gravelly from lack of use.
“Stop staring into space like a goddamn stunad and get back to work,” the thin man hissed at me.
“I have no idea what a stunad is,” I said.
Deep within that thick beard, the man’s lips curled.
“You’re a goddamn stunad,” he snapped. “And unless you want me to get Bull Zanoni to come and remind you why you’re here with the help of his fists, then I’d zip your face-hole and get back to doing whatever the hell it is you’re doing on that laptop.”
“Which one is Bull Zanoni?” I asked, trying to keep my face open and innocent.
“The man who looks like he swallowed a bull for lunch,” the thin man said.
“Oh, that guy.”
In all fairness, it was a great description of the huge man, who had lacked even the most rudimentary sense of humor.
I assured the bearded man that I’d get back to work, and he stalked off.
And so there we all were. Hackers and gangsters, all stewing in our gradually ripening clothing. Sharing a couple of toilets that had last been updated during the Industrial Revolution and were, quite frankly, the stuff that nightmares were made of.
I was tapping away at my keyboard when the be-dong sound, which had been plaguing me while I was both awake and asleep, assailed me yet again. Only this time the sound peeled out like a church bell tolling. It reverberated in my bones. Set my already taut nerves to jangling.
One of the other hackers, a young woman with platinum blonde hair shaved close to her scalp, fell off her chair with a soft cry.
“Je-sus wept, what the hell was that?” Gaspari yelled through the door at the back of the room.
This time, though, the sound was accompanied by something else. Something completely insane. Something that made no sense. Something that, had I not been in the room when it appeared, I wouldn’t have believed possible.
As the chiming note reverberated through the highly-strung interior of my brain and caused a couple of the other feverishly working hackers to start in their seats, there was a bright blue flash of light. This burst of light was so intense that, for a few moments, I was left reeling, my vision reduced to one giant purple smear of blindness.
I could still feel the throbbing chime singing in my blood.
There was much swearing in Italian from the collection of henchmen around me. Blinking like a prizefighter that had just received an uppercut under the chin, I stood convulsively, waving my hands around in front of me. My thigh struck the shitty rickety table and sent it crashing over, along with the laptop that was hardwired into the internet connection that had been rigged up, a cheap lamp, and a bottle of water that had been sitting on it.
For one dizzily scary moment, I thought that the cops had locked onto us and had a SWAT team bust into the abandoned garage with stun grenades. An icy wave of panic washed through me. My skin prickled with the abrupt thought of being perforated with nine-millimeter submachine-gun rounds.
The sound faded at the same pace as my vision cleared. The immediate and unanticipated silence it left behind was unnerving. It stretched. I waited.
Once my breathing rate had reached a level that wasn’t akin to that of a hyperventilating hummingbird, I took stock of my surroundings. It was only then that I realized I had instinctively taken cover behind my overturned desk.
Like a snail peering out from under the rim of its shell, I looked over the top of the table, which was now lying on its side. Then, I stood up. I felt my jaw drop. Like, I actually felt my bottom jaw lose its fight with gravity.
“By the hair of Swayze,” I breathed. “What in the hell is that?”
There was a stone obelisk in the middle of the enormous, low-ceilinged room. It was weathered and leaning drunkenly, as if it had been in the middle of that parking garage for ten-thousand years. It was as big around as a decent-sized oak tree. The top of it stopped just shy of the cement ceiling. The pinnacle was crowned with a fantastically life-like carving of four wolf faces staring in different directions. The stone head glowered down at us all, no matter where we stood. Although it was obviously stone, there was something incredibly lifelike about that carving.
“Where the hell did that come from?” one of the hackers said.
There was no rubble strewn about. It didn’t look as if this massively heavy hunk of stone had fallen out of the air and smashed through the ceiling. The ceiling was still perfectly intact.
I gaped. Across the weather-beaten surface of the ancient monolith, runes shimmered and shone with a pulsing blue light that almost hurt my eyes to look at, as if they were etched in the light of a welding torch.
“That,” I said, “makes absolutely no sense.”
Boy, if I’d thought that the appearance of the obelisk was a puzzler, what happened next showed me just how far my credulity had left to be pushed.
There was a moment of breathless silence, as the completely dumbstruck henchmen moved slowly toward the obelisk, weapons drawn. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Gaspari had ripped open the door of the next room and was staring with pop-eyed astonishment at the stone column.
And then…
And then…
I can hardly believe I’m about to say this.
And then, there were monsters.