The life of crawling on her knees and elbows in packing peanuts and alien slime is not what Varya had imagined when quitting her job in Silicon Valley.
It is, however, more or less what she understood as the reality of the infamous American dream.
On her left, Milena was rummaging through a box stuffed to the brim with cutoffs of wires. On her right, Dancho had given up on searching the floor of the capsule and was reclining comfortably in a pile of assorted rubbish. Grażyna was nowhere in sight.
Varya sniffed and wiped her nose with the sleeve of her shirt. She contemplated her unactualized potential and tremendously wasted talent. Then she removed a piece of drying up slime from her hair. Then she contemplated her potential some more.
“Have you checked your pockets?” Grażyna’s voice blasted through the headphone piece in her ear, making her flinch.
“Woooow,” Dancho’s sarcastic tone echoed through the cave. “How did I never think of that Grasia? Thank god you are our wise and inquisitive leader.”
There came prolonged static in the headphone piece, then silence.
“Fuck you,” the voice responded at last. “I’m locking the van and coming down.”
Four people searched every nook and cranny of the cave and the capsule - huffing, sighing, and cursing in five different languages. What was already a severely stressful week was now turning positively catastrophic. And there was no way out.
“Whose brilliant idea was it to have the same key both for the entrance door and the trapdoor?!” Milena exclaimed, having just bumped her head against the central panel desk. “Easily hackable! Zero security.”
“Eh.” Dancho shrugged. “Makes sense. Easier to keep track of one key.”
To that, Varya laughed so hard, it gave her a stomach cramp.
“Whose brilliant idea was it to leave the key in the front door?” she managed through fits of debilitating laughter.
“Ha ha very funny,” Grażyna said. “Are we seriously considering that someone might have stolen it? From this place?”
“You have a better working hypothesis?” Varya replied. “Like, come on. We’ve been searching for hours. What else could have happened to it, huh? Eaten by spiders?”
The statement seemed to have induced a brief but profound existential crisis for the whole group. Slowly, Milena raised herself from the floor, left the capsule, and began to assemble a sort of a minimalistic, borderline depressive picnic.
She put down an enormous table cloth, stained and dry-cleaned repeatedly into oblivion. She then opened her backpack and arranged around herself various snacks, a large thermos, and mugs for four. By the time she was pouring tea from the thermos into the battered plastic mugs, the other three cave dwellers had already joined her on the rough fabric.
“Well, fellow gamers,” Milena said, raising her cups. “We’re fucked.”
And they took a moment of silence to acknowledge the statement.
“Do we even need to get there that much?” Varya said. “We can just tell them the truth and fuck off. If they need the key, they’ll find it.”
“Yeah?” Grażyna seemed appalled that such a question could even be asked. “And what about all our stuff we have stashed down there? Stuff we made, ourselves, not just stolen spare parts?”
“I thought we had it moved like a month ago.”
“Never had the time.” Dancho shrugged. “Also my Sega Mega Drive is in there as well.”
“We could ask the Bosses to let us come back for our shit,” Varya suggested, to which everyone else snorted with laughter. “Yeah,” she realized. “Fair enough.”
“Are we done with the list?” Grażyna said, in a feeble attempt to shift the conversation and regain her shaky control.
“We are not,” Dancho replied, already flipping through the aforementioned list on his phone. “We’ve lost track of the LED cotton completely, the everything-filter is stuck in the pipes of Milena’s old apartment, and space bubble wrap is at the bottom of the grand canyon.”
“What about the crystal and the forever-battery?” Grażyna inquired. “We sold that to Jo right?”
“He sold them to someone else.”
“Of course.”
“He refuses to say whom to. Bosses are on that already.”
They drank some more tea, and ate some gingerbread, and tapped their fingers on the cavefloor, staring blankly at the gleaming white walls like one looks at an artistic masterpiece that is considered deep and profound but cannot be understood without a two hour long lecture of its background and philosophical significance.
Dancho pondered a very long thought that got lost in the depths of his brain. Then, after prolonged consideration, he produced the meekest of coughs, which prompted the girls to shift their gaze from the walls to Dancho. He acknowledged the shift by coughing again, even meeker this time.
“Yes?” Grażyna asked.
“There is one option.”
“And?” she hissed through her teeth at the man.
“I was messing around with long-range tracking, a passion project of sorts, you know, just fun thing on the side…”
“Dancho!” It was Varya’s turn to lose her temper.
“There’s a tracker in the keyring charm,” he finished. “But!” he added immediately. “There’s like a 99% chance it don’t work.”
“Dancho are you clinically thick?” Grażyna asked. “Just turn it on and see if it works!”
“It will only work if there’s an internet-connected device nearby,” he replied.
“What a shame that people don’t carry internet-connected devices in their pockets,” Grażyna said. “Oh wait they fucking do, it’s called smartphones you dimwit!”
“Okay-okay, jeez.” He raised his arms in defense. “No need to be rude.”
“Yes. Sorry.” Grażyna frowned, rubbing her forehead. “I’m under a lot of stress, okay? But I know I have no right to take it out on you of course,” she spoke faster, slurring her words, “I’ve just always had these urges, but, I’m trying to, uhm, I’m, I’m working on anger management in my CBT app and…”
“Guys,” Milena urged. “Thing. Tracker. Van?”
“Yeah it’s in the van,” Dancho confirmed, getting up from the floor. “I’ll go get it.”
“I really don’t like what this whole situation has done to us guys,” Varya spoke up. “After all of this is done, we should take money from emergency fund and go on holiday.”
“After,” Grażyna agreed with slight reluctance. “After the fucking reptilian overlords are off our backs.”
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
*
If any of Amanda’s old friends or acquaintances, or her mum, or indeed any random person off the street were to trade places with her for a day, they would have been bombarded by such an array of intense and profoundly bizarre experience that they would have been left unable to notice any details smaller than a piano dropping on their car right before their very eyes.
This was not the case for Amanda, who had been a part of the Rowdy 3 for almost a year.
Before joining the Rowdy 3, she lived the lifestyle of a retired cat-less widow, and her days were mostly filled with the following:
being worried about pararibulitis attacks, trying to distract herself from worrying about pararibulitis attacks through all means physically (though not always legally) allowed, and pararibulitis attacks. This left her hyper-vigilant of the tiniest slithers of reality, specs and glimpses that most people disregard at first glance.
For example, on a given Sunday morning, Amanda remembered the date, the weather, the number of people who had walked by her window in either direction, how much salt was left in the salt shaker, and whether the neighbor’s dog was snoring in its sleep or not. It all seemed awfully important to her brain and she didn’t dare argue with it. After all, keeping track of the presidential election in Bolivia or studying the grid system of Seattle was preferable to thinking about the ultimately inevitable horror show that her nervous system had in store.
This ability did not go away after Amanda exchanged her unusually quiet life for an unusually loud one. Her focus had shifted somewhat, but her attention to certain, possible, and strictly hypothetical threats did not diminish. She just became better at telling apart the categories.
As a result, on this particular Sunday morning, Amanda was aware of three things, despite an astonishing array of action and detail surrounding her like a gaudy cocoon.
First - her coffee was too sweet.
They arrived to the city at dawn, and parked outside a friendly-looking if somewhat shoddy cafe just as it was opening its doors for the morning shift. The Rowdy vampires did not need food and drink and Beast seemed to require very little, but Amanda was but a mere human. Besides, they all deserved a break after a night-long drive.
Upon entering, they had asked for a table for six, and the waitress lead them through the entire cafe and out to the other side. They arrived together to an outdoor space facing the street to its left, just where they’d parked; this part was neat, spacious, and quite clean - too clean almost - but mostly devoid of other customers.
The loneliness made the outdoors bleak despite bright sunlight. Sadly, no amount of hand-crafted decoration can make a public place seem welcoming in emptiness. But Amanda almost preferred the quiet.
Not that it was actually quiet, since Beast had consumed three ice-creams in under three minutes, tied together the shoelaces of a man who was fantastically rude to the waitress, and was now playing hide-and-seek with a little boy in cafe’s main hall.
In her excitement, Beast couldn’t help but laugh and exclaim from her hiding place, which made her quite terrible at the game. This suited the boy, who had previously been moping in the corner with his colouring book and a half-empty pack of crayons, and also the boy’s mother, who unexpectedly had to cover an extra shift and had nowhere else to leave the child.
Amanda found it endearing. She tipped fifty percent for the over-sweetened coffee and shifted her attention to…
Second - electricity was going rogue everywhere.
They had noticed it in every city, town and gas station they’ve passed on their way from the desert to Seattle, or rather Amanda had. It was subtle - no power outages, no suddenly exploding wires - just the tiniest blips. Lights flickering, electronic devices going on and off at random, wi-fi signals getting stuck in walls and finding their way out with no warning. Even now she could see, out of the corner of her eyes, the traffic lights switching in strange patterns, prompting occasional honks from passing by drivers.
Martin, who sat opposite her at the table, seemed to have noticed this too, but wasn’t commenting on it just yet. Instead he pulled a cigarette out of the pocket of his jeans, checked that there was no one close enough to be bothered, and lit it up with a match. Amanda considered asking him for a joint, but changed her mind. Instead, she thought of…
Third - she had That Feeling.
That feeling, which only came before an attack, or before a vision. Which one she could never tell in advance. It was a feeling of diffused tension, of thick heavy air and cracked lips and all of your organs turning suddenly into rats. It rarely meant good, not for her and not for her family. She glanced in all directions in search of Cross, Gripps and Vogel, and found them a few dozen meters away from the cafe.
Vogel, Gripps and Cross were currently engaged in a game of catch with a collection of personal belongings, ranging from wallet and smartphone to loose change and car keys. The belongings belonged to a young man who had previously spent a solid minute cat-calling a passing by girl.
Cross was the first to turn the situation around, stealing the man’s backpack and delightfully suggesting that the young man, too, would look lovely if he smiled, and echoing all the other not-so-innocent things that he had heard him list just a few seconds ago. Then the game ensued.
Amanda smiled with the corner of her mouth and sipper her coffee. She was fighting with every muscle in her body to stay seated and keep her hands from shaking. Whether vision or attack, the process was far from pleasant, though she rather preferred the dizziness and sweats of visions to the pain of pararibulitis.
She gulped down more coffee, ordering sternly to the feeling to go away right this very second. The feeling refused. Well, at least she tried. She bit her lip, grabbed onto her seat, and prepared for whatever was to come. She closed her eyes and…
The phone ringed.
Her phone.
“I think your brother is on the line,” Martin commented, and Amanda needed a moment to compose herself and dive under the table for her bag.
“It’s not my brother,” she said upon extracting the phone from the bag. “It’s an unknown number.”
“Do you want to answer?”
“Might as well.” She shrugged, and pushed the button.
The phone coughed up a cooking pot worth of static, then produced the screech of a dying pterodactyl and finally managed a distinct human voice.
“Success!” the voice exclaimed in childish, giddy excitement. “I mean, uh,” the voice corrected, “listen closely you miserable bastards.”
“Excuse me?” Amanda couldn’t help but laugh. Through static, she could hear faint conversation which she quickly identified as bickering. “Can you repeat that please?”
“I said,” the voice continued politely in a slight Slavic accent, “listen closely you miserable bastards, or you will regret it.”
“Oh-kay.” Amanda gave Martin a side-glance, but he didn’t react. “I’m all ears.”
“Give that to me” was heard off-call, and the previous male voice was replaced by a female voice, speaking in a somewhat different Slavic accent.
“Just give us back the thing and no one gets hurt,” the new voice said.
“The thing?” Amanda, at that point in her life, was sick and tired of various things the people were constantly finding, losing, and demanding of her to give back. “You’ll have to be more specific, dude, I’ve stopped keeping track of The Things a long time ago.”
This was a lie. In fact, Amanda’s mind was rapidly going over her mental list of things that this could be referring to, but none so far were matching the expectation of being mildly harassed and threatened over an unidentified phonecall.
“Oh you know very well what I mean,” the voice said. “Unless you steal from multiple military warehouses a week.”
“Hey so I am genuinely trying to connect with you here on like a personal level,” Amanda continued, “but it’s just not working out so, is there anyone else you can pass the phone to?”
There was an audible sigh in the static, then a third voice, also female, spoke with an altogether different Slavic accent. Amanda wasn’t even aware before that morning of the existence of such a variety of Slavic accents.
“You stole the key to our spaceship,” the third voice proclaimed. “Well, not our spaceship. Sort of. We claimed it. Anyway the key. You stole it! And don’t try to deny this cause we traced it back to your mobile device.”
“Sorry to disappoint but I’m totally about to deny it,” Amanda said, half-amused and half-concerned, “because I am pretty sure I haven’t hit Alzheimer’s yet and I don’t remember any military warehouses I’ve stormed as of late or like, stolen spaceship keys, or spaceships at all, or stolen keys of any sort.”
In the depths of her mind, Amanda was panicking, trying to understand whether it was possible that she had accidentally taken the key from the weird cave they’ve been to a few days before. At the front of her mind, Amanda was still playing clueless and innocent.
“Alright then. Of course. Sure.” The voice seemed superficially calm. “If you don’t have a key then, we won’t be able to trace you and follow you wherever you go. We won’t be able to watch you from outside while you’re sleeping and sneak into your house at night to steal it back. Or more. We might want interest on it, yeah? Or revenge. Also we have knife.” The voice added as an after-thought.
Amanda swallowed. She was almost ready to pass on the phone to Martin… but then she remembered that she was in charge.
“Feel free to do that to whoever actually stole your stupid fucking key and leave me and my family alone,” she snapped angrily into the phone and ended the call immediately.
“Everything okay, drummer?” Martin stared at her, wide-eyed, while she breathed heavily and proceeded to gulp down the remains of her coffee.
Amanda glanced at Beast, who was colouring with the little boy in the corner. Then she glanced at Cross, Gripps and Vogel, who had broken the man’s phone and drained his energy, and were now engaged in some recreational busting of empty beer bottles.
Then at Martin again, frowning and unsettled.
“I think we need to go straight to Dirk.”
“We’re already going.”
“No, I mean, immediately,” she said, as calmly as she could. “No stops no breaks. Get the Beast and the boys, tell them we’re leaving right now. Also I need a new phone,” she added, then got up, took the battery out of her phone, and crushed it against the pavement with the heel of her boot.
*
Meanwhile, at the other end of the call, Dancho, Grażyna and Milena were looking at Varya with deep respect and tentative admiration.
“That was… scary,” Dancho said. “Especially the revenge part.”
“You do know we sure as hell ain’t breaking into her house at night to slit her throat, right?” Grażyna asked.
“Nah. I mean yes.” Varya nodded. “You got stable tracking on her Dancho?”
“Yes sir.” He beamed. “I mean ma’am.”
“Good,” Varya replied. “We should leave then. Go to the van and go after her, right?”
“Immediately,” Grażyna confirmed.
Ten minutes later, two vans were on the road already: first heading for Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and second heading after the first van…