The hour following the departure from the Bidwell Center for Psychiatry was a whirlwind. Barrett, the old black man in the elegant suit, and the impossibly gorgeous redhead led Aaron out of the hospital to a car waiting outside.
It wasn’t the same car Aaron had nailed with a softball at the park what seemed so long ago — it was something of a shock when Aaron realized that had only been the previous afternoon — but a sleek SUV. A driver in a dark suit waited outside the car, monitoring their surroundings.
“We’re going to stop by your apartment so you can pick up some things,” Barrett said when they were all in the SUV. “Then, we’ll be off.”
When they pulled out onto Folsom Boulevard, Aaron noticed that two other cars fell into formation around them, one in front and one behind. When he mentioned it, Barrett let him know they were additional security. The drive back to Midtown only took a few minutes with the lack of late night traffic and soon they were pulling into the alley behind Aaron’s building. It hadn’t been twenty four hours since Aaron left for the hospital, but it felt almost as distant as the softball game.
“Some of our people will accompany you inside for safety,” Barrett said. “Just pack up the essentials — a few days clothes and anything you can’t bear to leave behind. It might be a while before you have a chance to come back.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” Aaron said, getting out of the SUV. “What am I supposed to do about my job and paying the bills?”
Barrett gave him a small, knowing smile and a wink. “We’ll get that all sorted out, son, don’t you worry.”
A pair of serious-looking people in dark suits emerged from each of the other two vehicles. They weren’t obviously armed, but looked like they should be. Each of them scanned the alley quickly as they moved to the staircase, two going up to the door and two staying at the foot of the stairs. Two more people had taken positions at the far end of their little caravan and were watching for traffic.
These guys are kinda spooky, Aaron thought as he climbed the backstairs behind two guards. All of this can’t be for me, can it?
“Keys?” one of the guards at the top of the stairs asked.
Aaron fished them out of his pockets and tossed them up. “My apartment will be the first one on the left going up the stairs on this end of the building.”
The guards didn’t walk in so much as flowed, pulling Aaron along in their current. By the time Aaron was at the top of the stairs, the guard in the lead was already stepping into his apartment and the other two stopped him on the stairs until their point man could clear Aaron’s home.
Glad the place isn’t too much of a mess, he thought.
When he got the all-clear and went inside, Aaron dithered on the threshold, the gears of his brain suddenly locking up. For the briefest of moments, he saw a dead man crumpled on the floor behind his couch, but then it was gone. It came and went so fast he barely registered it. That wasn’t the only thing jamming his circuits; he couldn’t seem to get his brain to engage in what he was doing. Packing. He was supposed to be packing.
Packing what? Aaron thought. Stuff. Important stuff. Do I have important stuff?
He forced himself to take a breath and blink, slowly. He used the brief moment to pull his scattered thoughts into a tiny box where he could sift through or ignore them as needed. This was life or death, he needed to focus. What did he absolutely need to take if he was leaving this apartment — and probably the city — for the foreseeable future?
Aaron moved through the apartment, heading for his bedroom. A rolling carry-on was the only luggage he had, so he grabbed it from the coat closet and dropped it on the bed. Now that he was getting to it, Aaron realized he didn’t really have a whole lot that he would consider essential. He filled the luggage with clothes and shoes. That was all he really needed. Except…
He took the small, dusty suitcase down from the shelf in his closet. He couldn’t leave that behind. Aaron lifted the lid of the suitcase and looked down into the baggage for a few seconds. He even reached out and gently set a hand on its contents for a moment, his eyes closing as he pulled in a deep breath.
Just for a second, he thought. There will be time to indulge when we’re somewhere private and safe.
The luggage needed some padding to make sure the important contents wouldn’t be jumbled around or crushed, so Aaron added several hoodies, pairs of socks, and tank tops to the bag. After he zipped the luggage closed, he took a mental inventory of the apartment.
Is this really what my life can be boiled down to? he wondered. A small suitcase with my guilty little pleasure inside and some clothes?
He had a fair number of books, but he could leave those behind; several of the ones he would re-read occasionally were also on his tablet. Thinking of his tablet reminded him of something else — his computer. He had a computer and a large thumb drive, both full of information. Files and, worse, saved log-ins for most of the sites he used. If the people who were after him found his apartment, those would tell them pretty much everything there was to know about him.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
After setting the luggage down on the couch in the living room, Aaron threw the thumb drive in a pocket of the suitcase. It took a few seconds to make sure the computer was powered down, then he started disconnecting wires.
“You’ll be able to get a new, better computer pretty easily,” the guard in the living room said.
“But this one has a shitload of my personal data on it. Even if I never turned it on again, it would be better not to leave it behind for anyone who might be looking for me.”
“Good point,” the guard replied and promptly started helping him unhook everything.
“There’s a lot of stuff on paper, too, but it’s scattered all over,” Aaron said.
“We don’t have time for that now, but we’ll have someone come pack everything in the next day or two.”
Packing up his computer made the reality that he was basically moving out finally settle in. He looked around the apartment he’d lived in for more than five years, expecting a sense of wistfulness or nostalgia to overtake him. Instead, his thoughts drifted to other ways he might be leaving a trail in his wake.
“We need to toss anything perishable,” he said. “If it spoils or rots, the smell might attract attention.”
“Good catch,” the guard at the door said.
Aaron went into the kitchen and threw everything that might go bad and start to smell into a trash bag. It didn’t take long and the bag was barely half full when he was done. The trash went to the guard in the doorway and the one in the living room picked up the computer, holding it under one arm as if it weighed no more than a large pillow. He picked up the two pieces of luggage from the couch and they were out the door.
Now I’m jetting off to do mysterious superhero shit with a strange old man and a supermodel, all while being chased by knife-wielding assassins, he thought. Or… assassin. It’s just been the one. Right?
He filed that incongruous thought with the others like it. He’d have to talk to Barrett about that because it was bothering him, but he had to keep moving. If he was being hunted — and everything suggested that he was — movement was going to be key to staying alive. So, he moved.
Or he started to. For a second, as he was coming around the couch with his luggage, he saw the dead body crumpled against the wall again. Blood stained their face and chest, their neck was at an awful angle, and a knife was plunged deep into their innards. Aaron stopped dead in his tracks, heart thumping a wild rhythm against his sternum.
The guards in the living room seemed to realize something was wrong and they adopted defensive postures, one reaching for some hidden weapon under their jacket. The vision, hallucination, memory, or whatever the hell it was passed and Aaron waved them off, telling them he thought he was going to trip over his own carpet. They all chuckled at that and Aaron willed his heart to calm right the hell down.
“I’m ready to go,” Aaron told them.
As they packed into the vehicles and drove away from his home, Aaron wondered what he was heading towards. He didn’t give a lot of thought to what he was leaving behind. His life hadn’t exactly been a glamorous thrillride, lately.
His job was pedestrian and not especially lucrative or satisfying. It was predictable and stable, and that was about all that could be said for it. The same could be said for his social life, which had dwindled to nothing over the past year or so. He barely even talked to his closest friends these days. Still, it was comfortable and that might have been enough, for a while at least. The high life wasn’t meant for people like him.
Aaron was so lost in his thoughts he barely paid attention to where they were going, so it came as something of a shock to him when they pulled into a tiny executive airport just a few minutes south of Downtown. He knew the city fairly well, but he’d had no idea the place existed as it was nestled in a big clump of residential area he’d never had reason to spend much time in.
After passing through two security gates, the train of vehicles stopped at a private hangar. Two private jets were parked inside, one nearly twice as large as the other, and the whine of their engines told Aaron they were ready to go on a moment’s notice.
Based on the length of the cabin Aaron had seen in his dream encounters with Barrett, he thought they’d be taking the smaller of the two planes. Barrett and the beautiful redhead led him to the larger, however, along with several of the guards and all of the crap he’d brought. Most of the other security people boarded the smaller jet, which taxied out to the runway before the hatch was even completely closed.
Upon boarding, Aaron quickly realized the source of his mistake — the jet had been heavily modified. Rather than entering into the cabin, the hatch opened into some kind of control room, ten feet long with banks of monitors and workstations attached to the walls on either side. The panels were all sleek, black touchscreens. Two of the guards took seats as soon as the external hatch was closed.
It’s like the Enterprise-D in here, except less beige, Aaron thought. Although the leather upholstery is probably Louis Vuitton or something.
Past the control room was the cabin Aaron had visited in his dreams. There was no exterior hatch in the room, but that could be chalked up to the syncretic geography of dreams. Outlandish, impossible things seemed perfectly sensible in a dream and a nonexistent door would hardly stand out. The last guard strode crisply across the length of the cabin and disappeared through a door in the rear.
Aaron felt out of place surrounded by such opulence. He didn’t even want to put his luggage down because he felt like his working class garbage would schmutz up the place. The thread count in the carpeting was probably higher than if you added the thread count in every piece of fabric Aaron owned. That he was even noticing or thinking about things like that when he usually didn’t pay much attention to the trappings of status or wealth, let alone actively giving a crap about them, told him just how off-kilter this whole situation had left him.
Out of sorts or not, Aaron was on the plane and on his way to a strange — and mildly frightening — future. He might as well try to find out as much as he could about his new circumstances.
Barrett and the redhead had taken seats across from each other and Aaron was torn about where to sit. It would be weird to sit next to Barrett, since he was most likely going to be primarily talking with the older man, but he found himself almost sweating about the idea of sitting next to the glamorous beauty across from him. He was awkward with women, but he was awkward with everyone, and he didn’t usually get nervous like this.
Maybe it has something to do with all these changes I’m going through, he told himself, taking a seat next to the woman. And maybe I won’t notice her as much if she’s in my peripheral vision.
“So,” the old man said as their plane started to move, “now we have the chance to have us a bit of a chin wag.”