Aaron shot up from the couch, groggy and disoriented, and stared around his living room wildly. It was unnervingly silent in his apartment. Even when he slept at night, he always had music, videos, movies, or something playing so there would be background noise; silence made him feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.
He blinked around the room a few times, sleep still weighing heavily on his eyelids, before noticing the autoplay on his video feed had stopped. An understandable — but annoying — feature of many video streaming sites. Such silences often roused Aaron once or twice through the course of the night, but never more than enough to hit the remote and keep the videos going.
The apartment was warm and uncomfortable. Aaron wasn’t sweaty, but he’d neglected to turn on his air conditioner when he’d gotten home, which contributed to the hollow silence in the apartment. Whatever he’d been dreaming about had been really unpleasant to make him feel so crappy after waking up.
Probably that awful softball game, he thought. Nothing like a little public humiliation for a little nightmare fuel.
He rose from the couch and turned on the window-mounted unit over the credenza. There was a second of tepid air, then the A/C started blasting him with frigid air. A sigh escaped from Aaron as his flesh began to cool.
No notifications on his phone — not surprising — but the clock told him that he’d dozed off for about an hour. Not a bad length for a nap; any more and he’d have probably thrown his sleep schedule off-kilter.
He needed to start thinking about dinner and a shower after being out in the heat, but first he needed to go check the mail. There was probably nothing but bulk crap in there, but the time you didn’t check the mail was the day the most important, time-sensitive, life-or-death letter would show up.
After grabbing his keys and locking the front door, Aaron went down to the front lobby of his building. He never left his apartment or car without locking the door if he was going to take more than a few steps away from it. It was a holdover from his childhood, when he’d been convinced murderers and other, less defined evildoers were constantly waiting just out of sight to take advantage of any lapse in wariness.
It’s not paranoia, he told himself. Good habits mitigate risk in general.
Sure, that risk was much more likely to be a neighbor with a drug habit and sticky fingers looking for a quick score on the sly, but risk was risk. Slacking on the small stuff made you an easy target and one day the small stuff wouldn’t be so small.
Down in the lobby, Aaron saw a man through the big plate glass windows on the front of the building. The guy was standing by the big tree near the curb, fiddling with his phone. He glanced up as Aaron came down the last steps and they made eye contact.
That’s unfortunate, Aaron thought.
Social convention demanded some kind of acknowledgment of the accidental connection. Each man hesitated, holding the other’s gaze for one of those interminable moments of accidental engagement between strangers. They were in too deep and couldn’t politely ignore each other’s existence.
Aaron only saw one viable escape from the awkward moment threatening to consume both of their lives. He tilted his chin up slightly in the stranger’s direction. A moment later, the up-nod was received and returned in kind. The fabric of polite society had been protected; they could both go on about their lives. The junk mail went into the trash and Aaron went back up the stairs.
Back in his apartment, Aaron locked the door and started trying to think of ways to distract himself from the crappiness of the day. A video game or movie would make a good start, but it needed something to make it more than just an ordinary night. If he ordered some food for delivery and added a couple of the beers from his fridge, that would probably do it.
Aaron always had some beer in the fridge. He didn’t really go out any more and he’d lost contact with pretty much all of his friends over the past year or two, but you never knew when someone might stop by. In theory. He liked his space to be his space, but he wasn’t inhospitable to his friends.
That left the question of what to do about food. Pizza was the obvious choice; it went well with beer and you got so much of it that a lone, fat slob like Aaron could munch on slices for hours. Especially if he added some bread. But it occurred to him that the softball team had been planning to go for pizza after the game. In fact, they were probably there right now, talking about what a freak weirdo he was.
Why can’t I be normal? Aaron opined. Though I’m not even sure I want to be.
He was used to being thought of as an oddball or weird or whatever. It wasn’t exactly untrue — he was awkward and weird at times — but he didn’t want to bury himself in reminders of his larger shortcomings or what a shitty day it had turned out to be. So, pizza was out.
His thoughts turned to the suitcase in his closet. There was comfort in there, after all. The most distracting, reliable kind he knew of. He pushed those thoughts away. There were other, better options.
Aaron quickly settled on ordering Chinese food. After a quick call to his usual place, Aaron had about an hour to kill. Not enough time to get into a game and far too much to start drinking on an empty stomach. When he didn’t wind up nursing one, he’d go through beer fast. Better to have something to soak it up so he didn’t wind up totally plastered. He had more than enough time for a nice, long shower, though, and that would definitely help him unwind from the stress of the day.
Half an hour later, he stepped out of the bathroom feeling refreshed, if still a little damp. He’d used much hotter water than usual without realizing it and the air was muggy with steam. He escaped into the cooler air of the bedroom and threw on some clean, comfortable clothes. He’d had an epiphany in the shower on how to recover from the awful day. It wasn’t exactly a healthy choice, but it would be an effective one.
In the kitchen, he pulled the six pack of long necks out of the fridge and checked the expiration date. He wasn’t sure how long the beer had been in there — he’d go months, or even years, without drinking at home — but he always checked. Once, he hadn’t been as vigilant and had chugged on something that tasted like liquid cardboard. Prior to that terrible night, he’d had the mistaken impression that beer didn’t spoil.
The other thing he needed was in the kitchen as well. He opened a cupboard over the sink and pulled out his emergency pack of cigarettes. Every time he quit, he bought a last pack and kept it sealed, just in case. After the day he’d had, he’d decided to quit on quitting. He pulled off the top of the cellophane wrapping, flipped a lucky, and tossed the plastic in the trash.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Now where the hell did I put my lighter and ashtray when I decided to give this shit up? he asked himself.
They would probably be on the little cubby shelves next to the credenza, so Aaron grabbed a bottle of beer and walked back through the dinette. He stopped dead cold as soon as his feet hit the carpet of the living room.
He had seen… something.
He blinked a few times. He had just walked past the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and his senses had screamed at him. His instincts here were far more clear and orders of magnitude more imperative than his knee-jerk reaction to a softball coming at him.
He had seen something.
Something just at the edge of his peripheral vision, near the front door. It didn’t make any rational sense — he turned his head to look and saw nothing there — yet he was no less certain of it. When he turned away from the front door, he saw it again.
Only it wasn’t an it; it was a them. He’d gotten the vague impression a person was standing by the door. Inside his apartment. That was, however, impossible; he had just looked a second ago. Turning to look again, Aaron saw that there was, indeed, nothing there – just an empty corner.
Still, his mind insisted, he had seen something.
Aaron stayed as still as he could. He carefully set the beer and pack of cigarettes down on the credenza, keeping his eyes trained on the wall across from him. He let his eyes unfocus and tried to force his brain to process the information from his peripheral vision into his conscious awareness.
You’re being ridiculous, he told himself, even as he continued trying to see something that couldn’t possibly be there.
For a moment, Aaron could almost make out the vague shape of a person, standing in the corner; but only for a moment. As soon as he was consciously aware of the hazy figure, it resolved itself to clarity — the previously hidden figure was charging at him!
Aaron had less than a second to process what he was seeing. From the height and build, the figure was likely male. They were wearing featureless black clothes and a black hood that showed only a small area around their eyes. And they were wielding a knife.
It’s some kind of modern-day ninja, he thought in surprise.
He reacted on instinct, recoiling from the attacker. He took a single step back and bumped into the credenza under the window. The beer bottle began to rock loudly on the wooden surface. He was trapped! The knife plunged into Aaron’s shoulder. There was no pain, thanks to the combination of adrenaline and shock.
With a grunt, Aaron shoved the attacker away and scrambled to get some distance. He wanted to be anywhere that was away from that knife. He pressed a hand to his shoulder, trying to stanch the bleeding. Except no blood flowed into his hand.
Aaron and the intruder both turned their attention to where the knife had struck — there was a small gash in his shirt, but no blood and no wound. The two men made the briefest eye contact. Aaron saw his own incredulity reflected in what little he could see of the assassin’s eyes.
The stranger deftly replaced the simple knife with another. This knife was longer, wider, and oddly discolored. The blade had a greenish tinge and, preposterously, a swirling gray aura.
When the hell did I snort some crystals that I’m seeing auras? Aaron wondered.
A chill formed in Aaron’s innards and quickly spread up his spine, an all-too familiar sign that fear was working its way into his thought processes, trying to wrest control away. That was a bad sign.
There were four basic stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn (or fuck, if you prefer more visceral imagery). Aaron had been afraid many times in his life, but he had only experienced two of those responses. He almost always felt compelled to fight. Sometimes his involuntary response was to freeze, but that usually gave way to fight all too quickly. If his instincts took hold, the results were never good, no matter how things shook out.
Control the situation before you lose control of yourself, he told himself. Just how I’m supposed to do that, I have no idea. Use your bullshit training, I guess?
Aaron dropped back, setting his body at a slight angle to the attacker. He dropped his stance slightly and raised his hands to a fighting position. He swallowed hard, his throat clicking from the sudden dryness. Half-remembered training from years of casual forays into the martial arts were chasing each other around Aaron’s mind.
One thought from all those different lessons cut through the noise: you win a fight against an armed opponent by not getting into one. Or you run.
Neither are really an option here, he thought. Fuck fuck fuckety fuck.
It had been barely more than a second since he’d realized he wasn’t bleeding. He didn’t know where to look. Maintain eye contact or watch the head? What about the shoulders? Maybe he should keep an eye on the knife? Did he have a weapon of some kind in the apartment he could get to? His thoughts were coming too fast; soon he wouldn’t be thinking at all.
The masked figure darted forward. A feigned slash turned into a jab, so quick Aaron barely registered the movement. His body reacted without conscious direction — not a good sign — and he stepped back, avoiding the thrust. Aaron was quicker than he looked, but not that quick. That was freaky quick.
“Why are you–”
Before he finished his sentence, the assassin was moving. Aaron almost tripped over his desk chair trying to maintain space between them. He backed up into the wall. The knife was coming at his face the moment he hit the wall. He threw up a forearm to deflect, knowing it was too slow. Somehow, he connected with the assassin’s arm, pushing the dagger off course.
The long blade pierced the wall like it was paper. The attacker backpedaled several feet, falling into a defensive stance. When Aaron didn’t pursue, they shook their knife arm gently.
The longer this goes on, the more likely I am to get shivved. I’m no match for a fucking ninja! Aaron thought. What should I do?
On the assassin’s next charge, everything seemed like it was moving in slow motion. Aaron could actually think, although nothing so complex as coherent sentences. Mostly he was processing the ninja’s movement and thinking about how to respond.
Rather than moving away from his attacker, Aaron stepped forward and dropped his weight into a wide stance. As he moved, he brought an elbow up, driving it into the intruder’s solar plexus. The ninja was launched off their feet. They tumbled into and over the back of the couch.
Aaron stood up, blinking stupidly.
What the hell just happened? he thought.
The stranger was back on their feet and they didn’t look happy. They bent low and suddenly the couch was hurtling through the air at Aaron, the ninja leaping through the air right behind it, dagger raised.
Oh crap!