Mikey didn't like the looks of things.
Of course, like every sane man, he didn't like taking the graveyard shift on the best of days. It was well past midnight, and he languished in the empty dining room of Giovanni's Best Pizza in Town, sitting against the wall in a wooden chair with another propping up his feet. He glanced at his watch: 1:34. In the morning. Outside, the neon lights of Giovanni's huge and garish sign lit the dark, empty street in an eerie pink-and-orange glow.
He whistled and tapped his fingers against the table, feeling increasingly nervous—bad juju, a gut feeling, whatever you'd call it. Something wasn't right.
From inside the kitchen a few meters away, he heard an impassioned plea. "Stop that goddamned racket, kid."
This was Herb, the reason why Mikey was awake at 1:34 in the morning instead of sound asleep under his warm covers at home. It was Herb, the crotchety chef who constantly smelled of onions, who had suggested that Giovanni's should remain open 24/7. The owner, Giovanni, agreed to a trial run of these new hours, just to see how many new customers they got. So far: zilch. And not a shocker, either. Who wanted a pizza at almost 2 AM?
Mikey stopped whistling, but shot an annoyed look in the direction of the kitchen. "Working hard or hardly working, Herb?" he called out, knowing it would piss the chef off.
Sure enough, Herb's sweaty head stuck out from the pass, scowling. "I could say the same for you. Look at you, just sitting there. Disgraceful. At least I'm doing meal prep for tomorrow. You're twiddling your thumbs. Get off your ass and do something. Sweep or something. I don't know." He disappeared back into the kitchen.
Mikey groaned and rolled his eyes at the ceiling, but Herb was right for once: he hadn't made a delivery since 10 the previous night, and after several hours of sitting around, he felt especially useless. He hoped somebody—anybody—would call Giovanni's with the early-morning munchies. Then he could get in his car, window rolled down, and enjoy the sights of the abandoned dark city at two in the morning, business signs buzzing and flickering, homes stark in the darkness, wind blowing in to muss his hair, tantalizing smell of Italian food drifting into the front seat from the back.
Anything but this. At 1:34—35, now—in the morning, Giovanni's was insufferably boring.
At 1:37, Mikey was considering obeying Herb's order and grabbing the green-handled broom that sat in the corner. But the phone—sitting on the small wooden counter where in-house customers also made their order and paid their bill—rang instead, its shrill whine piercing through the long-held silence like a fire alarm.
Mikey's ears perked up. An order?
He wasn't used to the night shift, and it was usually either Carlos or Debra who picked up the phone, so it was a few seconds before Mikey remembered that a skeleton crew was operating Giovanni's at the moment, and Carlos and Debra were currently at home asleep in their beds. Lucky bastards. He lunged across the room for the phone before the person on the other end could hang up and end Mikey's pipe dream of not being bored.
He'd never answered the phone before, but he'd heard the greeting often enough that he was able to perfectly replicate its words in a sing-songy customer service voice. "Giovanni's Best Pizza in Town, we make your mouth and stomach happy, how can I help you?"
The voice on the other end was husky and raspy, a woman's disinterested contralto. "You got pizza?"
He sputtered for a moment. "Um—yes. We have pizza. We are a pizza restaurant, ma'am."
"At one-thirty in the morning?" He could almost hear the sound of a bored eyebrow being raised; the woman sounded vaguely surprised that the pizza place she had called was open. "Tough break, kid."
"Yes," he agreed, because the customer is always right, and in this case, she was very right. "Tough break. What can I do for you?"
"Do you have—wait, I've got your menu here. I'm reading your menu. I should have read the menu before I called, right? Silly me. I am reading the menu. Okay, I'd like to get delivery. I want a large deluxe. Double pepperoni, double cheese, double vegetables, double mushrooms—you get the idea."
"Double everything. I get it."
"And a Coke."
"A Coke. Got it." It occurred to Mikey that he should probably be writing this down. Oh, well. "Where's the address, ma'am?"
"You'll be delivering to 113 Acacia Crescent. Take your time. I'm not that hungry." With that, the call cut off with an abrupt click.
With haste, Mikey fumbled for a pen and paper from the shelf underneath the wooden desk and jotted down the address, brow knotting as he did so. Acacia Crescent was on the other side of town—he wasn't even exactly sure where. Good thing the lady had asked him to take his time; it would take him half an hour to make the journey. Or so he estimated.
"Herb!" he called. "I've got a large deluxe with double everything."
At 1:58, Mikey was just where he'd longed to be: careening down the empty, early-morning streets of the city he loved. A state-of-the-art DevTech GPS system blinked on his dashboard, a small, square box with a plasma screen that guided Mikey where he needed to go. He didn't quite understand how the thing worked, but Giovanni had invested in one of these little gadgets for each of his deliverymen—which was only Mikey and Carlos, so not that big of an expense—and it'd been a pretty nifty accoutrement so far.
"Turn left," the thing calmly advised him in a tinny male voice, and he complied, teeth gritted with frustration. Though there was no traffic at this time of night—or, at least, very little—New Urbem was not a small city, and it would take him at least 45 minutes to get from one end to the other. The pizza would be cold when he got there, and one of Giovanni's fondest sayings was, "If the pizza is cold, so is the tip." Meaning that it was Giovanni's policy that if the pizza arrived cold, the customer was not obligated to tip the deliveryman. This slogan was slapped across all their pizza boxes in friendly red letters. Great. Maybe he could get ahold of a can of white spray paint and cover up the motto before he got there.
The pizza did smell delicious with its scent wafting into the front seat from the back, though. That was one of Mikey's favorite things about the job. Smelling all the food.
As he motored through town in his beat-up old car, Mikey wondered why Giovanni's had been chosen for this particular delivery. Why hadn't the woman contacted another place like Pizza Planet or Domino's, places that were well-known to be open all night, rather than a mom-and-pop outfit like Giovanni's? And this woman wasn't a regular customer—he knew the addresses of their regulars, and none lived so far away. Why hadn't she ordered from somewhere closer to home?
Still, if it netted him a tip, it didn't matter to him.
As he drew further to his destination, Mikey began to notice that things were getting a lot fancier: he was entering New Urbem's elite neighborhoods, and the houses had begun to look classier and classier as he continued down the road. Larger, too. Some had multiple floors; some had gigantic lawns on which Mikey's childhood house would fit comfortably; some had graceful palm trees lined up in a row, framing the path to their front doors. Mikey began to sweat. He wasn't all that familiar with Acacia Crescent, but if the owner was wealthy and generous—and not pissed about the cold pizza—then maybe he'd net a huge tip.
At 2:40, Mikey was close to the edge of town, where the city met the coast. He ground to a halt beside a stop sign at an intersection and glanced up at the street name, even as the GPS quietly told him to turn right. Acacia Crescent. Finally.
He turned right, indeed, and was greeted with the sight of the biggest hill he had ever seen in his life.
The thing seemed to stretch into infinity; it was just about a mountain. It was lined with streetlights, dimly glowing and lighting a well-paved road that snaked into oblivion up the hill. On the right side were houses, or, as Mikey would more likely call them, mansions; each was gigantic, impressive and stately. On the left side, the hill dropped steeply into a cliff that—he couldn't see at the moment, but greatly suspected—dropped into the sea. Only a weak, meager-looking white fence separated an incautious driver from certain death.
Still halted at the stop sign, he squinted at his GPS. It was telling him that 113 Acacia was at the very, very, tippy-top of the terrifying hill.
Of course it was.
Mikey gulped as he stared up the thing, and his previous sense of bad luck was infecting his insides like a sentient tar. Something wasn't right. Something told him he wouldn't find anything good on the top of that hill.
Still, with the thought of a massive tip—and the wrath of Herb and Giovanni—on his mind, he squared his shoulders and turned right.
His ancient little car struggled to make its way up the forebodingly steep hill, and Mikey suspected that this particular street was reserved for people with state-of-the-art vehicles. In other words, the rich. However, the car managed, and Mikey soon found that he was near the top. He looked to his left: the houses were only growing grander and farther-apart. He looked to his right: just as he'd suspected, a sheer drop down to the crashing water below. Mikey swallowed.
When the hill became flat again, his ears popped loudly with the height as Mikey pulled to a stop next to one of the biggest houses he had ever seen.
The house was geometric, gargantuan, a futuristic mix of sleek metal and sheer glass that sparkled and shone impressively even in the dim streetlights. Mikey's mind boggled just looking at the damn thing. In the darkness of black night, the house's jutting triangular framework cut into the sky like scissors, and it was clear that it wasn't just a house: it was a work of art, too. It scared the crap out of Mikey. This, he thought to himself with trepidation, this was a supervillain's house. In the days of superheroes, a band of supers would have raided this thing and staged an epic climactic battle here. This house was a lair.
With annoyance, he shook off his misgivings, his gut feelings, his bad juju: all silliness. Just his imagination. It was a rich lady's abode. Nothing more.
He put his car in park and shut it off, going to the backseat and picking up the pizza. It was cold, he noticed. Hopefully the customer wouldn't mind too much. He wanted that tip. Needed that tip. Since he'd moved out of his mom's house three months ago, he was increasingly starting to realize he'd bitten off more than he could chew; Mikey could barely afford his apartment anymore, but he was a loner by nature and preferred not to have a roommate. However, it was looking more and more like a necessity. And paying off the debt from his half-completed Medieval Art degree didn't sound like a bad prospect, either. If he could manage it. Which he couldn't.
In short, he needed money.
A stone path led from the road to the house, and with every step along this path—valiantly carrying the cold pizza in one hand, his red Giovanni's cap firmly on his head and his red Giovanni's T-shirt firmly on his torso—Mikey felt worse and worse. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to flee and don't look back.
But, again, he dismissed it, irritated with himself. He was only nervous because it was night and he'd never delivered so late before. He'd get used to it tout-suite. Or, at least, he'd get used to it if Giovanni decided to continue with 24/7 hours. Which—considering the fact that, since 10 pm, they'd gotten exactly one order—didn't seem like a huge possibility anymore.
Still, despite his rational brain calming the rest of his body, Mikey just couldn't shake the underlying feeling of—well. It was odd, but he felt like a gazelle being closely watched by a cheetah.
The front doors were grand and decadent, twice as high as Mikey was tall, and carved in intricate designs. He lifted his fist to rap, but noticed a button on the doorframe to his side, and pressed this instead. Stood to reason it was a doorbell, right?
He heard nothing—no telltale chime from within—but that didn't mean the doorbell hadn't rung. He stood and waited, tapping his feet nervously, wanting to get out of here. His stupid "bad feeling" aside, this neighborhood just wasn't for him. Mikey was not a fancy guy.
Within a minute, the door to his left swung open, and a woman leaned against it, lit from behind by a backdrop of startling blue light. Short-haired and anywhere from thirty to forty, she seemed impossibly bored and exhausted. She gave him a lazy smile.
"Come on in, pizza boy." The same voice he'd heard over the phone greeted him now.
Nerves buzzing, Mikey awkwardly replied, "Um, I'm just supposed to hand over the pizza and go, ma'am. Technically."
"Technically?" Her voice dripped with sarcasm. "Technically, you shouldn't be working at two in the morning, should you? Who knows who might call? All manner of creeps and weirdos are out at night. Come in. Screw technically."
The woman was probably one of said creeps and weirdos, but—thinking about that tip—Mikey reluctantly complied, entering the house. The door quietly clicked shut behind him, an ominous curse.
In the entryway, two grand staircases on the left and right sides led upwards to a doubtless-expansive second floor, but the woman had evidently chosen to make her home on the first. Though the entryway itself led into a much-larger room—shrouded in darkness; Mikey couldn't make out its contents—the woman had set up camp here, in the entryway just beyond the door. Papers were strewn everywhere, littering the ground in a cacophonous mess—mostly blueprints, Mikey could tell as he squinted at them, but blueprints for what? Three desks were set up haphazardly, no rhyme or reason to where they were placed, and there was a lamp at each—lamps that emitted blue light—and each desk was covered in more papers and pens and ink and half-empty wine glasses and…
There, on the desk to his left, among a tangle of wires and metal, sat something pristine and finished-looking among all the mess. He blinked at it; the thing caught his attention until he couldn't look away. Glasses. No, goggles. Blue-lensed goggles.
Mikey wanted to run.
The woman laughed languidly, and he almost jumped; he hadn't realized she'd sauntered up right next to him. "Pardon my mess. That's just the way I am."
Mikey was only just now realizing he'd forgotten the lady's Coke in the backseat; he hoped she'd just forget she had ordered a drink. "Um. Ma'am. Would you like your pizza now?"
"Nah, nah. Tell me about yourself first." She sat down on a revolving office chair at the desk to his left with the goggles, cross-legged and tired-looking. He noticed her clothes for the first time: a simple tank top and baggy pants, oddly and harshly patterned with black and white; they were hard to look at. "I'd like to have a conversation. I'm a lonely woman, Mike."
Mikey was about to tell the woman to look in the lonely hearts section of the newspaper if she wanted a boyfriend, because he was a pizza delivery man and conversation was not part of his job description, but then—
She'd known his name. A chill ran through him. When had he told her his name? He hadn't. At least, he didn't think he had.
This time, Mikey trusted his overactive imagination when it told him that the woman's smile slightly quirked at the sight of his apprehension. "I know your name. Yes. Relax. It's not that hard to find out information about people."
"What else do you know?" he asked, taking one step back, pizza still balanced in hand. He was this close to saying "tip be damned" and running out the door. The woman was that creepy.
With the left side of her body illuminated to a blue glow by the lamp to her left, and the right side mostly blanketed in darkness, the woman offered him a dead-eyed smile. "I know some stuff, Mike. I know you're twenty-two. I know you're an erstwhile student who really should be finishing up his degree by now. I know you're not in contact with your mother anymore. I know you don't have any friends. I know you've been thinking about quitting."
She leaned forward, using her hand braced against the desk to spin herself back and forth in the office chair; she looked vaguely innocent and childlike, but her words were not. "I know that, if you disappear, few will miss you. No one will report you."
The woman seemed to be enjoying the dark theatrics of the situation, and she was certainly, without a doubt, relishing the spectacle of Mikey's fear. Wide-eyed, he hesitated a single electric moment, his eyes locked onto the woman's. Then, the pizza clattered to the floor as Mikey made a dash for it.
The doors were solidly locked, and he struggled with them for several seconds, first pulling, then pushing, then nearly yanking the handle off with his impassioned efforts. All the while, he kept throwing glances over his shoulder, terrified that the woman would approach him with a knife or an axe or something equally unpleasant. She didn't. She simply kept watching him, seeming lazily amused. She extended one leg and both her arms, stretching and yawning hard.
"Not gonna work. Might as well give up. The door is locked, my friend."
He would smash a window, then. Goddammit, he was not going to die locked in a house with a serial killer because Giovanni was too dumb to realize that being open 24 hours was a bad goddamn idea.
He desperately whipped around and searched for something to break a window with. A chair, there! He picked up the nearby office chair with a burst of strength and bashed it into a glass window next to the door, expecting the thing to shatter and himself to crawl through the wreckage and sprint to freedom.
Nope. The chair bounced harmlessly off the glass. Shocked, Mikey stared at the chair for a few seconds before trying again, and again, grunting with the effort. Nothing happened. With a low, deep "boom," the chair deflected off the window each and every time. It was as though the glass was actually metal.
Mikey was finally forced to give up, allowing the chair to crash to the floor, and he stared at the woman, who was still sitting in her own chair and regarding him with half-closed eyes.
"My own design. Unbreakable windows," she said almost proudly. "I intend to have them on the market by this time next year. I'm sure foreign governments will love the concept."
"What are you going to do to me?" he asked suspiciously, hardly daring to blink for fear she'd attack him. Fears were running wild through Mikey's mind. He was going to join the garrison of skinned corpses she kept icy in her freezer. No, he was going to wake up in 48 hours in Cancun with organs missing. No, she wanted him for a crazed sex cult.
But his mind and eyes kept returning to the goggles on the table.
The woman slowly rose to her feet; the very action was as geometric as the house itself. Without even looking, she calmly reached to her left, and her hand closed around the goggles.
Mikey swallowed hard. He was sweating like anything, and his heart was going a mile a minute. "I don't want to die, ma'am," he pleaded. "Please don't kill me. I have money."
The woman rolled her eyes: "No, you don't." She was approaching. Oh, no, shit, she was approaching. The glasses were in her hand.
Mikey's eyes darted to his right: the stairs that led to the upper floor. Without hesitation, he was off like a shot, running like the hounds of hell were behind him, feet pounding. But without warning halfway up the cold marble staircase, a glass barrier slid down quickly from the ceiling and cut him off in his tracks, rendering the upstairs inaccessible. He spun his head around, breathing hard; the same thing had happened at the bottom of the steps, where the woman stood, smiling and waving a black remote control-looking device in her right hand. They were trapped on the stairs together.
"Tut tut, Mikey. You're no gentleman. You never go into a woman's private quarters without permission. Did your mama teach you nothing?"
Mikey assessed his options. Could he take the woman? He was maybe a little taller, but he rarely worked out, and his arms and legs were noodles. Perhaps he could wrest the remote away and free himself, assuming that the remote was what controlled the glass barriers. There was no option for fleeing anymore, that much was certain. It was fight or nothing.
The woman was ascending the staircase towards him, with a slight half-smile. Her apparent exhaustion, Mikey thought with fear, was simply a veil; underneath, she was coiled like a wily snake, and far more dangerous than she appeared. "You know," she suggested conversationally, "things will go more easily if you just let me put these goggles on you. I don't like fighting. Gets messy. I don't like mess." She let a sudden laugh loose; it echoed around the chamber like a lost dog running from place to place. "I mean, I live in a constant state of mess, but I don't like mess. Hypocrite that I am."
Mikey was consumed with utter abstract terror; this night was caught halfway between the boundary of the real and the insane, and he wasn't even sure whether he was dreaming or not. Maybe he'd already delivered the pizza. Maybe he was halfway home and had fallen asleep driving. Wake up, Mikey, you bastard.
As if she'd read his mind, the woman said, "I promise you, Mike, you are not asleep."
He stared at her, mind bouncing from one option to the next. Maybe he should just do it. Obey her orders, put on the glasses, submit to her weird woo-woo for a few minutes, and then get the hell out of dodge. What could be the harm of putting on some weird-looking glasses, anyhow?
Mikey allowed the woman to approach, carefully watching her every move with narrowed eyes. Soon, they were close enough that if he'd leaned forward four inches, he could have kissed her forehead. She was a step lower than him, and she looked up at him. The lazy smile was gone: in its place, a look of Antarctic calculation. This expression scared the living daylights out of Mikey far more than anything else the woman had done so far.
She shrugged and said, "Well. You'll do."
The glasses were over his eyes before he had time to blink.
Within seconds, Mikey was on his knees, agony running through his every vein and searing its hot fingers through his head. He could feel that something was trying to invade his brain, infect his mind, take him away and replace him with something else. It was the purest sort of horror, and he fought like hell against it, eyes shut tightly against the blue light that saturated every corner of his vision now. He fell down one stair, then two, and then he was tumbling, banging hard against each step, but he barely noticed the pain from the impacts: the pain in his mind was much worse.
At the bottom of the stairs, he curled into a ball, throwing his fists at the air. He was only vaguely aware of the woman descending the stairs and standing beside him, staring down. He was barely conscious of the glass barriers retreating with a swish.
"You're my first real test subject," she informed him, squatting next to him with arms draped over knees. "You know that? And—" She chuckled. "I don't even know if this is going to work. We'll see."
Mikey was losing himself: his fear and his agony were quickly slipping away as the virus of the other inhabited every single nook and cranny of his mind and his being. It was a horrible relief. The body on the floor stopped struggling and became docile as Mikey was relegated to a backseat position in his own mind, only slightly mindful of the woman leaving his side and heading over to the pizza box where it had fallen to the floor.
"I almost feel bad," her distant voice informed him. "I mean, sure, you were no angel, but still. You didn't own a TV. That's something."
She plopped down on the floor, cross-legged again, opened the box, and began to munch on a piece. Mikey was quickly fading away.
Just before he was gone for good, Mikey heard the woman's disapproving contralto once again.
"This is cold. No tip."