Justin
I've seen a lot of scary movies in my time. And they all had one thing in common. At some point some girl would start walking down the darkened hallway/out of the cabin in the woods/ into the attic and the whole audience would be yelling at her that she's an idiot. They would never do something so stupid! And then when the bad guy chopped her up with a chainsaw (if she was the heroine's best friend) or chased her through three cornfields into an electric plant where he was fried (if she had top billing and there was a good chance for a sequel, but her friend still got chopped up right at the end) then everyone in the audience would be yelling that they knew it was going to happen. She got what she deserved for being so stupid. They would never do that.
Little tip in life. In that situation, you'd do it to.
I had a lot of time to think later, and I decided that if what happened was a horror movie, then the audience would have been screaming at me that I was an idiot and look out. And since Zack was technically the hero after all was said and done, I was expendable. The chainsaw was already getting revved up. All I had to do was walk right into it. So I did.
I decided to believe that Zack had just tried some sort of scare tactic on me. I didn't know why and I didn't care either. The point was that I needed to know more about these guys and why they were around. Nobody had made a move on Ashley or Kayla or me for that matter and if these guys were as desperate as Zack said they were, then if they knew specifically who the X-5 in this city was, then it wouldn't make sense for them to sit there perfectly inert. They would have gone after one of us by now. The fact they didn't said they were trolling.
I just wanted to know why they were in LA. What made them suspect that there was an X-5 in the city? Maybe it was because I had spent five minutes with Zack, but I had to wonder if maybe it had something to do with Eyes Only. I had been very careful to make sure that neither Jhondie nor I was ever in any video evidence, but who knows. What if...what if Eyes Only was part of it all in some way? It was paranoid and remote to the point of ridiculous, but where Jhondie's safety was concerned, I was going to be extra suspicious.
I should have kept up with that theory for myself as well. Granted, it all worked out for the best, and life would have ended up drastically different had I not been stupid, convinced I was immortal, but there might have been another way around things that wouldn't have ended up with me in the situation that occurred.
It was late when I went back to do some more surveillance. I figured that if these guys were enough to put the fear of God into Zack, I was going to have to be extra careful. No little ploys to get close to them and make contact. They probably weren't going to be very friendly to anyone even walking around there. The plan was to watch until I had a clear shot to plant some listening devices. Get in, get them planted, find out what they know and then go from there. I knew Zack said not to mess with them, but Zack said a lot of things. I just didn't know then that most of what he said was actually very good advice in a survivalist sense.
I moved into position late that night, everything planned out pretty well. If they thought I was X-5, they weren't going to kill me and I would have the few minutes I needed to get out of the way. I was back on the building where Zack and I had been earlier. It might have been best to wait a day or two, but the sooner I knew, the sooner Jhondie was going to get to come home. That was my primary concern. It shouldn't have been. I learned a painful lesson. There was a huge difference between a journalistic investigation and a military operation. I didn't have to know that when Jhondie and I were together. It would have been a good thing to know when we were apart though.
I knew that surveillance was mostly just sitting and trust me, that gets painfully boring. From the window of the top floor of an abandoned building down from the target, I had a good vantage point. The Red Disposables were coming and going but not at the rate you would think if they were desperately looking for someone in a city the size of Los Angeles. That was worrisome. What if they weren't desperate because they knew who they were looking for specifically? I didn't see how that was really possible, but anything could happen.
I had some sound amplifiers that worked at a distance. Not very good, but it would let me know when I could get near the place. After several hours, I knew that something was a little odd. It was like they were waiting for something. They had spoken a great deal in their native language and I while I waited, I used an online translator. They were basically saying that they had been assured of delivery. Delivery? Who was being delivered? Jhondie was gone. Not in the city. And unless Zack had gotten bored with being the protector and decided to sell off a few spare X-5's, then there was no way she was being delivered.
I had to get closer and find out more. Jhondie was out of their reach, but these guys obviously were good at tracking down X-5's. And it wouldn't have surprised me to find out that Zack had another one stowed here in the city. Best place to hide someone is right under the nose, right? He had mentioned that the other one had almost been caught because she was careless. He had acted like he was referring to the way he thought Jhondie was careless, but what if he meant careless in who they trusted? I knew Jhondie was out of danger, but I didn't know about the others, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to tell Jhondie that I had backed off and let one of her brothers or sisters get caught by these guys. Wasn't going to happen.
The plans for the building they were in were still on file with the city planners. I pulled them up and started looking for underground entrances. That would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to get up on the roof. My eyes scanned over the plans, trying to find some kind of grate or something close to that. Sometimes I really wished life were like a movie where there was always the convenient place for the hero to slip in and get the goods. Of course he was always done in ninety minutes (or forty-five if it was on TV) plus managed to get the girl and save the entire city. Life is not like a movie. Grate? Nada.
I knew it wasn't the best idea but I was going to have to get closer. I had to know what was going on with this X-5 that was about to be delivered. I didn't think the risk was going to be too much. After all, they didn't know they were being watched. Behind the building ran a narrow alley that I thought I would be able to get into and plant some bugs in the back window. I had the get-up for a homeless person, complete with a half- bottle of some very cheap booze that would double as paint-stripper. It was a tried and true disguise that seems silly and see-through, but you'd be surprised at how often it worked, especially in LA. People tended to turn blind the moment they saw the homeless. A lot of things had been discussed right in front of me, as I lay on a sidewalk in a supposedly drunken stupor.
It just took a few minutes to head into a decent position. At least I thought I was in a decent position. There was just one thing I didn't know until much, much later. They were expecting a visitor. I wasn't the spider. I was, in fact, the little dumba$$ fly. But I didn't know that as I stumbled around the far end of a building two doors down from the target. I looked like a homeless guy. Walked like one. It was too perfect I guess.
And there was one other thing I didn't know. Those guys could be frighteningly quiet when they wanted to be. Maybe if I didn't have the earphones in it wouldn't have been so evident. Or maybe I was just too used to having a transgenic partner that would hear a mouse scampering through the walls. But I was hunched down, getting the listening devices set when a hand grabbed my shoulder and hauled me up.
I'm not a little guy and most of my weight is solid muscle. Fingers clamped around my shoulder and hauled me right off of my feet, flinging me into the wall, knocking the wind out of me. I tried to get a breath, but someone else was suddenly there and a hand around my throat lifted me off of the ground. Men, several of them, mostly blonde, all with that "I am bad-guy" look to them. And I had absolutely no back up in this city.
I tried fighting him, but it was like solid steel around my neck. The fingers around my neck tightened until things started going gray and large red flowers were blooming in my vision. In all of my work for Eyes Only, I never really thought I was going to die. I had been in a lot of dangerous situations, but I always thought I would make it through. For the first time in my life, I knew with absolute surety that I was a dead man.
The guy holding me hauled me off of the wall, still keeping me up in the air. It was everything I could do just to draw enough breath to keep from passing out. Big mistake in retrospect. Someone circled behind me and I heard a laugh.
"See," he said in heavily accented English. "I told you she had help. Just like he suggested she would."
The guy holding me drew back his other hand in a fist. Things went into slow motion. The fist drew back and then charged forward heading straight for my face and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I dimly heard a sharp crack, registered pain lancing through my whole body.
And then for a while, everything was mercifully black.
Jhondie
Ever just have that feeling of bad? Like you know something is wrong, but you can't shake it? That's how I felt the next day as I got the plane ready to go. I thought about calling Justin to let him know I was coming home, but decided against it. He would try to talk me out of it. But I turned my cell on and left it on, hoping he would call me. Something didn't feel right, and I couldn't place it. It was getting highly annoying.
I had gotten the information that Justin had needed for an article. It was basically finding out the forwarding addresses of a few people. Not like they had left them with an employer; girls rarely let their pimps know where they are going, but there are other ways. We were going to have to go to New Orleans to interview the last two that Justin wanted. Not going to complain. Always heard it was a fun place to visit.
So why couldn't I shake this feeling? It was making me hurry through my checklists and that was the one thing I never did. Not if you wanted to land the plane in one piece. Finally I did the one thing I didn't want to do. As soon as I was in level flight, I braved the lecture and called Mom.
She answered on the first ring. Bad sign. That meant she wasn't even looking at the Caller ID. "Jhondie!" she practically sobbed when I said hello. "Where are you?"
I took a deep breath. "Coming home," I said firmly. "I'm sorry I freaked, but...but I really let Zack get to me and I panicked. But I'm going to be landing in about an hour or so."
She didn't speak for a minute and I realized she was crying. Well, if she wanted to make me feel like a total louse, that pretty much did it. "Your sister told me what happened," she said quietly. Oh hell. A Kayla-version of the events couldn't be pretty.
Mom paused and that feeling of bad suddenly got heavier. "I don't normally ask this," she said quietly. "But make that death-trap your in go as fast as it can. You're needed here."
Most of the time I would have thought that she was just making a "mom" kind of statement and saying she wanted me home no matter what. But there was more to it. I knew that. I don't know how, but I did, and that of all things made me forget my flight instructor's many lectures on wasting fuel and I slid the throttle in to max power. The engines snarled into high power as I pointed the plane west and towards home.
I've seen a lot of scary movies in my time. And they all had one thing in common. At some point some girl would start walking down the darkened hallway/out of the cabin in the woods/ into the attic and the whole audience would be yelling at her that she's an idiot. They would never do something so stupid! And then when the bad guy chopped her up with a chainsaw (if she was the heroine's best friend) or chased her through three cornfields into an electric plant where he was fried (if she had top billing and there was a good chance for a sequel, but her friend still got chopped up right at the end) then everyone in the audience would be yelling that they knew it was going to happen. She got what she deserved for being so stupid. They would never do that.
Little tip in life. In that situation, you'd do it to.
I had a lot of time to think later, and I decided that if what happened was a horror movie, then the audience would have been screaming at me that I was an idiot and look out. And since Zack was technically the hero after all was said and done, I was expendable. The chainsaw was already getting revved up. All I had to do was walk right into it. So I did.
I decided to believe that Zack had just tried some sort of scare tactic on me. I didn't know why and I didn't care either. The point was that I needed to know more about these guys and why they were around. Nobody had made a move on Ashley or Kayla or me for that matter and if these guys were as desperate as Zack said they were, then if they knew specifically who the X-5 in this city was, then it wouldn't make sense for them to sit there perfectly inert. They would have gone after one of us by now. The fact they didn't said they were trolling.
I just wanted to know why they were in LA. What made them suspect that there was an X-5 in the city? Maybe it was because I had spent five minutes with Zack, but I had to wonder if maybe it had something to do with Eyes Only. I had been very careful to make sure that neither Jhondie nor I was ever in any video evidence, but who knows. What if...what if Eyes Only was part of it all in some way? It was paranoid and remote to the point of ridiculous, but where Jhondie's safety was concerned, I was going to be extra suspicious.
I should have kept up with that theory for myself as well. Granted, it all worked out for the best, and life would have ended up drastically different had I not been stupid, convinced I was immortal, but there might have been another way around things that wouldn't have ended up with me in the situation that occurred.
It was late when I went back to do some more surveillance. I figured that if these guys were enough to put the fear of God into Zack, I was going to have to be extra careful. No little ploys to get close to them and make contact. They probably weren't going to be very friendly to anyone even walking around there. The plan was to watch until I had a clear shot to plant some listening devices. Get in, get them planted, find out what they know and then go from there. I knew Zack said not to mess with them, but Zack said a lot of things. I just didn't know then that most of what he said was actually very good advice in a survivalist sense.
I moved into position late that night, everything planned out pretty well. If they thought I was X-5, they weren't going to kill me and I would have the few minutes I needed to get out of the way. I was back on the building where Zack and I had been earlier. It might have been best to wait a day or two, but the sooner I knew, the sooner Jhondie was going to get to come home. That was my primary concern. It shouldn't have been. I learned a painful lesson. There was a huge difference between a journalistic investigation and a military operation. I didn't have to know that when Jhondie and I were together. It would have been a good thing to know when we were apart though.
I knew that surveillance was mostly just sitting and trust me, that gets painfully boring. From the window of the top floor of an abandoned building down from the target, I had a good vantage point. The Red Disposables were coming and going but not at the rate you would think if they were desperately looking for someone in a city the size of Los Angeles. That was worrisome. What if they weren't desperate because they knew who they were looking for specifically? I didn't see how that was really possible, but anything could happen.
I had some sound amplifiers that worked at a distance. Not very good, but it would let me know when I could get near the place. After several hours, I knew that something was a little odd. It was like they were waiting for something. They had spoken a great deal in their native language and I while I waited, I used an online translator. They were basically saying that they had been assured of delivery. Delivery? Who was being delivered? Jhondie was gone. Not in the city. And unless Zack had gotten bored with being the protector and decided to sell off a few spare X-5's, then there was no way she was being delivered.
I had to get closer and find out more. Jhondie was out of their reach, but these guys obviously were good at tracking down X-5's. And it wouldn't have surprised me to find out that Zack had another one stowed here in the city. Best place to hide someone is right under the nose, right? He had mentioned that the other one had almost been caught because she was careless. He had acted like he was referring to the way he thought Jhondie was careless, but what if he meant careless in who they trusted? I knew Jhondie was out of danger, but I didn't know about the others, and I sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to tell Jhondie that I had backed off and let one of her brothers or sisters get caught by these guys. Wasn't going to happen.
The plans for the building they were in were still on file with the city planners. I pulled them up and started looking for underground entrances. That would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to get up on the roof. My eyes scanned over the plans, trying to find some kind of grate or something close to that. Sometimes I really wished life were like a movie where there was always the convenient place for the hero to slip in and get the goods. Of course he was always done in ninety minutes (or forty-five if it was on TV) plus managed to get the girl and save the entire city. Life is not like a movie. Grate? Nada.
I knew it wasn't the best idea but I was going to have to get closer. I had to know what was going on with this X-5 that was about to be delivered. I didn't think the risk was going to be too much. After all, they didn't know they were being watched. Behind the building ran a narrow alley that I thought I would be able to get into and plant some bugs in the back window. I had the get-up for a homeless person, complete with a half- bottle of some very cheap booze that would double as paint-stripper. It was a tried and true disguise that seems silly and see-through, but you'd be surprised at how often it worked, especially in LA. People tended to turn blind the moment they saw the homeless. A lot of things had been discussed right in front of me, as I lay on a sidewalk in a supposedly drunken stupor.
It just took a few minutes to head into a decent position. At least I thought I was in a decent position. There was just one thing I didn't know until much, much later. They were expecting a visitor. I wasn't the spider. I was, in fact, the little dumba$$ fly. But I didn't know that as I stumbled around the far end of a building two doors down from the target. I looked like a homeless guy. Walked like one. It was too perfect I guess.
And there was one other thing I didn't know. Those guys could be frighteningly quiet when they wanted to be. Maybe if I didn't have the earphones in it wouldn't have been so evident. Or maybe I was just too used to having a transgenic partner that would hear a mouse scampering through the walls. But I was hunched down, getting the listening devices set when a hand grabbed my shoulder and hauled me up.
I'm not a little guy and most of my weight is solid muscle. Fingers clamped around my shoulder and hauled me right off of my feet, flinging me into the wall, knocking the wind out of me. I tried to get a breath, but someone else was suddenly there and a hand around my throat lifted me off of the ground. Men, several of them, mostly blonde, all with that "I am bad-guy" look to them. And I had absolutely no back up in this city.
I tried fighting him, but it was like solid steel around my neck. The fingers around my neck tightened until things started going gray and large red flowers were blooming in my vision. In all of my work for Eyes Only, I never really thought I was going to die. I had been in a lot of dangerous situations, but I always thought I would make it through. For the first time in my life, I knew with absolute surety that I was a dead man.
The guy holding me hauled me off of the wall, still keeping me up in the air. It was everything I could do just to draw enough breath to keep from passing out. Big mistake in retrospect. Someone circled behind me and I heard a laugh.
"See," he said in heavily accented English. "I told you she had help. Just like he suggested she would."
The guy holding me drew back his other hand in a fist. Things went into slow motion. The fist drew back and then charged forward heading straight for my face and there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it. I dimly heard a sharp crack, registered pain lancing through my whole body.
And then for a while, everything was mercifully black.
Jhondie
Ever just have that feeling of bad? Like you know something is wrong, but you can't shake it? That's how I felt the next day as I got the plane ready to go. I thought about calling Justin to let him know I was coming home, but decided against it. He would try to talk me out of it. But I turned my cell on and left it on, hoping he would call me. Something didn't feel right, and I couldn't place it. It was getting highly annoying.
I had gotten the information that Justin had needed for an article. It was basically finding out the forwarding addresses of a few people. Not like they had left them with an employer; girls rarely let their pimps know where they are going, but there are other ways. We were going to have to go to New Orleans to interview the last two that Justin wanted. Not going to complain. Always heard it was a fun place to visit.
So why couldn't I shake this feeling? It was making me hurry through my checklists and that was the one thing I never did. Not if you wanted to land the plane in one piece. Finally I did the one thing I didn't want to do. As soon as I was in level flight, I braved the lecture and called Mom.
She answered on the first ring. Bad sign. That meant she wasn't even looking at the Caller ID. "Jhondie!" she practically sobbed when I said hello. "Where are you?"
I took a deep breath. "Coming home," I said firmly. "I'm sorry I freaked, but...but I really let Zack get to me and I panicked. But I'm going to be landing in about an hour or so."
She didn't speak for a minute and I realized she was crying. Well, if she wanted to make me feel like a total louse, that pretty much did it. "Your sister told me what happened," she said quietly. Oh hell. A Kayla-version of the events couldn't be pretty.
Mom paused and that feeling of bad suddenly got heavier. "I don't normally ask this," she said quietly. "But make that death-trap your in go as fast as it can. You're needed here."
Most of the time I would have thought that she was just making a "mom" kind of statement and saying she wanted me home no matter what. But there was more to it. I knew that. I don't know how, but I did, and that of all things made me forget my flight instructor's many lectures on wasting fuel and I slid the throttle in to max power. The engines snarled into high power as I pointed the plane west and towards home.