by Ella Storm
What my handsome stranger had said stuck with me. They were purposely keeping us sequestered in our homes. It wasn’t much of a hardship for me considering my condition, but those with a green thumb could grow their own food in fertile soil. Farmers could get a fresh start, and things could return to normal over several months. The need for the greenhouses would become a moot point.
I was in a hurry to get rid of Officer Johnson, but I couldn’t do that when he was trained to look for anything inconsistent in peoples’ behaviors. I had no idea where my hostage-taker had gone, but I was certain he wasn’t far away, most likely ready to act if I said something off-color.
I handed the officer the small disk I retrieved from my office. He was stunned, unable to voice his appreciation without first collecting his thoughts. “Wow, that’s very generous of you.”
“It’s nothing. Besides, I’m counting on you for the beta testing.”
“Isn’t there anything you can reveal about the game to give me a leg up on the competition? I promise I won’t tell anybody.”
“Your police training already gives you an unfair advantage. The one thing you need to remember when you play the game for the first time is to prepare for anything. Just make sure the people you invite into the campaign are those you can trust to cover your back.”
In the house, he had let his guard down. He removed his carbon fiber helmet and stood there more relaxed. “My two brothers are perfect to have my back in any campaign. They are blood, and nothing is more important than family.” His eyes went wide when he realized what he had just said. He gave me a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry for your loss. We always do our due diligence before we knock on a door to get a better understanding of what we’ll face when it opens.”
That fateful night, my parents took me to town to celebrate my sixteenth birthday. I was old enough to understand that dinner in town would have cost my dad two weeks pay, so I insisted I was in the mood for pizza and not some fancy dinner. If I hadn’t chosen the pizza parlor instead of the elegant restaurant in the posh part of town, they’d still be alive. Guilt ate away at me every single day.
His partner passed in front of the window, doing the round of my property.
“I should get going,” he said, “This is the best da—” he was making his way to the door when he stopped short.
On my kitchen counter stood two full glasses of water.
Chapter Five
In one abrupt move, Officer Johnson armed the gun attached to his arm, but before he could raise it, Maverick leaped out of the shadows, lunged forward and grabbed hold of his hips in a bear hug. The impact sent them both reeling through the basement door, which we had left ajar. I knew what would happen before it did.
The outside cellar was an addition to the house my father started, but never got around to finishing. There was no railing to hold on to. In less than a second, they fell off the steep concrete stairs.
I heard the crash when they landed. The ensuing silence was deafening. I felt around for the light switch, my heart pounding in my chest. I went halfway down the stairs, uncertain what to do. The two men lay at the bottom of the stairs, Maverick sprawled on top of Officer Johnson. They weren’t moving, and I couldn’t hear their breathing. The police officer’s head rested at an odd angle. His lifeless eyes were on me, blaming me for his death. My hands flew to my mouth to silence my scream.
I felt faint, unable to hold myself up. I collapsed on the stairs and put my head between my knees to get the blood flowing to my head. Violent tears shook my body. I had another death on my conscience.
“Helios….”
I didn’t hear the faint murmur through my loud sobs.
“Helios… I need you to help me get free. My arm is trapped underneath him.”
“You’re—you’re alive?” A hysterical sob choked me.
“He broke my fall.”
I wiped my runny nose on my sleeve and stumbled down the rest of the stairs. Relief and terror battled for dominance inside of me. Maverick was alive, but the officer was dead. The thought of going to jail terrified me.
I rolled Officer Johnson sideways, just enough for Maverick to pull his arm free.
“We need to get out of here.” He scrambled to his feet and pulled me up with him.
When he reached the top of the stairs, he fiddled with the lock on the basement door. “Is there a way to lock him inside?”
My inquisitive expression asked the unspoken question.
“We might gain a few precious minutes if his partner spends time searching the house.”
No way in hell would I brave the outside. And I wasn’t about to explain my psychological restraints to a complete stranger. “Leave now while you still can. I can make it sound like an accident. He slipped in the dark and fell.”
Maverick grabbed my shoulders, and lowered himself to be eye-level with me. “You don’t understand the gravity of the situation. They won’t take the chance of you knowing something after spending time with me. I don’t even want to think about what they would do to get information out of you.”
I struggled out of his grasp and he let go of my shoulders. He had no right to disrupt my life.
The weight of his words penetrated my mind. I only now understood what he was saying. If I stayed, I would go to prison, or worse, they would torture me for information before executing me. If I ran with him, I might live. That is, if I could surmount my fear of the outdoors and not get caught. The last possibility was to get killed while fleeing. I prayed for a clean shot that I wouldn’t see coming.
If only the fearless and powerful woman from Battlefield Glory was the real me. I used the game to escape my affliction. If I could use the same mentality in real life, I might have the courage to cross my threshold.
“It won’t be long before his partner comes looking for him. Grab the essentials and let’s go,” he ordered as he hauled me to my room. I opened my closet, my hands digging in the back. He grabbed hold of my hands and stopped me.
He knew what I was looking for. “Look at me. Do you see any protection suit on me? I came here wearing what you see. Nothing more and nothing less.”
It was the first time I realized his skin hadn’t blistered. He wasn’t suffocating when he broke into my house. Nor did he beg for water to relieve the burning in his throat.
I retrieved a black leather jacket with the lining fortified against the sun’s rays. “I prefer to be prudent and take precautions.” I regretted saying it as soon as the words came out of my mouth. There was no reason for me to justify myself.
He went to peer through the windows to locate Johnson’s partner’s whereabouts and found the officer waiting in their SUV. As he was about to step out into the backyard, he retraced his steps and said, “Wait, I have an idea to buy us some time.” He didn’t elaborate and used the key to open the basement door, then flicked on the light switch.
I watched while he searched through Johnson’s clothing and pulled out the communication device. “I’m going to be a little while longer. You know how passionate I am about the game. Just sit tight.” He covered his mouth while speaking and mimicked static so the officer wouldn’t recognize the voice.
I ran to the living room and peeped through the blinds. The officer hadn’t moved from the passenger seat of their car.
Maverick raced up the stairs, taking them three at a time. “We have to find somebody to pass my information to without worrying about it falling into the wrong hands,” he reminded me while securing the lock.
“I might know somebody to point us in the right direction. It’s a long shot, but it’s the only option we have.” I scurried back to my office, slamming my shoulder against the wall in my clumsiness, and grabbed my tablet which I slid into the lining of my jacket. Thanks to the game, I had a vast network of people, and the only way to communicate with them would be through this device.
As soon as I stood on the threshold to the backyard, my entire body began to tremble. My eyes became sensitive to
the light. My breath came out in short, irregular pants. My heart was beating hysterically. Sweat ran down my face. I was having a panic attack.
Maverick watched me. His brows wrinkled in confusion, wondering why I hadn’t followed him outside. He didn’t know about my affliction, and I didn’t want sympathy. It was better to keep it a secret as long as possible. There was no reason to make the situation any worse than it already was.
I took a deep breath and concentrated on my meditation breathing exercises. I closed my eyes and imagined black smoke coming out of my mouth, purging the negativity, and whispered my mantra over and over, You’ve got this.
I was using every tool in the book to manage my condition. I was terrified to leave the safety of my home and prayed for the courage to follow him into this madness. I took a small, hesitant step onto the porch and carefully stuck my hand out into the sun. I expected my skin to burn within seconds, but it didn’t happen. The sensation was unfamiliar and strange, the warmth comforting.
I took another deep breath and another step. I stood outside for the first time in eight years. My mind was too neurotic with doing something out of my comfort zone to notice the dread rising like bile in my throat.
We barely made it a few yards when the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked stopped us in our tracks.
Chapter Six
All I heard behind my back was the hissing of breath.
“One more step and I’ll shoot you dead.” Without a doubt, the cold, metallic voice belonged to Johnson’s partner.
We froze, not daring to move. I stopped breathing, afraid the uncontrolled heaving of my chest would make it look like I jerked and cause me to get shot. Maverick stood a few steps to my side. I turned my head a fraction of an inch to bring him into perspective. I needed the reassurance that he would know what to do. The color had drained from his face, his eyes scrunched up as if waiting for the bullet to be released.
“Where is Johnson?”
Neither of us answered. After a minute of silence, his boots crunched on the gravel walkway, and from the corner of my eye I saw the baton rise high in the sky and come down with full force. Maverick collapsed to the ground as if someone had cut the strings holding him up. He panted from the pain, his breath coming out in short shallow exhales.
“Ah, shit. You bastard!” he cursed and hugged his knee to his chest.
“I won’t ask you again.”
Every word was punctuated with a second of silence, to convey the underlying threat. It was clear this officer would not waste his energy on idle chitchat like Officer Johnson did.
When Maverick didn’t reply, the baton rose for the second blow.
“He’s in the basement,” I blurted, “It was an accident. He said he had to search the house and slipped on the stairs.”
He turned his head towards me, the movement unnatural, as if he were a machine and not a human being with coordinated movements. His visor hid his face, making it impossible to read his expression. He pointed the gun strapped to his arm at Maverick.
I linked my fingers behind my head, turned to face the officer and knelt. “It was an accident, I swear.” This sprouting courage surprised me when everything I did, everything I said, was out of pure panic.
He didn’t say anything, but used his weapon to motion that we should turn around. For the second time today, I saw how my life would end. This time, a bullet in the back of the head would do the job.
I faced death, or to be literal, I gave my back to death, but a calm descended over me. The unknown no longer frightened me. I felt liberated.
The sound of the detonation startled me, even if I had expected it. Maverick fell forward, his face rebounding on the dry soil before it settled in the dust. Pure terror rose from my stomach, made its way to my chest, and threatened to escape through my mouth in a scream. Another blast, and steel wires wrapped around my wrists and ankles. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what had just happened. An uncontrolled cry of relief burst from my mouth. The officer had thrown airborne capsulated manacles at us.
These capsulated manacles were the new generation of handcuffs. Officers no longer had to touch their suspects to restrain them. When thrown in the direction you wanted them to go, the capsules would track your suspect using body heat sensors, and once within reach, they would break open making an explosive sound and release steel wires that would wrap themselves around the wrists and feet to restrict the movements of the suspect.
I looked over at Maverick. He was struggling to get back into an upright position. His wrists were chained to his ankles, making it difficult for him to move. It was the officer’s kick that sent him sprawling headfirst in the dust. The officer had been kinder with me; my wrists and ankles were not bound together.
“We will sort this out. Make any sudden movements and it will be your last,” he warned. The hissing sound of his heavy breathing through the helmet continued to intimidate me.
He rattled the door to the basement before two shots rang out and he kicked it in. I heard him call out Johnson’s name as he scrambled down the stairs.
I remembered the tablet hidden in my jacket. I lowered my head as far as I could and whispered commands to access voice recognition and call Jason. In a few brief sentences I related to Jason the danger I was in and asked him to hack into the motherboard of nearby drones and rewire their orders. I begged him to hurry.
An important part of my work when creating video games was researching military equipment. I wanted the virtual experience to be truly realistic for the players. To make Battlefield Glory as genuine as possible, I had required access to the blueprints of drones. The military delivered the designs of the older versions that were no longer in use, on the condition that the information I wanted remained classified. But that didn’t stop Jason from hacking into their servers just for fun, and stealing the designs of the newer drones. I didn’t incorporate the newer drones into the game so as not to alert the military, but we had spent a lot of time analyzing their programming to understand how they worked.
“One murder wasn’t enough. You had to kill Johnson too.”
I hadn’t heard the officer return. I was lucky he didn’t catch me speaking into my chest when he circled to stand in front of us.
“The government wanted to make an example out of you, seeing as you killed a prominent figure and humanitarian. But I think I’ll spare them the expense of a trial. I’ll kill you right now in Johnson’s honor.”
My eyes jumped to his face. Bewilderment covered my features.
“Didn’t he tell you, princess? Romeo here, murdered a high-profile scientist. Everybody looked up to him to save us from this environmental apocalypse. The authorities are keeping the murder quiet until we bring the killer in. The victim’s identity hasn’t been disclosed, but when they get around to mentioning him by name, it will send shock waves throughout the world.”
I knew of only one notorious person who could incite such an emotional response from the people. Dr. Stephen Fleming; renowned environmentalist and humanitarian. He had inherited a monumental fortune from his parents when he reached twenty-one and distributed a sizeable portion to help feed the poor. The rest of his fortune, he invested in environmental research to save us from this burning planet. He defended citizens from the oppression of the government and had even accused Mother of deliberately keeping the lower classes underfed while the rich feasted. Every once in a while, he would broadcast messages of hope that we all clung to.
This information dismayed me. How did I get myself mixed up with a murderer?
“I’m innocent.”
I closed my eyes to block Maverick’s handsome face out of my vision and out of my mind.
“Helios, look at me.”
When I didn’t respond he repeated his command with more force. “Look at me!”
I opened my eyes, reluctantly, not knowing who to believe. What was the truth, what was the lie?
“They are setting me up for a crime I didn’t commit. I’v
e never met Dr. Fleming. I’m not sure what is going on here, but I’m not a murderer.”
His eyes looked so sincere it was impossible not to believe him. I gave him a small nod and the shadow of a smile. He let out a breath and turned to the officer; defiance sparked in his eyes.
“She has nothing to do with this. It could have been anybody’s house I broke into. I don’t know her and she has cooperated at the threat of losing her life.”
The officer didn’t move but kept his weapon pointed at Maverick. With his visor down, I couldn’t tell how he was reacting to what Maverick said.
“Are you seeing us?” Maverick yelled. “We are both kneeling in the sun and we are still alive.”
The officer stood right in front of me, giving me an excellent view of his weapon. I recognized it as the standard police firearm that had the ability to become an automatic. The computer chip in the activation mechanism was devised to make it impossible for anybody other than the intended officer to use the weapon. It had a design flaw, though. The firing mechanism worked by fingerprint activation, and the identification could be circumvented if you knew how to hack into the system and switch prints.
“I think I’ll shoot you in the back. That way I can say you got killed while resisting arrest.”
I had to take the risk of initiating a malfunction of the firearm. When he moved behind us, I memorized the weapon’s license number, thanks to my photographic memory.
“The government doesn’t want the population to know the truth. I worked for Sentos, but I can no longer turn a blind eye to what is going on. Mother is using people like you and me to keep the population hungry. As long as the government promises to feed them, they will never object to the elite holding all the power and the wealth.”
