by Mark Leslie
“It’s just a habit, I suppose,” he said.
Chapter Nine
Today
The door handle to the first aid room turned. First left, then right. Something, most likely a shoulder, bumped up against the door. But it was locked, and wasn’t going to budge.
Scott raised a single finger and placed it vertically against his pursed lips.
Gary shook his head, the look on his face saying, Are you nuts? Do you think I’d be stupid enough to make any sort of noise?
The door handle turned, one more time.
The vent immediately above the door suddenly came on, sending down a stifling blast of head right onto Scott’s forehead, the noise and warmth startling him so much that he almost let out an audible yelp.
As he watched the doorknob turn, he flashed back to one of many scenes from The Walking Dead, an AMC television program that he had gotten hooked on a few years back. Set in a post-apocalyptic world that has been over-run with some sort of zombie virus, a few remaining survivors do their best to stay alive, trying to stay one step ahead of the mindless flesh-eating resurrected dead, known by the main characters as “walkers” but also trying not to get killed by the other survivors.
It was in one of the very first episodes that the main character, Rick, who had been in a coma while the world had been going to hell, was taken in by a pair of strangers, a father and son team. In the night, the time when the zombies were most active, they had stood near the front door to their house, panicked looks in their eyes as a zombie on the other side of the door tried their door.
As Scott watched the knob turn, he couldn’t help but flash back to that episode. Although, admittedly, thought there were no zombies outside the door, there was something much worse. One of the two men who had been trying to kill him.
That was far worse than any imagined creature on a network television program.
Sweat leaked down Scott’s brow and into his eyes. He couldn’t be bothered to try to wipe it away.
Damn heating in this building, Scott thought, realizing that being closed in with another person and having the heat pumped in like that was extremely uncomfortable. Of course, the fact Scott had been running didn’t help matters; not to mention the danger he had been running from.
No, not running.
Evading.
The words of both Herb and the security guard echoed in his head. You cannot evade us.
The knob stopped turning and the footsteps shuffled away.
Scott reached up, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and looked back at Gary, who was quietly staring back. He hadn’t bothered to wipe the sweat from his own eyes.
The footsteps moved to the second door down this short hallway, to the supply closet, a room the same size as the first aid room; a six by twelve foot room, this one filled with various office supplies – paper, pens, folders, whiteboard markers, and other office paraphernalia. Scott knew the office was kept locked before nine and after five in order to maintain tighter control on what Digi-Life termed “unnecessary shrink” – employees taking additional office supplies for use, not in the office, but in their homes, as part of their children’s school supplies or for other non-work related needs.
Scott and Gary remained quiet as they listened, imagining the person was trying the supply room door; it too being locked.
Then the footsteps shuffled off back towards the kitchen area.
Seconds later, a second pair of footsteps could be heard approaching to join the first pair. No voices, just the footsteps moving in unison.
Eerie, Scott bemused. How very much like zombies. He shook his head.
He had imagined that Herb and the security guard, if that’s who these two were outside the door, had split up and each taken a different path on the second floor. With one of them taking the hallway to the left, and the other to the right, they would end up coming at Scott either of the two ways he might have run.
He figured that they likely had checked every single room on the second floor, including the bathrooms. There were at least eight offices and meeting rooms, mostly on the far side of this floor. The kitchen, the first aid room, and the supply closet beside the first aid room would be the last three places to check.
The question is, why weren’t they communicating with one another, and, more importantly, what would they do, where would they go now?
Without speaking a word, the footsteps could be heard heading back down the hall by the first aid room and supply closet. One pair then clomped down the stairs on the other side of the hallway, while the others, obviously not on the stairs, must have headed back to the front of the second floor in order for them to sweep the first floor, its offices and meeting rooms, and likely rendezvous somewhere in the middle.
Waiting until the footsteps had receded far enough away that he couldn’t hear them any longer, Scott let out a sigh of relief and then turned to Gary.
“Okay,” he whispered. “They’re gone. We have to figure out the best way to get past them and out of here.”
Gary didn’t respond.
He stood there, quietly blinking.
“Gary?”
A vacant, glassy-eyed look started to slowly come over his friend’s face and his eyes temporarily rolled back in their sockets.
“Gary?” Scott said again, waving a hand in the air between them. “Gary, speak to me.”
After a couple of seconds, Gary’s eyes rolled back to normal. He blinked, shook his head a bit. Blinked again. Then he looked directly at Scott again, as if waking up from some sort of foggy state. But the glazed look – that same glazed look he had seen in Herb and the security guard became evident on Gary’s face.
“You won’t get away. You cannot evade us,” Gary uttered in a monotone robotic voice.
Chapter Ten
Seventeen Years Earlier
Scott found a few more pictures of his grandfather in his father’s tackle box. That and a few other objects he couldn’t quite understand.
He might have gone fishing with his father, and grew up in a home where fishing was important, so Scott didn’t know what every single lure, reel attachment or gadget for fishing was. But he had seen a few of those objects quite by accident one afternoon when he’d been looking for a simple pin.
Scott was home for a visit with his parents; he had recently graduated from university and had been working part-time at a local Radio Shack as a sales clerk while taking on simple computer repair, home networking setup and illegal satellite and digital receiver card hack jobs on the side. Due to the part-time nature of his weekly commitments (which saw him working less than twenty-four hours each week) and the fact he could set his own hours for the side-jobs, Scott could easily craft four day weekends, making the trek from Toronto to his parent’s home simple enough.
Being the only son of Lionel and Jeanette Desmond, Scott was regularly guilt-tripped into making the trek back home, and he did so at least once a month. It wasn’t much of a hardship actually, but still, the fact that he had always felt obligated to do so was like a ball and chain that slowed him down, held him from being able to really branch out.
Not that he’d had any real ambitions.
He was content to do the computer mucking and hacking that he liked so well and spend the majority of his free time playing video games.
And, since most of the games he was currently into could be played on his laptop, it didn’t matter whether he was in his own apartment or in his parent’s basement for the weekend.
And that’s what had happened. He’d been playing a hacked version of Battle Warworld, an online immersive 3D first person adventure game; but somewhere in the middle of the adventure he was on, the sysops updated the game – they did that often, pushing down updates into the legitimate system paths that the hacks didn’t always pick up on – preventing him from moving further.
Scott had to pause the game and figure out a way to bypass the latest security install.
And that’s when he realized he neede
d a stick-pin, a long sharp and pointy object, in order to pop open the side of the drive case so that he could fiddle with the modified RAM sticks he had been using.
And, though he did have plenty of tools with him – he rarely traveled without the basic core requirements for most of the jobs he performed – he didn’t have all the necessary ones to perform the task he’d been hoping for.
And that led him to his father’s workshop, and his tackle box. And something a bit more confusing.
The first shock came when he got to the tackle box and saw that the lock his father normally kept on it was detached. The lock had been something that had confused Scott for a long time, despite his father’s explanation that it was always on, even when he was at home, out of habit.
He had never seen the tackle box left unlocked – heck, it was rare that his father was ever not at home without his tackle box – so he did what any curious young man would do.
He opened it up, slowly methodically, and a bit worried that there might be an alarm that was set off when the box was opened.
It felt odd, doing this, and Scott had to look back over his should as he was doing it, almost as if he were fourteen and had found his father’s secret stash of Playboys and was filled with an excitement mixed with an intense fear of getting caught. He laughed at himself for having that reaction, but still, it had been a completely unexpected thing.
He stared down at the box. Sure, he had seen it opened before, many time. But never when he wasn’t in the presence of his father.
He looked down at the tri-sectioned part of the box that folded up and back when the lid opened. It contained about three dozen little inch-wide by inch-long compartments filled with bits of metal, feathers, twigs, ribbons, and other assorted objects. It reminded him a little of his mother’s jewelry box, filled with earrings of all shapes, makes, and sizes.
He rubbed his chin, realizing, immediately, that it was the same gesture Indiana Jones had used in The Temple of the Lost Arc in that classic scene where he was about to lift the idol off of the temple, before carefully reaching out and lifting off the top compartment.
On top were a couple of topographic and hydrographic fishing maps folded and layered onto the top of the main compartment.
Scott carefully lifted them out and placed them beside the tackle box.
Beneath those maps were two additional compartments with a click-down lid.
He opened the one on the right and saw that it contained a bunch of larger items, pieces of reels, rods as well as a whistle, a mini flashlight, a bottle of bug-spray, a smelly oil-stained rag, some pencils, a pen, a carpet knife, and a half-used pack of throat lozenges.
The right side contained more of the same type of items – a mishmash of fishing and toolbox materials.
Scott frowned, wondering what was bothering him about this set up.
When he leaned back he realized what it was. Despite the space required for the top compartment and the additional pair of larger compartments underneath, there was still at least two and an half inches unaccounted for in the bottom of the tackle box.
Carefully removing all of the miscellaneous objects from both of the compartments, he quietly closed the box and lifted it up to look at the bottom and see if, perhaps, the design left some hollow spaces underneath it. Being empty, the partially plastic and partially metal box should have weighed no more than a couple of pounds. But, instead, it weighed perhaps five or even ten pounds.
He placed it back down and picked it up again.
Yeah. Almost ten pounds.
He tilted it first to the left, then to the right. Something heavy slid around inside, metal clinked on metal.
“There is something else in there,” Scott said, even more curious now.
He placed the tackle box back down on the workshop bench, again opened it and pried open the lids of the two interior compartments. He slid his fingers around the sides, looking for a gap, a line, anything that might indicate how those compartments opened or lifted out.
Solving this wasn’t all that different than looking at the code in a program and understanding how it operated. Through a simple trial and error series of logical steps, Scott fiddled and played with the compartment.
After a few minutes, still not having any success, he heard footsteps upstairs.
“Oh, oh.”
He rushed over to the door to the workshop and stuck his head around the corner. His father had been at work and his mother was home. Could his father have returned early?
He heard the sounds of a door opening, the clattering of cups. More footsteps and the sound of coffee being poured.
It was his mother getting a coffee from the kitchen. He followed the sounds of her footsteps back into the living room where she was most likely sipping at her coffee and enjoying a paperback romance novel.
He should have known it wasn’t his father from the sound of footsteps. His father had always walked with a distinct and unique lurch-step, the side effect of a motorcycle accident he’d had when he was a young man. Of course, with his nerves running on edge, he forgave himself for being a bit overly sensitive and paranoid.
He let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, realizing just how anxious he was.
This was, indeed, more than finding his father’s stash of porn magazines. This was a deeper secret, part of the cards Lionel Desmond held close to his chest.
Yes, fishing had always been a significant priority for the man – but this was something more, something that went a lot deeper than the desire to pursue, in Moby Dick fashion, the big one, the one that got away, the elusive perfect catch.
Scott returned to the “empty” tackle box and resumed his exploratory investigation, determined he would get into the secret lower compartment.
Running a list of the various ways he had already poked and prodded, he made a mental tick mark into the concepts and ideas he had already run through so that he wouldn’t duplicate his efforts and waste time.
This was, despite the nervousness, despite the fear of being caught, an intriguing and satisfying challenge.
He fiddled for another five minutes, continuing to tick off each new idea of things to try, before he finally figured it out.
It was a trick bottom that operated on a similar principal to the Chinese finger trap puzzle.
Placing just the right amount of pressure using opposing forces on the top diametrical corners of the box, he heard a distinct click. And that’s when the compartment snapped open and he was able to lift the false bottom out.
This is not a standard tackle box that you can buy at a place like Ramako’s Scott thought, as he lifted it out and glanced at the curious objects hidden beneath.
On top of the compartment were some additional maps; ones that seemed to be topographical and hydrographical like the other ones. But they were printed in a different fashion and on a thicker type of paper that the others. He placed them aside and there he spied a series of old brown photographs.
Pictures of his grandfather. He recognized the man’s distinctive well-packed eyes. At least, that’s how his father had described his dad, when he spoke about him. It was one of the main features he could remember from his father, and in the few pictures Scott had seen, the man’s eyes, slightly droopy in nature, seemed to always have large wrinkly sacks under them, as if the man were perpetually overtired.
“My old man’s eyes looked like they were always packed and ready to go,” Scott’s father had said on those occasions where Desmond senior had come up in conversation or reminiscences.
Scott had only ever seen perhaps half a dozen pictures of his grandfather in the various photo albums on the bookshelf in the family room – but here, tucked away and hidden in this secret location of his father’s tackle box, were at least a dozen shots he had never seen. The photos were of the same brown and white quality of the ones he had seen before, and featured Reginald Desmond in various stages of his life.
One featured him as a young ma
n, posing with a couple of buddies, shit-eating grins on their faces, their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. All three were crew cut like Scott’s grandfather, who was in the middle – his swollen eye bags immediately revealing him as the man to the left of the trio. In Reginald’s right hand was a beer bottle that he was lifting and tipping towards the camera as if offering a toast.
Another picture was a solo one of Reginald, dressed in his military gear – unlike the bust portrait Scott was used to seeing, this was a full-on full body shot. Reginald was in full dress uniform, hat, tie, etc.; he looked proud to be wearing the uniform.
The picture under that was Reginald, in a picture that had to be of him ten years earlier – this one was of him in uniform as well, but not a military uniform. A Boy Scout uniform. He wore the rounded small cap atop his head, the elegantly tied kerchief around his neck, the dual shaded brown shirt and pant combination. He looked like a soldier in training in that shot. Scott grinned, remembering some professor from an English class he had taken talking about how the Boy Scouts had indeed been a pre-training ground for young men to begin to learn the discipline of joining the military and serving their country.
Several other pictures featured Reginald at about the same age he looked to be in the Boy Scout photo – somewhere in the realm of ten to twelve years old. In them he was either holding a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other – a shot likely taken when he had been about to embark on his fishing expedition – or he was posing in a shot obviously taken when returning from the trip, holding a swath of eight fish of various sizes dangling beside him.
One of the pictures featured Reginald as a toddler, dressed in a fancy little sailor suit complete with a Donald Duck cap propped on his head. He was sitting back on a couch, his little legs not even reaching to the edge of the couch, and he was leaning forward, his right arm extended toward the camera and in his right hand, an unlit cigarette held between two fingers, as if he’d been an experienced smoker. He looked about to say something he imagined was quite amusing. And, even though he couldn’t be much more than a year and a half old, his identity quite clear by the fact that his eyes, though not as puffy and packed as they became later in life, were still full and pronounced.
