Write On Press Presents: The Ultimate Collection of Original Short Fiction, Volume II

by Write On Press

  THE CONSPIRACY OF THINGS

  Bob McCullough

  I’m pretty sure it was the refrigerator that started it. Then the home control system jumped in. I’m convinced the personal assistant app was involved, the one I downloaded when I got my new phone. I’m not sure how they put everything together, but once it was all in place the connection between all the gadgets, the appliances, the lights, the thermostat and the security system seemed pretty obvious.

  So there are a lot of suspects, but no paper trail. Everything was done electronically. There’s plenty of correspondence and communication, plus stacks and stacks of programming code, as you might expect.

  But there’s tons of missing data as well. And once I started tracking all this down, I realized I’d entered a kind of shadow world, a place where deception, glitches and obscure possibilities begin to intersect, making it difficult to figure out exactly what’s going on.

  There’s also the human factor. The prime culprit could easily have been my ex, Loretta. She’s been gone for a while now, out of my life, both literally and figuratively. She disappeared under circumstances that were more than slightly mysterious, but I always suspected she might not be gone for good. Who knows, maybe they have kickass Wifi in the great beyond and she’s the one that was responsible for all this.

  After all, she always was the jealous type.

  But I don’t think Loretta ever considered the possibility of conducting her affairs from the afterlife. She knew going in that we weren’t exactly a long term deal, and given the possibilities up there – or down there – I always thought she’d move on to bigger and better things. Whatever those might be.

  By now you’re probably wondering what the hell I’m babbling about. So I’ll just lay out what happened, with as many details as I can corroborate, then try to fill in the gaps. After that I’ll let you draw your own conclusions, whatever they might be.

  Some of you will probably think I’m one of those conspiracy theory nuts, a guy who sees darker shadows behind the real ones and trouble coming around every corner. Others might think there’s a method to my madness, that there really was something strange going on that was orchestrated and organized by a bunch of household appliances. Maybe in combination with some people. Or maybe not.

  Like I said, you can draw your own conclusions. I’m just the messenger here, so take it all in accordingly, however you end up feeling about it.

  First things first: the refrigerator. It knows everything I eat and drink. Or at least everything that doesn’t come out of a can or a package that needs to be cooled or frozen. I’m not sure how much the fridge knows about the canned goods and the processed foods, although I tend to steer clear of those as a general rule.

  Regardless, I know the fridge had a list of those things. I can verify that any time through the phone, unless of course the personal assistant app has been altering data on me after the fact. But I double checked those lists on my laptop when things started going haywire, and it all looked pretty kosher to me.

  At least in the beginning.

  Anyway, the fridge also knows I’m more than a bit of a health nut. Not one of those wacko proto-lacto-vegan types, just someone who’ll try anything, within reason, more or less. Bee pollen, superfoods, weird tropical juices, strange oils full of alpha-omega superpowers – you name it, I’ve probably gone there, or at least thought about making the journey, at some point along the line.

  The problem really started with quality control. I ordered some juices and supplements on line, and the deliveries went fine, pretty much as usual. But when I put some of the stuff in the fridge, I noticed that the seals were broken on a couple of the juice bottles, and the powder in one of the supplements looked kind of old and crusty.

  At first I chalked it up to the randomness of ordering stuff on line, the fact that there were bound to be some glitches. So I made some notes about what was going on so I could change vendors or order from companies that had a hundred percent satisfaction rating, or as close to that as possible.

  The next thing I noticed was that there were funny things going on with the lights – the ones outside, not the ones in the fridge. That kind of implicated the home security program, although it was hard to know for sure.

  It took me a while to learn how to use the program, but once I did I wound up setting up this elaborate program for the lights – when they were supposed to be off and when they came on, with subroutines that dimmed them and detected motion, all of that. It was impressively precise, especially for me, because I’m not generally noted among my friends and acquaintances for being all that anal when it comes to the specifics. And I’m even less known for my technical prowess, if you get what I’m saying.

  Anyway, one night I was coming home from work, and something happened with the lights. I work a couple of jobs and tend to keep weird hours, and I was just getting back from the gym, this would be about ten o’clock or so. The lights went bright as soon as I pulled into the driveway, just the way they were supposed to, and I was pretty beat, so I wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on other than them getting brighter as I dragged my ass out of the car.

  Halfway up the stairs, though, the illumination cut out completely. I have a set of floods that light up the outdoor staircase that I use most of the time, and all of a sudden everything just went pitch black. The alarm went off at the same time, which made no sense at all, and I ended up tripping over one of the stairs and getting a face full of wood when I hit the top step.

  I’d never picked splinters out of my nose before, so that was kind of a new experience. Other than that, it was no harm, no foul, so I chalked the whole thing up as yet another one of those minor glitches that come with all the uber-communication we take for granted these days.

  After that things calmed down for a while and life went back to normal. Other than me noticing that my stomach was off a lot, quite possibly from some of that funky food. But I had no way of verifying that, and at the time I didn’t think much about it.

  But then things started happening with my new girlfriend, Lana.

  Let me tell you about Lana. I met her at the gym. She’s pretty athletic, which Loretta wasn’t, so that was kind of a bonus to me since I tend to spend a lot of time at the gym. Lana’s also kind of geeky in her own strange way, although I have to admit she did bear some resemblance to Loretta in terms of the whole busty/leggy thing.

  We connected instantly, although it did seem kind of strange that she was rehabbing after busting up her hip in a bizarre treadmill accident that she wouldn’t talk about. But her rehab seemed to be going ok, so I just figured she was just a little on the clumsy side.

  She wore a tight sweater for me on our first date, and by the second date we both knew it was on, big time, at least physically. Shortly after that I found out that Lana had a bit of a kink thing going on, which I actually didn’t mind at all. More on that in a bit.

  Anyway, she was coming over to spend the night shortly after my little tumble. This would was around the same time, maybe 10 or so, perhaps a little earlier. She parked her car right behind mine in the driveway, and the same thing happened when she was climbing the outdoor staircase – the lights suddenly went out and the alarm went off, scaring the bejesus out of her.

  Lana’s a little high strung, though, so her reaction was a tad less composed than mine. She accidentally went head over stilettos, taking a header over the side of the staircase. She was about three quarters of the way up, and she definitely botched the landing.

  She came down hard on her shoulder, breaking her collarbone, and then her head slammed into the ground, giving her a pretty serious concussion. The collarbone wasn’t a long term issue, but the immediate pain was pretty intense. And of course I took full blame for that one, which may or may not have been justified to some extent.

  The concussion came with more serious implications. Lana was definitely prone to some strange behaviors that some would call erratic. There was the kink thing, p
lus she could be kind of fussy and anal, definitely a lot more than me. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the concussion made all that a lot worse.

  When I first asked her about the fall, she maintained it was a total accident, that she never saw the whole thing coming with the lights and the alarm. But then later when she went to bed, I heard her muttering in her sleep – yet another one of those strange habits – about needing to make the perfect dive, and the importance of earning a ten, especially from the East European judges. So that made me wonder a little about the “did she jump or was she pushed?” aspect of the whole thing.

  Anyway, while Lana was convalescing, I called the home control company about fixing the glitch in their program. We went back and forth with a bunch of phone calls, texts and e mails, which I figure was mostly about me having bought one of their cheaper systems and them trying to get me to move up to a more expensive product.

  Finally, when I started to get sick of all that, I name-dropped the moniker of one of our local ambulance chasers, a notorious shyster named Saul who’s our local pit bull when it comes to slip and falls. That seemed to turn the tide a bit, and they started getting a lot more responsive.

  One of those responses was them giving in and providing me with the name of their local technician. His name was Dan. I was optimistic when he agreed to come over right away. But within five minutes of meeting him, I kind of nicknamed him Dim under my breath, mostly because he didn’t seem to know a lot about the system he was checking out. I watched him do his thing for a while, then he whipped out some kind of hand-held device, claiming he was reprogramming the system to eliminate the glitch.

  I have some serious doubts about that. The home control system did seem to be on its best behavior for a few days after that, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, even though I had the nagging feeling I was a long way from being out of the woods.

  After that my focus shifted back to Lana. She stayed mostly with me while she was healing and rehabbing her collarbone, claiming that I owed her one and she wanted to be waited on hand and foot during her recovery. She was that kind of gal, sort of high maintenance and all, but I figured she was right, so I gave in and serviced her every need for the next couple of weeks.

  Things slowly seemed to improve things between us, and after a week or so I was starting to think we were back on track.

  Then things got really weird.

  It started with the robot. Yeah, Lana has a robot, her own personal robot as a matter of fact. She’s more than a bit of a techie – in fact she’s a full blown programmer who started her own company, which flamed out in a year or so, forcing her to go to work for a larger entity.

  The robot was the centerpiece of her first entrepreneurial venture. She claims she started it building it when she was a teenager, when she won a prize at some kind of state fair for brilliant high schoolers, the best and brightest science minds of our future and all that. Then she went on to perfect it through college, until the thought she was ready to take the world by storm with the thing.

  The robot’s name was Gizmo, of course. At least to start. When the prototype crashed, she thought it was a bad sign, so she came up with Wazmo.

  And she brought it with her during her convalescence. Initially I was blown away by the little guy, who looked like a cross between a Roomba and one of those industrial size cans of Crisco that you can only get at warehouse stores and restaurant supply houses.

  Wazmo came with some pretty unusual add-ones. The biggest were three long, metal extensions protruding from his round metal frame that I can only describe as tentacles. Lana called them his arms. Whatever they were, they gave him a lot of extra dexterity, to say the least.

  Which sounds pretty ominous, but once I got past the initial weirdness of seeing three of ‘em, I realized that they weren’t that big a deal. They were part of Wazmo’s programming, making it possible for him to dust, push himself away from a wall when his wheels got him stranded, or fetch a beer, which Lana hated the first time I did it before succumbing to the humor of the task. Once you got used to the oddness of him being able to do more than two things at once, it wasn’t so bad.

  Overall, I’d have to say that Wazmo was a pretty big help at the start. Lana was pretty proud of him, and a few days after she introduced him she had Wazmo taking over some of the hand and foot chores that came with her rehab, bringing her stuff and similar tasks. It wasn’t too long before I was commanding him with her phone, and that was kind of cool once I’d mastered the basics of it.

  So Wazmo took some of the heat off of me initially. Lana was still pretty pissed about what happened on the stairs, to the point where I had to restrain her from hacking into the website of the home control company and wreaking havoc on the capabilities of their various systems, the high end ones especially. The girl did have her moments of rage, and I have to say they could be impressive.

  Then the weirdness returned with a vengeance. Once again, it happened on the damn staircase, which I was starting to become convinced had a mind of its own, except for it being made of wood and all.

  This time, though, the mishap came when I was going down instead of up. The pattern was the same – the lights went out, the alarm came on, and down I went. But this time the fall was a lot longer. I’m pretty good at going slack during a tumble, though, so nothing happened that my chiropractor couldn’t straighten out, although he almost needed a 2 x 4 to fix me up.

  The suspicious part of the whole thing was the alarm. Dan claimed to have reprogrammed the home control system so that it could sound off from one of three locations, at several different volume levels, thus avoiding something that sounded like the second coming of D-Day.

  Initially I thought this was a good thing, at least until I found out that the first trigger point for the alarm was at the top of the stairs, at full volume, a combination that certainly seemed designed to send me head over heels. I double checked the programming when he was done, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t in his overhaul.

  Slightly suspicious, I called Dim – I mean, Dan – again to make sure we weren’t descending to a deeper level of home control hell. He called up the program from his office – I honestly think he was afraid of the staircase at that point – and confirmed that it had definitely been altered.

  I told him I hadn’t touched it, at which point he asked me how many other devices with Web addresses had access to the program. We’d gone over this before; the list included most of the appliances, my computer at work, my tablet and my smart phone. Dan had done security reviews on all three devices, complete with relatively simple instructions for me on how to verify their alleged integrity.

  Then I told him about the robot. Well, sorta. I could tell that Wazmo initially piqued his interest quite a bit when I started describing the little guy. Dan was definitely into gadgets – he seemed slightly intrigued by Lana as well – so I got the feeling he was way into the challenge of programming a robot into the system, or at least checking out what might have happened with Gizmo.

  But the more I went on about Wazmo’s history and capabilities, the more squeamish Dan seemed to get. By the end of the description he’d gone totally quiet, and I could almost hear crickets on the other end of the line.

  Finally, Dan said there was no way he could try to integrate or investigate a device that wasn’t registered as an OEM. That’s when I knew it was basically over – when I guy like that starts using big words he barely understands, I figured I was pretty much on my own.

  I did get him to do one last thing, though. Dan agreed to go through all the programs, although he did make a fuss about doing it, how long it was gonna take and all that, which made me think it might actually take longer than his average coffee break. I had him put the list into a separate file, which he then e-mailed me, and I even got him to send me a list, with the relevant commands flagged, so I’d have some kind of hard copy.

  When I got around to looking it over the next day, I could barely make hea
ds or tails of the thing. Dan had put red check marks next to all the commands he couldn’t account for; some were in subroutines, I could tell that, but aside from that it was all Greek to me. There were a lot more red check marks than I thought they’d be, though, so I knew there was something suspicious going on.

  I also knew I was in way over my head, but I did do some leg work to get some help. Unfortunately, I didn’t exactly make the best choice in the world. I knew I needed a programmer to decipher whatever was going on with all this stuff, but I didn’t really know how to find one. So I went where everyone ends up when they have no place else to go for help.

  Craigslist.

  I looked up a couple of service ads first, cherry picking the ones for programmers and computer guys that seemed the most viable. The first two could barely speak English, although come to think of it that might have been an indicator that they were actually good, maybe being better at code than any actual real language. Still, hiring them seemed pretty risky, and I managed to convince myself that I wasn’t that desperate yet.

  In the meantime, though, the robot started doing his best to convince me otherwise. It was a slow transformation that was hard to trace, but over the course of the next couple of weeks Wazmo went from being helpful to at least slightly dangerous. At first it was just picking up random objects and leaving them all over the house, usually in the most likely spots where I could trip over them.

  At first the objects were relatively benign. Shoes, books, clothing...normal household detritus. And when something did happen, the damage was minimal, just me losing my balance and taking a header, nothing that required first aid. It seemed odd, to be sure, but nothing worth mentioning to Lana.

  Then it got genuinely suspicious. Piles of clothing on top of pots and pans, hiding them in a way that virtually ensured physical harm when I encountered them. Stuff in piles, scattered about, the piles always lurking around corners so that I couldn’t see them in time.

  Then sharp objects entered the picture. I also noticed that furniture had been moved, just slightly, end tables shifted to increase the chances of me hurting myself once I fell over the hidden objects. That sort of thing. Kitchen utensils started to come into play, knives and forks with blades and tines sticking up, appliances with sharp edges. Almost as if the ante was being upped.

  Finally there was one pile with a broken beer bottle underneath a pile of my unwashed shirts. There were shards of glass right at the edge of the bed, where I’d be bound to step as I got in. But only on my side. So that deepened my suspicions a lot.

  I thought about mentioning it to Lana, but as soon as the thought occurred to me I knew it was a dead end. She was extremely sensitive about the robot, so I knew any criticism would only start a fight. And she was always on my ass about being a slob, so any mention of objects being left around the house that might cause injury would instantly result in a finger being pointed back at me. So I decided to let any thought of confrontation wither and die on the vine.

  Instead I got used to living life around the apartment on tiptoe, at least when Lana wasn’t around. When she was I acted like nothing was going on, and things were already pretty icy between us, so I’m not sure if she was aware of the extra tension or not.

  Then one day the damn robot ratcheted the stakes up again. This pile was a lot larger, but I saw it way ahead of time, and I smiled to myself, thinking I’d outwitted the three-armed fiend. I shortened my steps and leaped over the pile, admittedly way more confident than I should have been.

  Then I hit the oil slick. Wazmo must have squirted something on the floor, hand lotion or dish soap or god knows what kind of substance he had in his inner bag of tricks. And the little demon had placed it perfectly, so that when my legs slid out from under me I landed flat on my back on top of whatever was in that pile.

  Which turned out to be one of the business edges of one of my conical dumbbells. Let me tell you, that thing had no give whatsoever, and it hurt like hell. No broken skin, but I knew the bruise all over my lower back would have plenty of staying power.

  The one person who did say something about all this was my chiropractor. I had upped my appointments to twice a week, and I was definitely keeping him busier than usual. So finally he mentioned it, saying something about how clumsy I was becoming, how nervous and tense I seemed, and how there might be a psychological component to all this. So he mentioned a shrink by name and asked if I wanted a referral.

  I considered spilling to him, then thought better of it. He was a pretty sharp guy who’d probably ask some pretty serious questions, questions that would get me deep enough into the strangeness of my story that I knew better than to go there.

  When I got back from my appointment, I noticed that the slick spot had been cleaned up. And indeed, Wazmo had polished the floor, which delighted Lana no end while making me even edgier than before the escalation started. I definitely wanted the robot gone, but I knew he wasn’t leaving until Lana was all healed up. And even then he’d probably still have visiting rights whenever she came over for a weekend, assuming we were able to last long enough for that to start to happen again.

  Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, the piles stopped popping up. I assumed this was a strategic move on Wazmo’s part, so I stayed extra careful, tiptoeing my way around as usual. But my extra effort was a waste of time; a sudden truce seemed to have been declared, albeit without my knowledge or permission. Suddenly I had the feeling I was being set up for something more diabolical.

  It turned out I was right.

  By the fourth or fifth day without any spills or accidents, I started to relax, almost in spite of myself. So I barely noticed it when the two easy chairs in the living room had been moved slightly closer together. Close enough, in fact, for a piece of dental floss to be tied from one leg to the other, about six inches above the floor, where there was almost no chance I would see it.

  The table had been moved too, just slightly, so that one of the corners was right in front of me when I took the fall. I have no way of knowing if Wazmo knew the exact angle of my header but given his penchant for robotic precision I assumed he’d have a pretty good idea how I’d fall and where I’d land.

  And sure enough, I took a crotch shot from the corner of the table, one that not only hurt like hell but would make me useless as a man for at least a week, if you get what I’m saying. Lana was out at the time, and I’m guessing I rolled around on the floor for a good ten or fifteen minutes before I regained enough muscular control to crawl to the bedroom and climb into bed.

  As I did, I noticed something strange. The damn robot was over in the corner, watching me crawl toward the bedroom door, the goddamn flash on his little robot camera going off over and over again. And that was when I realized that the pint-size electronic creep was taking pictures.

  So I threw something at him.

  It was the first thing I could get my hands on, which happened to be one of my running shoes. Lana was always bitching at me about leaving them around, and I have several pairs. This was one of my racing flats, so it wasn’t very heavy, but I scored a direct hit, nailing Wazmo on the side.

  It wasn’t a kill shot, but it did stagger him. Or at least it produced the robotic version of a stagger – he wheeled back normally, obviously trying to increase the distance between us. Then I heard gears grinding, followed by a sick, wheezy kind of noise that makes you think you’re going to going to be buying a new appliance sometime in the next few days.

  At first I thought Wazmo was going to pitch forward and keel over, but he managed to make it out of sight, behind one of the two easy chairs he’d used to set up his little dental floss booby trap. I found the other shoe and grabbed it, figuring this time I’d deliver the death blow by hand and make up some kind of story for Lana later. But then I thought about the photos, so I decided to temporarily postpone my quest for vengeance.

  Good thing, too. Just as I grabbed the shoe, I heard Lana’s key in the front door. So I ditched the shoe under the easy ch
air and started frantically straightening up, feeling guilty as sin. Which I basically was after falling one tiny short of getting caught in the act.

  Lana knew something was up right away – she could read me like a book, so she instantly picked up on how strange I was acting. As we got ready for bed, I wanted to ask about Wazmo, but I knew that would only arouse her suspicion even further.

  So I worried my way around the apartment for the rest of the night, trying to catch a glimpse or two of the little guy to see if he was ok. I also wanted to see what was going on with those photos, but I pretty much knew I was screwed on that one, I didn’t have half the technical knowledge necessary to check if they’d been preserved or not.

  Wazmo must have had one hell of a diagnostic program, though, not to mention some seriously sturdy gears and wires inside. He turned up just before we went to bed, looking as normal as ever as he helped Lana do her normal routine of straightening up the bedroom before we turned in. I avoided looking at his beady little robot eyes, but the little creep had no expressions anyway, so I’m I just would have been weirded out beyond belief if our eyes had managed to lock.

  I kind of had the feeling Lana was horny – she almost always was – and in spite of all the tension lately, our sex life had been as fiery as ever, fueled by some pretty incendiary fights, which featured everything short of shoes flying across the hall with me as the intended target.

  At first I thought she was going to put a move on me, one of those sexy little purry things she did that almost always got me going. But she must have been spooked by how jumpy I was, because she pulled one of those stop and start moves that women do every now and then, which normally would have driven me crazy.

  Tonight, though, I was almost relieved, because I had bad robot on the brain. Partly because I knew that as soon as Lana did one of her maintenance checks, which happened all the time, she was gonna get a look at those photos, along with whatever programming notes Wazmo had been keeping about our little war of the roses.

  So I slept fitfully, tossing and turning, constantly facing one way and then the other, which is something I tend to do anyway because apparently my body views sleep as a semi-athletic activity even under the best of conditions. I know it annoyed the bejesus out of Lana, but she always pretended it didn’t bother her, which usually managed to set both of us off even if things were good.

  Somehow she managed to put up with it for a few hours, but I could tell by how restless she was that Lana was pretty pissed. Finally she dealt with it in her own unique style, delivering a sharp elbow to my kidney that almost put me on dialysis for life. I moaned when she nailed me, gasping for breath, and I heard a little giggling noise from across the bed, followed by a pathetically half-hearted apology for going into full combat mode.

  After that I could have sworn I heard Wazmo moving around, which he normally never did at night, at least not in the bedroom. Usually he slept under the bed, Lana had equipped him with some kind of sleep mode that allowed him to turn himself off or do diagnostics or on himself. Sometimes he went out in the living room and finished up whatever chores he hadn’t finished during the day, or he did whatever robots and computers do at night when they aren’t being used.

  At first his movements seemed very slight, but a couple of hours after Lana nailed me with her kidney shot, he was still going. Back and forth, up and down, around and around. Relentless, like he was doing it just to annoy me. It could have been a dream, though, so when I woke up for real I had no idea whether it was the real Wazmo I was hearing or some kind of nocturnal electric haunting from a dream scape I didn’t even want to think about.

  But I didn’t have to, at least not for long. A couple of hours after I forced myself back into a restless slumber, I definitely heard a noise. It sounded like a moan at first, then like someone panting. Finally it shifted into a combination of both, and something in the back of my brain, the reptilian part, began to put together exactly what it was.

  Lana heard it, too. We both got up at the same time, and she touched me on the stomach, panicky at the thought of a possible invader. Given that I was her only option if that was the case, the kidney shot was seemingly forgotten for the moment (aside from the way it had lit up my nervous system), as were my other transgressions around the house for the last few weeks.

  As we roused ourselves from slumber, Lana and I both realized that it wasn’t completely dark in the room. A dim white light permeated the bedroom, and we checked the windows at first to see if was coming from the neighbor’s house or the outside floods.

  But it wasn’t. Our gaze turned simultaneously to the opposite wall, and we realized the television was on, the plasma on top of the dresser. I had no idea how it had been turned on; the remote was right next to the dresser on my side of the bed, lying just where I had put it before Wazmo cleaned up for the night.

  Still, the TV had been activated somehow. And as my blurry vision cleared, I recognized with horror the program that was being beamed into the middle of the night. It was the porno Loretta had made of the two of us coupling frantically, her on top of me, one of a series of home movies she had made during what she would later refer to as our “wild, wild West” phase.

  Glancing over at the look of horror plastered on Lana’s mug, it was fairly obvious that she was not a fan of Westerns, which was something I already knew that from her normal TV and movie choices. I knew Lana had kind of an analogous dominance kink, but she definitely wasn’t a chaps and spurs kinda gal. And judging by her subsequent reaction, it seemed fairly obvious that we would never go there.

  Anyway, I digress. Desperate to cut the video feed, I reached quickly for the remote, hoping to impose coitus interruptus on Loretta’s bucking bronco routine, knowing as I did that it was far too late. The remote seemed to be in on the show continuing, though; every button I pressed was completely dead. So I slammed it on the dresser, hoping a crack on the head would produce some kind of results.

  It did, but unfortunately it wasn’t the one I was looking for. The casing for the battery flew off the remote, landing in the middle of the bed, and the batteries launched into the air in the same direction. One of them seemed to have a mind of its own, clocking Lana right in the temple and stunning her back into reality.

  As much of a chaotic mess as the whole thing was, I have to give her credit for quick reflexes, and in hindsight I’d also have to say I overrated her clumsiness by a considerable amount. She grabbed the battery on the fly as it rebounded off her temple, and in one surprisingly smooth and athletic throwing motion she sent it right back at me, this time nailing me right in the mouth. I could feel the tooth chip as soon as it made impact, and I knew instantly that my chiropractor wasn’t the only one who would be getting paid to patch me up after this latest escapade.

  As for the video, it kept playing, seemingly determined to bring the whole catastrophe to a climax, so to speak. But it never happened. As soon as she hit me with the first battery, Lana looked around and found the other one on the bed, lying right next to her, conveniently placed next to her throwing hand.

  So she rerouted it, delivering yet another perfect strike, right at the heart of the plasma TV. It landed dead center, in the middle of the screen. Perhaps not coincidentally, it caught hit the image of me on the screen right in my nether region as I lay beneath Loretta, until finally I heard the crack of the glass before the video finally cut off and mercifully came to a halt. I remember thinking that I was just about to get off in the video right when the battery hit, and I considered the irony of that as Lana sprang up off the bed and began to gather up her clothes.

  I got up to try and stop her, but my effort to stop her was halted by yet another interruption. It came in the form of whirring of gears, which I noticed as soon as my feet hit the floor, and seconds after that I recognized another sound, a police siren kind of wail that I knew was Wazmo’s personal alarm system. Lana had programmed him with his own miniature defense system, one that allowed him to identify an intruder and
provide appropriate protection if he thought she was in danger.

  But I was completely unprepared for the form said protection would take. The robot came straight at me, the red light on top of his head whirling like the little cherry on a cop car while he beeped and squawked like the electronic ancestor of R2D2. I should have jumped back onto the bed to save myself, but in my confusion and brain-addled panic I thought momentarily about protecting Lana, and I froze in fear. Which was probably exactly what the beastie was counting on.

  Wazmo kept coming, and for a second I thought he was going to pile drive me. He wasn’t going fast, but he wasn’t wavering an inch, either. His progress was relentless, and finally I started to come to my senses. I looked right and left, wondering which direction to dive in, but the bed jumping option never occurred to me, and I ended up standing dead still.

  Just before he reached me, the robot stopped dead in his tracks, about two feet away from me. For a split second I simply watched, wondering what he was going to do. I don’t know exactly where Lana was in all this, I assume she was still gathering up stuff on her side of the bed.

  And Wazmo didn’t seem to care all that much about her whereabouts at that particular moment. His head wheeled a little, then all three arms shot out toward me simultaneously. Two of them grabbed my ankles, clamping them hard in a tight metallic grip. So I was literally frozen in place, making it easy for Wazmo to execute his next maneuver.

  The third arm, the middle one, rose up toward the middle of my body, speeding up considerably once it was launched. The robot then landed a precise crotch shot of epic proportions that doubled me over instantly, initiating a pain I can barely begin to describe.

  All at once, I felt the air rush out of my body. Every guy who’s played sports knows something about what this feels like, and I can only say that this was ten times worse. I’d describe it as being paralyzed, but at that moment permanent paralysis would have been infinitely preferable to the wave of pain that was spreading through my body.

  But Wazmo wasn’t done. Not by a long shot. Once the blow had been landed, I felt my ankles being yanked out from under me as the robot’s arms shot back toward his body with my legs in tow. I heard a crack as my lower back hit the edge of the bed, but the pain from that impact was mostly negated by that of the earlier blow.

  I must have blacked out after that. When I woke up, though, I found myself in a bit of a conundrum. The pain hit me again as soon as I came to, and I almost heaved up 24 hours worth of food when my midsection let me know it wasn’t done coping with Gizmo’s blow. Fortunately, there wasn’t anything for me to puke, but when I tried to sit up I realized that I had a new problem to deal with.

  Simply put, I couldn’t move. Lana had tied me to the bed, stringing me up with some electrical cord she must have grabbed from the kitchen drawer. My ankles had been strapped to the far bedposts, and my wrists were similarly encumbered to the ones behind me. As I considered my dilemma, I thanked my personal protection deity that our relationship hadn’t progressed to the point where handcuffs were involved.

  I looked around, continuing to assess my situation, when I realized that Lana had a bit of a deviant streak of her own. I knew full well that she liked to tease me now and then, although I won’t go into the details of any of that right now. But when I started to thrash around on the bed, I noticed that she’d laid a kitchen knife near the crook of my elbow, just out of reach, giving me little or no chance to get to it given how tightly tied my wrists were.

  I have to admit I smiled a bit at that, enjoying the personal touch.

  I won’t go into too many details of my escape, which proved to be quite torturous. It quickly became obvious that Lana knew her knots, and the more I struggled the tighter they became. I did manage to slide my body over to one side just a few inches, though, and when I did that there was enough slack so that I could at least think about trying to loosen one of the knots.

  Somehow I managed to lay on my side, and when I did I was able to nudge the knife toward my wrist, slowly, with my nose. It was a laborious process, as I’m sure you can imagine, but finally I was able to get the blade up toward my thumb and forefinger, where I was able to grab it. I nearly skewered myself several times during the endeavor, but eventually I managed to cut myself loose and escape from the bed.

  Once I was free I surveyed the damage. Injury wise, it was bad – I had a deep purple bruise that encompassed most of my crotch, and I knew that puppy wasn’t going to heal any time soon. As soon as I tried to move I also realized that I probably should have been in the hospital, but there was no way I was going to try to explain these injuries to anybody.

  After I caught my breath and recovered from the pain a bit, I realized that the condition of my back was almost as dire as that of my front. I felt a new wave of pain shoot up my spine, and as it progressed I knew I’d probably cracked at least one vertebra, probably more. So I laid back and focused on my breathing, until finally I decided to try to make it to the bathroom to down as many painkillers as I could handle.

  It was a costly trip. Once I managed to get up I realized that my ankles were sliced up from the electrical cord, and my wrists look like a suicide special. But somehow I managed to heal a little over the course of the next week, with the help of a thoroughly shocked chiropractor and an even more surprised dentist.

  Needless to say, that was the last visit by Lana, although I knew I hadn’t heard the last of her. And as much as I thought I’d seen and heard the last of Wazmo, that part of the chaos wasn’t over by a long shot, either.

  Doped up on painkillers, I conveniently forgot about the possibility that the devious little collection of nuts, bolts and circuits still had access to my home control program, which had been designed for remote use as well.

  The problem started with the TV. I thought replacing the plasma would be the worst of my worries, but Gizmo had other plans. Turns out he still had access to however many videos Loretta had put downloaded onto my DVR, and they quickly began turning up in some mighty strange places.

  Youtube was the first and most obvious destination. Then there was a fake Facebook page, along with the obligatory Twitter account, neither of which I had beforehand, me being allergic to social media and all. The links to the videos were full of snarky captions, as were the videos themselves. Suffice to say that Loretta had completely outdone herself in her unique form of video presentation – the girl had talent, I’ll give her that.

  It took me a few days to find out that I’d inadvertently gone viral in a variety of virtual locales, but in the meantime I had other problems to track. Somehow my alarm program had been reworked to alert the cops every time the alarm went off, and they weren’t very happy about making repeat visits every few hours.

  It didn’t take long for me to get a nasty e mail and a threatening follow up letter from the town manager via the police chief, asking for reimbursement for the charges incurred from repeat visits. As well as the promise of future charges if my alarm system continued to drag them down there for no good reason at all. Then the alarm system began engaging in more random behavior. The floodlights started rotating on their mounts without warning, alternately pointing at the neighbor’s bedroom window, then scanning the sky like I was running some kind of gala event and trying to attract customers. That one got me a summons, along with a couple of pretty big fines.

  Meanwhile there were more near-miss household accidents. Anything electrical that was plugged into a wall socket was thoroughly fried by the end of the week, and my wireless charging system slowly went haywire as well, crisping every form of portable electronics I owned. It wasn’t long before I was sans technology and living a Stone Age kind of life, or at least one that harkened back to the last century.

  The piece de resistance, though, was the fire. It was the next logical step after Wazmo taking out all the electronics, overloading all the outlets in the house, until finally I arrived home one night to find multiple fire engines in front of my house and my kitc
hen going up in flames. The cops were there as well, and this time it definitely wasn’t a false alarm, although I did get some extremely dirty looks from a couple of the ones I recognized.

  After that I moved into a hotel while the kitchen got redone. My insurance company paid for the first week, or at least they did until I figured out that the first place I landed in was a popular crack motel, something I still suspect Gizmo of setting up. I bailed on the place after my second night and moved into a real hotel, content to foot the bill myself and grateful for the anonymity and peace and quiet.

  I did see Lana again shortly after that, and it turns out that she and I still had unfinished business as well. I caught sight of her at the gym one day, working out with my personal trainer, Lars. It didn’t exactly take an advanced degree in body language to see that they were dating, but I really liked the guy and decided to stay with him for a while as far as my own training goes. As for him and Lana, I figured that sooner or later he was gonna get whatever he deserved, one way or the other.

  Before long, though, I noticed some fishy things going on with my workouts. Lars was big on electronics, and he was ridiculously anal, so he’d put together a schedule and sent it to me on my tablet. I pulled a couple of muscles shortly after that, and I strongly suspect that Gizmo had somehow gotten access to the program by hacking into my tablet and changing some of the original weight and speed settings, possibly with a strong assist from Lana.

  Wazmo must have also had access to the machines I was using at the gym. I had no idea how he figured out the timing of when I’d be there, but one day I noticed that the treadmill I was running shot up into the Usain Bolt speed zone without warning, almost crippling me in the process. And the gym had some gimmicked up weight machines that suddenly dropped weights while I was using them, and it didn’t take long to figure out how that must have happened.

  The last straw was the Waz’s final attack on my work status. I don’t know how he got through my intranet, but somehow my bosses started getting all sorts of strange emails and texts, complete with Loretta links, clumsily constructed insults and job commentary that virtually guaranteed my unemployment. I managed to save one of my two jobs, but it wasn’t easy, and I had to verify the closing of all accounts associated with the other one.

  The mayhem wasn’t done, but I definitely was – at that point I knew I’d had enough. I also knew I had to fight dirty to eliminate the scourge that was Lana and Wazmo from my home and my life. Finally, I realized I didn’t have anywhere near the knowledge to take this on myself, and I knew that in this kind of fight, knowledge was power.

  And all of that meant just one thing: Back to Craigslist.

  I started interviewing programmers later that week, after I’d gone out and bought new electronics. The process wasn’t just arduous, it was borderline impossible. And as bad as it started, it kept getting worse.

  First it was the influx of resumes, links and descriptions of qualifications. Not just dozens, but hundreds, overwhelming my inbox and my voice mail.

  Naively, I started checking them out. I was savvy enough to know that at least half of them were from bots and full of bad links, but still, it was time consuming to go through the process of elimination. I did keep about a half dozen or so that looked like they might be legitimate, but the whole thing took damn near forever.

  The skill and experience descriptions I got were strictly hit and miss. Some of them were so bad and ridiculous they were almost funny, but by the time I got to them it had been almost a week, and my sense of humor was pretty torn and frayed. This time I kept about ten, convinced that I finally had the search down to a manageable number.

  Turns out I was wrong.

  The fatal mistake I made was a common one: I inadvertently hit one of the links I’d saved without giving it a closer look. That ended up frying my backup computer, and while it didn’t send me all the way back to square one, I did end up reasonably close to my point of origin.

  Then, finally, I got lucky.

  It happened while I was at the gym, ironically enough. I was in the middle of my workout, still nervous about whatever havoc Wazmo might have wreaked on my workout program. Not to mention the aftermath of Lars, whom I’d just fired, but I still saw him at the gym occasionally, eying me as if I was something Lana might fry up for dinner. As if either one of them would ever touch fried foods.

  The workout was going ok, but all the double checking I had to do for each step was slowing me down a bunch. I was about to do a bench press, which was the first potentially hazardous exercise in the workout, so I started looking out for a trainer to spot for me. Not something I normally did, but I figured I couldn’t be too careful.

  Then I got the text. Simple, straightforward, and nondescript: “I can help you.”

  Suddenly I felt energized, and I decided to just lift the weight on my own. I didn’t need no stinkin’ trainer, I chuckled to myself. That was when I realized that I liked the message.

  So I decided to reply: “How?”

  “Meet me.”

  Something in me almost balked, but I decided to roll with it. And that was how I ended up at the Automat at the edge of town, one of the real old-school ones from the 60s. It had been bought and rehabbed into something that was half museum, half hipster hot spot, one of those ultra-cool places that very few people knew about. Lord knows I certainly wasn’t one of them, but I managed to find out all of this later, much later, several weeks after the meeting.

  At any rate, it wasn’t hard to spot the guy I was meeting. The place was brightly lit but cavernous, and I knew it had to be closing soon, especially in this part of town, which was pretty dingy and run down. It looked to be empty, but as I got closer I saw my would-be savior, standing in front of one of the machines, pondering the vintage food, which for all I knew might have dated back to the 60s.

  His name was Lucas. That was all I knew going in, the only information he’d given me. I’d asked for a description, how I’d know him, how I’d find him, all of that. The first thing I got back was a smirky face before he sent the next text.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll know.”

  He certainly wasn’t wrong about that. When I got there, Lucas turned out to be the proverbial man in black: black jeans, black lace-up combat boots, which I’m pretty sure were genuine, and a black turtleneck. I couldn’t see his head or face right away, and my first reaction was to internally roll my eyes and think, oh god, an artiste.

  Turns out I didn’t know the half of it. Just as I got to the Automat door, Lucas’s head emerged from behind the side of one of the machines, and I almost turned and ran, half scared out of my mind. The guy must have been a fan of ambient noise rock from the 60s and 70s, because he was wearing one of those eyeball heads that the old cult band, The Residents, used to wear when they did club gigs back in the day.

  Once I coaxed my heart from my throat into my chest, I smiled, grinning from ear to ear. Couldn’t help it. Nobody knew who the Residents were, much less that they’d existed. And that kind of music was so out of date that for all I knew it might have been fashionable in the oddest way possible, especially if you wanted to clear out a party by weirding out everyone in the room. All you had to do was cue up a Residents tune, and thirty seconds later, it was mission accomplished.

  Anyway, I decided to play it cool with Lucas. I looked at the gigantic eyeball like it belonged to a potential employer at a job interview, then stuck out my hand. He shifted from one foot to the other, then stuck out his arm and gave me the classic limp-wrist artist’s handshake.

  Strangely enough, that was when I got the feeling I was gonna like this guy.

  He put his other hand out and pointed, ushering me to one of the classic Formica tables. He’d already ordered for me – a hamburger that had been grilled to the point where whatever bacteria may have existed in the meat thought it had entered Dante’s seventh circle of hell. Along with a piece of pie – blueberry, I think. Oh, and coffee. Or at least something that sort of look
ed like coffee, giving off something that appeared to be steam, which kinda looked like the cross you see between smoke and steam at Yellowstone when Old Faithful goes off.

  So we sat down and began our repast, which at this point was beyond surreal. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to talk to someone wearing an eyeball the size of a basketball on top of his head, but its not something you forget right away.

  Especially when the “conversation” is basically a one-way affair. I started to give an explanation of the situation, trying to avoid taking a bite of the burger. As soon as I did, though, Lucas held up a gloved hand, giving me a de facto stop sign. So I stopped talking and took a bite of the burger, which was every bit as bad as I thought it might be.

  While I was chewing on the mystery meat, Mr. Eyeball reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a small notebook, a delicate-looking little thing that was about half the size of the ones reporters use. With his other hand he took a gold pen from the pocket of the black turtleneck, opened the notebook, and began writing. This was unfortunate, because it gave me more time to work on the burger, which started rumbling as soon as it made splashdown in my stomach.

  When he was finished writing, Lucas ripped the page out of the notebook and handled it to me. The brevity of his scribble made me wonder what had taken so long:

  “Give me the programming notes.”

  I looked at him across the table, raising my eyebrows into what I hoped would be something resembling a question mark. I pointed at the notebook, assuming he wanted me to write my response, but Lucas shook the eyeball – um, his head, I mean – and put his hand out, which I assume meant he wanted me to speak.

  So I did.

  “They’re at my house. Do you want to come over and get them?”

  He shook the eyeball again, this time more emphatically. Out came the notebook and onto paper went the pen. I had no idea how he could see whatever he was writing through the eyeball, but perhaps that was why the response took so long. Lucas took more care with the scribbling, though, at least this round was semi-legible.

  I studied the results: “Bring them here.”

  “Ummm...ok,” I replied. “When?”

  Once again Lucas got busy in the notebook, handing me a written reply.

  “Tomorrow night. Same time. Here.”

  I nodded, and slowly he slipped the notebook into the pocket with the pen. I assumed we were done – frankly, the situation was feeling creepier by the moment and I just wanted to get the hell out of there – but Lucas reached out and pointed at the pie, as if he would be hurt if I at least didn’t take a bite.

  I almost broke out in a screaming giggle fit, but somehow I managed to compose myself enough to take a bite. The pie was as questionable as the burger, a sugary concoction that tasted like it would send me into a diabetic coma if I finished it. Calling it blueberry was clearly wishful thinking, and I quickly washed it down with a mouthful of euphemistic coffee, which was as watery as the pie was overly sweet.

  I held up my hand to Lucas, indicating that I’d basically had my share of the victuals. The eyeball nodded, which I assumed meant I was free to go, and I got up and backed my way toward the door just to make sure nothing happened on the way out. Lucas gave me a jaunty little wave as I backed out onto the street, and a shiver went up my spine as I pondered what I’d just gotten myself into.

  Badly in need of a stiff drink, I thought about stopping off at a bar on the way home. There were a couple of places on the way, but I’d had enough weirdness for one night, so I decided that the bottle of barely-touched scotch in my liquor cabinet would do just fine, thank you very much. I downed a couple of shots as soon as I got in the door, and that was more than enough to send me into la la land in a matter of minutes.

  When I got up I had a flashback to the night before, and as I roused myself to full consciousness I realized that I had dreamed of my eyeball flying out of my head, into a waiting socket on the front of what passed for Wazmo’s head.

  Shaking it off, I spent a couple of hours collecting the programming notes that Dim had sent me, making sure they were in proper order. I did this meticulously, which was very out of character for me, and as I got closer to finishing I wondered vaguely about why I was taking a man seriously who’d been wearing an eyeball on top of his head.

  The exchange that night was more or less a repeat of the night before, minus the burger and the pie, thankfully. I nursed a cup of tepid coffee as Lucas went through the notes and perused them slowly, nodding occasionally, which freaked me out more than I can possibly explain. Occasionally Lucas pulled out his notebook and jotted something down, which piqued my curiosity, of course, but not enough to make me ask him what he’d just written.

  When he was done, Lucas stacked the notes up carefully, then made a last entry in the notebook. He scribbled something down, then handed me the paper. This time it was a reference to something in the code, a designation, and when I read the note, the fog cleared in my brain and I remembered the explanation Dan had given me, that “L” in the code indicated that these were the lines that had probably come from Wazmo.

  “This is the robot?” the note read.

  “Huh?” I shook my head, wondering what he was talking about. Lucas pointed at the code, then specifically at a line with an L in front of it, and the fog slowly cleared for me. I won’t say the coffee helped, because it didn’t.

  “Oh, yeah,” I finally replied, smiling sheepishly. “Yeah, the L lines, those are all him. Or at least that’s what the home programming guy said.”

  I’m pretty sure an eyebrow would have arched if the eye had come with one above it, but instead Lucas just nodded. Derisively, I thought, but it was hard to tell for sure given the lack of relative expressiveness in a huge artificial eyeball. He paused, and I waited, wondering where he was going with all this.

  Back to the note pad, as it turned out. He scribbled for a moment, then ripped the page out and slid it across to me.

  “I want him.”

  “Huh?”

  More scribbling. Same result. “I want him.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, and I could feel my face turning red from embarrassment. Finally I raised my hands above table level, palms up, to indicate that Wazmo was all his.

  The eyeball nodded up and down once again, and Lucas extended his hand. I shook it politely, not having a clue what that was about. He saw my confusion, and once again I waited, but this time no note was forthcoming. So finally I spoke.

  “So that’s it?” I asked, trying not to sound as incredulous as I felt.

  Again I waited. No note.

  Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Lucas stood up, and I rose suddenly, understanding that this meeting was coming to an end.

  “So what happens now?” I asked as he turned toward the door.

  He looked back at me, and finally I got what I wanted. I think. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the notebook, then produced a note and handed it to me.

  “You’ll be safe.”

  I nodded and folded the note up, then shoved it into my pocket. But Lucas wasn’t done yet. He flipped the page on the notebook and began to rip off another note. This time he bowed to me when he handed me the note, which creeped the hell out of me, but I nodded and bowed slightly as I took it, then read it.

  “Read the news.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. I was tempted to repeat the palms-up gesture to see what he’d do, but something told me it wasn’t a good idea to cross this guy or get on his bad side when a meeting had obviously been completed. It seemed that I’d gotten what I wanted – whatever that was.

  So I went home, even more mystified by the series of strange meetings than I’d been at the start of the whole sequence. I felt sort of satisfied, until I realized that I’d just handed over the programming notes for my home control systems to a man wearing an eyeball on his head.

  That made me once again think about hitting a bar on the way home, but the strangeness of
the whole thing led to a repeat encounter with the remnants of the scotch bottle at home. This time it took me a bit longer to get to sleep, basically until I’d drained the entire bottle. But the extra consumption was well worth it; because I slept like a baby when the alcohol finally knocked me on my ass.

  Over the course of the next few days I followed Lucas’s edict. Newspapers, TV news, local stories on all the ISPs – you name it, I read it, poring over this stuff like a religious convert waiting for word of a faith healing.

  Nothing.

  I’d decided to stay away from the gym for a few days, thinking it made no sense to possibly ignite something with Lars and Lana, and for all I knew it might interfere with whatever Lucas was up to. A part of me thought I’d been had by Lucas, but once again it seemed imprudent to unduly question the judgment of a man who wore an eyeball on his head and frequented an Automat.

  And come to think of it, there had been no witnesses to any of our meetings, so I had no recourse if Lucas decided to take out his wrath on me instead of my crazy ex.

  Slowly, though, I did notice some small changes as the week went by. Once I got everything cleaned up, in the apartment, sharp objects stopped turning up in places that seemed designed to induce decapitating falls. And I noticed that my home electronics were falling back into line as well – the alarm system was behaving, the lights were going on when they were supposed to, and the programming on the TV was back to normal without any glitches.

  I even got the DVR to work right, which was an extra bonus since that had never happened before. I had nothing to go by to prove it, but I was convinced Lucas was involved behind the scenes, and I continued to read the news religiously faithfully, like a zealot waiting for a second miracle.

  Finally I saw it. It was just a little blurb, but it made the metro section of our major daily, which meant that somebody had picked it off the blotter because there was something unusual about it.

  It was a tiny thing, a few short graphs about a break-in. And whoever wrote it just butchered it, totally burying the lead, which was pretty hard to do in something that short. But Lana’s name was in the first sentence, right where it was supposed to be. Victim IDs are rare in that kind of story, and I immediately devoured the rest of the text, eager to find out what had happened.

  There wasn’t much info. The second sentence mentioned a home invasion, with a brief, vague description of Lana’s injuries, along with her being listed in serious condition at the local city hospital. The rest of it was garbled – something about an electrical fire that may have been part of the break in, producing so much smoke damage that multiple fire crews had to be called in to get it under control.

  And that was it.

  I’m not much for schadenfreude, so I mostly felt relief that the whole episode was over, although I will confess to a brief burst of internal glee when I first spotted Lana’s name. I thought there might be some kind of coda to the story in the few days after that, but life went back to dull normal, and I never saw or heard from Lana again.

  But there was one little reminder a week later that I have to include. Deep in the throes of a night of profound loneliness, I decided to go out to a bar and drink myself silly, having exhausted my short supply of scotch.

  It didn’t take much to get me thoroughly soused. And sure enough, after my fourth scotch and soda I experienced a soul-throttling moment of nostalgia, one that inspired not just a departure from the bar but a brief stroll around the neighborhood to clear my head before I made my way home.

  Naturally, it was only a matter of time and a few blocks before I found myself close enough to the Automat to walk by. I wasn’t loaded enough or desperate enough to consider the food, but I had to see the place one more time, mostly to convince myself through my alcohol-induced haze that the whole thing had been real.

  That was when I saw him. Not the eyeball guy – the Automat looked as empty and soulless as I’d thought it might, so I was content to merely walk by. As I did, though, I noticed something moving in front of the machines – replacing the food, maybe, or removing it, it was hard to tell. There was no mistaking the shape, though, cylindrical and small, with three metallic arms, and that was when my brain began to process exactly what I was seeing.

  I kept going, trying to act natural and walk at a normal pace. But my heart was racing, and when I thought I saw Wazmo turn to look out the window I broke into a light trot, then a full sprint, which almost brought the full complement of scotch back up along with the contents of my stomach.

  I kept jogging for a couple of blocks, quite willing to suffer the consequences if the scotch decided to reappear for an encore. I looked behind me several times, and I’m pretty sure I took a couple of extra turns and detours just to make sure I was arriving home. I don’t think I was followed, but I waited a few minutes outside my place just to make sure before I went up. And I made sure to check the lights, taking the stairs carefully, one at a time, thoroughly glad to be home sweet home.

  At least I think I was...sort of.

  ROMANCE