Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

by Max Florschutz

  “Would that something by chance get us some footage of Wanderer no one else has?”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “That’s the goal.” I didn’t tell him that it was only a small part of my ultimate goal. No matter how I spun it, and as good a boss as he was, if he got the idea that my goal was to get an interview with our resident superhero, he’d either think I was in over my head or get suspicious. And while he was nice, if he got suspicious, and word worked its way back up the chain of command, higher-ups would want someone else to be in control. They would put the pieces together somehow and take it from me. So I left my plan at what I’d said.

  My boss laughed. “Hell,” he said, shaking his head. “We payout more than a thousand every few days just to people selling us cell phone videos and pictures for our website. And you want a thousand to buy some cameras to try and get your own footage?”

  “Two-thousand would be better,” I said, hoping I wasn’t pushing it. “For installation and things like that.”

  “And you’re sticking your own money into this too, aren’t you?” he asked. My surprise must have shown on my face, because the corner of his mouth turned upwards in a smile. “I do pay attention to my employees, after all. You have a bit of a reputation as being one of Wanderer’s more dedicated fans. It wasn’t hard to guess a woman of your determination and dedication would be pouring her own funds into her hobby.”

  I breathed a little easier as he used the word “hobby.” He hadn’t guessed exactly how devoted I was.

  “So, tell you what,” he said. “Two thousand, and if you get something good consistently, I’ll pitch another thousand in as compensation for using your own money to pay for it. I’ll file it away under something or other.”

  I’ll admit I was surprised. It was a much more generous deal than I’d expected, and with a conditional bonus thrown on top. Still, I wasn’t surprised enough that I didn’t agree, and we spent a few minutes more hashing out details before he let me go with a promise to procure the two-thousand dollars as needed. I would still be working the project in my free time while I was off work, but with the extra capital, I’d be able to work a lot faster.

  The next week seemed to pass both quicker and slower than almost any I’d ever experienced, as I set about using my newly acquired funds to secure just about every cheap video camera I could find at every pawn shop in the city. I had a few requirements—they had to be small enough to be mostly unobtrusive, something that had either a nice, long battery life or a long power cord, and of course they had to work—but for the most part, my only requirement was that they were usable and cheap. I honestly think a few of the pawn brokers saw me as some sort of answer to their prayers, willing to buy up just about all their old camcorders in an era when most everyone was switching to phones that performed the same function but better.

  By the end of my week-long shopping spree, the pile of merchandise was enough to fill an entire corner of my apartment almost to the ceiling. The herculean act of sorting through it and making sure that everything was in working order took me almost three straight nights after work, and as I worked I divided everything camera by camera, checking each one and separating them into smaller piles based on type, recording medium, and other discerning features.

  There were a lot of those smaller piles, enough that I couldn’t use my table or my kitchen counter by the end—and that was after I’d used the available floor space. My apartment looked like the beginning of an episode of Hoarders, with narrow paths emblazoned across the floor, ribbons of whitish carpet flanked on all sides by a sea of black and grey plastic.

  Still, I didn’t care. I was getting antsy. Summer was approaching, and with it crime rates were picking back up, which meant that if Wanderer stuck to the pattern I’d discovered, I only had a week or two before his reappearance. And I needed to be ready by the time he arrived, or the whole thing would be blown. I couldn’t go around after he’d already arrived in an area and start setting up cameras. It would be a red flag. There was already a chance that he checked out each area beforehand and I was just going to push him away anyway … though admittedly, that didn’t seem too likely, given that security cameras and the like had never bothered him before.

  Still, that gave me anywhere from a week to two weeks to get all my cameras set up and in place, and I had over a hundred of the things to get ready and install. A daunting task.

  In the end, I ended up taking two vacation days from my job in order to get everything installed. My mother wasn’t happy about it, since I let it slip that I was taking them in order to get some other work done, but thankfully she interpreted that the work I was doing was for my employer, and I let her ill will fall to them rather than explain what I was up to. After all, it was in a way sort of true, and I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable lecture about my “obsession” that would have arisen had she learned what I was really up to.

  Still, two exhausting, hard-working days later I had placed almost all of my cameras. Some had required a ladder to get into place, while others had been as simple and easy to take care of as passing a twenty-dollar bill to a store owner to make use of his front windows. There were certainly a number of them that would probably “disappear” over the next few weeks, only to reappear back on the very shelves I’d purchased them from later. That or end up in a dumpster. But I’d expected it and planned things out accordingly. The ones in high-crime areas I’d made as unobtrusive as I could, though admittedly it wasn’t always easy. I’d ended up cleaning out one shopping center of their supply of black-plastic bags to use as makeshift waterproofing, but there were still a few that even wrapped in dark plastic were just big or bulky enough that they were going to catch attention. Or at the very least have their power cables stolen.

  I’d ended up with a variety of camera types too, and in the end I’d decided to spread them out rather than keep them in like clumps. While it would make tending to them each day all the more difficult, it would also help if it turned out one type of camera was better than another at catching footage.

  By the end of those two days I was exhausted, and almost wishing that I’d taken a third day so I could recover. My fingers were red and raw from hours of opening old plastic cases, readying everything from old camcorder cassettes—a tech I hadn’t touched since I was a pre-teen—to more modern conventions like SD cards—though even those took some work as some of the cameras I’d acquired couldn’t handle the modern storage capacities, and in a few cases I had to track down old, unopened bins of low-space cards. On the plus side, those were also dirt cheap.

  On the negative side, I’d have to change them at least once a day. Thankfully, most of the cameras I’d picked up had come with timers, so I’d be able to ensure that they were active during the latter half of the day and early evening when Wanderer seemed to do most of his work, and then full by nightfall, at which point most of them wouldn’t be seeing anything anyway, but that still meant that I’d need to come by each day and collect all the footage, swapping out all the recording material for new stuff.

  As it turned out, I didn’t need to rush. With all my cameras in place, I settled back to wait … and the wait was longer than anything I’d expected. It was almost another three weeks before the first report of Wanderer’s vigilante activities rolled in, and in the meantime I almost went mad with anticipation. I kept finding myself lying awake at night, staring up at the ceiling as my thoughts rolled over my cameras, second-guessing everything from their placement to the credibility of the patterns I’d picked out. More than once I found myself staring in my living room, my arms folded across my chest as I studied the map I’d spent so long pouring over, my mind racing with last-minute questions. Had I predicted everything accurately? Was my information correct? What if I’d miscalculated something, or missed something else? What about the holes, the information that wasn’t there? Was I ignoring it? Or giving it proper consideration?

  It probably wouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who’d seen
me during those few weeks to learn that several times I completely reworked parts of Wanderer’s patterns, just to make sure that everything I’d created so far was accurate. Unlike the previous periods where I hadn’t had much to do, I didn’t bother with reforming my social ties. I had something more important to deal with.

  I had a hero to find.

  SIX

  I’ll still remember the day it all paid off. I was sitting at my desk, typing up a short memo updating my current investigation—which to be honest, probably wasn’t that good, as I don’t even remember it—when my phone gave a little ping noise. It was an alert, a sound that only played when one thing, and one thing only, happened.

  Wanderer had showed up in the recent news feeds. He was back. He’d stopped a mugging and the act had just then been tied to him.

  I don’t remember if I got any work done for the rest of that day. Or the day after. I seem to recall something one of the higher-ups mentioned about being less-than-impressed by my assignments that week, but that might have just been me projecting. All I remember was that it was all I could do to resist heading out to my cameras that very moment to start them recording. I’d seen the address of the event and felt the elation. All my hard work had paid off. I’d been right. The pattern had held true, and Wanderer had shown up right near where I’d expected him.

  It wasn’t a perfect match. After all, the pattern I’d estimated had still given Wanderer a pretty wide area to appear in, somewhere around a ten-by-ten set of city blocks.

  But it was enough. Better yet, I had cameras in the area where the crime had taken place. All I needed to do was head out and turn them on.

  I skipped my lunch that day. Well, more accurately, I didn’t eat. I spent my lunch period frantically running from camera to camera, activating as many of them as I could. As I’d expected, several had disappeared, and more than one bore some scratches that probably came from kids throwing rocks.

  The next day passed in a blur. My fingers clicked at empty keyboard keys, my eyes staring off into nothingness. More than once a co-worker had to say my name two or three times to get my attention. They probably thought I was on drugs. I didn’t care. All I cared about was watching my footage. More new alerts popped up on my phone. Wanderer had been busy the evening before, stopping several robberies and even a case of grand theft auto. I pulled up an online map and tracked a path between the points as the day developed, mentally superimposing it over the map in my living room and checking my own predictions.

  They were spot on. Better yet, if Wanderer had passed from point to point in the straightest line, he had to have crossed at least several of my cameras.

  Lunch came and went, and with it another furious rush across town to swap out the storage in my cameras. I came back from my break with a growling stomach, but a purse full of plastic cards and tapes that clicked against one another as I walked.

  That night, I sat down in front of my computer and my TV and went to work. I remember laughing as the first image came up on the old projector’s screen. The television had been my father’s, the very first way I’d ever seen Wanderer. Now I was using it again, this time to watch old camcorder tapes that would hopefully give me a glimpse of the elusive superhero again.

  I found nothing.

  It was … a little frustrating. I watched each of the recordings twice without further result, staying up far later than I should have as I blitzed my way through at least a dozen hours of footage over and over again.

  Nothing. At least, nothing interesting that I could see. Lots of footage of people walking past, people loitering, people drinking, and in two cases making fairly public drug deals. But aside from that, none of the cameras I’d placed in storefronts or on the main streets had picked up anything.

  Unfortunately, I couldn’t say any differently for the cameras I’d placed in alleyways and on back-of-the-building streets either. Secretly, I’d saved them for last in hopes that something would come up, but speeding through the collection nothing jumped out at me. I caught several more cases of drug deals going down, what looked possibly like a middle-school kid making a getaway on someone else’s bike, and some wild animals, but no Wanderer. The second time I speed through them I was even watching closely enough that I slowed it back down to normal when the footage on the tapes went fuzzy for a minute. Thankfully, the brief bouts of static weren’t actually enough to completely ruin my view of the alleyway, and were short enough that I knew I hadn’t missed anything, but it was still a drag at one in the morning to stop a tape because I’d seen movement, only to realize that it was the recording medium being old again.

  We went digital for a reason, and that night I learned that more than ever. I retired that evening as I would every other night for some time: frustrated, annoyed, and cursing the ancient storage medium that was giving me false flags that added to my wait every night.

  I cursed them right up until I realized how wrong I’d been.

  It happened about two weeks into my observation. I was sorting through taped footage again, this one from one of those old cameras that had the time and date stamped in the corner. I was speeding along, running it at 4x speed so that I could multitask while I went over the reports of Wanderer’s most recent acts. He’d missed a few days here and there, but he was being markedly active, as if the city itself was compensating for his presence by producing even more crime for him to fight.

  Anyway, it was late, and I was just catching up on the last bits of footage for the day. Thankfully it wasn’t as late as it had been the first week I’d been at it. I’d managed to get actual footage of Wanderer over the weekend, footage of him stopping a robbery of one of the stores I’d placed a camera at, no less, and my boss had been thrilled to take if off of my hands. Rumors were flying, but I now had a lot more leeway with time spent on my special project, and as far as I knew my boss was at least keeping quiet, though some of my co-workers suspected the footage had come from me.

  In any case, I was reading over a summary of Wanderer’s latest set of heroics when I caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of my eye. I hit “Play” out of reflex, slowing the video down just in time to see another random burst of distorting static ply across the screen. It was pretty typical, and I scowled at the screen. The camera it was from had actually been closest to the report I was looking at, and positioned in a small, out of the way alleyway, so I’d hoped that it … would …

  I paused. I remember staring down at the screen in confusion, the rest of my brain struggling like a pedestrian moving against the flow of traffic to catch up to my subconscious , which was … well, it wasn’t quite shouting. It was more of a whispered exclamation of shock.

  The numbers, I realized with a start. The little time of day indicator in the corner. I’d never been able to get it to go away on most of the older cameras, but I had been able to at least get all of them to display the proper time.

  The time the image was currently showing was just one minute before the time listed in the report as when Wanderer had arrived on the scene of the crime.

  I set my papers down and began to fast-forward again. Three minutes later, one minute after Wanderer had taken care of the muggers, the image went fuzzy again.

  I ejected the tape, the plastic sliding into my hand and coming away from the VHS player with a snap. I shoved it into another player and watched as the image came up again.

  It was still fuzzy, the distortion identical. My jaw dropped as dawning realization swept over me. It wasn’t the players … it was the tape! Something had happened to the tape at exactly around the time Wanderer would have been passing through the alleyway.

  Suddenly my early bedtime was forgotten. I began sprinting through every other tape I had, some dating back over a week, speeding along until I found the same distortion effect on the screen. Then I checked the times against the reports I had.

  They matched in almost every occurrence. If there was a reasonable path by one of my cameras, and things went fuzzy, it corre
sponded—either before or after—with a nearby event Wanderer arrived at.

  There was still nothing in the images, nothing clear anyway. But if Wanderer really did have optical camouflage as many claimed, then that would make sense. But then … why the distortion? And why only on the older cameras?

  Then it hit me. Magnetic tapes. The older camera models recorded data by applying magnetic currents to a tape. The magnetic current was saved and then reinterpreted on the playback. But if an alternative magnetic field of some kind were to be nearby while it was recording, it could disrupt the process. Like holding a magnet up to an old hard-drive.

  What if Wanderer’s suit was guarded against newer technology, but the same tech that let him do that also let off an electromagnetic frequency or field just powerful enough to distort nearby magnetic tape during the recording process? I wasn’t sure of all the science behind it—after all, I’d majored in journalism, not engineering—but it made sense. I had done a few fluff reports on theoretical optical camouflage, and one of the basic ideas that came up every time had been using electromagnetic fields of some kind to distort the visible light spectrum and bend it around a point in space. If Wanderer’s suit had some sort of system that was actually capable of the concept, not only would it explain how he managed to get around the city completely undetected, but it would also explain the fuzzing on my cameras.

  Not only that, but it would be brilliant. Wanderer had made his appearance just as the digital age was really starting to take off. A system that rendered him invisible to the visible spectrum but produced a form of low-level magnetic disturbance would pass virtually unseen among a digital crowd. And those who did still use low-quality, outdated magnetic tapes? They would just assume that it was a failing of the technology, not interference from some exterior source. The only way to even notice or acknowledge anything out of the ordinary would be to be actively looking for it in the first place like I had been. And even then, I had almost missed it.