Unusual Events: A Short Story Collection

by Max Florschutz

  After I’d been assured by the audio team that my tapes were in good hands, I headed out across the city to change up my camera net. I’d had plenty of time over the weekend to think about how I was going to pull off what I wanted, and while I could see a number of holes in my plan. I also hadn’t been able to find ways around any of those holes. Sometimes, when life gives you a few lousy options, your best bet is to pick the least lousy of the bunch.

  It took me two hours to get all my cameras into place and once again talk with the owners of shops along my prescribed route, getting their permission to come back and look at the overnight security footage at a future date. It was going to be the next day, but I didn’t want them getting suspicious.

  I also cut a few cameras out of my collection, cameras that didn’t have the now-useful time-stamp in the corner of their footage. For what I was planning, establishing a time-frame for Wanderer’s movements was critical.

  Then, my cameras in place and ready to go, I went home and began plotting out each of their locations on my giant wall map. When I was done, I took a step back and admired my work. It wasn’t perfect, and there were definitely holes, but it would have to do.

  The brunt of my plan relied on an admittedly open circle of cameras surrounding the area. It wasn’t much, unfortunately. I didn’t have an infinite supply of devices to work with, and I hadn’t been confident enough that I was on the right track to commit all of my cameras to the outer edge, just in case I was wrong. But it would have to do.

  Inside that, and much closer to the collection of blocks that I expected Wanderer would be watching that night, I had two smaller rings of cameras, these two much tighter, but slightly off center from the larger ring. If everything worked as planned, and Wanderer continued to cross paths with my cameras as well as disrupting them, then all I would need to do was link the times together and plot them on my map, and I’d have a map of his movements through the area.

  But that wasn’t all I wanted. No, a map of his movements would be nice, and could perhaps give some insights into what sort of pattern he made when out in the city as well as when and where he tended to go, but those were details that I’d record while acknowledging their unimportance.

  What I wanted was the first time he made an appearance, and the last. Both of them on the outer ring of cameras. Because that would hopefully give me the lead on the real information I wanted: Where Wanderer went when he wasn’t “on duty.” Even better, if both of the locations where he crossed that barrier were near the same spot, then that would give me a direction to point my cameras towards. A vector to track slowly but surely across the city.

  I went back to work, and the rest of the day passed in a blur. I don’t remember much about the work I did—after all, most of it was just fluff pieces—but I do remember that everything sort of rushed by me in a sort of excited but nervous energy. I could feel both dread and eagerness competing within me, my mind letting them both take the field of battle against one another as they competed for my attention. On the one hand I was eager, excited for the night to pass so that I could collect my tapes and make a step towards Wanderer. On the other, I was nervous, fearful that somehow my plan either wouldn’t work or that Wanderer would figure out what I was doing and react, cutting me off for good and destroying months of dedicated effort.

  I was conflicted enough that at one point I recall idly wondering whether or not it was possible that Wanderer could have access to some sort of personal teleportation device. Or flight. Both seemed equally terrifying but possible in my mind, despite the fact that among known superheroes, there wasn’t a single one yet who could do either.

  Looking back, those two fears seem less-justifiable now than they did at the time. Regardless, I made it through the day and the evening without breaking down into a complete wreck. I even got my workload done early. Maybe it was the nervous energy.

  Whatever it was, by the next day the dread had mostly won out, and I remember my hands almost shaking as I collected my first tape and swapped it out for a fresh one. The cameras wouldn’t be in the proper places that night if I left them where they were, but I wasn’t concerned with that at the moment. If I did move them, and then my data turned out to be correct—though I wasn’t sure that would be the outcome I’d get—I’d need to move them all again anyway.

  As it turned out, all my worrying had been for nothing. I never found anything on the outer ring of cameras, but I did find something on one of the security cameras of a store I’d asked after. They wouldn’t let me take copies of the tapes, but they did let me fast-forward through the cameras they had available, and I dutifully wrote down the time and location of each static distortion. Later, when I went over my footage in my apartment, I came up with two times that were closely related to two of the static disruptions I’d seen on the store’s footage, and they happened to be the Wanderer’s first appearance and the last.

  I had him. At least, I was pretty sure I did. Luckily enough for me, before I headed back out to move my cameras over to the next location on Wanderer’s pattern, I got a call from the audio team I’d left my cassette tapes with. I could come in and pick them up any time, they wanted me to know, but they also told me that they had found something unusual about the specific times I’d asked them to look at. The voice on the other end of the line sounded disappointed, and from the tone I guessed that there had been some sort of bet riding on my request, but apparently on each one of the tapes I’d given them, right at the times I’d specified, they had found a very low but strange buzzing sound. None of them had any idea what it was, though a few of the team members wanted me to know that it sounded like my audio equipment had broken down … but then somehow fixed itself.

  Last of all—and this was what they thought I was probably hoping to find—they had heard footsteps in one of the recordings. To be honest, I think whoever I was talking to seemed disappointed that I didn’t react a bit more to that news, but all it really did was cement in my mind that Wanderer definitely had some sort of cloaking device.

  I thanked the audio team, told them that I’d come in soon to pick up my tapes, and hung up. I took a quick look at my map and, drew a few lines across its surface to mark the supposed path linking the points, and then stood back to eye everything that line crossed.

  It wasn’t going to be good enough. Even in my excitement-muddled haze I recognized that. Wanderer could change directions, double back, and there was absolutely no reason to assume that he was cutting a straight path back from his nightly operations. A massive sprawl of the city was open to him on the path I’d marked, one that stretched across miles worth of districts.

  I needed more data. On the plus side, I now knew that the cassette tapes would pick up Wanderer’s camouflage just as well as my camcorders if I knew what to look for. And if he headed back in roughly the same direction that night …

  I repositioned my cameras once more, this time not even bothering to put any in the area where I expected him to be. Instead, acting on a thought that was half hunch, half hope that Wanderer would leave in roughly the same direction he had the night before, I built a wall of cameras across what would be his path. Five cameras deep, twelve cameras across. None of them in public places, since most of my hits thus far had indicated that he stuck to back alleys and other areas.

  Then I sprinkled my recorders in out of the way locations at random, more as an added precaution than anything else. After all, I still wasn’t sure what the range was on Wanderer’s “distortion effect.” If it was short enough, I didn’t want to leave any holes in my “net” that he could pass through. At the same time, if the effect was wide, there was a chance I could pick it up on multiple cameras and get a decent idea of exactly how much area it covered, in turn letting me confidently space out my cameras a bit more.

  That done, I went back to work, answered my boss’s vague questions with a few vague answers of my own, and settled down to wait.

  I ended up waiting almost a month. Not for Wanderer t
o show up, no. My net worked on the first try, to my elated surprise. But for me to work my way back towards a payoff.

  It was surprisingly easy, though at the time it didn’t feel like it. Each morning I would get up and check my cameras, swapping out all the tapes for fresh ones. Then, back at my apartment, I’d go over the footage and plot Wanderer’s movements, if there were any, on my map. Then I’d head back out, move my net, and go to work. I moved slowly at first, gradually moving my cameras across the face of the city, but as it became more and more apparent that Wanderer moved with near impunity, I sped up, jumping whole city blocks as I tracked his path.

  There were a few close calls. Several times I was forced to widen my net or sit and wait while absolutely nothing seemed to happen. On one occasion I even was close to panicking, fearful that Wanderer had gone into another one of his bouts of inactivity.

  Thankfully enough, he didn’t. Nor did he catch on to the fact that I was watching him. Which at least indicated that however observant he was with security systems, he didn’t have some magical method of picking them out. If he had, he probably would have wondered about the bundles of cameras he was repeatedly running across, edging closer and closer to his base of operations.

  Then again, after getting a few of them stolen, I got pretty good at disguising them. Since the footage never had anything interesting, I’d taken to making my cameras look even more like piles of refuse, garbage, or abandoned boxes. Hours of blank, black footage wasn’t important to me. Only the distortion; and that came regardless of how my equipment was disguised or what it was looking at.

  But by the end of the month, I’d finally tracked my quarry down. At first I was so shocked at the location I almost didn’t believe it, but after confirming it over several nights by ringing the property with cameras, I couldn’t deny it any longer. It wasn’t some mysterious warehouse, as was so common in superhero fiction. Nor was it an expensive penthouse, a government lab, or any of those things. It was, to my great surprise, something far simpler: a long-term storage park.

  In retrospect, it made some sense. Some of the units in the park were pretty big, and the whole place was basically the epitome of low-oversight. All that it took to get one of the rooms was a regular supply of cash. And with Wanderer’s apparent cloaking system being what it was, the odds of someone actually catching the superhero coming in or out of the units was pretty low.

  There was just one problem, a problem that I’m almost ashamed to admit, kept me from rushing in to get the story immediately. I could detect Wanderer going in and going out … but only when he went to work with his moonlighting hero activities. Other than that, nothing.

  I spent two days camping in my car near the entrance of the storage park, keeping myself awake with copious amounts of caffeine and trusty pair of binoculars. Plus another camcorder, just to be on the cautious side. For two days and nights, trusting myself only with short naps, I watched the entrance to the park like a hawk. On the second day I even went as far as to set up a cheap motion alarm across the entrance so that I would be sure I wouldn’t miss anyone.

  Nothing. I mean, there were people, but none that were obviously Wanderer. Not that I’d expected someone to walk off of the storage lots wearing a trench coat over a set of high-tech armor, but I’d at least expected some activity. None of the people I saw leaving or walking onto the lot came or went at regular hours, and none of them had hours that really lined up with Wanderer’s. People came … people left, and as near as I could tell I either had to widen my net enough to assume all of them were Wanderer … or none of them were.

  Which really threw me for a loop, as it gave me two options. First—and the more likely—was that an unarmored Wanderer was sneaking over one of the walls after dark. Not impossible, certainly, and without his suit, I wouldn’t be able to confirm it in any confident manner.

  The other option—the more ridiculous one—was that Wanderer was living in the storage park. Which was a thing that happened, I knew that, but it just seemed odd that a superhero would be doing the same. Suddenly I could see more weight being given to those fan-theories that Wanderer wasn’t a human, but some sort of renegade robotics project.

  But as far as setbacks went, it was a pretty short one. The end was already fixed in my mind. I was going to meet Wanderer, one way or another, and I was going to interview him. I was going to meet the hero I’d spent my whole life tracking and following, and once and for all, I was going to answer all the questions that had gone unasked for so long. I wouldn’t expose what he didn’t want me too, but even if that meant sharing nothing, I would at least get something.

  And he would see how much his actions meant to some of us. How much dedication and hope he could deliver the city. Even if his superhero antics weren’t perfect, he was trying. He deserved to see what he’d done on a personal level. After all, I was one of the people whose lives he’d crossed.

  And I was going to thank him for it. In person. At long last.

  It was time.

  NINE

  I’d like to say that I figured out which storage unit he was using involved some highly complicated or impressive procedure, but that would be a lie. To be honest, it was shockingly easy. I rented one of the storage units, drove into the park, and planted my cameras all over the place. The next day, I came back, collected them, and worked out the data. That was all it took. Just like that, I had narrowed Wanderer’s possible location down to five of the larger storage units; the big ones with rolling doors and enough room inside for a small boat. And from there? Well, that was all I really needed. I set up a single, lone camera—digital this time—across the way at a vantage point where it could see all five of the units, and waited.

  The next morning, I had what I needed. The footage was dim, dark, and barely visible, but what was barely visible was enough for me to just make out one of the storage unit’s smaller access doors swing open and then shut, seemingly all on its own.

  Cloaking device. I’d been ninety-nine percent sure, but seeing it for myself made all the difference.

  I spent the rest of the day at work, feverishly taking care of everything I could while my mind raced with possibilities. There were so many questions to ask, so many things I wanted to know. I almost couldn’t decide where to begin or where to end. I felt like a dog that had done the unimaginable and caught the car they’d been chasing their entire life. Now what did I do? Bite the bumper? My day passed in a feverish haze of thought.

  The next day, almost a full twenty years after I’d first seen Wanderer on my father’s old television set, I found myself standing outside his storage unit, gear in hand. I’d opted for the low profile approach—I wasn’t wearing anything that screamed “reporter,” and I’d decided against bringing a camera, instead trusting in two standard-issue digital vocal recorders and an old-fashioned, disposable camera. I’d even left my phone in my car, rather than risking it by bringing it with me and getting it confiscated, erased, or even worse, busted. I’d left a note in my apartment explaining what I was up to, so at least if I disappeared others would be able to piece together what I’d been working on. Not that I expected to disappear, but at the same time there was a small part of me that was afraid Wanderer wouldn’t take well to being found out.

  As it turned out, that worry was at least partially well-founded. I walked up to the door of his storage unit, recorders heavy in my pockets like they were a full camera set, and knocked. The sound of my fist striking the metal resonated inside the unit, almost matching beat for beat the echoing pound of my heart.

  I waited for a minute as the jangling rattle of the door faded to silence. The same couldn’t be said for my insides. My heart kept thumping, my breaths coming slow and deep, and I knew I was probably standing so stiffly I could have been mistaken for a mannequin.

  Still, nothing. I reached out again. My palms felt cool and slick beneath my fingers as I made a fist, and I had to suppress the urge to wipe my hand on my pant-leg before I knocked.


  “Hello?” I called, wincing at the slight catch in my voice. It wasn’t how I wanted to sound. I wanted to sound cool and confident. Collected, like a professional. Instead, I sounded nervous.

  Then again, I was knocking on the door of the city’s secretive superhero. Maybe he didn’t want company? What was I going to do if he didn’t open the door? In my haste to arrive, I really hadn’t put much thought into it. Break down the door? Come back later? Wait outside until he let me in?

  That last option probably would have been what I would have done if the door hadn’t let out a loud click at that moment and opened inward. I’ll admit I froze for a bit, everything from the sound of my own breathing to the thud of my heart coming to a complete stop as I watched the door swing open to reveal—

  Nothing. There wasn’t anyone there. Just an empty concrete hallway, the kind that could be used for storing smaller stuff out of the way of the larger chamber. Partway down the hall was an opening in the concrete-block construction, a gap that led to the much larger space that lay behind the rolling door. There was light coming from it.

  I took a step forward, my foot passing the threshold and stepping down in the hallway. I felt an electric chill run through my body. I was there. In Wanderer’s hideout.

  But no Wanderer. I peered through the crack along the frame, checking behind the door to see who had opened it. There was no one behind it.

  Neat, I thought as I stepped forward, passing by the door. The fear and panic was gone now, replaced instead by an eager, almost giddy excitement.

  That excitement stopped the moment the door slammed shut behind me and an icy-cold, almost metal grip wrapped itself around the back of my neck. I froze, my eyes going wide as I felt the fingers tighten just ever so slightly. The message in that was clear: Don’t. Move.

  “Why are you here? How did you find me?”

  The voice was raspier in person than it had ever sounded in his interviews, rougher. There was a strength to it, a timbre that made me want to answer his questions, but at the same time it felt kind of … fake. Forced, even.