Forced Pair

by C. Ryan Bymaster

  Her smile bloomed once again as they crossed the street. She liked that the three of them looked like a family. Black man, white woman, mixed child. Though maybe not related by blood, the three held a bond stronger than that.

  They reached the other side of the street and she winced as she stepped in gum, the heat making it much gooier as it clung to her sole. She paused to scrape the bottom of her shoe against the lip of the sidewalk, removing the gum ….

  And most of the blood that still stuck to the rubber treads of her shoes. She looked back and grimaced. Her bloody shoeprints led all the way back across the street, along the sidewalk, and up the walkway to the house with the opened front door.

  The house that had not been empty when they had knocked.

  After a final sigh, she turned and skipped ahead to catch up to Jeffery and Connor.

  Yes, it was sad that some people reacted so passionately to the message they were spreading, but that wouldn’t stop her from trying.

  I

  Kasumi Takeda’s phone vibrated in her pocket, but she was too invested in the game she was playing to do anything about it. She had her feet spread apart as she leaned in toward the machine, tap-tap-tapping away at the “fire” button. This was the farthest she’d gotten in the game yet and she wasn’t going to let something like Dent trying to get a hold of her break her concentration.

  She narrowly missed being shot down by an enemy missile and she threw her whole body to the right as if it would help her dodge the digital attack. She returned fire and almost shouted in anger when a missile from the other side of the screen hit her, taking her last life. She cursed out loud in her native Japanese and then ducked her head sheepishly, looking around the empty stop-n-go mini-mart.

  Luckily, no one was around to witness her behavior. Well, no one but the old man behind the counter at the other side of the store, that is. He may have been hard of hearing and missed her vocal outburst, but his head shot up from his search-a-word puzzle book and he suddenly looked as if he wanted to throw his pencil across the room.

  Need to keep myself in check, she thought.

  She mentally kicked herself in the butt. It wasn’t her language she cared about — though for some odd reason Dent had been telling her a child of her age shouldn’t be using such foul language. It was her emotions that she needed to control. She took a deep, calming breath, relaxing herself and pulling her emotions back in, just like she had been practicing over the past four months.

  As she calmed her emotions she looked at the old man behind the counter. He, too, visibly relaxed, putting the pencil in his mouth to chew on as he bent back down to finish his puzzle.

  Her phone buzzed again and she fished in her pocket to pull it out, expecting to see Dent’s name on the caller ID. But, it wasn’t him. It was some unknown, blocked number.

  Ignore. Sorry, don’t know you, don’t want to talk to you.

  She gave the arcade game one last look, debated on giving it one more go, then decided against it. She grabbed her plastic bag of goodies and necessities and left the mini-mart, chiming her way through the sliding glass doors. Outside, she hugged herself tightly, warding off the chill bite in the afternoon air. Her wool-lined jacket may not have been designer or chic but it did the job. Dent had insisted on buying this one over the lavender one she had had her eye on. That pretty lavender jacket hadn’t been as thick as the one Dent had bought her, but it sure had more fashion and style than the blah-brown one she was wearing.

  She headed out of the parking lot and made a right after the gas pumps. She kicked a few pine cones that were stupid enough to have fallen near the sidewalk or in the thick grass lawns of the houses to her right and watched them bounce and cavort and wobble their way into the two-lane street. She was four pine cones in when her phone buzzed again.

  Unknown caller. Again.

  Now she was getting concerned. As far as she knew, only Dent had her new number. But with things the way they were with technology, she knew it wouldn’t be too hard for anybody else to get her number. That’s why Everything Buts were such a necessity these days. EBs allowed people to access the internet with total privacy, keeping their location and user information completely protected from hackers and prying digital eyes.

  And, like her thoughts had somehow magically dipped into that digital ether, her EB chimed with a notification. She put her phone back in her pocket and pulled out her EB. There were no little icons on top to signify what the chime was for. No new emails, no new media postings, no alarms, no important calendar dates, no nothing.

  Something was definitely up. She put her EB away.

  She needed to get home, get back to Dent and let him know what was going on. He’d know what to do, and he wouldn’t freak out like she was starting to. The thought of Dent freaking out calmed her, and actually made her chuckle. The thought of Dent doing anything remotely emotional was hilarious. Her spirits buoyed from her mental pep talk, she trudged on, pausing only to teach a few more pine cones a lesson.

  Da-ding.

  She froze.

  Da-ding.

  Like a snake charmer sticking her hand into a burlap sack full of cobras, she slipped her hand into her pocket. She slowly pulled out her EB, looking at the trees around her because she was afraid to look down. And then, like ripping a bandage off, she quickly looked down at the screen.

  GET HOME ASAP. TROUBLE. GET DENT.

  No freaking way! The message was written across her home screen. That in itself was impossible. In order to read a message she had to open the appropriate app. Messages just didn’t appear on the screen like that. And then the fact that there was no sender information, no return information, made the magic mystery message all the more frightening. She and Dent had made some bad enemies four months ago — her mother back in Japan being just one of them — and the two of them had gone to great lengths to stay under the radar ever since.

  Thoughts of Noman popped in her head.

  Dent didn’t believe her whenever she brought up Noman, but she knew Noman existed, and he was out to get her for some reason. It always seemed that whenever she felt the safest she would look around and notice the nondescript man watching her. He hadn’t done anything to her, yet, but he would. She knew he would. She hadn’t seen him in a while — the last time was in the supermarket three months ago — but she knew he was around.

  He was her personal bogeyman.

  She shoved her EB back in her pocket and walked ahead, at first briskly, and then soon enough she was practically flying over the sidewalks and streets, through bushes and trees, startling deer and birds, until she finally hit their street and huffed up their driveway — way too long for a driveway — and burst through the front door.

  The house alarm beeped, and she slapped her palm to a small plate in the wall near the doors. There was a small tingle as the reader scanned her palm and the beeping stopped.

  If the alarm was on then that meant the house was empty.

  Even so, she screamed Dent’s name.