INITIUM NOVUM: Part 1

by Casper Greysun

  Hearing this, Milton gently lowers his fork, wipes his mouth, and then offers his assistance, without ever leaving his seat.

  “Hey, check the utility folder on the start menu,” he instructs Ruth, who stares blankly at him before realizing that he was talking to her and no one else.

  “Oh, you’re talking to me. I’m sorry. My mind is gone today,” she says, attempting to excuse her own unintentional rudeness.

  “No worries,” Milton replies, politely dismissing her apology. “Check the utility folder.”

  Ruth follows his instructions. In a matter of seconds, she finds the application.

  “Thank you so much. How did you know where to find it?” She questions as Heather eyes dart to and from Milton’s frame and unto her sister’s.

  “That’s the latest model of the iCelly on the Sentinel Operating System. I sell them up at the mobile store on Union Square. Sold out last month during a blow-out sale. Still waiting on the next shipment.”

  “That’s funny. I got this one a month ago,” she says holding up the phone. On the back of the case there is an insignia which Milton instantly notices.

  “That’s one of ours, a limited edition iCelly. Exclusive to our location. Look at the Union Square stamp on the back.”

  “Oh, so that’s what that is. Okay, so then maybe you’ve met my husband.”

  “Maybe. I’ve sold a lot of those.”

  Just then Heather realizes that Will is their connection, but because Will’s is not present, there is no way for her to have known who Milton is, or what Milton’s purpose is. She is only allotted Will’s stories for review. Luckily, she’s already read a Will story where the man in question fits perfectly, and she has now just put two and two together. Milton’s wet, clinging shirt was all the evidence she needed. The only difference was that Heather never met up with Ruth in that reality. In that version, Will had never asked Heather, albeit somewhat obnoxiously, if she planned to answer her phone, thusly her subconscious mind never initiated the action. This time around, she picked up the phone.

  Outside, the rain begins to pour. Milton looks towards the entrance’s glass window and sucks his teeth.

  “Hey, mister, did someone spill coffee on you this morning?” Heather asks as she points to his damp shirt.

  “How did you know it was coffee?” He questions.

  “Wild guess. Was it hot?” She probes.

  “It was so frickin’ hot,” he responds, echoing his earlier words.

  “Of course it was,” she says, trailing off a little at the end. “Of course it was.”

  CHAPTER 9:

  “Hey!” Jessica hollers as Will snatches the smart phone out of her hand and takes off with it, running down the corridor of Beth Israel Hospital like a maniac. He runs past the security guard who makes little effort to turn his head to see what’s going on, let alone actually seize Will. The guard, shrugging his responsibilities off as the inquiring eyes of hospital visitors fall upon him—all silently seeking and expecting answers to questions concerning matters which are none of their business—goes about his day, reading his newspaper.

  For what it’s worth, he isn’t the worst guard in the history of hospital security. Actually, since his radio never goes off, he and all other guards on duty can correctly assume that there has been no emergency which requires any of their attentions. His motto: why go above and beyond only to scrap by at the end of the week? By this logic, he is as wise as they come. Yet, and as with most technicalities, there is a catch: one can never improve their situation while lying dormant. Sometimes, in order to gain small ground one must travel the Earth from end to end. This is what the guard and similar minds refuse to accept about improvement.

  Once outside of the hospital, Will begins running south on First Avenue. He’s so focused on getting away from the location that he disregards the unmarked vehicle double parked right outside of the hospital’s main entrance. In the passenger seat, there’s a blonde entirely too focused on what’s going on in her smart phone. The other occupants of the vehicle seem to be waiting on her, as she is the epicenter of that particular party at this particular moment.

  Will reaches Fourteenth Street in less than the time it would have taken him to hail a cab, not that he can afford one at the moment anyway. His pockets are empty save for a few bucks, his keys, and Laura Cohen’s bugged business card.

  Pedestrians and motorists alike stop and watch Will as he runs past them. The sheer oddity of seeing a man in a two piece suit running at top speed draws the attention and annoyance of those he runs past. Will doesn’t seem to notice the multiple sets of eyes landing on him, everything sort of passes through his peripherals in a blur of shapes and colors. The only thing that matters to him at the moment is running; not that he even knows where he’s running to, not that it even matters.

  In his mind, there is no logical explanation for why the voice would instruct him to steal the phone of a young lady whose grandmother is in the hospital due to an accident instigated by the very person running south on First Avenue with a stolen phone in his hand. Although, he blindly follows the voice, he does so placing in its instructions a reluctant faith. He continues to adhere to the voice’s directions simply because the voice has yet to steer him wrong; although, as his lungs struggle to meet his body’s demand for oxygen, he begins to have a moment of doubt. Considering all things, Will feels that only a sociopath would do what he has just done.

  The more he thinks it over, the worse he feels. He cannot even begin to fathom the kind of thoughts that might presently be running rampant through the mind of an already grieving Jessica. In between sharp gasps for air, Will manages to sigh deeply. He comes to a full stop at Twelfth and Second. Leaning against a metal gate, he relaxes himself and catches his breath. He examines the phone in his hands, lingering on the serial number engraved on the back just under the Union Square flagship store emblem. The number reads: 143-022897-13.

  Overhead, clouds gather, darkening an already gloomy sky. An ominous fog accompanies the darkness above, likening the air below to the heavens above. Drizzle begins to fall. A small drop of rain barely misses Will’s nose, landing on the fabric of his shirt. This is followed by another drop, then another, until the drizzle becomes a full-on thunderstorm. Almost instantly, the volume of the rain increases, intensifying the downpour, forcing Will to seek refuge, for himself and Jessica’s phone, under his blazer by pulling and holding the jacket over his head.

  Will continues his journey toward nowhere in particular, reaching Eleventh Street in seconds that seems to stretch for minutes. Gusts of wind blow rain forcefully into his face making it nearly impossible for him to see anything further than a few feet in front of him. He barely notices the curb’s end, stopping millimeters short of stepping into the street.

  Cars whiz past him, shiny blurs of colors and ovular shapes, each with similar but distinct sounds. Squinting so as to focus his eyes on the world behind the curtains of rainfall, he manages to see, for a brief second and a half, the other side of the street. A man in a mostly red Leatherman jacket stands there, seemingly unaffected by the rain. A look of determination manifests itself in the man’s face. His uneasy, unflinching focus, unperturbed by the harsh environment, seems out of place to Will, who notices it at once. Will, however, has never seen the man before, although he had passed right by him just a short while ago.

  Him!

  The voice speaks one word. Will hears it, but does not understand. The message is cryptic.

  “Him what?” He asks, hoping the voice will respond.

  Stop him!

  Will figured it would happen sooner or later, not the request exactly, but the request in general which would be too over the top to go through with. How can he stop a man who isn’t doing anything but walking in the rain? It’s preposterous. That exact act, and similar acts, are the very definition of psychotic. Despite the voice not once leading him astray, as of yet at least, he will not obey its directions, not this time.

&nbs
p; Coming from one block east, an unmarked police vehicle speeds up the street, sirens blazing. A gut feeling tells Will that the car would have been coming up from behind him had First Avenue not been a one way street heading north. At first glance, he can swear that he’s seen the vehicle before and very recently too.

  A weird sensation then befalls upon Will. Tenseness seizes his chest, different and worse than when he had been running.

  Veniero’s. Quick.

  Will sprints across the street, making a sharp right and heading a third of the way up the avenue and into the famed bakery. The car approaches, stopping near the corner as the passenger dismount. Will slows down as he enters, nodding at the workers as he speed-walks to the back of the restaurant, unclear as to why the voice directed him there. Then, as luck would have it, or so it seemed at the moment, Will lays eyes upon Heather and the girl from the caller ID picture on Heather’s phone; the picture he had stolen a glimpse of before Heather moved her phone.

  “Heather?” He questions.

  “Will?” She repeats, equally confounded. The situation is new to her as she’s yet to read this particular episode. Nonetheless, the new path Will has taken scares her, as she knows that, always around this point in Will’s stories, death occurs.

  The fat man turns around, noisy and curious to see who the lady’s unexpected guess is.

  “You!” The man yells as his large body springs to its feet and he points his finger at Will.

  “Aw, come on. For real, voice? For real? That’s bullshit,” Will says looking up, appearing to be talking to the ceiling of the bakery. He waves his arms in a gesture of exasperation. Milton catches a glimpse of the phone in Will’s hand.

  “What, did you steal that, you degenerate?” Milton outright accuses, redirecting his finger to point at the stolen phone.

  “No!” Will lies, with the conviction of being almost offended at the accusation.

  “Those are exclusive to my location,” he says of the phone bearing the Union Square insignia. “And I don’t remember selling you one, ever.”

  “Fine, I stole it,” Will admits. Heather shakes her head.

  “This is your friend, Heather?” Ruth asks with a smile, amused at the situation.

  “This is the little shit that threw coffee on me today,” Milton interjects.

  “What?” Ruth questions with a chuckle, unsure if she had heard correctly. “That’s a strange coincidence.”

  Get Milton to unlock phone and show picture gallery to Heather and the girl with her.

  “How the fuck do I do that?” He asks the voice.

  “You know damn well how you did it,” Milton responds, believing that Will was addressing him.

  Just then, as Milton bickers with Will, a loud thunderous bang rings throughout the air. There’s an accompanying flash, but it is much weaker than a lightning bolt. The subsequent series of similar sounds confirm that the sounds are not that of thunder, but of gunshots.

  Stay inside.

  When the shots subside, Ruth curiously heads to the entrance.

  Keep her inside.

  “Hey you, I don’t think you should go out there yet,” Will says, as he reaches out and grabs her arm.

  “Sure,” she says with a smile. Will believes her, smiles back, and turns away. When he’s no longer looking, Ruth power walks to the entrance and peers outside.

  Fuck!

  CHAPTER 10:

  Hector Santiago pulls into a spot just outside of Beth Israel, illegally double parking his unmarked vehicle. He steps out of the passenger seat and surveys the front entrance of the hospital building.

  “Here?” He directs his question to Laura. “You sure?”

  “Positive,” she replies, waving her phone in his face, displaying the tracking app to him. “It says that he’s here.”

  Hector had been following Laura’s directions without giving thought to how the man was being traced. He slowly begins to realize something is amiss. It takes a while for the epiphany to drill into his thick skull.

  What Laura doesn’t know is that the app, which is in its infancy—unfinished and with many bugs in the programming—is malfunctioning due to the speed in which Will fled. The software currently retrieves data from an already established GPS service, encrypting it so that only the person who owns the tracker can view the data. Being that encryption generally takes about 45-75 seconds, the current position of the target is delayed by that amount of time at the very least, if no other technical issues happen to arise.

  In the meantime, Hector calls his girlfriend.

  “He babe, what’s up,” Hector says.

  “Hey baby,” the voice over the line replies. “I miss you so much. You have no idea what’s happened—Hey!—

  Click.

  The phone dies on the other end.

  “Crap reception,” Hector says, blaming the dropped call on the network. He turns to Laura. “Heh? Funny thing: Jess is here.”

  About a minute passes with her face buried in her cell phone trying to track his whereabouts. With the device literally inches from her face, Laura completely misses Will as he sprints past her and the undercover officials. Hector spots a man running down the block but disregards it for two particular reasons. First off, he has never seen Will before, so there was no way possible for him to identity him. Secondly, he assumes that Laura’s cell phone is tracking him without any problems.

  “So, we arrest him, then what? You gonna charge him with littering? It would never stick and you’re better than that anyway, Laura. I mean, sheesh, littering. Not even the rookies want to hand citations out for that.”

  “I’m not going to charge him with littering,” she begins. “I’m going to charge him with manslaughter. An old lady slipped on the litter. And I mean, old. Like, game-over old.”

  “Wow. That’s a fucking stretch,” he replies before giving in to a hearty chuckle. “That might not be the most plausible outcome, even for you and your expertise,” he says.

  “Hector, darling, you should know better than that.”

  “Should I?” He questions again. “What I do know is that you’re vehemently vested in apprehending this person for a crime which we all know is not going to stick, not even slightly. Then on top of that, you’re planning on hitting him with another charge for something that isn’t one hundred percent certain. What gives?”

  “Hector, I accidently gave him the business card,” she confesses. “Any charge that I hit him with is just a technicality, just to scare him straight. I don’t want him—what’s the word I’m looking for?—snitching on me, okay. I’ll scare him, and then I’ll offer him the deal of a lifetime. He’ll think he’d be walking away scot-free, meanwhile I would have never actually had anything on him. Everything will blow over, we’ll be in the clear with the card back where it belongs.”

  “I follow. I do. I swear. Quick question though: what card?” Hector asks with a sly smirk and a comically raised eye-brow.

  “You know which one?” She barks

  “You mean, the one with the bug?” He probes.

  “What is this, a set-up?” She says looking at the cops behind her. “Shut-up. And, yes the one with the bug.”

  “The one we were supposed to plant on Edwin Cole?”

  “That’s the one,” Laura confirms.

  “Oh, that’s nice,” Hector says with a scoff. “We’ll just try Edwin Cole again, some other day, huh? You could have told me that when I picked you up. I thought you needed to alter the Cole plan or something. What the hell, Laura? We were on our way to meet you for the operation.”

  “I was running early, Hector. I thought it’d be a quick juggle. I didn’t mean to give him the bug.”

  “Well, as long as you didn’t mean it.” Hectors sarcasm hits home.

  “Oh, stop crying. Let’s just fix this. It’s all good.”

  A cop in the backseat sucks his teeth.

  Suddenly, a red-haired girl bursts through the hospital doors, running full speed, which—when in heel
s—is not synonymous with top speed. There is a look of exasperation on her face.

  “Jessica?” Hector exclaims, as he hops out of the driver’s seat upon catching sight of her. “What are you doing? What’s wrong? Are you okay?” Hector bombards her with concerned questions, one after another, without allotting her the brief moments needed to answer him.

  “My phone. That fucking sociopath stole my phone,” she responds franticly.

  “Who stole your phone?” Hector asks as he consoles her by rubbing her shoulders.

  “William. He said his name was William and he was a concerned member of my grandmother’s church. He was visiting her because he witnessed the accident,” she adds.

  “What did he look like?” Hector probes.

  “He was fairly tall, light-skinned, and had short hair,” she answers before adding, “and he was wearing a suit.”

  Hector looks back at Laura who is still fidgeting with her cell phone. Suddenly a curious look grows across Laura’s face.

  “Did you say that he was wearing a suit?” Laura asks Jessica in a tone close to the one she uses for a cross-examination. When Jessica affirms her inquiry, an expression of realization crosses Laura’s face. She terminates the application on her phone from the task manager menu. She then launches the application again and waits for it to load. When she sees where Will’s tracker is located, she becomes irate, mostly with herself for her own carelessness. “Fuck! Hector, he heading south on First,” she cries out.

  “How is that possible? You said that he was in the hospital,” Hector speaks in a tone only a few decibels below shouting. “Fuck, I just saw a guy in a suit run out of there. Fuck! I knew something was off about him.”

  “What didn’t you say something then?” Laura retorts, in an attempt to save face. Deep down she knows that his is her screw-up and hers alone.

  “How do I know who the fuck you’re looking for? I thought you were tracking the man,” Hector adds.

  “The software still has bugs, Hector. It froze, showing me the last location he had been at before changing directions. It’s still a beta test version.”