Frightened Boy by Scott Kelly (top e book reader .txt) 📖

at the thought. He hadn’t really looked to see if he’d missed or not when he shot at me, so maybe he just assumed he’d hit me. It didn’t make me feel completely at ease, but it helped some.

I didn’t particularly want Erika to come to work with me, but I wasn’t sure she completely believed my story. I wanted to show her the bullet hole so she’d have no choice.

We rode the bus side by side as we left my tidy neighborhood and approached the ever-looming metropolis of downtown Banlo Bay. The skyscrapers gleamed against the morning sun; the city was a shining testament to mankind’s continued insistence on order. The city itself had sprung from where Houston once sat and grown northwest away from the Gulf. The bay was as forgotten as the marshlands, but the name was as insistent on a proper existence as the rest of the city.

National guard had become highwaymen as the Fed went bankrupt; schools had no teachers, and prisons had no wardens. If the water you drank and the food you ate didn’t make you sick, the air would kill you. To me, it was as though all of the politicians and movers and shakers and honest citizens and good people of America had watched every aspect of their lives turn into a sick satire of itself, and only after the war was lost did they gather together on the outskirts of downtown Banlo Bay and yell “Stop!”

The wealthiest of residents could afford to live in the actual downtown area, but most of us regular folk had to make due living in the area immediately surrounding the central city. It was unfortunate, because when the gates slammed shut, there was no doubt downtown was all that would be left standing.

“I hate the city,” Erika said.

“I love it. It's so orderly, so clean and shiny. Makes me feel like the world still exists, you know?”

“The world still exists, it’s just a little different is all,” she countered.

“Not into a world I want to live in,” I sighed. “I want neighbors, barbecue, and a dog. A normal, friendly dog.”

“You want to live in the 1950s?”

“Definitely. You gotta admit, it beats this.”

“It wouldn’t be the same if I knew it was all going to end,” Erika said sadly.

“But still—no shit, no fan. Sounds dreamy to me.”

“Fair enough,” Erika said. “Is this where you work?”

“This is it,” I said. We could only see the first few floors from the bus, and the

giant charcoal-colored tower took up a full city block. It was surrounded by dozens of towers just like it, but none stood taller than Tasumec.

We stepped out into view of the tower and climbed the stairs up to the ground level.

“This is my elevator,” I said, walking her into the cool breeze of the lobby.

“Is this where the fighting happened?” she asked.

“Yeah, right here. Actually, I think two cops died right over there.” I splayed my hand out in the direction of the doors we’d just walked through. “It’s so bizarre. It’s like it never happened.”

Erika was uncharacteristically silent and only nodded her head. I wondered if she thought this was all some elaborate ruse to impress her.

There was still the bullet hole.

The elevator doors slid open.

The common area was full of security guards on break. I walked past them with Erika in tow. I wasn’t really planning on doing any work today, I just wanted to show Ms. Bronton around the office. Afterwards, I’d leave early and just count it as a sick day, like I’d never arrived.

“So, this is me,” I said. The door swung open, and I gawked at the unblemished floor. A small square of patched carpet was the only evidence of my adventure. “Well, that’s kind of a letdown. Still, though, check it out—a new patch of carpet. That’s pretty exciting, right?” I said lamely, my moment robbed.

Erika pranced around the small office lovingly, despite the fact that I’d let her down.

“One minute. I gotta tell my boss I’m not going to be staying today. Give me a second, and please don’t touch anything.”

I left the office and walked hurriedly down the hall to find the shift supervisor. The plain beige halls were empty, even when the tower was fully staffed, and my own footsteps were the only sound I could detect. Still, I couldn’t shake the dreadful feeling I was being watched.

I made myself ignore the anxiety. It was difficult, but since there was obviously no one else in the narrow hallway, I forced myself to keep going.

You’re just paranoid.

I reached my aging supervisor’s office and gave him my message. He waved me off with a noncommittal “Feel better,” and I was on my way.

I hurried to where Erika was. “C’mon,” I said. “There’s not much else to do here, but I’ll show you where we can get some good dumplings.”

Erika was spinning around in my chair, her legs extending from her khaki shorts like the stamen of an exotic bloom. The entire room smelled different when she was there.

”I’m sorry about the letdown,” I said, motioning to the floor.

“It’s alright, Clark. You don’t need a bullet hole to impress me.”

*

I went to work alone for the rest of the week, and I couldn’t shake the feeling of being watched, of waiting for the hatchet to swing down on me.

The sensation never happened in the same place twice; the feeling seemed to strike at random. I was eating lunch in the common area once, and I couldn’t shake the feeling until I hid in a bathroom stall—and only then did I finally feel safe.

One morning later in the week, I was startled to find that the door to my office was unlocked. Normally it locked automatically anytime it was closed, necessitating a key for each entry. As I twisted the knob and prepared to push, I nearly shit myself when I felt the door being pulled from the inside.

I couldn’t see a hand on the door even as it was wrenched out of my hands and pulled fully open. I felt something brush into me, and suddenly there was a part of a man in front of me. Despite his only half-visible body, he was the most ordinary looking person I’d ever seen.

I realized why I felt like I’d been watched all week. This diminutive man was so normal, so absolutely unnoticeable, that I couldn’t possibly see him until he bumped into me. Even now, he was only faintly visible. If I stopped concentrating on him, he would begin to fade from my attention, and for a confused moment I found myself wondering why I was afraid of the door in the first place.

“Where are the hard drives?” he asked. Suddenly, he became much more solid; he had a very recognizable, nasally voice.

“They’re inside,” I stuttered. “In the big steel cage.”

“They’re not in there,” he said. “Escher wants them. You’re hiding them. You’re in way over your head, Clark.”

“What does Escher want? I’ll do anything,” I pleaded. “Please tell him I’m sorry.”

“Sorry won’t cut it.” The man shook his head. “He hasn’t told me to kill you yet, but I bet the next time I come out here, it’ll be to finish you.”

I gulped. “I don’t know where the hard drives are if they aren’t in there. I promise. You have to believe me.”

“I don’t,” he said. “So my advice to you is to brace yourself. Escher is going to cast a plague on you worse than Columbus did America.”

He stepped out of the doorway of my office and began walking toward the main lobby. As he reached the area where other people stood milling about, he began to vanish. I tried to focus on his hand or his shoes, and each time, I’d find my attention diverted to someone’s sparkling watch or the colorful tie of a coworker. There was nothing noticeable about him.

I sat down at my desk and concentrated on little details in order to even remember I’d bumped into him at all. I focused on the moment when he’d threatened my life; this frame was vivid in my memory, and when I focused on it, the rest of the event unfolded in my mind. Once I had the story straight in my head, I wrote it down so I could study the details and make the whole experience solid.

Once I’d separated reality from fiction, I searched the cage. The Unnoticeable Man had apparently picked the lock, and now the door swung open. I’d only seen the contents of the cage once before. It was a machine with racks of hard drives and gently glowing green lights. Above each slot in the rack was a label giving a range of dates, displaying the timeframe for the recordings that were held on each drive. Just as he’d said, the slot in the machine that should have held the past month of footage was empty.

*

I unlocked my front door and stepped across my threshold.

“How was work today?” Erika asked from her place on the couch. I could see her curly brown hair cascading over the back of a pillow as she lazily flipped through a magazine.

There were a thousand things I almost said. “Okay,” I lied instead.

Erika kicked her feet out in front of her and admired her own toenails. “We need to talk,” she said.

“I agree.”

My heart was already racing in my chest, and the promise of a ‘talk’ didn’t help much. I couldn’t think of a way to breach the subject with Erika. I could tell she thought I was making all of it up; she was just too nice to tell me. Maybe she was waiting for a chance to leave me. Maybe that’s what the conversation was about, and that in itself was as scary as Escher coming for me.

“Come on and sit down,” Erika said, leaning up and patting the space where her head had lain.

I nervously walked over to her and sat down. The cushion was still warm from her body.

“You ever think about getting out more?” Erika asked me from across the couch where we lay sprawled, our feet intertwined and our heads facing each other on opposite ends like some ancient ornate Greek bench.

“I think about it,” I said. This wasn’t an avenue of discussion that I liked. “I just…don’t.”

“Why? Don’t you get lonely?”

“Not now that I have a psycho killer after me, no. I feel very wanted, believe me.”

Erika looked at me skeptically. “You don’t have to…do that.”

“Do what?” I asked, realizing I was angry. “Make up the stories so you’ll think I’m exciting? Isn’t that what this is about? You want out of this deal because I’m so goddamn boring, right?”

“I just mean…well, making some more friends. I don’t find you boring at all. I just don’t think it’s normal for someone to be so, uh…so solitary,” she said softly.

“Right. I’ve had friends before. I watched most of them die, either from thirst, or to keep from