Nowhere (5 page)
Upon turning back to his apartment, Richard was terrified to see that the balcony door was ajar. He stood there motionless, looking and listening for signs and sounds of an intruder. He heard someone in the kitchen.
He curled the top of the bag of oranges around his hand making a citrus mace, ready to brain whoever was moving about the kitchen. Then he advanced ninja like through the living room.
“Freeze!!” He yelled as he pounced out from behind the living room wall in a stance ready to attack the intruder.
A man was standing in the kitchen preparing something at the counter. He was facing the far wall of the kitchen, and Richard couldn’t see his face. The intruder stopped what he was doing and froze in place.
“Show me your hands!” Richard yelled from the entry of the kitchen.
Slowly, the intruder raised his hands, revealing that he was wearing a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.
“Easy does it Richard…” Steven said as he stood there facing the countertop and the back wall of the kitchen. “It’s just me Pal.”
“Steven?!” Richard’s voice broke with nerves. “I could have killed you!”
“You could have killed me?… with a bag of oranges, yea…” Steven said sarcastically.
“But how did you?”
“I have ways Richard, but now’s not the time to get into it.”
“But I jogged almost the whole way here, I took the quickest route, how did you beat me?…” Richard was puzzled. “Plus, I’m sweating like a pig, I’m winded and my sides are killing me, you’re not even breathing heavy.” Richard tossed the oranges on the counter then took his coat off and draped it over his arm.
“Like I said, I have ways. My people trained me well.” Steven said as he lowered his hands and, not turning from the counter, resumed his work.
“Your people?” Richard asked. “You mean like the FBI?”
“Higher than that Rich.”
“The CIA?”
“Try the AIA…”
“The AIA," Richard said with a puzzled look about his face. "I’ve never heard of them.”
“The Alien Intelligence Alliance,” Steven said. “And if you’ve never heard of us that’s a good thing, it means we’re doing our job.”
“I thought you said you were going to lay low, what are you doing here?” Richard asked as he returned to the front foyer to hang up his coat.
“I am, and don’t worry about me, because when I lay low, I lay low low. People only see me when I want them to see me. I know how to get gone in a hurry Rich, and when I’m gone, I’m gone to nowhere. You don’t have to worry about me.”
“Ok, so why are you here? I wouldn’t consider my apartment very low, low.”
“Yea neither would I Einstein, I came for you. You should be worried about yourself, not me.”
“Wait a second, are you here to…to?”
“To kill you? No relax pal, I’m not here to kill you, the one other person in the world that I know can help me. I’m not going to kill you. I’m here to help your sorry butt.”
“You might be surprised, I’m not as helpless as you might think.”
“They’re watching you, you know.”
“The cops?”
“They…” Steven said as he rolled his eyes upward as if to the heavens.
“They are? Why, how? What have I got to do with all this?”
“You can see them, just like me. That’s when they started hunting me, as soon as they realized I could see them. You, you’re different, they want to study you, contain you, but most of all, they want to use you to get to me. I gotta help you Pal.” Steven sounded almost friendly for a moment. “You gotta operate in the open, and I respect that choice, but I didn’t want to disappear without helping you somehow.”
“So what are you planning… no wait, better question, what are you building in my kitchen? You’re not making a bomb are you? Please tell me you’re not cooking up some kind of bomb?”
“Chill… it’s not a bomb, it’s just a secret little recipe that I remembered from training. It helped me escape from communist China one time. Trying to get low in China is kinda tough for a 6 foot American, let me tell you.”
He raised a hand up over his shoulder to pass something to Richard.
“Here take this…”
A closer inspection revealed that it was a small blue pill. Richard took it and was just about to put it in his mouth when Steven stopped him.
“Wait! You don’t want to do that! I meant take it and hang onto it, not take it like swallow it.”
Richard pulled it away from his lips.
“What is it?”
“Well I guess you just proved that you trust me, you really are all in…” Steven said as he began putting some things away. “You would have chowed down on that not knowing if it was super potion or deadly poison.”
“Then what is it already?”
“It’s a getaway plan, it’s for the direst of situations. If you know they’re onto you and there’s no way to get away.”
“Is it poison, like cyanid, will it kill me?”
“Most likely no… you take it and chew it up in your mouth and swallow what you can. It’ll make you spew out everything in your stomach. I mean barf your guts out like there’s no tomorrow.” Steven still hadn’t turned around and was now wiping down the counter. “We use these as a form of distraction to buy some time. You start throwing up on someone’s shoes all of a sudden and I promise you they’re gonna lose their grip on you and give you enough leverage to land a good elbow to the gut or knee to the groin. Otherwise if you want to play it nice and just disappear, it should buy you some unsupervised time in the restroom. If you can teach yourself how to take apart the flush handle of a toilet at the same time you’re throwing up in it, you can escape from anyone, anywhere.”
Richard suddenly imagined himself wearing a vomit stained shirt while jimmying off the handle of a toilet, and sliding out the large metal flush arm before sneaking up on an unsuspecting Chinese guard standing outside of the restroom and stabbing him in the neck with a toilet handle. Vomit speckles covered his mouth… He suddenly snapped out of the day dream and quickly shook the idea out of his head.
“Put that somewhere safe and use it when the time comes. You got me?” Steven asked.
Richard nodded and stuck the pill in his shirt breast pocket.
Without turning from the counter, Steven stopped him. “I hope that’s not your plan. That’s not only the first place they’ll check, but it’s also the quickest way to crush your getaway plan.”
He put some pots in the sink and then picked up a washcloth to dry his hands.
“Either put it in a plastic bag and tape it up next to your nut sack or you could carry it in that pill bottle you’re always carrying around. The nut sack is less likely to be detected, but the pill bottle may be easier to get to in an emergency, I’ll leave it up to you.”
Richard went back to his coat and got the prescription bottle from his pocket. He opened it and put the single blue pill in with the rest of his medication. He heard the click of his balcony door as he put the bottle back in his coat. He turned around and found himself unsurprised to see that Steven had left without a trace.
Richard walked to the kitchen, which was now clean and appeared as though no one had been there, then he went to the balcony door and found that Steven had even locked it before he left. He unlocked it, opened it and went out onto the balcony. The early evening air was full of the sounds of traffic and strangely a few hoot owls could be heard from a rooftop somewhere.It was a small balcony, only wide enough for a single deck chair and a small plastic patio end table. There was a black rot iron fence going around it. Richard looked over the edge.
There was at least a twenty foot drop on all sides, down to the concrete parking lot below, an athletic jumper might get super lucky and be able to make it to the small grassy patch between the lot and the building, but still... twenty feet. Richard looked up and saw that there was a four inch drain pipe running up the exterior wall to the roof, which was only about ten additional feet up. Richard nodded, believing this to be Steven’s most likely exit path. Still the man was an expert in disappearing quickly and efficiently.
"The AIA..." Richard said to himself with a smirk.
He shook this off as yet another one of Steven’s many oddities and then went in to fix himself dinner. He turned on the TV and flipped it to the news, then he went to the kitchen and opened the freezer to get a dinner out. It was between Fiesta Cheese Enchiladas with rice and beans or Fried Rice with General Tso’s Chicken.
He chose Mexican over Chinese and threw it in the microwave. Then he poured himself a glass of orange juice and added some ice.
The TV was talking about the armed robbery of a small express bank downtown. There was one suspect who was shot in the ankle and captured, but two others were apparently on the run. Richard decided to get up and lock the balcony. Just when he got to the door, he heard the sound of another owl, but now it sounded as though it was right outside on the balcony. Then from farther back, somewhere in the distance he heard what he thought was another.
Slightly creeped out by this, he quickly flipped the deadbolt on the door and stood there for a moment listening, but he heard nothing. He flipped open the blinds, half expecting to see some giant owl perched on his balcony, but there was nothing there.
He breathed a sigh of relief and laughed a little at himself. Even though Steven believed they were fighting an invisible war against aliens and Richard was getting to the point that he almost whole heartedly believed him, he now laughed, believing himself to be just a little over paranoid.
Fear of owls… he wondered what phobia that was.
He went back to the kitchen and decided that before he sat and ate, and connected to the news again, it would be best to rinse off in the shower. It would feel healthy to wash the nerves of the day away. After all, he had jogged about a mile and a half home. October or not, he had done some sweating. He took another swig of orange juice and then went back to shower.
He started the shower to let the water warm up, then he got a towel and some PJ’s to change into.
It was strange, but he thought he heard the sound of another owl just as he stepped into the shower. Then as he rinsed he could have sworn he heard a loud thud and the sound of yet another hooting owl.
You’re just being paranoid… he tried to convince himself, but he couldn’t shake the feeling he had. It was as though this was something to take note of and his brain wouldn’t let him erase the sense of danger.
Surely there’s not one perched outside the tiny bathroom window he thought. He rinsed the shampoo from his hair and then wiped his face so he could see. He raised the blinds that covered the semi opaque bathroom window. There was nothing visible in the light outside the window. He was about to go back to bathing, when he heard the sound of yet another owl, a big one, except it was lower in pitch than the others and Richard could hear a series of clicks projected after the hooting that almost sounded insect like.
It came from behind him…
within his apartment…
outside the bathroom door…
He tore open the shower curtain just in time to see a shadow move across the bottom of the door.
“Steven?,” he yelled, he could hear the fear in his own voice. “Steven is that you?”
There was no response, no sound at all in fact and no movement from below the door.
Richard looked towards the mirror and now saw a cryptic message written in the steam.
"The owls are not owls," it read.
Richard wanted to scream. He thought about leaping out of the shower to lock the door, but it was too late. The knob silently turned and Richard could only watch in paralyzing terror as the bathroom door swung open slowly, and the owls that were not owls came in.
Outside the apartment, on a balcony across the alley from Richard’s, there lay a cat. It was a fat cat who sat listening to the sounds of the night. First Misses Fat Cat heard the strange noises, then the sound of a man calling to someone. She heard more strange noises, banging and a struggle, and screaming. Finally there were no more sounds coming from across the alley and the night was quiet once more. The cat went back to listening for the sounds of the crickets, and the dogs and the owls, but there were none.
