Like the first interlude, this one’s written from the perspective of a side character working for the super secret Iskato Semiconductor Corp., and — when I finish this thing up — it’ll give everyone a little insight as to why our protagonists were drawn to this facility in the first place. Granted, you won’t get all that much information from this excerpt, but careful readers may be able to pick up a few clues that I threw in there. That’s the plan, at least. Enjoy. I’d suggest reading the previous chapters of this story for context. But hey. That’s your call.

Not super fond of the way I end this excerpt. Or chapter. Or whatever it is. But hey, it’s been months. Hopefully you’ll forgive me.

2/27/2024, roughly eight hours earlier before the events of chapter one. See the other chapters of 72 Hours for more background information on Iskato Semiconductor Corp.

Iskato Semiconductor Corp. didn’t allow its employees much room for personal choice, for individuality. All of this was outlined in the company’s employee handbook, under Chapter Five, Company Philosophy: Employees were required to dress the same, eat lunch at the same time, answer the phone in the same way. Iskato was one cohesive unit, a well-oiled machine, a unified front. All that.

People griped about Iskato’s policies, sure, of course they did, because they were humans and that is, in general, what humans do. They gripe, they whine, they rant and they rave, complain and condemn, ignoring what they have or had, what they’re given. But they did it on the sly (non-work-related fraternization was prohibited under Chapter Eight, Company Conduct), usually in the small kitchenette area tucked in the corner of the sterile, 3,000-desk cubicle bank that made up the company’s networking command center. The cubicles formed a nearly perfect O, something like a corporate Stonehenge that encircled the networking hub of the facility — a 15-foot-tall data server festooned with flashing diodes and tattooed with an arterial maze of circuitry and copper wire. The other employees called it Fred in tones of faux reverence, laughing as they did it. In a suspect design choice, the cubicles were all arranged so Fred was at their backs, not their fronts.

Sam Lorenzo was fine with this, just fine. Not the complaining — he tuned that out like so much white noise. And not Fred, either, because even though the thing was merely a mess of binary nodes and wires, Sam always felt like it was monitoring him. No, it was the conformity. Sam liked it. He relished the company’s dress code (all gray, every day — there were variations in that custodians wore gray jumpsuits, programmers and analysts wore gray polo shirts, execs wore gray suits, and so on and so forth, but it was always gray) because it eliminated the need to choose. Choosing was messy. He brought the same lunch every day, a methodically arranged turkey-and-Swiss with one dollop of mayonnaise, two pretzel rods and milk. Listened to the first 12 tracks of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons on the way into work, the remaining 11 on the way home.

He liked things regimented, structured, and predictable. Not messy. Controlled.

And his desk was arranged as such, of course. Invisible boundary lines partitioned off three equal sections of elementary-school-desk brown formica, each area with its own specific storage function: The leftmost tri-section contained lesser-used but still critical items, like software manuals and employee phone directories. In the center was his main workstation, where his computer and its peripheral friends lived in harmony and bliss along with his phone (dusty, and set to automatically forward calls to voicemail) and pencil cup.

He almost never used pens. He didn’t like things that you couldn’t erase.

Sam kept a few Penny and Charlie mementos in the rightmost section; a little stuffed smiley face and pink porkpie hat that Sam had won for his daughter at some random traveling fair, an old photo in a simple brown frame of Penny and Sam on their honeymoon years ago, during happier times (the Virgin Islands, Sam all smiles with a Cuban cigar, Penn with a crinkled nose, disapproving look, a blue sundress and a sea green blown-glass necklace she’d bought from a beach vendor). A second photo, this one with a burnished silver frame: Charlie in her yellow rain slicker, wielding an open red umbrella like a knight’s shield, a miniature Gorton’s fisherman grinning at the camera as she prepared to leave the house for one last time. Plus few other baubles, each one attached to a memory. Dust motes kept them company. Everything on that side of the desk was strategically placed so that in order to actually see them, Sam would have to physically turn away from the computer screen. Which he almost never did.

Their presence was enough. Just knowing they were there. A connection. It was enough.

Sam appreciated the banality of his job function, too, which was absolutely nothing more and nothing less than deleting spam messages from the discussion boards that contracted with Iskato, fifty or so, though he wasn’t sure what such a task had to do with semiconductors (in fact, he had never seen a semiconductor in all his years as the company, and wasn’t sure what one was). Two clicks, drag the mouse down an inch, two more clicks, all for eight hours. He had never accidentally clicked a spam link, knowing it was grounds for immediate termination (Chapter 8 again, subsection 5, bullet item #12).

On his good days, Sam operated the mouse with a ballroom dancer’s finesse and was, in general, able to clear 22 websites’ worth of knockoff Viagra and human growth hormone ads within that eight-hour period. Singlehandedly. That’s fifty thousand messages, nearly. It was enough to short-circuit spambots (Sam was under the mistaken impression that spambots were, in fact, actual robots that sat at computers and posted spam links on websites), to send Nigerian bank scammers scurrying away en masse. He had exactly one task and he did it perfectly. It was his job, his function.

During lunch, he ate and played solitaire. He usually won. Then he went home.

It was not always like this. But that doesn’t matter anymore.

On his last day of employment at Iskato Semiconductor Corp., Sam clicked his first and last spam link. That was one of two mistakes he’d made that day. The other was looking at the photo of Charlie. That took him out of the zone, thawed the ice just enough that he slipped. A quick glance — he wasn’t even sure why he glanced at all, but he did — and he misclicked.

His computer screen went red. Sam sat there for nearly a full minute, staring dumbly. A gray fog slipped over his vision, matching his shirt. Normally able to recite full subsections of the company handbook without being prompted (not that he’d ever needed to do such a thing), Sam now couldn’t remember a single word. He couldn’t remember what the protocol was for a situation like this. He didn’t know. He had lost control. Panicking, he jammed the red emergency button on his headset.

He heard a click. “Yes…” Sam heard keys clack over the earpiece. “Employee #23-383-98…Lorenzo, Samuel E. Is there a problem?”

Sam felt his earpiece grow warm. The server hummed behind him.

I’m figuring it’s about 75% done — the entry, I mean, not Titus Welliver — give or take a few paragraphs here and there, so the four of you (or zero of you) who are waiting with bated breath for the next installment won’t have to wait for much longer. Sorry for the long absence. I totally forgot how much I love doing this.

In the meantime, I’m working on a non-serialized short story that I hope at least a few of you will read and enjoy. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.

7:08 AM. Stanley Ulysses Leonard is several things. An ex-cop, for one. Bearded, for two. A Korean war vet. Breakfast connoisseur. Grandfather to three, father to two. But overall, to sum up, Stan is just an all-around, stand-up kinda guy. Ask anyone.

And if there’s anyone who doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen, it’s him.

It’s a gray wintry morning, and Stan has just woken up. He lies there in his bed for a few minutes, eyes shut, listening to the gentle whir of the ceiling fan. He can smell shampoo in the air, Marie’s, some tropical coconutty stuff, and his arm automatically reaches for her side of the bed. His hand grasps air. Startled, he opens his eyes and finds himself staring at a fresh indentation on the pillow next to him with roughly the same contours as Marie’s head. For some reason, and he has no idea why, Stan feels a sudden jolt of adrenal fear and sits bolt upright in the bed, his heart rattling.

And then he remembers that Marie had to be up early to review the casefile for one of her new patients. Not that he should have reacted so strongly on a normal day. It’s not unusual for her to be awake before him. But still, he can’t shake the dread.

“Nightmare, maybe,” he says to the empty room. “Jesus.” He runs a hand through his rapidly receding hair, blinks hard, exhales a breath that he didn’t know he was holding.

But wait. Now, Stan detects something else, another odor he can’t quite pinpoint but is able to narrow down to either French toast or something in the pancake family. He confers with his stomach and determines that yeah, he’s really pretty jazzed about both options. His fear is steadily evaporating. He lies back down again to watch the ceiling fan spin for a few minutes. Kicks off the covers, stands, stretches.

His last day alive seems like a pretty good one, so far.

7:28 AM. Seems is the operative word here. Turns out the breakfast smell had been a decoy, an elaborate con by Marie to get him out of bed early so he could go to the grocery store. Stan’s real breakfast is egg whites, unbuttered whole-wheat toast, orange juice, decaffeinated coffee and his cholesterol meds. She perpetuated the fakeout by lighting a buttermilk-pancake-scented Yankee candle as bait and simply waiting for him to show up. To Stan, it doesn’t smell like buttermilk anything. It smells like betrayal. And a little maple syrup, maybe. Mostly betrayal.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he tells his wife glumly. “Deceiving your husband.” He eyes the gelatinous, alien egg mass warily and forks a little into his mouth. Chews. “You know that this doesn’t taste like anything, right?” Chews more. “Honey, could you go grab my gun for a second? I just want to check something.”

“Stan, sweetie, you’re once again being a little bit of a drama queen,” Marie says, clinking around for something in the fridge. “Just a little. But here. Try this. It releases endorphins.” She lobs a bottle of Pistol Pete’s Hellfire Sauce at him. He catches it onehanded. “And it keeps the whining away.” Stan remains skeptical, but reluctantly drops this topic–he knows that it’s going to be a pivotal day for his wife, that she’s most likely nervous as hell and that it would probably help if he kept his kvetching to a bare minimum.

Stan sighs heavily, squeezes a few dollops of the hot sauce onto the egg thing. Now it looks like a bloodshot eye. His appetite disappears.

Last night, Marie had tried explaining why this specific patient was such a special case, but the only technical particular that Stan absorbed before she totally lost him to psychobabbly jargon were something about the frontal lobe of the guy’s brain getting damaged. He’d Googled it later, and the Wikipedia entry jived with everything Marie had said about the guy before–that the injury had whacked out his moral compass, blew away his long-term memories and caused him to regress into a childlike state. Truth be told, it was fascinating shit–and from what Marie had told him, it would be life-changingly huge if she could make any progress rehabilitating this guy.

“And to answer your question, yes. I got you out of bed with a candle, Stan, so I am extremely proud of myself.” She slips him a Judas smirk. “I’ll light a bacon-scented one next time. To keep things exciting.” She slaps a pile of paperclipped coupons onto the table in front of him with such seismic force that some of his orange juice erupts out of his glass. His eggs dance around a little on the plate. Marie winces. “Sorry. Was trying to be dramatic there.” Sheepishly, she hands him a paper towel and heads to the den to watch the news.

“You guys better not be expired,” he tells the coupons. “Or I am seriously going to lose my shit.”

8:42 AM. Stan is shaving blind–the shower had fogged up the bathroom mirror. He nicks his throat, near the Adam’s apple. “Ow.”

Stan had been miserable since retiring from the force in October. He’d missed the policework badly–this newly gifted free time, it was more like blank time, empty time, seconds and minutes and hours that he couldn’t fill because he didn’t know how to anymore. Eventually, he started hovering around Marie ceaselessly, bugging her like the world’s most helpful mosquito, asking maybe eighteen thousand times a day if she needed anything, a snack, the lawn mowed, something vacuumed or whatever.

After a few months of this, Marie took him aside and gently explained that while his helpfulness was great, it was also making her feel homicidal. Just a little. “Hon, all I’m saying is that you’re being so annoying that I really want to kill you,” she’d explained. “I mean, there’s nothing in our vows that specifically forbids murder. At least nothing I can remember offhand.”

“I think it’s sort of implied,” Stan had said, protesting. “In the vows, I mean. And the law’s pretty clear on this.”

But he promised her he’d find something. He sort of dug on being alive. So he’d talked to a couple of his old cop buddies and landed a part-time security gig at some backwoods company way out in the boonies that sold computer circuitry or positrons or something. The contracting firm decided to throw him a four-hour shift (starting later this afternoon, 4:30 to 8:30 PM) to see how he’d do. A test run sorta thing. Mostly desk work, but it’s still something, plus he gets a uniform, a low-intensity electrical taser and a key to the lobby vending machine out of the deal. Which works.

9:35 AM. Stan’s already donned his street clothes and is staring into the bedroom mirror, mentally preparing himself for some savvy shopping, when he hears the clink of Marie’s keys as she grabs them from the kitchen table. That adrenal fear from before blasts him out of nowhere and Stan freaks, charging blindly through the bedroom door. He beelines for the kitchen and almost barrels into Marie, who had been walking from the kitchen to the bedroom to say goodbye.

She pulls back and looks at him, eyes wide. Worry creases little lines on her forehead. The sight almost makes Stan tear up. “Hon, what the hell is with you, exactly?” she asks him.

“This feels like a mistake is all,” he says. His voice cracks a little. He hates himself for it. “This job, I mean.” He swallows. “Maybe I should stay here. To organize the kitchen cabinets, maybe. Or sweep. I could sweep, too.” Swallows again. “I could do both. Maybe at the same time, even.”

“Stan, you’ve been out of work for five months,” she tells him, gently. “Remember when I said I was going to kill you? I really meant it. I mean, Stan, we’re talking permanent death here.”

She smiles. He doesn’t. She tries again. “Hon, this is just the jitters. Stage fright. Like you had the day of the detective’s exam.” She cups his chin with her hand. “And you passed that, remember? You said it was easy.” That was more than 15 years ago, and the panic wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now, but he catches her drift and starts breathing a little more evenly. She kisses him on the nose. “You need this, Stan. As does my sanity. Okay?”

She lets go of him. “You get a taser, remember? That was the biggest selling point for you on this.”

He nods. “And the vending machine.”

“And the vending machine. Also, try to keep in mind that this job amounts to what’s basically four hours of sitting. It’s not like terrorists are going to be invading this specific office building or anything, right?”

He nods again.

“Right. So you’re fine. Nothing is going to happen. It’s jitters. That’s all.” She kisses him again and steps back through the front door, still holding onto one of his hands. “Call me if you get bored.”

She squeezes his hand, lets go. “And smile.” He tries. “I’ll see you later, Stan.”

1:15 PM. After hemming and hawing with reckless abandon at the grocery store, Stan has successfully shopped, put away the groceries and is now pacing and puttering around the house in a fit of nervous spazziness. All other preparations had been made: he’d read all of the documentation from the Iskato Semiconductor Corp. welcome packet, ironed his security shirt, made sure his taser’s battery was charged (he tested it on Fred, the giant mutant houseplant in the kitchen, and Fred didn’t seem to have suffered any serious or long-lasting damage), has packed a little bag of pretzels, an apple and an orange juice box for snacks.

He calls Cassie, his youngest (and favorite) grandchild, and leaves her a long, rambling voicemail about the day’s adventures thus far. Cassie has little to no free time at her job (assignment editor at the local daily, The Atlantic Standard), but Stan still calls her daily and the girl, bless her, indulges him every single time. (Cassandra actually looks forward to her grandfather’s calls, but Stan doesn’t know this and wouldn’t believe it even if she said it to his face.)

Stan scrapes the remainder of his breakfast into the garbage disposal. Does the dishes. Takes out the garbage. For the sake of being a completist, he does end up rearranging the kitchen cabinets and sweeping almost every patch of floor in the house. So Marie won’t have to do it later.

3:21 PM. Stan is waiting patiently at a crosswalk about two blocks away from the Blue Swan Diner, where he’s going to grab a slice of rhubarb pie in retribution for breakfast–and ostensibly to psyche himself up for his desk shift.

The traffic light changes and the sign across the street flicks to WALK. Stan takes a few tentative steps into the road, hears tires squeal and turns to see a Ford Bronco, red and somehow angry looking, bearing down on his exact location. Impressively, he manages to not piss his pants. He isn’t sure how. He’s mentally saying goodbye to his family when someone grabs his shoulders from behind and yanks him back, hard. His teeth click together and he sprawls back into the stranger, gasping a little.

He looks at his rescuer, an average-looking guy with short hair, a white shirt, a tie, no real defining characteristics save for a slightly misshapen boxer’s nose. “Thanks,” Stan manages. He stands. “Good thing you were there.”

The guy looks like he can’t believe he just pulled that off. “Yeah.” He grins. “Right place in the right time, I guess.” He tips Stan sort of a nerdy salute, nods and walks off.

Because narrowly escaping death sure does make a guy hungry, Stan continues on his merry way to the diner. He finds a booth in the back, orders his pie, eats it slowly with absolutely zero guilt. He feels vindicated.

Just now, Stan notices that his rescuer had apparently followed him to the diner and is sitting four booths away from him, trying (and failing) to act inconspicuous. He waits for the guy to use the bathroom–when he does, Stan slips out, shaken. He considers calling in a report, but…the guy did just save his life. So maybe he could let a little creepy stalking slide. Just this once.

4:15 PM. Stan pulls his Jeep Grand Cherokee into the Iskato Seminconductor Corp. parking lot. Corporate-looking types in suits–Stan assumes they’re employees–are filing out of the front door of the place in a frenzied weekend-bound mass workplace exodus. He sits and waits until the last one drives away, then kills the engine, grabs his Iskato welcome packet and starts trudging toward the entrance.

Enclosed in the welcome packet is a small, calculator-sized security passcode generator with no buttons, no dials, nothing on it at all except for a digital readout and a fingerprint identification pad. It displays a six-digit number that, according to page 42 of Stan’s employee orientation binder, changes every 30 minutes as a way of avoiding any potential security breaches. Each employee has a similar security device, which they use to get in and out of the building. Stan isn’t sure why security is so tight: Are the owners secretly diamond thieves? Are there millions of dollars of Kruggerands hidden in the basement?

Stan shrugs and punches in the code. The keypad bleeps cheerily at him, and the doors slide open. “Thanks,” he tells the door. Maybe this isn’t going to be so bad after all.

8:00 PM. Marie had been correct so far. Literally nothing has happened for the last two-and-a-half hours. Right now, Stan’s on page 54 of some book that Cassie had lent him called High Fidelity. He isn’t really getting into it and puts it down with a sigh, wishing he’d brought something else to read, a James Clavell novel, Shogun maybe, something that didn’t involve such a whiny protagonist.

He hears a chime from the computer in front of him. Yes. Something is happening. A little icon shaped like a security camera is blinking at the bottom of his taskbar. He clicks it. Someone–he can’t see the guy’s face, just the outline of a man wearing a long black coat and what looks like a fedora, maybe–is standing like a shadow in front of the front door, completely motionless.

Stan feels a pang of unease. He holds down the intercom button and speaks. “Passcode.” The instructions in the orientation binder had been very specific–don’t greet anyone who visits, don’t ask them who they are. Just ask for the passcode. They couldn’t key it in themselves because Iskato shuts down the keypad after work hours conclude, meaning that Stan needs to type a few commands and punch the MANUAL DOOR OVERRIDE button to admit anyone who recited it correctly.

The guy speaks the six digits in a low whispered monotone. Stan verifies them against the ones displayed on his computer monitor, nods and lets the guy in.

The new arrival approaches the desk, stops and just looks at Stan, his head tilted. His hat shades his face completely. The guy’s body language, to Stan, appears to indicate confusion.

“Why are you here?” he asks. Sandpaper, Stan thinks. That’s what this guy’s voice sounds like. The comparison doesn’t even make sense, but it fits. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Stan studies him, tries to see the guy’s face. He still can’t. “Louie assigned me this job.” The guy doesn’t respond. “From Century Contracting. I’m new.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” the guy repeats, snarling this time, spitting, slamming the palms of his hands on the security desk. The vibration is so strong that Stan, who isn’t even touching the desk, can feel it from where he’s sitting. And now, he can see the guy’s fingernails are horrifically long. Like bird talons. Or claws.

Shitshitshitshitshit, Stan thinks. Shit. He doesn’t even bother reaching for the taser and chooses, instead, to just swing on the guy and hope he catches him off guard. He cocks his arm back to punch, but that’s as far as he gets before the guy in the coat lunges at him, rakes at his throat. Stan doesn’t even feel it. His mind, mercifully, is blocking out the pain. He isn’t fully aware that he’s dying, but he can see things getting dark and for some reason, he’s totally okay with it.

He closes his eyes and hears Marie’s voice. Smile, hon. It sounds very far away. I’ll see you later.

This makes him smile. He forces his eyes open, tries again to see his attacker’s face. All he sees are two red eyes, tiny black pupils. He locks gazes with the guy. “You know,” he croaks, “I wish you hadn’t done that.” He swallows. “Because I would have loved to tase you, asshole.”

Things fade out completely, and Stan’s eyes shut for absolutely the last time ever.

8:42 PM. The guy in the coat has a name–his friends and colleagues don’t go around calling him Coat Guy or Dr. Claw, nothing like that–but it isn’t really pronounceable by the human tongue. It just sounds like a series of random, guttural howls. Written down, it looks like a bunch of squiggles, nothing intelligible. And it turns out that Stan’s analysis of the guy’s body language was accurate–the guy is confused, because he can’t understand why he’s looking at Stan’s body at all. Because steps had been taken. Stanley Ulysses Leonard should have been dead a little less than five hours ago, but someone or something had intervened. It’s a tiny chink in the plan. This has never happened to the guy in the coat before. He can’t quite comprehend it, but he knows he doesn’t like it.

He’s preparing to move Stan’s body when he hears a car pull up. The engine shuts off. A door slams.

The guy listens. Based on the gait, whoever is approaching the building is dragging one of his feet a little, like he has a slight limp. He nods. Good. This is supposed to happen. He ducks around the desk and taps a few keys, waiving the security code restriction on the front door to allow his new visitor easy access to the lobby.

The body is going to have to stay here for now. But he figures that once all three of his special guests have arrived, one stray body really isn’t going to make too much of a difference.

The guy starts walking away and pauses, looking at Stan’s body. Though he doesn’t feel any pity, exactly–that’s foreign to him–he does understand the concept of unfairness, and he sees it here. He shrugs, turns away and walks deeper into the building. Collateral damage.

But hey. At the very least, Stan remained an all-around, stand-up kinda guy. Even to the very end. Ask anyone.

Ollie, sitting fetal in the shotgun seat of Paul’s stalled-out SUV, is growing stressed, rocking back and forth, staring straight ahead into oblivion. His eyes are like the ones on glazed china dolls, chips of green glass, colorful and vibrant, unblinking and sightless, just barely hiding the fact that there’s really nothing there anymore.

The car had stalled out on a winding, curving, tree-lined dirt road, about a mile away from the job site. Paul had managed to maneuver his trusty steed–a 2005 Ford Escape, tan, the color of his hair, his unkempt sideburns, his eyes, his beard stubble–to the side of the road before it ground to a wheezy halt.

Paul hadn’t been able to get Ollie to take the Sominex. He didn’t know why. He’d had it down to a science: Just crush four of the pills, dump the granules into the big guy’s smiley-face Thermos of hot chocolate and hand the potent blend of cocoa, marshmallow and over-the-counter sedative to his friend for consumption. Thing is, memories–bad ones–tend to resurface when Ollie’s in a moving vehicle. Makes him difficult to manage. It was actually Ian who’d come up with the sedative strategy, and Paul, once he’d done enough research on over-the-counter sleep aids to determine that it’s impossible to overdose on them, reluctantly agreed to give it a shot.

And as it turned out, it did make most car rides smoother. Generally.

But this time had been different. Ollie had freaked, thrown the mother of all conniption fits and batted the Thermos away with a teakettle shriek, sloshing its contents all over the center console. Luckily, Paul had managed to keep him distracted for most of the car ride simply by handing him some McDonald’s napkins and instructing him to clean up the spill. Ollie’s fascinated by simple, menial tasks. It’s why he’s so good with demolition.

“Ollie,” Paul says now, quietly. No response. Just more rocking, more staring. Again: “Ollie.” He touches the big guy’s shoulder. Ollie jerks spasmodically, shrinks against the car door, his eyes saucers. Paul puts his palms up, peace. “It’s okay. We’re stopped.” He jabs a thumb toward the back of the car. “I’m gonna pop the trunk. Go get the blue and red toolboxes and put them on the ground for me. Okay?”

Ollie nods. “K,” he says, exiting. He rarely speaks more than one syllable anymore.

Paul turns his attention to the glowing yellow Check Engine light on his dashboard, glaring at it, as if he could will the vehicle to repair itself through sheer telekinetic force. The keys are still in the ignition: It chimes a staccato ding, taunting him.

The Escape had been gifted to him by his mother ten years ago, almost immediately following the 10:11 incident, when Ollie had accidentally killed that little kid. The car was for protection, she’d said: It had high safety ratings, five-star marks for both frontal and side impact crash tests, airbags sprinkled with enchanted fairy dust, +5 chainmail bumpers, whatever.

But none of that really mattered, because Paul was only going to drive it to exactly one place and that one place was the nearest airport, where he’d ditch the thing in long-term parking and go on his merry way. He and motor vehicles, they were through, done, broken up for good due to irreconcilable differences, and he was now ready for a long and fruitful relationship with the city’s public transit system. Because public transit was safe, and it was easy, and it wasn’t messy. No one gets hurt. However, Paul had realized something that night as he weaved his way through traffic on the way to the airport–he felt fearless in that thing. He felt safe. It was the one damn place where he felt safe.

So he kept it. For protection.

Now, Paul is stalling, avoiding the inevitable. He chews his bottom lip. Takes off his glasses, chews those for a little bit. Chews a thumbnail. Runs out of things to chew. He hears the metallic clang of Ollie spilling one of the toolboxes in the background. He sighs and twists the keys, one more time, for posterity’s sake. The Escape sputters once and sputters no more, sadly coughing out a wisp of pale exhaust that Paul watches in the rearview as it wafts up, snakelike, into the night sky.

He feels a deep, jolting pang of loss as he removes the keys from the ignition.

The dashboard light flashes again in Paul’s periphery. Red, this time. He glances up. Before, the light had looked like a little yellow engine.

Now it’s a little red tombstone, above the words You’re Dead.

He has a flash of something in his vision: The blueprints, the ones he’d looked at back in the office. The ones with the wrong angles. Paul opens his mouth to scream but finds that he can’t, he can’t do it, he can only manage a dry, dusty wheeze and now, oh god, something’s thwacking against the driver’s side window and he jerks left, his head ricocheting off the glass. The thwack turns out to be Ollie, his face pressed up against the window in a ghoulish deathmask. He grins and runs off.

Paul stares after him in disbelief for a beat. He turns back to the dashboard, where the Check Engine light actually says Check Engine and is back to its normal amber hue. His anxiety is still in the red, maybe past red.

His phone buzzes. It’s Handy, who, over the course of the last several minutes, has quickly metamorphosed from an enigmatic, mysterious-yet-friendly webmaster for a freelance construction job website into something more like an especially clingy eighth-grade girlfriend with stalking tendencies. He had texted Paul six times on the way to the job site, asking for updates, and Paul had eventually started ignoring the messages.

But Paul texts back now: Technical difficulties. Mile away. Need to walk it. Status?

Handy: Ian surveying sub-basement. Just spoke with him. All is well. Crew arriving in an hour.

Paul: Be there in 15.

He calls Ian. It goes straight to voicemail. Paul has not quite embraced the technical age, and has put off purchasing a smartphone for as long as possible. So no email, no Internet. He uses a flip phone instead, as he enjoys the clicky sound it makes when he snaps it shut. He does that now and drops it into his jacket pocket. He retrieves his flashlight, flicks it on and exits his vehicle, signalling Ollie to grab the toolboxes, we’re going.

Paul shuts the Escape’s door, gently, and just looks at it for a minute. Saying goodbye. He suddenly feels very alone.

Ollie’s already walking up ahead, swinging the two toolboxes cheerfully.

“No escape now,” Paul says under his breath. He and his flashlight beam follow.

During the not-so-halcyon days of his youth, Heck had always been fascinated by abandoned places: decaying buildings, schools, hospitals and houses with no families, no patients, no students, no people. Just dust motes and silence and shadows behind locked doors and boarded-up windows, the buildings themselves choked with weeds, caked with rot, condemned, old and forgotten. He’d spent month after month at the library in a microfiche-reading frenzy, studying the history of these buildings and tracing the lives of the people who had occupied them: When they were born, when they lived, what they did, when they died.

People were much more interesting after they’re gone, he’d thought. Not so much when they’re still there.

Heck explored all of these places, walking down dark, dead and lonely hallways without a flashlight. He didn’t need one. Heck had what his ophthalmologist called a tapetum lucidum, an extra layer of tissue behind his retina that can somehow bounce extra light back to said retina, thus increasing the amount of light received by the eye’s photoreceptors. Or something. Heck had been seven months old at the time and had been far too busy drooling and cooing and trying not to shit on the exam table to really comprehend the technicalities of it all.

What all this means is that Hector has nightvision. He can see in the dark. Most vertebrates, cows and dogs and the like, have the extra layer of tissue that allows for this ability, but no humans. Except him. His mother, fearing media exposure of her son’s sort-of-awesome genetic abnormality, packed up their things and left their dingy one-room apartment for a similarly dingy one-room apartment three states over. She never took him to the eye doctor again.

This sort of thing has its uses, especially in creepy, dark, unfamiliar places like the one Hector is currently standing in. He’d trailed the guy he was following to an office park and watched from the bushes as the mark removed his sunglasses and entered one of the buildings through sliding gunmetal-gray doors. The signage outside claimed that it housed the offices of Miskato Semiconductor Corp. Heck’s aversion to technology was almost a phobia, and that aversion extended to words that sounded even remotely technical. (His MP3 player — a generic gray thing, thick and bulky, containing roughly two terabytes of random music — is the only exception. He finds that having a soundtrack tends to jack up the adrenal high he gets from following his marks. It also helps him blend into crowds.) It was enough to almost make him cancel the Follow entirely, but Box Elder, by Pavement, had just started playing through his headphones, and Hector found that song so jaunty and upbeat that he figured hey, what the hell, let’s roll. He waited thirty nervous seconds and slipped inside.

And hey! The entrance lobby actually looks pretty friendly at first glance: nice plush leather couches, glass tables, the walls and ceiling painted with soothing shades of blues. Each corner of the room holds a little cluster of potted plants that, despite Hector not having a master’s degree in botany or plant health, whatever, look like they’re doing pretty much okay. Overall, it’s just a really, really welcoming little entrance area and it appears that there is nary a conductor in sight, semi or otherwise.

The doors snap shut behind him, leaving him in darkness. Which, of course, is fine by him.

He scans the room. Box Elder continues to be jaunty and upbeat, and Hector is kind of bobbing his head to the music. Good times! Sure, the mark is nowhere to be found, but maybe there’s some coffee somewhere. Or some donuts. He’d find some snacks, poke around a little bit and depart.

Following is trickier than it looks: you need to have really, really sharp observational skills. You’ve got to stay on the lookout for cops, for suspicious passersby, for shortcuts in case the mark gets too far away and you need to make up for lost time. So, to Heck’s credit, he ends up spotting the corpse pretty quickly, just as the happy sounds of Box Elder give way to the much more menacing guitars of Maybe, Maybe.

He removes his headphones with shaking hands.

This has never happened before, and the anomaly throws him. He sucks in his breath through his teeth. A primal fight-or-flight response kicks in: His fists and teeth are both clenched and he can feel his body trembling. His eyes are darting this way, that way, but there’s still no one in the room…except there’s something on the ground, a rectangular, glossy black something, possibly a phone. His mark’s phone. He’s still here.

“Hello? Anyone here?” Pause. “I saw you walk in. You dropped your phone.” Still nothing. “If you killed this guy, you probably shouldn’t try to charge me or attack me or whatever. I can probably kick your ass. You know, big time.” He’s going for an intimidating tone, but the end result is more squeaky than scary. “So.”

He hears a shuffling. The guy must have moved: a blue sneaker is poking out from behind the guard’s workstation. “Nice shoes. Converse?”

This startles the guy into speaking. “How the hell can you see my sneaker?” A beat. “Yes, they’re Converses.”

Heck doesn’t reply to the guy’s question — he doesn’t usually reveal the nightvision thing to strangers, as it tends to freak people out — and instead starts scanning the walls for a light switch. He doesn’t find one, but he does find a raised square touchpad thing with beveled edges on one wall. He lays a palm on it: after a second or two, the room starts glowing with artificial white light.

The guy crawls out from behind the desk and blinks his eyes shut hard, as if in pain. Fishes around in one pocket, retrieves his sunglasses and plants them on his face. He looks at Heck, sizes him up. “I saw you at the Swan. Toward the back.”

Heck is both impressed and a little alarmed that his mark had recognized him. “Yeah. I followed you.” A pregnant pause. The guy looks at him kind of funny. Heck’s never actually been caught following anyone before, so he’s sort of at a loss as to how to proceed. “No real reason. Just a thing that I do.”

His mark now looks like he’s slowly coming to the realization that he’s standing in the room with a deranged bear, maybe a protege of Charles Manson or something. “That’s fine. Listen, yeah, I’m going to leave. You cool with dealing with the corpse?” He starts for the door. “Sort of weary of corpses.”

Heck looks at him, puzzled. “Are you an undertaker or something?”

Still walking: “No. I’m not an undertaker. My retarded idiot friend ran over a little kid ten years ago and I got to sit there with her as she died. So, yeah, I’ve seen way too many dead bodies in my lifetime, thanks. I’m pretty much done with dead bodies. Bye.” He keeps going.

“Where was your friend?” Heck asks the guy’s retreating back. No response. “Retarded is offensive, by the way,” he sidebars. “The appropriate term is mentally handicapped. And he probably shouldn’t have been driving. If he was, you know, retarded. Mentally handicapped or whatever.”

The guy stops, but doesn’t turn around. “He wasn’t retarded when he was driving the car. He became retarded later.” A beat. “Not that it’s any of your business, seeing as how you’re a creepy stalker and whatnot. And guess what? I really don’t give a shit if it’s offensive. The guy’s a retard. He’s also an asshole. After he killed the girl, he just ran away. To McDonald’s. For some goddamn chicken nugg–”

The guy stops midsentence. “But why…” Heck begins. The guys shushes him. “Shut up. Listen.”

Heck listens. “Yeah.” He hears it. It sounds like something is scrabbling in the walls. “Rats?”

Thud. “That’s not a rat.” Their eyes follow the sound to one of the walls. Another thud. Louder this time. Hairline cracks are appearing in the wall now. “Oh, Christ. Time to go.” The guy starts for the door, Heck behind him.

Too late. The wall explodes outward, spraying the two of them with chunks of blue drywall. Something runs out. Heck can barely get a glimpse of it — it’s too fast. But it looks humanoid, child-sized. Naked. Its arms end in…points. Sharp points. Teeth. A pink mouth with lots and lots of teeth. It’s scampering around the room, a blur that Heck can’t track.

“Oh my Chriiiiist,” the guy says. The thing is charging the mark. He throws his hands up…but the thing runs right past him and latches, instead, onto Heck’s face.

Heck screams, tries to bat the thing off. Its claws rake his face, his eyes. He falls backward, the pain blistering and white-hot, like someone had taken a cheese grater to his brain. Heck, flailing about, manages to blindly latch one hand onto the back of the thing’s scalp. It feels like he’s grabbing a rubber Halloween mask coated with vegetable oil, maybe — and yanks. The thing detaches and Heck cracks its head against the floor twice, three times, many many more times until it stops moving.

As Heck lay on the ground, a memory comes to him. It was the last time he’d ever explored one of his abandoned places. He’d been thirteen.

The thing about abandoned places: They’re really not as exciting as they sound. Most of them had already been cleared out by looters, but a few things — usually aged appliances, stoves and sinks and the like — were still there, quietly rusting away. This one house had a refrigerator in the attic, for some reason. It was the only thing in there. Something about its pitted, pockmarked surface scared Heck, filled him with a dread so palpable that he could almost feel it wafting off his body like fever heat. But he needed to see inside.

He creaked the lid open. An animal skull, a cat or fox or something, greeted him. Hi there! it said, its mouth a frozen, smiling rictus. Nothing else. Kids probably put it there, Heck realized. What Heck didn’t realize, though, was that four boys from his middle school had followed him there. Heck recognized one of them, redheaded and freckled and sneering, as the recipient of Heck’s foot to his testicles and Heck’s knee to his face after an ill-advised attempt to steal Hector’s backpack that day. He apparently held a grudge, Heck deduced, shortly before a group ass-beating commenced. A steel-toed boot brought first stars, then darkness. He awoke in a cramped place, unable to move. His friend, the skull, sat on a shelf next to him, still smiling. Heck’s face was plastered against the inside of the refrigerator door. All he could see was white.

An hour later, one of the boys, a kid with glasses and freckles, returned and unlatched the refrigerator door out of guilt. Hector burst out, wheezing, sobbing, and ran. He ended up at a Seven-Eleven. He hid there, behind the store, for hours. Heck really started avoiding people after that.

Now, as he lay on his back, it’s like he’s back in that refrigerator. He sees nothing at all, his vision whitewashed. His hearing still works — he knows this because he can hear his mark’s footsteps retreating further and further away. “Sorry!” he hears the guy say.

Heck — thirteen years old, once again — lets out a single, choked sob.

I hear the lobby doors close behind me. They seal with a pneumatic hiss. The room, cavernous, metallic, sterile, had been at least dimly lit by the moonlight. It’s pitch black now. Which is fantastic news. I’m in the dark, unarmed (I’d left my backpack, along with any objects that could potentially be used as weapons, sitting on the passenger seat in my car), just maxing and relaxing with the second freshly killed corpse I’ve ever encountered in my lifetime and seriously, being near a corpse is not any more fun the second time around. It really isn’t.

I pull out my smartphone — my hands are shaking, they’re shaking really really bad right now — and start composing a threatening email to Handy, one rife with expletives, to take my mind off things. Things like the dead guy in the room. The phone provides a little light, I’m noticing now, so I start brandishing it, waving it around like the world’s shittiest flashlight.

The beam illuminates Dead Guy, slumped facedown on his keyboard, arms splayed. Orange polo shirt, SECURITY stitched in blue on one sleeve, a shock of white hair poking out from underneath a trucker cap and yup, he is most definitely still dead. His computer monitor is also facedown, perhaps in sympathy for its owner, and there is a ton of blood all over the keyboard, and the desk, and pretty much everywhere, and the freakout I’m currently experiencing is made about six thousand times worse by the pills I’d taken an hour ago. Rather than dialing 911, I go to call Paul, to warn him away from this place.

I make it six digits in when the phone dies. Things go dark again. Full dark.

Realization sets in: I can’t see the lobby doors, can’t remember what direction they’re in. Something is skittering in the walls. I can’t pinpoint where the sound is coming from. I remain unarmed. I swipe my phone’s touchscreen with a shaking finger. Nothing happens. I fumble at the phone again, and this time it slips out of my hands, clatters to the ground.

I panic and lurch straight ahead, running into the desk that makes up Dead Guy’s security station and cracking my knee, hard, into the wood. I stop and just stand there for a minute, in the silence and the dark, my eyes shut, breathing hard, trying to find my chi, my center, whatever.

I count to ten, slowly, and reopen my eyes. I still don’t know where the lobby doors are. And it is still dark. Adjective. The absence of light.

Wait. Not completely. I must have jostled something during my brush with the desk and knocked the computer out of sleep mode. A few tiny bits of light leak from the computer monitor, still facedown. Realizing that I’m disturbing a crime scene, I wheel the guard’s chair left, lift up the monitor and peer at the screen. It, too, is almost completely dark, save for a flashing text cursor and the words input login: in flickering white letters.

For a second, I consider trying to hack into the system — at the very least, I could use this workstation to email Paul and tell him to alert the cops — before realizing that I, unlike Paul, lack the technical wherewithal to hack the coin slot on a Galaga arcade cabinet, much less a security terminal. But I reason that Dead Guy has a badge with his login information on it, maybe.

Grimly, I grab a tuft of his hair — his cap falls off and it, oddly, looks like it has Japanese kanji on it, above the bill — and lift his head off the keyboard. I pull harder until the body flops back into the office chair with all the dead weight of a department store mannequin. Now it looks like he’s just bored, staring at the ceiling, taking a little siesta, maybe. No badge, but the polo shirt’s embroidery tells me that Dead Guy’s name was Stan.

“Sorry, Stan,” I tell him. I mean it. The guy looked like he could be someone’s grandfather, maybe. Stan’s throat looks slashed, I see now.

No. Not slashed. It looks chewed.

Something lands on my arm. I look down. A spider’s eight eyes, red as blood rubies, look dully back at me. I swipe it off my arm, shivering with dread, and stomp the thing five, six times. As I go in for a seventh, just to make sure it’s dead, I hear the skittering in the walls again. It sounds closer now. Louder.

I hear a hiss. The lobby doors whir open.

Moonlight blinds me.

Across the street, though, that’s where the comparatively interesting stuff is. Trees, for example, black walnuts, planted by the town’s Shade Tree Commission five or six years ago. Like a little wooden Stonehenge, they encircle a children’s park, complete with swings and slides and teeter-totters and plastic painted smiling bouncy horses and all that jazz. A little fountain in the middle squirts water; little cavorting stone birds are carved into the base. There are three benches positioned around it, green and slatted. Two streetlights, flanking the break in the trees that permits access to the park, guard the whole tableau.

It makes Paul nervous to look at it. The park becomes sinister at night, the swings more menacing, the tree branches more clawlike, the horses more like evil demon horses. Their smiling horsey faces contort into something different, something grimacing and alien, and everything about the scene is twisted and wrong and distorted. Movie theaters, hospitals, restaurants, bars, streets, street corners, alleyways, train stations, convenience stores, and conversations with other people all tend to have the same effect on Paul at night. So he tries to avoid all of those things. When possible.

Every five minutes, though, he forces himself to look out the window at the playground to make sure that Ollie, seated on one of the three benches, is in his line of sight, lest the guy wakes up and pisses his pants or wanders off into the middle of traffic or tries to eat something that he shouldn’t (earlier, he had eaten two ballpoint pens and had been halfway through a third before Paul noticed and banished him from the office). But the big guy’s still asleep, one fist propping his chin up, looking ike a modern-day, living reproduction of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker. But with the mind of a six-year-old, Larry Fine hair and an affinity for denim overalls.

To stay busy, Klein has been futzing with paperwork, crunching various numbers that need to be crunched, and performing lots and lots of really important office duties at the frenetic pace of a cashier ringing up groceries on amphetamines. It helps him keep his mind off more critical things, like Ollie’s deteriorating mental condition (it was worsening far more rapidly than his neurologist had predicted) or the team’s similarly deteriorating bank account (the team has broken a personal record at a solid six weeks, with zero work to show for it).

A polite ding! from the computer snaps him out of the zone. The email is from Ian, and it’s short. The main points include:

1. Ian has accepted a 72-hour job from fullmetalbracket.com. At 8:00 PM on a Friday night. (Not that any of the team’s three members had anything planned.)
2. It’s easy, he claims. It’s busting up some walls in an office building. We can have the retard do it. He goes apeshit for that stuff. Paul winces at this. Ian is not a huge proponent of forgiving. Or forgetting.
3. The job also entails some wiring or cabling or whatever that should be super easy for you. Paul rolls his eyes.
4. Ian would like Paul to please bring food, thanks. He does not go into any more detail.

Below all of this is a unique, nine-digit hexadecimal thumbprint (Paul writes it down), part of an algorithm used to decrypt any ancillary files attached to a particular job. Below that is a hyperlink (Paul clicks it) leading to the job page. The web browser hangs, then the entire computer follows suit. Annoyed, Paul glances outside and notices, now alarmed, that Ollie is no longer sitting on the bench.

His stomach drops, then rights itself as Paul sees that it’s okay, Ollie has only switched benches, but now his back is facing toward the office window now and it looks to Paul like he’s still dead asleep, still in the Thinker pose.

Paul is unsettled, and is content to continue being unsettled, but is distracted by the sounds of the office computer resurrecting itself. Its hard drive spins and whirs from beyond the grave and eventually defibrillates itself back to life, and the screen is now displaying a convoluted soup of numbers and letters that makes up the project description for job #16998. Right now, Paul is busy focusing on the word uninterrupted, as in uninterrupted 72-hour job, as in the job that Paul now realizes is impossible to finish with a three-person team because it involves extensive demolition across eight of the building’s ten stories, plus wiring throughout the entire facility, including its basement and sub-basement, and Paul supposes that Ian did not read any of that.

Uninterrupted jobs are reserved for contracting teams that have thirty or forty workers immediately on hand for the job: They have to be completed exactly 72 hours after acceptance of the job. There is no way their three-person team has any chance of completing it. Paul is looking for the job cancel link but can’t find it, even though he’s canceled jobs before and the link is always in the upper-right. It’s just not there.

He grabs the landline, dials FMB’s customer service department to cancel manually. He’s on hold, listening to a muzak version of Springsteen’s Hungry Heart, and clicks the project blueprint link out of professional curiosity. Keys in the decrypt code. Lines, angles, squiggles, squares and rectangles pop up on the screen. Paul studies them.

“The angles are wrong,” he says, aloud. He doesn’t remember saying this later and even if he did, he wouldn’t have known what he meant, wouldn’t have thought it significant.

A car whizzes by outside, its tires kicking up a spray of water. The splash jolts Paul out of his reverie. He’s lost 24 minutes—they’d just vanished, gone into the ether somewhere—and has somehow fallen backward out of his chair. He observes the lightning bolt crack from his current vantage point on the floor. It looks like an EKG readout.

His foot is tangled in phone cord. He extracts his leg, gets up, brushes off his clothes, and sees he has yanked the phone jack completely out of the wall. Out the window, Ollie is now sitting on bench three, same pose. One of the tree branches looks like it’s reaching out to grab him from behind.

Shuddering, Paul turns back to the computer, sees the blueprints are onscreen, averts his eyes and alt-tabs out of the window, though he’s not quite sure why. He uses his smartphone to send Ian an email that is brief and to the point: he has a bad feeling about this job, Ollie is not doing well, and please let him know when he’s gotten this email because his thing is happening again so it’s probably not a good idea for them to do this. He sends it and (accurately) predicts that he will not receive a reply. Paul thinks about sending a follow-up email, one that would remind Ian that his bad feelings were usually accurate, that the last time he’d had one, years ago, an eight-year-old child had died by way of Ollie’s green Buick Regal, which ultimately led to Ollie’s brain damage, Ian’s limp and photosensitivity, the “thing” that keeps happening to Paul.

But he needs to cancel the job before the 15-minute grace period ends. Alt-tabbing back to FMB, Paul sees the job cancellation link is back. His spirits lift; he grins and exhales a puff of air that he didn’t even know he was holding. He starts guiding the cursor toward the link when a chat window appears, the buddy icon an anthropomorphic grinning claw hammer with the word HANDY etched on the handle. Handy, the site’s proprietor, is mysterious almost to the point of self-parody, which is why Paul found it odd that the guy had started chatting him up online a few weeks ago about random topics: roofing materials, Chinese food, cats, the Atari game Pitfall. Paul had gone along with it. Handy scared him. And he knew some interesting trivia about Pitfall.

—Shouldn’t you be on the road by now? Your buddy already left.
—My buddy should have never accepted the job in the first place. There’s no way we can complete this in time. It’s not physically possible.
—That was actually my fault: I miscategorized that job when I added it to the database. Just get as much as you can done in 72 hours: I’ll send a team out to assist. You’ll still get paid.

Paul considers. Glances out at Ollie, who is now laying prone on bench two.

—Okay. I’ll need to contact Ian for directions, and I’ll need access to the wireless network at the job site to access the project schematics. Is that cool?
—I just talked to Ian. He’s there already. He just got through security. But the directions have probably been autodeleted from the phone. I’ll send those, and the network key, to your phone,
—Thanks for doing this, Handy. Ian sound okay?
—He sounded fine.

The chat window winks out of existence. Paul logs out with one hand and yanks the bottom desk drawer open with the other, rustling through it until he uncovers his flashlight, brushed steel and familiar. He hefts it in his hand and immediately feels better, braver, ready for the elevator ride to the ground floor. He also takes extra batteries for the flashlight and four Sominex, to sedate Ollie for the car ride. As he walks out, he doesn’t notice that when he fell out of his chair during his episode, he’d ripped the Ethernet cable out of the back of the computer, too.

Hector Drogan’s thing is following. He follows people he sees on the streets, in restaurants, in bars, in laundromats. Heck worried, at first, that this could be a symptom of some dark, deep-seated behavioral issues, maybe some sociopathic tendencies he’d developed as a kid that had been dormant for years.

But no. He’d seen it in a movie once. He’d been bored, so he started doing it. And now he can’t stop.

Still, Heck knows that it’s something of a creepy hobby. So he justifies things to himself by only following people if there’s a specific reason to do so. Like if they could potentially be in danger, maybe. Or if it’s possible that they could be up to no good, to some nefarious plan. Like if he sees a suspicious-looking guy somewhere, you can bet your ass that Heck is going to follow the living hell out of that guy, just in case he’s up to something that is actually suspicious. Or if he sees a drunk couple giggling down the street at two in the morning after a party, something like that, Heck is by all means going to follow them too. Because, you know, two in the morning? That’s when all of the crackheads and the muggers and the ninjas come out. The streets are dangerous.

By all other accounts, Heck is pretty much a normal guy. Bland, even. He keeps his hair trimmed short. He works out, stays in shape. He has no visible markings on his face, no moles, no scars, no piercings. His only distinguishing facial characteristic is a slightly upturned pug nose, a souvenir from repeatedly getting punched in the face during a very brief stint in his alma mater’s boxing program. He’s a rebate analyst for a company that produces rubber materials: mostly condoms, pencil erasers and balloons. He dresses neatly. Solid tie, pressed white shirt, brown pants, brown shoes, brown belt. He pays his bills on time. His neighbors like him. His colleagues like him, too. He plays poker with five of his buddies on Wednesday nights and usually wins.

He just has this one little quirk, something that’s more of a noble pursuit if you think about it, really.

Generally, though, the people Hector follows—he calls them his marks—don’t go anywhere or do anything notable. There are exceptions: he’d stopped a burglary once, without resorting to violence. He’d just sauntered out of the shadows, walked right up to the perp and flexed his biceps menacingly. Narrowed his eyes and gave the guy a really withering stare. The would-be thief (who was dressed up in black, plus a black ski mask accessory, like he’d been planning to break into the Louvre to make a run at some ancient Egyptian urns, maybe) blanched, turned tail and fled.

And one other time, he’d been following a woman home from the supermarket when she tripped, stumbled and dropped her bags all over the sidewalk. Heck helped pick them up. After she’d thanked him and left, Heck waited for fifteen seconds and followed her the rest of the way home. Just in case she dropped the groceries again. It could happen.

But mostly? Heck’s marks go to work, they go out to eat, they shop. Later, they go home. That’s all there is.

Hector has a list of good following locations that he keeps in his wallet—he’d used this list to select his current venue, a diner known for its Friday night crowds. If you were to look at him, you’d figure he’s just some guy sitting alone in a corner booth, picking his way through a Cobb salad and reading A Farewell to Arms.

But he’s actually surveilling his current mark, a haggard, scruffy looking guy who is wearing sunglasses indoors. Sunglasses has been staring blankly at a laptop for the last hour, occasionally typing something, clicking something. There is something off about him. His hands shake constantly. Hector suspects illicit drug use.

After thirty more agonizing minutes of watching Sunglasses type, then click, then stare off into the distance, Hector observes as he pops a couple of strange blue pills into his mouth. Hector nods to himself. Sunglasses’ clicking and typing become more frenzied. Eventually, he finishes his business, rises, snaps the laptop shut and dumps it unceremoniously into an orange backpack. He limps toward the exit, favoring his right leg.

Heck smiles. It’s easy to follow orange.

I’m here for the eggs (poached), the coffee (unlimited refills) and the free wireless Internet. As my team’s only proactive member, I am trying to find some freelance work, and it has been a staggeringly tedious process of sifting through message boards at more than eighty little hole-in-the-wall type websites, most of which have been graffitied with spam messages. I am starting to get bored, irritable. I haven’t slept for 20 hours. The caffeine pills I took in the afternoon have worn off, they’re not blocking the adenosine levels in my brain anymore, and my vision is starting to get swimmy. I shake two little blue pills out of the packet I keep in my jacket and crunch them between my teeth.

I decide to dick around for a few minutes while waiting for the pills to kick in. I watch the rain through the window. I stare blankly at the ceiling, inspecting it for water stains. Feeling suddenly artistic, I use a piece of toast to try and draw a happy face on my plate with leftover yolk, but I somehow end up with one of the angry smileys with the arched eyebrows. It leers at me.

Forty-five minutes go by. The pills have kicked in. I’m feeling edgy and jittery, but my brain is knife-blade sharp. I spin my laptop around to face me and tap a key, dispelling the flying toaster screensaver off to whatever hell it is that flying toasters eventually end up in. Fingers crossed, I click open my web browser’s bookmark list and click the entry for fullmetalbracket.com, my go-to site for fast cash gained through very little physical effort. FMB has been down for about three hours—its extreme popularity means it’s also extremely prone to server shutdowns.

The guy who owns this domain calls himself Handy, by the way, and the guy (or girl) is a total cipher. He operates one read-only message board where he posts lucrative, high-end side jobs for general contractors, easy gigs like cabinet installation or bathroom remodeling commissioned by people who (a) end up way overpaying for the work performed and (b) generally have the money to blow anyway, so I don’t feel too too bad about taking it. He is obviously a fan of the films of Stanley Kubrick. But aside from that, no one knows who he is. He does not answer personal messages. Site memberships are invitation-only (Paul got one somehow) and the whole thing is almost self-consciously mysterious.

But the jobs are all reliable, and it looks like Handy did reboot the server. It must have been recent: I’m the only person online.

It feels strange, like I’m in an empty movie theater. I don’t like it.

But there is one open job posting on the message board. I see the fee (5K) and the project timetable (72 hours worth of work). The post is a minute old. I grin and click the ACCEPT button, sight unseen, and skim the project summary. About 65% of the job is demo, a few walls here and there. Some wiring (networking cables, if I’m reading this right) and cleanup. And that’s it.

I forward the link along to Paul at the office, along with a message telling him that I’ll meet him and Ollie at the job site. “Bring the tools,” I type. “And food,” I add, an afterthought.

Handy’s associates value their privacy, so any contractor who accepts a job through FMB goes in blind. Addresses aren’t listed with the job specs. Contractors are directed to the job site via text messages sent to their smartphones, and anyone who reveals a job location publicly after the fact is blacklisted from FMB. I’ve seen it happen.

My phone buzzes at me with the first of several step-by-step directions—it’s directing me to the highway. As I start packing up, my laptop bleats at me, indicating a new email. It’s from Paul, who is claiming that he has a “bad feeling” about the job. He also informs me, in a postscript, that he doesn’t think that Ollie’s up to working this weekend because he is having one of his “episodes” and “just ate two pens.” I click delete. Ollie eats pens all the time. It doesn’t impact his work. And Paul is nervous about everything. He was nervous about a milkshake I bought him the other day, because he feared poison.

When I get to the job site—a ten-story corporate office—a freshly dead security guard is there to greet me. I feel a vibration from my jacket pocket. I pull the phone out of my pocket, study it.

It’s a message from Handy. I feel honored and important until I see what it says. “Sorry,” it reads.