Marcus Svenson's page

The hallway, as far as could be ascertained, was empty. Watching for a few seconds longer, you spy one of your neighbors sticking their head out the door in an exploratory manner, then quickly retreating inside to latch the door again. It remains quiet for a moment longer, then you hear more footsteps upstairs... and the sound of something heavy being dragged.

Marcus took a deep breath and centered himself, feeding everything into that inner black hole of calm he had developed over the years. He remembered vividly the surprise of his mentor in the parkour club he had joined a few years ago.

"Marcus," he had said, "what most people don't realize about parkour is that it's not how fit you are. Fitness helps, but it's really all about the mind set, your mental state. You have to reach a point where you're not thinking about how to get over or around something, you just do it, become one with your environment. You already seem to have that part down."

What Marcus hadn't told him about was all the time spent as a child and teenager trying to develop just that attitude. Too many books maybe, but he had asked friends to throw pennies at random times when he wasn't looking. His theory was that eventually he would get so tired of being hit in the head with pennies that he would sense when it was about to happen. It had worked, eventually, partially. Sometimes he would KNOW that his friend was about to throw one. Also, he really, really hated pennies now.

Marcus took another deep breath. Whatever was going on here tonight gave him a very bad feeling. He heard Jake's voice again. "Just remember dude, however bad you think things are, no matter how weird the situation, it's both worse and weirder than you think."

He did a quick check.

Mossberg in the left side of the trench coat, ready to be drawn with the right hand. Machete in a specially made sheath across the back. Plan is to run down the hallway, up the stairs and see what's going on.

Marcus retightened the night vision goggles, focused his ears and nose, opened the door, and moved.

I leaned forward intently as the ball headed down. This would not only be a win, but they'd beat the spread too, and I had five hundred riding on this game.

When the power went off, I'm a little embarrassed to admit that my first thought was about the brand new UPS I had just hooked up to the tv YESTERDAY, and those jerks at Amazon were going to be hearing about this ASAP. After a second the scream registered, and unbidden, the last words I'd heard Jake say replayed through my head. "Oh yeah, remember, don't trust too much in your high tech stuff. Sometimes the old ways, the simple ways, work best."

Unfortunately, the memory of his voice brought to mind the memory of his appearance there on a slab in the morgue. Guts pulled out, knotted around his neck, wrists and ankles like shackles. The deep cuts all over his body that almost seemed to have some kind of pattern. His lawyers voice, droning soulessly, "Jake asked that you be the one to identify his body if anything happened, and insisted that it be like this, not just the face. He also left you a key to a storage unit. All of this is off the record, not in his official will, he insisted that I not write any of this down, and told me to assure he's done what he could to minimize your connection to him."

Why was Jake on my mind now? I hadn't thought of him in months. My feet carried me over to the closet, the well memorized route not even requiring the use of the LED light on my keychain. I'd navigated my apartment blindfolded until I could walk through without bumping into anything. It was one of the things Jake said he liked about me, that my paranoia nearly matched his own.

The light on my keychain illuminated the corner of the closet where I had put the things Jake left me. The long leather trench coat with the odd designs and the built in holster that seemed a perfect fit for the tricked out Mossberg 590 with the cop issue ultrabright halogen mini flashlights attached standing next to it. The boxes of the weird shotgun shells. I'd swear the casings were silver. The big ass machete. The night vision goggles with the built in flash compensators. The flash bangs, which I was pretty sure were completely illegal for civilians to have.

I felt a bit of an idiot as I put it all on, but Jake's voice played on my head. "There's no point in owning a gun if you're not willing to use it. And there's no use in being willing to use it if you don't have it with you. You're instincts are good, but you haven't carried it to the logical conclusion. Stuff is messed up out there, more than you know, and if you're not prepared to get the bear, I guarantee you the bear is more than ready to get you." We'd both been really drunk at the time, one of our typical drunken rambling arguments at the bar, covering a wide variety topics that included pretty much everything. I'd told him he was over reacting, but now, that scream and that thump playing in my head, what harm in being safe? The trenchcoat hid the Mossberg and the machete pretty well, so if there were other people going to check it out, I wouldn't have to worry about it.

At that point I realized that I was going to check it out, despite a deep seated feeling that it would turn out to be an extraordinarily bad idea. I thanked Jake mentally for all the time he'd spent with me at the range, doing drills, as I loaded the shotgun in the dark, and threw an extra couple of boxes into the trench coat. A few flashbangs for luck.

I strode to the front door, of course the cameras were off too. I figured it was probably too dark for the peep holes to be of any use, the peep holes all my friends except Jake had laughed at when I'd installed them. A normal one, that looked straight out the door, and then four more. One looked up at the ceiling, one at the floor, and two more that looked both ways along the hallway. Jake's voice in my head again "Never make assumptions. Get as much information as you can. Ignorance will kill you, or worse."

So I put my eyes to the peep holes, both with and without the night vision goggles, and I listened as hard as I could. I'd always had sharp hearing, and for some reason I felt like right now, I needed all my senses to be at peak efficiency.