Chapter 12 #2
I open the Internet and type ‘how to tell if your house is being watched.’ Nothing comes up that I didn’t think of already. So I sneak in. It feels so strange to be at home, and yet feel like I’m not entirely safe there.
The door is locked like I left it, but when I open it, I see my place has been tossed about.
I don’t turn the main light on. I don’t want there to be a beacon that tells these people I am here and they can come and get me. So I use the light on my phone, and that relatively narrow beam reveals a series of intrusions and breakages that make me gasp.
Those. Assholes.
I’ve been annoyed through this, I guess, sort of excited and nervous and a bit scared.
This is the first time I’ve been seriously pissed.
They came into my home and threw my things around, breaking little pieces of art I collected over the years from friends and family.
My underwear drawer has been emptied out, tossed in the bath and drenched, along with all the clothes in my wardrobe.
Fuck. They’ve made it so I can’t come back for a fresh set of anything.
All my electronics are either broken or gone.
I am homeless, I realize. I might still be paying for this apartment, but they’ve rendered everything in it unusable.
I have the clothes on my back, and my phone, which is starting to run low on battery, and of course my charger is either in the mass of stuff they’ve left piled everywhere, or gone completely.
Tears sting my eyes. I don’t want to cry, but I know I am fucked. I can’t go to any of my friends; even if I knew people who would take me in, they’d be in danger if they had anything to do with me.
I scramble around in the dark, trying to find anything useful.
I find nothing besides a bunch of broken glass and other hazards also left to make sure that coming here is upsetting and dangerous.
Finally, I cut my finger.
“Ouch!” I stick it in my mouth and suck the blood and with this final incursion into my being, the tears start to flow. How dare they do this to me. How fucking dare they.
“Stop crying,” I lecture myself as I cry more. “You can do this. They’re just bullies, and you’ve dealt with bullies before.”
The last time I had bullies in my life was when I was seven years old, but I assume the general procedure for dealing with them is about the same now as it was then.
I keep picking through things a little more. They took what they knew to take, but I’m the sort of person who puts things away for safekeeping and then forgets where they are. That gives me an advantage at times like these.
I find my old charger, one that was stuffed at the back of my junk drawer. It’ll work on this phone, though not as fast. I don’t really trust anything in the kitchen thanks to the way they rifled through it, but I have some noodles and candy in a shoebox under the bed, which they didn’t touch.
They really weren’t thorough, I realize as I sit on the floor of my trashed apartment, tearing open a bag of sour candy and tipping the brightly colored nuggets into the palm of my hand before shooting them into my mouth.
They wanted to fuck my place up and intimidate me, but my real secrets are still secret. There’s probably a moral to that story.
I also find a pack of underwear that I bought a while ago and put away for safekeeping because I like the style and I knew they’d stop making them as soon as they realized I wanted to keep buying them. You learn not to trust supply lines when you’re a woman.
I crawl under the bed and curl up with a blanket and a pillow.
I am exhausted, and I have to sleep. I guess they’re probably not coming back tonight, and if they do, they probably won’t check under the bed.
I make sure there’s a bunch of garbage in front of me so it all just looks trashed the same way
It’s afternoon when I wake up. I can tell by the way the light is coming through the window and filtering through the debris of my life. I get up and have some more candy for late breakfast, then wash a non-broken cup out and have a drink and generally do my best to make myself presentable.
Leaving the apartment is dangerous, because I can’t see if they’re watching it or not. It’s way more likely that someone is watching from nearby now than it was early in the morning. I hesitate, wondering if I should just stay put.
I am glad to see that my phone is charged. I have an idea. Well, less of an idea, more of an impulse that I blindly follow because I am feeling incredibly lonely.
I call Simon.
I don’t really expect him to pick up. And he doesn’t. But someone does answer the call.
“Hello, Lydia,” Veronica says.
“Hi, Veronica, can you put me onto Simon, please?” I act like this is any other day and any other call taking place on that any other day. I am not going to give her the satisfaction of hearing me freak out.
“No,” she says. “If you would like to see Simon, you would have to come into work. I see you’ve decided to no-show today. That will have to go on your permanent record.”
“Oh, well. I’ve been informed I have tenure, so I am not worried about a little sick leave.”
“Oh, you’re ill?”
“No. You make me sick.”
We are trading verbal jabs and it is equal parts satisfying and awful. This woman has fucked up my life and wants to make me a prisoner of her evil company and all I can do right now is be passive–aggressive about it. I want to be full aggressive.
She sighs. “How much longer is this going to go on?”
“Forever,” I tell her. “Your henchmen are too stupid to catch a fly in a flytrap. They’re never going to get their hands on me. How long are you going to keep trying to fuck with me before you realize there’s no point?”
“You turned me into a cat. I am not going to stop until I have taken everything from you,” she says, her tone chilling. I can hear the venom in her voice. She truly does not like me. She truly wishes me harm. If I were not so useful to her, I think she might want me fully dead.
“I never had anything for you to take. You’re the bad person in this. You’re the one who made this situation happen the way it has happened.”
“I didn’t turn myself into a cat,” she says, putting emphasis on the word that makes it apparent she blames me for what happened to her.
“Okay. I did that part. But, aside from that you are definitely the bad guy. Still are. Sending men to trash a girl’s apartment?”
“So you’re in the apartment,” she says.
“No,” I lie.
“It doesn’t matter. This call has been traced from the moment you made it. Several teams are converging on your location now. There’s no way out…”
I hang up, throw my phone down on the floor, grab my bag, and run.
I go to the stairwell, but I don’t try to go down.
If she’s telling the truth, they will definitely be out there.
I go up instead, onto the roof. There are fire escapes up here, but I have a different plan.
This set of buildings was made all in a row.
I think I can jump between them, escaping by losing them yet again.
But this isn’t the mall. I wasn’t fast enough.
Veronica didn’t tip me off until it was too late to matter.
She’s probably kicking herself for telling me at all.
Or maybe, if she’s really fucking twisted, she’s imagining how panicked I must be and enjoying the knowledge I am suffering.
And to think I bought her the fancy cat food when she was living in my bathroom.
I approach the building’s edge, and to my dismay, notice that the gap between structures seems a lot wider up here than it did down there.
Could be an optical illusion, or it could be my survival instincts trying to keep me from jumping between multi-story buildings.
I bet I can do it, but brains really hate that kind of thing.
Bam!
The door behind me bursts open and men start yelling at me. It’s the fucking worst.
“Put your hands up!”
“Hands! Hands!”
I know they have weapons trained on me. Probably tasers, but they could be guns. I don’t really want to find out which.
“The parkour videos make this seem so easy,” I comment right before I launch myself into the arms of oblivion, but find myself on the building opposite.
Now that I am in motion, it’s easy to stay moving.
Laws of physics are great that way. Inertia held me back from jumping, but now that I am in flight mode I think I could make a jump twice that distance if I had to.
“What the fuck is she doing?” I hear the question shouted behind me.
“She’s fucking running. Get after her.”
“I don’t get paid to jump fucking buildings! I’m not Superman!”
I’m out of earshot after that exchange, so I don’t know if they decide to give chase or not. It doesn’t really matter. This city is densely packed and almost designed for rooftop chases. I run four buildings over, until I am sure line of sight is blocked, and then I try the rooftop door. It’s open.
I let myself into that apartment building and rush downstairs, moving quickly, but not suspiciously quickly. City people often have a pretty fast stride anyway.
I go downstairs, around the back, across another block or two, then get on a bus.
I’ve escaped. Again.
It’s hard not to smile to myself as I realize that. This woman is throwing all her resources at me, and they’re doing nothing that a bunch of incompetent and immature frat boys aren’t capable of.
* * *
Simon
I am worried about Lydia, but where she is concerned, I have to assume that no news is good news.
I am being held in one of the reinforced high security labs, designed for products that need extra security.
The general idea was to provide safety, not become a prison, but I suppose it works both ways.
I am going to escape, obviously. I want to do as little damage as possible when I do, and I also want to ensure that I give as little of my work away as I can.