by D. L. Line
“Yes, I have my phone. Now, before that shot they gave me totally kicks my ass, I’m going to bed.” She looked up to meet his eyes. “Thank you, Jake.”
He left and Shelby pushed the door closed, leaning against it until the deadbolt clicked. What a long, strange day it had been. A battery of tests followed by the completely anticlimactic diagnosis that there was nothing there. No shadows, no spots, no epilepsy…nothing. Just a phantom pain from a shooting that, in reality, never happened.
Shelby headed into the kitchen to get a Coke and to see if she had any crackers.
You must eat, Shelby Hutchinson.
“Fuck you, Tasha,” Shelby said into the air of her empty kitchen. “This is all your fault.”
How is this my fault?
Shelby closed her eyes and leaned back against the kitchen counter, wrapping her fingers around the cool stainless steel of the sink for support. “This is your fault, Tasha, because I trusted you. I trusted you and you fucked me over.”
But I was not the only one. You were not exactly truthful with me.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Shelby turned on her best Russian accent, laced with a big dose of sarcasm. “We must find inner bad girl for you, Shelby Hutchinson.” She took a can of Coke from the fridge, held the cold aluminum against her phantom head wound, and shuffled into the bedroom.
Chapter Ten
Shelby sat bolt upright in bed and shouted, “Tasha, no!” Her heart was racing, she was gasping for air, and she was certain when she removed her hand from the sore spot on her forehead, it would be covered with blood. But it wasn’t. “What the—?”
She shaded her eyes with one hand, squinting against the bright light filtering in through the slats of the vertical blinds, and made a visual scan of the room. Her eyes were drawn to a pizza box–sized chunk of white cardboard, propped in a chair where it would have been difficult to miss. It was a simple note, hand-lettered in DayGlo pink permanent marker, large enough to see from anywhere in the room:
Chicago
January, 2039
“Oh, shit, not again.” Shelby reached up to hold her head with both hands, closed her eyes, and fell back onto the bed with her head on the pillow. The sign was a project from earlier in the day. It had seemed like a good idea, and was proving to be quite helpful in reminding her she had just had another seizure and the pain in her head was, in reality, nothing. Just the thought of that pissed her off all over again. She found her phone on the floor next to her nightstand and called the hospital before they called her, just to get the conversation over with. “Yes, I’m fine. No, I don’t need an ambulance.” Same conversation every time, and Shelby was becoming more than a little annoyed by the whole process. Maybe it was time to call Andrew at Head Trip. She thumbed though the call log on her phone until she found his number.
After two rings, he answered. “Good morning, Head Trip Travel Services.”
She closed her eyes against the pain and the light. “Andrew, hi, this is Shelby Hutchinson. Remember me from over the weekend?”
“Yes, Ms. Hutchinson, I do. Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yeah, actually I was calling to ask you about my trip. I still have that headache that you said would go away in a day or two, and now it’s escalated into seizures.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that. Have you sought medical attention?”
“I have. The doctors at Northwestern Memorial tell me that there’s nothing wrong.” Shelby experimentally opened one eye. Bad idea. She pulled the sheet over her face to block the light. “I’m sure you can imagine that I’m more than a little concerned here.”
“I’d like to assure you again, Ms. Hutchinson, that you will be fine. Your issues should resolve within the next day or so, but if you need to, please have your doctor call me. I will be happy to answer any questions that he or she might have. We only have your best interest in mind and—”
Shelby couldn’t listen to this again. Her head hurt too much, so she cut him off. “Okay, then thanks.” She snapped her phone closed. “Asshole.” He still sounded like a used car salesman, so Shelby got disgusted all over again. With a frustrated grunt, she extricated herself from the tangled mess of sheets on the bed and shuffled her way into the bathroom. She met her own reflection in the mirror, complete with its dark circles under the eyes and the wildest case of bed hair she had ever seen. “Wow, I look like shit.” She poked at her forehead. Although she really didn’t think it would help, Shelby turned on the faucet, splashed some cold water on her face, and looked back, dripping wet, into the mirror. “I was right. It didn’t help.” She lightly touched the spot immediately above her left eye. “Ow.”
Shelby scuffed her way back through the bedroom and out into the kitchen, ranting sarcastically to herself the whole time. “They all reported they were fine and back to normal within the first twenty-four hours. Well, that’s just crap, Andrew. It’s been”—she hesitated to look at the clock on the microwave—“wow, it’s been seventy-two hours, and I’m neither fine nor back to normal.” She reached into the refrigerator to grab another Coke and lifted the cold aluminum can to the sore spot on her forehead in an attempt to find some relief. Fortunately, her head didn’t hurt all the time; only right before or after a seizure, and the combination of cold Coke cans and Advil seemed to manage it pretty well. She opted not to take the pain medication provided by the hospital because it made her feel dopey and a little sick to her stomach.
Shelby Hutchinson, you are loaded, yes?
“Tasha, please, not now. I just got out of bed,” Shelby warned the empty kitchen. She turned to reach over the sink for a couple of Advil, downed them with a handful of water from the faucet, and stayed right where she was, elbows on the edge of the sink, Coke can on her forehead, trying to decide what to do next.
“So calling Andrew is apparently a waste of time.” Shelby had called him Monday night when she got home from the ER and had, once again, been assured she would be fine. Now it was Wednesday, it was close to noon, and she now had proof Andrew was just as full of shit as he had been on Monday. The doctors at Northwestern Memorial had also been full of assurances she would be fine, but she couldn’t help but think their supportive words had been more for themselves than for her. She knew full well there were very few doctors who would admit they were clueless and there was nothing they could do.
Shelby startled to the sound of a knock at her front door. She hauled herself away from the sink and over to the video monitor for the hallway. One push of a button revealed her caller to be Jake, and from the appearance of the bag in his right hand, it looked like he was bringing lunch. She opened the door.
“Hey, Jake.” She tried to sound cheerful, but it just wasn’t working.
“Hey, Shel. Wow, you look—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I look like shit.” She held her Coke can up for him to see. “It’s the red. It’s just not my color. Come on in. It’s been a rough couple of days.”
He gave her a long, comforting hug. “We’ve missed you at work. Everyone says hey and all that.” Shelby nodded as he held a white paper sack up for her to see. “I brought lunch. Are you hungry?”
“Eh, you know. Sometimes…” Shelby hesitated. She was tired of listening to her own complaints and figured Jake probably needed a break too. “Sorry, Jake. Yes, I am hungry. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” He set the bag of food on the counter. “Do you want to eat it or just hold it up against your face?”
“Depends on what it is,” she said, offering him a little sarcasm in return.
“Hey, nothing but your favorite. Pho noodles from that grubby little Vietnamese place you love so much.”
“Ooh, good choice.” He pulled containers of noodle soup and chopsticks out of the bag. “There’s more Coke in the fridge if you want one.”
Drink in one hand, soup in the other, Jake followed her into the living room and claimed his usual spot in the beat-up chair next to the coffee table while Shelby set down her soup and flopped
onto the couch.
“Is this her?” Jake asked as he pointed to the Head Trip printout Shelby had left lying on the coffee table.
“Yeah, that’s her.” Shelby wasn’t certain she was ready to have the Tasha conversation with Jake yet.
“She’s definitely hot.” Jake always had a way of cutting to the relevant parts.
“Yes, sir, that she is…I mean was…whatever.”
This is the time for facing fear, Shelby Hutchinson.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
“You know what, Shel?”
Shelby closed her eyes when she realized she had spoken out loud. “What? I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes, you did. You said ‘yeah, yeah, I know’ and I didn’t ask you a yeah-yeah-I-know kind of question.”
“This is going to sound incredibly stupid.” She looked up to see how he had reacted. “It was Tasha.”
“This Tasha?” He tossed the papers back onto the coffee table. “Shel, I hate to break this to you, but—”
“Yeah, I know. Tasha isn’t real. But…God, this sounds insane…Jake, she talks to me. I can hear her like she’s in the room with me, and I’m here all by myself, so I talk back to her.”
Jake just sat there, and Shelby supposed it was because he was too flabbergasted to do anything else. He appeared to be thinking, so she remained quiet until he finally came up with something. “Okay then, what do you talk about?”
“Mostly I get bitchy with her because things are weird now and I blame her for it, and then she points out to me how everything that happened on the trip was basically my fault.” Shelby stopped to poke around her noodles with her chopsticks, trying to piece together what she was trying to say. “I mean, it’s not like we talk about the weather or plans for the weekend or anything else like that.”
“Was it your fault?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. I guess so.”
Shelby Hutchinson, it’s time for the truth.
“Okay, fine. You’re right, it was my fault. It was me being all gee-whiz, look at the hot Russian babe with the great ass, and sure I’ll go with you, and every other dumbshit thing I did. But you have to admit you set me up.”
“I didn’t set you up. Wait, you weren’t talking to me, were you?”
“No, Jake, I wasn’t. Sorry. Happens sometimes.”
Jake stared back with a look Shelby couldn’t quite decipher. “Have you called the guy from the vacation place again? What was his name?”
“Andrew. And yes, I talked to him just before you got here. He just gives me a lot of noise about how I’ll be fine, and no one else has ever had any problems, so frankly, I don’t ever want to talk to him again.”
“I get that. So here’s something I don’t understand.” Shelby waited patiently. “If Tasha, who is now living in your head, is the one who shot you, aren’t you like, I don’t know, scared shitless of her? I mean, every time you have a seizure, you wake up terrified, but now you’re having conversations with her. I’m totally confused.”
Shelby stared. She was confused as well but tried to piece together her thoughts. “Okay, I’m not sure. It’s like I am scared of her, but it’s kind of not really her. Jeez, that sounds stupid. Of course it’s not really her, but it kind of is her.” Jake stared as if he didn’t understand, but how could he? Shelby didn’t understand it herself, so she kept thinking out loud. “It’s like this, Jake. When she talks to me in my head, she’s the Tasha that helped me while I was on the trip. She taught me how to fight and made sure I was safe.” Shelby rolled her eyes. “Yeah, well, safe except for that executing me part, but she took really good care of me for three days. Made sure I got fed and had a place to sleep, and other, well, you know, things and stuff.” Shelby felt the blush rising up her neck while her thoughts drifted back to a particular vodka-fueled roll in the hay. “Never mind. Anyway, it’s like she was a nice person who did one really shitty thing and so when I have a seizure and wake up, my head hurts and I can only think of that one bad thing, and I’m scared of that more than anything else that she did. Besides, I don’t figure she can really hurt me because we’re not in the Head Trip anymore.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I’m not sure about anything anymore. All I wanted to do was go on vacation, and now my life is seizures, headaches, and blackouts, and I have no idea what to do about it.” Shelby shrugged and picked at her noodles.
“I get that too. So what’s next? Are you going to tell the doctors about, you know, the heavily armed Russian badass with the great butt who is apparently living in your head?”
“Um, no…don’t think so.” She gave Jake a pleading glance. “This whole thing already makes me feel like I’m crazy. I certainly don’t need a diagnosis of schizophrenia to make it official. Besides, you know how things are at the hospital. We all work together and it would only be a matter of time before people started to talk. Great. That’s just what I need.” She stopped to lean forward, offering Jake her own approximation of how the conversation would go. “Oh, hey, did you hear about Shelby Hutchinson, you know, the big geek who runs Information Systems? Apparently she has an imaginary Russian spy who lives in her head.” Shelby lowered her voice to a whisper. “I hear they’ve even done it.” She held up two fingers. “Twice.” Shelby flopped back into the sofa. “I have no idea what to do about it.”
“It sounds like a programming glitch,” Jake said through a mouthful of noodles.
“Programming glitch?”
“Sure. Think about it. Head Trip and their whole fantasy vacation concept is nothing but a mega-tricked-out computer program, but instead of a computer, the program runs in your head. Mother Nature’s own supercomputer, right?”
“Right, so if something interrupts the normal flow of the program, it gets buggy. And then you get a glitch. Jeez, Jake, why didn’t I think of that? It’s so simple. Now what?” She gave Jake a questioning look, which he returned with one of his own. “I must have skipped Debugging the Human Brain 101 when I was an undergrad.”
“Yeah, I missed that one too.” He scratched his head. “While this may just be a theory, it seems to me you need to call your buddy Andrew again and shake him down a little.”
“Yeah. Squirrelly little rodent. Telling me twice now that everything is fine and dandy.” She crossed her arms over her chest with a resolute grunt and reached up to rub at the fading sore spot on her forehead. “Asshole.”
*
“Yeah, well, I’m starting to think you’re completely full of shit.” Shelby snapped her phone closed. “I guess I’ll just have to get to the bottom of this myself.” Her third call to Andrew in as many days had proven fruitless. Once again, he was full of assurances that she’d be fine and everything would just clear up on its own. He had even offered to pay her medical bills this time. “I still think it’s bullshit.”
Before she could get even more pissed off, her phone chirped in her hand. It was Jake.
“So did you finally get a hold of him?”
“Yeah, I did. He’s a weasel.”
“You didn’t find anything out?”
“Not a fucking thing. He’s still trying to tell me it’ll all just go away in a day or two.” She headed to the kitchen for a fresh can of Coke. “I’m really sensing that something isn’t right here. He sounds too much like a used car salesman.”
“That’s not good, Shel. How about if I come over after work and help you dig around a little online?”
“That’s nice, Jake. Thank you.”
*
Shelby stopped staring at her computer and rubbed her eyes, partly from fatigue, but mostly in frustration. All of her attempts to find out anything about Head Trip clients who had had a similar experience had come to dead ends. Maybe a fresh outlook was what she needed. Since Jake had offered to come by after work, she took a chance that since she was the head of the department, she could cajole him into leaving work early.
His phone rang twice before he picked up. “Hey, Shel. What’s
up?”
“Are you still coming over?”
“Actually—” Shelby’s door buzzer went off. “I’m here.” He smiled and waved at the front door video camera.
“Oh. Cool.” She pressed the buzzer to let him in. “It’s kind of early.”
“Well, yeah, but I made some noise about bringing some work over here, so no one questioned that I left an hour early.” Jake handed Shelby a small stack of data disks.
“What are these for?”
“I figured that since your buddy Andrew was being such a squirrelly little rat and not telling you anything, maybe he’s got something to hide.”
“Yeah, and what’s on these?”
“Hacker codes.”
“Hacker codes? I thought you didn’t do this anymore. It’s illegal.” Shelby tried to act offended, but the more she thought about it, he was probably right.
“Don’t get sanctimonious on me now. We need to find out if he’s lying to you, and I can’t think of any other way. Can you?”
“No, I can’t, but we have to be careful.”
“C’mon, Shel, it’s me. I used to be good at this.” He patted her shoulder, attempting to instill a little confidence. “Just like riding a bike.” He gave Shelby a gentle shove toward her computer. “Pop one of those bad boys in there and let’s see if we can find out what Head Trip is really all about.”
*
“I’m just not sure about this, Jake.” Shelby pulled the collar of her ski jacket closer around her ears. The early evening was cold and she had once again left home without her hat.
“You had to get out of your apartment. It’s been four days and, quite honestly, you needed to blow the stink off.” Jake must have sensed Shelby’s evil glower of disapproval, amending his statement to something a touch more gentle. “Not that you literally stunk, but—”
“Yeah, I get it.” Shelby knew her self-imposed exile probably wasn’t good for her, but she’d been so afraid to leave the house, Jake had finally pushed her toward the shower and dragged her bodily from her apartment. He was probably right. “It’s just hard.”