Shadows

by Jack Dagger

  SHADOWS

  -A Double Friction Studios Production-

  written by

  Jack Dagger

  edited by

  J. Siciliano

  cover by

  Sylvester Sledge

  One

  -The Gathering-

  “I have a question,” Tony said, reaching into his pocket and fishing out his cigarettes.

  “No,” Peter said automatically.

  “Why is it that women are all on about us seeing them as sexual objects?” Tony continued, completely ignoring Peter and extracting one of the cigs. He replaced the box, his fingers coming back out wrapped around a lighter.

  “You can't be serious,” Peter replied, trying to keep his eyes on the road. It was mostly deserted, as it was pushing nine o'clock. He knew that, if he hurried, the night security guard would still let him in. But only if he hurried. He'd never met the night security guard, but had heard stories about the guy. The smell of nicotine was suddenly present in the car.

  Peter sighed.

  “I am serious. Dead serious,” Tony continued, pulling on the cigarette serenely. He at least had the kindness to roll down the window, but all that really did was fill the car with a chilled Colorado air. Winter was a month behind them but it was still cold.

  “I trust you have a reason for asking me this question,” Peter murmured. Tony always had a reason for bringing up some stupid remark like that. And he wondered why he was still woefully single. Well, it wasn't like Peter could really rub that in his friend's face. He was still painfully lacking in that particular department.

  “Two, actually. At least. A minimum of two, my good friend. Point one: look at the internet. It is positively full to bursting with porn. But I'd like to point to a very specific kind of porn. You see, it's a subsection that is extremely popular and quite large. It features college girls just giving it up to guys at parties, usually in groups, totally whoring it out. And there are thousands of these videos, each video feature at least three to eight girls, so that's tens of thousands of girls. I mean, thousands of these chicks make videos like that, and then get mad at someone like me for asking them for a one night stand,” Tony explained, pulling on the cig again.

  “Tony, women get mad at you for that because you come off like a creeper.” Tony flicked some ashes out the window.

  “And you're only saying that because your sister said I was one.”

  “You asked my sister, and I quote, 'Can I fuck you?'”

  “I was drunk!”

  Peter rolled his eyes and tried to remember why he'd brought Tony along as he rolled to a stop and idled at a red light. It was late, he'd been off of work for just over half an hour before realizing that he'd left his cellphone back at the office. And while he had no great need for it, he'd taken off the next two days and you never knew who might need to call. Tony had already been at his house, ready for a night of video games and pizza, when he'd made the discovery. Unwilling to sit alone any longer, Tony had opted to join for the small journey.

  “And the next reason,” Tony plowed on, relentlessly, “is aimed at famous men. Especially like rock stars and rap stars and stuff. I mean, here's the thing, women get mad at them, probably especially rappers, for 'womanizing',” Tony hooked invisible quotes in the air, nearly dropping a load of ash in the process.

  “Watch it!” Peter snapped.

  “Sorry. Anyway, 'womanizing', and shit like that, but then any time a woman actually gets within contact distance with these guys, they try as hard as they can to open their legs and get nailed. I mean, these women are basically saying, 'Womanize me. Treat me like a sex object.' See what I'm saying?”

  Peter sighed.

  “Lemme break this down,” he said. Tony smiled, settling into his seat.

  “Ooh, I love this part.” Peter pressed on, ignoring him.

  “While I'm sure there are tons of videos featuring these college girls gone wild, there's always going to be people like that. It's just much more publicized now that there's such a thing as the internet and the general population has access to cheap and affordable cameras. And even if there's, say, fifty thousand women like this per year, that doesn't represent even a large percentage of how many women there really are, even in America. There are always going to be women who act like idiots, use alcohol as an excuse and lust after frat-house morons.”

  Tony tried to open his mouth, but Peter continued, and Tony just put his cig back in place.

  “And as for your second point, well, a lot of the same goes there. I'm sure not every woman that comes in contact with a famous man immediately tries to fuck him. There may be a lot, but not that many. The problem with your logic is that it's too broad. You're making sweeping statements. There are some women that might like being treated as such, and there are some women that absolutely abhor the idea. For the most part though, I imagine the majority of women don't like being treated like sex objects for a good reason. It's disrespectful.”

  “You sure do love the sound of your own voice,” Tony said after a few seconds of silence.

  “No, you love the sound of my voice. You're the one that started it.”

  “You know, I remember a time when you'd have agreed with me.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “You're only like this because of that chick you work with, what's her name? Auburn?”

  “Autumn. And you don't need to concern yourself with her.” Tony rolled his eyes and flicked his nearly dead cigarette out the window.

  “Sure thing, pal.”

  Peter drove on, spying his office building in the distance.

  …

  Ian stared grimly at the bank of security monitors laid out before him. Each was clear and clean. Each depicted a different view of Apex Tech, the office building he'd been employed to protect at night. Corridors, offices, elevators, stairwells...all fell under his vigilant gaze. The desk before him, situated beneath the wall of monitors, was immaculate. It was empty save for a single mug of steaming, black coffee and a single paperback novel.

  Despite his nigh constant vigilance, Ian had relented after six months and admitted to himself that the job got boring. Not once in that six months had anything gone wrong. No break-ins, no injuries. There was only that one, singular incident with one of the former janitors attempting to steal something from a supply room.

  But that had been in the first month. And even though he'd been tempered by ten years in the Marines, most of that spent over in Iraq and then Afghanistan, former Sergeant Ian Powell knew that he needed something to occupy his mind during the long, lonely hours of the night. So he'd taken up reading.

  First, he had tried science fiction, but found them to be too fantastic and far away for his taste. He'd then switched to fantasy, and found much of the same. Next in line was what he realized he should have started at first: military novels. But, despite his Marine background, he found such books painful to read. They all lacked description and focused too wholly on protocol and procedure, becoming bogged down with weapons, statistics and vehicles.

  Despite all logic, Ian had discovered that romance novels compelled him. At first, he'd been torn between his desire to maintain a professional appearance and his desire to kill time with his newfound love of the romance genre.

  This bout of indecision was short-lived, though, as he grimly and silently brought his first book to work and dared any of the night staff to make a comment.

  No such comment was made.

  Ian continued to stare at the monitors. The last of the staff had just left, all except for one of them, and the night crew was accounted for. It was time to lock down the entrances and secure the office building. As he stood, making sure everything was in order on his belt, something caught his attention. His gaze snapped up, foc
using on one of the upper monitors.

  The scene depicted was a generic corridor, outside of a small break room. He stared at the screen for a few more seconds, waiting for whatever it was that had caught his attention to happen again. After a little bit longer, it did.

  The screen flickered and rolled briefly, then darkened. Ian frowned deeply. He didn't like errors in his night. Especially not at the beginning. He reached forward and tapped the screen. The darkness and flickering persisted for several more seconds, then abruptly ceased. Ian made an unhappy noise, somewhere between a sigh and a grumble.

  He'd encountered electrical problems before, but nothing like this. If it happened again, he was going to have to put in a request. He would hate to have even one of his cameras out. There were enough blind spots as it was.

  Making sure one last time that everything was in place, Ian left his office and began to make his rounds, preparing to lock the building down.

  …

  Jackson yawned and rubbed his eye with one hand while feeding a dollar into the vending machine with the other.

  Another fucking night of this shit.

  Jackson suspected himself an insomniac. The truth of the matter was that he just had a different sleep cycle than most, and preferred staying up all night and sleeping all day. After graduating high school, he'd drifted from job to job, unable to hold any down for too long due to his lack of motivation and his tendency to argue with superiors.

  At twenty four, he was going nowhere fast and fine with it. He had a car, he had an apartment, he had a girlfriend, (sort of), what more did the world want from him? To date, the rent-a-cop night watch job was his best gig.

  That didn't mean he didn't hate it, though.

  The pay was good, great, in fact, (which was probably what had brought Amy back around again), and the hours suited him pretty well. It was just so fucking boring. Walk around a goddamn empty office building for eight hours. Jackson was pretty sure he'd have gone crazy putting up with the occasional run in with Ian and the mind-numbing boredom if it weren't for Keith and Richard, the pair of crazy-assed janitors that had been hired on about the same time as him.

  They always had a crazy story to tell, and Keith was almost always good for weed. Not Richard, though. Lately, they'd had to do their deals in secret.

  Jackson's nights mostly consisted of walking around, avoiding his boss and the other two janitors besides Keith and Richard, and shooting the shit.

  A can of soda fell out of the machine. Jackson knelt and retrieved it, popping it open. As he began to drink, a chill settled over him. It was a feeling he'd become familiar with, something that had him half convinced he had mind powers.

  It was the feeling of being watched. He always knew when Ian was watching him through the security cameras, he could just tell. But there were no security cams in this room. Which was why he hung out here sometimes. Jackson turned around, but no one occupied the doorway and he was alone in the room. Jackson frowned.

  This wasn't just the regular Ian-stare feeling he got. This was different. He stared out the windows across the room, but he was high up in the building, the only view offered was that of the black, star-stained sky and the blinking city set out before him. He scrutinized the room for a few seconds longer before shrugging it off.

  He finished the can, crushed it and tossed it into the trash can.

  Time to go see what the others were up to.

  …

  Richard glanced over at Keith as they prepared for the long night's work ahead.

  “Come on, man. Get your shit ready,” he grumbled. Keith was playing with his cellphone...another fucking ridiculous purchase he'd made.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Keith replied, finishing up on his phone and jacking his headphones into them. Richard mentally reviewed his schedule as he finished off the soda he'd brought from home. As a team, the pair of them had the first seven floors of the building. First there was emptying all the dozens upon dozens of trashcans, then vacuuming the offices, then sweeping and mopping the bathrooms, and then came buffing the hallways.

  It was physically taxing, but in a way that most other people didn't seem to get or feel, deeply satisfying. Richard enjoyed his job, and felt genuinely lucky to have it after all the shit that had gone down a few months ago with him and Keith.

  The pair of them had been running with a gang of drug dealers, pushing mostly weed but some coke and meth through the city. It had been a good life, but a dangerous one. Richard had never entirely been comfortable with the job, but the money was too good. And Keith was his best friend. They'd grown up together, and been there for each other during some pretty shit times. So when Keith offered to let his weed buddy in on something bigger, right after he'd lost his job and with no better offers in sight...how could he say no?

  But the shit went down, as shit always inevitably does.

  Most of the gang had ended up dead in a shootout. What few remained had been locked away for a long, long time. Being relatively low on the totem pole, Richard and Kieth got lucky: they were allowed to cut a deal. They sold out their out-of-city suppliers and got off with five years probation. Wanting to be free of his former lifestyle, Richard searched desperately for a simple, quiet job. He'd found it in the form of a dual position at Apex Tech, overnight janitorial. He thought it was fate, smiling on them.

  Keith hated it.

  Where Richard saw an easy job with surprisingly good pay and a fair amount of freedom, Keith only saw long, boring, pointless nights and pined for the easy money of dealing drugs. But he held his peace, and went to do the job when Richard all but forced him to, because even he saw how stupid it would be to not take the opportunity.

  They'd been here for several months now, and had fallen into a routine.

  Richard lined one of the large, rolling garbage cans with a new bag and began to make for the door. The man in charge of the night janitorial staff, known only as Bill, had come and gone already, heading up to the top floors. He was a grizzled old hardass who'd been in the business for over twenty years.

  At first, he'd ridden them both so hard that Keith had almost thrown a punch the old man's way. But they persisted, and eventually Bill had seen that they could do the job fast and right, and basically had left them alone since then.

  Richard passed the fourth and final member of their little cleaning crew as he headed out.

  “Hey Rich, how ya doin'?” Nick asked benignly. Nick was older, not as old as Bill, but getting up there. Richard pegged him at his late forties. He was a portly, balding, smiling man who Richard couldn't imagine out of his gray cleaning uniform. Nick was a little spacey, and tended to repeat himself, but he was nice in a way that few people were, and loved to talk.

  “Hey, Nick. I'm alright. Just getting ready for the long haul.”

  “Oh, I hear ya buddy, I hear ya. Good luck out there.” Nick passed Richard into the room, then began to attempt to chat up Keith. Richard left them alone, heading for the front lobby. He knew this was a night that, at least at first, Keith didn't want to talk. Whenever he shoved this phones in, it was his way of saying 'fuck off, I'm in a shit mood tonight.'

  Which was fair enough, Richard supposed.

  He kept walking.

  Two

  -The First-

  Peter stared up at the office building. It loomed before him and Tony like a monolith cast in steel and glass. The sun was gone now, buried beyond the horizon, already faded into nothing more than a memory.

  “What are we waiting for?” Tony asked, shivering slightly. Their breaths foamed upon the air. Overhead, a bleak cloud formation covered the land, threatening snow or worse.

  “Just...sorry. I didn't realize how creepy this place looks,” Peter replied. Most of the lights were still on and the flow of traffic around the building was regular, which should have offset the slight sense of dread welling in Peter's stomach. Familiar sounds and the yellow lights saturating the empty parking lot were comforting, if cold.

  But the apprehe
nsion persisted.

  “Let's just do this,” he said finally, making for the front doors.

  “So...this is where you work. You know, we've been friends for...what? Eight years now? And you've had this job for three? I've never been here before,” Tony murmured.

  “It's not like you've had a reason to come to my job. You work and live on the other side of town.” Peter fell silent as he saw someone heading towards the front door from within the building. He focused, trying to see who it was. His eyes widened a few centimeters and he quickened his pace. It was the security guard.

  And he didn't look friendly.

  Right as the pair of them reached the door, Peter quickly grabbed it and pulled it open. The security guard, a grim man if Peter had ever seen one, stood in tense anticipation just a few feet within the building.

  “We're closed,” he said flatly.

  “I know, I'm sorry. My name's Peter Fletcher, I work here. I left my phone here and needed to get it,” Peter replied awkwardly. The grim man seemed to consider this.

  “Can't you just wait to pick it up tomorrow?”

  “I'm off work for the next two days...and I really don't like being here anymore than I have to. Or being without my phone anymore than I have to.”

  The security guard considered it further. Peter found himself studying the man's hard face in the growing silence. He tried to place his age and thought that the man, whose nametag read Powell in bold, no-nonsense text, was the kind of man who was, in fact, young but looked old. If he had to guess, he'd place Mister Powell in his early thirties. He had a clean shaven but lined face. Powell seemed to come to a decision.

  “Who's he?” he asked.

  “My friend,” Peter replied, then regretted it. Letting in a worker there was one thing, even provided he believed him, but letting in this theoretical worker's friend? Well, that was another thing. Powell opened his mouth, but suddenly blinked and swiftly glanced over his shoulder, his hand dropping to his hip.