by Logan Jacobs
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Chapter 1
“Spam, spam, spam…” I sang as I scrolled through my inbox. I sipped at my black coffee and winced. I usually dumped a bunch of creamer in it to make it palatable, but we were out and I’d been too busy delivering other peoples’ groceries yesterday to buy my own. “Rejected. Rejected. Job offer? Pyramid scheme. Pyramid scheme, spam…”
I’d been sending out resumes like crazy, but nobody wanted to hire a guy with a half-finished Liberal Arts degree from a school that had closed its doors three years ago. I was under qualified for the jobs I wanted, overqualified for everything else, and too deep in student loans to pick up and start again at a new school.
At least I had a car.
I cleared out my useless inbox and gulped down my coffee. I was about to sign in to the GoGroceries delivery app and start the rounds when another message popped up in my inbox.
This email was from my Uncle Sol. The subject line just read “READ THIS ASAP.” An email like that from anyone else would have normally gotten shifted into the spam folder, but I always marked Uncle Sol’s emails as “safe,” since he was not only my favorite relative, but he was also a super interesting, if partially nuts, genius.
Also, Uncle Sol’s rants were always original and entertaining. This time, the email just had a video file attached, and another note: “DON’T WATCH IT IN FRONT OF AARON. FOR THE LOVE OF FUCK.”
“Uhhh, okay?” I whispered to myself as I glanced across the room at my roommate. We were both in the tiny front area that doubled as a kitchen and living space, but I was at my desk, and he was on the futon/couch playing Jedi: Fallen Order. Aaron knew about Uncle Sol’s rants anyway. He’d asked me a few times about going to visit the guy, but Uncle Sol didn’t like strangers on his property.
So, I angled my laptop screen away from Aaron a little, plugged my earbuds into the laptop instead of my phone, then opened the video.
Uncle Sol’s familiar old face filled the screen. His once-bushy black hair had shrunk to a curly gray bowl, and more wrinkles had etched themselves around his eyes and mouth, but his brown eyes were as bright and intelligent as ever. He set the camera on something solid, then backed away so I could see his “Fuck Commies” hat, the faded Doctor Who T-shirt he wore under his flannel jacket, and the bare concrete wall behind him. He dragged a metal folding chair into the shot, sat down on it, and leaned forward.
“Listen up, kid.” Sol began. He cleared his throat and then glanced around his space before he began again, and it looked like he was in his workshop three miles away from my apartment.
“Ugh, why don’t you ever call me by my name,” I sighed.
“Dave, okay listen,” my uncle continued, and I suddenly sat up straight.
Uncle Sol never called me by my real name.
“We got a whole bunch of fucked up shit going on, kiddo,” he grunted. “Pause this video and go look at the fucks parked out in front of your condo. You’ll see their black cars.”
“What?” I muttered with a frown.
“I’m not joking.” Sol rolled his eyes. “Pause the video and go look.”
I hit the spacebar, took off my headphones, and then moved to the living room window. We were on the second floor, and I carefully peeled aside the blinds to look out at the street.
Sure enough, there was a black windowless van parked across the street, and then another black sedan parked right in front of my complex. It wouldn’t have been noticeable any other day, but this was street cleaning day, and anyone who parked there was going to get a ticket.
My heart started to beat a bit faster, and I gently let go of the corner of the blinds so I could go back and sit at my desk. Then I glanced over at Aaron, but my roommate was wrapped up in the game, and he hadn’t even noticed my movement, so I put back on my headphones and resumed the video.
“They are going to be watching you,” my uncle continued, and his voice sounded unbelievably annoyed, as if someone had just told him he had to go to the Michigan Secretary of State to get his driver’s license updated. “I’m gonna need you to do something really important for me.”
“Uhh, okay?” I whispered to the email video.
“You know I can’t hear you, right?” my uncle groaned as he rolled his eyes. “You probably just said ‘uhh, okay?’ It’s a fucking video, Dave. Jesus.”
“What the fuck?” I scowled. “Look, I’m just going to turn this--”
“Don’t turn off the video!” Sol hissed as he clapped his hands to get my attention. “Look, kiddo. I’ve got some good bad news, and then some badder news, and then some like … good news. Bad news is that I’m dead.”
“Wait, what?” I gasped, and my heart stuttered to a stop in my chest.
“I made this thing in case I got fucking Jeffery Epsteined. See, the fucking boogy-men don’t like the experiments I was doing. Or at least, I thought they didn’t like it, so I made this video back in like … fuck … what year is it? Like twenty-eighteen or something, ehhh, I guess they haven’t killed Epstein yet, so that’s a bit of foreshadowing. Oh! Here, my computer says it’s April fifteenth. Fucking tax day asshole mother fuckers. Ha! Jokes on the cunts who killed me, I haven’t paid a dime of taxes in like twenty fucking years. Dave, fuck these lizard-men-pedo-satanists. I mean, really. Fuck ’em.”
“You’re dead?” I repeated as the bottom dropped out of my stomach. Uncle Sol was my favorite person in the entire world, and I’d spent a huge chunk of my childhood hanging out with him in his garage while he worked on “shit that will fucking blow your mind and change everything, kiddo.”
“So, there is an automatic thingy on my computer that will send this out to you if I don’t hit the fail safe every three days,” Sol continued on his video. “I’m probably dead, or they are doing some sort of sissy-ass waterboarding bullshit on me to try to get me to talk. Not gonna work bitches! Anyway, that’s the first piece of bad news. Second is that those spooks in front of your apartment are watching you, and I need you to go and destroy my workshop, lab, home, and yeah. Blow it all the fuck up, Dave. I don’t want any of these dirty pedos to get their hands on my work. In my home, you’ll find a bunch of C4 and detonators, put it all up in there, and in the workshop, and make sure you blow up the seventy-two Lincoln Continental parked on the side. Dave, that’s really fucking important, okay? You abso-fucking-loutly need to blow the fuck out of that car. Got it? Put the C-4 right on the hood and just send that mother-fucker straight to the moon. Don’t look under the hood, don’t look in the trunk, don’t pass go, don’t collect two-hundred dollars, just blow it the fuck up. You’ll find the explosives under the benches in the Airstream. Can you do this for me, kiddo? It’s really fucking important.”
“Shit, shit, shit,” I whispered as I felt my head start to spin.
“You okay, bro?” Aaron asked.
“Uhhh, yeah!” I blurted out as I hit the spacebar to pause the video.
“Are you crying?” He tilted his head a bit, and his eyes narrowed.
“Just, uhhh … watching one of those videos on Youtube where the vet dad gets home, and his dog and kid see him for the first time.”
“Oh, yeah,” Aaron laughed. “I love those. I totally get the tears.”
“How’s the game?” I asked, mostly because I wanted to give myself a few extra seconds to process what Uncle Sol had said.
“Fucking awesome, bro,” he laughed. “It’s really good. Mak
es up for the movies, for sure. You wanna play?”
“I’m gonna have to head out in a bit,” I said. “Just gonna finish this video.”
“Right on,” Aaron said, and then he turned back to his game.
I turned back to my computer and hit the spacebar to unpause the video.
Normally, Uncle Sol’s videos involved two major elements: math I couldn’t understand on a chalkboard that had seen much better days, and something being blown up in the middle of the woods on his property. Sometimes, he started out explaining something philosophical he’d been thinking about, like the concept of free will or parallel universes, but it almost always ended with something blowing up.
I really hoped he’d just forgotten to do this thing on his email to keep this video from automatically being sent to me, but the black cars in front of my building made me think this could actually be legit.
“So, you can’t drive to my place, since the spook-assholes are going to be watching your front door,” my uncle went on. “Take your mountain bike and go out the back. And avoid the roads, cause if those cunts see you trying to head to my place, they will follow you there and try to keep you from blowing my shit up. Got it?”
“Uhhh, got it,” I muttered.
“Dave, it’s a fucking video,” Sol snickered. “You don’t have to reply.”
“Shit, sorry.” I winced.
“Don’t say you’re sorry, kid,” Sol sighed. “Not your fault. It’s mine. I should have picked a place to do my shit farther away from you, but the truth is … well … I just love ya, kiddo. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye.”
“Fuck,” I whispered as I felt the tears start to roll down my cheeks.
“But that brings me to my next bit of news,” Sol continued. “And this is the good stuff. I’ve left you a few million dollars in my offshore account.”
“What?” I gasped. “A few million--”
“So, you are gonna wanna get a piece of paper and a pen and write this shit down, and then grab the money out as soon as you can. Ready? The bank is located in the Caymans, and the account number is--”
“Shit!” I paused the video, searched around for a piece of paper, grabbed a junk-mail envelope, and then resumed Uncle Sol’s last will. He read off the numbers in the next ten seconds, and I rewound the video to make sure I had it all correct.
“They are probably going to find this account in the next few weeks,” my uncle said after he finished telling me the numbers, “So, I’d move it to another one as soon as you can. You’ll have to drive into Detroit and walk into the bank to do it, but the money should be safe once you open a new account and put it in there. I hope you don’t spend it all in the next year. You aren’t the kind of kid who will spend it all on hookers and blow, but you should think about going back to school or something useful. I figure this is the least you can do, and I don’t need the money where I’m going.”
“Damn,” I sighed as I glanced down once more at the account number. I couldn’t make sense of my swirl of emotions. I was absolutely heartbroken that my uncle was dead, or that he was telling me he was dead, I was terrified of the men out in front of my apartment in the black cars, and I was pretty psyched that I had inherited a bunch of money.
“Okay,” Sol continued. “That’s all I have to talk about. Just please, kid. Go destroy my shit. Don’t let the spooks follow you. And for fucks sake. Please, for the love of God, Moses, Allah, and Farrah Fawcett, do not, and I repeat, do not fuck around with the Lincoln. Just blow the shit out of that thing and get the fuck out of there. Got it?”
“Got it,” I repeated, and it felt like my heart was slamming into my rib cage like an elephant trying to break out of a zoo.
“I love you, Dave,” Sol finished. “Have a great life.”
Then the video ended.
I stared at the screen in shock for a second before I forced my muscles to jolt to life. My uncle was dead, there was some kind of secret agent spook operation going on right outside my home, and I had a few million dollars to potentially inherit.
I had to see what was going on.
So, I grabbed my tan Carharrt jacket, shoved my feet into my Red Wing work boots, and headed to the door. I glanced at Aaron before I left, but he didn’t even look up from the game. If I knew Aaron, he wouldn’t notice if I took the entire day to come back. I considered warning him about the black cars, but I decided the less Aaron knew, the better.
Even though the blinds still covered the window, I still ducked to avoid being seen as I grabbed my mountain bike from the hallway. Then I hauled the bike downstairs toward the back door. My hands were shaking so bad that I banged the bike into the rail a few times, but I managed to get it down without putting a tire through the drywall. Once I was at the back door, I ducked down so the men in the black cars wouldn’t see through the window in the kitchen, and then I gently opened the door with my foot, pushed the bike out, hopped on, and pedaled as quickly as I could so I jumped into courtyard of the apartment complex.
The courtyard was really just a sad patch of dogshit-filled grass that was surrounded on three sides by condo windows, but the open side faced the road that wound around the outside of the complex. More importantly, it faced a park that the black cars weren’t going to be able to follow me through because it was separated from my condo complex by a lot of trees and a thirty-foot drop. The park snaked its way for nearly a mile around the curve of the condo complex, but it was only a few hundred yards wide. I’d biked down there before, but I was pretty sure the woods were too thick for any car to follow.
I pumped my legs hard as I biked through the overgrown grass, but I picked up speed once my tires hit the asphalt.
Unfortunately, I also saw a big black SUV barreling down the road toward me.
My lungs froze, and then they started to work double-time as I zoomed across the street toward the line of trees that separated the park from the complex. I could hear the SUV’s tires screech behind me as I aimed my bike at the space between two huge maples, and then the ground dropped out from beneath me.
My teeth chattered as I rode down the hill. I usually coasted here, but now I had to pedal for my life as branches cracked under my tires. I kept my eyes on the ground so I didn’t slam into a tree or a big rock.
Someone started yelling a few seconds after I raced down the hill, and then I heard the slam of a car door. An engine turned over, and tires screeched in a long, stuttery squeal before the car revved up and raced away. It sounded like it was heading left out of the complex.
I’d have to be quick enough to bike across the park before they got there, and then I’d have to be sneaky enough to lose them. I didn’t know if I could really outrun a bunch of government spooks in unmarked cars with just a mountain bike, but I had to try.
Shit had just got real.
I broke through the line of trees and leaned over my handlebars as the ground evened out into lush green grass.
A small flock of mallard ducks took flight as I raced toward them, and the high-pitched sound of their angry quacks created a frantic song when played against the screeching tires of the car on the street behind me.
“Watch out!” I yelled at one fat brown duck that hadn’t bothered to fly away, and I banked to avoid running over the stupid thing as it quacked at me.
The sound of an accelerating engine whined in my ears, and I pumped my legs even harder as I raced over the last dozen yards of grass before the road.
The black van accelerated toward me from the right, but it had almost a quarter of a mile to go before it reached me, so I knew I could make it across the road before it hit me.
Then a black sedan screeched around a curve in the road on my left. It took the bend on two tires, and the engine growled as it barreled toward me.
“Fuuuck!” I yelled as I soared across the road. I could feel my tires bounce on the asphalt as I hit the street, and my legs windmilled as I propelled myself toward the subdivision on the other side.
&nbs
p; The black sedan’s roaring engine Dopplered from left to right as it shot past me, and I didn’t hear any screeching tires as I cut across the entry road and toward the sidewalk. The black van slowed down audibly as it got nearer, and I realized it wasn’t just trying to catch me.
The driver wanted to see where I’d go. Just like Uncle Sol warned me. These fuckers were trying to figure out where his workshop was.
I had to lose them.
So, I cut across someone’s soggy lawn and aimed for the fenceless gap between two beige McMansions. I knew there was another grassy common area with a paved trail between the houses around here, and I just hoped the men in black cars didn’t know the area as well as I did.
I shot between the fake stone walls of the houses, and dirt sprayed up from my wheels as I tore ass through someone’s flower bed. I leaned over my handlebars and cut across the winding trail that ran through the common area before anyone came out to yell at me about their ruined petunias. I could hear the faint whine of a revved-up engine on the breeze, but it was too far away for me to be able to tell where it was coming from.
I gulped air and pedaled like crazy, but I realized I had no idea how many black cars were actually stationed around town trying to track me. Just because I’d only seen two of them didn’t mean there weren’t more. I just had to avoid them, or maybe confuse them, so I banked a hard left away from my original route and pedaled through the trees toward the road.
A big black SUV idled at the corner about fifty yards away to my right. Its engine revved as my tires hit the sidewalk, and it started to roll toward me as I hopped the curb.
I shot across the road toward a cul-de-sac that had a backdrop of tall trees rising up against the sky, and I cut across the road to the left as the SUV took a right into the curved drive. Then I aimed through two smaller beige brick boxes and into the trees again. I could hear the SUV squeal around the cul-de-sac and roar off toward the left, so I banked back toward the right through the tiny strip of trees where the fenceless backyards met.
I thanked an unknown architect for their belief in open-plan neighborhoods as I rode toward Sol’s place.