he honoured their code. He thought it was far more trouble than it was worth, but Vidar was out numbered in his pack. Once the choice was made, it was never something to go back on. Still, he was annoyed as he packed the truck. His annoyance didn’t go unnoticed either, but he wasn’t the best to be poked at a time like this. He also wasn’t going to dispute it.
A pain in their ass. That was what Vidar called the kid who got close to them. Had he not seen his eyes on two separate events and jobs Vidar may have missed it. Once it became something noticed, it had to be something taken care of. A little research had brought only more questions. Alex was allowed to keep his name, that meant one of two very different things.
and it was Vidar’s job to figure out which it was. The van parked in front of the gas station as if they were filling up. The back door opened and Vidar had already slid his mask on. One giant step down was all it took to get to the pavement. He walked into the gas station and grabbed the kid by the back of the neck and drug him out of the store rather effortlessly.
With a toss, Vidar slid the kid across the floor of the back of the van. He closed the door behind him and the rest revealed themselves. One unseen driver, and 4 others with him. All masked, all alert, all picking him apart without a single word at all. “I had a similar question for you, Alex Smite.”
The boy stood, his arms in front of him as the van volted, moving forward. Crap. Alex knew this day had been coming for awhile, but if he’d known it was coming today, he would have fucking torched everything. It would have made this situation so much easier, because he wouldn’t have been thinking of escape, or what he should have done, it would have just been a matter of killing himself so they couldn’t extract all the information out of his head.
“Oh, nice! Then we should have similar answers! You go first since I asked you first!” Alex said, putting a healthy distance between himself and the brute squad. There were still a few of them, put together to grab the stragglers outside of the system. There weren’t a lot of them anymore . . . There was a thought, passing himself off as part of the system. An operative, the same as them. They just needed to start talking. He’d weave himself into their story later.
Alex had never thought of wearing a mask outside. Until now, he’d never needed to. His style had remained unchanged since he was a teenager for good reason: it was unassuming and people clocked him an number of years younger than he really was. He was a forgettable person, so long as he kept his mouth shut. Would it have mattered anyway? He didn’t know. You could never be too paranoid he supposed.
“That’s my name,” He frowned. “don’t wear it out Vidar.”
“Where did you go?” Alex whispered, flashlight in hand as he leafed through papers on the desk. People didn’t just disappear without warning. Alex frowned, unfolding a map of the city. They were hard to find, Alex knew, he preferred paper maps over Google. The boy looked around, clicking the light off for a moment, waiting to see if any red lights came out from the background before sitting down. Dots lined the map, too numerous to count or guess what they could have been. A telephone was drawn over city hall and the office his mom worked at. Something crunched outside.
“Fuck. Fuck.” He whispered, grabbing another map, paying no mind to the papers that stuck to it as he booked it out of his friend’s house. Justin’s mom was at the side-door, and he didn’t like what she had in her hands.
Even if people didn’t just disappear, that didn’t mean you could find them. Any hope he had about Justin had long faded, replaced with the unfortunate theory that his family killed him. “No evil ever came from a woman’s womb that wasn’t placed there first by a man.’ Sighed, Pareto. Alex ran his fingers over the signed words. Just another clue he couldn’t figure out. A book with a wealth of information that just told him things he already knew because he could listen to the whispers! It didn’t tell him what to do. . . .
Alex had ran away. He couldn’t trust people in that town, so he left. And now, he needed to see if they put him on the schedule this week, or if he needed to hit up the gas station to make his rent- “Hey!” Alex bit his lip as a set of fingernails sank deep enough into his upper arms to make him see stars. They couldn’t have known. It was fine. It actually calmed him down.
