4.
The USB
slid into the port well. My computer started to slowly register the new device
that was hooked up. A small window popped up filled with document and image
files. Colourful pixels filled the small window before I started to copy and
sort the files to my laptop’s memory.
The light cast over the small and
desolate office I called home. I called out for Sam as I reached for my can of
tuna. He wouldn’t come and I called out again. I breathed out and went back to
the computer.
Pictures began to cycle on the screen.
Each picture on the USB drive had been copied and the document copies were spread
out on the drive’s other folders. Each document was either a receipt or a
journal article that had been coloured in a multitude of hues. I went back to
the pictures.
The passed girl was in each picture.
A revolving door of people with the girl came into focus on my computer screen.
As I cycled through the pictures again, there was another person that was
common. A man in a hat and overcoat in the back of the pictures at first, but
as the pictures went on with the dates on the file the man began to look more
openly and maliciously at the girl.
I couldn’t tell if he was a Photoshop
or not. The man began to stare at the girl openly, and what appeared to be off-coloured
eyes stared at her. The eyes weren’t normal; the almond eyes weren’t a normal
colour. They were purple. I shrugged and breathed deeply, the damn contact
lenses.
I got up and unplugged the USB drive.
I needed to see Jason.
5.
Jason had
his large frame crafted by oceans of soda stuffed into the spinning captain’s
chair. The mountains of flesh which greeted me were dimly lit by his four
monitors. His face was curtained by black straight drapes around his face.
“Alright, Kev,” Jason wheezed, “let
me see what you’ve got.”
I handed him the drive. The stubby
fingers took the drive from my hand and inserted it smoothly into the computer.
As he did so, a small breath was let out from his direction.
“There’s a guy on these pictures. I
want to see if any of the pictures have been tampered with and get print outs
of the originals.” I sat back and watched Jason’s fingers fly over the
keyboard. The pictures began to run through the program as the printers pushed
out pictures and documents.
Enough paper to republish War and
Peace stood on the printer. Colours dashed along the paper were dim in the
monitor.
“All the pictures are printed out as
they were before any tampering. If you want to see them now, they’re on the
monitors,” Jason said as he turned to me. I grabbed the paper and went to the
monitors. The girl was there, the revolving cast of people – the man. He was
still there. Same coloured eyes.
“The girl is sexy.”
“What?” I broke my eye contact with
the man and looked at Jason.
“The girl, she’s hot. Are you
following her?”
I looked at him. “No, I’m
investigating her death. She might be sexy now, but she may turn into Bloody
Mary overnight, look out. Is this guy,” I pointed to the guy in the back,
making sure my finger wasn’t touching the screen. Jason hated that, “real or a
fake?”
“The guy that has a total Akhenaten
thing going on? If he’s fake he’s a cut out and not an implant into the
picture.”
“Go back to that first part?
Akhenaten?” I looked at him quizzically.
“Akhenaten, look, he’s a weird
looking pharaoh from ancient Egypt.” He pulled up a picture of a statue of Akhenaten.
They shared many similarities, a lack of shoulders, a long, elongated face, the
almond eyes and what looked like a serpentine figure.
“Well done, Jason. I’ll be back tomorrow
or something, I got to look through this stuff,” I shuffled the papers, “see
you, bud.”
I got up and started to walk out, as
Jason said, “Hey, I’ll send you some links of this guy. You may want to read
some of the hilarious shit people say about him.”
His voice died as I walked out. I
was looking at the paper as I walking down the street back to my office. The
receipts were colour coded to journalists, many of whom worked for large
syndicates are in the list. Colours that listed as edits, changes and complete
deletion, but payment for the article was listed with separate hues for each.
I looked up and saw that I had
arrived to my apartment and walked up to my office. I was looking at my papers
to read as I opened up to a truly astonishing scene.
Allow me to say this about myself: I
don’t get scared very easily. In fact, I don’t normally get scared by anything
that should probably scare me. Suspense movies, thrillers and horrors have all
come and gone without my notice and I leave without caring about being scared.
I say this so you may understand that when I saw the man from the picture,
purple eyes and all, holding a knife to my cat’s throat, I screamed. I didn’t
know what else to do.
He looked at me and went out the
opened window and I realized that I had continued to scream.
Sam looked at me, feline eyes and
all, and said, “Thank the gods you’re home.”
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