He clicked send, and returned to his government network. It was a relative Romanian Cluster Fuck, as far as the coding; looking like a government official wrote it instead of a programmer, but from his experience, most network boards were thrown together hastily. They served their function, and that was all that was important, actual appearance quaility-control was minimal, only the desire to be user-friendly for the computer illiterate.

Deeper into the system, he found a small batch of Company emails that seemed of interest, and saved them into a text document on his desktop, for easy retrieval. Pushing forward, he resumed the search for anything concerning Louisiana or it’s in-lying cities. He knew it was not likely that there was any activity, but sometimes paranoia could seriously save ones ass. It was a matter of survival for people in his trade. With a pop of his neck again, joined with his shoulder this time, he yawned silently and took a strong swig from his Mountain Dew/vodka concoction, and brought up a blinking message on AIM. He was almost ashamed of being a user of the program, since the company was nearly everything he was against, but it was simple to use and he didn’t solely communicate with those of his ilk. It was her, she was sick of relaying on the forum and wanted to talk in real-time. Fine by him, he was a bit annoyed with it himself. The forum was great for quick notes and questions, but never anything of any substantial length, like the conversation they were carrying on.

sl0wm0tionri0t: Hey
emptystar: whuttup doggiefish?
sl0wm0tionri0t: Nothing, bored senseless. You?
emptystar: samesame. just checking up on any news with louisiana and a particular abc.
sl0wm0tionri0t: Sounds exciting. BTW~ I haven’t heard or seen anything involving them or any other shadows
emptystar: ok. anything else of note, other than the children’s movie porn?
sl0wm0tionri0t: Not really, just a bunch of picking around. You’d think I was a damned chicken.
emptystar: but what an intelligent chicken you be.
sl0wm0tionri0t: Right. Well, what have you been up to?
emptystar: eh... nothing as productive as you, been pretty empty for last couple of weeks.just the normal shit that goes on, doctoring my bank accounts, fixing the rent, power, etc... wait... hold on a sec... brb

The chair he had lifted from the office of his former employer flew back into the door of his pseudo-office as he bolted to the window, the bottom of his jeans wrapping tightly around his feet. Inching open the drapes, he peered with one eye to the street, a large boat of a car he had never seen before crept by on the street, the engine loud and the model old, his heart began slamming against his chest. Closing the inch on the drape, he pulled the chair in behind him and sat back down at the desk, his hands rocketing over the keyboard.

emptystar: back. fuck. think there’s an abc or shadow outside my fucking window. big, old car, loud. not from around here. most assuredly not, no one ever drives through this late, all the farmers are fast asleep. fuck. not good.
sl0wm0tionri0t: You’re just being paranoid.
emptystar: no I’m not. there’s no other reason they’d be creeping the way they were in front of my house. no explanation, whatsoever. I’m off for the night. if it’s nothing more than paranoia, I’ll be back on tomorrow night, assuredly. keep your eye out, though, okay?
sl0wm0tionri0t: Yeah, okay. Seeya.
emptystar: Bye.

Double-clicking on his burning program, he opened the carriage of his CD-Rom drive inserting a blank disk and closing down his messengers and the forum window, after they were logged off he brought up the program, and clicked on the DataCD selection, taking everything from his desktop and a couple of file folders full of privileged information and dumping it onto the disk. As it burned, he lit a cigarette and peeled up a small section of loose carpeting and the floorboard underneath it, reaching down into the hole, he removed a small lockbox and returned to the desk, dropping in the freshly burned CD, he locked it and replaced it into the hole and covered it invisibly. If anyone entered the room, and did even the most thorough of searches, they wouldn’t be able to find it.

Back at the desk, he highlighted the contents of the CD and dumped it into the Recycle Bin. With his slight modifications, it had two options instead of the standard one. Lingering over ‘Empty’, he reconsidered and knew that his function was the one he needed. Shred. Ten seconds later, the files had been ‘shredded’, and would be absolutely unable to find, let alone reassemble. After that task was finished, he played a game of Solitaire and smoked another cigarette to calm his nerves. His heart still pounding, and right leg jittering up and down, he decided that the only solution was to take a shower.

Pulling the shirt from his shoulders and tossing it onto the back of the chair, he headed out of the office, down the hall, and into the midnight blue bathroom. With a flip of a switch, the fluorescent bulb lodged in the ceiling came to life and fired bright, letting his step freely in the space allotted to him, without stubbing his toe or other appendage. His hands pressed firmly, palm down, onto the vanity, he stared into the quickly fogging mirror as the shower reached full temperature and the album in the CD player cranked out at near full volume, A Perfect Circle’s, Thirteenth Step. An album about dependancy and redemption. Just what he needed, for the moment, at least.

With noone left to talk to, [sl0wm0tionri0t] shut down her notebook and crashed backward onto her bed, her brain sore and body weak, she looked up to the ceiling and watched a small fly staring back at her with its hundreds of eyes. Outside, she heard all the familiar noises of New Orleans; the traffic, the loud and boisterous people, all creating a wall of noise, and being the last thing she needed with the headache forming inside her skull. The low throb of the ever reoccurring migraine, caused by what she called a ‘caffeine overdose’. Her chin-length dark hair fell over her face and was soft against her full lips, like the crimson colored satin pajamas she had on. For a second, her mind was off of [emptystar]. She didn’t really know much about the kid, if anything, but the idea of alphabet agencies and/or other government spooks troubled her. If they were in Nowhere, it would be likely they were in New Orleans. Only time would tell.

She wasn’t quite the paranoid he was, but she also knew when trouble was around the bend, and when to be careful.

The yellow walls of her dingy three-room apartment faded in and out, her eyes finally giving way to exhaustion and finally down to sleep. Drifting down the familiar corridor to the world of dreams, she opened a set of glass doors and stepped out onto the ever-busy Bourbon Street, out of what must have been a hotel, a hotel she had never seen before on the Street. The wind was kicking up fierce, dead and decayed leaves blowing badly about, her hair following the cross currents of air.

She was dressed in one of her lightweight peasant blouses, embroidered beautiful in blue and green around the neck region and dipping down between her small breasts. The sleeves clumped up around her jeans, her hands slipped down into her pockets to the third knuckle on each middle finger. She was content and comfortable, and ignored the confusion of the hotel. She noticed for the first time that it was evening and unusually dark. Stepping out past the awning, she looked heaven-ward and scanned the sky, without a cloud in sight, there was still no moon to be found, and as her eyes lowed back to the horizon, she noticed that the street lights were out. Scoffing quietly to herself, she looked around and saw but one car on the street, which wasn’t too unusual, Bourbon Street usually being packed like sardines with bodies - pedestrian traffic.

Back under the awning, her eyes kept returning to the slow moving car, as it neared she noticed that was much larger than anything found today, even the most monstrous of Cadillacs, this was an old car, from the days before gas spikes and emission standards. Closer it grew, and she picked it out - a ‘56 Mercury - the car James Dean played chicken with in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’, and inside the confines of the well-manicured car, she saw four bodies, all looking to wear Fedora’s, or cowboy hats. She couldn’t be sure at this distance, but none-the-less, they weren’t usually worn, especially around these parts.

Closing in on her, she could finally make out the pedestrians; four men, seeming to be of eastern European descent with their oily, olive complexions, square jaws, and coal black eyebrows. Their faces were hairless, without even a hint of a five o’clock shadow or any growth, period. All were also dressed the same; extremely crisp suits the color of smoke, stark white collared shirts, and jet-black, skinny ties. Their movements were almost mechanical, and she noticed that they looked nearly identical, like they were all from the same womb.

Looking into the cold, dead eyes of the driver, her insides knotted up and she filled with dire panic, bolting back inside the hotel, her eyes shot wide open and palms sweaty as she watched the fly crawling upon her ceiling, the yellow walls bright and comforting in the warm light from the bedside lamp. Her arms were stiff as she reached up and wiped the cold, beading sweat from her brow and felt as her heart down-shifted gears like a manual transmission.

Returning from the bathroom, she took a shot of NyQuil and curled back into bed, this time the right direction and under the covers. Turning the light off with a click, she stared at the amber light on her monitor signifying lack of power, and drifted back into sleep, this time without dreams of The Gray Men.