Chapter 2 – The morning after and the visit
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The morning after

I woke up with large cup of coffee. I was up earlier than normal after a very restless night with bushy eyebrows looking down on me and lots of running. Is that some muscle-ache I felt? Mark slept a half an hour longer then his usual 6 o’clock and missed his chance to jump on me. Even if everything passed without any personal fallout, I was still left with a very uneasy feeling. I decided to avoid that spot and area for the next two years.

After dropping the kids off to school, I rushed to my work. I wanted a few minutes of quiet before disappearing the work-crowd again. I sat in my car with some music on the background fidgeting with my keys when I suddenly felt an object in the pocket of my vest that wasn’t supposed to be there. I took it out and yes, it was a small rectangular box. Even more surprising, it had an address on it. Oh no … this is not good. He must have slipped it into my pocket during our struggle. My heart instantly tried to beat an Olympic record. The one for jumping. Out. Of. My. Chest.

Breath! Breath! Breath! Inhale and count to 5, exhale slowly counting to 7. The panic will now wash out of your body with the last whispers of air leaving your lungs. Who makes up this rubbish? Panic reduced? Absolutely not! I could do this a 100 times, and I would still feel like I want to empty my stomach.

Totally stressed out I tried to scramble out of my car, only to fumble and fall flat. Yes, people, move along, this is my normal routine. I always tend to exit my car this way. Nothing special to see.

Luckily there were no people nearby so I could try to pretend this didn't happen. I got up feeling something stingy in my left hand. I had crushed the box. I turned the box and felt some fluid spill over my hand. Apparently, it had contained a vial with a liquid. The fluid felt really cold. Which makes sense, since it was evaporating very fast into some yellowish smoke.

I took some paper handkerchiefs and pulled out a little glass shards from my hand and threw the box, the broken content and the shard in the nearest garbage bin, after taking a picture of the address on the box with my phone. I bound my hand with fresh paper handkerchief. What was so important about the vial that it was worth all the fuzz yesterday? What was that stuff anyways? Am I poisoned now?

I was running late, so I went as fast as I could to the daily morning yawn-meeting. I didn’t want to add unemployed certainty to the poisoned possibility. I took my place aside Steve, another of my colleagues.

I tend to avoid him. He was big, muscled, booming voice, always funny, always pro, with a gorgeous wife and a very clever son. The only mistake I could mention about him, is that it was just plainly impossible for him to not exhale his greatness. I had my difficulties, but overall, I think I was doing fine. But this guy made me really insecure. He looked surprised when he saw me, and instantly whispered: “You should visit the bathroom after the speech. You have a graze on your chin and it’s bleeding slightly.” So much for falling inconspicuously out of my car. Well, I needed to visit the bathroom anyways to wash my hands and disinfect the wound on my left hand. Hopefully it would wash the traces of that product too.

While our much-respected leading gorilla was performing his morning tricks, my mind was buzzing with a thousand questions, doubts, fears, possibilities, and other incomprehensible thoughts.

“Was it nothing?”
“Was it nothing?”
“Was it radioactive?”

Oh no, I’m going to die! I need a will.

“Was it expensive?”
“Was it a virus?”

Definitely a virus! I’m dead! Everyone around me is also dead! I quickly scanned around me with sheer panic in my eyes. Nobody seemed to notice. Not even Steve, who was listening concentrated to the trivia’s of the day.

“What was in that vial?!”
“What is going to happen now?”.

One thing is for sure, the content of that package was worth a lot of trouble. I wasn’t doubting anymore. That lab-guy was kidnapped. That package was extremely important. And it is destroyed now for better or worse.

The rest of the day passed in a haze. I was extremely clumsy. I spilled coffee. I dropped my lunch in a waste bin and had to buy a new one. I mixed up names in the support calls. And I was worried sick about what would happen now. I even had to pass the bathroom outside the fixed ‘bathroom-break’ moments. Which is so not-done! I knew that would earn a remark on my work prestation sheet. A bit silly now I thought about it. You have a firm with strict rules. You have people obeying them very well. And if someone really needed to break a silly rule like the forced hours to visit the toilets, you marked him for punishment without even considering the effects if he didn’t disobey.

“Hey, dear manager, I obeyed the rules! Can I get a new chair and fresh pants now?” It would be an all too real remark, I thought. I wonder if you would get fined for that as well. The ultimate trap. Avoid it and you are toast, do it and … you are toast. Maybe the trick was doing it on your chair and then switch it with one from a co-worker and hope it ends up at the manager. Who can ask a new chair at his manager? Silly thoughts. I needed that toilet and bee-lined for it. No need to publicly embarrass myself.

I’m quite sure there were some effects from that liquid on my body. Aside from the pain from the glass cut, my hand felt a little numb and cold and stiff. But I didn’t have any problems operating my keyboard and mouse with it, so it could be ok. To be sure, I booked with my family doctor to take a look at the cut this evening. I intended to lie a little about the cause…

Before picking up mister jumpy and miss grumpy, I made a detour passing the address mentioned on the box. It appeared to be a location in a normal suburb with family homes. The letterbox belonged to a nicely kept home with some nice tasteful decorations and flower beds in the garden. The house breathed an “occupants-on-holiday”-vibe. I passed the house looking for suspicious signs. I didn’t find any. I realized, with a sly grin, that I lacked about every skill needed to discover “something suspicious”.

So, I parked the car across the street, and pretended to post a letter while feeling up the letterbox on its bottom. Wrong mental image. I blame it on the stress. But I felt a card stuck underneath the box and quickly ripped it off. When I walked back to the car and literally saw nobody in the street. All the cars, all two of them, aside from mine, were on their parkways. I guess this is the reason this box and house was chosen. It was very difficult to keep an eye on this spot without giving you away to even a novice shady operation detector. I deleted the previous address picture and took a new one of the card. The bin at the school served as alternative mailbox to post the card to oblivion. It was nicely hidden between candy paper and disposable lunch bags.

“Hey my little ones! Guess this is one of those lucky days for you! I have cut my hand on a glass and must pass the doctor to check if I bandaged it right, so I don’t have time to cook. This means pizza and pasta time!”

“Jeeeaaay”, they screamed in chorus. Guess miss Grumpy is miss Happy now.

“How was your day? And what do you want from the Italian take-away?” I asked.

They both excitedly starting speaking, creating a barely understandable sound mash in which I heard the words lasagne and pizza and something about a boy stumbling on the playground and hitting a pole mixed up with a story of a girl crying because she forgot her homework. I heard the most important things, so I tuned them out, giving some hums and ok’s and cool’s to satisfy their feelings. They didn’t start arguing among themselves and were just happily excited. That’s one thing going right!

After our delicious lunch, I took two fully-charged tablets and we all got into the car for the doctor. They were still too young to stay home alone. I know some parents think an almost eleven year old girl and a eight year old boy can be alone for an hour but I’m against it. Give it another three years and I’ll consider it. The tablets would keep them quiet and docile in the waiting room.

The doctor looked at my cut and listened to my story. I had broken a dirty glass at work in the coffee corner and had cut myself. It bled a little but I rinsed and cleaned the wound and bandaged it. I mentioned the pain and numbness and cold feeling afterwards. He examined a bit further but he concluded that there was nothing wrong. He said that the cut was healing really good already and if I would have told him, the cut was from the day before yesterday, he would have believed me. He would have prescribed a local anti-biotic ointment but since it was healing so good, there was no point in it.

The rest of the doctor’s visit went about how I was holding up with my children. If I was still able to  keep my head high and how I was feeling. I talked about feeling lonely and blaming the world a little for what happened to me. My mind kept on returning to that mystery bottle. It took all self-constraint I could muster not to spill the beans on what really happened. I walked out with a prescription for some vitamins. They would support me mentally and would provide general healing aid for the wound on my hand, regardless of what the yellowish smoke-liquid was.

When we got back, we all enjoyed a nice kids movie together. They had a good time picking the right one and they enjoyed it thoroughly. For me, it was enjoying my little family to the fullest before everything would inevitably fall apart. I did have a sense of unavoidable doom looming around. After all, I still have to visit that second address.

 

The visit

Two days passed very normally and finally the weekend started. Saturday was our shopping day and I needed some clothes for Mark since they shrunk again in the wash. Or Mark grew too fast. I had a healthy and proud suspicion it was the latter. The mall gave me an innocent and safe idea for my visit of the mystery address. I bought two items: a burner phone with a some credits on and a box of cookies. At home, I had recreated the box that got destroyed as good as my memory remembered it. I’ve put a small medicine bottle filled with water in it as further decoy.

After the mall we went to the house marked by the address. Again, this turned out to be a very normal looking house. That wasn’t very surprising since most of the houses in the world just look plain normal. Only the rich and the very eccentric live in houses that look out of place. But it could have been a warehouse too I suppose, or an office building. It was a house with neatly kept garden and light yellow curtains that really complemented the soft colour of the bricks and dark brown wood of the window frames. This time, the house seemed actively inhabited. I assembled my courage, took my kids out of the car and went to the front door. Time to give away some free cookies.

Shana won the paper-rock-scissors and got to ring the bell, which she did enthusiastically for seconds. On the bell the name “Stevens” was mentioned. The length of the ringing was bordering impolite but her grin was just too cute to stop her. It helped that I wanted this ordeal to be over as quickly as possible. After a minute or two, a man of my age opened the door wearing some worker outfit with some dirt on it. It looked like he was gardening.

“Yes?”, he said, eyeing us curiously.

“Good afternoon, sir, I have a delivery for you. I got your address and a package from an acquaintance.”, I explained.

The man perked up and looked curious.

On that queue, Mark pulled out the box of cookies like we rehearsed and offered it to the man openly for everyone to see.

“Oh”, he replied, “I expected a box from someone I didn’t know but I didn’t expect any cookies. Who is this acquaintance you are talking about?”

I ignored his question and said, “Please accept them, the cookies are an extra bonus, the actual delivery is this box.” I offered him the small box covertly.

The man accepted the cookies without thinking and quickly snatched the small box from my hands. He stepped a bit further inside and examined the small box.

“This is not right. I have some information on the box, and this is not the correct one. It doesn’t contain the correct labels.”, he told after a quick examination.

I had obviously made some errors while recreating the box. It wasn’t the original box after all and my memory of the original was far from perfect. “You know what should be in the box? And can you proof that you are really the intended recipient?”, I asked.

The man was silent for a few moments, and then he asked us to come in. Standing too long on at the front door was a bit suspicious.

“I don’t have the time, right now.” I declined. “If we can agree on a moment to meet, I think I can correct the delivery. I’ll give you my number so we can text to set up the time and place.”

Everything worked out perfectly as I hoped. I had different scenario’s in my head. Even scenario’s where we just gave the cookies and walked away. I gave him a card with the number of the burner phone and the name “Tom”.

“Please use my name somewhere in the message, that way I’m sure it comes from you.”, I suggested.

He nodded and thanked my kids for the cookies with little bit pocket-money.

We walked back to our car, teasing each other and my children seemed happy that the man was grateful for the cookies. They were already making plans for giving out more cookies. I put a lid on that plan since they were counting on my wallet to provide for the cookies. Which would rapidly become far more expensive than a weekly allowance. For as far as they know, I had to deliver a box of cookies and a little box.

“But Tom isn’t your name, daddy”, Shana remarked. She had obviously read the card.

“No, it isn’t. But I don’t trust the guy enough to let him know my name. It’s like you don’t give your address or phone number on sites on the internet either. I explained that already a lot of times to you two. And I will keep repeating it.”, I side-tracked them.

“Ah, it’s because you can never know if someone is a bad person who wants to harm you and come to your house and steal your bed.” Mark enlightened.

I explained that stealing a bed isn’t a likely possibility but that there are other things in our house that are a lot more valuable then a bed. But if you are 8, then your toys and your bed are among your most prized possessions. I smiled happily at the naïve thought.

I was still driving when my pocket buzzed with an incoming message. At the next red light, I risked a fine, but I had to know the meeting details Mr Stevens sent me. I memorized it and deleted it immediately. No traces, right. I had already deleted the picture of the address card too. It seems I’d have to take half a day off on Tuesday. I was worrying again.

“Was it ok? Was it a trap? Shouldn’t I forget about this?”

All very correct questions but I feared the liquid really was something dangerous. Even if the cut in my hand had healed swiftly to the point only a small fading scar was left. A scar the would be gone in a few days too. Maybe it was because it healed so fast and perfect that I was motived for a meeting. My hand still had some episodes of stiffness. That feeling had spread to my arm this morning. It comes and goes without a steady rhythm. The image of the blood stained lab coat was still haunting me and the guilt of not having done anything was pushing me to do things I normally wouldn’t.

Soon all my doubts were pushed to the back of my head because I had two real life distractions and a household. They were my life and demanded my attention eagerly. When I was home I opened my laptop and put in a request for a half a day off and time flew.

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