Every other Sunday is Free Story Sunday, with another story brought out of the archive for your reading pleasure. Believe only the things you see in front of you and then only half of that.

Photo by Dez Hester @DezHester on Unsplash

The first thing that Jason noticed about the hotel lobby was that there was a long crack running down the wall behind the service counter. It was a festering crack, the kind potentially brimming with moulds of various lethality. It put a heaviness into the bottom of Jason’s ribcage, near the solar plexus. He kept his eye on it as he waited to speak with the front desk clerk, and he nervously fingered the magnetic identity card in his pocket that proclaimed his affiliation with Carver Security. There was a slight warmth to it, and from experience Jason knew that this was attributable to information packets being sent to and from the flash sector of the card.  

Ahead of him, a very loud woman argued passionately with the desk clerk. As was his habit in such situations, Jason tried to ignore as much of what she was yelling about as possible, but a lot of it still slipped through his mental defences. She was unhappy with the water temperature in her room, apparently. Her children needed to be bathed in hot water, because there were germs everywhere in the suburbs. This isn’t the city she kept saying, and by the fifth iteration Jason developed an urge to reach forward and strangle her. This isn’t the city, it’s the wilds of Maryland, and who knows what kind of filth is out here? She was adamant about this, repetitive to the point where Jason suspected that she might be suffering from brain damage.  

Eventually the front desk clerk (a tired-looking black woman with a sarcastic twist to her lips) soothed the suburban woman and promised to send the maintenance person up to her room as soon as possible. As Jason approached the desk the clerk mouthed her apologies. Jason smiled and shrugged his shoulders slightly. 

“I’m here to check in,” he said, “Jason Varis. I should be listed under the Carver Security convention block.” 

The clerk swiped at her screen. “Mr. Varis, I have you listed as room 417. Right off the elevator, your floor happens to have the ice machine. Do you need any help with your baggage?” 

“No need,” Jason said, smiling. “I travel light.” 

Jason tried to get a signal in the elevator, but he couldn’t even find Carver’s private satellite linkage, let alone any public wi-fi. He slipped his phone back into his pocket and tapped his fingers on his pants pocket. The elevator had a slight rumble and when it opened on the fourth floor, he was surprised to find how relieved he was. The fourth-floor hallway had an overly air-conditioned chill lingering in it. He found room 417 and touched his keycard to the grey pad set above the door handle. It clicked open and he slipped into the cold, musty darkness of his hotel room. He thumbed the lights on and poked around. It was small but efficient, and much cleaner than he’d expected. A tiny bathroom led immediately off the main entrance. There was one bed, queen size, its duvet tucked neatly and crisp on the corners. A flatscreen television was embedded into the wall across from the bed, and a neat plastic desk sat between it and the window. Jason pulled back the heavy black curtains on the window and saw that his view was of a thick concrete security wall and a jittery pine tree. He let the curtain fall back against the window and left to retrieve his bags.  

On his way back through the hallway he passed a tall Vietnamese man dressed in swim trunks. He had a blue towel thrown over his shoulder and was whistling something unrecognizable. Jason stopped to speak with him. 

“I didn’t see a pool when I was checking in, where are they hiding it?” 

“They’ve got it coming off of the third floor,” the man laughed. “If you’re coming in from the rear entrance, it’s technically on the second floor. You need a map to navigate through this place.” 

Jason thanked the man and went into his room. He dug through his suitcase for his swim trunks and set them on the bed. He considered them for a moment. A dip in the hotel pool would be refreshing after a touch-and-go trip from the Carver office overlooking Battery Park. At the same time, he felt that a nap and then a light dinner would go a long way towards getting him prepared for the security convention. On a whim he decided to ask the Oracle. He picked up his phone and tapped the question into the application: Go swimming or take a nap? A moment later the answer appeared: Weather near Washington D.C. is sunny, 87 degrees. You have been travelling for several hours. The time is now 2:43 P.M., Eastern Standard Time. You are standing in a Best Western hotel in Cheverly, Maryland. You should go swimming. Jason nodded, tossed his phone onto the bed, and redressed into swim shorts. He retrieved a towel from the bathroom and left the room again. 

He made a wrong turn out of the hallway and had to follow a path around through a completely different floor than he’d originally thought. When he pushed through the light screen door into the pool area, he realized he felt badly disoriented. He sat in a nearby pool chair and leaned back, letting the towel drape over his midsection. The white clouds streamed by overhead at too rapid a rate and he closed his eyes to try to stop the dizzy feeling from overtaking him. From the pool he heard splashing, and the squealing laughter of a young woman.  

He felt himself falling into sleep and jerked himself awake. The pool area was almost deserted. A young man with sinuous black tattoos was floating languidly and watching a young woman with pale skin and light blonde hair test out the spring in the diving board. On the other side of the pool, a rumpled man with a thick, bushy brown beard lay on one of the deck chairs with a slim laptop propped up on his prodigious gut. Jason left the towel on the deck chair and made his way towards the pool stairs.  

The water needled his skin, but he forced himself onward until he was submerged to his waist. Once at this level he turned his attention to the young couple in the deep end of the pool. The young woman was bouncing on the end of the diving board. With a quick motion she pushed off after a pair of false starts. Her lithe body flipped twice in the air, and she came down into the water like paper in a slot, without the slightest hint of a splash. Jason nearly began to applaud and turned away, embarrassed. The young man gave out a great cry and embraced the young woman when she slipped up to the surface. They dissolved into laughter and the young man loudly declared that she would make the diving finals for sure this year.  

Jason stayed in the pool for a brief time. He began to feel self-conscious after the young couple exited the water, and the air was starting to cool off. He towelled himself off briskly and as he did so lightning broke over the darkening sky. The young couple took it as a cue to leave and after a moment Jason followed suit. The bearded man remained lounged in his seat, buried in his laptop. 

The hotel breakfast was held in a large room off the lobby. Jason picked along it, indecisive about the options on display. There was a waffle maker and a tray of scrambled eggs. The eggs were powdered and unappetizing, so he patiently made himself a waffle and paired it with an overlarge orange. It was a quick repast and Jason finished it thinking he’d have to find an early lunch in the city. The Vietnamese man from the hallway came into the breakfast room while Jason was leaving, and they nodded to each other. The harried desk clerk from the day before was working the morning shift. She informed him as to when the transit shuttle would be arriving, and he stood out under the vast awning at the hotel’s front entrance to wait for it.  

The shuttle took him to Cheverly Station. The escalator he rode into the brutally efficient concrete block groaned loudly. The damp platform exuded a rank smell that got into Jason’s nostrils and stayed there through the entirety of his trip over the Potomac. When he exited the metro at Mt. Vernon Square it was replaced by another set of scents: dust, the sweltering heat of the summer swamp, the rich tang of oxidizing steel, the unpleasant perfume of massed flesh and sweat. He made his way to street level and found himself amid concrete monoliths and the sky-sweeping touch of construction cranes. He used his Oracle to find directions and saw that he was mere steps away from the convention centre. There was an alert notification in the news bar of Oracle, but he swept it away into the ignore bin. 

The conference was bustling, filled with security professionals from all over the eastern seaboard. He spent ten minutes wandering the lobby, utterly lost, before a helpful digital signboard gave him directions to the first part of his agenda, a lecture on footprint scanning in the modern age. It was more of a human resources learning opportunity, but his director had insisted on the agenda and Jason was not about to deviate from it. He felt something approaching awe at the clean, digitized nature of the conference centre and tried to hide it behind a mask of jaded boredom.  

By the time four o’clock came around, shimmering and hazy with the hot July sun, Jason was mostly bored with the proceedings. One of the lectures – a position paper on the rights of private security forces in foreign countries – had been interesting, but on the whole, they had been largely technical. The spec geeks in the crowd had been entranced, but Jason had fought to stay awake long enough to take notes. His director had insisted on detailed notes, which had seemed like a good idea when Jason had agreed to it but had quickly turned into an exercise in masochism. As he descended back into Mt. Vernon Square Station and reversed his original journey, he dozed off. His itinerary had specifically mentioned that sleeping on the D.C. Metro past the Potomac was not advised, but he came to as the train pulled into Cheverly and was whole and in possession of his goods. The hotel shuttle was supposed to arrive at the station’s parking lot every fifteen minutes, but Jason waited for twenty, watching the empty cement lot with wary eyes. When the shuttle did arrive, there were apologies and Jason accepted them with good grace. 

Back at the hotel he decided to hold off on seeking out dinner. The pool beckoned him, clear blue water rippling with the breeze that had picked up with the lowering of the sun. As he brushed off his swimming trunks, he remembered the urgent news notice that he’d ignored that morning. He brought up Oracle and saw that it had returned, the red exclamation mark seeming to pulse beside the “[BREAKING]” indicator. He checked over the wallscreen and found that it had direct streaming built in, so he thumbed the alert over to it. A CNN feed blew up in a burst of light and sound. It was a satellite link-up from the South Korean bureau, unedited; the ticker-crawl at the bottom of the screen meant nothing to him. An English translation loudly followed the anchor’s speech by a second. 

“We have received confirmed reports now that a large earthquake has struck the city of Pyongyang. Satellite imagery shows at least five residential apartment blocks have collapsed, in addition to several buildings in the core government area. Attempts to reach Chinese government officials for comment have gone unanswered at this time. More on this as it develops.” The screen flipped over to a series of related feeds. He disconnected from the link and thumbed off Oracle.  

The pool was more crowded than it had been the previous day. A family of hard-scrubbed tourists lounged at one corner of the shallow end; the children splashed loudly while the parents leaned against the side of the pool, smiling indulgently. The young couple was standing by the diving board, arguing about who was next in line to dive in. The Vietnamese man from the hallway was sitting in the deck chair near the pool stairs with a woman and they were chatting amiably. The man with the bushy beard sat near them, buried again in his laptop.  

Jason considered the pool but before he could work up to going in, he saw the Vietnamese man waving him over. After an awkward moment of indecision, he walked over to the seated couple. The man gestured towards an empty chair next to him and Jason took it. The woman smiled thinly at him and then patted the man on the wrist. 

“I’m going to the zone for a cigarette,” she said, her voice like water over gravel. “Be back in a minute.” The man nodded and then turned his attention to Jason. 

“So, you’re here for the Future of Corporate Security conference,” the man noted. “I saw you down at the convention center earlier today.” 

Jason grinned. “I was sent down from New York for it,” he replied. “The office decided it was my turn to go this year.” He extended his hand. “Jason Varis.” 

The man accepted the handshake warmly. “Van Nguyen,” he introduced himself. “Home Office security for the Anderton Group in San Fransisco.” 

Jason widened his eyes. “You’ve come a long way, then,” he noted. Van shrugged. 

“It’s worth it, to be honest. You’ve got the cutting edge of our business gathered in one place, and you also get the chance to tour Washington. Have you had a chance to check out the city beyond the convention yet?” 

“Well, I’ve seen part of the Metro line, anyway,” Jason replied, and Van cracked a grin. 

“You really do need to take a little tour of the city before you leave,” he said firmly. “It’s well worth it. Washington is every inch the Imperial City.” 

There was a commotion from the pool, and it drew the attention of both men. The girl had pushed her boyfriend into the pool when he wasn’t looking, and he had hit the water with a loud slap. When he came back up to the surface he began to swear sulphurously. The girl crossed her arms and looked unimpressed. The tourist family in the opposite corner of the pool became indignant; the mother began to loudly remonstrate against the language that was on display, claiming that her children’s ears were on fire. The boyfriend began to yell back, claiming that it was a free country still and that he had a right to express himself however he felt. The mother responded that he had a moral duty to regulate what came out of his mouth when children were present and that his vocabulary was a strong indication that he needed to obtain further education. The boyfriend replied that she could feel free to perform several obscene gestures upon herself. By the time that the father left to find the hotel staff Jason decided that he’d had enough. He said goodbye to Van and left to find food. 

The clerk at the front desk was a younger woman, in her early twenties. She mentioned that there was no built-in restaurant in the hotel but that there was an Italian restaurant on the downhill slope of the hill. He left the hotel and followed the driveway down to the squat little restaurant that was halfway down towards the gates at street level. It smelled of cigarettes despite the ban on indoor smoking having been in effect for twenty years; the odour lingered in the walls and furniture like a hairy overbearing ghost. He ordered linguini alfredo and decided to bring it back to his hotel room to eat.  

He paused at the crest of the hill, near the side entrance to the hotel, and looked back out over the darkening landscape. Another hill rose in the distance, swarming with thick green trees and topped with a building that resembled a fortress. A brightly lit H was the only clear symbol that could be seen from his position. 

He found his way back to his room and ate at the tiny little table beside the window. The restaurant hadn’t provided utensils, and he eventually had to settle for the plastic spoon that came with the room’s complimentary coffee set. After he finished, he considered his options and eventually turned on the flatscreen television mounted to the wall. The television was obsessed with sitcoms and competition shows so he flipped it off. The sudden silence made the air-conditioned chill seem oppressive. He turned down the crisply made bed and proceeded to get ready for bed. 

He stared at the ceiling for a moment, thinking of his schedule for the following day, and he reached for his phone.  

“What’s the weather like for tomorrow after 3 PM?” he asked Oracle. Oracle thought about this. 

“Weather in Washington D.C. metropolitan area after 3 PM tomorrow will be 75 degrees and partly sunny. Winds will be coming in from the northeast and there will be a ten percent probability of precipitation.” 

“What tour options are there in downtown Washington?” 

A selection of web results appeared listed on his phone. The first was a sponsored advertisement for a tour bus service that operated out of Union Station, in the heart of the city. He saved it to an alert scheduled for 2 PM the next day, set a second one for his morning wakeup, and set it aside. He was asleep within moments. 

After he made the rounds at the conference on the second day he was invited out for drinks with several familiar faces from the schedule. They went to a hotel several minutes away and paid an exorbitant amount for martinis. The place was packed with people in formal business wear and every second person had their phone in their hands or to their ear. Most of the people that Jason had come with were discussing information they had learned from the conference, and he tuned them out. Another, a tall man with thinning, greying hair, was holding forth on the history of the hotel they were sitting in. President Grant held court there during his Presidency, he kept saying, and the people that kept gathering in the lobby to bring his attention to their pet issues eventually gave rise to the usage of the term “lobbyists”. The story itself was interesting enough, one of those bits of Washington lore you could only really learn through visiting the city, but the man had a pompous voice and Jason found himself wanting to fade out of the conversation after a few minutes. 

He felt his phone vibrate and he checked it. It was a push notification from Oracle and when he opened it, he was confused. Oracle did not typically push news stories to his attention but now it was showing him another article about the earthquake in North Korea. The death toll had risen to 600 now, it said, and there was video of the aftermath available. He scrolled down the article and a second window popped open. After a quarter-second it resolved into a splashy plea for donations, a colorful page that showed hardworking volunteers pulling aside rubble and helping smiling, bruised children to eat. There was a gigantic “DONATE NOW” button, garishly yellow and set in the bottom right corner of the page. Jason thought it must be from the latest Haitian earthquake; they would be using the images from the remains of Pyongyang soon enough he decided. He pursed his lips and put the phone back in his pocket. Looking around at the table he saw that the conversation had died off. His colleagues were all browsing their phones with silent, shocked faces whose expressions bordered on awe.  

“My God…” one of them said. Several others nodded in agreement. 

“It’s just going to get worse before it’s all over,” the pompous grey-hair ruminated. “There’ll be disease and maybe even war there before the final account is settled.” 

“Listen, I’m thinking of heading down to Union Station,” Jason said, anxious to change the subject. “Maybe catching one of those tour buses and seeing the sights. I haven’t seen much of the city past the conference centre and this hotel.” 

One of his colleagues, a thin, ratty man with shapely glasses, snorted through his nose.  

“Kind of a horrible thing to think about,” he droned. “How can you even think about something as mindless as tourism at a time like this?” 

“Oh, come on,” another retorted. Her lips were crooked with contempt. “The only thing you can do right now, sitting here, is give money and feel bad. Both of those take about two minutes. Are we supposed to stretch it out because you can’t concentrate on more than one thing at a time?” 

The argument continued, becoming heated as it went, but Jason pushed his way out of it. He excused himself and paid his bill with the waitress at the bar. He asked a couple of people for directions and neither of them stopped to acknowledge him. Irritated, he pulled his phone out and asked Oracle for directions to Union Station. When the application generated the map for him it came with a bright banner announcement pleading for him to consider donating to one of the emergency earthquake funds. He swiped it away with frustration and studied the map. The walk was a bit much, so he hailed a cab; the cabbie was chatty for a moment but trailed off after Jason muttered a series of non-answers.  

He stood in Columbus Circle a few moments later, staring at the flags of the Union and feeling hemmed in on all sides by sweeping concrete vistas. Cars moved around the circle past the impassive face of Union Station with the grace of slugs in the sun. There was a brightly coloured double-decker bus idling along to the right and he approached it diffidently, ingratiating himself with the considerable lineup that had formed alongside it. When it came to be his turn to be at the front of the line the ticket-taker asked him for his pass and Jason spread his hands. 

“Sir, you need a pass to board the tour bus,” the ticket-taker sighed, his deep contralto running right through Jason’s intestines. “You can get a pass in the station marketplace.” 

“How much is the pass?” 

“Twenty-eight dollars, sir.” 

Jason pulled out his leather wallet and rifled through the billfold. He pulled out a pair of worn twenty-dollar bills, folded them, and handed them to the ticket-taker. 

“Sorry,” he said, “here’s my pass. I forgot I’d gotten one from the hotel.” 

The ticket-taker took an infinitesimal glance at the pair of bills, smiled, and folded them into his considerable hand.  

“Very good, sir,” he crooned, “watch your step on the way up and find a seat quickly. We’ll be leaving quite shortly.” 

He managed to find a spot on the open-air upper deck and, quite to the ticket-taker’s word, the tour began in short order. As they rumbled slowly along the congested streets and the movie-magic filtration of twilight fell over them, he began to feel continually smaller amongst his surroundings. The city seemed sculpted from mountains of concrete and glass, a monument to the simple ideas of complicated men. The names piled up on him, plazas on statues on parks on monuments. Washington. Lincoln. Cleveland. McLellan. Roosevelts. Grant. He listened to the tour narrator prattle on about the history of every building they passed and learned that the truth behind the concrete supremacy was exactly as it seemed: the city had been built specifically to be the Imperial City in full splendour.  

An hour and a half later he exited the bus after extracting a return schedule from the driver. He stood on the edge of the Tidal Basin looking along the shore at the columned dome that housed the statue of Thomas Jefferson. He walked along the path and around to the steps and climbed them to their peak. A handful of tourists were hanging listlessly about the statue, and Jason ignored them. He stood before Jefferson’s statue and felt the air slow into a muggy soup. His breath caught and he drew deeply, trying to fill his lungs. He stared around at the inscriptions, carved into stone on the orders of the Franklin Roosevelt administration to support the ideas of the New Deal, and felt a touch of moisture touch his eyelashes.  

His phone vibrated and he checked it automatically. It was only once he saw the light of the screen that he wondered about disturbing the sanctity of the monument. He looked around at the other tourists and saw that no one cared in the slightest. 

It was another news alert; Jason considered trying to figure out a way to disable it and pushed it away as something to do later. The screen he landed on post-swipe showed a video of a diverse group of people pulling aside the rubble of a collapsed concrete apartment block. A weeping Korean woman clung to a large, brown-skinned man dressed in tough black canvas. A tickertape played beneath the video; the North Korean government had agreed to let a certain amount of foreign aid workers into the capitol to help rescue the victims of the earthquake. The death toll had risen to 630. Many global charities had begun to establish emergency collection procedures. The video ended and another alert was pushed through to him. It was another splash page for charitable donations. This one was built around a black-and-white picture of a group of people setting up what appeared to be a soup kitchen near the ruins of a nondescript building. A young man and woman were busy putting together an industrial hotplate for a soup pot while a larger, older couple were breaking open generic packets and mixing the contents into a series of steel bowls. “They’re doing all they can,” the caption read, “But they need your help.” Beneath was another of those garish yellow DONATE NOW buttons.  

Jason stared at the donation button for a moment and then looked up at the statue of Jefferson. In the deepening shadows of the encroaching dusk the other tourists seemed to disappear, and he felt alone with the impassive sculpture. His eyes flicked around the dome and in the failing light much of the wording was rendered unintelligible. The only line that he could see with even a slight degree of ease was one that read “I know but one code of morality for men whether acting singly or collectively.” He looked back to the statue, and then back to his phone. His thumb grazed the donation button and within seconds he found himself entering his payment information and giving $500 to the Arching Foundation. He had never heard of them before that first splash page he’d been directed to, but he reasoned that it was likely a pet charity of the Oracle developers. An alert buzzed on his phone; it was an email telling him that his payment had been processed and thanking him for the donation.  

He put his phone away and looked around the monument. The crowd had thinned out and there were only two or three people still present around Jefferson’s statue.  

“We’re all in this together,” he declared aloud, but the other tourists ignored him. 

Later, he caught the 11:27 train out of Union Station and followed the line back into the wilderness of suburban Maryland. He emerged from the sweating concrete of Cheverly Station with a weight on his shoulders, and he slumped on the bench to wait for the hotel shuttle. When it arrived he climbed aboard and buckled himself into the very back of the van. There were no other hotel guests on the trip, and the R&B music issuing from the radio echoed metallically off of the van walls. 

The swimming pool was closed by the time he checked. His room was cold , and he made turning down the air conditioning his first task. His stomach rumbled uncomfortably and he poured himself a glass of water. He remembered the street dog he had picked up during the tour with faint nostalgia. The television was the same jumble of displaced narratives it had been the day before but he decided to keep it on as background noise. The $500 he had spent at the Jefferson Memorial was weighing on him and he asked Oracle to give him the rundown on the Arching Foundation. A website designed with an eye towards stately marble was the first result. He browsed it with as steely an eye as he could muster at that hour. Eventually he set the alarm on his phone and shut the television off. He hadn’t found anything alarming on the page, just professionally designed pages and vision statements that were the same sorts of MBA language-games he was used to seeing in the corporations that Carver contracted for. They provided hot meals for people in need on a global scale and they had a whole gallery of photographs attesting to this that Jason had only very lightly skimmed through. Just before he fell into sleep he heard the faint thrumming of a helicopter flying overhead. 

At breakfast the next morning he saw the young couple, sitting in a corner of the dining room and whispering intimately to each other. He favoured them with a quick smile but they were engrossed in themselves. He picked out an orange and made himself a Belgian waffle. While he was munching alone he watched the tourist family from the day before come in, talking and squabbling in loud, oblivious tones. They parked themselves at a table near Jason and continued on with their chatter. It made him uncomfortable, so he finished his waffle quickly and took the orange with him out to the shuttle. 

The metro trip was uneventful, as was the final day of the conference. He completed his agenda by 1:30PM and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering amongst the trade booths in the sprawling lobby of the centre. He chatted with some of the people he recognized from the lectures and took some literature that was on display. Around three he ran into Van Nguyen at a booth advertising a new model of private military-grade drones; he was chatting amiably with the booth girl and grinned when Jason approached. 

“Welcome to the future,” Nguyen said. “Who needs human event security when you’ve got these new spider-types crawling around the area?” 

Jason shrugged. “They’ll still need someone to monitor them, program them, maybe provide backup in the case of failure.” 

“Better learn to code, then, huh?” Nguyen’s hand went to his pocket and he withdrew his phone. Jason felt his own pocket vibrate, but before he could bring his phone out Nguyen’s voice arrested his thought process. 

“Wow, that’s not good,” he said loudly. His piercing eyes came up to hold Jason’s. “SimuLens just issued a statement warning that there was a security breach with the Oracle.” 

Jason felt himself grow cold. “Jesus, how much metadata would they have gotten away with? They couldn’t have broken into the payment data, though, could they? That stuff is locked up with military-grade encryption, it would have to be an inside job for that sort of thing.” 

Nguyen shook his head. “No, nothing like that.” He browsed his phone, a frown forming deeply on his smooth face. “It sounds like it was a lot simpler than that. A simple ad-hijack exploit. Injection-only. Redirected the advertising splash pages that should have been there with something different.” 

“What kind of ad?” Jason asked through numb lips. 

“Some sort of charity,” Nguyen responded. “Called, uh,” 

“The Arching Foundation.” 

“That would be the one,” Nguyen said, his eyes raising back to meet Jason’s again. They held eyes for a moment and Nguyen’s widened slightly. 

“Oh, you didn’t…” 

Jason shrugged. “I was at the Jefferson Memorial last night,” he said, “and the ad came up again, and…I don’t know. It felt like the thing to do.” 

“Of course it did. Bastards. Hijacking aid from people who could actually use it. Worse kind of person. How much are you out?” 

“Five hundred bucks.” 

“Could be worse, I suppose.” 

Jason laughed and it felt a trifle nasty. “Sort of. Carver isn’t making me a rich man by any means.” 

Nguyen laughed but it sounded forced. “I know that feeling.” 

“Did they say if they knew who was behind it?” 

Nguyen shook his head. “They’re still investigating, sounds like.” 

“I was looking through their page last night, it looked legitimate enough. Maybe if I take another look through it.” He opened up the history of the browser on his phone and found the page he’d been on. It came up the same way it had the night before and he felt his heart begin to pick up a quick pace.  

“It’s still up.” He flipped through the pictures with a closer eye than he had the previous night. There still wasn’t much to them – people setting up aid stations and photos of filthy children standing forlornly near rubble – but he stopped on the ninth picture in the gallery. His heart skipped a beat and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him.  

The picture showed a shirtless young man hauling up broken wooden beams from a pile of rubble. The young man had familiar sinuous black tattoos curling around the curves of his torso. Next to him was a svelte young woman that Jason had last seen nuzzling with the young man in the breakfast room of the hotel. He flipped the phone around and shoved it into Nguyen’s face. After a brief moment of irritation, the other man’s eyes widened in shock. 

The metro trip back to Cheverly was tense, filled with the sort of restless electric silence that keeps the heart-rate at an uncomfortable speed. The images from the Arching Foundation’s website kept playing through his mind and he had to squeeze his thumbs inside of his fists to keep from shouting randomly. His teeth clenched to the edge of pain and he noticed a few fellow passengers eyeing him nervously. When the train finally pulled into Cheverly his breath was coming raggedly. As they stepped onto the cement platform of the station, Nguyen’s hand fell onto his shoulder. 

“Softly,” he cautioned Jason. “This is the time to play it cool.” 

By the time the shuttle arrived back at the hotel, however, Jason had not gotten into a position where he could play it cool. His pulse seemed to seethe with anger and his breath was steaming out of his nostrils. He leapt out of the shuttle’s sliding door and nearly collided with the bearded man from the pool. There was an awkward moment as they manoeuvred around each other; the bearded man had a large laptop bag slung around his shoulders and it made the dance more difficult.  

“Sorry,” the bearded man mumbled, but Jason ignored him, already stalking into the hotel in a cloud of frustration and anger. Nguyen followed closely after him. Jason stabbed his finger viciously at the elevator button but when it took longer than forty-five seconds he stormed away and found the stairs instead. 

He arrived on his floor puffing slightly from having taken the stairs at a rapid clip. He traversed the hallway in bounds and stormed through the screen door to the pool area. The loudness of the door slamming open caused every head in the pool area to swivel towards it, and the expression on Jason’s face caused many to blanch and look away instinctively. The young couple were bobbing near the middle of the pool, their faces half-bored.  

Jason pounded across the pool deck, threw his jacket onto a deck chair, and dove into the pool. An audible gasp came from the others and the young couple’s boredom evaporated into shock. When it became clear that Jason was swimming towards them, the young man put his arm out and pushed his girlfriend back behind him. 

“Hey, what the fuck man?” he bellowed, but Jason rose out of the water at him. The snap of the young man’s nose sounded like an electrical arc coursing over the entire pool. 

After that, everything came to Jason in a series of flashes that could be described using a wave form. Falling on the young man in the pool. Losing his grip in a churn of chlorinated water. Getting decked across the temple by the guy’s girlfriend, who had a punch that felt like a diamond drill. Blacking out for a second and waking up to pool water inhalation. Pulling himself up onto the cruelly hard concrete deck and watching as the older tourist with the aggravating family tackled the young man on the opposite side. Nguyen stepping in and shouting out a brief explanation that rang in the shattered crowd’s collective unconscious. His vision swimming and a brief attempt to remember if the young woman had been wearing a ring of some sort. His fingers coming away with blood from his hairline. Delirious shouting. He’s a cheater! Check his sleeves for the aces!

Jason huddled in a ripped task chair, holding a Ziploc bag of ice to his bashed-in temple. His head throbbed in painfully regular pulses but he was otherwise awake and responsive. The hotel security office was surprisingly small. At the same time, he supposed, there were a fair number of people in it. Nguyen stood with his back against the office door, his arms crossed and his expression flat. Three hotel security officers were leaning against the desk, the steady gaze of the hotel security cameras outlining them like auras. The young man with the sinuous black tattoos sat on the carpet against one wall, still dressed only in sopping swim shorts and holding a bag of ice to his nose. There were dried maroon streaks peeking around his fist. His eyes bore into Jason balefully. 

“So if you don’t work for this Arching Foundation, why are your pictures on their website?” one of the hotel staff asked. The young man made a contemptuous sound, playing his tongue off of his teeth.  

“Man, anyone can put one photo into another place,” he said. “It’s pretty basic.” 

“So where are you, then?” Nguyen asked. “In those pictures?” 

“Haiti, yo, like two years ago. Me and Christine went down there with Food Not Bombs, kind of shit looks good on your law school applications, you know?” 

Jason shook his head, wincing at the pain that went shooting through it.  

“It doesn’t make sense,” he rumbled. “You’re clearly in Pyongyang in the picture on the Arching site.” 

The young man threw the bag of ice to the floor in sharp frustration.  

“Someone must have cut us out and pasted us into some news footage still or something,” he shouted, “I don’t know.” 

“You don’t know,” Nguyen repeated sardonically. “Can we see the original photo then? Is it on the Food Not Bombs site, maybe?” 

“No, they don’t keep many pictures up on the site, they cycle through them pretty quickly.” 

“Convenient.” 

“Look, I have it on my hard drive, back in my room. Let me go get it, or let Christine bring it to me.” 

“That’s also pretty damn convenient,” Nguyen snapped, leaning forward from the door and adopting a menacing stance. “Unless you were the one that made the photos, anyway.” 

“What?” the young man exclaimed, sneering. “You can’t tell me you think-” 

“I think we’ll let the police do the thinking from here on out,” one of the hotel staff said mildly, and after a moment of indignation the young man grudgingly picked up the ice bag and placed it back on his mashed-tomato nose. 

Jason got up out of the chair and gestured at Nguyen and the door. 

“Can I take a walk out to get some air?” he asked. “I’m feeling a bit nauseous.” 

The third member of the staff hesitated for a moment and then nodded approvingly. 

“Sure, just don’t leave the actual hotel. Use the pool deck if you want.” Jason readjusted his own bag of ice and nodded. 

He and Nguyen came out into the pool area. There was only one other person there now, the older tourist who had assisted them in tackling the kid earlier. They nodded familiarly at each other and he got up to join them in standing alongside the shallow edge of the pool. 

“Boy, that was some excitement,” he gushed, and Jason allowed himself a small smile.  

“Yeah, it was something alright,” he murmured. “What are the odds that the kid would be staying right here with us? That I would recognize him?” 

“Puts it into perspective, I guess,” the older tourist said.  

They stood in silence for a moment and then the door opened behind them. One of the security staff was motioning to them. 

“Sorry, guys,” she said, “the police just arrived, they’re definitely going to want to talk to you.” 

“Good luck!” the older tourist called out as they left. 

Later, once full dark made it’s way across the Maryland sky, the older tourist came back out onto the deserted pool deck with a cold can of PBR. He’d gone out earlier that day and found a little liquor store near the University that had been selling big cases of the stuff for $10. He could have splurged and bought something more expensive – lord knew he could afford it, now – but why bother? PBR tasted good cold and did the right stuff. He popped the can open and smiled at the way the hiss seemed to linger in the empty night air.  

“To your very good health,” he smirked to the quivering waters of the pool. He titled the can back and drank half of it at once, his throat bobbing up and down at a gleeful pace. Except David, he thought, that weirdo can be exempted from that. He frowned. The guy had come highly recommended for the kind of work he’d been hiring for, but the guy had also proven to be a total prima donna pain in the ass. He’d been more than willing to host David down in Florida but the asshole hadn’t wanted to go that far away from Buffalo. The meetup in Cheverly had been an okay compromise – at least Liz would stop hassling him about going on vacation again for a while – but the guy had been a total tooth-grinder the entire time. Insisted on building the damn site from the ground up, hacking through the hotel network security to get the things he needed.

Still, it had been a neat trick. He grinned in the deep shadows of the pool deck, and swallowed the rest of the can at a gulp. Host the site right from the hotel and shift the blame onto some other guy, neat as a magician pulling a card trick at a table full of bumpkins fresh in from the desert sun.  

The empty can went in the garbage can near the door. He decided to find out if Liz was still awake, although he knew that he’d probably end up in the bathroom gloating over the balance of his crypto laundering-account. He stretched and stared up into the night sky, laughing a little; he was feeling good. It had been a good day. Overhead, the bright light of a helicopter sped across the velvet expanse, making its way towards that fortress of a hospital rising out of the hill in the distance.  

But wait! We don’t have to stop here! Click on the image above or those below to check out other unsettling glimpses into horror.