MITCH:
The door swung open. The president and his goons had found us. I never thought I'd die in such a horrible manner. True, I still didn't know how I was going to die yet, but I never thought it would be because I discovered deep state secrets that the president was involved in a satanic cult. I always hoped my death would be less satanic and more painless.
"What's this? Duck and Cover?" a familiar voice asked. April taught me that ducking and covering was nearly useless without wearing a tinfoil hat for protection. This was quite embarrassing.
I peered through my impromptu fort of pizza boxes to see my friend, Faizan, standing at the door.
Faizan was the first person I met when I put up the sign with the drawing of the cat inviting people in for cookies. Technically, he didn't read the sign. When I was putting it up, I realized that I didn't have any tape and he just happened to be walking by. I asked to borrow some, and he said that would be no problem. He also told me that I had drawn a cute squirrel. I would have pointed out that it was obviously a cat, but when you are needing tape you really don't want to start needless arguments.
What Faizan lacked in art appreciation, he made up for in cookie appreciation. His favorite are my peanut butter cookies with sea salt. You don't encounter many peanut trees near the ocean, but the unlikely combination works. I was now prepared to bake him all the cookies he wanted in appreciation for him not being a black ops assassin sent to kill us.
"Hey, dude," I greeted weakly.
"You have an olive in your hair," he observed. "And something moldy. Maybe it was a pepper once. You should probably get rid of that."
I always considered the idea of cutting and styling my hair to be quite bourgeois, but in the odd situation when it became infested with ancient pizza toppings, messy hair could be a hassle. It was a painful endeavor but I managed to pull all the greasy ingredients out. Faizan was incorrect. It was a mushroom not a pepper but, in its state of decomposition, it was really hard to tell the difference.
I'm sure Faizan never had this problem. For one, his apartment is impeccably neat. For two, his hair is impeccably styled. For three, he's just impeccable. He certainly wasn't like that at all six years ago when I met him. He was a poor disheveled student newly immigrated from Pakistan. Now he's a rich computer programmer more Americanized than any American I know. He was much more genuine before, but you've got to accept your friends though all their changes.
"April. Is that you?" Faizan asked, staring at the blanket. The woman under it muttered something unintelligible. Under the covers, she looked like a sad scared Charlie Brown ghost. A ghost that's afraid of the living. Someone should write a story about that.
Faizan was usually smiling, though it was hard to tell with him wearing those fashionable masks everyone wears these days. I don't get the point of spending money on stuff you really don't need. I've worn this same T-shirt for five days straight. Now that's value.
Anyway, I could tell Faizan wasn't smiling because that's not the kind of thing one does when they say something like "Someone blew up Danny's Bar. It's gone."
"Wait. What do you mean gone?" I asked.
"An explosion or something," Faizan explained, pacing the floor. "People automatically look at me suspiciously when things blow up-which happens a lot these days- so I sure as hell wasn't going to stick around. I know you hang out there, though, so I wanted to make sure you were okay."
I didn't know how to respond. Shock. Disbelief. Those words don't come close.
"I almost went in there," I finally said after an eternity of silence. "I was right at the door. I could see Danny and Sheryl sitting there laughing through the window."
The times were crazy. You never knew when the person right next to you was going to snap and just stab you. Fights broke out in the street. The news described even worse in excruciating detail, but it was never really real until it happened to someone you knew. That's when you couldn't just turn off your computer and make it all just go away.
"Maybe people got out," Faizan suggested unconvincingly.
"I'm going to check," I said.
April threw the blanket off herself. Her clothes and hair were now covered with green little threads from my frizzy throw. "Don't. It's too dangerous to go out."
"There's no danger, dude. The bomber is probably long gone," I protested. "Or suicided themselves to bits."
"She's right," Faizan said, agreeing with April for once. "Bombings are a red hot flame for would-be violent little moths."
He had a point. In the good old days people would stand there shocked or try to help. Now the sight of death and destruction was an invitation to try to top it. Police sirens echoed in the distance, but who knew when someone would actually show up. Sometimes that was a good thing.
"There's nothing you can do right now anyway," Faizan said.
"He's right," April said in a another unusual show of agreement. It was touching how much she cared about me. Almost as much as she cared about the poor aliens trapped in Roswell.
"Besides, we have our proof of this huge conspiracy," she continued, throwing the blanket to the ground. "We have to plan how we're going to get the word out."
"What conspiracy this time?" Faizan asked with rolling eyes that pretty much stayed permanently rolled when he was talking to April. "This isn't the Big Bird cult again?"
"Bigger than the big bird," April said. "Though it is a fact that the Illuminati planted subliminal messages in the programming when Sesame Street debuted in the 60s. All the captains of industry who watched the show as children are now under their thrall, doing their evil bidding."
"Uh-huh," Faizan said. "And the lizard creatures are behind this?"
"Of course not," April said, running her hands through her greasy jet black hair in frustration. "The lizard overlords are smart enough to know that TV caused cancer; evidenced by the rise in people contracting fatal diseases since television's creation. They'd avoid it like the plague. Keep your far fetched theories to yourself, please. Sesame Street was obviously done by human beings. Come on. How could a show be sponsored by the letters K and S and the number 3? That's all code and someone's behind it. But what Mitch and I have just discovered is bigger. Much bigger. Presidential bigger and we have proof. Damning, irrevocable, x-marks-the-spot proof."
"Okay, I'll bite," Faizan smirked. "Let's see this proof. You saw me using air quotes when I said the word, proof, right?."
"Sorry, we don't trust you." April crossed her arms and held her ground.
Sometimes these two were too strange even for me. It was like watching a tennis match where one person was holding a baseball bat and the other was juggling. You just knew nothing productive was ever going to happen.
"Guys stop!" I held my hands up like a referee who no one ever listens to. "No one else gets along in this world. We have to. I declare my apartment to be a vibe positive zone."
"Fine," April relented. "We can show him the proof."
"I don't want to see it," Faizan countered.
"You need to have your eyes opened to the truth," April said. "I'm going to shove the red pill down your throat if I have to."
"Guys stop! Now!" I screamed. I never shout unless it's to exclaim about how good the pineapple on the pizza tastes but April and Faizan brought this out in me. "Just look."
I turned the screen back on and there was Hellfire Jones aka President Price standing in front of a blood dripped White House making a satanic pact with a two-headed wererabbit.
"See," April said.
"See what?" Faizan asked. "You have a crazy video game. So what. Does this have something to do with Big Bird?"
"He just can't be reasoned with." April turned to me for support. "How do you explain President Price standing in front of the White House in a game that was made 15 years before he was even elected?"
"Um, it doesn't show him as the president," Faizan said. "He's just in front of the White House. Wasn't his character in the White House in one of his movies."
"Oh yeah!" I said. "That was 'Hellfire Jones 4: Hell to the Chief.' A true classic. The Citizen Kane of Hellfire Jones movies."
"Yep, so just because Damen Price appeared in a Hollywood version of the White House doesn't mean it predicted he would be president," Faizan said.
"Well, our current theory is actually that this game used subliminal messages to elect him president but yeah," I admitted. "I guess you have a point."
"Et tu, Mitch?" April sighed. "You can't reason this away. It's real."
"Maybe you're both right," I said, hoping to end the argument. Neither April nor Faizan were having it. "Okay. I have an idea. Faizan, you're a computer programmer, right? Can you reverse engineer the game to see what it's all about?"
"That's not exactly what I do."
"Oh," I said, feeling a little dejected. "What do you do?"
"I'm a consultant."
That really didn't explain anything.
"You know how you've been enjoying a website, then suddenly they change it and it's way worse?" Faizan asked. "You can't find anything anymore. There's no consistent organization. The whole thing's a mess."
Me and April nodded.
"Well, when web designers want to 'improve' their websites, I help them,"Faizan continued gesturing wildly. He really loved his job. "They ask me if the new design is confusing enough. I always answer 'no' and I find ways to make the website even worse."
"Why would anyone want that?" I asked.
"I dunno," Faizan shrugged his shoulders. "But there's a lot of demand for it and people pay me well."
"So you're telling me that you only know how to make things suck. You don't know how to find clues of mass manipulation hidden in 15 year-old video games?" April asked.
"Pretty much."
"I guess we'll never get to the bottom of this," I said, sliding comfortably in my beanbag chair. I was a little relieved. This all seemed like a lot of work.
"I don't care what either of you Luddites think," April said. She started filming the screen on her phone. "If we can't take this proof to anyone, then we're going to shove it right in the mouth of the serpent. See how the cornered animal reacts."
"Huh?" I asked. "Who's the cornered animal? Bigfoot?"
"Of course, not Bigfoot," April scoffed. "How would he access a computer? He has no tech skills and he's half blind. You're getting him confused with the Yeti again. No, I'm going to email this footage directly to the president and watch him squirm."
"I bet he just ignores you," Faizan said. He was going to ask if April realized how many crazy emails the president got from whackjobs like herself, but didn't really want an answer.
"Oh, I will not be ignored," April said. "I'm not emailing president @ whitehouse.gov. The only ones that read those are programs that respond with 'Thank you for contacting the president.' Or, in my case, they always say 'Please leave us alone.' You have to be smarter than the respond-a-bot and the intern drones. A friend on one of my message boards told me how to email Damen Price directly. He'll have no choice but to confront the truth."
"Aren't you afraid you'll get caught?" Faizan asked. "No, of course not."
"Of course not," April answered. "I'm going on the deep web to go on the even deeper web where there's a link to the invisible web where there's no way anyone could trace it to me. Also, I'm going to use Mitch's computer."
"Go ahead," I said.
A gunshot blasted in the distance, but still close enough to not be considered distant. April tapped frantically at my keyboard. Faizan eyed my crumb-filled couch suspiciously before deciding to just lean against the wall. Catnip, my timid little tabby, decided to slink out of his hiding spot and nab some kitty kibbles. We were all safe for now, but for how long?
I missed the good old days when Hellfire Jones was a demon-slaying hero and not a fascist. Life made so much sense back then. I told myself that I was surrounded by the two people and one feline that I cared for. All the other problems could just fade in the background.
"Oh crap! I think I set off some kind of alarm," April said staring at the flashing computer screen.
Or maybe not.
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