I Found A Knife
A Story site from EldonHughes
Willie & Frank--
Shakespeare?
In Nano-Time
Chapter 16 --
Squeeks in the Dark
Two
hours later, Ken and I were at a bank of computer screens, watching
paint dry. OK, not
really. But that's what
it feels like when you are watching computers do work.
We had four different systems engaged in searching through
different days, racing around the logs to see who could come back
with the desired results first.
Again, not really.
But in my head I wanted to convince them that that was what
they were doing, hurrying them along with the incentive of a finish
line.
Little
blue bars wandered back and forth across the screen.
Behind the monitors, down the wires and off on circuit boards
and hard disks somewhere, micro munchkins and digital drones were
trolling and sorting through bits and bytes of information, holding
them up to compare them to the little scrap of a virtual notepad
with wsfulton on it, searching and discarding, searching and
discarding, retrieving and returning false hope after false hope.
The false hopes showed themselves on the screen as little
flickers of hesitation in the lines of blue bars.
And
then, suddenly, tiny little flags started appearing on the screen.
They popped up one at a time, one after the other, and then
row after row. And then
they began popping up on all of the
screens. Moments
later, the flags stopped.
The search was over, and the drones and munchkins went back
to where ever it is they live in the computer, to await the next
adventure.
“Way to
go, guys,” I breathed.
“Now, let's see what you found.”
Ken was
already sorting the results, sorting for the earliest entries.
I leaned in to watch.
“Wait.
Look at that one,” I said, from just over his shoulder.
“That
looks like the creation entry,” Ken agreed.
“No, the
one two lines below that,” I pointed.
“What
the...” Ken started.
“It would seem that Mr. Fulton has his own personal
transporter.”
Beginning almost immediately after the creation of the account was a
series of computer terminal accesses, seconds apart, on machines all
over the campus. Some
of them were a half mile apart from each other.
“Looks
like we have some security holes,” Ken said. “Not for freaking long,
though. First let’s see
who it was that found them for us”
He
double clicked on the first entry and a window opened that had the
information we were looking for.
He was
reading the screen, but I was way ahead of him.
“No way.
That asshole.” I
reached over his shoulder and grabbed the mouse.
I hit the “print” button and heard the laser printer behind
us start to pull paper through the tray.
“Hey,
isn't that the weasel guy Jamey told me about?”
Ken asked. I
heard him, back behind me, but I was already long gone.
“Shhh.
Quiet,” Jennifer said.
There were five of us. Jennifer, me, Doctor Kyle, and a
couple of campus security cops.
We were gathered at the end of the sidewalk at the Weasel’s
house. It was one of the old, brick and wood bungalow houses.
Hundreds of them surround the university.
“Don’t
we have to wait for the local police?” Jennifer asked.
“No offense, guys.”
“None
taken, miss,” the one with the handlebar moustache said.
“We’ve already called the U-City Police, but they aren’t
going to get too excited about some stolen college property.”
The
other campus cop was just as tall as his partner, just no mustache.
No hair at all actually.
He doesn’t even have eyebrows.
Weird.
What he
did have was muscles on his muscles, and a voice deep and spooky
enough to scare a Halloween movie slasher.
“They said they’d send a unit as soon as one was freed up
from more serious calls.
The house is technically University property.
We’re ok to approach and enter if we think it’s necessary.”
“If that
bastard took Willie and Frank, it’s necessary,” I said.
“Easy
Jake, let’s go knock on the door, and see what we can find out,
first, ok?”
“You
folks wait here, please. We’ll go see if the Doctor is in,” spooky
voice said.
“How
long you been waiting to say that? “ cowboy cop said.
“I know,
right?”
The
porch light was on. We watched them push the doorbell.
We
waited.
“No
answer,” I said, and called out “Did you hear a bell? Try knocking!”
“Jake,”
Jennifer said, “Easy.”
Doctor
Kyle said, “Hang on.”
There was a driveway beside the house. He trotted down it and
disappeared around the corner.
He was back a moment later.
“There’s no car in the garage.
I don’t think he’s here.”
“Can we
break in?” I asked.
“Sure,
if we believe conditions warrant it,” cowboy cop said. I was close
enough to read the name tag under his badge.
“Officer Kirtland”
Officer
Kirtland said, “We are allowed to enter the home, if we decide it’s
necessary.”
“Officer,” Doctor Kyle said.
“We have evidence that Doctor Wizell has taken valuable
university property from one of our labs.
A number of critical experiments are in jeopardy.
Time is of the essence.”
The
spooky voice cop turned out to be Officer Martin, “The front door
was locked. Let’s look around back first.”
We
followed them down the driveway and around to the back door.
The back porch light was on. The porch door was locked.
Kirtland knocked, then knocked again.
He looked at his partner.
“Well.”
“Hey,
look,” Jennifer said.
She was standing near a lit basement window.
Inside
we could see the computer screen end of Willie and Frank’s cage.
The other half was in shadow, but we could see a couple of
rabbits and a guinea pig in the lit section.
“Do
those have something to do with your experiment, Doctor?” Martin
asked.
“Those
are the experiment,” Doctor Kyle said.
“Or at least part of it.
We have to get them out of there.”
“Allrighty
then,” Martin said. He
lifted on the porch door handle and pulled, and it came free with
almost no noise at all.
Inside, on the porch he knocked on the back door once, and then put
his shoulder into it.
The old wood frame of the door was no match for the officer’s
muscles. I was first in
line behind the cops.
“Was it
locked?” Kirtland whispered.
“I don’t
know,” Martin whispered, and grinned.
“It’s
not now,” I grinned back.
“Look,”
Kirtland said, with a hand in my chest.
“You folks need to wait out here until we check out the
house. We’ll holler as
soon as it’s clear, ok?”
“But..”
I said.
“Out
here,” he repeated.
“Actually, it would be better if
you waited off the porch, please.”
“Yeah,”
Martin said. “We might
need to make a run for it.”
“Let’s
go,” Kirtland said.
We
waited and watched the darkened door as they disappeared inside. A
light came on. Then
more lights. We went
back to look in the basement window.
Another light came on in the basement and I thought I heard
the sound of feet on stairs.
“Stairs
must be just the other side of this wall,” Doctor Kyle said.
Suddenly
there was shouting inside.
“Holy
Shit! Rats!”
“Look
out! He’s got—“
“Watch
out!”
Somebody
screamed, and the lights went out.
Well. Of course…
“Look,
Officer Martin,” Doctor Kyle said, “I meant no offense. I’m
just saying, if Jake hadn’t turned the lights back on you might
still be sitting in the corner of the basement.”
“That’s
not true,” Kirtland said. “I’d have gotten him out.”
“My
apologies. Yes , you probably would have,” Doctor Kyle said.
“Look, everybody has things they are afraid of, phobias,
whatever. Things that can irrationally paralyze them. It’s nothing
to be ashamed of.”
“I’m not
ashamed,” Martin said.
“And I wasn’t afraid. I
just… hate rats.”
“They’re
mice,” I said. “And you
apparently hate them enough to hide in a corner behind a desk.”
“Jake,
that’s enough,” Doctor Kyle said.
“Point
is,” I said. “They were
out of the cage, but they were in that room, and now they’ve disappeared. Probably scared crazy
and halfway across the city by now.”
“We’ve
got the rabbits and the guinea pigs,” Kirtland said.
“But
none of the mice.
Willie and Frank are still out there.
I wonder how they got loose to begin with?” Jennifer said.
“No way would Doctor Wizell have let them loose on purpose.”
“Miss,
just before it went dark, I’d swear a couple of them had a stick.”
“I’m
sorry? What?”
“A
stick. They were on the
table and they had a short stick they were pushing against the wall.
I think… I think
they turned the lights out.”
“Is that
what you are going to put in your report later tonight?” Doctor Kyle
asked.
A U-City
police car pulled up to the curb in front of the house.
“Or what
you are going to tell them?”
“Oh
hell, no.”
“That’s
probably wise,” Jennifer said.
“What
about the weasel?” I asked.
“I think
Doctor Wizell’s time at the university is safely behind us,” Doctor
Kyle said. “In fact,
I’d say that, once we take complete inventory of all the
university equipment that has magically transported itself into his
basement, his stay in academics is over, period.”
“That
doesn’t bring Willie and Frank back,” I said.
“We’ll
just have to keep looking.”
Up Next: The "How".
Available Tales
--"Willie & Frank"
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