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Chapter 1

So, the best place to start this story is probably the day after my friend "died". His name is not important, but you can call him Albest. He is kind of weird and stands on a fine line between pure stupidity and genius. If divine providence really exists in this world; Albest would be what happens when one such being had simply gave up in humanity and resorted to filling his entire personality with overused clichés and unhealthy obsessions. 

Albest had earned a living by weaseling it from people with more money than sense. Which are usually paranoid millionaires trying to keep tabs on their friend/spouse/mistress/cat, and trust me when I say that it is probably the best way to lose faith in humanity other than working as customer support while in high-school. Given time, he might’ve become a drug addict from the sheer pressure that society forces upon him, but life didn’t give him that chance. 

On a rather anti-dramatic day when everyone had more on their plates than they would care to admit to a casual stranger, the police found him dead on a park bench with a syringe stuck in his arm while wearing duck flippers. At the time, his supposed death was quite convincing and a rather nasty surprise for me; especially since I had received the news while I was on the toilet (the worst time to hear about the death of your best friend from your boss, who happened to be the type of person that have no qualms about breaking that kind of news from another toilet cubicle). It is not exactly unusual for someone to die while on drugs; People die on drugs every once in awhile, but there’s a limit to how annoying your boss can be when you’re working minimum wage at a job that had basically consumed your life.

Of course, I didn’t realize back then that Albest wasn’t dead and merely faked his death, but that isn’t exactly the first thing that came to mind when I heard the news (my first thought after hearing this news happened to be: ’Can I punch my boss and get away with asking for a day-off later?’) ; imagine how surprised I am when a not-dead Albest called me during the night. I had been pretty sad about his ’untimely demise’ and couldn’t sleep, tossing and turning in my bed. Since feeling sad is something that typically happens after having heard the news of your friend’s death and failing to get your boss to give you one of those holidays that you really bloody deserved. Seriously.

Just when I was contemplating sleep (that’s right, contemplating, not actually sleeping), life intervened in the form of a ringing phone, and I managed to knock over almost everything on my nightstand in order to pick up the phone with the  unreasonable belief that it was boss calling with a radically changed opinion (I really shouldn’t have told my boss to go eat a dick when he rejected my application for a day off from the stressful job I have). Then I had finally remembered that my phone is still inside my shirt because I had forgotten to take it out due to the fact that I had been heavily drinking alcohol to escape from the depressing mess that is my life. After a bit more fumbling, I picked up the phone, and I tried to sound professional.

"Hello? You have reached Peter Stewart. Who is this?"

"This is me, Albest. I faked my death. Peter, I want you to come to my apartment right now. I apologize for making you worry about my death, but I have to go. They are coming. Your life’s in danger." His voice sounded scratchy, and distant, like he was calling from an old phone; like trying to watch a movie while listening to static.

Of course, I tried to ignore the blatant pronoun game that he had been playing and tried to concentrate more the phone call as I had stopped taking it seriously. "Is this a prank call? We just heard the news, like, a day ago? Isn’t this a bit insensitive? I know he may be a douche. But can you try not to disturb my sleep?"

"Listen, brain-dead, I’m not dead. Also, do you really not recognize my voice? Someone is out to get you. Well, it might have been my fault, but the point is that your life is danger, Pete."

"Oh," I said, as reality finally punched through my hazy wall of tiredness that Albest isn’t dead. Though it’s mostly because of the fact that anyone else that dared to call me Pete had probably discovered that they might not survive the experience unscathed. "I thought you were dead, you prick. And it’s way too early in the morning for this kind ofAlbest? Hello?" 

"Goddammit, even if he is alive. This usually isn’t the kind of prank he’d normally pull." I grumbled to myself, justifying why I had to do this. I had dealt with his ’pranks’ before, but nothing like this. 

Since he had hung up before I had time to talk and argue for the sake of it, I don’t really have any choice but to at least visit that godawful apartment Albest had incessantly raved about and see what the flying fuck is going on. Feeling an odd burst of adrenaline, I suddenly felt awake, alert. I hastily threw on some clothes and walked to his ’bachelor pad’ as quickly as my legs can carry me without tripping over. 

As I reached the apartment block, I suddenly stopped in my tracks and realized how the building loomed over the area, casting a shadow that looked as creepy and intimidating as imaginable. Maybe it’s the lighting, but the combination of a cold night and a creepy building did nothing to calm my nerves when I had just heard my recently deceased friend’s voice over the phone. 

As I went inside the building, a brief revelation struck me: he lives in a dump. Imagine the dinkiest apartment you know, now add peeling paint, a sleeping security guard guarding precisely nothing, toppled trash cans, vandalized walls, and a torn notice board hanging on a nail covered in dust and grime. You got a pretty good idea of what that place looked like. After several futile attempts to wake the security guard, I gave up and ran towards a dangerous, rickety elevator and travelled towards his place while listening to whatever ungodly medley from the ’70s era the elevator had happened to be playing that day. Then a gigantic cockroach scuttled in through a hole in the, I didn’t even bother to be scared, I was already tired and whatever part of my brain that handles fear (it’s the frontal lobe. Yeah, so what if I had once wanted to go to medical school and scouts, MUM? It isn’t a nerd thing. That’s what I meant when I said I wanted to be a doctor) had been asleep before I even got the chance to close my eyes. Instead, I had looked for signs of immediate danger such as broken pieces of wiring, faulty call button, any sign the elevator is going to kill me in the lamest way imaginable. Which is essentially me dying with a cockroach by my side. I tend to avoid dying near cockroaches, since that was a personal rule I happen to have; no dying near cockroaches for me. 

When I had heard him bragging about the ultimate apartment that his money can buy, I was in awe at his skill to find whatever rathole that can pass as a ’living area’; after visiting this building...I was seriously wondering whether he was a closet masochist or not. From what I had just seen, the building looked like he had purposefully tried toand rather unfortunately succeeded-find the worst possible place to live.

If that doesn’t foreshadow what his apartment looked like, then I have been doing a terrible job describing the place. His apartment was even worse than I had imagined. The door was hanging slightly off the frame, and the doorknob was broken, the lock was jammed with gum. Not that it is relevant in any way—I don’t have a key inside and he never invited me here. We always met at either my place or a café somewhere; perhaps it was for the best. I would rather live in my house than accept oversized cockroaches as a part my daily life (I happened to had just shared an elevator ride with one). 

Apparently, whoever designed the doorknob didn’t design it to be useful in any way, because when I grabbed it, the doorknob came entirely out of the door. It came as a surprise to me as I discovered the doorknob was broken this way. Gum stuck in the door, cool, but this? C’mon, are they even trying? Then I briefly hoped he wouldn’t get fined. 

As I stepped inside, carefully making sure I won’t break anything, or accidentally step on a cockroach(I was especially wary of them after the aforementioned elevator ride). I surveyed the room, calling his name. The rational part of my brain then proceeded to tell me that it knew all along it was a scam, since I met exactly zero people that had decided to fake their death in any situation, so my brain just stopped caring. As I was calling him for the third time, a blurred figure came out of nowhere and pushed me to the floor. I was down on the floor before I got a chance to resist. Before I had a chance to even be afraid, a three successive rounds of gunshot suddenly exploded out of nowhere. Not the kind of noise you would expect from a normal gun, but the relatively less noisy sound of a sniper rifle. Immediately, I was dragged into a bedroom (Can you believe it? Albest actually had a bedroom) and I took in the figure that had just saved me. Before I can finish saying thanks, he put a hand over my mouth.

It was around that time I realized that it was in fact my friend Albest who saved me from getting a bullet to the head. 

He then placed a finger on his lip and that, as many should know, is an universal gesture for silence, so I had quieted down and silently followed him. I mouthed to him whether or not he is going to explain this to me later and whether or not I get to punch him in the stomach for ruining my sleep schedule and nearly taking a bullet to my head. The only response I got was a grin which vaguely translated to a smug "screw you, I don’t care".

I checked my surroundings and noted an obscene amount of newspaper clippings and tabloids covering the wall. I heard the distant ping of an elevator sliding open, panicked, and told Albest that we had to go. 

In response, he lifted the bed up and pull open a hidden trapdoor. He then whispered, "Bolt for that trapdoor when the time is right. Our blood will decorate these walls if you don’t follow my instructions."

I waited for him to finish his preparation of whatever he is doing before saying, "Dude, too much melodrama." As he shoved a gigantic lump of machinery onto the trapdoor and went inside, I followed. The trapdoor closed, and the world was dark for a moment until the light turned on. He had way more crazy in him than he had let on...

"I suppose I owe you an explanation," he said as we walked down and out of the dark passageway. Feeling like an idiot, I asked him to explain what the fuck is going on. As stress of recent events finally exploded and I ranted for a couple of minutes. He smiled and explained the current situation.

"I faked my death. I bought some medicine off of a really suspicious auction site that can simulate a heart attack. I woke up in the mortuary and had to call you to arrange a meeting in my apartment. As I had stated in the phone call, I believe your life is in serious danger, and it’s partly my fault. Things are in motion, my good friend." He licked his lips and continued. "You would be correct to think that I don’t have either money or patience to do anything like this. But I do have...friends that do happen to possess at least one of those things. They helped."

"There should’ve be no reason you would have to plan and do this. Why? Who the fuck did you piss off to elicit such a ridiculously strong reaction? This doesn’t seem to like something you would do or get involved with. James Bond, yes. You? No. This isn’t a movie, so please don’t expect me to follow along like a clingy puppy until you have at least explained why the hell are there random snipers that had been staking for god-knows-how-long around this place with the active intention of killing me? What is inside the elevator? And when do I get to punch you in the jaw?" I asked, torrents of questions spewing out of my mouth.

"Don’t worry. I will answer your questions once we are in a public place, like at that really downtrodden cafe filled with hoodie-wearing hipsters that are trying to write the next YA sensation on a MacBook Air or that shitty Mexican food place that served as nightmare-fuel for the unfortunate food safety inspectors." Albest said evenly, expertly dodging my request of punching him by trying to change the subject and ignoring the last thing I said. 

Ignoring the fact that you are just answering whichever question that are the least bothersome to answer and purposefully withholding information that concerns my life, I thought as I got more and more pissed off at the fact that he’s essentially demanding to go with the flow just because there’s a few snipers that seriously wanted to kill me, You are being waaay too damned specific with the complaints. Do the restaurants around here really piss you off so much that you’re prioritizing complaining about shitty restaurants over the fact that there’s a secret passageway built inside your apartment without anyone knowing and homicidal assassins on your trial? Seriously, I haven’t even gotten over the fact that you’re supposed to be dead yet!

"The explanation is going to be a bit long. But the long and short of it is that I took a really shady job and somewhere in the middle of this bullshitty job, I got too involved with other people’s secrets and voilà: assassins are dispatched to hide some secrets. They assume you know the truth too and so you’re target as well. Haha." Albest said, laughing mechanically. "That a good enough explanation?

Yes, that’s a brilliant explanati—as if I would say something like that after all of this happened! No matter how you look at it, you purposely gave me an explanation that tells me absolutely nothing that I don’t know or haven’t already guessed except the fact that you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. YOU woke me up at the middle of the night and almost got me killed by snipers that are stationed at YOUR FUCKING APARTMENT, give me a better explanation, dammit! I seethed in my mind and almost said all of this out loud. Who knows what kind of attention I might attract if I started screaming. Did he get infected with the desire of schwardenfreude when I wasn’t watching? That asshole. 

On that note we walked at a brisk pace and swaggered out of an alley. I suspected that he had been intentionally vague and gave him a (slightly edited) piece of my mind. His answers left a lot of blanks that needed to be filled in. 

He better have an actual explanation for all this, I thought.

Next Chapter: Chapter 2