Through The Fog

My husband says that I’m am liar, but I’m not. I know what I saw, he pinched that waitress’ bottom. He claims that I invent things in my head so that I seem more interesting, but that’s simply not true. His claims irritated me so much that I simply had to get away from him. There was no way that he was going to call me a liar and not pay the price for it.

The fog was thick as I made my way down the street. Luckily it was a walk that I had made a million times before. Like my life, everything was mundane and routine. No surprises, nothing to shake things up even a little. There was no doubt in my mind that when I got home my husband would apologize for the imagined transgression and everything would be back to the way it was.

Shouting from the other side of the street made me turn my head. From the corner of my eye, I saw a man following me. Somehow I knew that he meant me no harm and yet on a deeper level, it worried me that he appeared. I didn’t know him and yet somehow he looked familiar.

“Do not be afraid, Shelly. You know why I’m here,” His voice was deep and gravelly like Kathleen Turner’s. A chill went down my spine.

There was no way that I was stopping for this guy, he might rape or kill me. “Fat chance winning the lotto.”

When he said those words, my body stopped functioning. It felt as if someone had hacked my brain and was giving the orders now.
Slowly my body turned towards the man. “What are my order Captain?”

“I never understood why you had to make things so difficult. No matter, the crime lord that known as Proteus has come to town. We need you to track him down.”

***

Between the time of that encounter and when I came to, I had changed into a black turtleneck and spandex pants. I also had entered the downtown area of the city. People rushed by, never even giving me a second look. For some reason instead of hurting my feelings, this pleased me. The thick fog also helped me hide.

My focus was on the Gemini building. Without getting into the backstory, Gemini’s CEO bought it for office space. But urban legend held that it was used for other nefarious business. It worried me because my best friend Kelly worked there, but she told me time and again that I was just being a worried wort.

There was a light on in Kelly’s office. Instead of being worried though, my instincts told me to check things out. Something was off about this, Kelly barely worked and rarely that she was working this late at night.

Getting into the building was surprisingly easy. All I had to do was scale up the back of the building and go in through a window on the fifth floor. I climbed the stairs to the eighth floor, and exited. Kelly’s door was the second one on the right.

“She’s completely lost her mind. She’s crazy!” It was my husband’s voice saying this.

“You know what you signed up for.” It was nice that Kelly had my back, even if it was a little condescending. “Just apologize for grabbing the waitress butt and move on. There are more important things to worry about.”

A figure peeked out from the corner down the hall. It was hard to see anything, I assumed that it was dressed in dark colors as well. Someone was trying to set up a trap for me, and I was not going to take the bait. I scrambled into an office, and was surprised to find it completely empty. Everything seemed to be quiet in the hall, so I made my way back out.

On a hunch, I opened the doors of the other offices and found them all to be empty. At the end of the hall was a small sign, it a white P with ocean waves under it. Kelly had told me that it was a sex toy company, you can guess what the P stood for. The waves allegedly represented pleasure. Now I knew that was a lie.

The P didn’t stand for a dirty word. It stood for Proteus. Kelly was Proteus. What a smack in the face to get this far and find out that my best friend was the crime lord that I had been tracking all along.

“Did you follow me hear?” My husband asked me, his voice filled with anger.

“No. I came to talk to Prote—I mean Kelly. I wanted to tell her about your nastiness.”

“Shelly, come on. We all know that you’re Agent 44. What we don’t know is why you’re dressed like a poor man’s Sydney Bristow.” It was Kelly this time, and she had a gun trained on me. “I didn’t think the CIA was going to call you back into action after the last fiasco.”

“Well they did. And I know you’re Proteus. You gonna come in easy or make it hard?”

“This is an action story, so there has to be bloodshed.” At those words, guns were fired. I dropped to the ground, as did my husband. A puddle of blood began to form around him.

I grabbed his gun and shot at Kelly’s ankles. She fell like a ton of bricks. “Sorry but it’s not going to be my blood getting shed.”

“Now I can’t wear heels.” She went to shoot me at me again. I was faster and caught her in the chest. As she laid bleeding out, she looked at me and whispered, “There is more than one Proteus. We’re kind of like vampire slayers, one dies and another takes over. It’s a whole organization.”

I watched my former friend die, and asked myself how did a walk in the fog turn into this?