chapter 15: contact

I tilt my head to the left and ask in a joking tone:

"What do you mean game? Like volleyball?" while trying to maintain a calm demeanor.

"Shut up, Daniel." He replies.

I keep quiet.

His piercing blue eyes stare intensely into mine. His beard under the dim light looks salt-and-pepper-like, there are white and black hairs sprouting out of his chin. His weathered face has begun to droop, his brows are furrowed down, and he appears angry. I never noticed before, but his nose is slightly crooked as if it's been broken in the past.

My skin's beginning to crawl. My extremities feel cold, and my hands and feet almost feel like they're about to go numb. The only sound between the silence of us two is a random drip of the sink in the classroom and the ticking of the wall clock.

I begin looking around the room, trying not to dart my eyes. Looking for a weapon, anything I can use to fight him.

There's a pen on the desk, it's ballpoint tip might pierce his skin if I were to strike him hard enough. But am I fast enough to grab it and leap over the desk?

He's still keeping his eyes on me, observing my movements. It looks as though he's thinking.

Mr. Radek is probably much stronger than I am. But if I can catch him off guard? But his guard is completely up. The next time he speaks, his body will be preoccupied with talking that I might be able to attack while he's semi-distracted.

His hands are in front of his face though, he'd react quickly enough to stop me and then he'd likely overpower me.

My mind is going a mile a minute, it feels like there are no real thoughts entering my head, just a process of what actions I can make. There's no real planning going on. They come to a halting stop when Radek begins to speak.

His deep low voice which usually carries his dry sense of humor, now speaks slowly and deliberately. His words are neat and to the point.

"I know you're a part of this too." His usual friendly tone is somber and while he speaks, his lips seem to tremble slightly. His face looks pale. There's a certain sadness in his eyes that tell me, at least right now, I don't think he'll hurt me.

He's staring at me.

"I can see you looking at the pen on the desk Daniel. You won't be able to do anything with it. So just calm down, and let's talk." He says after shifting his arms downwards and laying them flat on the desk.

"How did you know?" I manage to mutter, my heart is beating quickly. I feel like I'm about to have a heart attack.

"if you tell someone about the game who isn't a part of it, you'll black out and come to a few hours later." He begins to tell me about what he knows right now.

"I had the dream too, I seen..." it", too." His words are becoming more concrete in my mind and solidifying that he's a player..

"This morning, I woke up and wanted to tell my wife about what I saw. I was given a penalty for it." He says before sitting back in his chair and folding his arms.

"Me and my wife both wake up at 5 am on weekdays, 6 am I go for a jog. I'm home by 7. When I arrive home, I take a shower and eat breakfast with my wife and daughter before driving her to school." He begins to look at the ceiling.

"So, if you weren't a part of the game. I'd be home right now and eating supper and watching TV with my daughter. I needed to take this risk to find other players." He says while finally looking down from the ceiling and keeping his eyes on me.

"I blacked out, from 5:30 am to 7:30 am. I have zero recollection of what occurred during that time. So I asked my wife a few questions. Of course, I didn't tell her about my amnesiac state. She said something along the lines of..." he pauses to recollect his conversation with his wife.

"She said that it looked like I did what I normally do every day. And began telling me everything I did while I tried to piece together what happened during that time."

"I made up an excuse for my question to her, I just told her that I wanted to know if she was still watching me the same way she always has, after all the years we spent together. She smiled after that and said of course I am. The way she always does."

"After hearing the words: "Penalty complete." I knew I couldn't divulge any information about the game to anyone."

Mr. Radek smirked a little after that before his face contorted back to the same serious look he had during his entire speech.

"So, Daniel. You already know right?" Now he's pressing me for answers.

"Yes, I understand," I speak back to him, I feel like he's the only one in control of this situation. Before I can begin to ask any questions to him. He resumes his speech.

"I need your help, Daniel." He intertwines his fingers again and begins looking downwards.

"I planned on killing you. There's a pistol underneath my desk. If I thought, for even a moment. You might have been a threat to me, I'd have shot you immediately." He talked without skipping a beat.

"There are no witnesses now that we're alone, if that satisfies the conditions, I would have continued living and you would have disappeared from the world. From everyone's memories, even that girl you're so close to." He does his best to turn his serious face into one that's calm and serene, maybe in an attempt to comfort me.

"However, I don't want to think about killing kids. I've got my own daughter, and I've seen you trying so hard to be a better person."

"I have memories of you, Daniel. I've seen you around town, living as a junkie in my past life. I remember you quit school and became a full-on addict. I've never seen you recover, and you were the first suspect I'd have to question." He looks like he's finished talking right now.

That's true, there's so much I don't know about others' lives. Or what they know about me. I became so disconnected from others, I had no real support system or friendships, and I barely maintained relationships with others. I was so focused on my addiction that I'd never bothered to worry about anyone but myself. My neurotic self and addiction drove me to become so detached from the world around me.

Begging for change must have made my relatively high profile, we don't live in a huge city. It's not uncommon to lose touch with others, but people must recognize me. If I ever slighted someone while high, I don't remember. Anyone would recognize me in this new life.

"We're allowed teams, correct? You must have heard the rules too. I'm sure that thing told everyone the exact same set of rules." He keeps his friendly face on while speaking, but his eyes still look cold and sharp.

"Yeah, we're allowed teams. I know that I did hear the rules as well." I say after looking down to speak, it's hard to keep eye contact with him right now.

"Are you asking me to team up with you?" I ask. He answers the question with deliberation to his understanding of the situation.

"Due to the nature of the game, you can see that I'm an adult, and you're a child. We were both reverted to the same time, but the nature of our reversions must be relevant to some sort of trauma, or trigger that we needed to avoid in order to change our futures." His deduction seems on point, but what happened to Mr. Radek in the past?

"Which means, and I've been mulling this over for a large portion of the day. That is the "In- vicinity." That's in the corner of my eye could also apply to kids, kids like yourself." He pauses again, for only a second.

"I'm not going to force my hand to kill kids, and we aren't allowed to run away. So, I need someone who's on the same playing field as me. Someone like you. In order to fight, I think it'd be better to work together rather than alone." His hands drop from the desk as he uses them to push his chair closer to his desk, but keeps his hands under the desk. Waiting for my answer.

"So, you want me to kill other kids for you? Is that it?" I ask.

"Yes, that's exactly right." Mr. Radek replies without a hint of hesitation.

I think over his response for a moment.

"Why did you choose me to help you?" I ask.

"You were one of the most obvious people to be a part of the game, by process of elimination, I chose you to be the best fit for this role and the quickest to find in order to help me."

He pauses for a second and stares deep into my eyes.

"Do you want to know how I orchestrated this meeting? I needed you to not be weary of me, I used the pretense of having you as a volunteer for the school trip. During class, I used a deflection method to avoid calling you out immediately. I knew Emma would be willing to help, and that the other students wouldn't want to, or be able to volunteer anyway. Since you're well accustomed to being around her, I knew you would follow along if I asked her. I needed to catch you quickly before you could be approached by someone else. Then I'd have been forced to kill you if you joined another team. You were probably thinking about things like this as well. Weren't you?" He ends his speech.

After the revelation that I'd fallen into his trap without even questioning it, I realized that there could be others in the game who are just as clever as Mr. Radek if not more.

"It's not a bad deal for you either, there are a lot of benefits to working together for you as well. I'm sure you've been racking that rain of yours and attempting to figure out who's a part of the game, right?" He talks as if he knows exactly what I'm thinking. He isn't too far off the mark either.

"If I wanted you dead, I'd have marked and killed you. I can use the class registry to find your home address and attack at night. Or watch your movements that way. I'd watch you enter the school from the second story, you wouldn't have even been able to find me. But I'd know where you are, and you'd be scrambling in anxiety as I planned my attack." He finishes his speech.

He thought everything out. He finally brings his hands back up to the desk, revealing a pistol. His index finger is coiling around the trigger, he places it on the table but doesn't take his hands off it.

"Now... Are you going to join me? Or are you going to die here?" He finishes his speech by giving me an ultimatum.

Obviously, I have no other choice. He's putting me under duress. What does he expect me to say? I couldn't fight him for control of the weapon, it's already pointing my way. All he'd need to do is pull the trigger.

I've already died once, I'm not ready to find out what happens if I do a second time.

"Yes, I'll join you," I affirm to him.

Mr. Radek breathes a sigh of relief.

"Alright then, we're in a team now." He says while looking happy with my choice.

There's a sudden flash of light emitted from our hands; it sparks a quick blue light with an image on the back of our hands. The shine of which catches us off guard, it only appeared for a moment and disappeared the next. It was so quick that neither of us saw the symbol that was emitted.

We both look at each other blankly.

"This must mean that we've been accepted as a team, right?" I blurt out in the silence.

"Guess so." He says while looking at his hand.

After we both sit quietly for a minute, I begin thinking of all the ways to approach our current problem of finding other players. It's hard to talk to him right now, after seeing him this way. It's pretty fucking terrifying to think that you could die if you say the wrong thing to someone.

He stands up and leaves the pistol on his desk and walks towards the door to the hallway and grabs his coat that's hanging from the door hook and puts it on.

"Get your stuff, let's go for a ride. We should share information where no one could be listening to us." And he gestures to me to follow him after grabbing the pistol from his desk.

I'm still on high alert, I follow him through the hallway, he smiles at students that are still here, we pass by the boardgame club's room, the door is shut since it's a Tuesday. No one's there right now.

After we make it out the front door, we walk towards the parking lot on the left side of the entranceway.

It's gotten colder outside since this morning, the ashen grey sky looming overhead looks as though it's about to start raining or snowing, the latter is more likely to happen considering it's November.

The asphalt parking lot is hard and when walking on the surface, I can feel the bumps of the road underneath my sneakers.

We arrive at his car, and he unlocks the automatic doors with his keys.

It's a 2010 Ford focus, pretty new considering it's 2011 right now.

"Get in, let's have a nice long chat about some things." He opens the driver-side door and enters the car.

I can't help but feel weary of him, about everything. I begin to think of all sorts of radical events. Like the conditions of the game, the whole no third-party witness thing. How a body won't disappear, and you'll need to kill the third party yourself. What if the sound of the pistol alerted other students, or people in general? Would that not satisfy the conditions due to the sound of the gun going off?

What if that also applies to more than just sight, if someone within hearing range heard the sound of the pistol going off, would it nullify the conditions? What if he wants to take me to a secluded area and shoot me in the back of the head?

Mr. Radek is staring at me, standing outside his vehicle, and thinking, he rolls down his window. He removes the pistol from his pocket and places it into the glove compartment.

"You ride shotgun, if you're worried, I'll do anything, you're the closest one to the weapon." Before starting the ignition of the vehicle.

Fuck, this guy thinks of everything.

There's a part of me that wants to run away, but we're on a team now, right? The cold wind is biting and whipping through my hair, it tugs along my clothes, I didn't bring a sweater with me to school today. I've only got my thin plaid shirt over-top my T-shirt. When breathing, I exhale white puffs of air from my lungs.

After walking along the side of his car, I smell the exhaust of the running vehicle, and when I open the passenger door, there's a slight dampness on the handle. I hop into the passenger seat and feel the hot air being emitted from the air conditioner. We begin to drive.