Ayala Foxman

Deep into the heart of Buenos Aires is a non-descript ten-storey apartment building. On the fourth floor is apartment number D7, staying in which currently is a peculiar yet commendable tenant by the name of Ayala Foxman. She was quiet, paid her bills on time, donated handsomely for any fundraisers, and was always willing to loan a cup of sugar but never asked for one in return. What more could you want from a neighbour?

What was peculiar was that there were never any awkward encounters with her. Or fond ones, for that matter. All her encounters with neighbours were, as a rule, friendly. Nothing more, nothing less. Almost as if by cruel design. She was great at hiding her tells, but if you looked closely enough you could sense a tinge of artificialness that gave it all away.

Apartment D-7 was aptly chosen for her profession. The door of the apartment was partially hidden from view by an architectural fault (a wall had been built next to the door without much forethought and it put her doorway in a sort of niche). The redwood door of the apartment opened only to give a view of a bland hallway that ended in a bare wall. The rest of the apartment was only accessible through a curtained opening to one side of the hallway and could not be viewed from outside.

The apartment was east-facing, meaning all its windows (except the one in the guest bathroom) faced a gloomy apartment building within an arm’s reach from the balcony. She could have her blinds drawn twenty-four-seven without inciting suspicion. The apartment that her balcony faced had been rented out by an accomplice, a bachelor by the name of Joseph Dohan. She didn’t even have to bring her supplies disguised as groceries, which certainly would have attracted suspicion given the fact that her dealers mostly dealt in the dead of night. Whenever she was in need of a refill or wanted some new apparatus, Joseph would smuggle it in for her and they could exchange it from their balconies.

Discretion was never to be undervalued.

Her work was almost over (well actually it had been in a state of being almost over for over two years now) and no flies had been attracted to the honey she was straining in the long bottom flask. She was currently in the shower that she had rigged into a full-body sanitising chamber. She was always wearing two full layers PPE and disposed of them in formaldehyde at the end of each day, but there could be absolutely no room for error. Not in this project.

It was ironic really. She was preparing that bacterium for an unknown client whose motives were definitely far from pleasant, yet she was afraid the bacterium would leak out and cause a scene.

She was thankful that it was a bacterium and not a virus as it was initially supposed to be. Viruses were much too much a hassle to contain. Though, it was definitely far easier to make a highly contagious virus than a highly contagious bacteria. It would’ve also been easier to make it go undetected for a while and the mutations would be a lot quicker. But on the whole it wouldn’t be possible. Not with all the twenty-six requirements her client had asked for.

That was one wacky dude, her client. Good Lord he was.

Her initial reaction to the offer had been of quiet horror. The whole thing had felt like a setup, like a juvenile prank with no punchline. She was in China then, and was expecting the walls to fall back and reveal a team of MSS (the Chinese equivalent of the FBI).

She had stared stupidly in the face of her client’s emissary (a man from Afghanistan by the name of Abas Al-Nuri) while instinctively feeling for her Glock 26. The dark skinned Afghan had grinned back at her showing a complete set of dull gold teeth. A minute passed. Then two. Then five. The walls stayed rooted to their spots. The Afghan still grinned at her loosely.

Finally, unable to bear the silence any longer, she asked the Afghan who the hell did he think he was fooling. The thickset man grinned on and tapped on the contract on the table between them. Twenty thousand dollars. Weekly. With a million dollar deposit at the start and fifty million to be wired to her bank account on completion. Funds for equipment and all project related expenses would be borne by the client. It was absolutely ludicrous.

Who the hell would want to pay that much? Heck, who the hell would want a micro-carrier for a zombie-esque epidemic?

That wide, unsettling grin was driving her crazy. She had demanded to know what zombie-esque implied.

The Afghan laughed a deep, throaty laugh and the sound resonated dimly in the closed room. It again gave her the eerie feeling of the walls being hollow props standing on wooden legs.

“Don’t ask me what it means, my major was linguistics not biology,” the Afghan said heartily, “all I know is that the Boss wants a germ that creates a state of mass hysteria; take those video games for example.”

“Excuse me?”

“It says so in the contract, you will find some references as in…” the Afghan scrunched up his eyes to read the small print of the contract, “The Walking Dead, or so it says.”

“Is this a joke?”

The Afghan bellowed laughter. If it was a joke then it was a damn good one, it seems, and she was making a bigger fool out of herself each second she sat in that room.

“Excuse me,” she said again while collecting her purse and her Glock, “I better leave.”

“I hardly think so!” The Afghan called after her and for a moment she thought he was about to fling the table out of his way and chase after her like a monster from Temple Run. She looked up at the green-painted ceiling of the room and half expected to see a zipline instead of the door frame.

The Afghan chuckled softly as she left and the table stayed as it was. The next day, as she was lying on her bed crouched into fetal position, convinced that she had made a terrible, terrible mistake following that little Chinese busboy into that room, a packet dropped down her mail sound making a muffled thud on the carpet.

Ayala, understandably petrified, hugged her Garand closer to her chest. Silence ensued like vicious playback of the night before. This time she let an entire hour pass before daring to move a muscle. Slipping off the bed, her feet instinctively tucking themselves into her warm, fuzzy slippers, a habit her mother had passed on to her, she silently crept to the hallway, the Garand in her clutches.

The drawing-room had been completely still. The lock on her door had been intact. The little bell she had hung from top of the door frame, a makeshift intruder alarm, hadn’t rung since she had almost dislodged it bursting home the night before in fevered panic. There was a packet resting on the soft, purple carpet at the foot of the door.

Shaking slightly, Ayala bent down and took the packet in her hands. It was wrapped in smooth, rich paper and was completely plain except for a small card pasted exactly in the middle. It simply read: if you should consider otherwise.

Uncomprehending, she scratched away the tape and unfolded the paper. Inside was a simple wooden rectangle. It was perfectly smooth on all sides with no ridges or bumps or even any discolorations. Its plainness was odd looking, its utter simplicity hinted at something special.

Ayala puzzled over it for a few moments, then, out of sheer habit (at this point the groundless fear had numbed her brain to a point where she was functioning on auto-pilot) she attempted to lift the rectangle and place it in the cupboard where she placed all the meaningless show-pieces people insisted on giving her as gifts.

I say attempted because, just as she applied the slightest force, the top came up in her hands. It was a box. Ayala muttered a soft “oh” of surprise and peered in. Inside she found the contract from yesterday, a sealed envelope, and an ancient-looking Nokia NMT-900.

Instinctively, she reached out for the envelope but her hand stopped short midway. The envelope had been placed dead center of the contract with painful accuracy, and the Nokia had been placed in the same manner on top of the envelope. It seemed cruel to destroy the geometrical harmony of the box.

She forced her hand to descend downwards and grip the envelope but again it refused as if an invisible force was holding it back. The contents were arranged just too perfectly. The paper of the contract was smooth and creamy, the envelope was void of any creases or edges, the Nokia too blended a bit too perfectly with its neighbours. Ayala had never seen such an old device before, but she could guess from the smoothness of the curves and the translucency of the buttons that it was not a regular issue phone.

She grabbed her right hand with her left and plunged it down into the box. Her fingers hovered millimetres over the Nokia, unable to descend any lower. In the distance, cutting through the strange stillness of that Chinese hotel room, Ayala heard faint giggles.

She moved her hands out of the box and strained her ears to listen. The giggles seemed to get progressively closer and louder. There was a familiar ring to them, she had heard them somewhere, years before, in her childhood when the greatest problem in her life had been choosing which cartoon to watch after playschool.

It was her. She was giggling.

She realised that with something akin to horror and clasped her hands to her mouth but that did nothing to stifle the volley of laughter that had been welling inside of her. She gripped a rough wooden chair with her free hand and giggled into the dimness of her sparsely lit room.

The giggles slowly evolved into silent laughter, then bawling, then outright hysterics. The guests in the rooms adjoining hers were alarmed, one of them almost called reception but, luckily for Ayala, he was in the throes of a terrible hangover and did not wish to travel the distance between the bed and the wallphone.

It took Ayala well over six minutes to finally calm down and bring things into perspective. The replaced lid on the box (which slid down a little too gracefully, again giving it the impression of being a plain, unbroken box) and sat down on a green cushioned chair. She closed her eyes, took three deep breaths, and started logically defining her situation.

The eyes that had been viewing her from two hundred billion kilometers away suddenly lost their connection and the vision became foggy. They bored into the fog but it refused to clear. They hadn’t quite achieved what they had set out to, and some of the results were strange and unwanted, but they could try again in good time.

Ayala, meanwhile, had decided for reasons of her own that China was not safe anymore. She had had encounters with all sorts of buyers in her line of work, but this one really gave her the creeps. Her motto had always been better safe than sorry, and her last contract, the Russians, had left her quite shaken (though her bank account had fattened considerably). No, she won’t stay here and risk anything; even if this buyer was harmless it was definitely not the type she usually dealt with, and mixing with the wrong kind of people could taint her reputation.

Better to just fly back to Córdoba in her secured villa where it was safe. She was getting tired of the food here anyway.

The next day at noon she was tucked comfortably in a first class seat of an Airbus A380 looking intently at the balding head of a gentleman two seats in front of her.

She felt as though everyone else was watching him too. Or at least, one other person was. It was a queer feeling. She had had times when she was certain someone was boring into her head, but this was different. Someone was staring hard at that balding fellow and she was aware of it, somehow. The man seemed to be aware of it too, and was squirming uncomfortably in his seat. Twice, he looked backwards, but not at her; he looked past her and his eyes were troubled.

The eyes were billions of miles away, an error of a few seats was completely justifiable.

Midway through the flight the eye lifted, exhausted, and Ayala’s brow started to furrow by degrees. She was confused. Something felt odd. She was starting to question herself and her decision to flee so hastily. She could remember calling the airlines and booking the tickets, and the decisions seemed level-headed enough, but had she ever stopped to consider if she should leave so soon? With so much left undone? Plus, try as she may, she could not remember having packed and left the hotel for the airport. She vaguely remembered a yellow taxi with a moustached driver, but all else was a complete blank.

She was getting more confused by the minute. Not only was her memory impaired but many of her actions in the last forty-eight hours did not seem to make sense. For instance, she always travelled with a carry-on bag with all the little necessities: lip-balm, tampons, reading glasses, the whole nine. It was a habit drilled deep into her. So where was that bag now? Had she simply forgotten it? Why hadn’t she at least called her contacts and cancelled all the meetings she herself had arranged for? And, hold on, why had she met with that strange Afghan man in the first place?

As a rule, she always got her buyers from trusted contacts, and even still ran a background check on them. She thought back to when that meeting was arranged and frowned fiercely when she couldn’t turn up a picture. The memory was muddy. Not just muddy, it was completely gone. The meeting felt like a dream, she could remember most of it in vivid detail but could not for the life of her remember how or when she had got there.

Ayala sat bolt upright in her seat. Something was definitely off. Something big. She clutched at her thoughts but all of a sudden they were disoriented again. Her head throbbed. Little at first, then like a constant beating of a hammer. Her hands felt sweaty. Her breaths slowed down, then speeded up again. Her eyes felt tired and bloodshot.

She was about to untangle it all then. The alien drugs running thick in her blood had deteriorated prematurely. Without the influences of the eye or the careful hypnotism (which didn’t really do jackshit other than add to the facade), her brain was slowly emerging from the fog. A minute more and her neurons would rewire themselves and months of preparation would be lost.

They didn’t, obviously. The eye still had a few seconds to spare when her seatmate discretely injected her with another dose (a small one but it would do till she could be handled properly in Córdoba) and all was well again.