Final Short Story

Where did it go? I scratched my rough unshaved jaw, and pulled on an old faded t-shirt from a video game competition I had won a while back. I sorted thorough the files I could have accidentally placed it in but I knew I had saved it on to my desktop. As I reached to take a sip of the coke sitting on the monitor, I caught my brother subtly glance up at me from the room across the hall. My hands dropped their pursuit of caffeine and pursued a new target. “Henry, where did it go,” I enunciated slowly and ominously. My brother stood there nervously with his eyes shifting back and forth, “I, uh ,” he stammered. Having my younger brother staying with me for the week was bad enough and now he was messing my things. Last night I had received a call from a mysterious agency, offering me five grand if I would develop a special program for them. Seeing as I have been crawling deeper and deeper into a variety of debts, I accepted this offer without a second thought. They emailed me the information I needed, with a encrypted server backup, basically impossible to trace. Despite the warning signs of illegal activity and the secret identity my new clients hid behind, I needed the money and it seemed easy enough. They had me set up a virtual game. It was a minefield of stimulating challenges and problems that an agent could advance through to display his skills and decisions making qualities. I was proud of it, this creation of mine that I had finished in a mere 18 hours. It was complex and high quality, but now it was missing. After interrogating Henry I did find out a few things. First of all, as Henry promised over and over, he did not move or delete the game; but he did use it. Henry had brought over his friend Steve, who is notorious for being forgetful. He had left the game up and told Henry that he explained the whole game to the some “guys” who asked about it. With this knowledge I started to feel nervous. How could these strange men have known about my game? And for Pete’s sake, why can’t Steven just keep his mouth shut? All in a moment the door handle raddled and burst open. I’m standing there in shock and two men roughly grab me. Although my voice seems to fail me at this moment my body is released from the shock and I try to wiggle out of the clamps on my arms. It too late. As I’m being dragged down the flight of stairs leading down to the ground level of my apartment I see a black car. From the large variety of action movies I’ve watched, I know it is meant for me. They toss me in the car and we zoom off. I thought I was dreaming, it felt like I had been dropped into a James bond film, but instead of a cool hero, I had become the victim. I sat up in the car and adjusted to my dim surrounds as my voice returned to me I yelled weakly, “hey what’s going on.” One of the men sitting in the passenger seat smirked back at me and my bulging confused eyes, trying to retrieve some sort of information from him. He looked back to the road ahead, and in a thick Slovak accent said, “ you ‘ave gotten your self into trouble.” As the car drove on reality sunk in and I felt like I was drowning, I had become a prisoner of war.