“Okay. Hooookay.” Alistair huffed into the darkness, trying to catch his breath and rein in his racing thoughts. The tiny closet where he hid was filled with the sound of his asthmatic breathing, muffled by the soft press of winter coats. The sharp edges of piled shoeboxes poked against his large, doughy form, which was unfortunately compressed in the tight space.
“Damn, Carla,” he mumbled. “You have a shoe problem.” He did his best to ignore all that. The closet made a decent hiding spot, and he’d chosen it partly because it also served as an impromptu recording booth.
If these were to be his last words, Alistair wanted to be damn sure the sound quality was good.
Not to mention there was a violent stalker after him. He gingerly felt the raw, raised cuts along his left arm and hissed in pain. He coughed, the ache in his lungs reminding him how infrequently he ran. It must have been three miles across the highway to get back to Carla’s house.
His hands trembled as he struggled to get his cell phone out of his pocket. It finally tugged free. He unlocked it and opened the Voice Memos app. Tapped record.
His mind blanked for a moment.
“My uh … my name’s Alistair. Alistair Goodman,” he finally said. His voice trembled, too. Normally, this false start would have annoyed him. He definitely would have started over if it were for the podcast.
Come to think of it, the podcast was where this all began. His most successful creative project had turned deadly. He banished the image that rose in his mind: blood streaking the road, the rash-covered body of a middle-aged man on the other side of the half wall. He clung to the true beginning of the story, his podcast, with desperation. It grounded him enough to carry on.
“Over a year ago, a radio producer from Austin named Carla Mendoza called me. She told me how much 93.3 loved my ‘internet show.’ After I stopped laughing, they offered me a two-hour slot every Saturday morning to talk about what I was already discussing on the podcast: tech, VR, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and more. The time slot was terrible—5-7 a.m. Central on Saturday mornings, and there I was living in the middle of bum-fucking-nowhere, Ohio. If you’re doing the math, that’s 6 a.m. for me—but I couldn’t record from home. Oh, no. I had to hoof it 30 minutes to an auxiliary radio station. But a time slot was at least a foot in the door and some publicity, so I said sure, why the hell not? I figured I could draw some of the radio audience to my podcast, which made it more valuable to me than the meager compensation they offered. But I never thought…well, we’ll get to that.”
Alistair paused, gripping his phone like a weapon. In his hands, the recorder was a sword of truth. He wielded it.
