Oh no, not again!

I was ALONE on the street and it’s like 2 in the morning, all thanks to my idiotic buddy, James. So it happened like this: I went to his apartment to play video games and hang out after school as his parents were at work and we had the whole apartment to ourselves. However, by the time we finished fooling around and gorging ourselves with snacks, it was already very late, so we have decided to have a sleepover. However, James seemed to have forgotten one tiny detail which is that his parents don’t like him having sleepovers on a school night. So, of course, when his parents came home from work and found me, they were fuming. They yelled at James and kicked me out. So I ended up walking down the sidewalk alone enveloped in darkness, my heavy footsteps echoed in the eerie silence. All the shops around me had long since closed, buildings of apartments with dark windows loomed around me. There were a few street lights along the sidewalk, trying to win over the darkness but seemed to be losing, blinking every few seconds. There was little brightness except for the moonlight and a few apartments’ windows where the light was steadily streaming out from behind the curtains. As the wind howled into the endless night, I could feel the cold wind sweeping into my body, making me shiver. I drew my leather jacket closer to my body, hoping to keep the chilling night air out. I yawned and walked a little faster, hoping to get home quickly so that I could snuggle under my warm, cosy blankets and catch a few hours of sleep before I have to wake up at the crack of dawn tomorrow for school.

I turned into a narrow alley where the entrance to my apartment building is, but before I could open the front door and get inside the lobby, someone grabbed the collar of my jacket and dragged me around the corner into another alley. I squirmed trying to loosen his grip. He suddenly released me, making me hit the ground with a grunt. I turned around to see two burly men in grey suits. Both of them were bald with broad shoulders and looked exactly the same, they were at least a head taller than me and their arms were probably twice as thick as mine. “What the hell dude?” I glared at the guy who dropped me, “That hurts!” They just stood there and returned my glare. If glares could kill I would be 3ft. under by then. “Who are you?” I stopped glaring at them as my curiosity got the better of me.

“You know who,” big guy 1 said (since I didn’t know their names, I called them big guy 1 and 2)

“Umm… actually, I have no idea,” I racked my brain for answers, “why don’t you just tell me?” I tried to stall them by talking so that I could have time to figure out a plan on how to escape. The most obvious solution would be to run, though I doubted I can run far before they catch me back. Another way would be the large grey van behind them, but I doubted I could get past them. So it looked like I was doomed.

“How about…,” big guy 2 pretended to think about it and stroked his imaginary beard, “no.”

“Alright, enough fooling around,” big guy 1 one said to his partner. Then both of them turned to look at each other, staring at each other’s face as if they were communicating with their eyes. “Come with us,” they said together as the both of them turned to me, “you know what you did.”

“Uh… That’s creepy, but I have no idea what you are talking about.” I said a bit creeped out by their identical actions.

Both of them grabbed me by my arm and handcuffed me. “Really guys? Is it necessary.” I tried to sound brave, but my voice came out shakily and I was freaking out on the inside. “Help! Help me!” I shouted desperately, hoping that someone could hear me. However, as fast as lightning, big guy 2 slapped his hand over my mouth, muffling my cry for help. “Shout again and I will kill you.” Big guy 2 glared at me. I swallowed and nodded at him.

They walked me to the grey van and threw me into the backseat. While big guy 1 walked around the van to the driver seat, big guy 2 slammed the backseat doors shut and locked it with a ‘click’ before walking the passenger seat in the front. “Wait, what do you guys mean when you say that I know what I did?” I asked.

“We meant what we said.”

“But I don’t know what I did!”

“Then that’s your problem, not ours.”

“Did I do something good or bad.”

“What do you think?” Big guy 2 turned to look at me.

“Umm… with the handcuffs, I would say bad,” I concluded, looking at him sheepishly. He continued to stare at me as if I was some alien talking fish. I started to get anxious by his unnerving gaze and when I was nervous or anxious, I babble.

“So what level of bad is it? I mean the thing that you say I did.” I continued to babble, hoping that he would stop glaring at me, “Is it I did not feed my fish and I did not do my homework bad or is it illegal that kind…” Just as I said ‘illegal’ something clicked in my brain and I immediately stopped talking.

You see my best friends (James, Brian, Aria) and I are hackers, not the serious ones. The four of us just kind of hack for fun, we have never hacked for anything important, mostly just for video games, like hacking around a level we can’t beat or hacking for weapons and stuff. We are pretty good at it (if I said so myself) and we have never been caught before. However, one day after school, when James and I were fooling around on the internet, hacking into a random website, a message popped up on my computer screen saying,

“Thought that you are undetectable huh, guess you are wrong because I can see you very clearly. You and your little friend hacking into my things. You’re so going to regret this.”

There was no signature, no nothing. James said that the guy who wrote this was probably bluffing and that I should just ignore it. I agreed with him at that time because even if it was real, there was nothing I could do. Though I’ve got to admit, it freaked me out a bit.

“Ah, so you have figured it out, haven’t you?” big guy 2 amused, turning back to face the road, “Pieced the puzzle together huh?”

I quickly rummaged my pockets for my phone and took it out, wanting to warn James. However, just as I unlocked the screen, a message popped out.

“Don’t bother using your phone, we can track everything you do with it. If you try to contact your friend, he will face the same consequences as you will. Be careful of what you choose to do, or you will regret it. This is not a threat, it’s a promise.”

I knew that this was not just a bluff, seeing that they had actually carried through their previous threat. The people behind this were powerful and should not underestimate them or take their threats likely. I won’t doubt for a second that they will keep their promise.

When I realised that we had stopped, I tried to find out where we were. I tried looking out of the side windows, but all of them were blackened. The only way to see outside of the van was through the windshield and all I could tell from the windshield was that we were in an abandoned alley. However, before I could investigate more, big guy 2 had already opened my door and pulled a hood over my head. They each grabbed one of my arms and frogmarched me away from the car. I squirmed in their grip, trying to escape, but their grip was very tight and I couldn’t break loose. I was a goner, there was no way I would be able to escape.

With the hood on, I couldn’t tell where we were going, I only knew that we went up the elevator at some point. I heard keys jostling against each other when one of the big guys took them out. The door clicked open and they pushed me in. One of them shut the door and turned on the lights while one of them sat me down on a wooden chair. Chair legs scraped across the floor as someone sat down in front of me. Maybe it’s the boss who is behind this whole operation, I thought to myself, I am definitely gonna die now. The hood was pulled off my head and the light shined in my eyes, I brought up my hand to block out the dazzling light, unaccustomed to the bright light for being in darkness for so long. I put down my cuffed hands and looked around at my surroundings as I got used to the lights. “What the…” I said, realising where I am, “no way. Aria? Brian?” Instead of some weird powerful businessman (at least that who I thought the boss would be), Aria and Brian sat in the chairs in front of me, laughing.

“Hey Alex,” they chorused together.

“Wait, what? How did this happen? Where are the big guys?” I turned to look around the room and saw two costumes lying on the floor, “What?? The two of you were the big creepy dudes?” I looked at them and saw they were staring at me, trying to hide their laughter, but failing miserably.

“Yeah,” they laughed, by now they are rolling on the floor, holding their stomach, laughing.

“So is this a prank?” I asked, trying to take it all in. I thought I was going to die mere minutes ago, and now they tell me that it’s a prank. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that.

“Yeah,” Aria said when they calmed down and sat back on their chairs.

“The messages were from you guys too right? That’s why you guys were looking at each other when James and I told you about it over lunch that day,” I said as the events of that day came back to my mind, “I knew something was going on between the two of you.”

“Nice right? You guys were sooooo freaked out by it,” Brian laughed. I laughed as well, feeling stupid that I had been scared by it.

“So how did you pull this off? Also, can you take this cuff of me? It’s very uncomfortable.”

“Oh that’s just a Chinese handcuff, you could have taken it off anytime.”

“What? No way!” I marvelled at my idiocy, “I can’t believe I didn’t try to take this off earlier.” I pushed my hands into the handcuffs and they popped off. “Now tell me about the prank,” I asked them again.

“Well,” Aria started, “we used voice changers for the big guys’ voice so that you wouldn’t recognise our voice, as for the height…”

“The soles of the shoes of the costumes are really thick, so we seemed taller than we are.” Brian finished.

“I should have known it was you guys with the same actions and talking together thing (Brian and Aria are twins),” I said as I thought back on what had happened earlier tonight, “What about the messages? How did you hack into my phone and computer?”

“Come on bro, how long have we been friends for? Since preschool?” Brian joked, “Well maybe not, but the point is, we can guess the password to all your devices with just a few tries. So it’s more like we controlled your phone and laptop from another device rather than hacking into your accounts.”

“How… How…,” I opened and closed my mouth repeatedly, like a fish.

“Don’t worry, we didn’t tell anyone about your passwords,” Aria laughed at my dumbfounded expression.

“But it’s like 3 in the morning now and we have school tomorrow! Couldn’t you have chosen a better time for pranks?” I protested when I finally regained the ability to talk.

“That’s payback,” Brian smirked.

“Payback for what?”

“For pelting us with water balloons filled with lemonade in the cafeteria at the start of the school year.” Brian’s smirk only grew wider.

“But that’s like 5 months ago.” I couldn’t believe them, they still remembered it. I meant we play pranks on each other all the time, but how did they even keep track of every single one of them? We have probably played a hundred pranks since that one.

“Well we planned this long ago, we just never have time to carry it out,” Aria explained. I just smile to myself and shook my head at them, wondering how I got such amazing but idiotic friends.

“By the way, you can’t crash here tonight. Our parents are gonna be home soon and they will flip if they find you here.” Brian shouted to me from his bedroom.

I groaned. Not again.