Chapter 6

It was with a sudden start that I woke up many hours later at about the middle of the afternoon of the next day. I’d fallen asleep sometime during the early morning out of sheer exhaustion while sitting down on the concrete floor back against the corner wall next to the storage room door for ‘just a minute or two’ to rest my eyes. Now as I scrambled back onto my feet I was still boned tired from most of a week without proper sleep, and now sore from sleeping on the floor for nearly half of a day, but as I got up I thought that I had regained at least a sense of purpose once more.

Hubert’s DVD had finished playing sometime during the night and the TV had gone into screensaver mode, the disc defaulting back to the original main menu. I’d watched Hubert’s 27 minute ‘Film Editor’s Introduction several times last night, some bits over and over again so that I could make better sense of them. Then I’d quickly looked over his other file called ‘Pre-Production Graphics’, which was mostly a collection of screen shots taken from the original Bad News Bear production from the early 1990’s now contrasted with Hubert’s 21^st century ‘improvements’.

The middle video, the ‘The Final Re-Re-Cut’, was Hubert’s final masterpiece. His very own bleeding edge computerized technology remastering and re-edit of the eight original Bear episodes condensed to a single animated movie of about 102 minutes. The difference in the quality of the screen shots was stunning. All of the original craptastic Korean video had digitized and reprocessed to virtually modern animation standards, complete with all of the original subliminals and the audio remastered as well. Hubert had even remixed the entire soundtrack, cleaning up the extremely muddy background sound and voicing the Bear and the other characters now with computer generated voice dialog.

It had been the challenge, Hubert kept insisting during his video confession, of taking the flawed student created ‘proof of concept’ and proving to himself how it could all ‘really be done’ by the hands of an expert. Hubert was a genius ... and quite possibly a totally insane one to have done what he did – merely to prove to himself that the concept of creating a film of ultra-concentrated pure evil was not only practical but demonstrable. He had figuratively taken a normal high explosive bomb and turned it into a thermonuclear warhead. Without any of usual niceties like a safety switch.

Sometime a few hours before Hubert phoned me that last morning, he’d apparently had something of an epiphany, that he never should have kept a secret back-up of those original video files that I had made him supposedly erase from his computers ... then just maybe also, perhaps ought not to have ‘somewhat improved’ upon the original product as well. I think the idea just then suddenly occurred to him that this nuclear video could and just might accidently fall into the wrong hands ... like reappearing again on a television broadcast network somewhere! The idea of building this figurative bomb was merely a technological challenge for him ... now he’d discovered that murderously insanely dangerous people out there might actually want to use his creation!

Hubert had indeed been indiscrete, he freely admitted. For starters, right after starting work on his secret copy of the videos, he’d become fascinated by the symbology used in the subliminals and he made at least a dozen phone calls around the country to various experts in semiotics to try and find out what the symbols meant, and perhaps even where they had originated from. By late Friday afternoon, the day before his death, about when he’d completed his ‘improvement’ project and feeling entirely too pleased with himself, he was then brought down to earth to learn the truth about those symbols. A Professor of Semiotics at Arkham University had phoned to tell him that images that had been faxed to him for identification had for certain come from the ancient Pnakotic Manuscripts, allegedly written by a race that predated humans that worshiped the ancient Elder Gods. This document now only existed as fragments collected and bound into a 9^th century medieval manuscript with later side margin annotations added at some later date by an obviously insane monk. This manuscript was kept locked away at the Arkham library under severe security restrictions, but a little further research indicated that it had last been accessed in the late 1980’s ... by Mr. Big himself!

The professor had urged, even begged Hubert to destroy the recordings, originals and especially his remastering but since it was just a technical exercise in applied genius, Hubert felt that it wouldn’t matter anyway because no one would ever see it. Even at the very edge of his mortal life, Hubert had never considered even for a moment that the symbols embedded into his video every thirteen frames, were symbols that were the very anti-thesis to human life and sanity!

In a last confession at the end of Hubert’s recording, he admitted that he’d called Mr. Big himself that evening, to merely ask a few technical questions about that original endeavor. He’d had no idea of the depth of Mr. Big’s evilness, and willingness to kill anyone and everyone associated with the now apparent recovery of his long lost original tapes. Hubert might have been extremely misguided, but he was not stupid. It was only then that he’d realized that he’d perhaps blabbed to the wrong person and his high quality remastering of the Bear had undoubtedly made him an immediate target.

Perhaps realizing that he only a few hours left to live, Hubert had taken a few last minute precautions. He’d burned this one last final DVD with this confession and his remastered now-masterpiece on it and phoned for an old friend to come collect it, well before he’d called me, as something of an off-site data storage backup and insurance policy. Then he announced at the end of his confessional recording that he was going to security wipe all of his computers with NSA grade software to clear away any data traces of the Bear. In the morning he was then going to call me over, explain the situation and suggest that we remove all of my original physical media traces as well. Obviously he’d called me too late and by then the killers were almost upon him.

He told me repeated at the end of his recording not to watch his remastered creation. Ever. By that point he was positive that he’d made a horrible mistake and that no good at all would ever come from anyone viewing it.

I hadn’t last night ... or at least I was fairly sure that I hadn’t anyway. I’d been so tired last night that frankly now I couldn’t remember now exactly what I’d watched anymore.

I had been too exhausted and nearly too apathetic earlier in the wee hours of this morning to rightly comprehend then what my genius of a friend had truly accomplished, but now that I’d had a modicum of rest the very final pieces of the puzzle had now settled into order inside of my head. Hubert had discovered indeed the identify of Mr. Big, and just like I had predicted to Inspector Kramer, the villain was indeed far too rich and politically powerful to ever touch, let alone publically accuse.

Before ejecting the disc I replayed Hubert’s confession one more time all the way through now that my head was a bit clearer from a little sleep. Then I viewed some of the imagery files one last time to further refresh my memory, especially the production symbol that had directly identified Mr. Big. Already the apathy and despondence within me was beginning to return. A dozen people, including my friends and co-workers had died ... and there wasn’t going to be even a prayer that justice or even revenge could ever be accomplished. Still, for the sake of the victims I thought I needed to do something, even if it was probably the wrong and stupid thing to do.

I unplugged the extension cord from the hall and tidied everything up, then locked the storage closet door with the A/V rack, but I took the disc with me in just a blank media plastic sleeve. It probably wasn’t the least bit smart to carry Hubert’s new and improved version of the Bear around with me, but nothing was safe anywhere anymore. Also the notion now occurred to me that the old original U-matics weren’t likely to be safe for much longer in my bank’s safety deposit box either, downstairs in the lobby of my office building. Those would have to be moved too, but where?

My first thought was to call Kramer and dump everything off onto him, but that was foolish too. Things disappear out of police evidence lockers all the time. Also, detectives and people from the DA’s office would want to watch those recordings ... which I was starting to believe was an extremely bad idea. On the other hand I wasn’t ready to destroy them all yet. In fact they were the only leverage that I now had to keep Mr. Big’s killers away from me. Maybe my only hope was to make a deal with that devil, to threaten to destroy all of the videos and the only disc if I was threatened again. I wasn’t sure that Mr. Big possessed enough restraint for that plan to work though.

There was a third option, of sorts. The very last ‘Prep-Production’ image listed Hubert’s friend, an ex-military acquaintance of his that had taken the insurance disc and then mailed it on to me a week later. I didn’t know what sort of help if any he could offer me, a stranger, but I’d entered his name and phone number anyway into my cell’s contact book.

For the lack of any other better idea, the first person I phoned after I went back upstairs into my office building and collected the eight video tapes from my bank deposit box was Maureen. It might have been longer than week since I had last called her and to my mind she was the last friendly face that I thought I could turn to. Her voice sounded like magic to my ears too, right up until that last domino fell and my utter and final ruin became complete.

“Sweetie! I’m so glad you called,” she exclaimed happily, “It’s been awhile since you called and you looked so worried when you suddenly left last week. I have such good news, too! Some folks from Rockville College in Maryland phoned during the week wanting to buy dad’s video collection. They’re here now in fact loading all of the boxes up into their truck. They didn’t even care that my inventory wasn’t quite done yet and they had a check in hand for me, from a grant they suddenly got from some big entertainment company! They told me the name a few minutes ago but I’ve quite forgotten it already, silly me!”

“Maureen, did they say Casserly Company?” I immediately demanded, with seemingly the entire pit of my stomach now racing to escape up from out my throat.

“That’s it! That’s the name they said. Gave the school some grant money and they sent a truck with three guys here to get everything!’

I wanted to scream for her to get off of the phone and run not walk to her car and drive the hell away from there now! I was pretty sure exactly which three guys had shown up to her door!

Paralyzed for a few seconds too many, Maureen beat me to the punch...

“Oh! Have to run now, I think they’re finished and they need me now for something real quick. I’ll call you right back!” <click>

For the next ten minutes I kept auto-dialing her phone number but at first it just rang and rang endlessly with no answer and then all calls began going automatically to voice mail. Either her phone had now been destroyed or else the battery had been removed. That was my growing conviction. I had been too late, and by mere minutes!

I was in central Manhattan and there wasn’t one damn thing I could do to help or save her. I’d didn’t even know the name of the county in New Jersey that she lived in, so I just bypassed all of that by calling 911 here and letting the emergency operator do the transferring my call twice until we reached the local 911 line that covered Maureen’s small town. I’m not sure that I made much sense, but I kept insisting with an increasingly loud shrieking voice that something was wrong at Maureen’s house and that they needed to send the police there immediately now at once! I’m sure the operator thought I was either a kook or a complete madman, but she eventually murmured something about sending a request for police service and she hung up the phone on me.

Without a van, I thought I was trapped here in New York, impotent. My first notion was to take a cab to the Downtown Manhattan Heliport to rent a copter to fly me straight to New Jersey, expense be damned. What’s the point of being a very petty millionaire if you can’t spend the money if necessary in an emergency? That might have been the fastest way there, but instead I remembered that Shirlene’s car would still be in the parking garage and that she always kept a spare set of keys in her desk drawer. A fast trip upstairs located them, right on the floor where her desk drawer contents had been hastily searched and dumped.

I didn’t think this constituted legal car theft but I almost kept to the legal speed limit while barreling to Maureen’s house and looked for police everywhere before I ran stop signs and red lights. Her car even had an almost full tank of gas too. It was the only good piece of luck that I’d had all week but I doubted it would last.

It had been late afternoon when I’d started to leave the city and it was almost dark when I pulled off the state highway near the dirt road to Maureen’s house. I couldn’t have made it down that way any further on a bet, the lane being clogged with fire trucks, police and a few other emergency vehicles. I’d been able to see the cloud of smoke rising up in the distance from a couple of miles away and my work fears were all too quickly confirmed.

Our arsonist friends had paid my lover a visit, posing as the transport agents. They had wanted all of her father’s U-matics, believing at last that they would find the original Bear tapes here at last! Maureen wouldn’t have mentioned to them that I had them ... or would she have talked under torture? The killers would want a definitive answer for their master and now if they suspected their trail had come to a final successful end they would especially want to know about any further potential loose ends that might also need tidying up.

I found a spot where I could park just down the road and joined a small gaggle of local onlookers and a pair of reporters from the local town fishwrap just outside the police tape surrounding the arson crime scene. For the next three hours I passively watched the first responders work in the smoking wreck of Maureen’s house. My 911 warning had done a little good, as the fire had been caught early and the four walls of the house and part of the roof were still intact. After the fire was completely out the local county crime scene guys moved in and someone then apparently called for the county coroner. Sometime later into the evening under the red and blue strobe lights of the parked emergency and police vehicles, a gurney was rolled out with Maureen’s remains upon it. Even almost entirely covered in a plastic sheet I could tell that her corpse was not intact. Her left hand was surprisingly unburned and dangling out off of the side of the rolling cart, and clearly showed that she was missing all of the fingers of that hand.

I’d seen more than enough and I left. I was sure that at least one of the investigators had taken a few covert pictures of the small crowd and that I’d become another person of interest quite soon enough. Frankly I just didn’t care anymore.

For the rest of that night I couldn’t state with any accuracy where I had gone even if my life depended upon that alibi. Really my old clear recollection after leaving Maureen’s house was hearing the ding-ding sound of the low gas warning and seeing the icon on the dashboard flashing yellow. Somewhat alert now, I found a wide section of open gravel shoulder just off the roadway and I pulled over and turned off the ignition to think for a few moments there in the dark but I fell fast at once to sleep and dozed fitfully until the early rays of daylight hit my eyes and awakened me.

Ignoring the low gas warning for another couple of miles I found a small one pump gas station outside the offices of a small rural drive-up motel. I filled the tank with gas and I rented a room for a week with cash. The overnight clerk, a young college aged stoner with obviously no significant worldly prospects, didn’t make me fill out the guest register or even ask for my name, especially after I passed him a couple of Ben Franklins in addition to paying for a week upfront in cash. I could tell at a glance that the kid would find a way to pocket all of that cash. On paper at least, I was never here.

The motel room had the basics, a bed that probably less than ten years old with blankets and sheets that didn’t stink or have too many old dried semen stains on them. There was a coffee pot with the usual crap commercial brand packets next to it and I immediately brewed up strong pot while taking a long, long shower that might have lasted for an hour or more until the local hot water heater ran cold.

There was also a small modular TV on a bureau with a built-in DVD player and when turned on the screen went right to some cable X rated movie channel. I had other delights in mind right now however, and pressing the DVD eject button I loaded up Hubert’s DVD and selected the option to play the new and improved Bad News Bear: The Movie, and I watched it ... and then watched it over again and again.

What did I have left to lose? Everyone and everything that I had cared about in life was now gone!

I think I might have come to my senses a few days later. Undoubtedly because my room was entirely out of coffee packets left to brew. I’d been watching the Bear for hours, probably even days. Nothing else ... nothing I had left mattered to me anymore.

As a technical production I have to say that Hubert had done an Academy Award worthy job of both production and editing. The new computer generated animation sampled from the old videos was nearly Pixar quality and for the first time ever there was something resembling a coherent storyline too! He’d taken the eight 22 minute episodes and merged the old weak storylines into some order and carved them down artfully to 102 minutes. Short, but now a concise and coherent plotline that even a child could follow. Something the U-matic tape episodes never had. The computer generated voices took a little getting used to at first but after a bit you stopped noticing the occasional speech oddity. I had to give the genius credit ... he’d taken the student project and turned it into a true proof of concept!

I’d also have to agree with Hubert – that all of this ‘Elder Gods’ stuff was bunk. I’d watching this video at least a dozen times now ... perhaps even a hundred times, and I had no inclination towards conducting any blood sacrifices to either Satan or Cthulhu either!

What I did want now was a couple of hamburgers and then go make one last phone call ... and perhaps get some revenge after all?

I never learned ‘Jack’s’ real name or anything at all about him. He was the friend that Hubert’s had given his insurance disc to, and how had forwarded it on to me a week later. I’d decided that he was the only possible living man left that I could trust and Hubert had suggested strongly that if things got bad he could be relied upon ... for suitable inducements. We talked twice on the phone and then met one very late-night evening a few days later at an all-night greasy spoon diner on the north side of Harlem. I wasn’t the right skin color for the neighborhood, being neither black nor Hispanic, but Jack was both ... and exuded the very loud and obvious don’t fuck with aura that only a real killer can pull off. We talked alone in the diner for about an hour and I told him as much of the entire story as he wanted to hear, then he left to think things and said he would get back to me later.

Jack at some point must have owed the genius for a favor but now that debt had been paid off, pretty much in full. Still, the vet (who seemed to be a very genuine ex-special forces type) felt a small amount of regret. In the end he decided to help me ... but strictly on a hired ‘cash and carry’ basis at his usual rates plus expenses. It took a while to quietly assemble the cash but that’s what money is for anyway ... to help bury your friends, and their enemies.

Now that I finally had a plan for living again (at least until I could get my revenge) it was time to handle a few dozen things that I had been ignoring entirely since Pat, Shirlene and Ryan ... and also Maureen, had been murdered.

First I phoned up our contract hire IT firm and had their web guru take down our main internet page and replace it with photos of our dead staff members along with the notation that TVRatings was taking a short summer hiatus while we dealt with our recent tragedy’s. No other details. Anyone curious enough could Google their names and find the various newspaper reports of their murders. Since our site had not been updated now for several weeks I was sure that both readers and customers were in a panic.

Next, I contracted with a temporary personnel service from within our building to bring in a temp staff of about a dozen administrative assistants with strong filing skills to sort out all of the tens of thousands of tossed and trashed documents in our office that had been ejected from their host filing cabinets. I gave them order to try and put our office into some sort of minimal functional order again and at least take messages when the phone rang. That would take them a week or two to restore orderliness, I’d thought, but the crew managed it in three days. I temp contracted their lead supervisor to remain on as my acting office manager and also let her select an assistant or two to keep on as well for a temporary staff.

After that was accomplished I could now dig into our old employee records to track down the contact information for the names of a few of our prior interns, kids that had worked for either Pat or myself over the last few years. Surprising, most of the folks I called were willing to either quit or take an absence from their current jobs to return here for a very uncertain duration. I admit throwing some company money about like bird seed to make it finally all happen, but within a few days I had a pair of trained replacements in house that I could trust to carry on with Pat’s old duties. Another pair of my prior interns returned to take over my own job too, as it was patently still unsafe for me to be here at the office or anywhere that I could be easily located. I was sure that Mr. Big’s killers were now hunting for me.

Then, accompanied by Kramer and a half dozen detectives in suits for security, we finally buried Pat, Shirlene and Ryan. None of them had much if any local family and I was almost alone at the ceremony. A few dark colored cars could be seen just down the road from our hearses but they drove away quick, when one of Kramer’s detectives tried to sneak over close enough to get their plate numbers.

I was living in a series of local fleabag NY hotels, rarely spending more than a single night in the same place. I’d ‘work’ remotely, connecting to the office via my laptop and using only a burner phone to call my new staff. Slowly as the fall network TV approached, the company was pretty much fully back to work, business as usual. Money was coming back in our coffers, and with the recent publicity about my company and the start of prime network season, new commissions were flowing in at a near record pace. Pat would have been delighted.