The Replacement Phenomenon, Page 2

  Several hours passed with the usual string of complaints and problems. There was nothing unusual, but still enough to provide the daily headache that Jake was growing tired of. He started to think about a career change again. Okay, so maybe he wouldn't find a job that he really enjoyed, but he must be able to find one he hated a little bit less.

  Now would probably be a good time to start looking for a new position, although he was aware that a lot of other people would also be considering a change of career just a few weeks into a new year.

  They were less than a couple of weeks past the most depressing day of the year, which was statistically proven as being the third Monday in January. Apparently, according to some scientific study or other, that was when the euphoria of the Christmas season wore off and people realised they were in huge debt and hated their jobs. Despite the increase in numbers of those searching for work, Jake knew he could find something more suitable.

  Just as Jake was starting to drift off into his thoughts again and imagine other job possibilities, the phone rang. He answered with the usual insincere monologue involving his forename, position, and the typical “How can I help you today?”

  “I have a complaint to make.”

  Jake recognised the voice. “I hardly see my husband much these days because he's always dealing with petty problems.” His wife, Amy had a habit of calling and making some semi-amusing comment that would make it obvious who she was.

  “Well, I’m afraid there's not much I can do about that, Madam. I only deal with the serious problems,” he said in return. “Hi gorgeous, what can I do for you?” This time his question was much more sincere.

  “Do you realise you spend more hours per week with people that hate your company than you do with me?”

  Jake picked up on her point. He spent plenty of time around the family, but not too much time with just her. Someone else always seemed to be there, usually one of their two children. Such was life for a couple with two kids. Time to themselves was pretty much a thing of the past.

  “So you think I've worked so hard recently that I deserve some time off?” After almost ten years, Jake was now at the point where he could recognise by the tone of her voice when his wife was smiling on the other end of the line.

  “That's exactly what I'm saying,” she replied. “We could both do with some time alone.”

  “We have a big enough house,” Jake said innocently. “If we sit at opposite ends it would seem like we're alone.”

  “You know I mean. Alone time together, not alone time.”

  He decided he would finish early today and make time for an evening out. Even though they'd been married for a few years, they still wanted to set aside one or two nights a month for dates, like a courting couple. They were about due for another one.

  “I'll be home by four. We could get our impromptu free baby-sitter to take the kids for the evening.”

  “Your sister? Shouldn't be a problem. She always seems to be willing to help out where she can,” Amy said.

  “Absolutely. It's not like she'll have much else to do.”

  “That's harsh. You assume she won't have a date on a Friday night?”

  “It's a reasonable assumption to make. She hasn't had a proper relationship for a good few months. It's like she lives the life of a parent vicariously. Almost every time we see her in public she's got the child of someone or other nearby or in her arms.”

  The conversation ended with the usual vocalisation of affection from Amy and an uncomfortable reciprocation by Jake. With that, Jake hung up the phone. He figured it would be better for him to sneak out at ten minutes to four than to try and tell anyone he was going beforehand. He often lived by one phrase in the business world - It's easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission. He didn't know who had said it, but in his mind they were worthy of some sort of important accolade or title. No truer words had ever been spoken in business, especially when it came to Nannotek.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Jake glanced up at the large clock in the main hall. It was rather an old clock. Jake admired antiquated things, yet with the frustration rapidly building inside him, he would happily break anything there, old or new, if it could distract everyone long enough so that he could leave. He watched the hands as they swiftly rushed around the face of the mahogany timepiece, like the blades of a helicopter high on the wall. Through the rest of the day he watched the second hand of the clock in his office as it dragged itself unwillingly from one point of the clock face to another. Time went so slowly during his time working, so why did it suddenly speed up when he was trying in vain to get away from the place?

  Jake was mentally kicking himself when he thought of how he'd taken his usual exit route from the building. At this time of day there was always someone in that area, but they were rarely worth the effort to talk to. This time, Frank, the head of the finance department, had collared him, obviously keen to avoid work for the last hour or so of the working week by just wandering the corridors with a couple of pieces of paper in his hand.

  Jake was too polite a person to just walk on past a colleague and completely ignore him. Somehow he thought it was less rude to stand there and act interested, when in fact he was ignoring him and watching the seconds tick away behind his overweight friend. Several minutes into the conversation he could honestly not repeat back a word that Frank was saying. All he was doing was smiling and nodding at seemingly appropriate moments.

  Over the course of his life, and partly due to the long stories inflicted on him by grandparents, Jake had developed the ability to look completely absorbed and interested in what someone was telling him, whilst at the time completely switching off somewhere inside his mind. He knew this in itself was not too impressive. He saw others do it all the time. What set him apart was the fact that he always managed to say the right thing at the right time, and sincerely enough that the conversation would not result in the other party saying, “Are you listening to me?”

  He knew Frank would be saying something about the change in the company pay structure, but he didn't care. Such changes usually meant the people at the bottom of the chain had a minimal increase in salary, while the so-called fat cats at the top would take a large slice of the increase.

  Jake started to look for the slightest pause in conversation. Several seconds ticked by as quickly as before but still no pause for breath. It was as if this guy had developed the technique of breathing in through his nose while speaking with his mouth, thus allowing him to carry on talking without the inconvenience of stopping briefly to breathe in.

  More seconds passed. The time was a quarter past four. He had been talked to for about twenty minutes. If he'd have known beforehand, he could have brought a chair to sit on, or concealed a pair of minuscule headphones and a portable mp3 player about himself and listened to his favourite songs on the device whilst feigning interest in what his colleague was telling him.

  There was a sudden pause as Frank exhausted another subject within the vast encyclopaedic area that was accounting. Jake took his opportunity and butted in.

  “Well, it was nice talking to you Frank, but I have somewhere else I need to be.” It was probably possible to get out of this situation without lying, but he'd had enough. He was willing to do anything to end this. “My wife needs me home a little earlier today. One of the kids isn't doing so well.” He thought he'd better stop talking and walk away before Frank saw through his lies.

  They shook hands and Frank wished him a good weekend. Jake was finally able to walk out of the door and taste of the freedom in the air he felt whenever he finished work that little bit earlier.

  He hurriedly put his briefcase in the back and climbed into the car. The engine started, and within minutes, he would be home to his darling wife and wonderful children.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Amy looked out of the living room window for probably the hundredth time in the last five minutes. As she looked out at the empty road and driveway, she could se
e that daylight was fading quickly. She was not concerned as she knew exactly what would have happened to Jake. One of the windbags Jake worked with was talking his ear off again. She told her precious husband that he just needed to be stern with them. When he was leaving, he needed to tell them he was leaving. He needed to walk away and never look back, instead of letting people stop him from doing anything he wanted or needed to do.

  If he kept lying down and letting people talk all over him, he would never grow any kind of a backbone. He was too patient for his own good. She tried to tell herself that his patience got to her, but she loved him for it really. He was so sweet and kind that they hadn't ever had a fight in nearly ten years of marriage. That was no small achievement these days.

  Some couples seemed to be at each other's throats all the time, but Amy had no idea how those people could stand to be in such a relationship. In her mind, a person’s husband or wife should be someone in whom they can confide and feel comfortable with all the time. A spouse needed to be a best friend too. Anything less was not really worth the aggravation if fighting was a part of daily life.

  She was beginning to look at only two things around the house as she continued to wait, and each for only a couple of seconds. First, she would look out of the window at the driveway, and then she would look to her left at the clock above the doorway leading to the dining room. As her gaze was shared between these two scenes, her eyes passed straight over the front door in between.

  Almost twenty minutes late. It was not normal for Jake to be that polite when collared before leaving work. Surely he would pull into the driveway at any minute. Just as she thought that, she noticed a familiar looking silver coloured car drive around the corner and slow down on its approach to the red brick paved driveway.

  She turned around to notify the children.

  “Kids, your father's home.” Within seconds a rumbling was heard that signalled the two small boys charging down the stairs from their bedrooms to greet their father.

  Although it seemed to be the cheesy, typical movie-style greeting for a father returning home from work, Amy enjoyed it. She would open the front door, the kids would bolt out and run to the car to greet Jake as he stepped out and walked towards the house. She always stood just beyond the covered porch area and watched him greet their two sons, before he walked towards the door and gave her a kiss on his way through the doorway. Whatever the weather, the same scene always followed that silver Mercedes pulling into the driveway. The only variable was the closing of the front door behind her during the winter months. Jake was forever pointing out the expense and ineffectiveness of heating the great outdoors.

  As she opened the door, the two little boys, aged six and eight, ran past her with enough force to knock over a medium sized animal, should any such collision ever occur. They reached the car and paused. In the dimming light and over the bright car headlights she struggled to see who was in the car. It didn't look like Jake. Her eyes quickly lowered to the number plate. It was different. This wasn't their car. She'd never seen it before.

  Amy called out to the boys, trying her best to not sound concerned. “Kids, get back in the house. That's not your father.”

  They didn't move. “Jason, James, get back in the house this very minute.” She always called them by name, starting with the oldest, when she wanted to get through to them. The next stage was embarrassing them by calling out their full names, followed by an order. They didn't need the final stage this time. They turned around and started walking slowly back to the house.

  “Who is it, Mum?” asked Jason.

  “What do they want?” added James.

  She didn't know. It wasn't anyone they had ever seen before. Perhaps it was a new work colleague or a friend to whom she had never been introduced.

  A tall, well-built man in a dark grey suit and light blue tie opened the driver side door and stepped out of the car. Another man, dressed the same but with a red tie, stepped out of the passenger side. “Amy?” the first man said, posing it as a question. Before any response could be given, he added to the question and asked again. “Mrs Amy Hingham?”

  She took an instinctive step forward. “Yes… and who are you?” she replied, with a question of her own.

  The two men were dressed smartly and had a certain presence of authority about them. She thought they might be official authorities of some kind. They made no attempt to show any kind of credentials or identification.

  What seemed like a huge amount of time was just an uncomfortable several seconds. The two men looked at each other, nodded slightly, and without warning pulled guns from their jackets and opened fire on Amy and her sons. The first man struck Amy with the first shot, and the second.

  The noise of gunfire was far louder than she had ever thought it would be. Her ears were ringing and sharp pains were spreading from her torso around her whole body. The other man picked off the two children with ease as they were running back to the house, a deafening bang accompanying each shot.

  Amy saw her sons fall to the ground like the stuffed toys they had played with throughout their short lives. They didn't move, and she knew they wouldn't be getting up. She tried to scream, but she was unable to. She looked down to her midriff to discover two large red patches growing by the second on the front of her floral dress. Looking back at the men in horror, she wanted to know why they had just done this. The two strangers climbed back into the car with slight smiles on their faces and were gone as quickly as they had arrived.

  Amy's strength was failing. She was in horrendous pain, and worst of all, she knew her children were dead. She was sure she was about to join them wherever they had departed to. She leaned against a post supporting the porch and started to slowly slide to the ground. As she felt her strength sap away, she noticed another silver Mercedes drive around the corner. Then everything went black.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  Jake was almost home, seemingly seconds after leaving work. He flicked the indicator on to signal he was turning right at the next junction. He slowed down and found a gap in the traffic moving the opposite direction, allowing him to turn onto Wymundham Way.

  After turning into the street on which he and his family lived, he still had a couple of corners to drive around before he arrived at his house. His wife could usually spot him from a distance, and by the time he pulled up, his two sons would be bounding out of the front door towards him just as they always did.

  When he was just seconds away he heard a loud bang, followed closely by three more. The first one sounded rather like a tyre blow out from a neighbour's car, but on hearing the next three, he wondered if a firework had been lit somewhere. Knowing a little from crime television shows, he feared for what sounded suspiciously like a gun being fired.

  Drug problems and gang warfare could often have resulted in shootings in the area surrounding a city. Everything was bigger in cities, including criminal activity. Shootings might happen in bigger places but not in their small town, and not in this neighbourhood.

  Jake drove around the last bend to see an almost identical silver Mercedes heading towards him. He panicked, but steered wide enough to avoid the oncoming car as it sped past him. There was no sign of an apology, and no reaction at all from the two dark figures in the other vehicle. They were obviously not concerned with manners.

  Jake was focussed on the car in his rear view mirror so intently that he failed to notice he was heading towards his own gatepost. His attention was refocused in front of him just in time to see the front of his car whack the edge of his own property with great force. The iron gatepost collapsed to the side with the weight of the now unsupported gate attached to it, and several airbags in the car flew up in his face and sides.

  For a few seconds everything was a bright white and all he could see was airbag. The first few thoughts that came to mind when he realised what had happened all involved the word, “expensive.” He fought until he was free of the two large white airbags on his side of the car, and clambered
out of the door, covered in a white powder and ready to make a grovelling apology to his wife.

  Jake stepped out of the car and couldn't believe what was in front of his eyes. This wasn't real. It couldn't be. The usual scene of happy children and a beautiful wife were replaced with a frame from a horror movie. His wife was slumped in front of the porch with two huge scarlet stains around her stomach, obviously from the bullets he heard being fired. Were the children in the house? Did they hear? He needed to find them.

  He hurried anxiously past the edge of his car, numb from head to foot and completely unable to feel anything but a kind of light-headed panic. As he walked around the car his two sons came into view, lying face down on the grass next to the driveway, about ten feet from the door. It took all of his effort to stay on his feet.

  He could not believe what had happened. He began to see what had unfolded just seconds before he had arrived home. Whoever had been in the other silver car had driven up to the house. Amy and the kids had thought it was him, and so were ready to greet him as he arrived. Those two men must have reacted in seconds, and the four shots were the sound of his wife and children leaving him alone in this world.

  He now wished he'd at least hit the other car. Within moments, he wished he'd hit it, hurt the two strangers, locked them in the car and burned it. The excessive patience which Jake held was, in an instant, as much of a part of history as his family had just become.

  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

  No more Mr Nice Guy. It sounded so clichéd, but it could not have been any more fitting when it was first expressed, or in any of its many uses since then. Jake was ready to go out and destroy every silver Mercedes he ever laid eyes upon from now until the end of his life. Someone had destroyed his life, and he needed to even up the score somehow.

  The worst part of it all was the mystery surrounding it. The police had come and gone but they could not shed much light on the situation.

  Initially, the police had questioned Jake. Apparently this was standard procedure for such an incident. He needed to be eliminated from suspicion. He had agreed to go with the officers to the police station, and to provide his fingerprints and a DNA sample, and to give his own statement of events.