Tense

Cyrus transferred out of bed into his wheelchair and wheeled over to his window.

Drawing the blinds, the early morning’s glow infiltrated his room. Looking down at the street five stories below, he watched as a firetruck and an ambulance, lights flashing and sirens blaring, pushed their way through long lines of honking cars and yelling pedestrians who hadn’t a care in the world as they meandered their way to the other side of the crosswalk.

City living was not for the weak, nor was getting dressed into a polo and khakis as a man with limited mobility, which Cyrus did with great effort and a few curse words.

He was grateful for such a view. It didn’t matter to him that he had to share this apartment unit, with its peeling rustic walls and hot water that only worked half the time, with his mother. He enjoyed the company, and truthfully, he wasn’t ready to live on his own. Not just yet.

Hopefully, that would change soon. He had a job interview for a copywriter position at a magazine for disabled young adults later that day.

His mother was standing at the stove when he finally made his way out to the kitchen. She looked at him and set a spatula onto the counter, “Well, there’s my handsome soon-to-be-employed young man. Good morning, baby!”

She walked over to Cyrus and kissed him on the cheek. He hated it when she did that, when she treated him like a child. At this point in his life, though, he no longer cared. Smiling, he tried to shift the focus from him.

“Good morning.” He then looked at the eggs in one pan on the stove and sausages in another, “Thank you for making breakfast, but you didn’t have to. I know it’s hard for you with your arthritis.”

His mother gave him a look as if he had just said something halfway offensive, “Baby, you might be twenty-one years old, but you’re still my son. You’ll always be my son!” Flipping the eggs, she added, “It’s a big day for you, too.”

Carter smirked, “It’s just a job interview.”

“Just a job interview? Cyrus, you’ve been job hunting for months! You gotta savor every small victory.”

“They might not even hire me.”

She turned and scowled at him, “Don’t entertain those fibs! They’re from Satan, and Satan wants nothing more than to see you lose—”

Cyrus’ smirk faded as his mom went on and on about God and the devil, most of which he tuned out. He’d heard it all before, so he nodded and nodded some more.

“—See what happened to your dad? He didn’t read God’s word, and now look where he is.” She pointed to an urn inside a curio cabinet next to a bookshelf in their living room.

Excusing himself from the lecture by claiming he had to use the restroom, Cyrus wheeled back to his bedroom and turned on his computer. He checked the thread of private Discord messages he and his friend exchanged last night.

FreddyRueger: “You ok man? Saw what you said in the server.”

cyrus_the_not_great: “I’m alright.”

FreddyRueger: “And I’m a millionaire. Come on bruh spit it out.”

cyrus_the_not_great: “idk. Life fucking sucks sometimes, I guess. First my dad, then my girlfriend breaks up with me, and now my car doesn’t work just in time for my first job interview in months. It’s not like they’re gonna hire me anyway. Why bother?”

FreddyRueger: “Sounds like you’re going through a lot of stress. None of that is fair. But man, you’re going to rock this interview. Don’t sell yourself short. They’d be dumb not to hire you.”

cyrus_the_not_great: “I’m just so damn stressed out of my mind all the time. Nothing ever works out for me. I should just kill myself. I’ll never do anything with my life.”

There was one new message:

FreddyRueger: “Don’t say that! You graduated from college despite all the shit life has thrown at you! Do you have any idea how much strength that takes? You are awesome, and you will accomplish great things.”

Cyrus began typing out a response when his mother yelled that breakfast was ready, so he erased everything and wrote “Yeah” before wheeling out to the dining room.

Wheeling out the double doors of his complex, Cyrus looked around at the passersby, most of whom were staring at their phones.

Rolling to a stop, he looked down at his phone and opened the rideshare app he had used to request a wheelchair-accessible ride. There was no profile picture for the driver. That was strange to Cyrus because he was pretty sure all drivers for the accessible vehicle program were required to have one. Even stranger was the driver’s name, which read “???”.

The aroma of Indian food caused Cyrus to follow his nose to the right, to a Mandir with yellow spires and red columns. This was one of his favorite restaurants, called “Curry Temple.” He thought about canceling his ride and his interview to chow down on a plate of Tandoori. Tempting, but the thought of hearing Mother’s religious lectures for the next several years distressed him a great deal.

He was jostled out of his thoughts when something crashed into his wheelchair. A lenky red-headed teenage boy tried to catch himself by grabbing onto the left sideguard, but missed and fell to the ground with a thud.

Cyrus’ instinct was to yell at the kid, to tell him how stupid he was, but he stopped himself. The kid was staring at the ground, sitting cross-legged, his back turned. He appeared dazed, completely unmoving, other than the rise and fall of his chest.

“Are you okay?”

He slowly turned around and raised his head up at Cyrus. His skin turned green and scaly, and his eyes were jet black. He smiled. Then, the world froze still.

The kid’s voice was unnaturally deep and sounded like it was coming from far away: “We’ve been watching you, Cyrus, and we’re so excited for you to join us.”

Cyrus, terrified, grabbed his handrims and tried to wheel away. He couldn’t move, no matter how much force he exerted. He was stuck.

The world unfroze. The kid’s eyes turned to brown. He looked up at Cyrus, eyes wide and cheeks blushing.

“Sorry, sir. I-I’m okay.” He stood up and brushed himself off before briskly walking away, eyes glued back to his phone.

Cyrus felt sick to his stomach. What the hell was that? Had he gone mad, or was he actually being stalked by monsters?

Rifling through his pants pocket, Cyrus grabbed his AirPods and let Twenty One Pilots fill his world until the van he ordered pulled over in front of him. He stuffed his trusty listening devices back in his pants when the van’s door opened automatically, and the ramp fell to the ground.

“Hiya, son,” said the driver as he walked around the van to greet Cyrus. The man had a wrinkled forehead with only a few threads of hair sticking out of the top of his scalp. His smile was missing the majority of its teeth; the only ones remaining were four on top and two on the bottom. Cyrus was relieved to see a pair of blue eyes.

“Hello, sir! By chance, are you a reptilian sent to kidnap me and take me to your planet?” said Cyrus under his breath.

“What’s that, Sonny?”

“Never mind.”

Cyrus wheeled into the van, its black leather interior warm to the touch in the hot summer sun. The driver secured his chair, tying anchors to the frame, before making his way into the driver’s seat.

Before driving off, the driver smiled at him in the rear-view mirror. The smile was beyond friendly—it was off-putting, almost terrifying, for Cyrus could not read the man’s intentions. A shiver ran down his spine. He almost screamed, wanting to demand whatever form of mercy was warranted in this situation.

He had a job interview to attend.

Cyrus forced a smile and nodded before looking out the window at the bank across the street. Everything was fine. Mentally combing through everything he had done that morning and why things could possibly be so off—first the boy and now his jumpiness, he realized he had forgotten to take his anxiety medication. That would explain why he was so jittery, but what about the boy? Was he really so stressed for his mind to play tricks on him?

The driver interrupted Cyrus’ thoughts, “Ready?”

The question didn’t even pierce through his consciousness, like a dart fired at a bullseye by a blind shooter. Cyrus just stared unblinkingly at the cars racing past.

“You all right there, sonny?”

Blinking as he returned to reality, he looked up at the rear-view mirror once again. The driver’s forehead was wrinkled, his eyebrows forced together.

“Oh. Uh, yeah. I’m just,” his voice trailed off as he looked at the people going in and out of the Target, “I’m just nervous.”

“Where are we taking you today?”

“Job interview.”

Besides the extroverted driver’s war stories interspersed with swear words at speeding cars and oblivious pedestrians, the ten-minute ride was quiet. There was a report on the radio about a boy hit by a bus a few blocks from Cyrus’ apartment, but that was all.

However, near the end of the trip, the driver’s skin morphed into green scales, and his eyes turned black. His mouth stretched unnaturally across his face into an unearthly smile.

The driver spoke in the same otherworldly voice as the lizard boy from earlier, “We’re going to do such wonderful things together.”

Cyrus grabbed at the hooks around his wheelchair’s frame, “Get me out of here!!! I want out! Who are you? Tell me who you people are right now? I want out!”

The van screeched to a halt.

Having successfully removed the front hooks, Cyrus tried wheeling towards the door. The rear hooks, however, prevented him from moving.

Cyrus banged on the van’s windows, “You have to let me out of here! I will sue you!”

The driver’s eyes would have popped out of his skull if they weren’t properly attached, “Sir? Sir? Are you okay? What’s happening? Do I need to call medical services for you?”

Cyrus’ chest heaved as he calmed down, “Just let me out of here. Please, let me out. I-I want out.” He felt like he was locked inside a cage.

The driver chuckled like he had just heard a bad joke and was trying to amuse the speaker, “Ah. I get it, son. You’re just a tad distressed about your interview, isn’t that it?”

Wanting to bang his head against the window to shatter it and crawl out, he conceded and acted like everything was fine, like he was crazy.

Maybe he was.

He nodded.

The driver grunted, “It’s okay, son. I completely get it. I remember when I got out of the Air Force. You see, back then—”

Cyrus tuned out the old man. He wasn’t sure how this guy’s experience in the military translated to struggling to find a job post-graduation as a wheelchair-bound man.

“Well, that’s what I have to say about that,” he stepped out of the driver’s seat and opened the rear passenger door. Kneeling down to reattach the anchors to Cyrus’ wheelchair, he said, “This can be between only you and me, if you want. No one has to know.”

Cyrus’ eyes grew wide as the wanting to leave returned, “What?”

“Your little episode. It’s okay. My daughter is mentally ill, too. She sees things that make her go crazy, so she takes a special medication. A few, actually. You know how the pharmaceutical industry is with all its mumbo jumbo about taking fifty different meds. They want you to depend—” he paused and waved his hand in the air. “Never mind. I’m rambling. Just saying I’m not writing you up for messing with the securement. We all have bad days where things don’t feel quite real.”

Cyrus waved goodbye to the odd, elderly driver as the van sped off down the street, now completely believing that he was crazy and had imagined all of the day’s oddities.

He grabbed onto his handrims and turned around, heading towards the beige building, before nearly jumping out of his skin as a woman with long, blonde hair and a man who could have been a linebacker for a professional football team stared at him with smiles, the kind of smiles that made you unsure if you should smile back or beg for your life.

Stopping himself from screaming, he forced a grin, “Oh. Hi.”

The woman with long blonde hair must have mistaken him for a baby, given her high-pitched, slow-paced response, “Hello there! You must be Cyrus. We’ve been expecting you! I’m Samantha.”

Cyrus wondered at what point she would call him a good boy, but he shrugged her condescending tone aside, “Hi. I’m here for an interview for the copywriter position.”

The burly man raised an eyebrow and exchanged a look with Samantha.

“Oh. Well, of course you are! Yes! This is the right place. Dr. Langhorse can’t wait to meet you!” She side-eyed the burly man and continued, “Lucious here is going to give you a hand—”

Doctor? Why would you work for a magazine if you have a doctorate? This man must really like editorials.

Lucious stepped forward and grabbed at the push bars on Cyrus’ wheelchair.

Carter instinctively wheeled out of Lucious’ reach, “I can do it. I’m fine.”

The woman giggled, “Silly. We have to. It’s”—the duo morphed into the same scaly green creatures with black eyes, and the woman’s voice became distorted—“company policy.”

No longer scared and accepting that he was genuinely insane, Cyrus blinked and shook his head. On the first blink, they were still the strange humanoid creatures, so he blinked once more. This time, they were humans.

“Okay, fine, go ahead.” He thought such a policy was odd. Would they require someone to wheel him around all day?

Samantha clasped her hands together as her overselling grin resurfaced, “Wonderful!”

Robert wheeled Cyrus inside to a reception area. Cyrus anticipated that Robert and Samantha would drop him off here to check in for his interview, so he was a little surprised when Robert kept walking past the chairs toward a pair of elevators.

Samantha hit the button for the 6th floor before turning around, unsurprisingly smiling ear to ear, “You know, Cyrus, Dr. Langhorse and the pa-!”

“Patrons,” interrupted Lucious.

“-are so excited for you to work here!” finished Samantha.

This was a job interview, not a family reunion. Wanting to make a good first impression, though, he decided to play along, saying, “I’m excited, too.”

At that exact moment, Samantha morphed into the creature once again, “Good. Good. You’ll love it here.”

Cyrus shuddered and looked to the ground.

The elevator doors opened to a corridor. Several doors lined the walls, each with a badge scanner. Samantha walked forward, her eyes back to normal. She scanned her badge and held the door open for the men. Once inside, Lucious set him at the end of a row of chairs. There was a blank TV on the wall and a coffee table at the center of the room.

Samantha and Lucious sat on opposite ends of a couch to the left of Cyrus.

Samantha spoke first, “I’m serious, you’ll fit right in here. We’re like one big, happy family. Isn’t that right, Lucious?”

“Oh, yeah. We’ll make sure you’re comfortable—we love your kind.”

Cyrus found that last bit about his “kind” off-putting and somewhat bigoted, but he shrugged it off, knowing that he needed a job more than anything.

“So, are you guys, like, gonna join the interview?”

“Yep! We’re here to help Dr. Langhorse make the best assessment of you he can!”

“Assessment?”

“Job assessment, I mean. For the interview.”

“Oh. Hey, can I ask you guys a question?”

“Sure,” said Samantha. “We’re eager to assist in anyway we can.”

Cyrus debated divulging his acute hallucinations, “Are you real? Is this actually a job interview?”

Lucious leaned forward.

Samantha raised her eyebrows, “What do you mean, silly? Of course, we’re real.”

“Ah.” Cyrus began laughing nervously. Samantha returned the nervous laughter. Lucious just sat there, hands in his lap.

“What?” asked Samantha. “Come on, don’t be shy.”

“It’s just, I don’t know. This is gonna sound crazy, but—”

Suddenly, a man with the same green, scaly skin and empty, colorless eyes wearing a white coat over a suit and tie walked through the door. He had a syringe with a giant needle in his hand and was smirking at Cyrus.

Shaking, Cyrus asked, “A-are y-you Dr. Langhorse?”

“Mm. Yes.”

“He was just about to tell us something,” said Samantha, who was also in her Reptilian form. Lucious was, too. Everyone in the room began forming a circle around Cyrus.

“Tell us, what was it you were planning to say before I interrupted?” asked Dr. Langhorse.

Fearing for his life, Cyrus pushed Dr. Langhorse away and spun around. He shook the door handle up and down. To his horror, it was locked.

Dr. Langhorse plunged the needle into Cyrus’ neck. Lucious bear hugged Cyrus. He tried to fight back as light began to fade. Cyrus passed out.