Chapter Text
The camera lens was a greasy eye, winking red in the grey afternoon light that spilled through the smashed-out windows of the old Acme Shoe Factory. Ty held the Sony handicam like a holy relic, his thumb stroking the record button.
“Yo, what’s up, Ruin Rats. It’s your boy Ty. Today we’re inside the belly of the beast. Acme’s been dead since ‘98, but check out the bones…”
He panned the camera over a row of silent sewing machines. Dust motes swirled in the sunbeams like slow, lazy ash. He was alone. The only other heartbeat for a hundred yards was his own, thumping a steady, pleased rhythm in his chest. Six hundred subscribers but a head full of delusions about viral fame. The perfect cocktail of stupid and brave.
“You can practically smell the ghosts,” he whispered, grinning.
That’s when the big diesel grumble cut the silence in half.
Ty froze, the camera catching the sudden flash of white in his own eyes. He shuffled, sneaker crunching on broken glass, and edged toward a grimy window that looked out over the loading dock. A truck had pulled up. Not a cop. Worse. A rust-bucket F-150, primer-gray, with a tarp over the bed. A man got out. Not a security guard in a pressed shirt, but a man in a stained wifebeater and jeans that had given up on life. He was holding a gun. A snub-nosed revolver that looked like it had been used to hammer nails.
The man didn’t shout. He just started walking toward the main entrance like he was coming home.
Ty’s bowels turned to lukewarm water. He felt them grumbling.
“Okay. Okay, okay, okay,” he breathed into the camera mic, his voice pitched up an octave. “We are not sticking around for a meet-and-greet.”
He didn’t think. He moved, a rabbit bolting for the warren. He knew the layout from his scout: a back door off the old shipping office, leading to an alley behind a collapsed chain-link fence. He crashed through empty spools and leather drive belts, his heart hammering against his ribs. He hit the shipping office door, shoulder-first, and burst out into the blinding July sun.
And there he was. Waiting.
The man leaned against the brick wall, arms crossed. The revolver was now tucked into the waistband of his jeans, but that didn’t make Ty feel better.
“Going somewhere, Spielberg?” The man’s voice was a low gravel rasp, like a shovel dragged over concrete.
Ty raised the camera, an instinct. “I—hey, man. No problem. I’m just leaving. Private property, I know. I’m a YouTuber, I do urban exploration, I didn’t see a ‘No Trespassing’ sign—“
“There’s one on the fence, about ten yards that way.” The man didn’t point because he didn’t have to. “Put the camera down. And turn around.”
Ty’s mouth was a desert. “Okay. Okay, look, I’m sorry. I can give you fifty bucks. For your trouble. Just let me—“
“Turn. Around.”
The man’s hand drifted to his waistband. Ty turned. His hands were shaking. He could feel the man’s breath hot on the back of his neck.
“Hands behind your back.”
“What? No, come on, man. Just call the cops. I’ll take the ticket.”
A cold, hard circle of metal pressed into the soft spot behind his ear. The revolver.
“Last time I’m gonna say it. Hands. Behind. Your. Back.”
Ty’s arms obeyed. He felt the man’s other hand fumble with his belt loop, then the cold, sharp bite of steel closing around one wrist, then the other. The handcuffs ratcheted tight, clicking into a too-small notch. Ty hissed in pain as the metal bit into his skin.
“I… I’ve never put these on before,” he stammered, hating how small and weak his voice sounded.
The man snorted. A dry, humourless sound. “Fucking kids.” With a quick, efficient twist, he loosened the cuff a notch, then tightened it again. Like he’d done it a thousand times.
“Thanks,” Ty said. The word just fell out of his mouth. A reflex. A pathetic, suburban apology for existing.
The man’s head snapped up. His eyes were flat, lifeless, but there was a flicker of something else there now. Dark amusement. “Thanks? The fuck did you say?”
Ty swallowed. The man got close. So close Ty could see the burst capillaries in his nose, the single gray hair sprouting from a mole on his cheek. “That’s ‘thanks, sir.’ To you. Say it.”
Ty’s lip trembled. “Thanks… sir.”
The man nodded, a small concession. He grabbed Ty by the upper arm. His grip was iron, fingers digging deep enough to leave bruises. The man marched him toward the passenger side of the F-150. He popped the door open. The seat was torn, the foam bleeding out.
“What’s gonna happen now?” Ty asked, as the man slammed the door and got in behind the wheel. The engine roared to life.
The man didn’t look at him. He just put the truck in gear and pulled out of the lot, tires spitting gravel.
“Well,” he said, the word drawn out like a piece of saltwater taffy. “Usually, I just shoot the little pricks I find in my buildings. Or I turn ‘em over to the county for trespassing. They like that. Keeps their numbers up.”
Ty felt his soul try to crawl out through his spine. “Please. My mom—“
“Did I say I was gonna shoot you? No. Shut your fuckin’ mouth and listen.” The man downshifted, turning onto a two-lane blacktop that cut through scrubland. The sun was starting to get low, a blood-orange ball in the rearview. “I’m offering a third option. For you.”
Ty’s brain seized on the words like a drowning man on a rope. “What third option? I’ll do it. Whatever it is. Just don’t kill me.”
The man just drove. The silence stretched like a rubber band, thin and getting thinner. Ty felt the need to fill it, to be charming, to be the YouTuber who could talk his way out of anything.
“So… you own the place? The factory? That’s pretty cool, I guess. My dad used to work in a—“
“Did I ask you about your dad?”
“No, sir. Sorry. I just meant—the architecture is really something. The pre-war brickwork, you don’t see that anymore. I was doing a whole segment on—“
The man took his right hand off the wheel. Not slow. Fast. A snake striking. He grabbed Ty’s Sony handicam, the eye he saw the world through, by the screen, ripped it from Ty’s cuffed hands, and cranked down the window.
“No, no, NO, that’s my footage, please, I can edit you ou—“
The camera flew out the window. Ty watched it bounce once on the hot asphalt, the red light still blinking, and then explode into black plastic under the truck’s rear tire.
“You son of a bitch!” Ty screamed, lunging toward the door. The cuffs bit in, yanking him back.
The man didn’t even flinch. He reached over again, his fingers closing around Ty’s iPhone in his jacket pocket. He held it up for a moment, letting Ty see his own terrified reflection in the black screen. The lock screen photo. Him and his mom at his high school graduation.
“Please,” Ty whispered. “That’s all my contacts. My life is on that.”
The man’s lip curled. He threw it out the window too. It skipped twice and slid into the weeds.
“There,” the man said, rolling the window back up. The highway ahead was empty, just a shimmering ribbon of heat and silence. “Now you ain’t got a goddamn thing to record.”
He turned to look at Ty. Really look at him. His eyes traveled down Ty’s chest, lingered on his lips, then settled back on the road. The dark amusement was back, and this time there was something else underneath it. A hunger. The patience of a man who had all night.
“Now. About that third option.”
The truck ate up the white line. The sun dipped below the horizon. And Ty, handcuffed and alone with a stranger who smelled of blood and diesel, realized he had never been more terrified - or more alive - in his entire life.