129 - Rome

SEVERAL YEARS AGO “What in the world is going on?” I heard one of the people I hadn’t known that had been abducted with us whisper.

I didn’t have an answer for him, but at the moment, it was just as well. For just when he spoke, the cop in the dark armor–it was slightly shiny, which I hadn’t noticed until we were in the light of the back of the truck–glared at him and shifted his gun in a way we were all sure to notice.

No one said much after that.

I took the opportunity to study the two men–cops? I couldn’t be entirely sure–but there really wasn’t much that I could make out. Both were men and both looked to be in prime physical condition. I couldn’t tell much more than that about the one in the black body armor as the armor and the softer pads between the plates covered all of him except for his face. I thought there might even have been a faceplate that he could have swung down should he have chosen to do so.

The other man looked a bit more familiar. I wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen him on the streets back home, he looked that much like an officer of the law. The strange thing was though, that there was nothing in the way of identifying him anywhere that I could see. He didn’t have a name badge or any sort of rank patches or sigil. There wasn’t even a name of an organization that he might belong to. For all I knew, he could have been anything from Vatican City police to some random guy off of the street wearing a rented cop uniform from a party store.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure which of the two options bothered me more.

Another thing that bothered me more than I realized at first was that I couldn’t keep track of where we were or where we were going. Granted, I didn’t actually have a mental of where things were supposed to be in the city, but that shouldn’t have mattered. At least I could have kept a rough track of which way was back the way we had come. But the way whoever was in the front of the truck was driving, it was as if they were trying to get us lost. There were stops and starts–far more than street lights would account for–and all sorts of turns that I didn’t remember from the way here. Then again, I hadn’t been paying that much attention to the exact details of where we were going, just trusting in Father Antonio’s and Amira’s directions to get us where we needed to be.

So there I was, dead tired in the back of God only knew whose van driving God only knows where, jet lagged up one side of the world and down the other, running on something closing on a day and a half without sleep. The adrenaline that had come form the chase had long since worn off. The second shot from the sudden reappearance of Lazarus–where had he disappeared to anyways?–was already fading, as was the jolt from the sudden appearance of the cops. I couldn’t even think of another event that would have been enough to keep me awake at that point.

So, really, it was only inevitable. There was nothing else much that I could do, at the moment everything was out of my hands and in the hands of the men that were driving the truck and in God’s.

Really, it was only a matter of time. It wasn’t really that strange, no matter the circumstances.

I fell asleep.