MANDELA97.EXE - A Mandela Catalogue AU

1

3 months.

He's been gone for 3 whole months.

I lay down on my bed, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark green stars plastered on the top of my room ceiling, letting out a breath as I slightly bounced against the sudden impact.

He just said he was gonna run some errands, that's all.

Get new supplies, maybe some new tech from Mr. Lee in his new shop, snatch some maybe bought grub and rush back to our hideout.

But he hasn't returned. And I think that's obvious.

I grip the keychain on my bag I haven't used since junior year tightly against my chest, eyes beginning to water. Adam and I have been friends since... what felt like preschool (but probably when we were freshmen). It's been hard for Sarah and I, especially for me. Sarah can't even comfort me. She knows we were close. 

She knows how much we bonded when Adam barely even snuck a dirty look at her in the moments he wasn't knees deep into another case, another thing to hyperfixate on for a few days before begrudgingly dropping it.

Eat a shitty breakfast (either burnt from our ass cooking, or microwaved like all our other meals), drive around to find our lunch and dinner for the day, hopefully get a call and head over to sit out on an empty house to eat our dinner in the van, listen to Adam's rambles glorifying the paranormal shit we live off of, and head to bed.

Rinse and repeat.

Every day, week, month has been like this.

I sit out in the van, eating stale pizza, while Adam busts his ass off about (usually) literally nothing - that he claims are "ghosts" talking to him - unless I see something on the cameras.

Then that's when we both freak out, giddy like children on a sugar rush.

Those are the times I was really excited about the job.

Well, those were the times I was really excited about the job...

I catch myself sniffling, choking on my snot running and sit up, grabbing tissues.

Then I hear the familiar chime.

"You got mail!"

I took in a deep breath, logging into the computer. God, it just needed a makeover.

This thing looks like absolute dog shit with the default settings, so I go playing in the settings.

After around 45 minutes, I figured out a lot about the computer and damn I was missing out. I replaced the stupid paperclip with a boy in a purple suit and monkey features, adorning a purple tail, cute to, and a hat and cane he can summon, as well as a vine for good measure.

His messages were adorable and pretty interesting, he said fun facts, notified me when we got a new email came in from a client... It was pretty sick.

I also got something called MS Paint, which was pretty fun to draw stick figures that came out of kindergarten, but I digress.

After around 2 hours, Sarah poked her head out right as I was about to respond to Amanda about how much weed can make someone see stars and black out. She held a paper and slid it to me.

"Jonah, I think we need to..." She trailed off, unable to look at me.

I didn't even need to look at the paper in order to know what she was about to tell me.

"No, no..! We don't need to give up yet!" I squeaked out, tears tugging at my eyes (which I forced back).

Sarah let out a sigh. "Listen, Jonah," She crouched to my level, putting a hand on my shoulder as she continued in a soft voice, "We haven't seen him in a bit. There's no police reports done of him being taken into custody, we haven't heard from him in 3 months, not even Dave has seen him. I think it's time to consider it."

I shake my head, the sadness and anger swelling in my chest. I couldn't hold the tears back, and my eyes were starting to sting at all the tears I was shedding into Sarah's shoulder.

"I know, I know, shhhh..." My co-worker whispered into my ear, "I know how you feel right now, when my brother passed..." She began to describe how she got out of depression over her brother's death, but at this point I decided to tune her out and drift off.

I imagine all of the good times, all the times he screamed at me to stop snoring and to actually watch the cameras, the times when he aced the exam and snuck me out of tutoring...

Once I get pulled back from the memories, I'm holding a lighter in one hand and a fatass blunt in another.

The air was intoxicating as I waddle over to the computer, seeing I had a new message.

"You know Adam, RIght? Adam Murray?"

My eyes don't have a reaction, but my body sure does. I rush over and immediately respond "Do you have any info on him?"

"Yeah, I'm a fan of your works. I find it compelling. Just take this file and run it, it should be able to give you all the info you need. Stay safe out there man."

Without hesitation, I click the link. It was called Mandela97.exe... like the county??

As I sat there in confusion over the program name, it buffers a bit and I blacked out from the fumes of the weed getting too strong.

I shouldn't have clicked that link.