Category: Fiction

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Short Story: The Murder of an Angel

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I found her wandering the Ginsu Corporate Japanese garden. I’d been called to the scene to address a public nuisance. Such is the way of our culture now that even this woman, goddess though she was, could not escape our surveillance drones nor there automatic report. Though she was non-violent, I knew from the report I received en-route, that I’d have to take her in. What I found when I arrived though…

The Ginsu Corp’s Japanese garden is an enormous courtyard in the center of a sky-scraper made of all modern, sleek angles, stainless steel trim, and large, open windows. That last bit seems the most important for what I found, but it was hardly on my mind when I entered from the lobby-side. The door there was designed to open and close like a sliding door, but was hidden in the windows to appear as one. Something about architects and their styles– or some such nonsense– made it necessary to hide the door.

There was a persistent, purposeful gurgle of water in the garden. A make-shift river was cut through its center with clever, hidden plumbing and a slow-trickling waterfall to the left side. The water would slip down those rocks endlessly, follow the twists and turns of its man-made banks, flow beneath a foot bridge in the middle, then exit somewhere far to the right to start the process again.

The few, Japanese Maples Ginsu had imported were delicately placed around the garden’s stone pathways and small clearings so as not to overshadow the countless foreign hedges, flowers, and ancient, potted bonsai-plants. Over the sky-scraper and through the foliage, the sun’s rays cut streaks through a mist that persisted over the area. It gave the garden an almost ethereal look.

It was surreal. There I stood in heavy, corp-sec armor with an LR-30 five-five-six in my hands, in a veritable garden of Eden. It was even more surreal when I made my silent progress to the footbridge, then clomped over it in my weighted gait into the Garden’s heart. Somewhere behind me a Koi jumped at one of the various water-dwelling insects. It landed with a splash that I missed but caught the ripples of. Even at the distance I could see the Koi in the river; they were massive, all manner of mixtures of orange, black, white. Some were wholly patterned, the rest mostly solid colors with speckles of others splattered across them. There must have been a few hundred that swirled through the water, added life to the already-teeming garden.

I found her a few paces from a split in the hedges. To say I was breath-taken would be an understatement. She sat in the dewy grass in one of those shining sun-rays that gleamed down from the heavens. The metaphor was all the more apt then. Her knees were drawn up, legs curled beneath her while she leaned on an arm. She glowed with an aura of the sunlight– or maybe it was her angelic features– while a hand pensively hung at the back of her neck. She stared upward in trance, as oblivious to me as I was of what was to come.

I don’t know how long I stood there, but it was enough to eventually rouse her curiosity. I should have said something, anything, but I knew I couldn’t. To add anything to the sounds of that low gurgle, distant, quiet birds, and the faint scent of fresh mist would have been blasphemous. Instead, I watched her. As if of her own volition and nothing else, she rose from the ground and angled toward me.

She was clad in little more than a transparent dress. It wasn’t a thing from any of the corp-owned stores in town. They’d have never allowed it. Even so, she wore it like a goddess, could have fit in with any of the old myths about ancient women whose beauty brought men and women their knees.

She tilted her platinum blonde head– which curiously seemed natural despite its impossibility– and drew a slow hand upward. My eyes caught the motion to see her pale skin beneath the dress, her body bared for the world, for me. The glow behind her gave an outline of something voluptuous to her already-transcendent beauty. It was difficult not to stare. Even so, something in the way her hand curled beneath the hard angles of her jaw made it seem as though she wished me to, took pleasure in it.

Imagine me, all corp-sec clad and rifle-toting ready to rain hell-fire on rebels and revolutionaries, being met with a match so fully inverse of myself– in appearance or otherwise. Surreal didn’t quite cut it anymore, if only because of the ethereal, extra-worldly magnificence before me. I was the beast in the metaphor, a perfectly sculpted image of terror, torture, and pain, and somehow I’d found beauty that brought me to my knees. Literally.

My rifle dropped from my hands first, the safety thankfully on. She was within arm’s reach, could see all the subtle curves of her supple breasts, perfectly-rounded hips, and the glistening green of her eyes. The left side of her head was shaved. The rest short but with bangs that angled around her forehead. The seemed to weight it into a tilt to one side, then drifted in the light breeze that made it over the gargantuan walls of the around us.

I met her eyes with a breathless, parted mouth. I was only vaguely aware of the people gathered around the garden and surveillance cameras. Most would be watching out of curiosity, others out of arousal. So repressed has our society become that this woman was committing a crime simply by existing. By then, I had forgotten my job there. She could have murdered me, if it meant only a touch from her unearthly wonder.

Our eyes were still locked when I fell to my knees. Her mouth formed a sadness then that still stabs my heart when I remember it. With a pair of nimble, silken fingers, she lifted me upward by the broad-underside of my chin. Her touch sent a shiver through my spine. I was ready to faint, so powerful was she.

Why what came next happened, I don’t know. Maybe she knew what was to come from it. Maybe, like I with her, she’d been captivated by something in me that I didn’t know existed. Or maybe she was as enthralled as I by the unseen, primal forces of lust and love that have allowed our species to propagate. Whatever it was, she gave a small shake of her head as I rose to full-height from the light pressure beneath my chin. Then, slowly, both of her soft hands rose to either side of my face. She pulled me into a long, deep kiss that nearly made me buckle again.

Her breath was hot, inviting, her tongue soft and trained like a dancer. Between us a slow, almost mournful ballet began. I’m not sure how long it lasted, but I never wanted it to end. My hands were warmed through my gloves at her hips while the breeze tousled the creased, see-through dress around them as its anchors.

I know she sensed what was to come. I felt it in a burst of passion that surged between us. If I had known though, I might have done something more. But all I knew was her; a glowing, pulsing beacon of beauty, love, and good in a world literally gone to hell. Outside that garden, there were a dozen different corps all vying to carve out the largest part of the world they could. Anyone that got in their way was labeled a traitor, dissenter, terrorist.

My job was to rid the world of those people, the undesirables. All I ever did was drive wedges between people and their families, murder the righteous, and taunt the rest into choosing sides in a war for the most basic of freedoms. I will never know her name, but I’m sure that she was all of those things and somehow… I couldn’t have done more than I did in that moment.

There was a sound like a someone shouting in the distance, but I didn’t hear it. Then a hiccup in the low gurgle. I was a million miles away, riding a beam of sunlight with a queen of stars. Her passion never faltered; not from the moment our lips met. It merely stopped as she slipped down my body, clutching at my armor. I was hit by reality like a freight-train ramming an unseen motorist off the tracks. Another apt metaphor that was just as bloody as my armor as she slipped away from me.

Before I knew it, she and I were surrounded by one of the Corp’s Emergency Response Squads. The ERS are guys sent in to “contain,” a “situation.” In other words, I didn’t do the job fast enough or well enough, and some assholes kicked down the door. They murdered an angel. I know no-one believes in that stuff anymore. Neither do I, really, but then again I never believed in love, or love at first sight either. I do believe in those last two now.

She bled to death in my arms. Her glowing gown was stained red from the exit wound in her chest. I was safe from my armor and its built-in kinetic compensators. I wish I hadn’t been. I’d have rather died there with her.

I held her, breathless tears welling in my bestial eyes. She never stopped smiling. Not even after the life left her eyes and her last breath eased from her chest and tore out my heart. I was arrested for indecent public conduct and displaying affection while on-duty. The latter was a reprimand, the former a felony.

I took my forty licks– corporate lashings that we all agreed to allow when we signed on with corp-sec. Why wouldn’t I? I was cold, numb, without feeling. I had become the very thing the corps always wanted out of us. It wasn’t until I realized that that I finally understood why she’d smiled even with a bullet through her heart and her life fading: she’d made a statement with her life, her death, and the moments leading to it. I was the punch-line to a joke about trying to remove the humanity from a human.

Even now I don’t mind. Every day I wake up in my dingy hovel, help more people to escape the prison-compounds the Corps have turned most cities into. I use my power, my authority, despite my Spartan living and appearance, to do the one thing I know she would approve of. I help people find feeling again, just as she did for me. Even if she didn’t love me, I loved her, and I’ll go to my grave doing everything to honor that. It took the murder of an angel to awaken me, but I’ll be damned if it was in vain.

100th Post Bonus Story: Tearing Down the Wall

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Riven was a seventeen year-old kid. He had that Berlin-punker look that had been lost sometime in the 1980’s then re-discovered decades later by a new-wave of punk and rebellion. He was all decked out in leather, denim and flannel with studded shoulder-pads and three-inch spikes gelled into his bright pink hair. The term Misfit might have fit him, were he not usually surrounded by a crowd of similarly-clad punkers like him. Like them, his face was a perpetual sneer, accented by gauged ears and piercings any where they’d fit along his face. It was said he had more metal in him than an android.

It had become commonplace in the last couple years for the more counter-cultured youth to trend toward Riven’s lifestyle. In itself, it was the pinnacle of excess; an extension of the peaks of great rock-icons and their most offensive acts. But where Townsend trashed hotel rooms, and thirty-years later, their cultural offspring like Cobain smashed guitars and live-sets, Riven and the others took things to their logical, next step. Riots were common wherever the neo-punkers gathered, usually dispersed only after days of wild amphetamine and booze-filled destruction.

It was admirable, in a way. The kids like Riven had been threatening to “fight the man” and “bring chaos to the system,” since roughly time began. That was the way with teenaged rebellion, a sort of cataclysmic byproduct of the child-ego learning it wasn’t special, and its dreams more than likely weren’t coming true. Where most would have sunken deeper into hormone-fueled angst though, Riven and the others like him did something astonishing; they suppressed it into a ball, formed a core of outrage against the wrongs in the world. Most importantly, they unleashed it at the people they felt were most responsible for it; cops, governments, men and women on Wall-Street in suits.

The targets of their rage were often society’s elite, the upper echelon of what humanity had to offer even if it seemed lame in comparison to its aggressors. Those elite though, were cowards. They were too concerned with profit-margins, power-trips, and corporate bottom-lines or banging their secretaries and bosses to fight the aggression first-hand. They were weak, fawns to the proverbial wolf-pack that Riven represented. Such is the nature of the strong, the truly powerful, to prey upon the weak.

“Tearing Down the Wall” was a movement arranged by the few, level-headed anarchists inside the neo-punks. A reference to the literal end of the Cold War, a conflict fought for the minds and hearts of the two-greatest super-powers’ citizens with words and clandestine actions rather than all-out war. It seemed apt to the metaphorically minded. With little more than word of mouth to spread the date and time, a few thousand punkers– Riven included– managed to form a new-age Woodstock in the center of wall-street in New-York.

For a while, things were peaceful. The NYPD couldn’t help but shut down the trading buildings, cordon off the area, and let the mayhem inside carry on in its drug-fueled, screeching distortion, and sex-crazed way. Wall-Street became freak capital USA in mere hours. People from all around the world showed up over the course of a week to party, fuck, and fight. NYC’s mayor, too afraid of a riot to risk dispersing the crowds, gave orders for the police to hold their lines and not break ranks. They were smart enough to hold to his orders, for a while at least.

The various news stations played vids and on-site reports of the chaos along “The Wall” night and day. The twenty-four coverage drove their ratings through the roof. Advertisers scrambled to pay higher fees to have their commercials show-cased at the peak ratings hours. The media corps made out like bandits, and the advertising agencies nearly bankrupted more than a few, major companies whose marketing budgets rampaged out of control.

Then the unthinkable happened– or rather, the statistically-obvious happened.

There was something to be said of the new Woodstock and how, despite the untold numbers of drugs and genitals used, the anarchists managed to contain themselves as long as they did. In retrospect though, everyone on both sides knew it couldn’t last forever. The stock markets had already taken a nose-dive, and more than a few people had lost more money than they could stand to live with. Most ate the ends of pistols or full pill-bottles before the week was out.

It was the night of the sixth day since they’d begun to tear down the wall. Riven and a few pals were doped up, boozed-out, and smoking near a line of riot-gear clad cops. In as few words as possible, one of those cops was a hot chick who’d more them more than a look or too. Anarchy is that way for some, especially the ones embedded in the system. It’s like a drug, even more-so than the drugs themselves. It was a dangerous and rampant, youthful energy that most neo-punkers embodied. It made them appear as immortals, each a high-lander ready to die by the sword for the cause. More than a few men and women outside joined their ranks for even small tastes of the power they exuded.

That cop joined too, broke ranks when Riven and his pals pulled and coaxed her out to the chaos. Either from fear or jealousy, one of the other riot cops didn’t like it. Cue the melee as the hot-chick’s colleagues rushed Riven and the others with batons and shields. It didn’t take more than a minute, literally, for the crowd along The Wall to surge, break its melange of insanity, and join in the brutality.

Tear-Gas was launched, but most were so drugged it didn’t matter. Nothing could stop the madness that had brewed, waited for just this type of even to explain. Before the end of the night, Wall Street was a bath of blood, fire, and rage. There were never any official numbers released, but it was well-known that hundreds on both sides were dead. It was even more well known that somehow the National Guard had been called out to contain the situation. Thousands of drug-crazed, insanely-righteous and pissed off people were given a literal keg of explosives in the form of a National Guard convoy.

Like most, Riven made it out of The Wall a few days later, more broken and bruised than before. The intervening time and its effects though, made it all the more worth it. No-one’s quite sure how, though their always prepared to point fingers elsewhere, but The Wall was torn apart. Literally. The anarchists had managed to secure a load of non-lethal explosives from the Guard convoy entrenched on the outskirts with guns at the ready. Combined with some convenience store products, and good, old-fashioned know-how, they constructed real, lethal bombs.

At roughly five AM on the seventh day, a half-block of Wall-Street was collectively leveled from detonated, home-made explosives. There hadn’t been such carnage seen in NYC since the Towers fell decades earlier. The hundreds dead and wounded from the destruction joined the victims of the brawl with the riot-cops and the Guard. Before the end of the day, The Wall was unrecognizable. Not a single building escaped unscathed. And just as they had arrived, most of the punkers– bleeding or not–filed back to the woodwork and disappeared.

Among them were Riven with his hot-chick cop, and couple buddies, bruised and bloodied from the brawl, but alive– the damage wasn’t anything more booze or drugs couldn’t handle.

In the end, the US market crashed, the Global economy tanked, and most if not all everyone felt it. In the midst of the chaos that ensued, those sophisticated, Elitist humans became more animal than anything. Meanwhile, spurred by the Punkers ways, the rest have took to their own kinds of anarchy, where a curiously-peaceful, almost Utopian coexistence has arose.

Funny to think all it took was tearing down the Wall.

Rehab: Part 7

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

10.

Carol awoke the next morning to a skull-splitting hangover. Her limbs were lethargic, heavier than usual. She could already sense her shortened fused. Sherry still snored from the couch, Buddy now across the room, splayed out between the coffee table and television. Carol reset the recliner, sat upright to hug her head. A murky version of the night returned, the day before it frightfully clear.

During their binge, Carol had silently resolved to seek out DePaul. She wasn’t sure what to do or say, but she would wake Sherry, inform her, then attempt to find a way to DePaul. Carol fell to her feet, shuffled to the kitchen with Buddy groggy at her heels. She let him out the door, made her coffee, then woke Sherry. After a fashion, they discussed her decision over a cup of coffee.

While he was well known, DePaul wasn’t a celebrity like Evans had been. He’d be relatively easy to contact; a business man for hire that they could meet under a false pretense. In the meantime, Carol hoped to discern the point to it. Babcock had said his patients retained none of their memories or personality. Carol had to be careful to test him without making him suspicious, find some way to discern if he’d truly been changed.

The ride to Sherry’s to shower and re-dress was infected with yawns and Buddy’s whimpers in the truck’s back seat. It was a risk taking him along with his weak stomach, but Carol felt more comfortable cleaning up barf than leaving him alone. The brief intermission at Sherry’s was followed by a stop at a fast food joint for more coffee.

Sherry inched them along the drive-through’s queue while Carol’s eyes rose absently to the side-view mirror. A blue sedan maneuvered into a space a few cars back, the man in it only just visible. Her eyes narrowed, the truck rolled forward. Sherry’s voice sounded, honed Carol’s vision. She grappled a coffee handed to her, suddenly recognized the car: She’d seen it at the rehab center just outside the city. The man inside was on his cell-phone again, as he had been when she’d first seen him.

She spoke at a hush as Sherry cranked up her window, “Someone’s following us.”

“What? Where?”

“Don’t make it obvious. The blue Ford, five o’clock.”

Buddy’s ears perked up in the back seat. He sniffed at the air, caught their scent, began to whimper louder. Sherry pulled forward, took her time to let the car follow. She adjusted the side-view mirrors with a subtle hand, pulled onto the avenue.

With a clear view of the restaurant’s exit, they rolled into the far lane, stopped at a light. The sedan reappeared, hesitated. The light changed, the truck started forward. The sedan waited a moment longer, eased out into the morning traffic to settle a quarter-mile behind them. Carol gave a few, precise directions, weaved them in and out of traffic. The sedan fell in line behind them, weaved carefully, disappeared again only to emerge moments later, nearer by. Carol tested the car, made errant turns for no discernible destination.

Sherry was agitated, her knuckles white over the wheel, “What should we do?”

“Can Mike help?”

“I doubt it,” she replied, her voice higher than usual. “Even if he could, I don’t think he’d want to be involved in this.”

Carol surveyed the gridded streets; there were plenty of places to park, leave the truck to hide in. On the other hand, Buddy couldn’t follow them, and she wasn’t going to leave him behind. Moreover, hiding only prolonged the inevitable. Whoever followed them likely had orders from someone, possibly even knew where they lived. There could be no end without some confrontation.

The weight of the holstered pistol at her side comforted her, Buddy’s quiet, helpless whimpers swallowed little fear she had left. Her eyes closed on a mental layout of the city to study it. To the North was an old, abandoned train-yard that would give her room to move in– If the car followed them that far. The truck’s digital compass read out “NE” from below its rear-view mirror. Her mind raced, connected her destination to a side road ahead.

“Make a left.” Sherry’s face rippled with confusion. “Just trust me, make the turn.”

Sherry winced, maneuvered the truck off the four lane avenue onto a smaller, two lane side-street, “Wanna’ clue me in here?”

“Not yet.”

The truck’s compass shifted to “N.” They kept forward, moved with the speed limit through sparse traffic that revealed the car behind them still followed. They were blocked on either side by high office buildings, but would soon pass through older, residential districts before the road made a ninety-degree left. She tried to map the road in her mind; the turn would lead them north-west, then the road Teed off. A right at the T, then a left, and another into the train-yard.

She watched the sedan, “Right.”

They turned, the sedan disappeared. A moment later it curved onto the road behind them. She glanced at Buddy in the rear-view mirror; he moaned, fidgeted. She knew the behavior well, encountered it each time they headed for the Vet. This was different though, more intense. All of his instincts told him to run. She sympathized.

She looked to Sherry, directed them through the next left. The train-yard began to sprawl out beside them. Sherry’s knuckles and fingers had turned purple. Obvious terror formed sweat on her forehead and upper-lip. Carol winced. She didn’t blame Sherry for her fear, she was a twenty-eight year-old, sex-fueled workaholic used to the fast paced, metropolitan lifestyle. She could’ve never been prepared for this, doing what they had to survive, right wrongs. For that matter, Carol wasn’t sure she was any different, but had led them here all the same.

“Left,” Carol directed at the yard’s small access road, the sedan far behind on the empty road. “Carrie?” She squeaked.

“Pull in to one side. If he follows us in, we’ll pull forward, block him off at the gates.”

Sherry’s sweat doubled, her face drained of color beneath the oily sheen. Carol’s violent reaction and confrontation with Babcock had struck too quickly for Sherry to react. This time it had been a slow slow build that allowed her nerves to get the best of her. Buddy’s whimpers didn’t help. Carol reached back with a hand, rubbed Buddy’s muzzle without turning. She couldn’t afford to alert their pursuer.

They rolled along the short entrance to the train-yard, the chain gates wide open with one half hanging from its hinges. It rolled past the passenger window. Sherry immediately veered right, parked parallel to the gate. They would have precious, few seconds to block the man in once Carol gave the word.

The truck came to a rest beside an outcrop of stacked box-cars that lined a rusty, barbed-wire chain-link fence. The yard was massive, a maze of rusted steel and worn rail-roads with stacks of weathered ties every few hundred feet. Carol’s heart pounded, her breath ragged. Buddy flattened himself against the seat, each breath a high wheeze of terror.

Carol soothed him, “Quiet down, Buddy. Please.”

He went silent, albeit not without a reservation in his eyes. Carol slouched in her seat, made herself as difficult to spot as possible. Sherry followed, her breath laden with fear, terror. Her hands tight, purple fists.

Five minutes passed, then ten. No car appeared.

“M-maybe he’s out there, w-waiting for us,” Sherry stammered at a whisper.

Carol rolled in her seat watch see truck’s rear through the side-view mirror, “Maybe. Either way, we wait.”

Fifteen minutes and Carol was disheartened; twenty and she already had another trap planned. She wasn’t giving up, letting this man try to silently hound them. Before she had threatened the doctor, she wouldn’t have given his presence a second’s thought, but she sensed more at work now. They’d arrived at the first rehab center with the man already tailing them. Someone had wanted them followed even before they’d learned the truth, there was no reason for them to stop now. She suspected someone had intercepted Mike’s request for DePaul’s records, had been watching for any inquiries about him– someone on the inside.

How high does this go?

Carol moved to speak, suddenly stopped. A movement in the mirror caught the corner of her eye as a man inched his way toward the rear of the truck. They flattened further, invisible, but Carol caught a glimpse of him. His shoes crunched gravel, headed away from the truck, but she didn’t hear it. She was caught in utter shock.

“Son of a bitch!” Carol spit at a hush.

“What? What’s going–”

“Back the truck up, but stay in it.”

She threw open the door, drew her pistol. The truck started as the pistol’s sights zeroed in on the man’s head. He turned, startled by the noise. Carol’s teeth ground together.

“You son of a bitch!”

It was Art Warren, the state-man that dealt with Ed and Chuck– the one that so peculiarly resembled Pee-Wee Herman in his tweed and bow-tie. Both gone now, replaced by fresh-pressed khakis and a windbreaker over a button-up shirt. Even the Brylcreem slick in his hair had been washed away to a spiked, jet blackness.

“Warren, you son of a bitch! Talk!” She yelled.

He cocked a smug grin, shouted back, “What makes you think I’ll tell you shit? The gun? You won’t fire it.”

He began to step forward in time with Carol. She fired a round into the ground in front of him. He flinched, smacked by gravel that dusted the air.

Carol’s steps were slow, deliberate, “What the hell’s going on! What’re you doing here?”

The state-man shook off the shock, resumed his steps to continue closing the distance. He no longer needed to shout, “Yeah, big girl with a gun. Didn’t really think you’d make off with those files so easily, did you?”

Carol made a mental calculation, the gun at eye-level. A single bullet whizzed past his left ear, ricocheted off an over-turned rail-car and into oblivion.

Warren froze, his smug superiority fell away to a shaky calm, “What d’you want to know?”

“Who the hell are you?” Carol said as the truck’s door opened and shut behind them. Sherry stepped for her side as Buddy woofed and howled in the truck. Carol judged the situation, awaited the man’s reply. By his smugness, it was clear he was armed. His only problem lay in accessing his weapon. It was clear between them that she wouldn’t miss again, but Sherry was in danger now. On top of that, Buddy was an easy target. If she lost the upper hand, some one would die.

He took a few steps forward, and Carol’s aim landed on his head, “Close enough.”

Sherry squinted beside her, refused to believe her eyes, “Pee-wee!? Art? You’re following us?”

He considered his options, replied in earnest, “Leon Greene.”

“Who d’you work for?” Carol demanded.

“When I’m Art Warren, it’s the Ohio State Government. Unfortunately, public service doesn’t quite pay well enough, so Leon Greene takes some matters into his own hands.” His eye twitched, “But does it really matter? You can’t expect to walk away from this.”

“It matters to me.” Carol said, her aim steady. “I’ll offer you the same deal I gave Babcock; you tell me what I need to know, I’ll let you go.”

He considered it with a tilt of his head, “It’ll only add to your confusion, send you in the wrong direction. But I’ll give you what you want.” Carol allowed him a few steps forward, “Your bosses aren’t the philanthropists they appear to be, but they’re more opportunists than they let on.”

Confusion trickled into the back of Carol’s mind, “I need more.”

“What the hell’s he talking about?” Sherry whispered.

Greene took another step, spoke casually, “Mordin and Henderson employ me under the table to … clean up, their messes.”

Carol finally saw the last, hidden pieces of the puzzle revealed. She still wasn’t certain how they fit together, but at least now she could affix them given enough time. Greene’s words lent a certain kind of sense to her bosses’ success in such a weakened economy. If they had major investments on the side that Greene kept track of, was involved in while retaining his hand in state affairs, the firm would receive as many deferrals as it would need while for the firm to avoid formal inquiry. In the meantime, Ed and Chuck would be getting rich off whatever it was they’d invested it. The only thing left was how the rehab centers fit in to it. She gathered Greene wouldn’t know that.

“So you’re… what, some sort of spy?” Sherry asked.

“I suppose you could call me that, I consider myself more a P-I.”

“Pee-Wee Herman gag’s a bit much,” Carol scoffed.

Sherry agreed, “Yeah, makes you stick out, not blend it.”

He laughed, “You’d think so wouldn’t you? Fooled you though.”

“This is ridiculous,” Sherry said dismissively. She shot a look at Carol, “You really believe Ed and Chuck’re behind all of this?”

Carol’s grip on the gun tightened, “How do I know you’re not lying?”

Greene shot her a disappointed look, “You question it now? After you’ve already figured it out?”

She blinked off the ridicule, “I need evidence. Physical proof.”

“I can’t give you it,” he said earnestly. “But I’d assume its not to hard to find, if you know what to look for.”

Carol eyed him, “What’re you saying?”

His head bobbed subtly as he explained, “This kind of operation’s not something you make public, but it’s also not something you keep track of without leaving a trail. I assure you it won’t be hard to find. There’ll be paperwork, ledgers, computer files. I’d start there.”

He was right, she knew it. The evidence would be simple enough to find now. Ed and Chuck both suffered various levels of obsessive compulsiveness, a disorder that required they keep meticulous details of every thing in their lives. It was a curiously fortunate coincidence that had originally brought them two together as friends. Now, it would undoubtedly condemn them, reveal their involvement in the rehab program. There friendship may have even been the catalyst to their schemes.

While some things still required an explanation, she was satisfied with Greene, would keep their deal, let him go.

“Drop your gun on the ground, and go.” He reached for it under his jacket. “Other hand. Good. Slow.” It fell to the ground. He stepped forward. “I ever see you again, and I won’t hesitate. Get lost.”

Sherry returned to the truck, pulled away from the gate. Greene stepped within arm’s reach of Carol as she lowered her gun.

“I trust you won’t say anything to either of them,” she said, eyeing him.

He gave a laugh and smiled, “Wouldn’t dream of it. I’ve been waiting for this cluster-fuck to blow up in their faces for years. Always thought I’d go down with them…. Guess not.”

“We’ll see.”

His smugness returned, “I know.” He explained, “My name won’t come up, and even if it does, I’ll be gone. I got paid well and that’s what mattered.” He stepped away, “Good luck.”

She holstered her pistol, “What if I need more?”

“You won’t,” he shouted as he disappeared past the gate.

Carol sighed, retrieved Greene’s pistol, and returned to the truck. She handed it to Sherry, pointed to a lever on one side, “Safety on.” She flicked the lever. “Safety off.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

“Just don’t aim it at any of us and you’ll be fine. I’ll help you learn.”

She attempted a weak smile, “Okay, whatever you say.”

Sherry backed up from the train-yard, Greene and his sedan already long gone. Carol scanned for him, sensed their deal would be kept.

“We need to find Ed and Chuck,” she instructed.

“Ed’ll be home, and Chuck’s probably at the office getting ready for tomorrow.”

A corner of Carol’s eye twitched, “Let’s go see Chuck then.”

Poetry-Thing Thursday: Metamorphosis

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

Metamorphosis is a change,
one of greater range,
than shifted perspective or minor amendment.

It is the growth of one,
whom once graced by the sun,
finds peace in themselves and their surroundings.

It is the molting,
of a deep inner soul-thing,
and not to be taken without its grains of salt.

Ne’er to be avoided,
but reaped and rewarded,
is one with patience and agility.

When at last,
no longer the past,
plots and paths the future’s course,

Then Metamorphosis,
hath formed unbeatable forces,
of mind and heart and body.

Once cocooned,
those that it’s roomed,
fear reprisal and grace.

But on the other side,
flows a great tide,
that welcomes all with willing arms.

Fear not,
the change that you’ve got,
for it is nothing more,
than a metamorphosis,
soul-fire, that’s sore,
from long being hidden.

Find peace,
in release,
of burdens and fears,
then metamorphose,
all whom oppose those,
and return to life appeased.