Short Story: Eternal Optimists

June 14, 2016June 14, 2016 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Paris Incident by now. Who hasn’t? It was the sole trigger to the single greatest atrocity in modern history– and I speak as a German whom hasn’t forgotten her history. The Corps may have purged the bombings from the light ‘net and the media archives, but where I’m from, we still live with it. Everyday.

I wake up to a half-leveled horizon outside my window. There’s always frost there when the sun comes up. It doesn’t help that we have no heat in the building. Unless you count barrels of fire as heating. I don’t. After I eat whatever I’ve scrounged up or gathered from the air-drops by neighboring rebels or surviving humanitarian organizations, I head downstairs to the book store I live above.

Funny how some things never quite go out of style. For decades there were people who said that print media was dead. E-readers and web-books were supposed to make the written word obsolete. I can only laugh at the thought– one of few that elicits such emotion nowadays. Those people never realized you couldn’t use e-readers without electricity, or god forbid, the internet.

I miss the light ‘net. All we get around here’s the dark-net, and that’s used for encrypted communications between rebel cells. We simply can’t risk linking the light-net to any of the people here. The few that even have access are lucky. Most of them rigged scavenged-solar cells to old, power-hungry laptops provided by various cells around the continent. Most are grateful, but it makes me feel like we’re a charity case.

Imagine that, all of Berlin, once a powerful seat of progress in a technologically-minded country like Germany, groveling for scraps and hand-outs. There are probably only a few thousand of us left now. The corp-bombings saw to that. When Lemaire fell, and Paris burst into flames, London and Berlin were next in line. There were other places too, but most were small– too small to notice when they were wiped out completely.

But as a haven of technology and free-thought, instilled since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we had the greatest concentration of Augs– that is to say Cybernetic or bionically augmented humans. Whoever wasn’t directly an Aug, was an “Aug-sympathizer.” Everyone knew that, including the corps. So when the proverbial sheisse hit the fan, everyone was splattered with it. When I say that, what I mean is; after two weeks of battling on the streets in major cities around the globe, the offended players banded together to bomb the rest of us back to the stone age. Literally.

Berlin got the worst of it. If there’s any solace to be take from our fate, it’s that we managed to wound the corps’ bottom lines enough to push them out of Germany altogether. We’d taken over most of their buildings, destroyed the rest, cut down those whom sided against us in the fighting. Most were slayed by the waves of bodies that filed through the burning streets.

We Germans have a way of being ruthless to a point of barbarism at times– not from a lack of humanity, quite the opposite in fact. We care so deeply and passionately about things that our natural ambitiousness makes us too strong-headed and hardhearted at the worst of times. Maybe if we weren’t so consumed by our ambitions then, we’d have stopped to look around at what was happening, or sensed what was about to.

Maybe if we weren’t so enamored with listening to our hearts we’d have heard the Raptor-cries. Maybe even, if we hadn’t been so loving of our augged brothers and sisters– whether literal or figurative– we’d have been righteously hardhearted enough to save ourselves.

But we weren’t. We were eternally the optimists. The same people whom, even generations later, were socially guilt-ridden for Hitler’s actions and determined to make up for it. Each of us felt the shame of World War II, promised not to repeat the mistakes that led to it. Somehow, we still let the corps take charge, and until they began their Nazi-esque campaign of extermination against the Augs, we supported them.

That was the issue though. It always has been for us. We let the evil into our hearts with open arms, ever-believing in the good of Humanity. Instead, we’re soon shown to have been manipulated, our love used against us and those that would otherwise truly deserve it.

The first bombs that fell over Europe targeted three, initial cities; Paris, where it all began; London, where the revolution looked to spread most violently, and Berlin, where the Augs that wouldn’t or couldn’t fight were likely to find sanctuary.

Raptors screamed over Europe with their hard-angled noses spitting chain-gun fire and their rounded bellies splitting to unleash hell. In minutes, any hope for a life in Berlin– for Aug or otherwise– was exterminated, burned to dust in the fires of evil. Before the sun rose the next morning, tens of thousands were dead or dying. Those not killed or critically wounded– and even then some– were distraught, chaotically confused. They tried to save what few they could. Everywhere you went it was like standing in a crowded metro whose noise and movements made you want to cower and weep. Many did. A few couldn’t take it, led themselves out.

I was eighteen when the bombs fell, just into university. I was just old enough to drink, and just young enough to feel the last of my innocence dissected from my heart. It was like I’d been given bypass surgery without anesthetic. The sharpness of grief in my chest was omnipresent in those days, punctuated by the stabbing sounds of rubble as we combed for survivors and dead alike. Most found were the latter.

I remember the worst of it, not because of the grisly scene, but because it was the first time I felt hatred. Hatred is something humans speak of out of anger most times. It is often despair masked by the ego to keep one’s image intact. This was different. This was real, pure hatred; a feeling that filled my mouth with a wetness as though I were goring the throat of a foe with my teeth. From there, it infected my being with a sharpened determination, a strength I have not lost since. It has kept my muscles taught when they should have faltered in fear, steadied my hands when they would have trembled with terror.

I saw a young girl curled in her bed. We’d dug a path to her grave from beneath the collapsed upper-floor of her apartment building. Everything around us was charred black. We were forced to don respirators from the dust and stink of days old, immolated flesh. Then I saw her; curled in her bed as if sleeping peacefully, but where her skin should be was the marred, blackened flesh of a war-crime. She was like one of those Pompeiian victims, forever frozen in her death-pose.

I am a healer, a medic, a surgeon and I feel no shame in admitting I have a strong stomach. I have seen things that could bring the strongest men and women to tears and pained retching. Most of the time, I’m forced to power through them for the sake of the victims– my patients– and I do so. This was so awful I stumbled away in tears and vomited all the grief that I’d held back since the attacks.

Every morning I wake up she occupies my thoughts. Even as I go down through the bookstore, and out into street I think of how she was stolen from this world. She could have been my daughter had I not been more careful. At that, she could have been me if the bombs had been dropped only a few years further beyond than that.

So I walk along the street, largely clear of its debris, and watch the city around me with her in mind. It still has the look of the blitzkrieg turning in on itself. Full, corporate towers are replaced by mounds of rubble, steel and concrete land-fills. Nature has done its best to reclaim the rest while we keep it enough at bay to carry on in our missions.

To that end, my part is simple; keep people alive. I do it for her. Most that come to my clinic down the street are badly injured, either from work-accidents, refugee status, or as acting rebels for the cause. Germany is not without its remaining corporate outposts, but even they steer clear of Berlin. I guess it’s to pick their battles. They already took our government away, any representation or sympathy therein gone with it. Maybe they let us live just to remind the world that, while there may be a place for Augs to hide, it is still due to their good graces.

All the same, every morning I rise for her. The hatred of her image never falters or fails to arouse my determination. So I leave, patch up those whom may one day lead us from darkness and into light. While Lemaire’s death may have caused everything, an unwitting catalyst to a global revolution, it was us that let it happen– the survivors. Whether from our own convictions, or a greater cause, we can not allow ourselves to fall again. At least for us Germans, we’re eternally optimists, believing in a better world with heads even stronger than our unshakable hearts, and finally working toward it.

Short Story: Think Deeply

May 31, 2016May 30, 2016 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The bomb threat at the Oakton Memorial Hospital had been called in by an anonymous tip. Whether or not it was credible, the two-thousand odd doctors, nurses, M-As and other people inside were evacuated. A whole city block was cordoned off. Police blockades re-directed traffic or otherwise halted it whole for two blocks further on all sides. Someone had estimated, if the building went, its parking garages at either side and a few of emptied businesses might go too.

The chaos was already well under way when the Emergency Response Squad arrived. The new-age SWAT team was more an army than a police force, privately funded by many of Oakton’s large corporations to relieve the local, municipal government’s pressures. In truth they were free-agents, authorized to use any and all force necessary to eliminate threats. Unlike police, they were not a government agency, and were free to do any of a number of sordid things– like kill without the petty worries of justice, due process, or the pesky amendments protecting the obviously guilty from being presumed as such.

In short, ERS was everything American Police wished to be with none of the obligations that kept them in check.

ERS was rarely called in, though. OPD didn’t like having its toes stepped on, neither as an entity nor as as individuals comprising that entity. Even so, they couldn’t handle a threat of this nature alone. Recent years of poor press and tension between citzens and the department had festered a growing resentment. Among other things, it kept many would-be peace officers from joining.

OPD gracefully bowed to ERS, this time. In request for aid, containing the situation and keeping panic from spreading, ERS’ crack-squad were sent in. Their ingress across Oakton from its outskirts was unmistakable. They rolled in like an army in freshly armored sleek, blackened APCs with angry looking cannons. The vehicles were all thick, steel-plated angles and cylinders with tires enough to crush even the largest of vehicles that got in their way. Enough of the pseudo-tanks were able to form an impassable wall around the hospital’s entire city-block.

Captain Abraham Logan stepped from an APC. As acting leader of the ERS battalion, he had complete autonomy. His ultra-thin, kevlar and graphene-woven, black uniform and tac-vest gave him all the menace of SWAT combined with the next-gen tech of an army more advanced than the US’s own. The comm-link in his ear was satellite-guided, good for up to a thousand meters under water, or a mile of concrete on all sides. It connected him with ERS dispatch that had twenty-four hour access to public and corporate satellites to monitor situations in real-time.

Equipped with thermographic and night-vision, A-R glasses, Logan could see in the dark while overlaying his GPS-tracked location on a map of the hospital to one side of his vision. In combination with the Explosive Ordinance sniffers embedded in small, microscopic points around his clothing, he was almost singularly useful. His own stubborn will and battlefield experience would keep him and his people alive so long as they listened.

He led his group to the doors, their hi-tech gadgetry enabled and their comm-links active. Their AR glasses even had small cameras to keep ERS-dispatch aware of the teams’ surroundings. They presently showed Logan and his team breaching the facility with expert movements, their voices short, punctual.

“Cut the lights,” Logan ordered through his comm.

An ERS dispatcher, linked to the city’s power grid and the Hospital’s auxiliary generators, did as instructed. The lights went out. Gleaming, sterile white and warm wood paneling turned to dark silhouettes and blackness underfoot. It was almost blinding. The team’s AR glasses faded up their night-vision, and the way ahead was clear– albeit a little more gray-toned than usual. The active sniffers on Logan’s suit tracked scents of plastique and something most certainly lethal, but unidentifiable.

The team moved in sweeping caution, to a stairwell. They burst through its entrance to follow the stairs downward for a basement boiler room. Silence beneath their collective boot-steps sent a chill down their spines. Even Logan, war-hardened as he was, shuddered from the cold. He hid it from his team, led them further down in silence. The E-O trail was hot, as a faint, green line on the AR at their eyes.

They slipped into the bowels of the hospital beyond the stairs, angled for a morgue spanning half the basement. This was where they kept their dead. Everything said it. It was cold, morbid, and overpoweringly sterile smelling. A slightest scent of death though, still remained– as if it could never be scrubbed for its eternally continued presence.

Once more they readied to breach and entered the morgue. The team’s chill shudder returned in full force, caused a pause to their advance. Night-vision revealed steel surfaces of counters, tables, and gurneys both empty and filled across the morgue. Bodies atop them tainted the air further, the stench increasing each second the air warmed from lack of cooling. Even if Logan had given the order to engage the back-up power for the room, he doubted it would undo the odor around them.

He fanned the team out across the room. Behind them the door swung closed with a click. They advanced through the long, wide morgue and autopsy area. Logan followed the AR sniffer trail toward small doors equally spaced along the back wall. Body storage was six high, twenty wide, and according to the faint-outlines on thermal-vision, mostly full.

Logan was too preoccupied with the sniffer trail. It led to a door in the center of the storage unit. He pressed a pair of fingers against a panel there that was still active, likely powered by a back-up battery. Over the course of a minute, the door swung open. An empty tray inched outward. In its center sat a curious looking bomb; tall, wide, but hollow with a glass protrusion atop it. Through it, there was the undeniable stir of vapor mist.

Logan set his rifle aside, reached for the bomb.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” an old-man’s voice echoed over the room. The men and women rubbernecked. “Don’t fret. I’ve been gone a while now. You on the other hand…”

The door they entered from hissed, locked. Ventilation covers snapped shut across the room. All at once, the other hundred-and-nineteen doors on the storage wall opened. The scent of over a hundred bodies doubled the team over, Logan included. A few people passed out, overwhelmed by a mix of Methane and Vomit.

After a few moments of retching, Logan regained his feet, “You sick bastard!”

“Death is a funny thing, Captain,” the man’s voice replied over the PA speakers. “It does interesting things to a man. For instance, it causes a reaction of decomposition that, when mixed with bloating, makes one able to literally explode their guts around the room. The problem of course, is that we are dead when we gain this lovely ability.”

“You sick fuck, these are people!” One woman shouted. She sprinted for the door, breath held, tried to pry open it.

“Ah, ah, ah,” the voice said. “You’re locked away, you see. Were I in your position, I’d make peace with that.”

“Fuck you!” Logan shouted. He suppressed a dry-heave.

The man sighed as though a teacher disappointed with his pupil, “Now, now, Captain, we all have to die sometime. As I said, the body does interesting things. One which I have discovered, and which no one else knows but I.”

“Let us out of here you bastard!” The woman screamed as she booted the door.

“No,” the man replied simply. “No, you are to be the statement which reveals my discovery.”

“What the hell are you talking about, psycho?” A man shouted upward at the room.

“You see, I’ve discovered something many men don’t realize they already know about a dead body,” he paused dramatically, as if it meant all the world to his phrasing. “What I’ve discovered, dear friends, is that a body can create a powerful statement after the consciousness inhabiting it leaves.”

“You son of a–”

“And many dead bodies, Captain,” he said without interruption. “Can create a very powerful message.”

“You son of a–”

A sound came from behind Logan. A buzzing that shot up a thousand Hertz to scream with a high-pitch. Two blocks away, the earth jolted and trembled with a nearby explosion. Dirt and debris filled the air. A cloud of smoke and dust covered the distance between ground-zero and the furthest cordoned areas. The shock-wave blew out glass from every window for a mile. Shards rained through Oakton as precipitous drops that fell from the heavens.

When the dust settled, it took two weeks for ERS and OPD to count the dead and injured– most from the effects of the shock-wave. The crater where the hospital had been was kept roped off for months. Various crews worked day and night to restore power, water, and sewage to the effected areas.

Through it all, ERS and the various news outlets worked to locate the man responsible. When the team’s final moments, recorded by ERS’ dispatchers, finally leaked to the web, the world began to speculate. His statement, it seemed, was lost in the tragedy of the moment. That was, until a few amateur sleuths discovered a single phrase whispered in the final half-second of audio.

Buried beneath sounds of methane igniting, bodies being torn asunder, and cement cracking was the man’s voice; “Think Deeply.”

Rehab: Part 8

March 4, 2016March 3, 2016 ~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

11.

It was past noon when they made it to the office, the traffic heavy from the lunch-time rush. Even so, Chuck would be there until late into the afternoon as he laid out neat stacks of files for the coming week, combed the surfaces with white, latex gloves for any dust the cleaners had missed. It had been his Sunday routine longer than Carol had known him.

Suddenly, the thought now about what she may have to do bubbled within her. She’d never known Ed or Chuck to carry a weapon, but she’d also never known either of them to be amoral businessmen who stole lives and released monsters onto the streets. In fact, that was the polar opposite to what she knew them to be. Everything about this seemed out of character– an assertion she was forced to question as they made their way through the vacant lobby for the office.

Would Chuck be waiting for them? Had Babcock or Greene betrayed her? Could she trust, if things went South, that Sherry would be prepared for the worst?

They reached the office door, the firm’s name stenciled on its frosted glass. The radio inside was muffled behind it, near-silent given the thoughts that rampaged through their minds. They looked to one another, uneasy. Carol reached for the knob, hesitated, but Sherry nodded her onward. The door was thrown open wide, Carol’s pistol out in a flash. Chuck stumbled backward into his chair with a pant, surprised.

“Christ, Carrie you scared the hell outta–” He stopped short at the sight of the gun in her hand. “What’s this all about?”

“You tell me, Chuck,” she growled.

Her head was tilted down at an angle with a vicious, primal fury. It infected Chuck’s veins with ice. He shuddered, sighed. He knew it now– why she had come. With a speed she thought him incapable of, he reached beneath his desk. In a flash, metal gleamed, rose. Her gun echoed a single round that slammed his heart. The revolver flew sideways, hit the floor with a thud. Chuck slumped back, already dead.

Carol was cold, empty. Her eyes were narrow beyond a barrel that still smoked before her. Sherry turned sideways, doubled over, and vomited into a trashcan. Carol ignored it, moved to Chuck’s body to rifle through his pockets for his house keys.

She turned for the door, “Come on, we need to finish this.”

Sherry dry-heaved, groped her way up the wall to her feet, “You…. you–”

She hesitated at the door without a look back, “I killed him. He’s dead and this building’s empty until tomorrow. We need to go, finish this before it gets worse.”

“Carrie, I-I.. don’t know if I can… do this anymore.”

Sherry’s eyes were tilted down, avoided Chuck’s body, his blood still wetting his button-up shirt. Carol looked at her, “Sheryl, you have to understand what’s at stake here. If he’d have killed me for knowing, he’d have killed you too. You saw what happened. It was self-defense, my right.”

A tear began to slide down Sherry’s face. Carol watched it, numb to its attempts at stinging her. In the beginning, she’d drawn strength from Sherry’s persistence and support. Now, Sherry was hollow, too terrified for anything more than the autonomous regulation of her body. Somehow, Carol was still strong, as though the strength had transferred from one to the other imperceptibly. Sherry was haggard, pale, as if too long without sleep.

“C’mon, we’ve gotta’ go.”

Sherry ambled mindlessly from the office, followed Carol back to the truck. When they arrived at Ed’s house, she handed over Chuck’s keys, “If I don’t make it, you have to finish this.”

Sherry nodded, incapable of making eye contact. Carol began the short trek from the street to the doorway, thirty-feet and a million miles to her racing mind.

Why do this? What was the purpose behind all of it? Was it really just money? And what did Greene mean about being an opportunist?

She wasn’t sure, but she knew the last of her answers lay behind the gold-trimmed, maroon door, of Ed’s red-brick house. Whether he gave them to her, or she pried them from his cold, dead hands, was up to him.

She stepped to the door, ready to kick it in, tried the knob first. It was unlocked. A strange sensation flooded her as she stepped inside, pistol at the ready. The faint aroma of whiskey clung to the air. She listened carefully, heard nothing. She stepped right, toward the dry bar and recreation room, her feet light on the hardwood floor.

“You don’ ‘ave to creep around in here, Carrie,” Ed slurred across the room.

He was drunk enough that his smell burned her nostrils even at the distance. She raised her pistol, watched him gulp from a half-empty bottle.

“’M unarmed Carrie. ‘Nless you… cosider thiss-sshit a weappn.” He raised the bottle, chugged. Carol was silent, her feet planted, legs braced, and the pistol high, steady. “Well? What the fuck’re ‘ya waitin’ for?” He bellowed, flung to and fro from the force of his words.

In all her years of dealing with Ed’s occasional drunkenness, she’d never seen him in such a state. It was obvious he knew her intent, knew she’d learned of the rehab program. That much would’ve was assured after they’d been followed between the rehab centers. She thought for a moment, her eyes on the drunken husk of a man.

She lowered her pistol, holstered it to step forward.

His drunken sway worsened, “What? Whadda’ya–”

She charged, slammed him backward. The bottle flew as he was knocked to the floor. His head hit the floor with a loud thud that morphed into a cry. She balled the hardest fist she could, straddled his chest. He struggled to breathe against her weight, drunk, confused.

She struck him– once more. Then three times. Four.

She lost count. Her fists pummeled his face. Ed was too dazed and drunk to struggle, barely able to breathe. She was far from killing him, but began to shout.

“You prick!” She screamed with a blow. “Bastard… Backstabbing… Son of a bitch…”

Tears streamed from her eyes. Her hands ached, bruised, bloodied from gashes on them and fresh wounds on Ed’s face. An unassailable sadness melded with her anger.

She struck harder, “I trusted you! You let him go! All these years! I-I trusted… you…”

Her anger exhausted with her strength. She fell to his side, wept into her hands. Ed had been a second father– albeit a distant one. Though she never voiced it, she trusted Ed to aid her in her crusade. Her entire life’s work and purpose had been to save women from men like Evans. Now her greatest ally, closest friend, was even worse than the people she’d tried to put away.

In one simultaneous instant, she questioned all her hopes and dreams, recalled her deepest regrets and failures. She welled with anger and joy, sorrow and happiness, at all that she had aspired and succumbed to. Her heart and mind overloaded with guilt and loathing, love and happiness.

She reacted without conscious thought, felt the gun lift from her holster. She knelt over Ed, his face bruised and bloody, but his wounds superficial. He might yet live, but he might also die. The dilemma only worsened as the pistol pressed his forehead. The duality of life climaxed in her mind; success and failure, love and pain, good and evil. Each side tugged at her, forced her thumb down on the gun’s hammer. Her mind fought her heart’s pain and anger with steel logic as it questioned which action led to what consequence.

She’d already killed Chuck, but that was self-defense. This was murder, plain and simple. Was she ready to take that chance– become the person she’d fought so long and hard against?

The question echoed in her mind while her senses screamed at her, body ached from the convergence of dreams to nightmares. The couplet of bullet-trains collided at Mach speeds to explode, fog her vision as her finger slid over the trigger.

Her arms were locked, her body poised. The moment had come. It was up to Ed now.

Her body trembled, her voice shook, “Why?”

The word echoed through her into a deafening silence that rang with the war-drum charge of her heart. Ed’s left eye was swollen shut from the beating, but his right focused on her beyond the barrel.

“No one… was ever supposed to know,” he replied quietly, sobered by the beating. He exhaled slow, his breathes labored from her weight. “Chuck and I felt the recession… started doing patent work on the side. One of the inventions that came in… was a machine, intended for memory loss. The client died before the patent was finalized. We took some capital, built it… We only had the best of intentions.”

Carol’s lip twitched. He’d chosen. She rose from his chest, the gun still poised on him. His breath returned. He pushed himself into a sit. She allowed it.

“It’s bad now, Carrie. I-I know that. But it… it wasn’t always this way,” he assured her. “When we first created the program, the state didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But they let us try it. All of the cons we experimented on… they were lifers looking for reduced sentences, parole.” He shook his head in disgrace, “The device failed so many times, left dozens brain-dead. Chuck and I pushed to keep trying. It was impossible not too. All we needed was to discern the specific regions of the brain that caused the behaviors. That was it.”

He hung his head, quiet for a moment. When he looked up again, there could be no doubt of his sincerity. Even so, it made Carol’s stomach churn, her skin crawl.

“It got out of hand. But one day… one day, something happened. It permanently erased the person’s mind, but kept them alive. They were child-like, docile– but alive!”

Carol watched him with a knife in her chest. She wasn’t of anything more than its incise and his words.

“Babcock could tell you more about it, he was the… tech, guy. He learned how the machine had done it, manipulated the process. He learned how to read what chemical imprints meant which types of memories. It became mathematical, a formula we had to get right. We found something… something that differed between the genius and the layman. It was a certain set of chemical and genetic markers– the reason we’d failed so many times was its absence in those patients.” He swallowed hard, “It wasn’t long before Babcock was manipulating specific memories, wiping others to clean slates, creating new ones. I-I’d tell you how, but it’s too technical for me.”

She believed him; Ed could barely work his smart-phone most days.

A corner of her mouth twitched with spite, “How could you do it, Ed? How could you let Evans go?”

“I’ve had to let dozens of guys like Evans…go,” he admitted without remorse.

“How could you do it to me!” She spit, wounded.

“I didn’t do it to you, I did it to him— to all of them… for you.”

Vertigo overcame her. The room began to spin. His next words were muffled by a confounding guilt. Everything that had happened to Evans– all of the people whose lives had been taken from them– were taken because of her.

She hastened to a realization as the final pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Everything Ed had done for her, the reason he’d hired her, was a result of his own mental illness– the meticulous workings and rationalizations of a mind obsessed with his own crusade. He’d spent so many years repressing guilt for stealing lives, letting murderers, rapists, and pedophiles be reformed, that he used her past trauma as the reason and rationale for all of his victims. In due time, his “success” was endorsed by the state, country even.

Finally the fractal-like image was revealed in all of its complex and deluded splendor. The rehabilitation program, instituted by Ed and Chuck, had been a vision of grandeur and hope– stolen from someone much brighter and tainted by their lack of morality. They’d failed at making the machine work for its original intent, re-purposed it, and removed all claim to its moral responsibility in the process. After years of growing guilt, nightmares, and remorse, Ed found a victim he might redeem himself through.

But it all fell apart that day Ed met Greene in the restaurant just before Evans’ sentencing. He’d come in his usual disguise, but as a courier to inform Ed of Evans’ chemical markers. Ed’s redemption was impossible then, but he still needed to rationalize, keep his conscience clean. It suddenly became Carol’s repayment, and when Evans was reformed, his drunken binges began. Either consciously or not, he’d been drinking, waiting for either it to kill him or Carol to suss out the truth and finish him herself.

The spinning stopped. She pushed through her haze, tried to discern her next course of action, but couldn’t. Ed’s words continued on, incessant ramblings of rationalizations and justifications for the atrocities he’d committed– all in her name, to honor her. It made her sick.

With what little strength remained, she pushed herself up, stood over him. There was only one logical resolution; Ed was a criminal, mentally sick and amoral, but no less human. She wasn’t a murderer, but she wouldn’t allow herself to be a victim to anyone anymore, much less the scapegoat for a lunatic.

“Get up,” she ordered. He didn’t respond. She kicked his foot, holstered the pistol, “Get up god damn it!”

She drug him to his feet, got behind him to steer him, stumbling, out the door and to the truck. She threw open the doors as Buddy growled at his stench. She silenced him with a word, threw Ed into the backseat. He toppled in, once more adrift in a sea of drunken confusion. Sherry looked across the truck with a question on her lips, her face once more colored, but still oily, sweat-covered.

Carol shut the door, climbed in beside her, “Call Mike. We need to get him there before he comes out of it.”

They pulled away from the house, the front door still wide open. Sherry made her way through afternoon traffic to the police station at twice the posted limit. They fought to carry Ed up the steps, for him into an interrogation room and wait for him to sober up.

Mike met with the two women in the observation room beyond the interrogation room’s two-way mirror, “What the hell happened?”

For the first time since the day had begun, they looked at themselves. Sherry was unscathed, save for her exhaustion, but Carol’s clothing was disheveled, her hands and knees bloody, bruised. She looked frightening, as though she’d been at war for the last two days, had fought her way through the trenches to uncover the truth. In the small amount of time she’d been afforded rest, she’d chose instead to drink herself into a stupor. She wasn’t sure whether to be proud or sick with herself.

She decided she didn’t care, launched into retelling the events while Sherry corroborated. She’d be damned if she was going to let Ed skew the truth any further than he already had, made up her mind to come clean about everything, perfectly at ease with whatever consequences she might be due.

EPILOGUE

When attorneys Carolyn Switzer and Sheryl Hunter relayed their story to Detective Mike Boone, Carol took the blame for the death of Charles Henderson. Simultaneously, aspects of their story, corroborated by various parties (including Dr. Henry Babcock and Edward Mordin.) placed them at no fault in the use of The Ohio State Investigative Act. Edward later went on official record during the trial of State of Ohio V. Switzer and Hunter, testifying that he knew Henderson had stashed a loaded thirty-eight revolver beneath his desk. According to his testimony, it had been there since Zachary Evans had been sentenced to rehabilitation, placed in fear of retribution in the event that Carolyn ever discovered his secrets. Mordin also assured the court that Henderson kept the weapon loaded with the safety off.

To the surprise of everyone involved, Edward produced security tapes from hidden cameras secretly installed in the office, and went on record to say, he too, believed retribution might some day come, but suspected Henderson would make the first move. A series of cameras were placed at angles which gave full, 360 degree views of Henderson’s desk. When the tape was reviewed during the trial, it was immediately determined that although Switzer drew first, Henderson’s prior actions and his reaction therein, negated any charge of murder.

The case was dismissed following an innocent verdict on the charges of first and second-degree murder.

A subsequent trial, State of Ohio V. Edward Mordin revealed that the defendant had been guilty on fifty-four counts of first degree murder, and seventy-one counts of felony criminal battery against State Penitentiary inmates. On the advice of a separate, expert witness and testimony by one Carolyn Switzer, it was recommended that Edward Mordin be sent to an upstate, mental health facility for rehabilitative therapy and life imprisonment without chance of parole.

When the evidence of Ed’s actions came to light in open court, both Leon Greene and Doctor Henry Babcock were arrested and tried by attorneys appointed by the state’s deferment laws. The attorneys, on expert advice of witnesses Carolyn Swizter and Sheryl Hunter, sought the maximum sentence of criminal neglect and felony assault. Henry Babcock’s sentence was reduced on appeal however, when he gave up several, senior members of his medical staff to authorities. Each was subsequently tried and found guilty for criminal neglect and malpractice against some two hundred and thirty seven former rehab-patients.

The media’s field day summarily exposed the state’s rehabilitation program, shedding light onto a dark corner of the criminal justice system. The resulting public back-lash forced the specific form of therapy, known as Cognitive Reassignment Rehabilitation Therapy, to be suspended indefinitely despite its success. The US Supreme court later found CRRT to be unethical, instituting a nation-wide ban on its use. However, various rumored reports have relayed that its use has continued in secret both in and out of the United States.

As for the two women, having garnered fame and public praise from their revelation, they became sought out as high-profile attorneys. Their careers took off, allowing them to open their own practice, Hunter and Switzer Law. In addition, Detective Micheal Boone was awarded a Public Safety Officer Medal of Valor for his service and willingness to risk his reputation to fight injustice.

Shortly after the media-circus subsided, Anthony DePaul received the following letter from an anonymous source:

Anthony DePaul,

I send you this letter in the hopes that I may assuage my own guilt for actions against you; though they were never of my own accord, nor by my own hand.

It’s no doubt you’ve heard of the incident regarding Edward Mordin and Charles Henderson that resulted in the losses of memory in two hundred and thirty-seven criminals sentenced to CRRT by the state. All of the files have been released to the local police departments and FBI to be done with as they see fit, save an unknown two hundred and thirty-eighth victim.

This man, intentionally obscured by my hand, is Zachary Evans. His crimes were unspeakable in nature, copious, and cold. Mr. DePaul, I’m sorry to inform you that you were once this man. However, he died when you were born. Your memories are be fabrications, your personality manufactured, but they were done so to bring out the best aspects of your character, keep buried the worst. I tell you this because of an event that took place roughly two weeks before this all began; a woman bumped into you on the street, dropped her things and stammered like a fool. You were kind to her then, sincere and apologetic.

In that moment, I met you, Mr. DePaul. But in that moment, I also felt the specter of a man I loathed. The quest to understand led me to lay to rest a great injustice. It is for this reason, and this reason alone that I have kept your former self from the press. You have been given a second chance. One, I feel, you deserve because of the injustice done to you. You are Zachary Evans, but you are also Anthony DePaul. As the latter, you may live your life in blissful ignorance, or pursue what you will to know more of your former self. In either case, you will atone for the crimes of a past life, because it is ingrained within you to do so.

Enclosed is a flash-drive for you to keep or destroy. It contains all of the information on who you were. What you do from here on out is your choice, but believe me when I say, that to follow Evans’ path is to erase the soul you’ve been given.

I gained much more from our encounter on the street than a mere letter could tell. Now perhaps, you may gain as much in knowing that you were given a second chance, and have been living it to the fullest. I hope you continue to do so.

The files you hold are the only copies. No one can speak of Zachary Evans and link him to you. Please, for your own sake, destroy the file. I can not bring myself to do it and it is not my right to do so. I unintentionally wronged Evans, and in turn, you. Though his crimes were unspeakable, so too is the breadth of your chance to make up for them. I hope this atones for my part.

Anonymous.

Upon finishing the letter, DePaul removed the small drive. He stuffed the letter into the inside pocket of his jacket. In one, simple motion, he dropped the drive to the floor and smashed it with a booted heel. He keeps the letter on him to this day, intent on using every chance he has to atone for a past he cares not to remember.

Short Story: The Murder of an Angel

March 1, 2016January 6, 2018 ~ 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.