Tag: Short Story

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.

Short Story: Masquerade

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

His head was clear through the digital sights of her scope as she stalked him from the shadows of a fifth floor balcony outside an empty apartment. The building straight ahead was the usual conglomerate of department stores for the first three levels, the fourth jam-packed full of offices. The fifth story contained the high-class and fine cuisine the wealthy elite were so accustomed to. She knew he would find him here sooner or later, in this seat; it was his favorite place and seat, and this was his favorite time of day.

Overhead, lighting cracked in clouds that unleashed the torrential downpour between the two buildings. Somewhere below, cars splayed streaks of light across wet asphalt while people scurried like ants through the rain. She cared nothing for them or their existence. Her mind and gaze were fixed, her posture rigid. Her rifle’s bi-pod sat studiously atop the cement edge of the balcony wall, it and her beneath a specially-made poncho that masked her heat signature from any surrounding surveillance. In moments, she would make the hit, he would be dead.

The why didn’t matter to her. It was her job to kill, not to care. She did, however, know the man’s steel-gray hair and chiseled features from newscasts. He was Leo “The Lion” Wilco, CEO of the fortune five-hundred company Wilco Industries. The company was deeply embedded into every major manufacturing industry through either its own holdings or those of its subsidiaries. With proper motivation, Wilco was perfectly positioned to make a swift move, gain market share and monopolize all of those industries. Evidently someone believed it was about to.

Another crack of lightning. With it she racked the bolt on her rifle, placed her finger beside the trigger. All she needed was another strike. The thunder that followed would hide any remnant of sound that her rifle’s flash-sound suppressor left for prying ears. Through the scope she watched the minor shift of the wind indicator along its edge, inched the rifle back into alignment. The cross-hairs flashed red, a kill-shot centered on the left-side The Lion’s head.

He sat with his hands on the edge of the table, fingers-interlocked to await the arrival of his meal. His back was rigid, un-moving, but his jaw and face made the subtle hints of a low conversation. His mistress of the month curled a hand around her wine glass and sipped with a forward lean. She was clearly a trophy, arm-candy; all legs and tits that crossed and bulged beneath her crimson dress. She gleamed with millions of dollars worth of diamonds that decorated her ears, neck, and fingers.

The woman’s obvious vanity made the assassin sick, for a moment she thought of turning her rifle on the trophy. But it wasn’t her job. Eliminating gold-diggers and trophies was a job for street-thugs and heart-disease. That, and it never paid nearly well enough. No, her job was simple, fruitful; one breath, one round, one life. A hundred G’s was all it took to end the insanity Wilco was positioned to bring.

Unbeknownst to his assassin, The Lion’s head was sought for what was known but that he believed to be unknown. Wilco’s closest friend and associate, Robert Kiely, with him since the start of Wilco Industries and largely responsible for its success, had recently discovered that business had a way of separating those believed closest to one’s self. This information came in the form of a mysterious package Kiely had found on his doorstep in the middle of the night.

The forty-eight year old millionaire of modest home, was drawn from his bed in the wee hours of the morning by a ringing doorbell. Like any cautious homeowner, he answered the door with a 12-gauge shotgun in his hands, ready to bring hell to any would-be intruder. Instead, he found a small, brown-box with his name on it and nothing more. Kiely laid his shotgun on the island counter in his kitchen, tore open the box to find a lone SSD flash-drive. It took mere moments for Kiely to boot his laptop and sift through the contents.

Both video and text files alluded to a massive, off-the-books deal that would end with Wilco holding a monopoly over three separate industries; construction equipment manufacturing and sale, Northwestern US Logging, and West-coast Realty development. In essence, Wilco was ready to purchase, develop, and monopolize the entire West-coast of America. The how and why bothered Kiely much less than the final two snippets of information he found; information, that in time, would lead him to hire Wilco’s assassin.

The first snippet was a money trail to various contract lawyers. There was little to go on, but it was clear Wilco intended to cut Kiely out of the deal, and likely, out of Wilco Industries entirely. The next was a simple text file that offered a solution without explanation. The small notepad file enlarged onto his screen, readout; “We have a mutual problem. Bring $100,000 US to the address below. Tomorrow. Midnight.”

The address was somewhere in NorCal; a nondescript storage facility made of small, garage-like units. The moon overhead made a shadow of Kiely as he followed instructions that led him to the last unit in the back, right corner of the storage compound. It was open, dark, but from the way the shadows seemed to breathe outside the unit, clearly occupied by a man.

He lit a cigarette, his face showing only enough to hint at angry, European features despite his obvious, American accent, “Toss the money inside, and leave. The problem will be handled.”

And so here she knelt, in freezing rain, ready to correct the problem. It was her job. She was an assassin for the highest bidder. She did her job well, had eliminated more targets than most in her line of work. Partly, it was her handler that allowed her to get her work, and partly it was the fact that no-one suspected a small, ex-gymnast girl with a dyke spike and no tits could ever be a threat.

She smiled at the thought. Lightning cracked. Her finger laid over the trigger. Her breath stopped. The world around her was silent. For a moment, the thunder seemed not to come. She knew it would, even through a calm dispassion.

Then, the low rumble. The trigger was squeezed. A crack and the thunder apexed. The rifle recoiled with a thump and near-invisible flash from its barrel. It was hidden from view before Wilco’s brain finished splattering out the far-side of his head. The trophy’s screams signaled the successful hit as the rifle broke down into its few pieces, was deposited into the small backpack she kept it in. She slipped back inside the empty apartment in time for a group to gather around Wilco’s corpse.

Someone examined the tempered glass to locate the single, small hole while she made her way down in the elevator. It stopped at a random floor, her masquerade solid as a man entered and paid her no mind. Somewhere in her pack, the rifle was still warm with fresh powder, but no-one could ever know.

When the elevator opened in the lobby, police cruisers screamed past. She and the man from the elevator exited the building together.

He stopped to watch the cruisers fly past and around the corner, pulled on a set of gloves, and mused aloud, “Must’ve been an accident.”

She didn’t smirk, or smile, or anything else that would indicate inside knowledge. Instead, she was indifferent, stone-faced, “Guess so.”

She and the acquaintance parted ways. Off on their separate paths to their seemingly ordinary lives. Her job was done and it was time to collect payment. Lighting cracked overhead to blind anyone watching, but by the time their vision would have returned, she had disappeared into the rain-storm, and back into obscurity.

Short Story: Desert Man

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

How he survived no-one was sure. They only knew that he emerged onto a stretch of I-40 just south of the Mojave National Preserve. He was a ratty, shell of a man, emaciated and parched to bleeding from an indeterminate amount of time in the sun without water. One of Nevada’s National Park Rangers had found him wandering the highway a few miles from his shack. Richard Powell, the Ranger, found the John Doe just before dawn.

“There’s obvious signs of dehydration,” Powell explained to a doctor over the phone.

The John Doe sat in the tiny, air-conditioned Ranger’s shack across the room from Powell. His eyes were focused straight ahead, his shoulders and back slumped in a hunch atop the leather couch. He wore a suit, clearly tattered from his tenure in the Mojave. He’d yet to say a word, and a small trickle of blood still leaked from the cracked skin in the center of his bottom-lip. Every few moments, almost mechanically, he would lift the chilly, tin cup in his hand to soothe his sandy throat with cold water. As if autonomous, only his arm, mouth and throat moved. His eyes stayed focused ahead. His body never flinched but for the occasional shallow breath.

Powell hung up the phone, lifted his wooden chair from behind the desk, then set it down before Doe on the dusty rug in the center of the room. He sat slowly, considering his words with care and taking a long, droll look at his charge. He shook his head with confusion.

“I dunno’ how you done it, son,” Powell said. “But you clearly got your feathers ruffled over sumthin’ and I’m not sure how to go ’bout fixin’ that.”

The Doe’s eyes shifted to stare into Powell’s, but he remained silent. His eerie stillness was only normalized in the few, human movements that comprised his drinking. Either oblivious, or altogether too concerned to address it, Powell steered the conversation with glances here and there that gave more humanity to his charge than he may have possessed.

“Now I called the Doc, ‘n he’ll be here soon, but ’til then I’mma need you to tell me whatever you can remember, alright?”

Doe looked straight through Powell, a gaze that froze the desert-man’s blood. It wasn’t an easy thing to do– like most desert people, Powell was used to the two extremes of the desert; the smothering heat and the unbearable cold. Doe’s piercing look though? Even antifreeze couldn’t have kept his blood flowing. There was something alien about him, inhuman– like he’d come from another planet and could see everything inside, outside, and through a man just by looking in his eyes.

Powell’s discomfort began to rise, but he powered through it for the sake of his charge, “Look, I understand you’re prolly not in the talkin’ mood. I ‘magine your throat’s mighty soar, but you gotta’ tell me what happened to you, else I’m not gonna’ know what to tell the Doc.”

Still Doe sat there, eyes fixed ahead, mechanically drinking. Powell scratched his five-o’clock shadow with a grating of stubble on nails. He pushed himself up from the chair with both hands on his thighs, began to step away when Doe’s mouth opened with a rasp. Powell stopped in his tracks, looked at the man in anticipation.

Doe’s mouth was slacked like he’d stopped mid-speech, a word still ready to roll from his tongue, but all of his movements had ceased. Even his breath seemed to stop, likely to help muster this bizarre state of being. Suddenly the hand that held the water dropped its cup, seized Powell’s wrist.

There was a flash like a mortar’s exploded, but Powell was unharmed. He recoiled from a blinding light, suddenly found himself standing beside the man in the middle of the desert. It was near dusk, the sun swollen on the horizon as though the Earth ended somewhere in its direction and it began there. For a moment Powell swore he saw the dividing line where Sol and Earth were separate entities. He shook off the thoughts in favor of a rubbernecking back-step that included a full-circle of his feet.

He came to a rest on the face of Doe. It stared at him, more animate and human than he’d seen it yet. Powell was awestruck, ready to accuse the man of sorcery, but he raised a hand slowly to halt him from speaking. For some reason, it worked. A trickle of complacency coursed through the Park Ranger all the way from his chest to his brain. Something flooded his body from its presence, and he felt content.

For the first time, Doe spoke; his voice was old, hoarse, as though it came from a man hundreds of years older than the vessel that possessed it. “I… do not know my name. It has been… far too long since I began my journey.”

Powell’s breath weighed on his chest, “Wh-what’s going on ‘ere?” He whipped his head left to right, “We’re… Where are we? Where’s the shack? What’ve you–”

Doe’s hand went up again, and Powell felt endorphins leak from his brain, “You… don’t worry. I… won’t harm you. Something… wonderful. I wish to show you.”

He presented his hand to Powell, as if to take it to be led somewhere. Indeed, once more compelled by the curious force, Powell took Doe’s hand. The land around them began to morph, by the looks of it, to a late-prohibition era town. The distant sunset disappeared to form brick and mortar buildings. Trees and freshly-paved street intermingled with the fanciful colors of painted homes in the distance. Long, hand-molded steel fenders and chrome bumpers appeared on exquisitely manufactured Fords and Chevys along the streets’ edges.

Doe’s voice sounded over the change in scenery, “It began here, when I was a young man. Though my appearance does not reflect it…. I have been here a long time. On this Earth.”

Powell glanced around to see a couple step from a nearby speakeasy. The woman was clad in a fur stole. Enormous diamonds glittered around her neck above a flashy, red dress. Beside her, Doe was unmistakable, truly unchanged since the era. Powell watched as Doe maneuvered to the vehicle to open the door for his mistress, his gray fedora and suit freshly-pressed. The angle of his head, and the loud laughter of the woman covered the sound of a slowly approaching vehicle.

Doe opened the door, and the car’s engine revved up. It skidded to a halt just as two men popped out the passenger windows. A hail of Thompson machine-gun fire exploded through the night. The sounds were so loud and near that Powell jumped in fright. One of the men yelled something about Timmy the Fish “sending his regards” as Doe and his mistress were gunned down.

The scene suddenly changed to Doe once more in the desert. This time, he wandered through the Mojave alone. As if Powell followed him with each breath, he kept pace with Doe’s past-self in real-time.

The man’s now-disembodied voice spoke to him over his aimless wandering, “I’m not sure how I survived…. alas, I did.” The walking Doe fell to his knees, exhausted and panting while the elder one continued to speak, “I had been shot four dozen times by Timmy the Fish’s wise-guys. They murdered my beautiful Mary, but I survived… I didn’t even bother going to the hospital. I … I think that was why I wandered out into the desert. I wanted to know if I could die.” He seemed partially amused by his next thoughts, “I left because there was nothing left to stay for. My Mary was gone, and Timmy didn’t trust me anymore. If he’d known I was alive, he’d’ve tried again. If I didn’t die then, he’d’ve just exchanged my shoes for cement ones and I’d be stuck at the bottom of the ocean– maybe for eternity.”

The images morphed back to Doe standing before Powell. The sun sat once more on the horizon. Doe was now animated in response to Powell’s insane look of scrutiny. The former managed a weak smile, his eyes tired and glassy with tears and cataracts from the desert sun.

“I’ve not aged a day in almost a hundred years,” he said with a heavy heart. “And I think on the day my Mary died, I did too… or a part of me did.” He heaved a dreadful sigh infected with grief, “Problem is, the rest’a me’s never quite gone with it.” He took a step toward Powell with the sadness of a man long-past his expiration date, “I started walking the day she died. First, to escape the police, then Timmy. Then, ’cause I didn’t know what else to do. I hadn’t stopped… not really anyhow, ’til you picked me today. Somehow, I’d managed to wander for ages, never dying, never stopping. I like to think that… now, I’m more desert than man. Like a dune in the wind that’s just carried between locations, but never really leaves the desert.”

Doe went quiet. Powell was flabbergasted. He wanted to call the man a crook, a liar, but he couldn’t. He had a peculiar effect on the Park Ranger, reminded him of something from home. It was as though he was part of the desert, somehow had managed to embody it in all those years he’d supposedly wandered it. Being a desert-man himself, the Park Ranger felt at home, couldn’t help but be placate the bit of that Doe embodied.

He shook his head again, focused on the task at-hand, “I dunno’ what’s goin’ on here, but I’d appreciate it if we could return to the shack now. Otherwise, we’re gonna’ miss the Doc.”

Doe gave a few, solitary nods– they were small, presided over by a sad smile. In a blink, the Ranger’s shack re-materialized around them. Powell found himself standing just as he’d been, ready to return to his desk. Doe’s arm retracted back to his body.

He cleared his throat with a slosh of water, then rasped out a few words, “I just wanted you to know my story, Sir.” Powell turned to eye the man as he continued, “All those years I been searching for death, but it still ain’t come. I dunno why. After today, I almost glad it didn’t, ’cause now you know my story.” He took a long, slow drink from his water, then smiled with teary eyes, “She sure was somethin’, my Mary, wasn’t she?”

Powell couldn’t help but be affected by Doe’s sorrow, be it from one man to another, or one desert-man to another.

Powell gave a small nod, his voice quiet, “Sure was.”

Doe nodded back, relaxed on the couch and closed his eyes. Powell sighed, stepped for his desk to lift the phone. He gave Doe one last look, and as if he were a dune, a wind kicked up and the man blew away like grains of sand. What was left of his body after the gust dissolved into sand-grains.

Powell lunged for the couch, felt around it. He drew his hand up with a pile of sand that leaked through his fingers. Powell’s eyes were wild, but somehow he knew: the desert-man had returned home.