After thirty hours of reading, Vern grew weak and weary. His throat was dry, his eyes stinging.
Soon, he would fall asleep, and then the zombies would get him.
As he finished the last story in his personal inventory, the strange audience once again began to move forward. Desperate, Vern started to make up new material, right out of his head.
“Once upon a time,” he began with the cliché, not so hot at thinking on his feet, “uh, there was a group of people who paid a visit to an old friend. They were sick – and he was a doctor.”
The zombies calmed back down and settled in for another of Vern’s stories – this one a live creation.
“The sick people didn’t realize how sick they were. Many of them were so sick, they barely seemed alive. Their minds were disintegrating, their bodies imperiled. They craved something – they thought it was brain matter – but they were wrong. They craved release from their tortured prison – from their walking death.”
Vern continued to speak as he placed his stack of stories back on a shelf. “One of them,” he said, looking at what used to be a man, “had a patch of gray hair on the left side of his head, and his left eye dangling by a thread of muscles and nerves. We’ll call him Fred. Fred was barely aware of his own existence. But Fred was nonetheless a leader.”
An idea was forming in Vern’s mind. He hoped it would work.
“One day, Fred and his associates, while visiting their doctor friend, decided the best way to find peace would be to cleanse themselves of their disease – the only way possible. Fred stood and-”
The moment Vern said the words, “Fred” rose to his feet.
“Fred stood up and picked three random friends to be his assistants.”
Vern watched as Fred slowly raised his bony arm and pointed at three other zombies.
“Fred instructed the assistants that they needed to build a huge bonfire.”
A gurgling sound came from Fred, and the three other zombies began to shuffle out the door.
“Fred explained that he and his friends were to be the fuel for the fire. He explained that this was how it had to be.”
Fred, his assistants, and the twenty or thirty remaining zombies all made their way slowly out the front of the cabin and began piling themselves up on the lawn.
Vern followed, bringing a candle and the last of his current supply of fuel.
Like a pied-piper of the undead, he continued to tell his bizarre story to the group as he doused the pile of bodies with the fuel.
“Once the pile was ready, Fred, as their leader, climbed atop the pile, and the doctor, Vern Charles, lit a match that would bring healing to all.”
With that, Vern ignited the zombie-pyre.
“And they all lived happily ever after,” he mumbled as the flames rose, consuming the zombies.
As the creatures became charred and blackened, their shredded clothes enveloped in crackling flames, he thought that if only he’d been published back in the Days Before, his zombie-controlling writings would’ve been available the world over.
Perhaps he could find a way to disseminate his writings. They were no longer mere entertainment – they were more valuable to a free and safe world than hollow-point bullets.
The acrid smoke rose into the darkening sky, and Vern collapsed from exhaustion.
THE END
* * * * *
BONUS: FLASH FICTION
Unsettling Things
Oh, no.
I must do it again.
I wish there were another way, but there isn’t.
Who knows what might be in there?
Yet another reason I prefer to keep my nails so short that no white is showing. At least that way nothing can get stuck under a nail, pressed up against that tender part where the nail attaches to the skin, lodging there like an unwanted guest.
Unfortunately, it’s been a few days since I clipped my nails, and there is some white showing, practically inviting some tiny piece of debris to wedge itself in there.
Some determined crumb is bound to make its way under one of my nails, and I’ll be plagued by its presence, feeling as one does when a particularly stubborn piece of meat is trapped between one’s teeth, unable to leave it alone until it is extricated.
But that’s not the worst of it.
It could be sticky.
Oh, how I loathe stickiness. If it’s sticky in there, I won’t rest (or touch anything) until I’ve washed my hands. The way it feels when your fingers stick together, involuntarily bound by some foreign substance, is almost too much to bear. Washing my hands instantly afterwards is not fast enough.
Even worse, there could be something sharp hidden in there. A pin, a needle – it puts me on pins and needles to think about it. Maybe there’s a lost pair of scissors or a knife waiting to slice into my probing fingers. There could even be a syringe – who knows where this thing’s been.
I’m not up to date on my hepatitis shots, so there better not be a syringe.
But there’s bound to be crumbs.
Bread crumbs, cracker crumbs, cookie crumbs, crumbs that used to be something soft, but have dried up into some unidentifiable flotsam – all waiting there to escape their dark prison and hitch a ride on me.
Wasting no more time on my perfectly legitimate fears, I dive into the dark abyss. I slide my hand in, and it feels cool on my skin.
As expected, there are crumbs.
There must be hundreds of the little castaways, huddled together, waiting to be rescued and see the light once more.
I brush past them, feeling my way in the gloomy little cavern. Cautiously, I slide my hand back and forth, pushing deeper into the fissure, hoping to find my quarry before it’s too late.
It’s too late.
I somehow managed to find something sticky. With a three year old in the house, it could be anything. I am not going to sniff my fingers afterward, because I just don’t want to know.
Moving toward the back of the space between the cushions, my hand strikes something hard.
Smooth.
With little rubber buttons.
Eureka!
I have found it. I reach my fingers around it and slowly pull it from its hiding place and place it on the end table.
Tiny threads, hairs, and a few escapee crumbs are lodged between the buttons.
Once again, the remote control has been snatched from the murky depths of the couch. Once again it is redeemed from the fate of eternal darkness amidst all the other lost items. Why it is so drawn to that dire pit of doom I will never know.
As I dash up the stairs to wash my hands, I struggle to pick the crumbs out from under my nails and feel thankful that there was nothing sharp lurking in those cushions.
This time.
All stories © 2011, 2012 Michael D. Britton / Intelligent Life Books
MORE BOOKS AT WWW.MICHAELDBRITTON.COM
* * * * *
SNEAK PEEK:
An excerpt of the techno-thriller ASSASSINWARE
PROLOGUE
Scott Faraday was not used to this.
He’d spent his career with the CIA – and before that, with the Navy – as a nameless, faceless cog in a wheel.
Just doing his job.
Doing it remarkably well, but doing it under the shadow of anonymity.
Yet here he was, going public. Well, sort of.
Maxine Miller had first approached him at his favorite D.C. internet café, eBrew - at the time, he was surprised that such an attractive woman would be interested in him. She sat down close enough to him that he could smell her flowery perfume and feel the warmth of her body. But after a few minutes of conversation, it became clear that all she was after was his story. Once his emerging ego was quickly put back in its humble place, he agreed to the interview, on the condition that his identity would remain undisclosed. And that it take place in a location with fewer people around.
&n
bsp; Now he sat in a neighborhood park near his Ingleside apartment with the Newsweek reporter – a petite blonde he’d once hoped was picking up on him – trying his best to do justice to one of the biggest cybercrime stories of the decade. Under his black leather jacket, his left arm was in a sling. In his right hand, he held a bottle of water. As usual, he needed a shave.
“Tell me about your partner, Simon Jakes,” she said, brushing a strand of sunshine-colored hair behind her ear and poising her well-manicured fingertips over her laptop keyboard that sat atop her tight skirt. A small digital recorder sat on the bench between them, the bright morning sun, low in the sky, reflecting off its shiny surface.
Faraday sighed, and a puff of water vapor floated out of his mouth in the cool late-September air. “What do you want to know? I mean, Jakes was – he – he was a great agent and a good friend. He had a real sense of humor, you know, the kind of guy who everybody liked. And he knew how to motivate people – a persuasive guy.”
“What about his death?”
Faraday shook his head, looking down at the gravel walk, still covered in a thin veneer of frost. “It all went down so very quickly.”
Maxine gently placed her hand on his forearm. “Just let the words come, Scott,” she said, her big, dark eyes looking surprisingly empathetic, for a reporter. “Don’t worry about how it sounds. I’m a writer – I’ll make it flow just fine once it’s in print. It may be hard to talk about your friend’s death, but this story will have much more impact if you can explain how everything occurred. So, just relax, and tell me all about it.”
Faraday took a sip from his water bottle, then began to paint the picture. “We were in the closing action of a very long-term operation. I was running the op out of headquarters in Langley. It all came down to this – it was time to make the bust. We had a team in the field, ready to shut down a big ring of Seattle-based corporate data black-marketers . . . ”
#
Scott Faraday sat at the helm of the CIA’s counter-cybercrime operation team in a black leather high-back office chair, surrounded by an array of at least two dozen flat screen computer monitors ranging in size from twenty inches to forty-six inches, all displaying full-color images and data streams.
The lighting in the room was subdued – most of the illumination coming from the bank of screens and the blue-glowing control panels. The smell of hot dust from the heavy-duty computer network mingled with stale coffee and a leftover pizza from a long night of surveillance.
Faraday wore an earpiece-microphone and his strong hands flew over the smooth-surface keyboard as he relayed commands to the S.W.A.T. team on the ground, thousands of miles away in Seattle.
He moved his right hand to a delicate joystick device that he used to maneuver a remote camera and zoom in the image.
His team was closing in on the hideout of a group of heavy players in a ring of thieves stealing sensitive corporate data and selling it to the highest bidder. These were the guys who ran the actual auction site – shutting down these punks would put a serious dent in business.
Simon Jakes, Faraday’s partner, was closing in on them from the electronic side while Faraday directed the ground team.
Suddenly, Jakes erupted in anguish.
#
Faraday stopped telling the story and sunk into silence.
“What happened?” asked Maxine. “How’d he die?”
To Faraday, she seemed poised on the edge of her seat like a salivating hound waiting for its master to release a dangling steak.
“I can’t tell you.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, I am not at liberty to say. The information is classified.”
“Come on, Agent Faraday,” her voice was hardening, a contrast to the soft coaxing voice of a few minutes ago. “This is the centerpiece of the story. There are rumors that Jakes was killed by his computer. Is this true?”
“I can’t comment on that. Do you want the rest of the story, or not?”
“All right,” she said, sounding a little exasperated – like a man who’s been asked to stop and talk about his feelings right before intercourse. “What happened after Jakes died? How did you catch the perpetrators? And why does the incident report show that you were alone when you brought them in – no backup?”
“There was no time - ” Faraday started.
“So the claims that your apprehension of the Seattle Six was motivated by vigilantism are false?”
“Completely unfounded,” said Faraday, his face stern. A jogger passed by and he shifted in his seat before continuing. “It took me a while, but using a data tracking technique I designed, the doors started opening in my investigation, and I was chasing down leads as fast as I could run - the rest of the Agency couldn’t even keep up. In the end, it was just me and the six of them. And in the end, justice was served. So why the fabricated controversy?”
Maxine raised her eyebrows, then brushed aside the hair that was tickling her forehead. “I didn’t make up the accusations, Mr. Faraday, I’m just telling you what I’ve heard over the past two weeks since the arrests. You are free to refute the claims, as you just did. But I believe the people have a right to know.”
“To know what? That I took down six scumbags who got what they had coming? Besides, I went easy on them – that is, I followed procedure to the letter, with the exception of having backup. Nobody died. It was a clean bust.”
“But you put all six of them in the hospital – one of them in critical condition.”
“We all checked in that day,” said Faraday, lifting his injured arm slightly and wincing. “I took a bullet, too, you know.”
“I am aware of that.”
Faraday watched her tap a few words into her laptop. “Well, if there’s nothing else, I’d like to call it a day,” he said, standing up.
“Actually, I really would like to know more about Jakes’ death. Can you at least tell me if you feel it was preventable? Given what you know now, what would you have done differently?”
“I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Just take what you’ve got and write your story.”
She didn’t budge. “The people have a right to know.”
“Do they?” Faraday said quickly, his voice rising. “Why? For the same reason they like to slow down and stare at traffic accidents?”
“I’ll ask again - was it preventable? What would you have done differently?”
“Of course it was preventable! What would I have done differently? I’d have had better software.”
Faraday pushed himself up from the bench with his good arm and walked away without looking back.
As he walked briskly toward the rising sun between trees that were starting to lose their leaves, his mind revisited the part of the story he could not – would not - reveal to the reporter . . .
#
Suddenly, Jakes erupted in anguish.
“Scott, something’s happening – I – I – my hand, it’s – arrrrrrrggghhhhhhh!”
At the blood-curdling scream, Faraday spun around in his chair and watched as his partner of two years stood up at his desk then fell to his knees beside his own office chair, his right hand held in front of his shocked face like a monstrous, bubbling boiling claw dripping blood from the pores.
Everyone in the office jumped into action and swarmed around the floundering Jakes as he collapsed onto his back and started to go into convulsions. Two men tried to hold him down as a man and two women gripped his arm to hold his shaking hand still and try to figure out what was happening to the veteran agent.
Moments later, Jakes’ quivering body ceased its tormented throes, and he lay stiffly on the floor, his eyes wide open, staring the cold gaze of the dead, a trickle of bile oozing from the corner of his slightly open mouth.
It had happened that fast.
One moment, his partner and friend Simon was working at his computer, trying to infiltrate a black market website – the ne
xt he was in unspeakable pain as his life was drained out of him like a high speed download.
The scuffle of action and sudden death of Jakes distracted Faraday from the operation at a crucial juncture, and the mission fell apart. The ground location turned out to be a dummy – a shell system run as a decoy to throw off the authorities. It blew up in a fiery blast as the S.W.A.T. team entered, killing half the squad.
Faraday would’ve caught it in time if he’d not been torn away from the computer screens at the last moment.
More blood on his hands.
Now everyone in the room scrambled to try to deal with the new situation at hand as the ground team struggled to regroup and figure out where to go next.
Everyone except Faraday, who just stared at Simon.
As he stood over his dead friend, he was shaken, but determined to get to the bottom of it – to make someone pay.
He was still composed enough to examine the mouse on Jakes’ desk. The black hunk of polymer had mostly melted away, corroding the edge of the keyboard along with it. Faraday scraped a small sample into a clean teaspoon from Jakes’ top drawer, and ran it downstairs to the lab as fast as he could.
An hour later, Jakes was being wheeled out of the building on a gurney, zipped into a dull black bag. Faraday watched bitterly from the front steps as his friend disappeared into an Agency meat wagon.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder, making him jump.
“What?”
“Agent Faraday – I thought you’d want to know right away,” said the lab technician, a bespectacled, thin-haired man in stereotypical white coat who stood about a half a foot shorter than Faraday’s six foot two. “The substance you brought us – it was a toxic morphogenic compound – highly corrosive, deadly poisonous when absorbed through the skin.”
“How did it get inside this building?”
“Uh, that’s the thing. It didn’t, exactly. It came in through the internet.”
“What?”
“Like I said, it’s morphogenic. It was sent in as a data stream – a program with instructions to use nanochem to literally transform the polymers in the mouse into the substance that killed your partner. It was a targeted kill.”