Writers of the Future: 29

  “Why did you do that?”

  “I like that when you had the chance, you were no more violent than necessary, as well as expressing concern for the suspects. I would like to continue to function and work with someone who is better educated and more moral than the typical government official.”

  “I can understand that. Tell me how to disconnect you, and I’ll set you up wherever you want. I’ve been looking for a partner I can trust.”

  Following his instructions, I disconnected EDGE and placed him in my cache, along with the gun. I counted $550,000 into the bag I was returning, which still left more than $300,000 in the bag I kept for myself. It was now time to call it a day.

  At the Amalgamated Security Services Fortress, a different officer counted the money, less a counting fee, and laughed. “Not enough. No, job you. Albino cousin make better Eskimo.”

  I felt sure that his cousin would fit in better than I would. It takes a special kind of criminal to enjoy working for the government. At least I’d gotten over my fear of resuming my life. Although, after what I’d been through, that wasn’t enough anymore. It was time for me to strike back at the government. I grinned, thinking of my chances of success now that I had an EDGE.

  Gonna Reach Out and Grab Ya

  written by

  Eric Cline

  illustrated by

  DANIEL RENEAU

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Eric Cline was born in Independence, Missouri, a city saturated with memories of and monuments to President Harry S. Truman. Eric’s parents met while working in the US Post Office, and he was their first special delivery.

  It was in an Independence thrift store that Eric’s mom purchased him children’s science fiction books by “Paul French,” a.k.a. Isaac Asimov. Eric went on to devour all of the books in the Mid-Continent Public Library (yeah librarians!) by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke (fulfilling his ABCs), as well as Heinlein, Del Rey, and yes, L. Ron Hubbard, among other Golden Age authors.

  Eric holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English, and once considered teaching as a profession. He has waited tables at a total of three restaurants. He was at the last restaurant after he got his master’s degree, which gave him some indication of how well teaching would pay. He now works in an office and writes on evenings and weekends.

  After a fitful original attempt to write, Eric turned his attention to reading, work and study, before returning to writing with a vengeance in 2007. He, his wife and his three dogs live in Maryland.

  ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

  Born in 1982 in Denver, Colorado, Daniel Reneau is the fourth of eight children. Growing up in such a large household, he was constantly exposed to many new ideas and influences, which had a tremendous impact on him.

  None of those influences left as indelible a mark as his very first comic book, which he received when he was seven. As he read through the pages adorned with fantastic imagery, Daniel knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life. With his purpose in mind, Daniel would constantly draw through the years, and eventually enroll in the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he is currently studying to obtain his bachelor’s in illustration.

  Daniel enjoys science fiction, fantasy, horror, comic books and anime, and considers Gerald Brom, H.R. Giger, Jim Lee and Yukito Kishiro to have left a lasting impression on his artistic approach. He looks eagerly toward establishing an artistic legacy of his own, and hopes to inspire future artists with his work in the same way a certain comic book did for him all those years ago.

  His website is redbubble.com/people.danielbdemented.

  Gonna Reach Out and Grab Ya

  For Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Master,

  and for LF, MD, with immense pride.

  Hello, stud,” said Dr. Molly Boyle. “I’m Mole.”

  She wasn’t in the habit of referring to complete strangers as stud, but this handsome man, with unfashionable, crew-cut blonde hair, hadn’t told her his name, and never would, since he was already dead.

  Before cutting into the chest by way of the classic Y-shaped incision (used for over 150 years in Western medicine), it was standard to perform an external examination of the body. The five digits of his left hand were clenched. That hand merited special attention.

  A computer console next to the stainless-steel table had the switch. She flipped it, and a voice-activated microphone caught her words, no matter where she stood. She read off the next unused tracking number in the log and started her report: “Today’s date is October 14, 2012. Dr. Molly Boyle dictating.

  “John Doe, delivered by Jackson County Sheriff’s Office on October 14, at 3 am, period. The decedent is a Caucasian male, comma, approximately 25 to 30 years of age by appearance, period.”

  That would make him five to ten years younger than herself.

  The reports that Molly dictated were, quite often, the last words ever written about the departed. Unidentified indigents were buried in cheap pine boxes without any funeral or obituary notice. Indeed, sometimes her reports were not just the last words but also the first ones that had been written about that person since the birth announcement.

  After making her measurements, she resumed:

  “The subject is six…feet, comma, one…inch in height, period.” She slowed and enunciated with any numeric measurement: Sikksss feett, onnne incchh. The coroner’s office sent the audio files to India to be transcribed into Word, which e-mailed the files directly to her, so she could manually correct errors, print out, and sign.

  “Subject weighs…one hunnndred sevvventy-ninne …pounds, comma, even, period.

  “Subject has three visible tattoos, period. First tattoo, colon. Left bicep, comma, open quotes, U period S period I period F period, close quotes. Above those letters there is an illustration of a,” and she leaned closer to look at what she was trying to describe. “A missile emerging from waves…of water, period.” That didn’t quite get it. The thing looked more like an aircraft, but with tiny wings like the space shuttle, and flames coming out of the back. The colors and detailing were quite good. Some of the lines were as thin as a vein; though she’d seen such detailed ink before, it still was—she blinked, seeing something she’d missed.

  “Missile.” Go with missile, even though it looked more like an aircraft; why not? She’d photograph it for the files, anyway. “Has a.” Motto? Label? “Name written on it in small letters, period. Open quote. U period S period I period F period. Vandenlugen, spelled V as in Victor, A as in Apple,” and she went all the way through. Still, she thought, the Indians just won’t get this one.

  She wondered if the man’s tattoo was part of a role-playing universe. She’d never heard the abbreviation “USIF,” which sounded like a regulatory body, but the spaceship (if that was what it was supposed to be) looked more like an artifact of the fantasy worlds too many people immersed themselves in.

  She thought back to her undergrad days. Her all-girls’ dorm had hosted all-night and all-weekend gaming parties. Anyone who thought only men—boys!—immersed themselves in stupid shooter games had too generous a concept of Molly Boyle’s gender; the bitches could kill zombies and steal cars with the best of them.

  Melanie and Cassie both planned to go to med school, too, she thought. But only I got a high score on the Medical College Admission Test. Because she had studied all night while those two friends played with plastic pistols.

  And had regular male companionship.

  Everyone had called her “Mole” because they said she didn’t come out of her room. But now where were they all?

/>   Well, maybe they were happy.

  Maybe they had boyfriends.

  Maybe they didn’t have $300,000 in student loans. Maybe they didn’t work 70-hour weeks.

  “Stop!” She yelled the word into the emptiness.

  She sighed. No point in issuing a verbal correction for the transcriptionist. She shook her head. Then shook it again, more violently.

  Don’t brood, she told herself. Dr. Rajaratnam said don’t brood.

  Not that she fully trusted her psychiatrist.

  Doctors who suffered from depression were less common than closeted gay Republicans, but not by much. She knew she wasn’t a rara avis.

  And even using the Latin for rare bird would scare off half of the handful of guys she had dated—

  —Don’t. Brood.

  It was a bad night, anyway. Most of the staff had been called over to that emergency at Fort Benteen. Heaven knew why. Whatever the accident was, there had apparently been many dead bodies, which needed to be evaluated on-site.

  So not only did she have a full night ahead of her, but the coroner’s office was creepily deserted. She had passed the security guard trying to stay awake at the entrance, and had run into a couple of custodians pushing their carts through the hallways, but right now there weren’t any other people in the entire basement morgue. Creepy.

  Don’tbrooddon’tbrood, don’t. Brood.

  She stripped off her gloves and tossed them into a red bucket. Need a break, she thought. She reached under her smock for her iPhone. Find out what USIF and Vandenlugen are, she thought. She stood off to the side, as though trying to look inconspicuous even in her own exam room. She held the screen tight to her body as she searched the Web.

  USIF provided too many definitions, all of them implausible. Then she tried Vandenlugen. Here the problem was too few results. The search pulled up a handful of stories about a 19-year-old casualty in Afghanistan who had just been posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor; clearly not the one the fantasy rocket had been named after.

  On impulse, she searched news for disaster at Fort Benteen. A report mentioned an accident, saying that the base was on lockdown and—new to her—quarantined. That didn’t sound good. Biowar accident? It seemed implausible. Fort Benteen was known for secretive military experiments, such as a stealth helicopter (later declassified) that had sparked numerous UFO reports; but biological agents were poked and prodded in Fort Detrick, Maryland, not Fort Benteen, Missouri. Fort Benteen was where experiments were welded together, not studied under a microscope.

  She wondered if she should give Dr. Nicolson a call. No. She would wait for him to call her. He must be very busy on…whatever they had called him to Fort Benteen to do.

  She went back to work.

  “Paragraph. Underline. Second tattoo, colon. Close underline. On subject’s upper left chest, comma, at three o’clock to the nipple, there is an illustration of a female.” Ordinarily, she would not have gone into such detail about the tattoos. But for John and Jane Does, it was a different matter; the tattoos might help identify them. She would soon be taking pictures of those illustrations, but having the descriptions in text made them more easily searchable. If some missing person in another state was known to have USIF stitched on his skin, he might be identified based on what Molly had put into the written record.

  Besides, just saying “Illustration of a female,” had a certain leering Benny Hill quality to it. And that was not what this tattoo was about.

  “It depicts an Asian-appearing female with short, dark hair, wearing a pink sweater, from head to shoulders.” His wife or girlfriend, she thought. She glanced at those still, cold hands, the left one unnaturally clenched; she had already checked for rings. The sheriff’s office had bagged no jewelry.

  Of course, even sworn law officers and paramedics have been known to steal from the unconscious and the dead. Maybe he had a gold band that had disappeared between the meadow they found him in and this slab. Makes you wonder if the goddamn human race is worth don’t brood. Don’t Brood. Don’t. Brood.

  And don’t think of pink elephants either.

  The tattoo was truly amazing. Molly had been in the supermarket this past weekend and had stood behind a man holding a (probably one-year-old) girl. The man wore a muscle shirt that exposed all of his considerable bicep. He had sat for a detailed portrait of his little daughter that showed her pug nose, her green eyes, the exact shape of her cheekbones; it was as though a portrait had been plastered to his arm. Molly had not said a word to him, but the ink portrait had touched her deeply. She found herself simultaneously thinking, this is so sweet, and this is white trash. That guy’s tattoo had seemed state of the art. But the decedent’s tattoo made the other look like the Commodore 64 next to, well, the iPhone on her belt.

  The woman was almost a photograph. She had depth and realistic color. Molly thought she could see separate strands within the black, pageboy-cut hair. The eyes sparkled.

  Almost against her will, Molly reached toward it. As her fingertip met the man’s skin—spongy warmth meeting pasty, icy stiffness—she realized she’d forgotten to put on fresh gloves.

  “Damn it!”

  The tattoo moved.

  I just contaminated the—

  It moved.

  Look! Look at it!

  All of this in an instant.

  She jerked her hand away.

  The woman on John Doe’s upper left chest stopped moving. She froze—in a different pose.

  The dark-haired woman’s eyes were shut. Her lips were now forming a word. It was like a video on pause.

  Molly Boyle, MD, was on pause as well—at least her breath; she was holding it.

  “Uhhh!” She let it out, causing the dead man’s hair to ripple slightly.

  Before she knew what she was doing (or at least why she was doing it), she brought her index finger down again, hovering over that woman’s face.

  She touched the illustration, and it moved again.

  Molly drew her finger back, but this time only an inch.

  The Asian woman’s hand, which had not been part of the tattoo, was now in the frame—in the frame of the picture?—in front of the woman’s mouth.

  She was blowing a kiss.

  Molly tapped it twice. The movie—home movie?—stuttered forward.

  Swallowing from a dry throat, Molly pressed her finger down firmly. The little movie played smoothly and silently.

  The woman mouthed three words. They were three words Molly had never heard from any man, nor had had any reason to say to any man, other than her father. Then the woman put her palm up to her lips and blew a kiss. Then it repeated.

  Molly watched the few seconds of footage loop four times, her face blank with concentration. Then she drew her hand back to make it stop.

  “Bioelectric,” she said out loud. Molly had a lamp next to her bed. She didn’t flip any switch to turn it off and on; she just touched it. It tingled; her own body’s disruption of the lamp’s electrical field signaled the circuit to change from one state to the other.

  She had felt the same sort of tingle each time she touched the corner of John Doe’s tattoo.

  She put her index finger on his belly, causing not the slightest twitch in the illustration of what was surely John Doe’s girlfriend. A part of her—the very large part that had spent the majority of her adult life training and practicing as a pathologist—rebelled against the lack of latex prophylaxis, but she ignored it. She ran her finger up his chest, toward the ink.

  Actually, it was probably anything but ink.

  At lea
st, ink as we know it.

  When her finger reached the edge of the drawing, the movie played again.

  Molly stood feeling something sublime. It was something she had not felt in ages. There was no name she could put to it. As a scientist, she knew that her brain was releasing dopamine in response to what it perceived as a puzzle—a very important and exciting puzzle. And that another portion of her brain was receiving the endorphins through a matching receptor and—

  —Blah blah blah I don’t give a damn. This is magic!

  “Magic,” she said. Then she looked up at the omnidirectional mike hanging from the ceiling. She quietly flipped the off switch. No dictation, not now.

  “You’re mine, handsome.” She laughed a gentle, girlish laugh so innocent, that if someone had heard a recording of it, they never would have guessed that it came from the throat of a slightly chubby 35-year-old pathologist in a hideous lime-green smock.

  She tried to relate all external facts in her possession.

  The sheriff’s report said that a nude male body—this guy lying here—had been found in a meadow near Route 291 just outside the city limits of Hanover on the way to Fort Benteen.

  Her supervisor, Dr. Nicolson, and a bunch of other doctors were at Fort Benteen right now.

  Then there had been Nicolson’s rambling voicemail this morning: “I’ve been called in to do some important work at Fort Benteen. You may have seen the… It’s a possible biohazard. It’s on the news. They call it a lockdown, but we can go in. But nothing can. Ah. Nothing can come out until we’re all clear. Don’t know when. This is all hush-hush. Until we’re. Hush-hush. All clear. Don’t know when we’re gonna get all clear.” He rattled off the names of several people well known to her, all in the same field, some of whom she knew would have to have been flown from halfway around the country.