dark short story

Radio chatter

March 27, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

You’re not going to believe me, and that’s OK. I really don’t believe it myself. I’m writing it down because I have to. I don’t know how much time I have. There isn’t anywhere to run.

I listen to those app scanners on my phone. Used to listen. The police scanners. You can choose from all over the place. All the big cities and some of the medium ones. I used to like listening to Chicago PD. It’s amazing how calm all of them stay. The professionals who keep society from fraying. I wouldn’t want to face the kind of grind they do. Constantly dealing with people who are on the edge of disaster, or have gone over the waterfall completely.

The situations play out in ways more macabre than any reality show writer could come up with. The questions and conversations baffled and fascinated me all at once.

“Seven children being taken into protective custody. Parents argumentative. Need assistance at 1024 Roberts. 10-4.”

“I have a recovered box of stolen items. Do I need to hold it for fingerprinting?”

“What’s in the box?”

“Clothing.”

“They can’t print clothing.”

“Short hair, hoodie, dark jeans, white shoes.”

“Time for a shift change. Good night everyone, and get home safe.”

Male voices. Female voices. Impassively discussing the fragility of civilization and the bad behavior of the days and nights in the cities where they act as counterweights to every type of bad behavior imaginable. It’s a show, and I’m in the audience nearly every night.

Or was. Until I tuned in last week. I dialed up Chicago PD, except that’s not what I got. Something got snarled up.

“What’s the status of the shipment?” I couldn’t place the accent on the male voice. Perfect English. Like too perfect. Everything enunciated crisply. Like someone who isn’t from anywhere at all. Maybe someone who has lived everywhere and been to some kind of school that teaches you to talk perfectly.

“Shipment due at 2300. Agent is in place to receive.”

“What about the entry team?”

“We’re go. Team is assembled three clicks from insertion. Status yellow. Will go green when shipment has been delivered and QAed. Primary and secondary extraction plans look good. Six approved.”

The feed squelched. Then I heard, “Passing 5100 block of Walcott. Wearing green shirt and blue jeans. Wanted for eluding police. One Amelia Anderson. She is a 27-year-old female, short blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“Two male blacks aggressively panhandling and grabbing people walking by. They have a bottle of whiskey.”

“Rolling northbound.”

“Thank you units.”

“The kill order is confirmed. We are Romeo, Echo, Alpha, Delta, Yankee. Will update when the package is in place.”

“Two black males, shoplifting.”

“He’s in the alley going through garbage.”

“This is the leader of the free world we are talking about. This is the highest profile target in the United States. There will be fallout.”

“Three male Hispanics having a loud argument, West Plains and 30th. Six one eddy. Headed to complainant.”

“Stand by a second. Twenty is going east. How is the victim?”

“She’s fine. We’re rolling to the hospital.”

I hear the static of an open mic and then, “Watch your keys, watch your keys. We’ve got an open key.”

I shake my head, trying to make sense of the secondary conversation. Someone must be playing a practical joke. I wonder who will be getting a visit from the Secret Service in a few hours or maybe days. I wonder how they track down trolls making jokes about stuff like this.

“We’re cleared.”

“Two one Robert we need a welfare check. Four two three Robert, who has the plate reader?”

“Thirty-three is coming in with it.”

“Confirmed with the client that there is an individual bonus. Double the standard rate. Whoever gets the best body cam footage of the terminal moments earns triple. Verification that team will be extracted to non-extradition territory per original discussion.”

I shut it off then. I was scared I could get in trouble just for listening. I’m not dumb enough to shout “bomb” in a crowded airport, and I don’t want to be party to people playing jokes that are also felonies. Christ they sounded serious. People. Never cease to amaze me with their stupidity.

I took some NyQuil and lay down in bed. Next day, I checked Google News. Nothing. Trolls. Just trolls.

Except two weeks ago, the President was assassinated. That was less than 72 hours after the weird radio chatter I heard.

I deleted all those scanner apps. Too late.

There are people following me. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know who to tell. No one is going to believe me.

I didn’t do anything wrong. You need to know that about me. I was just listening.

The TV news people are saying it was probably the Russians, but I know what Russians sound like. They weren’t Russians. They sounded like broadcast news anchors to me. Broadcast news anchors who kill important people for a living.

Shit. I’m fucked. Maybe all of us are.

Home

September 27, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

She did her shopping alone today. Casually browsing the aisles looking for nothing in particular. It was strange. They were all grown. Finally. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Birds flown from the nest. Her husband was on the golf course. Enjoying stories and lies with his friends. She thought about what a good man he was. Then she thought about how content she was. It made her uneasy. And she liked it. She had always liked the sharp edges of things.

He’ll do well in college, she thought. Her youngest son had always been her favorite because of how different he was. Like her but unlike her. She sighed and placed an avocado in the plastic bag which crinkled with a noise she loved. She loved many strange little details of her white picket fence life.

Moving down the aisles aimlessly she continued to think about her children. It was hard to believe they had grown into adults. It was hard to believe that she was so old. She’d never expected to be old. She wondered what she would watch on television. She wondered if he would come home drunk again and fuck her. He seemed restless. Retirement didn’t suit a company man like him. He was driving her crazy. Maybe they would take a trip somewhere exotic. They needed something different.

He built his power base carefully. A marijuana business had never been something that interested him. It was lucrative though. When more than half of the states in the union found their sanity and legalized recreational use he invested in cultivation. Then he expanded to retail. He was a criminal but he was also a gentleman. He broke the rules but never for the sake of breaking them. He was cautiously reckless. By skirting the lines and applying grease where it was needed his business outgrew that of his competitors.

He had to kill one of them. She was a cutthroat. She was unhinged. When his competitor had one of his fields burned her people killed one of his employees. That was unacceptable. He went to his locker, took out one of the rifles and practiced for several days. Then he shot his competitor through the head from a hilltop a mile away while she was sipping white wine from a crystal glass. The glass didn’t break when it hit the deck of her home with expensive mountain views. Her head exploded and he had the rifle smelted down into its base elements. The deck was demolished and rebuilt so the realtor wouldn’t have to disclose that someone had been murdered in the home. His business continued to grow. His remaining competitors became more cautious.

When she arrived at home she thought about how empty the house felt. Then she got high and fisted herself. Got lost in a memory and talked to a man who only lived in her head. He didn’t come home until well after midnight. He didn’t fuck her. She wondered if he had someone else and realized it didn’t matter if he did. She dreamed about a demon who shape shifted into an angel. At times she forgot if the being had appeared as the angel or the demon initially. She realized it didn’t matter. In the morning he went into the garage and lost himself in a project. She got high on the porch. That night they began planning their exotic trip.

He took a small portion of his profits from the marijuana business and built a special place. In his travels all over the world to meet growers and convince politicians it was in their best interest to vote his way on legalization he’d come across a few very special parcels of real estate. Through a shell company he made a land purchase. Then he drew up a blueprint and hired an old friend who had gone into contracting after they left the military and the wars. The contractor was reliable and knew how to keep his mouth shut. The place took a year to build. It cost him millions. Mostly because everything had to be flown in from a great distance by seaplane. The house at the end of the world took shape. The special room inside was constructed exactly to his specifications.

When they did the final walkthrough his friend knew better than to ask any questions about that room. They were like that. There was no need to discuss what the room would be used for. They had been through so much together. There was no need to talk about what or why anymore. Some people just get things done.

The trip was going wonderfully. She was falling in love. She did that a lot. The girl was younger than her. Beautiful. Her husband was too busy drinking and playing golf on the savanna to notice that she was sneaking off to play with her new friend. The two of them were comfortable being apart together. When she and the girl finally decided to explore each others’ bodies fully it was magical. They got high and tasted everything including each other in the tent while giraffes grazed outside in the acacias. She drifted off to sleep and dreamed that she was being kidnapped.

Everything was ready. It had been for some time. The plane arrived on time. He had interviewed and hired everyone for this job personally. It went like clockwork. The girl arrived with the package on time. Everything had been planned meticulously. She woke up a little groggy. It took a few minutes to realize that she was in chains.

“Hello girl,” he said. “It’s been long enough.”

She fainted.

When she came back he was doing something noisy. She heard scraping and a crackling noise.

“Hello again girl.”

She struggled to see but her head was clamped into something. Something made of metal. She realized that her head was trapped inside a cage made of metal mesh.

“I’m going to brand you now,” he said quietly. The words sounded so loud inside her head. “It’s well past time.”

She thought about the history the two of them shared. About the decades in between the beginning and the now.

The smell of her own flesh burning made her feel more loved than she ever had before. She cried as she realized she would never leave this place. The wandering and wondering were over. She was home. She was his.

Stem

October 31, 2013 by Pen Leave a Comment

The little girl walked down the dirt road slowly, holding the last thing her protector had given her. Her jet black hair hung limply, despite the strong wind gusts that stirred leaves and raised little dervishes made of dust. She did not seem to see the bleak landscape around her. Her brown eyes stayed always focused on the thing in her hand. She clutched it tightly to remember him by.

A storm brewed nearby, malevolently. Cracks of thunder broke the silence from time to time. Each thunderclap engendered the same reaction in the solitary little girl. She clutched at her dress with her free hand. Her lips pursed and she squeezed her eyes shut momentarily. Then her lips moved.

“Master, protect me. Keep me safe. Show me the way. Give me strength.”

Off to the sides of the dusty road on which the girl walked, bodies littered the landscape. They lay in the creek. They hung across the fences on either side of her. They were scattered like flotsam and jetsam across the fields surrounding the road. Some, not yet surrendered to the inevitability of their own impending deaths, struggled and moaned. A few cried for their mothers, lovers or friends. The little girl heard one man crying for water.

“A mercy,” he begged. “Water for my lips before I go to the next life.” His voice was strong until the last two words, when it faded to a croak. He grimaced and closed his eyes.

The girl shivered, for she knew the power that came from words on the lips of the dying. She clutched the thing in her hand more tightly and averted her eyes from the destruction all around her. Then, despite herself, the girl looked at the man who had begged for water. Three arrows protruded from his stomach and another from his groin. He looked back at her for a moment and his hand reached out. Then his eyes closed. The hand fell. He spoke no more.

The girl’s lips moved again. “Give him peace.” Her hands rolled the stem. It had perhaps been some flowering thing at one time, but now it was only a ghost of what it had been. It had a stalk. A single damaged flower petal clung stubbornly to the top of the stem. The petal was half pink and half black. Like the litter of human beings scattered around the walking girl, the stem was a dying thing.

She closed her eyes and continued walking, trusting her feet to keep her on the road.

The wind gusted, roaring in from the north. The air around her grew cold. She shivered and made a sign of some sort against her chest. Her white dress swirled around her ankles as dirty dust rose in spirals around her. The pillars of dust rose high into the air, dwarfing the girl.

Fat, gray rain clouds scudded in the sky, moving rapidly over her head. At the edges of the fields around her, trees began to bend and groan as a merciless wind pulled at them, swaying even the strongest and oldest of them from top to bottom. The forest came alive with loud shivers of protest, joining in the cacophony of those whose lives leaked out into the soil around them. The dance of the wind and the forest trees grew frenetic.

She continued walking, trying to ignore the increasing sense of foreboding. As the air grew colder and the noises of the storm grew louder the voices of the dying were eaten by the wind. The sky turned from grey to black and rain began to fall. At first only a few fat drops came down, but those were soon joined by an endless multitude of brothers and sisters from the heavens. An army of battering drops grew larger and colder until they changed from water to ice.

Liquid began to pool in the ditches on both sides of the girl. In minutes, the channels became rushing streams. Soon, almost mercifully, the dying men in the fields began to drown in the deluge. In the falling hail, few of them had enough energy or fight left to do anything but let go of the world.

Her white dress clinging to her body now, the little girl tried not to watch the injured men as they succumbed. She tried not to think about how many souls were being claimed but failed. She saw the man who had been begging for water pull himself upright against a fence for a few seconds. Then his eyes rolled back in his head. He fell into the thing he had been begging for and it drowned him. The girl wondered if he managed to swallow any water to assuage his thirst before he died.

The rain continued falling. The ditches began to overflow. Soon the road was no longer a road. The two streams on either side of her joined forces and rose until the water was pulling on the bottom of the her dress. It threatened to pull her feet out from under her each time she took a step.

Soon, bodies were floating by, brushing against her feet. The hail stung her skin. As it grew in size it began to more than sting. Her pale skin soon became mottled with red splotches. All the world turned to water. Stumbling now in the wind and the current, the girl began to despair. Unbalanced, she fell with a splash that went unheard by any ears but her own.

As she fell a corpse brushed against her. She flailed, in a panic and rose quickly, but only by the greatest effort. The girl found herself barely able to stand against the fury of the storm. Mud stained her dress now, and her black hair was disheveled. She coughed dirty water from her mouth and trembled. The water pulled at her yet again. Angrily, like a hungry beggar.

The hail grew even larger, and it began to rip her skin. It battered her and when it hit her in the head, the pain made her dizzy. She began to panic.

“Save me,” she begged, and looked up into the sky.

Lightning flashed. It blinded her. The thunder clap came almost immediately. She felt it resonate powerfully in her chest. Then something unexpected happened. The stem in her hand quivered. She felt the movement and flinched. Her hand went numb and opened of its own accord.

With the single half-dead petal still clinging to it, the stem fell through the rain towards the water flowing past and around her feet. She grabbed desperately and failed to snatch it. Her mouth fell open in a silent scream of despair as she thought of the dead man who had given it to her, promising her that he would always protect her from harm.

“I will bring you another flower when I return,” he’d said. Only he hadn’t returned. She had waited until the food ran out. Then she went looking. She had found him dead in the forest, a large wound in his back. He’d caught a rabbit, which she’d eaten through her sobs. Her master was also holding another stem in his dead hand. The petals of its flower were crushed. She’d left it with him.

After a time with his body, she had started walking.

The only people she’d seen since finding her dead master had also been dead or dying. In a daze, she had looted the bodies, walked and prayed. She was not sure how many days and nights had passed.

The stem disappeared into the water and she thrust her hand downward again, plunging it into the frothy, muddy maelstrom. Her hand made contact with something hard. It felt like a large piece of wood. She realized that something was happening under the water. Something was growing down there.

The ground beneath her trembled. She felt her body rising and her mouth opened. The water receded and she realized that the ground was pushing itself higher. In the center of the rapidly growing hill, the stem had anchored itself the to the ground. As she watched it grew thicker and thicker. The single pink and black petal grew as well. Its color changed and become more radiant as the black faded away and the pink grew vibrant. New pink petals began to sprout from the top.

In moments the plant had grown to twice the height of the girl. Soon it towered over her and the petals formed a protective pink umbrella that the now massive hail simply bounced off and fell to the ground in a circle around the canopy. The girl entered the safety of the shelter. She clung to the stem of the now massive plant and watched the storm wash the wicked world away.

Time passed, and the sun returned. The girl stood. Tears fell from her eyes as she thought of her dead master and his promise to keep her safe. She kissed the stem, and prayed a prayer of thanks for her safety, then continued on her journey.