Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Spink signed off without another word. Half a second later, a text message scrolled across my retina. A thousand bucks, down from fifty thousand. More than half that went to my parents for what they called ‘room and board’ but what I called ‘cruel and unusual punishment with added terror’, and I still owed on the shoes. I was going to have to do something about that; my guy in Prague wasn’t bastard enough to call a delivery on me, but he could just go nuts and employ a regular assassin.

  Damn. I was going to have to borrow money from my sister, and she’d probably take issue with her twin brother owning an illegal pair of shoes, what with her being a police officer; she wouldn’t loan me the money without knowing why, and I was never very good at lying to Amily.

  ’I don’t have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I’m totally fine. Leave me alone or I’ll do something embarrassing in your front office. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go practice the back-flippy-onto-your-feet trick for the next six hours.’ James007, in response to his doctor’s findings

  Chapter 2

  “What do we think about Outraged Citizens? Are you really asking me that? They’re sick, is what we think. They need help, medicine, therapy! Being allowed to wander the streets, insane, is just, uh, you know, crazy! They should be safely locked away so they can get better! No, I don’t know the statistics for how many OC’s get better each year, and I don’t need to know! They are crazy and need to be institutionalized!” -an unidentified representative of CoPL

  There are better ways to wake up than being greeted with the news that the deliverance you did the night before is being investigated for delivery malfeasance.

  Personally, I wasn’t worried that much, but I hoped that the issuers of the Writ (Zongo) had ensured that their legal department had done their due diligence. If the hugely dysfunctional family really had been starting up a legitimate smoke shop complete with governmental permission on both sides (from here and the country of origin for the cigarette companies), a lot of trouble would come down from on high. After all the bad press Zongo’d been getting the last few years, it was likely they’d go belly-up.

  Thankfully it isn’t my job to get the information that goes into deciding whether or not a Writ is, er, Written. All that stuff is handled, starting in order of the people who touch the nascent Writ; the people who want someone dead, the Global Oversight Committee branch responsible for the Writ System, the winning paper company and finally the Writman who gets the final product. Between the issuing company and the GOC there is enough intelligence to determine if a Writ is warranted and any charges of malaise or wrong-doing will (should) come to rest at the issuers, and more rarely, at the GOC (who do their jobs very well).

  Still, there was the remote chance that the government had decided Zongo’s stranglehold on tobacco products here in town had gone on for long enough. If that was the case, then someone down in Zongo’s legal department was going to find themselves in a very tricky situation.

  In theory, that should bother me, but it really didn’t. Before I’d become a Writman, I’d played an awful lot of first person shooters. I have a very difficult time separating fact from fiction in the first place, and am heavily inoculated against guilt for those same reasons. A dead guy is a dead guy, and at the time of blowing his head off, I’d been trying to stay alive.

  The fallout from a wrongful Writ wouldn’t be too bad on my end. Spink might catch some undue flak for the whole shotgun thing, which he would dutifully pass on down to me, but again, we were protected by the umbrella of our jobs.

  “You got home late last night.” My mom chirped from her end of the breakfast table. She was cutting her way through some form of ultrahealthy bread with an industrial strength knife. Any more exuberance and the orange juice would go over the side and we’d all suffer the consequences of being conscripted into a matriarchal army hunting for broken glass instead of doing something a great deal more fun, like, well, like anything else.

  I looked at her over the newspaper then looked to my dad for guidance. It’s hard to tell what my mom means when she opens her mouth. By pointing out that I’d gotten home late last night she could, in fact, be telling me that I’d inadvertently rendered all left-handed people invisible to the world or that it was my fault the Mayans had disappeared. My dad, who’s lived with her the longest, occasionally has some insight into her inscrutable double-talk, but he just raised an eyebrow and went back to doing Quantum Sudoku in pen.

  “Uh,” I began around a mouthful of cereal, all in the vain hope that she’d get angry about me talking with my mouth full and forget all about secret codes, “yeah, uhuh, I did. Was I, uh, noisy?” I knew I hadn’t been because I spend most of my time being sneakily quiet. I am only loud when I want or need to be, and coming home after a shotgun occasion calls for sneaky.

  “Nnnoooo.” Mom finished cutting her toast and smiled at me. “Nothing like that…”

  And then she looked at me.

  My stomach clamped tight and I’m pretty sure I was already hyperventilating. I knew why Dad hadn’t proffered any support.

  This was the We Think You Could Do Better speech.

  Oh God, I hate them both so much. For simplicities sake, they think I really am a delivery man. They think I drive pizza and other various foods from some restaurant in town to people who are too lazy to forage for themselves. Whenever they dial work, they get Spink, who pretends to be a guy named Larry Hankenshine, my boss and general prick who spends much of his time complaining about how useless I am and how he’s doing the rest of existence a favor by keeping me employed when I should be on the roadside somewhere in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash and getting whacked by stuff thrown out of luxury SUV’s driven by rich, spoiled teenagers. Then he tells them that personal calls aren’t permitted, and if he finds out that I’ve been using company minutes to waste time talking to mommy and daddy he’s going to set me on fire and spare everyone else the chore.

  The one time they’d ordered pizza, it’d been two hours late because no one in the company I work for had ever once thought to be fully prepared for such a contingency, and they’d all had to scramble together some kind of passable pizza box complete with pizza mascot.

  They did not, and I cannot stress this enough, have any clue that I am a Writman. In the grand scheme, I can’t see my dad being too stressed about it because my sister is a cop. My mother, who I swear has only just realized that I’m not three and a half years old, would literally explode at the news.

  “Honey,” mom started in, looking very misty and concerned and matronly, “it’s just that when you were in school you were so very promising…”

  My dad chimed in with a timely ruffle of the newspaper. He’d moved from Quantum Sudoku to eighteen-letter jumbles. I saw with disgust that he’d finished the number puzzle in exactly one half the time possible as indicated by the guy who’d come up with it.

  “School,” I said, voice wavering and not at all becoming slightly defensive and girly, “is an artificial environment that is not built for independent thinking and individualistic behavior. Classes are taught, not for the person, but for the greatest common denominator.”

  “Not true.” Mom smiled glassily. “Your sister went through school just fine, got the same grades as you and is now doing wonderful things in law enforcement.”

  “My sister was a cheerleader and an evil …”

  “If you call your sister an evil jock concubine, James Mallory Murphy, I will knock you out.” Dad brandished his cereal spoon threateningly.

  I’ve been hit in the head with a spoon. It hurts quite a bit more than you expect, so I backed down and forged off in another direction. “Do you guys want me to move, is that it? This is what this is about. You want me to move?”

  “No dear.” My mom didn’t even bat an eye, which is bad news. The ‘move counter attack’ always gets her panicky and kind of weird, which has the added effect of swinging the discussion away from my perceived shortcomings and into the realm of ‘you
need to do more laundry more often’ which is an arena I am fully versed in. “Nothing of the sort.”

  I am not a Writman without reason. I can think ahead of my opponent. Have to, even if all my opponent is thinking is ‘gotta kill this guy’ because there are all kinds of ways to be killed. Especially in a kitchen. If you ever become a Writman, never ever try to deliver your Writ in a place where food is prepared. Besides amusing repartee and dodging thrown fruit, the sheer volume of stabbing/slicing/poking/shredding/boiling objects per square inch of standard kitchen space is enough to put an end to an invasion.

  “Who did you call?” I demanded, all thoughts of Zongo’s legal problems gone. “Who?”

  My dad snorted laughter at the answer to the eighteen-letter jumble and folded his newspaper. “It’s for your own good, son. We want the very best for you, really.”

  “Oh. My. God.” I was barely coherent. My fingers felt a mile away and I couldn’t even tell you where my toes had gotten to. “You didn’t.”

  “Son,” my dad gave me one of his very best Ward Cleaver smiles, “your younger sister Jane has virtually guaranteed you a position at the newspaper. All you have to do is show up with your shoes on the right feet for the interview.”

  “I am not working for the Unbiased Herald, dad! It is the world’s most depressing newspaper! People who live in Finland, in ice shacks, on frozen lakes, surrounded by blood-thirsty demons, don’t read it! It’s full of death and dismay!”

  “Well, dear,” dear old mom said with a sigh, “it’s not like you can just snap your fingers and be a police officer.”

  I shot daggers at her across the table, but they were neatly deflected by warm, caring love and probably a sneaky shot of bourbon before I’d come up from the basement. “Ouch, mom, really ouch.”

  “Look, James, just go to the interview, would you?” Dad cleared his throat to get my attention. “If you don’t, well, it’s highly likely that we would be forced to, ah, raise your rent.”

  Crap. Legally, I was a tenant of theirs, regardless of my genetic association with the pair of backstabbing lunatics. They had to log my payments every month with some bureau or guild or some such stupid thing, and believe me, if I was late or paid a little bit less, I heard about it. Last year alone I spent fifteen hours in an office building trying to explain why I’d managed to somehow miss paying my parents fifteen dollars for the replacement of a doorknob without mentioning anything about being occupied at the time in a very complex Writ down in Florida (which had gone poorly, as I’m sure you surmised). If they raised my rent, knowing full well that I couldn’t pay it and knowing that they couldn’t legally kick me out before six months of ‘official squatter’ status, they were instead promising endless piles of paperwork. No matter the reason, this is a vile, loathful thing to do to a son.

  Or I could spend an hour pretending that I wanted to work for Unbiased Herald and then, at the very last possible moment, throw up on my shoes or quack like a duck or something equally bizarre and hopefully self-destructive.

  “Well,” I said defensively, crossing my arms and fixing a firm, defiant cast to my face, “I can’t do it today. I have to see Amily down at the station and the way those guys get all excited when I come by, it’s not likely I’ll be out of there before midnight.”

  My mom flushed a smile at me. “Oh, that’s ok, dear; Jane says the man who’s doing interviews right now is the graveyard security manager because the other person doing the job went crazy. Something to do with it being absolutely impossible for a human being to remain completely unbiased for any length of time without losing his mind.”

  “Oh?” Dad asked, eyebrow raised, “did he quit?”

  “No, Jane says he threw himself into one of the printing machines. Apparently he’d left a note behind daring anyone who worked there to be unaffected and unbiased about the destruction of company property.”

  “Did it work?” I asked, well and truly beaten. Legal international assassin though I might be, my folks could, when they wanted to, dance circles around me.

  “I don’t think so. He was on page eighteen, next to a factual account of a cat stuck in a tree.”

  I pushed my cereal away and went back downstairs.

  Only eight in the morning and I was already monumentally depressed. It was a world-record for me, and all I could look forward to was that score being beaten sometime around midnight, when I got interviewed by a guy who was the replacement for another guy who hated his job so much he’d literally thrown himself into his job.

  If my day got any more awesome I’d die.

  You may not have figured it out yet because of my very subtle exposition, but once upon a time, I was a very big deal in the Writperson industry. I was recruited right out of high school, and while you might think my being headhunted so early has something to do with excellent grades (they were) or my physical prowess (second best in Track and Field and Kung Fu Wrestling), you’d most definitely be dead wrong. I was approached by Writ Off in the summer of ’85, and it was because of all the time I was spending in a Hinky Jinks arcade playing Face Blaster 2000.

  For its time, FB2k was one hell of a game, and is still listed in gamer magazines (both online and in print) as one of the all-time first person shooters known to mankind.

  Whether it’s because of the unbelievably realistic and graphic graphics or the endless array of weapons you could use in-game, for that entire summer, all I did when I wasn’t trying to hump my way insensible was to beat the game. At the time, I couldn’t have known that FB2k got through the rampant rating system because it was an employment center for Writ Off and thus sponsored by the government. All I knew was that it was the most awesomest game of all time and had to be beaten at all costs.

  I know, I know, it sounds very Last Starfighter with a little of Tron thrown in for good measure, but I assure you, it happened exactly that way; one thing they teach right off the bat in Writ Off is not to color the truth or to get carried away with fanciful story telling. It doesn’t do anyone any good. Come to think of it this is probably why my folks are trying to get me a job at Unbiased Herald; I’m not very good at lying at the best of times, and my lies almost invariably include aliens, robots, talking animals, or, at the very least, an improbable amount of coincidences all happening at the same time to make me late for dinner.

  That’s the truth of it, and I remember quite fondly beating the game amidst a roomful of anxious teenagers confused by the desire to see girls naked, blow something up and school the boss in Joust so thoroughly that even the flying ostrich is killed. I barely recall the actual steps getting to the final stage, and this I blame on falling into some sort of hypnotic trance like the Hopi Indians or even a Dennis Hopper-like state of drugged out clarity.

  The last stage is basically an onslaught of all the previous bosses of all nineteen levels, resurrected from the grave through a combination of voodoo, evil genetic science and a big green rock from outer space. The easiest boss, the one you kick down a flight of stairs at level one, goes from being a toothless granny wigged out on Ben Gay into a slavering maniac with laser rifles grafted onto his head, so I’m sure I don’t need to tell you what the final boss is like.

  I’m still not sure how I beat Megaloricon, He Whose Face You Cannot Blast. I sure didn’t blast his face off, because that was the whole premise behind the game; he wears an iron mask not at all similar to Dr. Doom’s, and trying to shoot it off results in your barrages coming back and wounding you for triple damage and a decline in stamina.

  But kill him I did, and the next day I was working for Writ Off as Junior Writman 10012, going around town showing people the error of their ways. JWs don’t aren’t licensed for full deliveries; their job is to exact specific forms of physical punishment on people who made some sort of commitment to someone and broke it. Their various extremities are broken in direct correlation to the gravity of their promise.

  I still keep in touch with a few of my first deliveries, and of those, a few have forgiven
me for being a hardnosed bastard (this was probably due to unreasonable fear that I might come back … my drive to get out of JW had been quite forceful).

  I moved rapidly from General Beatings to Grievous Bodily Harm (which sends people to hospitals requiring various levels of long-term physical care) to Assisted Euthanasia (it’s not like old people don’t piss off the powers-that-be, you know) and finally, after a long year and a half, Full Deliverance. I didn’t like killing old people all that much, which is why I’m on the record as being the fastest transfer from AE to FD; in order to stop taking care of grams and gramps for the rest of my life I engineered several highly successful very media-coverage-intensive deliverances that catapulted me into the very limited limelight of professional assassins.

  From there, what can I say? The Golden Boy of Writ Off for four (I say five because my awesomeness had, at least to me, always been a foregone conclusion) long years, delivering Writs all over the world, getting big fat bounty checks and the sort of job satisfaction you can’t buy or improve with drugs or alcohol. I was very, very good at delivering Writs and there hadn’t been a moment’s doubt about becoming Writmaster by the end of my fifth year until … The Sneeze.

  There are a lot of moments that people will remember, no matter how old or how young they were when they happened; Mother Teresa dying, the alleged moon landings (numbers four and five categorically did happen, but odds are the first three didn’t) Morty Ziegler cracking the time/space barrier in his bedroom above the garage, the appearance of Spartan, the world’s only alien (as far as we know).

  Those are global, far reaching events that literally changed millions of lives. Some people found hope, others lost it, but they all share one thing in common; they can, with shocking clarity, tell you exactly what they were doing, right down to the smallest minutiae, when they heard the news.