Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  It’s the same for me, but thankfully I’m protected by Anonymity Inc, so no one else knows anything about the Sneeze, so no one else was really affected by the cock-up. Yes, yes, the relatives of the person who did get shot were quite upset, but since they got themselves a massive apology check that came, eventually, out of my pocket, I figure their new house in the Cayman Islands has kind of softened the blow.

  The gig I had opted in on was a major one, full live coverage; Johnny Shorts was a very bad man who’d upset a lot of different people, all of them powerful, and some of them in ridiculously influential positions of authority. Guilty of everything from unsanctioned industrial espionage to False Writs, good old Johnny Shorts had won himself one of the rarest Writs known to man.

  Open Ended.

  OEWs are legal permission for anyone working for the company owning said Writ to open up wherever they could, using whatever means were at their disposal to get things over with as quickly as possible; happily, Writ Off had bid for and won the right to deliver this particular piece of idiot should he show up in our fair city. Everyone from the President of the United States to Nelson Mandela wanted Johnny Shorts dead. Trick was, Johnny was a quick thinker, and spent a lot of time hanging around preposterously crowded areas, believing quite rightly that there wasn’t a Writperson alive who’d really take the full road to delivering an Open Ended Writ in a public place; collateral damage aside, there was just no way to handle all those people witnessing something as massive as that. Anonymity companies could deal with your digital evidence with no problems, but a single eyewitness posed major problems. A horde of crazed spectators could make Hercules’ job look like a breeze.

  Now, this isn’t to say that it couldn’t be done, and on the day of The Sneeze, Johnny Shorts had gotten himself into some pretty hot water; he’d been caught red-handed and flat-footed by Eirich Dormander (who must have forced his employers to buy a chance at the delivery from Writ Off for a pretty penny), a traveling Writman in town for another job, and unlike North American Writmen, Dormander was a fairly well-known figure. So Dormander opened up with his nines, killed three or four innocent bystanders and attracted the attention of nearly all of the city’s police force. Shorts, as I said, wasn’t stupid. He quickly turned the tables on Dormander by throwing his sudden and unwanted popularity firmly into Federal hands by taking a cop hostage. That kind of tactic normally wouldn’t dissuade a major killer like Dormander from opening up and killing them both just to claim coup on an Open Ended Writ, but his employers had gotten kind of upset at the deaths of innocents and wanted him back in Salzburg ASAP.

  Eirich’s on-screen flounce from the scene is one of the funniest damned things I’ve ever seen. I don’t have much patience for traveling Writpeople; when I go to another country to hand the paper off, I’m very polite, very low key, and I tip well. I don’t shoot the wrong person in the head and then get all pissy about getting yanked.

  As luck would have it, I’d been in the general vicinity. With Dormander out of the picture I was guaranteed a clean shot at Shorts. A quick call to Writ Off sealed the deal and I headed to the nearest rooftop to make myself Writmaster.

  As I said, I remember those moments very clearly. The rooftop of the Manchester Building has a particularly excellent field of fire for the open-air café/bazaar where Shorts had taken the cop hostage, and I was comfortable up there because I’d used it on several occasions. It didn’t have any gravel, thereby reducing chances of telltale footprints and slipping and falling, had quite a few gargoyle type things hanging around and was really effing high up there. Unless a Writ Junkie or particularly rabid news reporter was looking in exactly the right spot at the precise moment with a very powerful camera, no one would be the wiser until well after the fact.

  Miggy Mellons had just announced her latest husband had died of a cocaine overdose and was bitching about how no one understood how difficult it was to be so insanely popular. Miggy, of course, you know from her retro-punk ‘n’ funk rock band the Mellonballers as well as being responsible for making it legal for musicians to take drugs ‘if it made the music better’ by proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that rock made by sober people is just plain depressing. Naturally, all of her husband’s/boyfriends/lovers/boy toys and paramours took this to mean that her drugs were their drugs. Sadly, without an advanced degree in Cocaine-ology, any amount other than just a tiny little bit eventually turned out to be a real killer high.

  The end of Tom Cruise’s acting career was being celebrated in Hollywood as one of the wisest decisions of all time, ranking up there with becoming bipedal and Universal Health Care.

  Both of these things had been on my mind during the set-up and installation of the high-powered Browning Sniper Rifle with Extreme Rangefinder because I was distinctly bothered by Miggy Mellons’ irritating voice and absurdly pleased with Cruise’s decision to leave Hollywood, even though it had eventually taken the issuance of a Writ to get him gone permanently. As an aside, he hadn’t been delivered, which is a shame, because he’s still just as irritating, only in a different way.

  Every few minutes I checked over the side to make sure no one had done anything stupid. My pocket radio, receiving live coverage from Very Biased Radio, was relating, verbatim, Johnny Shorts’ requests. By the time I’d slid the final piece into place, the guy was demanding a one-way ticket to the moon and the erasure of his OEW. The only thing he was likely to get was a bullet in the brain.

  I remember Writ Off’s agent-on-duty telling me to hurry the hell up; the Fed who was wasting time pretending that he truly cared what Johnny wanted was getting irritable because it was past his coffee break and VBR was starting to take potshots at the general math skills of federal agents.

  I remember sliding the single round into the chamber and being very cautious as I peered through the sight. Johnny Shorts bloomed into view with crosshairs on his forehead. He hadn’t looked so damned smart, which goes to show you that you can’t judge a book by its cover. The officer being held against his will had been a young guy, no more than twenty-five, with a godawful soulpatch hanging off his lip.

  I remember wondering who he’d screwed or who he was related to to keep something like that on his face and still be a cop.

  I remember taking the usual deep breaths to calm myself and summon up my chi; this was a major deal, and I couldn’t screw it up for love or money, because this one shot would catapult me into the Annals of the Writmaster. I would be the first one under thirty to take the mantle, and the million dollar purse wasn’t too shabby either.

  I remember sliding the safety off and taking a few precious seconds to ensure that the shot was going to go smoothly. Through the sight, I saw Shorts cracking wise with a few of the older officers. Rumor has it he’d promised his hostage that everything was going to go just fine, but I’ll never know.

  I remember my nose tickling. I remember thinking Miggy Mellons had been hotter when she’d just been Maggie Horsenfelger and that I wasn’t ever going to miss Tom Cruise running around in a movie.

  The last thing I remember before twenty-four hours of blurred sights and sounds was a truly horrendous sneeze at the same time as I’d pulled the trigger.

  The rest of it you’ve seen yourself. The officer’s head opening up like a ripe melon, the look of shock and disgust on Johnny Shorts’ face as he tried to shield himself from a sudden fountain of blood and brains, the shrieks from the reporters and onlookers, the thoroughly disgusted look on the Fed’s face as his coffee break vanished into thin air.

  Me? After screwing the pooch, I abandoned ship. Left my rifle, my radio, my pride and my professional standing up there on that rooftop.

  Twenty-four hours later, instead of being the youngest Writmaster in the history of legitimate assassination, I’d gotten the biggest fine of all time and instant demotion from Rogue Writman to Paperboy; gone were the fancy guns, high profile cases, global Writs, virtual award ceremonies and the big, fat paychecks. No more weapons stores, no more sexy dam
es. Just me, in my parents’ basement, eking out a shabby existence as a fallen Writman, taking whatever jobs Writ Off thought I could handle and nearly screwing them up nearly all the time.

  And now I had to borrow money from my twin sister to pay for a pair of illegal performance-enhancing sneakers from Prague’s finest sweatshops, which not only meant I was going to have be humble as hell, but that I was going to have to weather an almost incomprehensible storm of abuse while she ranted about me doing something so fantastically stupid as bringing them into the country, let alone wearing them into the station.

  Hey, I might be a colossal screw up, but until you’ve felt the grip on a pair of these shoes, you can’t possibly judge. I wasn’t going to stop wearing them until a judge authorized the bailiff to chop them off at the ankle and even then, it’d be a good bet I’d be hauled back before the judge on a matter of unwarranted violence against a representative of the court, bloody stumps and all.

  Anyone who lives in the suburbs hates coming into the city, and vice versa. For those of us ‘wealthy’ enough to live where the air is cleaner, the roads safer, the packs of roving gangs marginally more well-mannered, we hate going into the city because, quite frankly, it’s a pain in the ass to get over the Eyesteen-Rosinburger Bridge ever since Morty popped back from where/whenever he’d been, creating some kind of temporal ruckus that really and truly makes bumper to bumper traffic feel like for­ever. Everyone in office claims that the ripple is small enough now that it will only affect a single person at any given moment, but since it is a time ripple, all moments are the same.

  Beyond that particular nugget, the bucolic life in the ‘burbs really tricks you into forgetting how truly insane it is in the city; there are, at last count, close to eighty million or so people there, all trying to do whatever it is they do while trying to prevent everyone else from doing it. City folk don’t like coming to the ‘burbs because, unlike their own neighborhoods, they can’t see the people who are staring at them, and it makes visitors very paranoid.

  Funnily enough, there are other ways to move back and forth, but people almost always use the ER Bridge, chronistic problems or not; we’re a crusty bunch of people and we’ll put up with a lot of shit.

  I personally dislike going into town because these days it usually means I’m going to visit Amily. Don't get me wrong, I love her dearly, even more so since we were both allowed to stop dressing like each other and finishing one another’s sentences like some cute Disney characters. Unlike my parents, who love me a whole lot and who are, excluding the creeping horror that is a job interview at Unbiased Herald, basically not allowed to cast judgment on me, Amily takes each opportunity to tear me a new one.

  See, we’re both very, very smart. I blame Dad, who does Quantum Sudoku in pen and Amily blames Mom, who apparently worked in some government think-tank for a long time before popping out three kids in rapid succession like some kind of child-bearing Pez dispenser. Amily takes it as a personal affront that I’m not doing something more with my life.

  The last time we met, she’d accused me, right in front of everyone, of having the audacity to resort to twin stereotypes by being the bad twin. Still reeling from that kick to the junk, she’d finished up by announcing that I’d set the rights of twins worldwide back thirty years, and that the next crop of twins to pop up would, based on the damage of my inaction, be forced to live together until well into their twilight years being creepily … creepy.

  Unable to think of anything intelligent to say, I’d pointed out that by dint of her argument she was the good twin, which made her saccharine sweet, nastily kind and an evil jock concubine from the lowest levels of Hades.

  And all before pie.

  Thanksgiving Dinners can be such fun.

  After muddling through the ripple on the Eyesteen-Rosinburger Bridge in record time, I turned left on The Honorable Doctor Brown Roadway and made a beeline for Amily’s place of business, which lurked at the end of the very long road like a big, fat law-dispensing homunculus.

  I’m not sure if it’s a fundamental law of the universe or if government architects only get taught how to design one specific type of building, but the AJ Murphy Police HQ Center for Law (so named for its architect and no one else) is typical of administrative buildings everywhere. It was forty floors of bureaucracy, concrete, steel and the smallest windows you could legally have in a structure without having to install oxygen masks near every desk. Out front was the ubiquitous and inexplicably artistic water fountain (I have it on good authority from Amily that it is not a very large penis shooting water out of its gargantuan tip but two globes representing law and order coming together at a rod of justice). The artist, unsurprisingly, got Written Off after handing the city a million dollar bill for designing a massive water-shooting phallus.

  Guess who got the chore?

  In addition to non-penis water fountain that is impossible to remove without tearing out the building’s entire waste removal system, there are forty-six trees of indeterminate nature, forty-six benches no one sits on, one hundred-thirty two neglected outdoor cigarette trays, fifteen uneven tiles, two homeless men and one Outraged Citizen.

  I sighed as I drove by the Citizen. I was going to have to go by the crazy bastard on my way in because they (they being the people who work as police officers) won’t let me enter in the back and because they take some sort of perversely evil hilarity from subjecting their visitors to the absurd notions of their resident Outraged Citizen. Hey, they’re cops. They have a limited area in which to practice their sense of humor, and what they think is funny is wildly opposite to the rest of us.

  I parked my ancient POS next to a brand new Lextron that looked very out of place in visitor’s parking, looked at myself in the rear view mirror and emotionally braced myself for the Citizen. I climbed out of the car, jammed my hands in my pockets, tucked my chin into the collar of my jacket and assumed the ‘leave me the hell alone’ stance and began the ‘no time to talk to anyone at all’ pace that anyone who lives/works/travels through the city learns in the first five minutes.

  The two homeless men were bickering aimlessly over the worst films in history as I went by. Old Man in Hunting Cap asserted loudly that it had to be Ernest Goes to the Moon, a statement he backed up by saying it wasn’t even the real Ernest but Ernest Borgnine in costume. Jittery Bugeyed Man with One Shoe announced that all films starring Nicholas Cage barely equaled the talent required to qualify as a single movie, and therefore he was quite justified in making his claim. OMHC shrieked loudly that Valley Girl was one of the best movies of all time and launched himself at JBMOS and the two of them started tussling underneath a tree.

  Still chuckling as I got closer to the Outraged Citizen, I realized my error in being amused by the Great Film Debate; an OC doesn’t truly need an excuse to fly off the handle, but independent studies have shown that if they can find the smallest reason to get the old righteous fury burning, their chances of turning their target into an OC increases by ten percent. Of course, since that likelihood has been proven to be an almost negative chance in the first place, most Outraged Citizens use that little gem as their kindling for their rhetorical fire.

  Not so for my new friend Mr. Baggy Pants and Plaid Shirt. He looked a lot like Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, and I honestly couldn’t see any reason why someone would accidentally dress like that. There was probably some deeper meaning to his wardrobe that I couldn’t figure out, but then again, I didn’t want to. Down that particular road lay madness, and if you reach the end, you’ll find yourself in front of a police station, or mayor’s office, or hospital, preaching lunacy disguised as legitimate concerns.

  “Hey!” Fred shouted loudly as I tried politely to ignore him by shoving my head further into my jacket. “Hey, man! You gonna go see the police?”

  “No,” I retorted, angling myself for one of the million concrete ashtrays, “I’m here to check the bullets.”

  Undeterred by both my evasive actions and my witty quip, Fred
followed on, trying to shove a reams’ worth of leaflets into the crooks of my arms. “Man, the police don’t do anything! We’ve got assassins roaming the streets calling themselves deliverymen! We’ve got ex-football players legally breaking the arms of people who are late paying their bills! Miggy Mellons is releasing a comeback album!”

  “The funny thing about the bullets, you see,” I zipped around the ashtray, hoping that Fred would get bunged up by an object utterly immune to illogic. “Hey, wait a minute, what does Miggy have to do with Writmen and oathbreakers?”

  Against my better judgment, I felt myself slowing down. The usual patter for an OC is quite linear and exponentially weird. To go from Writmen to Miggy Mellons, chaining together conspiracy and backroom whispers, should have probably taken something along the lines of fifteen pamphlets and a slide show.

  Fred shoved a pamphlet down the front of my jacket. “Nothing. I love Miggy. Her last comeback album three years ago was truly awe inspiring. It was her forcible ejection from the Grammy’s that led me to become an Outraged Citizen. I’m hoping, uh, you know, that if it’s a good one I can stop being an OC and go back to my wife and kids. Maybe even get my old job back.”

  “Okay, weirdo, I’ll bite. What did you do before you became a complete and utter nutcase?”

  To give Fred his due, he didn’t flinch at the insults. Hell, in his time as an Outraged Citizen perched in front of respectable businesses shouting about the end of the world and conspiracies in which ‘The Man’ figures prominently as the source of all our woes, Fred has probably been called worse. Given the state of affairs, it’s possible he’s spent time in hospitals, too, but that’s what you get for being a state-sponsored lunatic.

  “I produced the album that Miggy destroyed by being under the thumb of a shadowy organization I like to refer to as Darkstar. They forced her to get up on stage, take off all her clothes and urinate all over Puffy Dids. And that was all designed to make me crazy. But,” Fred announced, pulling himself up straight and adopting a look he probably thought made him appear noble and self-sacrificing, “that’s all going to change. I can feel it! When I’m back, I’m going to devote all my spare time to finding Darkstar and bringing them down!”