Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  Now, that doesn’t mean that radio and papers don’t get carried away from time to time. You’d have to be blind and mentally incapacitated to miss the fact that in order for everyone to get paid, there has to be some excitement in the news; otherwise we’d have the Action Chat News Team at Six, Ten and Eleven roaming like maddened buffalo, manically covering a spill in aisle twelve to anyone who’ll listen. All the over the top stuff like ‘Baby Kills Entire Family with Butcher Knife (actually a rather sad tale about a puppy stuck between two slats in a stairwell) and ‘Blood Hungry Martians from Beyond The Stars Ransack a Local Grocery Store (a Mexican bought a pack of gum from a grocery store one time and apparently freaked the WASP behind him out of her mind) is relegated to the internet now. The banners match the guts more than ninety-five percent of the time, but the news you read and see is still wickedly exciting.

  Not so for UH. A bank robber dies in a shoot out with police? He’ll get about two lines. Something like ‘A man robbed the Mercurial Bank and Trust located on the corner of Fairfax and Kofax. He shot three people dead on the way out, two men and one woman, and was shot crossing the street. Names of the victims will be released when they are made available.’.

  And then, two days or a week later, while the press is screaming around town carefully crafting insane plots involving bank managers or the sexy teller or a convoluted long con and generally making Hollywood’s job a lot easier, Herb will add an addition to his Additional News Section; ‘The bank robber who robbed the Mercurial Bank and Trust at the corner of Fairfax and Kofax was named Robert Rickey. One shot man was Donald Crunch, the other was Doctor Gunsalmo Trist. The woman was Janice Cornwall. The location where Robert Rickey was shot will be cleaned tomorrow.’

  You see? Incredibly dull and dry without speculation or expansion of the story. Incredibly Biased News would have a fifteen page expose on the bank robbery, chronicling the lives of the three dead heroes and turning them into martyrs for the cause of selling more newspapers. Rickey would also get a fifteen page spot, the gist of which would be he’s either the devil incarnate and robbed the bank not for the money but to kill people for no reason other than he could or he was a good child with rotten, terrible parents. Both tales would sell a million newspapers. The news channels, not to be outdone, would interview everyone who’d ever known the principal players.

  Herb would move on to the next story without looking back. From that point on, the only treatment that event would receive was if, in fact, it was an inside job or if the mythical Rickey had in truth been doing a long con, and then all it’d get was another addition in the ANS portion of the UH.

  When each story gets a maximum of two inches of column space, you can cover a hell of a lot more news than the others guys. When you include photos at the end of every month and not every issue, you can cram even more stuff in there. And when your newspaper is easily three times as thick as the thickest Sunday edition out there and you print nearly everything in 8pt Verdana, well, that’s an awful lot of news.

  I can’t explain why UH is so popular except to say that it appeals to a wide variety of intellectuals and manic obsessives who don’t have the time or the emotional faculties to bother with fripperies. Unlawful Conspiracy Theorists will spend their print money on copies of the Herald, homeless people build shelters out of them and brawlers roll them up to beat the hell out of each other. UH is wildly popular overseas for some reason, which doesn’t make any sense at all since more than ninety percent of what Herbert prints is about the city. I think the last international story that made it into UH was the accidental detonation of a nucleonic device with a forty-meter killing range over the house of the World’s Noisiest Man.

  It got one line.

  And unless I could think of a way to tank the interview without seeming to screw it up, I was going to be working there.

  The Herbert J. Smith Building was in the oldest of the old city centers and was the only edifice to remain completely unaffected by the ravages of time, weather and marauding packs of maddened journalists driven insane by the unflagging popularity the Unbiased Herald continued to enjoy. Built before things like building codes, architectural guidelines, Feng Shui and ergonomics, the home of the Unbiased Herald was a monolith of granite that started looming at you five miles out and began actively lurking by time you got to the closest block. It had a few dozen windows interspersed across the perfectly cubic form; these seemed to be at random intervals following no particular train of thought other than ‘oh, we should probably put a few windows in here on the off chance that someone wants to jump to their doom’. There were lots and lots of gargoyles carved out of brass and other (intentionally, I thought) creepily designed hanging-on-the-side-of-building things that gave the HJS Building an aura of menacing despair.

  If a practicing Wiccan came up to me and suggested that perhaps the structure was built on corrupted ley lines, I wouldn’t bat an eye. Hearing from a metaphysicist that there was an open gateway to a black dimension would get a little bit more of a response, but only because at heart I’m a geek.

  There was nothing, and I literally mean absolutely nothing for a full city block in either direction. Oh, there were the remains of office buildings, a library, a bank, a couple of corner stores and what looked like a coffee shop, but the sheer power of the unbiased press forced itself on you and wouldn’t let up. It was like a spastic dog, jumping all over you, slobbering gobbets of bitterness on your face and creeping you out. I can only imagine what it’d been like ten years ago, with concentrated pockets of cold, stark logic and un-adorned prose chasing you across the street.

  You might think I’m making a lot of this up because I didn’t want to work there. Check your history books for the facts. Without some kind of bias, you start losing emotional ground, and without emotion, you become pretty damned close to an automaton, and when that happens, well, it’s game over. You become a shell.

  There’s something about being expected to work without any bias (emotional, sexual, contextual, racial, hereditary, assumed, made up) that will eventually drive even the most Spockian person stark raving mad.

  Of course, all the suicides, murders, journalistic attacks, bombings by UCT’s, the endless parade of OC’s, and a few pro-active attempts at beautifying the neighborhood with high-yield explosives might have had a part to play.

  I got off the bus and watched it speed up, ear still ringing from the lambasting I’d received from Rigible. He wasn’t very enthusiastic about dealing with a car so laden down with high explosives that Police HQ was structurally at risk, nor was he very polite after realizing that he was going to have to do so himself, with no help from anyone. He’d become even more voluble after I’d told him that it appeared as though the car was wired to go when driven, leaving few in the way of options for dealing with the situation; the last minute of the conversation was me giving Rigible a safe route to push the car to the nearby river where he could literally throw the car away.

  It didn’t take a genius to realize that I wasn’t going to be welcome at the precinct for a long while, possibly forever. Rigible was a nice man, always friendly and courteous to me, but our relationship wasn’t one of friendship but of convenience; I was a Writman, he was a Law Enforcement Officer. We basically worked together but our means of execution were radically different.

  My skullphone rang; it was Spink. My heart sank, and then my head started ringing again, this time because someone had just clobbered me with a two by four.

  Backing away, arms thrown out to deflect any incoming attacks from pieces of wood, I answered. “Let me guess,” I asked breathlessly, touching the already swelling bruise, “midnight session, strong arm tactics, capitulation and shit-spreading.”

  “Got it one, James. How did you guess?”

  I blinked the last of the blurriness out of my eyes just in time to dance out of the way of the two by four wielding maniac; the chunk of wood collided with the bus stop with enough force to make my attacker drop it. “Well, maybe t
his guy trying to kill me is a good place to start. Hold on, let me check. Hey!”

  My attacker was six foot two and dressed like an all-star Football professional, complete with all the pads and the jersey. He wasn’t wearing a helmet, which made identification easier; few Writmen go in for the whole ‘out-in-public’ persona, and even fewer dress like a posterboy for pre-30’s Middle American Perfection. At the moment, there were only two; Johnny King and Kurt Snodgrass.

  I was up against Johnny King, the golden haired blue eyed maniac from South Dakota, a washed up semi-pro athlete who lost his career the same day he lost his virginity by nailing a senator’s daughter. Oh, the sex didn’t do him in, but Daddy’d had a Clausal Writ on dear daughter’s unsullied hymen and deliverance had come in the form of two broken kneecaps and a shattered elbow. After recuperating, Johnny had tried unsuccessfully for years to get into any branch of Writ Deliverance, finally happening upon a cut-rate quick-and-dirty outfit called Mr. Paper. What no one could have imagined was Johnny’s success rate in deliverance, even with the ridiculous get-up.

  Thank the good Lord that Writ Off discouraged its employees from being showy.

  “What?” Johnny asked, eyes gleaming. I hope his hand throbbed from the hard collision with the bus post.

  I took a few steps backwards and interposed the bench between myself and Johnny; not much of a deterrence to someone who’d grown up leaping over men, but I was hoping his knees weren’t up to snuff. “You trying to deliver me?”

  Johnny pulled out the 8x11 electronic paper and waved it at me. “What do you think, moron?”

  “Yeah,” I said to Spink, “Johnny King’s got paper on me. How could it have happened so quickly?”

  “Who’re you talking to?” Johnny shouted loudly.

  If you’re not good enough to need a skullphone, you don’t even know they exist. Spink spoke. “Time-delayed OEW is my guess. My guess is Johnny caught sight of you somehow, called his office who then called the big boys upstairs who decided to offer a lease. Technically illegal, but once you’ve been delivered, the fines won’t matter so much…”

  Johnny picked his wood up but didn’t move just yet; he was plainly trying to figure out if I was crazy. “What about my legal counsel?”

  Spink snorted. “Writ Off wants you gone, James. It was a lackluster performance at best, and Zongo’s claims that no one would be in this mess in the first place if you had followed through on the Writ properly are hard to deny. The only person in any trouble is you: Zongo’s not stupid, they’ll have set-up a paper trail for GOC investigators.”

  Johnny smacked the concrete with his two by four and came at me over the bench.

  Evidently he’d had enough of me talking to myself. I tried to run away but he clipped me on the shoulder with enough force to send me spinning into a garbage can. I’m no physical slouch, but Johnny King is an up-close Writman, so he’s all about strength and stamina; he caught up to me again just as I was picking myself off the ground and clobbered me again with his homemade baseball bat, this time in the side. I kind of but not really fell to the ground, side aching like the blazes.

  I noticed with dismay that my shoes were dirty.

  “So,” I gritted through blood stained teeth, “I guess this is goodbye.”

  “Yes it is, James, sorry. Don't forget about the CoPL reward if you survive.” The line went dead.

  Johnny, thinking I was talking to him, eerily echoed Spink’s sentiments. “Yeah, it sure is.” He raised the club.

  Now, you’re probably thinking that I’m stupid enough to leave the house without weapons, right? You probably think I went to the Police station to visit my sister without taking any kind of protection along at all, right?

  If I’d been invited to see the president of our fricking Divided States of America, the Secret Service would have had to take another hour searching me for all the weapons I carry. I’ve been a Writman for ten years. Half the time I don’t even remember what I’m carrying; setting up is completely automatic for me as is brushing your teeth (if you believe in clean, hygienic living, anyhow) is for you.

  What I am not is stupid enough to bring a gun to visit Amily. The only people who are legally allowed to carry firearms inside a police station are cops or the various flavors of police officer. The only time a Writman carries a firearm into a cop shop is when he or she is going to deliver a police officer and they have decided to stop living because the trigger reflex when someone who is subconsciously identified as ‘not cop’ pulls a gun goes into overdrive. Even though a Writman delivering an officer is legal and probable, that Writman is for sure going to die if it goes down anywhere near other bluecoats.

  I didn’t have a gun on me, but I did have knives, knuckle dusters, caltrops, throwing stars, blow dart ammunition (my blow gun was probably below sea level by now), a MiniShock cattle prod and my favorite choice for a situation like this; Superdust.

  You can make Superdust at home. You need a mortar and pestle, patience, a decently stocked spice rack and some plate glass you don’t want any longer. Grind it all up, stick the deadly stuff in carefully prepared cheesecloth grenade-sacks and wait to chuck it into some goof’s face. The flavor of Superdust I had on me at the moment was Cayenne Curry Glass Surprise. I flicked the loosely tied bag at Johnny’s head with the expertise of hours practicing to get the motion just right (the first dozen Superdust bags hadn’t had anything but berry sugar in them and even still it hurt like a mother) and waited.

  Johnny, very intent on making my head lumpy and leaky, didn’t react to the cheesecloth bag smacking him on his nose until it unraveled and dumped its contents into the air around his head. He sneezed immediately (keeping the rest of the Superdust in airborne for a few more seconds), staggered back, took a ragged, deep breath (of glass-laced Superdust) and came at me again. He ran right into the few particles remaining, sneezed again, and howled as he started spitting up blood.

  Superdust is not nice. I know it, and now you know it. Delivering people isn’t as romantic as they make it seem in the movies. It’s actually super messy and kind of gross.

  I felt weirdly ambivalent about doing Johnny in because he was, technically (very technically) one of my peers. I was innocent of serious wrongdoing. Yes, I was guilty of not performing a flawless Writ, but Zongo had somehow managed to turn this ‘mis’-deliverance into something equal or greater than The Sneeze. I deserved punishment. Not deliverance.

  I wearily pulled myself upright and watched as Johnny danced around in circles, trying to claw the miniscule glass fragments out of his throat. In the process of doing this, he succeeded only in biting one of his fingers off as he sneezed explosively around a probing hand. I looked at my watch.

  Great. It was after midnight, I’d been up for close to twenty-four hours, I was going to become a Renegade Writman any second now, I was bruised, battered, carless and the owner of a pair of four thousand dollar illegal performance enhancing shoes that were covered in my own blood.

  The only potential good thing out of the whole crazy thing was my appearance. Anyone sane wouldn’t hire me. Hell, looking how I did, I wouldn’t hire me, and not just because I don’t want to work.

  Johnny staggered at me making ugly sounds in the back of his throat. From the color of his face, I’d say he was asphyxiating on his own blood. Not a comfortable way to die. I kicked him in the knees, then stepped on his chest. He was too far gone in pain and blood loss at this point to do much more than groan at me, so I rummaged around in the pockets of his ludicrous get up until I found the Writ.

  Typical stuff, I’m sure. I didn’t even bother to read the print, knowing as I did what I was being accused of; being the wrong Writman at the wrong time.

  I turned the page over and found the unique Writ number on the back. While Johnny continued dying, I waited until the number changed; this was the real deal for sure, then. It wasn’t a fake Writ and I really was a Renegade Writman (until someone from Human Resources figured out a way to conduct an exit inter
view with me). Johnny gave a wet, final gasp and died.

  “About time.” I muttered petulantly. The guy’s insides had to be Swiss cheese from all the screaming he’d done and he’d still taken twice as long to die as the last person I’d used ‘dust on. I took out my phone and dialed operator assistance.

  “Operator Assistance, how may I help you?”

  “Direct line for Champions of Proper Law, please.”

  “The number is…”

  “Um,” I hated interrupting, but did it anyway, “could you, um, please dial it for me? I’m kind of stuck here.” I didn’t actually want to dial the number from my cell phone because if you are smart enough or know someone who works for the phone company, you can backtrack a call pretty easily. By having the operator dial it for me, I was mitigating that worry somewhat.

  There was a dual click, and then another voice came on the line. This one was a woman, brisk and professional to the point of perfection. “Champions of Proper Law Downtown Headquarters, my name is Janice, how can I help you?”

  “I’ve, ah,” I watched a dog trot by, eyeing dead Johnny somewhat hungrily, “just delivered my deliverer.”

  The change in tone was abrupt, I can tell you! “Well that’s just wonderful, Mr. …”

  “You can call me … you can call me sir.” I couldn’t give her my real name for obvious reasons and I couldn’t give her my work name for the same ones.

  “Of course, we here at CoPL recognize and support the anonymity of anyone who delivers a Writman.” Janice burbled merrily. “After all, according to the outmoded governmental system that allows and perpetuates the use of the Writ, you have, correctly or incorrectly, been labeled as a criminal. Do you have the Writ handy, sir?” She continued when I announced that I did. “Excellent. Would you care to read me the number for validation purposes?”