Citizen Pariah (Unreal Universe Book 3)

by Lee

  I rattled the thirty digit code off quickly then stuffed the paper in my pocket. If I managed to get home without getting killed, I was going to scrap book this along with a photocopy of my first successful terminal deliverance. I got off Johnny and started walking away from the body and towards the HJS Building.

  “I’ve verified that the Writ is legitimate. Writman Johnny King, Senior Writman for Mr. Paper. Writ delivered fifteen … fifteen minutes ago.” Janice was definitely impressed. “Oh. Um. One moment please.” Cheesy muzak came on.

  Damn. Obviously if CoPL’s mainframes could access who was delivering the paper, they would know who the deliveree was, and since the damned Champions had undoubtedly been instrumental in my current predicament in the first place, Janice (who had a very nice sounding voice) knew I was a Renegade Writman.

  My skullphone rang again, and the caller ID flashed a name on my compact lenses. Henrietta Henessey from Human Resources was trying to call me up. I smiled, relaxed. As long as they didn’t figure out a way to force Spink into revealing how to bypass the end-user connection protocols, sweet old Henrietta (who’d hired me for God’s sake) wouldn’t be able to sever my attachment with Writ Off. I quickly zipped through the on-screen functions for my skullphone and call-blocked all office numbers, even Spinks’s. They were going to have to get to me the old fashioned way or not at all.

  A very bad rendition of ‘Cult of Personality’ was replaced by Janice. She sounded winded, as though she’d had to run around the office trying to find someone who could find a legal loophole to prevent me from collecting my CoPL paycheck. “Mr. … ah, sir …”

  “Yes?” I looked at myself in the highly reflective glass doors that led into Unbiased Herald and the worst job known to man. You couldn’t say I’d had the crap kicked out me because I’d definitely come out on top, but the knot on the side of my head was bigger than my fist and turning a very ugly color. I hiked up my shirt and took stock of the bruise forming there; it was already bloody colored and, all things considered, it would be better if I went to the hospital to get it looked over by a trained professional.

  If I did that, though, I’d have to explain to my parents why I wasn’t grown up enough to do the right thing.

  “We’re … we’re not really sure …” Janice stammered like a car trying to start in the dead of winter. “You can’t claim the money.” She blurted.

  “I think,” I replied calmly, poking my bruise like an idiot, “that you’ll find I can. The wording, as I understand it, is quite clear. Anyone who has a Writ against them can claim a reward for reverse deliverance. It’s not my fault I’ve got paper on me. I’d prefer not to have to worry at all, but since I completely toasted Johnny King, I’d like my money. Please.”

  I added that last out of the vague recollection that it can occasionally help if you’re polite.

  “It’s just that, you’re a Writman. That’s an unfair advantage. That would be like offering money to Mikhail Brovloski if he knocked someone out. No deal.”

  That Janice hadn’t hung the phone up on me and gone back to giving herself a French manicure suggested that she wasn’t allowed to; if I was right but allowed myself to be talked out of it, I couldn’t go back later and demand reparation. Legally, Janice couldn’t end the conversation until she had me, on record, denying in some way, shape, form or intimation that I didn’t want, get, or deserve the money.

  “Is there anything in the wording of your offer, which is on record with all the important people who do nothing except wait around for situations like this to happen so they can start suing, that clearly and in no uncertain terms says that Writman can’t do a reverse deliverance because of prior skill? Because, Janice, I have to tell you, some of the people I’ve delivered were actually pretty hard to deliver. In fact, I’m okay in confiding to you that a few of them were right up there in terms of skill. If you tell me I can’t get a Champions of Proper Law cash prize for killing Johnny King then the next time some ex-pat mercenary from some third-world country is going to have to hear the same thing, and of the two, I’m relatively certain, Janice, that Mr. ‘Been Living in a Jungle Surviving on My Own For Three Years on Bugs and Slugs’ is more likely to come to your office with a rocket launcher than I am. Now, Janice, do you need my Swiss bank account or is that information in there along with everything else?”

  Stunned silence. In the background, I could hear Janice’s peers muttering unhappily to themselves while they tried to work out a way for them to deny me without risking either a lawsuit from any organization that was anti-CoPL or a visit from the next maniac who managed to one-up his deliverer. I waited patiently because I wanted to see if the bruise on my head was going to go down at all. Eventually I heard a man with a very authoritative voice telling Janice to just give me the money, there was nothing they could do about the wording now or ever.

  “Transmitting five hundred dollars to your account now, Mr. … sir.”

  “Five hundred bucks? Are you serious?” I hated to whine, but come on. Johnny’d nearly taken my head off with that two by four. The amount of aspirin I was going to have to take alone would come to more than five hundred bucks. “I thought you said this guy King was top of the class at Mr. Paper.”

  I could hear Janice’s ingratiating smile over the cell. “This is true, sir, but as you yourself already know, Mr. Paper is the last bastion for Writmen who can’t find work anywhere else. Is there anything else I can do for you?”

  “Actually,” I said, having a moment of brilliance, “you can email me a list of Writmen and their bounties. My email is JamesDoubleOhSevenBetterThanEveryone@writoff.org. That’s double oh seven with letters and not numbers, and it’s all one word.”

  “Thank you and good luck.”

  Two things: I hated my email address and my Writman pseudonym, and I completely understood now why my handler ten years ago had spent an entire week haranguing me about my choice, going so far as to trying to get me declared mentally incompetent and unable to choose one for myself. The entire world knew me as James DoubleOhSeven, which would be much cooler if James Bond was as much of an icon now as he had been twenty years ago. But he’s not, and I’m stuck with the worst name ever.

  Second thing: CoPL was in a win-win situation and it pissed me off no end. If I continued killing Writmen, I was doing them a favor by weakening the work force of legitimate assassins and also painting us as homicidal maniacs, (only a few of us are actually homicidal. Most of us are sociopathic, which is a completely different disorder altogether) which would help their attempts at changing the laws. If I died, well, I was out of their hair and they wouldn’t have to shell out rapidly escalating bounties: Johnny King was the best of the worst, but sooner than later, I was going to find myself face to face with guys like Chupacabra Jones or Laughing Larry Lips or, God forbid, Deliah Lifestealah. Luminaries like those would definitely net me more bounty money or a scorching case of death.

  Alive for at least another hour (I couldn’t imagine any other Writmen being in the neighborhood) and five hundred simoleans richer, I pushed the door open and walked into the cavernous lobby.

  After a small eternity of walking through the foyer, which was home to a sort of Unbiased Herald shrine of bestselling issues (bearing such winning titles as ‘There is a War Happening in Another Country’ and ‘Dog Put to Sleep for Biting Owner’) as well as heavy Ayn Randian statues of inexplicable purpose and design, I stood before the only desk to be seen. Behind the desk, seated in front of a computer so old it probably had an mpeg of the dinosaurs dying was a man who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on the planet.

  In his right hand he held a GlauerMack .55 Caliber handgun modified to hold six Shreddies instead of the normal fifteen rounds. In his left hand he held a pen. If Cranky came to the conclusion that I was an unwanted visitor, they’d be finding bits of me on the ceiling for centuries. I am fast and I am smart and I am tricky, but I am not faster than a bullet that is as wide as a damned quarter is round.


  “Name?” he asked without blinking.

  “James. James Murphy.” I blinked for him. “What’s the, ah, gun for?”

  The desk clerk was busy looking at a piece of paper in front of him. Theoretically, somewhere on the oversized sheet was my name and a warning not to shoot me. “Occasionally one of the prosaic press gets into their head that they are going to attempt to educate us on proper news telling. Typically this occurs several hours after The Newsies. We often beat the more lurid press in overall sales and they cannot, in their minds, conceive of a reason why this should be.”

  “And they come armed, do they?” It was a rhetorical question; Journalistic Wars were required reading in grade school.

  “If they didn’t, I would be holding a cup of coffee in my right hand instead of Lucky Lucy.”

  The guy still hadn’t found my name, and the gun was still pointed unerringly at my head. It was an amazing feat, to be sure; a GlauerMack .55 weighs a lot to begin with, and one modded to hold Shreddies had to push the boundary at seven or so pounds, and his arm wasn’t even trembling. The guy had to be over seventy and his forearms could probably deflect bullets.

  “Here we are. James Murphy, interviewee for Archives.” The clerk put the gun away and picked up his cup of coffee. “Take the fifth elevator all the way down to the bottom.”

  “The … bottom?” This place had a basement? To where? And why?

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks, I guess.” I shrugged and went in search of the elevator bank. Underground newspapermen printing newspapers full of up-to-the-minute unadorned news. No wonder my sister worked here.

  If it sounds like I don’t think very much of my younger sister, you’re right. I don’t. I love her because she’s my sister and I guess I’m legally required to have some type of familial affection for the little twit, but she’s … weird.

  Everyone in the family is smart, really smart, and that includes Jane. It’s just that she’s divergent; Mom and Dad are both ridiculously good at math and numbers and all that stuff, I’m exceptionally good at programming (though I prefer delivering, which I am also, or was, incredibly talented at) and Amily also scores very high in both programming and firearms. Janey is equally at home with numbers and words, and from what I hear from my parents, not that bad at programming. All three of us are healthy, strong, and have shiny white teeth. Minus the red hair, we’d be superheroes for the Modern Age.

  You could say that in a very real sense, we’re a perfect family. If we were posing for one of those 1930s posters proclaiming The Murphy’s as the All-American Family of the Decade. As far as I know, I’m the only one who’s a little … off the range in terms of actual differentness (being a Writman is fairly rare) but Janey … Janey’s intentionally weird. Which bugs me an awful lot.

  My sister Jane is a Mellonhead. To be more specific, she’s a Dark Period Mellonhead which means she runs around town dressed head to toe in black clothes (expensive black clothes because when she’s not assaulting the eye with stories devoid of any context she’s solving math problems for NASA and getting paid ridiculous sums to do stuff their own damned scientists should be able to do), a virulent swath of red eye makeup spread from one ear to the other, black fingernail polish (except one fingernail, which is pearlescent white) and ninja shoes (for comfort). Her hair, my mother’s particular fixation du jour (originally a luxurious natural red, thick and healthy and able to suspend railway cars from fifty feet) was now Armageddon It On Red. Janey’s hair was so red it glowed in the dark. Helicopters and airplanes crashed into tall buildings because Janey’s hair competed with warning towers.

  My guess is that it’s a reaction to the overwhelming normalcy that our family unit theoretically possesses. On good days when I’m feeling semi-charitable towards my weird little sister I get very close to telling her that I’m a Writman. The only reason I haven’t done so is the surety that she’d just move on to some other bizarre affliction even weirder in an effort to outdo me. Quite frankly I don’t think I could handle that.

  The Smith Building had, since the last JournoWar (just ten short years ago), added fifteen underground floors to its architecture but not bothered to do much in the way of adding central heating. It was as cold as sin down there. I almost turned around after losing a finger to the elevator buttons. Being a hunted man is physically and mentally taxing in the best of health and prime conditions. Catching the mother of all pneumonias while skulking in an uber-basement colder than the Arctic Circle does not for a long life make.

  My finger was poised over the recall button when someone shouted my name.

  “James Murphy?”

  I slumped in defeat. Caught. “Yes, that’s me.” I turned around. The skinniest man alive wearing the biggest parka available on the open market was coming at me, stogy flaring brightly in the near-gloom of the fifteenth underground floor.

  “Jonathon Jericho Jiminson. You can call me whatever you want.”

  “Just don’t call you collect?” I asked, finishing the joke.

  Jonathon frowned around his cigar. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s … a joke?” I hazarded carefully. Jiminson might be small but he had enough wiry energy in him to overload a nucleonic power plant. I was half-afraid he’d shove me into the wall and start yelling at me.

  “Ah.” He nodded once, briskly. “Right. That’s not my thing, but whatever. You can be as funny as you want around here, no one will notice. That’s not how we do things.”

  I swallowed.

  “So,” Jiminson crooked an eye at me, “you want to work in the papers.”

  “Not … not really.” The absolute cold was seeping in through the bruises. “I … I’m here against my will.”

  Jiminson blinked and pursed his lips. “Very honest. Very …”

  He was going to say it. I could hear the word coming out of his mouth before he’d even formed it in his own head.

  “Unbiased.”

  I groaned. “Isn’t my unwillingness to actually be here somewhat of a deterrent?”

  Jiminson started walking and gestured for me to follow. Since I needed to get the blood flowing again, I picked up the pace. “No. It’s not. There are only two people in this entire building who come because they must, and that is Herbert Smith and Jane Murphy. Is she your sister?”

  “Yes.”

  Jiminson nodded again, a single time, apparently absorbing a factoid he hadn’t known into whatever weird system of logic he had instead of a brain. After a few minutes of silent walking down freezingly dry systems, it dawned on me that we were heading towards a place filled with lots of noise. A minute or so after that realization, Jiminson shucked his heavy parka, hanging it on a coat rack next to a metal door big enough to let cars in. He opened it and revealed unto me a scene right out of Dante’s ­Inferno.

  “That,” Jiminson said with as much pride as he could muster, “is the Press.”

  The Press, I felt certain, was unique. Maybe once upon a time it’d been a normal printing press, but not any longer; it was the size of a football field, made from cast iron steel and sporting more cogs, gears, wheels and steam turbines than I could readily count. Massive tubes connected randomly to the overall machine, which was clanking and wheezing and groaning in a non-stop expression of mechanical fury. Portions of the press burned bright cherry red while others were incandescent white. The noise was deafening, the heat as burdensomely oppressive as the cold. Men, dressed in flame retardant underwear and little else, ran to and fro, pushing buttons, throwing switches, putting out fires, throwing things into openings with teeth, risking their lives by dislodging jams with fragile fingers and all of it was directed by my sister, who was, at the moment, zooming through the air on a rickety platform connected to a latticework of tracks in the ceiling.

  Out the other end came newspapers. I’m waiting for a report on whether or not concentrated evil was also shoved out that end.

  “I am fairly certain,” I heard my voice say, “that you can do this a lo
t easier and without any loss of life.” I could not believe my sister worked in this literal hellhole. It was demonic, even for her.

  “Life is not important,” Jiminson replied stoically, “without knowing what’s going on, James Murphy.”

  At that moment, Jane’s attention turned our way. She jumped up and down and waved excitedly in my direction.

  Two men in yellow underwear, thinking she was ordering them to throw more coal into the machine’s forge, tossed a few armfuls in; the pressure rose commensurately and a klaxon alarm ripped through the enclosure. Janey frowned, shrugged and began dictating a course of action that would save, I prayed, the entire building from being blown to shreds.

  “Amazing, isn’t she?” Jiminson, who was at least twice as old as God, breathed excitedly like a four year old staring at a shiny new bike.

  “Kind of … biased, don’t you think, there, Jiminson?” I asked politely enough, but Jiminson flinched like I’d hit him with a baseball bat.

  “Quite right, quite right.” He threw his stogy into an ashtray and pulled me along through a safety corridor to another elevator.

  “There’s another level?” I asked, incredulous.

  “There’s another forty.” Jiminson answered smugly.

  “Seriously?”

  “Son,” Jiminson gazed into my eyes and there I saw a little kernel of madness, “do I look like the sort of person to lie?”

  “No, not really.” The elevator came and we went in. Predictably, Jiminson pushed the last button, and, in accordance with Elevator Etiquette, turned to stare at the floor counter. I fidgeted nervously for awhile, unsure as to what was really going on. I knew I looked like crap, and my poor reflection in the highly polished brass elevator doors confirmed that I was looking pretty ragged. There was a good chance I had a concussion and a cracked rib, and I was standing in an elevator descending into the literal bowels of the earth with a guy who hadn’t even blinked when he saw me when he should have called the police immediately.