Megan nodded. “True enough. He thought you’d take the job with EA that he’d offered you.”
Gray shook his head. “No,” he said, and surprised himself with the harshness in his tone. “I’m grateful that the Company cut me out of the whole thing, but no way could I go back to that. There’s just no…” He shook his head, trying to find the words. “No justice there. Besides, Marowitz took him up on it instead, yeah? He’ll do fine there.”
“Justice isn’t something that comes from an organization, Dan.” Her voice was gentle, and she crossed the floor to lay a hand upon his arm. “You know that. Comes from a person. Their choices.”
“I know.” Gray said, drawing back gently from her touch. “I just I don’t see myself ever doing any good there.”
Megan was so different, the dark eyes and dark hair, the fumbling affection with which she had begun to treat him. She wasn’t at all like Angie/Villalobos/She had been. Megan was real. He wasn’t ready for real. Not yet. “And that’s what you want?” She searched out his gaze, held it with her own. “To do good?”
Gray looked at her for a long moment, then he nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s what I want.”
She smiled. “Then I think you’re making the right decision. You know that you can count on me if you need me.”
“I know.” Gray reached out and squeezed her hand before letting it go. “I think I’m going to open an agency in the Verge, actually. Private security, investigation, that sort of thing. For people who are too afraid to go to Civil Protection, or maybe too afraid of Civil Protection to go anywhere else.”
“Oh?” She canted her head. “That’s rather noble of you. Dangerous as hell, but noble.”
“I think I could do with some nobility.” He took a deep breath and looked around the place for the last time. “I need to get out of here. I think if I look at that wall display one more time I’m going to break into tears – I’m sure as hell not going to have anything like it where I’m going.”
“Spoken like a true man,” Megan said with a fond smile. “All right. I’ll walk you down?”
“Sure.”
The two of them took the elevator down and walked together into the parking structure; rather than commit the place to memory his mind seemed to be erasing it, inch by inch. That’s how he knew that he was making the right decision. Carter had wanted him to join Executive Affairs, but there was nothing for him there now. Whatever the woman that had called herself Angela Velasquez had been to him in life, she had become a new beginning in death – a beginning that he now had to seize. He owed it to himself, and to everyone else who had suffered during this whole obscene affair, to make the best of it.
They stopped at the Vectra, which sat as low and bulky as it always had. Never had Gray been happier to see such a plain car as when it had reappeared in his parking spot. The two of them stood quietly for a moment, looking at the concrete, letting the silence swirl around them like morning fog. This time, with this woman, Gray felt promise rather than despair. “I should go,” he said.
“All right.” Megan looked up at him. “I can’t tell you how much I respect what you’ve done, Dan. Maybe if things had been different…”
“If things had been different, we wouldn’t be talking right now.” Gray smiled. “Not like this.”
She looked at him a moment, and to his surprise he saw tears begin to well around the corners of her eyes. “Just don’t vanish in the Verge, all right? I expect you to invite me around the minute you get settled. And then there’s the Company…are you sure that they’ll let you go like this? Are you sure that you’ll get any peace out there?”
“Maybe not,” he said with a shrug. “But honestly, I don’t think it will be a problem. As long as I keep my mouth shut, I’m not worth the trouble. Don’t worry, huh? It’ll be okay.”
Megan sighed. “All right, fine,” she said, and nodded. “Just please take care of yourself.”
“I will, Megan.” Gray reached up and brushed a budding tear from her cheek as it began to trickle down. “This isn’t goodbye. I promise.”
He left her standing there, getting into the car and plugging the key rod into its socket; the Vectra started up as quietly as it always had, a comforting note of the old and reliable amongst the uncertainty of this new life. He waited until Megan had stepped out of the way to back the car out of the parking space, and watched her shrink in the rearview until he rounded a corner and she vanished from sight. He had said that it was not goodbye, but he wondered just how true that would turn out to be. It was a big city, after all, and their worlds were steadily dividing. He hoped that he would see her again, and maybe – when he was ready – a new chapter could be opened in the book of his life that Megan could be a part of. He didn’t know. You never did.
As he turned out of the parking building and onto the street, Gray turned on the Vectra’s console and dialed it over to a music stream. ‘This American Age’ poured into his ears, already dated, ridiculous patriotic Pablum that it was, a tawdry mockery of freedom. Faces swam into his mind as he put the car on autodrive – all those who had come before. The living and the dead, especially those whom he had killed. They had not been innocent, nor had he. And yet, he had managed to walk away. He started laughing, and didn’t stop when his throat went hoarse, not even when the tears came – with every breath came release that he didn’t know was possible, the weight of years spent drowning in blind ambition lifting away. By the time he could laugh no more and the tears would no longer come, he felt like a new man. Perhaps he was at that.
Gray had real freedom, now. He would make the best of it. There was no alternative but death, and he’d had enough of that. Night was falling, and the street reached out like a lover’s arm to guide him to his new home. And beyond that night, a new day. He would see it through to something more.
Thank You For Reading.
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About the Author
Michael Shean was born amongst the sleepy hills and coal mines of southern West Virginia in 1978. Taught to read by his parents at a very early age, he has had a great love of the written word since the very beginning of his life.
Growing up, he was often plagued with feelings of isolation and loneliness; he began writing off and on to help deflect this, though these themes are often explored in his work as a consequence. At the age of 16, Michael began to experience a chain of vivid nightmares that has continued to this day; it is from these aberrant dreams that he draws inspiration.
In 2001 his grandfather, whom he idolized in many ways, died. The event moved him to leave West Virginia to pursue a career in the tech industry, and he settled in the Washington, DC area as a web designer and graphic artist. As a result his writing was put aside and not revisited until five years later. In 2006 he met his current fiancee, who urged him to pick up his writing once more. Though the process was very frustrating at first, in time the process of polishing and experimentation yielded the core of what would become his first novel,Shadow of a Dead Star.
In 2009 the first draft of book was finished, though it would be 2011 until he would be satisfied enough with the book to release it.
His work is extensively character-driven, but also focuses on building engaging worlds in which those characters interact. His influences include H.P. Lovecraft, William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip K. Dick, and Clark Ashton Smith.
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ISBN: 978-1-62007-068-0 (ebook)
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ISBN: 978-1-62007-070-3 (hardcover)
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Table of Contents
Appetizer:
Book Cover
Title Page
Main Course:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-five
Dessert:
Closing
About the Author
Copyright & Publisher
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