“Here, take ours,” one man at a table close by said, offering Steven their cookies. His wife was nodding, looking like a puppy trying to please a master.
“No, thanks,” Steven said, waving the man off. “You two enjoy them.”
Immediately the man and woman dug into the cookies, acting as if they were having small orgasms while crunching on the cookie, paper and all.
The man behind the counter grabbed a large bag that had to have three hundred fortune cookies in it. “This good?”
“That’s perfect,” Steven said. “And it’s very kind of you to give them to me.”
“The honor is ours,” the man said.
Steven laughed as he left. It was getting easier and easier to just get everything for free. Whatever was happening with him, he sure loved it. He could get used to everyone waiting for him to talk. After all, that’s what everyone did for those in power.
Back in his apartment, Steven opened the bag, got a glass of milk from the fridge, and cracked into the first cookie. It was the same basic fortune that Jane had gotten the night before.
“You will come into a vast sum of money.”
Steven laughed. “Yeah, that’s going to happen.”
A moment later, before he could even wash down the cookie with a sip of milk, the phone rang. He never did get back to the fortunes that day because his evil old aunt had had a stroke and was in the hospital. He didn’t much like her, but he was the only thing she had. She died before he got there, which actually didn’t upset him. Last thing he would have needed was the old bag hanging on and building up hospital bills.
He spent most of the night dealing with all the details of his aunt’s death, then the rest of the night at Jane’s, making her do things naked that no woman ever really thought of doing outside of porn films.
He sure loved his new power.
It was the next morning, after making funeral arrangements and talking to his aunt’s attorney, that he came to understand what had happened. His aunt had left him everything, and the old broad had been rich. Millions rich, or so the attorney thought. It was still too early to tell just how much it might be.
Steven laughed all the way back to his apartment. Now he had his stake to get him started toward his plan of world domination. The cookie had been right again.
There was no telling what the next cookie would bring him. He could just keep opening cookies and gaining power.
Today, he would become a truly powerful being.
The bag of fortune cookies and the half-empty glass of old milk were right where he had left them. He dumped out the milk, got himself a fresh glass full, then took the first cookie off the top of the bag. He cracked it open, tossed half into his mouth, then read the fortune as he ate, as excited as a kid opening a present on Christmas morning.
But this fortune didn’t seem right and he had to read it twice.
“All special powers that you have been given by fortune cookies will be forever lost.”
Steven tossed the slip away like it was on fire, but it was too late. The feelings of being in control drained away from him like someone had pulled a plug in his shoe.
“No!” he screamed. “That’s not a fortune!”
He slammed the rest of the uneaten cookie into the wall and grabbed another one from the bag, opening it and putting half in his mouth before reading the fortune.
It said the same thing.
And so did the next one and the next one.
He opened a hundred before giving up and sitting down on a stool in disgust.
Someone had planted the entire bag with the same fortune. But who? And why? And who would have known he was going to come back here and open all these?
A moment later the phone rang. It was his aunt’s attorney again, talking some sort of gibberish about taxes and problems with the government and how there wasn’t as much money as there had seemed to be earlier, maybe none at all after all the fees and hospital costs. Steven just listened in shock, said nothing, then hung up.
The money was gone as well, right along with his powers.
He stared at the kitchen counter covered in half-opened fortune cookies. He knew, without a doubt, he had lost everything, all his dreams of being in charge of everything.
But how? Why had someone done this to him, taken his specialness?
Then the faces of those two sitting in the Chinese restaurant came back clearly to mind. Not everyone would follow him. Someone had known what was happening, somehow, and had changed out his real cookies with these special ones.
He needed to find out who. And why.
He dumped the entire sack of cookies out on the counter. At the bottom was a note.
Dear Fortune Cookie Tyrant,
Steven stopped reading and sat down on the stool. That was a name he had only been thinking about using after he gained world domination. No one would know it now. Something wasn’t right here.
Steven went back to reading the note.
You forgot rule #41. And sorry about the slow-acting and very painful poison in the cookies, but after what you did to the world over the last forty years, after all the people you killed and enslaved, we figured it was the least we could do.
Signed,
The Anti-Cookie Alliance.
Steven could feel the pain in his stomach starting to grow.
He swept all the cookies from the counter top, then doubled over in pain. He had been poisoned.
He got to the phone and dialed 911, begged for them to hurry, told the operator that the poison was in the cookies, then hung up as another wave of pain hit him.
As it eased, his mind went back to the note. Rule 41? What did the note mean by that?
And forty years? He was only twenty. He hadn’t been alive yet for forty years.
In the distance, a siren was growling louder. Help was on the way.
Then he saw the list on his bulletin board, the list of 100 things he would do if he became an Evil Overlord. The list that he promised himself he would follow carefully.
With the pain in his gut causing him to stumble, he went to the board, pulled off the list, and slumped to the kitchen floor, his back against the wall. Outside his apartment, the sound of the siren stopped. He could see the flashing lights through the window.
Help would be here in a moment. He forced himself to take a deep breath to hold back the pain and flip the list to the right place.
Rule 41. Once my power is secure, I will destroy all those pesky time travel devices.
“No!” Steven shouted as the pain shot through his body. “I didn’t get to become an evil overlord. I didn’t get to be Fortune Cookie Tyrant.”
There was a banging on the door and his name was called out.
He tried to get up, but instead went face forward onto the tile floor.
The last words the great Fortune Cookie Tyrant muttered was, “Not fair.”
About the Author
Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and hundreds of published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom.
He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.
Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.
Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.
Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.
hive.
Life and Death of Fortune Cookie Tyrant Page 2
