A rare hint of a smile crosses her father’s handsome face. “You did well, Daughter. I’m proud.”
Funny even after all these years how good that still makes her feel.
Even so, as she watches her father and brother enter the house, she resists going back to the warmth of her truck. Clamping a hard hand on her wound to help staunch the sluggish bleeding, she stares down at her handiwork.
The figure is twitching. The legs are moving in slow motion, like a dog dreaming of chasing butterflies.
That fierce grin comes again, but she doesn’t raise her gun.
Not yet.
Not yet.
“I might not be able to kill you, you bastard, but I can make damn sure you don’t ever hurt anyone again.”
8
(London Bridge is falling down…)
For being the richest man in the world, Peter Westerhaus is hardly your typical breed. At least, your typical breed pre Microsoft era, when the standard of multibillionaires was changed forever.
With his slight, skinny body, and a face sporting a healthy eruption of acne better suited to an adolescence that had gasped its last more than three decades ago, Peter has less in common with the robber barons and steel magnates of old than a hen has with a toothbrush.
But even with his food stained clothes and pungent scent—he takes a bath twice a month whether he needs to or not—he might have been accepted by his contemporaries if he just wasn’t so darned strange.
Eccentric. That’s the word they use these days.
Or is it the word they used to use?
Does it matter, Stan?
Nope, Johnny. Doesn’t matter at all. Not anymore.
Right you are, Stan ol buddy. Right you are.
(…falling down…)
Even so, the wunderkind who had breezed through Harvard at fifteen and then gave MIT a try— until he grew bored in three months and was out-professing the professors— bears little resemblance to the man who now owns the largest corporation in the world.
(…falling down…)
Peter sits in his megalithic office. An office that is so crowded with the latest in up to the nanosecond computer hardware and software that it looks like the cockpit of some fantastically futuristic flying machine rather than the staid walnut-and-teak showpieces of his contemporaries.
Contemporaries? What contemporaries? Ha! Ha! Ha!
A huge, drive-in movie screen sized monitor sits on the desk in front of him. The monitor is dark save for an eerie, endlessly scrolling band across the bottom. It’s an innocuous little band, really. No different from the one that scrolls beneath the picture on CNN or MSNBC and announces the sports scores, the stock market closings, and the weather while some correspondent in some far flung country cheerfully relates the latest death tolls in some war or other.
I’m not gonna look. I won’t and you can’t make me.
Sure ya can, Stanley old sport! Have a look see. Just a little peek. Come on. You know ya wanna.
Shut up, Johnny. I don’t want to look.
Come on….
Nope. If I don’t look, then I can convince myself this is all a dream. Just a nasty nightmare that will eventually go away.
Newsflash for ya, Stan. This is reality. No nightmares here.
Well…I can pretend, can’t I?
Sure ya can, Stan. Suuuure ya can. You just go on and pretend. I’ll be here when you get back from your trip to Fantasy Island.
(…London Bridge is falling down…)
Spinning his chair, Peter looks at the blank, windowless walls of this, his inner sanctum sanctorum. His throne room, if you will.
No nasty toilet jokes if you please, Johnny.
Wouldn’t think of it, Stanley ,m’man. Simply would not think of it.
He stares at the dark paneling, counting knot holes as his brain begins the last chute the chute down the slippery slope they call full-blown insanity, eating of itself in a fine and fitting act of auto-cannibalism.
(…falling down…)
His body does what his mind forbids; his feet scooch along the carpet, turning his chair until it faces forward once again. His eyes sweep left, then right, then left again before settling on the monitor and the scrolling Writ near the bottom.
The words aren’t in any language that he can decipher. Indeed, the characters rolling by in their stately, if horrifying, procession are so alien to him—and indeed to anyone of human ancestry—that his brain cramps and twists, trying to process the view into something it can make sense of.
It gives him a blinding headache.
Understanding the letters isn’t the problem, though, is it Stanley.
When you’re right, Johnny, you’re right.
It’s the words you need to understand. The message, if I may be so blunt.
Blunt away, my friend. Blunt away.
And you already understand the message, don’t you, Stanley. The message is as clear as glass, isn’t it.
(…my…)
And, indeed, Peter has done everything in his power to make that message go away. The wreckage of his once relatively neat office bears mute testament to that fact.
I did everything I could. Everything. You need to be aware of that one little fact, Johnny.
Oh I am, Stanley. I most certainly am. Never let be said that Peter Stanley Westerhaus didn’t Try His Best.
Several of his highly classified—and highly illegal to boot—supercomputers are smashed to bits on the ground, their shattered pieces looking up at him, almost glowering, as if wondering just what they had done to deserve their fate.
In fact, if one were to look beneath the desk, to where the surge protector lies nestled, one would notice that the monitor plug has left its secure haven. As has the plug to the computer currently broadcasting the damnable scrolling message.
And still…
‘And still…’ It always comes back to that, doesn’t it, Stanley. ‘And still…’ If they ever write a book about you, old sock, that phrase will beat out ‘Jesus wept’ for brevity, won’t it.
…
(…fair…)
It’s true, though. What the voices in his head are telling him is all too true. All he has to do to prove that fact is to raise his eyes, oh say ten degrees, and set his sights on the two dozen or so TV screens broadcasting from every corner of the globe.
They show the same thing over and over again. Scenes from some sort of post-apocalyptic nightmare that he put into place simply by saying “yes” instead of “no”.
Dear GOD! What have I done???
…
(…lady.)
From a corner of his silent office, a soft beep sounds, and yet another monitor comes to life. This one shows the hallways leading to his inner sanctum. Hallways which, up until now, have been as empty as a looted tomb.
They’re coming for you, kid.
“I know. I know! Dammit, I KNOW!!!”
Reaching into his drawer, Peter pulls out a fat handgun, one he’s never had to use. He twirls his chair again until he faces the one and only door in the office. The gun sits limply in his lap.
Oh yeah, that’ll work. Kinda like shooting rain at a flower. You made them almost indestructible, ol kid, ol sock. All part of the plan, remember?
“Fuck the plan!!”
He’ll never leave this office alive, he knows that. And with the realization comes a feeling of almost blessed relief. The irony of being killed by his own creations isn’t lost on him. In fact, it seems a rather fitting punishment for what he’s done.
But still…
Oh, back to that again, are we?
Shut up, Johnny. Just…shut…up.
…
“I’m forgetting something. I know I am.”
A quick glance at the security monitor shows he’s still got some time left. Not much, granted, but some. And some is a start.
He looks around his office again, and his eyes alight on his personal computer, the only one in the office that was spared his fit of rage earlier. It sits proudly on his secondary desk, as if lording its veritable wholeness over its shattered buddies.
“That’s it!!”
Forcing his body out of the chair, he stumbles over broken computer bits until he’s at the desk housing his computer. It’s booted up and ready for him. A quick flick of the mouse, and the email he had typed earlier is brought to full bloom before his eyes. It’s not much of a letter, no, but he thinks it spells out the whys, wherefores, and by-these-present-know-ye-thises pretty darn well.