MalContents (14 page)

Bleeding, filthy, and bruised, Sunny faced the sky. The sun was up there again, no longer blocked by ash clouds. She drew in a deep breath. Even the noxious humidity was being driven apart in the aftermath of her private war with Rona Bustamante. Somewhere on the island, a bird called out. Another answered.

That last chapter, Sunny thought, was about to be written.

She walked back into the chaos of the cottage, her former retreat from the pressures of the world, but stayed only long enough to fish her car keys out of her purse. Methodically pocketing them, she marched down to the dock and scanned the water. Nothing moved beneath the surface. The pond looked as clear as the distant shore, where she could see the red planks of the boathouse and something the size of an ant she knew was really her car.

Sunny waded out into the water and began to swim. She paced herself, sustained by thoughts of Joseph and her career. When she reached the shore, exhausted but still very much alive, she rose up from the water, feeling baptized and reborn.

CHOOSE

by Ryan C. Thomas

When
there’s a gun to your head, every single heartbeat that pumps in your ears, every blink of the eye that snaps the world from white to black and back again, every single goddamn second that your brains aren’t splattered on the floor like last week’s spaghetti feels like an eternity.

Seconds.

Too small to make decisions.

Just enough time for a single thought.

I’m still here, you think.
Tick
. Another second gone. When is he going to pull the fucking trigger!

The anticipation is worse than the thought that the next world might not even exist. It plows through you like a bullet more powerful than the ones in the gun kissing the hair above your ears. It’s outright torture.

If the gunman has done his homework, he knows that your brain is fixing to have itself a breakdown. And this, of course, becomes part of the game. Because maybe if you get desperate enough, if you just can’t stand the waiting anymore, well then maybe you just reach up and help him with that trigger.

Tick
.
Tock.

I was teetering on the edge of such a breakdown that Monday morning in the small back office of my computer repair store, some disgruntled customer’s revolver pressed hotly to my temple. A big gun at that, the kind Dirty Harry would be envious of. The kind that could stop a stampeding elephant, and maybe take out the trees behind it in the process.

He was a young man in a silver, shark skin business suit and white cowboy hat who’d been outside the door at nine o’clock waiting for me to open the store. Said he wanted to talk to me about some work I’d done on a computer, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea who he was. He’d kept his head down, staring at his shoes, his big hat blocking out his face. I figured he was afraid to meet my eyes out of embarrassment; I see lots of things on people’s hard drives—most of the viruses that cause computer crashes come down through hardcore porn sites. I’ve seen everything from nasty scat photos to foreign rape scene to bestiality videos that’ll make bile rise in your throat, but hey, who am I to judge? It’s a free country, right? People have their kinks. Told him I’d go through my records if he gave me ten minutes to fire everything up. He nodded and followed me in.

Before I could flip the lights on, I was on the ground begging for my life.

His voice became a graveled mix of phlegm and Marlboro Reds, and he gave me a kick in the spine to make sure I didn’t try to stand up. “Stay down,” he ordered. “Don’t make me any madder than I already am.” Oh, he was mad all right, mad like a man who gets into arguments with post-it notes and peanut shells; that kind of mad. The kind where I knew he was loving every minute of making me cry.

The seconds passed in silence. I could smell my own fear as I shook with uncertainty. I felt that gun against my head, saw the shadow of its massive barrel on the floor. He was watching me sweat, enjoying it.

Just shoot me already! I wanted to scream. But I didn’t want him to really do it. Of course not. I wanted to live. I’ve got a wife and daughter, was all I could think, and I need them and they need me. We’ve got a nice home and live a good life. Very nuclear-family kind of shit, which some might find boring, but it’s good, secure. I wanted more than anything, just to wake up and start the morning over, have my cereal and coffee again, watch the morning news about the politician who got caught wearing adult diapers while he banged his maid. I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want to be driven insane either, although I was getting close to the last one.

“How’s it feel, huh?” he asked, giving the gun enough of a shove to send shockwaves of pain behind my eyes. “How’s it feel to be this close to death?”

I couldn’t speak a word. My tongue was far too dry to move.

“You thought you were a man of respect, huh?”

Man of respect? Sure. No idea what—

“Thought you’d go about your business, huh? Thought you could just ruin my life and everything would be hunky dory? That’s why this country is in the shitter. People like you don’t care about anyone but themselves. Love thy neighbor is just a folk song from the past they teach to kids in history class. Well, maybe I squeeze the trigger now.”

The gun bucked into my head. Oh God!

Tick.

“Or maybe not. There’s more hell in the anticipation. Man, don’t I know.”

Sonofabitch.

“Let’s say we count to ten, and then I pull it. Sound like a fun game? Okay? One . . . two . . . three . . .”

Tears cascaded down my cheeks, their coldness reminding me how just last week my daughter Mandy had gotten the best of me in our backyard snowball fight. I hadn’t suspected a fourteen year old could throw so hard, but she’d knocked my glasses clean off.

“Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . .”

Tick.

Oh Jesus, it was too much to bear. When was he going to actually do it?
Was
he going to actually do it?

I fought for my voice. “Please . . .” I said feebly around a mouthful of snot.

“Please what? Please shoot you? I don’t think I’m ready yet. I don’t even think it would make up for what you did to me.”

“I don’t know who you are.” The tears ran into my mouth and continued down my chin, plopping on the floor. A warm, wet stain was spreading out beneath me.

“Well, smart guy, you’ll know now then, wont you?”

“What do you want?” I started to rise, wanting to plead with the guy, was on all fours now, like a dog. Beneath me the puddle of my own drool and tears reflected the pathetic visage of a grown man sniveling. This is what you look like dying, I thought. You don’t look like a man, that’s for sure. You look like a joke.

Suddenly, I was yanked to my feet, bent over a small laptop I keep on my desk for record-keeping purposes.

“Turn it on,” he said, “I want to show you something.”

My fingers shook as I hit the power button. It took a lifetime for the startup screen to boot up. The desktop photo was a picture of my family taken just ten days ago at Christmas, my daughter holding her new Macbook in her hands. My wife’s hair was tied back because she was in the middle of cooking a turkey for the dinner; her parents drove down from Flatwood for the day. All in all it was a good time.

“See that?” my captor said, still behind me. “See those faces? Happy. Perfect. Faces. I’m gonna give you a choice now, which is more than you did for me. Listen close, because I’m only saying this once.” He spun me quickly to my right, bent me over and forced me to look down next to the filing cabinet where I kept a small safe. “There’s a gun in your safe there. Shoots pretty accurate for a .357. Loaded with those .38s I bet it barely bucks. Take it out. Bring it home. And make a choice. Either your daughter or your wife. One of them goes. Tonight by midnight. Bullet in the head. I’ll be keeping tabs on you, and if I see them both still alive even a minute after, then they
both
go. Got me? It’s one or both. And you gotta choose? You take one of them out and our business is done. You can try to run, but it won’t help. I’ll find you no matter what. I’ll show you I’m a man of my word.”

If this whole situation made no sense before, it sure as hell made no sense now. “What?” I asked. And I was being serious. It was a universal
what the flying fuck
was going on? Who was this guy and what the hell was he getting at? He wanted me to kill my family? Was he fucking serious? Was I still asleep? Was Allen Funt hiding in a closet?

“What nothing,” he replied. “Kill one of ’em. It’s your choice. When you’re done, maybe in the future you’ll learn to have some guts, make decisions that matter, be a man.”

“What did I do!? Just tell me and I’ll make good on it. You want some new computers? You want money—”

“Don’t fucking insult me, Mr. Baker. Don’t even try to make me feel stupid.”

He had to have the wrong guy. I just needed to explain it to him. There are lots of Peter Bakers in the world. Clearly this was some issue of mistaken identity. “Okay, look . . . ” I made an attempt to calm down, which isn’t that easy when you can smell your own piss all over you. “I can see you’re mad. But I’m pretty sure you’re confusing me with someone else. I repair computers, see. Like, when people get a computer virus, they bring it to me and I reinstall the hard drive and reboot the OS. I can do Windows, Mac, Linux—”

“Shut up! I’m not mistaking you with anyone.”

Really? Had I really done something, then? “Um . . . did I work on your computer? Can you tell me what I did to it?”

He bopped me on top of the head with his gun again. A searing pain ran down into my teeth. “See you tonight, Mr. Baker of 1453 Montana Road. Don’t let me down.” And with that, he kneed me in the side and drove the wind from me. As I fell to the floor like a sack of laundry, desperately gasping for air, I watched him saunter out through the small showroom where I sold various computer peripherals and then out the front door, the little bell over top jingling with holiday cheer. I never saw his face. All I saw was the damned cowboy hat and the gun by his side.

As my breath came back to me, I closed my eyes and began to cry. It was all over and I was still alive. Just some whacko, I thought, just some fucking nut out for a good time. Oh Christ, what a sicko. You hear about these random acts of violence in the paper and you never think it’ll happen to you. What does it all mean? How the hell did he choose me? The world is just a sick place.

The bell over the front door jingled as Kelly walked in, a MacDonald’s breakfast burrito in one hand and his laptop, in its case, in the other. Kelly was my assistant, a young man of twenty-four. He was a hell of a computer programmer, using the job I’d given him to put himself through college and get his masters in Computer Science. He was also fat and geeky as hell and hated his name. I told him Kelly was a cool name for a guy, but truth was, it was only really cool if you had the looks to go with it. Kelly did not. He looked like a pink Michelin Man.

When he saw me on the floor, he rushed over and stared down at me. “Mr. Baker? You okay?”

I grabbed the edge of the desk and hauled myself up, my breath stabilizing into a normal breathing pattern. The muscles in my abdomen were tight and throbbing and I felt like I’d be constipated for life. “I just got mugged. Call the cops, would ya?”

“Serious?” His face went slack for a moment, and then he waddled over to the phone on my desk and dialed 911. As he relayed my message to the dispatcher, I found myself staring at the photo on the desktop of my laptop. An uneasy feeling began to sweep over me as I realized two things. He’d mentioned my address (which anyone could find since my number was listed in the phone book) but even stranger, he’d known about the photo I took last week and the gun in the safe. The gun he could have guessed at—maybe—but the picture . . . how the hell had he known that? Just eight days ago my computer desktop was a big picture of a golf course in Phuket; I’d been trying to book a trip there for three years now. No one, not even Kelly, knew that I’d changed the picture on my laptop.

Kelly hung up the phone, took his own laptop bag off and set it on a chair. He glanced at my wet crotch, then back up again. “They’re on their way. Do you know who the guy was?”

“No. Not a clue.”

“Did he take anything?”

“No.” I wasn’t about to tell him what he’d demanded of me. That kind of shit was for the police.

“Did he hurt you?”

Just my pride, but again, I wasn’t gonna relay that information. “I’m fine. Couple of bumps on the head but I’ll live. Let’s get a disc ready for the cops.”

“I’m on it.” Kelly shoved the whole burrito into his mouth and then went out behind the counter in the showroom and pulled up the security camera feed on the cashier computer. I had a digital camera hidden behind a small mirror in the showroom. I watched as Kelly opened the video capture program on the screen and scrolled the time bar backwards. “There!” he said, stopping the file at the point when I could be seen opening the front door. He let the file play forward. On the screen, I came in, the man in the suit and cowboy hat behind me. He followed me toward the office and then we were both out of frame. There was no evidence of any violence.