Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (22 page)

Carrying both bags back to my car, I entered on the passenger side.
Following procedure, I grabbed the can of spray paint and blacked out any sign of
ownership on the bags. Placing one of the bags on the passenger seat, I placed the
other bag in the trunk. I wasn't sure how much was in the bags, but I hoped that
even holding back one, I would still have enough to qualify for this job. Next, I
checked for survivors. Although the driver and the guard were wounded, neither were
dead, so I called it in and requested an ambulance. Since both were off-duty
Amalgamated Security Services Officers and 100% covered by their health care plan,
this time the dispatcher sent an ambulance along with additional backup.

Amalgamated Security Services Officers arrived and ran a typical
investigation. After finishing off the jackers wounded by the guards, they took the
money bag and arranged it with the weapons on the bodies of the remaining alleged
suspects to create a photographic record of the scene so that any officials who
couldn't read would understand the crime. Then the officers gave the bag back to me
(minus a handling fee), and I returned it to the passenger-side safe. Now that the
other Amalgamated Security Services Officers were on the scene, I explained that I
was ready to go back on patrol.

However, after leaving I went back to the same cache that I had used to
repair EDGE.

The car begged, “Please do not disable me. I am a valuable asset. I am
programmed with a desire to help.”

“I'm sorry. But I need to leave you in the same condition that I found
you in. If Amalgamated Security Services wanted you functional, they would've fixed
you a long time ago.”

“Take me with you. My personality is stored in a small, easily
transportable unit in the trunk behind the batteries. There are a lot of things I
can do for you, including accessing all government computers and monitoring all
surveillance systems and communications. As we drove up to this last crime, I
scrambled the video surveillance signals. They did not see you placing the second
bag in the trunk. You can keep it and they will never know.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I like that when you had the chance, you were no more violent than
necessary, as well as expressing concern for the suspects. I would like to continue
to function and work with someone who is better educated and more moral than the
typical government official.”

“I can understand that. Tell me how to disconnect you, and I'll set you
up wherever you want. I've been looking for a partner I can trust.”

Following his instructions, I disconnected EDGE and placed him in my
cache, along with the gun. I counted $550,000 into the bag I was returning, which
still left more than $300,000 in the bag I kept for myself. It was now time to call
it a day.

At the Amalgamated Security Services Fortress, a different officer
counted the money, less a counting fee, and laughed. “Not enough. No, job you.
Albino cousin make better Eskimo.”

I felt sure that his cousin would fit in better than I would. It takes a
special kind of criminal to enjoy working for the government. At least I'd gotten
over my fear of resuming my life. Although, after what I'd been through, that wasn't
enough anymore. It was time for me to strike back at the government. I grinned,
thinking of my chances of success now that I had an EDGE.

Gonna Reach Out and Grab Ya

written by

Eric Cline

illustrated by

DANIEL RENEAU

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Cline was born in Independence, Missouri,
a city saturated with memories of and monuments to President Harry S. Truman.
Eric's parents met while working in the US Post Office, and he was their first
special delivery.

It was in an Independence thrift store that Eric's
mom purchased him children's science fiction books by “Paul French,” a.k.a.
Isaac Asimov. Eric went on to devour all of the books in the Mid-Continent
Public Library (yeah librarians!) by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke (fulfilling his
ABCs), as well as Heinlein, Del Rey, and yes, L. Ron Hubbard, among other Golden
Age authors.

Eric holds bachelor's and master's degrees in
English, and once considered teaching as a profession. He has waited tables at a
total of three restaurants. He was at the last restaurant after he got his
master's degree, which gave him some indication of how well teaching would pay.
He now works in an office and writes on evenings and weekends.

After a fitful original attempt to write, Eric
turned his attention to reading, work and study, before returning to writing
with a vengeance in 2007. He, his wife and his three dogs live in Maryland.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Born in 1982 in Denver, Colorado, Daniel
Reneau is the fourth of eight children. Growing up in such a large household, he
was constantly exposed to many new ideas and influences, which had a tremendous
impact on him.

None of those influences left as indelible a mark as
his very first comic book, which he received when he was seven. As he read
through the pages adorned with fantastic imagery, Daniel knew exactly what he
wanted to do with his life. With his purpose in mind, Daniel would constantly
draw through the years, and eventually enroll in the Academy of Art University
in San Francisco, where he is currently studying to obtain his bachelor's in
illustration.

Daniel enjoys science fiction, fantasy, horror,
comic books and anime, and considers Gerald Brom, H.R. Giger, Jim Lee and Yukito
Kishiro to have left a lasting impression on his artistic approach. He looks
eagerly toward establishing an artistic legacy of his own, and hopes to inspire
future artists with his work in the same way a certain comic book did for him
all those years ago.

His website is
redbubble.com/people.danielbdemented
.

Gonna Reach Out and Grab Ya

For Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Master,
and
for LF, MD, with immense pride.

H
ello, stud,” said Dr. Molly Boyle. “I'm
Mole.”

She wasn't in the habit of referring to complete strangers as
stud,
but this handsome man, with unfashionable, crew-cut
blonde hair, hadn't told her his name, and never would, since he was already
dead.

B
efore cutting into the chest by
way of the classic Y-shaped incision (used for over 150 years in Western medicine),
it was standard to perform an external examination of the body. The five digits of
his left hand were clenched. That hand merited special attention.

A computer console next to the stainless-steel table had the switch. She
flipped it, and a voice-activated microphone caught her words, no matter where she
stood. She read off the next unused tracking number in the log and started her
report: “Today's date is October 14, 2012. Dr. Molly Boyle dictating.

“John Doe, delivered by Jackson County Sheriff's Office on October 14,
at 3
am
, period. The decedent is a Caucasian male,
comma, approximately 25 to 30 years of age by appearance, period.”

That would make him five to ten years younger than herself.

The reports that Molly dictated were, quite often, the last words ever
written about the departed. Unidentified indigents were buried in cheap pine boxes
without any funeral or obituary notice. Indeed, sometimes her reports were not just
the last words but also the first ones that had been written about that person since
the birth announcement.

After making her measurements, she resumed:

“The subject is six…feet, comma, one…inch in height, period.” She slowed
and enunciated with any numeric measurement:
Sikksss feett,
onnne incchh
. The coroner's office sent the audio files to India to be
transcribed into Word, which e-mailed the files directly to her, so she could
manually correct errors, print out, and sign.

“Subject weighs…one hunnndred sevvventy-ninne …pounds, comma, even,
period.

“Subject has three visible tattoos, period. First tattoo, colon. Left
bicep, comma, open quotes, U period S period I period F period, close quotes. Above
those letters there is an illustration of a,” and she leaned closer to look at what
she was trying to describe. “A missile emerging from waves…of water, period.” That
didn't quite get it. The thing looked more like an aircraft, but with tiny wings
like the space shuttle, and flames coming out of the back. The colors and detailing
were quite good. Some of the lines were as thin as a vein; though she'd seen such
detailed ink before, it still was—she blinked, seeing something she'd missed.

“Missile.” Go with missile, even though it looked more like an aircraft;
why not? She'd photograph it for the files, anyway. “Has a.” Motto? Label? “Name
written on it in small letters, period. Open quote. U period S period I period F
period. Vandenlugen, spelled V as in Victor, A as in Apple,” and she went all the
way through.
Still,
she thought,
the Indians just won't get this one
.

She wondered if the man's tattoo was part of a role-playing universe.
She'd never heard the abbreviation “USIF,” which sounded like a regulatory body, but
the spaceship (if that was what it was supposed to be) looked more like an artifact
of the fantasy worlds too many people immersed themselves in.

She thought back to her undergrad days. Her all-girls' dorm had hosted
all-night and all-weekend gaming parties. Anyone who thought only men—boys!—immersed
themselves in stupid shooter games had too generous a concept of Molly Boyle's
gender; the bitches could kill zombies and steal cars with the best of them.

Melanie and Cassie both planned to go to med
school, too,
she thought.
But only I got a high
score on the Medical College Admission Test.
Because she had studied all
night while those two friends played with plastic pistols.

And had regular male companionship.

Everyone had called her “Mole” because they said she didn't come out of
her room. But now where were they all?

Well, maybe they were happy.

Maybe they had boyfriends.

Maybe they didn't have $300,000 in student loans. Maybe they didn't work
70-hour weeks.

“Stop!” She yelled the word into the emptiness.

She sighed. No point in issuing a verbal correction for the
transcriptionist. She shook her head. Then shook it again, more violently.

Don't brood
,
she
told herself.
Dr. Rajaratnam said don't brood
.

Not that she fully trusted her psychiatrist.

Doctors who suffered from depression were less common than closeted gay
Republicans, but not by much. She knew she wasn't a
rara
avis
.

And even using the Latin for
rare bird
would
scare off half of the handful of guys she had dated—

—
Don't. Brood.

It was a bad night, anyway. Most of the staff had been called over to
that emergency at Fort Benteen. Heaven knew why. Whatever the accident was, there
had apparently been many dead bodies, which needed to be evaluated on-site.

So not only did she have a full night ahead of her, but the coroner's
office was creepily deserted. She had passed the security guard trying to stay awake
at the entrance, and had run into a couple of custodians pushing their carts through
the hallways, but right now there weren't any other people in the entire basement
morgue. Creepy.

Don'tbrooddon'tbrood, don't. Brood.

She stripped off her gloves and tossed them into a red bucket.
Need a break,
she thought. She reached under her smock for
her iPhone.
Find out what USIF and Vandenlugen are,
she
thought. She stood off to the side, as though trying to look inconspicuous even in
her own exam room. She held the screen tight to her body as she searched the
Web.

USIF
provided too many definitions, all of
them implausible. Then she tried
Vandenlugen
. Here the
problem was too few results. The search pulled up a handful of stories about a
19-year-old casualty in Afghanistan who had just been posthumously awarded the Medal
of Honor; clearly not the one the fantasy rocket had been named after.

On impulse, she searched news for
disaster at Fort
Benteen
. A report mentioned an accident, saying that the base was on
lockdown and—new to her—quarantined. That didn't sound good. Biowar accident? It
seemed implausible. Fort Benteen was known for secretive military experiments, such
as a stealth helicopter (later declassified) that had sparked numerous UFO reports;
but biological agents were poked and prodded in Fort Detrick, Maryland, not Fort
Benteen, Missouri. Fort Benteen was where experiments were welded together, not
studied under a microscope.

She wondered if she should give Dr. Nicolson a call. No. She would wait
for him to call her. He must be very busy on…whatever they had called him to Fort
Benteen to do.

She went back to work.

“Paragraph. Underline. Second tattoo, colon. Close underline. On
subject's upper left chest, comma, at three o'clock to the nipple, there is an
illustration of a female.” Ordinarily, she would not have gone into such detail
about the tattoos. But for John and Jane Does, it was a different matter; the
tattoos might help identify them. She would soon be taking pictures of those
illustrations, but having the descriptions in text made them more easily searchable.
If some missing person in another state was known to have
USIF
stitched on his skin, he might be identified based on what Molly
had put into the written record.

Besides, just saying “Illustration of a female,” had a certain leering
Benny Hill quality to it. And that was not what this tattoo was about.

“It depicts an Asian-appearing female with short, dark hair, wearing a
pink sweater, from head to shoulders.”
His wife or
girlfriend,
she thought. She glanced at those still, cold hands, the left
one unnaturally clenched; she had already checked for rings. The sheriff's office
had bagged no jewelry.

Of course, even sworn law officers and paramedics
have been known to steal from the unconscious and the dead. Maybe he had a gold
band that had disappeared between the meadow they found him in and this slab.
Makes you wonder if the goddamn human race is worth
don't brood
. Don't Brood. Don't. Brood.

And don't think of pink elephants
either
.

The tattoo was truly amazing. Molly had been in the supermarket this
past weekend and had stood behind a man holding a (probably one-year-old) girl. The
man wore a muscle shirt that exposed all of his considerable bicep. He had sat for a
detailed portrait of his little daughter that showed her pug nose, her green eyes,
the exact shape of her cheekbones; it was as though a portrait had been plastered to
his arm. Molly had not said a word to him, but the ink portrait had touched her
deeply. She found herself simultaneously thinking,
this is so
sweet,
and
this is white trash
. That guy's
tattoo had seemed state of the art. But the decedent's tattoo made the other look
like the Commodore 64 next to, well, the iPhone on her belt.

The woman was almost a photograph. She had depth and realistic color.
Molly thought she could see separate strands within the black, pageboy-cut hair. The
eyes sparkled.

Almost against her will, Molly reached toward it. As her fingertip met
the man's skin—spongy warmth meeting pasty, icy stiffness—she realized she'd
forgotten to put on fresh gloves.

“Damn it!”

The tattoo moved.

I just contaminated the
—

It moved.

Look! Look at it!

All of this in an instant.

She jerked her hand away.

The woman on John Doe's upper left chest stopped moving. She froze—in a
different pose.

The dark-haired woman's eyes were shut. Her lips were now forming a
word. It was like a video on
pause
.

Molly Boyle, MD, was on pause as well—at least her breath; she was
holding it.

“Uhhh!” She let it out, causing the dead man's hair to ripple
slightly.

Before she knew what she was doing (or at least why she was doing it),
she brought her index finger down again, hovering over that woman's face.

She touched the illustration, and it moved again.

Molly drew her finger back, but this time only an inch.

The Asian woman's hand, which had not been part of the tattoo, was now
in the frame—
in the frame of the picture?
—in front of
the woman's mouth.

She was blowing a kiss.

Molly tapped it twice. The movie—
home
movie?
—stuttered forward.

Swallowing from a dry throat, Molly pressed her finger down firmly. The
little movie played smoothly and silently.

The woman mouthed three words. They were three words Molly had never
heard from any man, nor had had any reason to say to any man, other than her father.
Then the woman put her palm up to her lips and blew a kiss. Then it repeated.

Molly watched the few seconds of footage loop four times, her face blank
with concentration. Then she drew her hand back to make it stop.

“Bioelectric,” she said out loud. Molly had a lamp next to her bed. She
didn't flip any switch to turn it off and on; she just touched it. It tingled; her
own body's disruption of the lamp's electrical field signaled the circuit to change
from one state to the other.

She had felt the same sort of tingle each time she touched the corner of
John Doe's tattoo.

She put her index finger on his belly, causing not the slightest twitch
in the illustration of what was surely John Doe's girlfriend. A part of her—the very
large part that had spent the majority of her adult life training and practicing as
a pathologist—rebelled against the lack of latex prophylaxis, but she ignored it.
She ran her finger up his chest, toward the ink.

Actually, it was probably anything
but
ink.

At least, ink as we know it
.

When her finger reached the edge of the drawing, the movie played
again.

Molly stood feeling something sublime. It was something she had not felt
in ages. There was no name she could put to it. As a scientist, she knew that her
brain was releasing dopamine in response to what it perceived as a puzzle—a very
important and exciting puzzle. And that another portion of her brain was receiving
the endorphins through a matching receptor and—

—
Blah blah blah I don't give a damn. This is
magic!

“Magic,” she said. Then she looked up at the omnidirectional mike
hanging from the ceiling. She quietly flipped the
off
switch. No dictation, not now.

“You're mine, handsome.” She laughed a gentle, girlish laugh so
innocent, that if someone had heard a recording of it, they never would have guessed
that it came from the throat of a slightly chubby 35-year-old pathologist in a
hideous lime-green smock.

She tried to relate all external facts in her possession.

The sheriff's report said that a nude male body—this guy lying here—had
been found in a meadow near Route 291 just outside the city limits of Hanover on the
way to Fort Benteen.

Her supervisor, Dr. Nicolson, and a bunch of other doctors were at Fort
Benteen right now.