Dues of Mortality (2 page)

The
timer was at three seconds.

For
the second time in his life, Stanley felt the presence of divinity
that had told him to say “I love you” to Dolores, leaving
her, looking like a deer in the headlights.

He
turned his head as if someone were in the room with him and said,
“Boy, I sure hope nobody else gets hurt.”

Cleveland, Ohio, August 25,
3:16 a.m.

Xavier
gazed into the heart of the burning streetlight above his head in a
lame attempt at some ad hoc, sadomasochistic ritual. He had a
destination all squared out, but could only remember that this wasn't
it. A half-minute was about all he could endure, before he looked
back at the duplex, trying to blink away the light's dancing imprint.
The horrific eyesore of an abandoned home had seemed to just
materialize under the brim of Granddad Willie’s old baseball
cap as Xavier wandered the streets of a particularly gritty section
of East Cleveland. The first thing he noticed was how the bricked
concrete steps leading to its porch were cracked in a way that
resembled tiers of giant teeth smiling back at him. There wasn’t
a single square inch of paint that wasn’t chipped or peeling,
and every window on the bottom apartment had been boarded-over with
sheets of compressed wood.
Perfect
,
he thought as he tossed back a shot of gin from his old stainless
steel flask, flexing his jaw on the swallow. He then tucked it back
into his jacket pocket and marched to the rear of the house.

Xavier
found the back door to the house completely unobstructed and breathed
a sigh of relief. Earlier, he'd tripped over his own feet and smacked
his face on the gummy ground outside the liquor store.
He
was reticent
to attempt anything that demanded genuine
athleticism. He was as quiet as he could be, despite the minimal risk
concerning noise. Many of the surrounding homes were, as well, vacant
and the ones that weren't likely contained folks who were dead asleep
or just wouldn't care. It took him almost ten minutes to divorce the
stubborn door from its jamb. With a few good kicks and the unwitting
aid of a heavy branch from a blown over tree, he considered it record
time.

Once
inside, Xavier surveyed the first floor as best he could through the
combination of murky space and drunken stupor. The road-mapped
ceilings ran brown with water stains and scraps of old wallpaper
formed curls of striped leaflets desperate to escape the remains of
plaster. The parquet floors creaked ominously under his feet. They
were shy a few boards in some spots, so he had to watch his step. If
he wasn't careful, he could easily discover a ten-foot drop to the
basement. A damp musty stench clung in the air—a mélange
of rotted wood and rat droppings that bombarded him with all the
mercy of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.

“
In
a world of shit now,” he said, and segued seamlessly between
chuckling and gagging.

Then
Xavier felt the wave wash upward and he began to sweat. What it had
taken to get inside would not be without a price. Dropping to his
knees and leaning over one of the larger holes in the floor, he
heaved violently; his eyes nearly spurting from their sockets. Echoes
of vomit splashing against the basement's cement reminded him of
frying bacon, which added an extra wring in the pit of his stomach.
Afterward, empty and exhausted, a dry corner of the room appeared to
him like a blissful desert oasis. He crawled over and crumpled into
it with the wispiness of a dust bunny, in hopes that tomorrow’s
sunrise would be kind enough to pass him by.

****

“
Hold it!” the voice
exploded. It cut through Xavier’s short hours of heavy slumber
like a jackhammer through concrete. During the night, wood rot had
claimed a victim among the boarded windows and the sounds tailed in
on the morning breeze.

“
I
said hold it, you little shit!”

The
voice made Xavier’s head feel like a basketball being dribbled
down court. He warily pushed himself to his feet and stumbled over to
the sounds of running footfalls along the side of the house. Looking
down, out of the window, he spotted the frame of a boy—adolescent,
twelve, maybe thirteen. The kid was zipping through the small
alleyway between the house and the old brick building next door. To
the rear of the building, a trash dumpster gave the boy the barest
pause as he lobbed something into it. He then spring-boarded for the
chain-link fence that divided the property from the adjacent street.
A misshapen piece of fencing caught the hem of the boy's pant-leg
like a bear trap, and it wasn’t long before a huffing, burly
policeman had his prey by the scruff of the neck. The instant Xavier
saw the police uniform he plunked beneath the window and peered
cautiously over the sill.

“
Little
bastard,” the policeman said. He was panting uncontrollably,
angry as hell that the youngster had incurred such extreme physical
exertion. “Bet if I broke your legs you’d think twice
about running!”

“
Fuck
you, man,” the boy hollered back. “I ain’t do
nothing!”

Xavier
watched as the boy was carted away. He was grateful that he hadn’t
been spotted by the uniform. He’d already filled his weekly
quota of dirty looks from suburbanite cops with hard-ons for the
homeless. He had yet to actually be dragged in and had resolved to
keep it that way. Though he had been pretty badly rousted and even
shoved around a few times by the worst of the bunch.
Those
jerks never learn
, he thought. One would think the
corruption scandals would have straightened them out, but if
anything, they were just taking out their added frustration on people
like him. He supposed he could take more care not to
look
so much the part, for all the good it would do. But then he'd think,
why bother
? His
boyish head-turning features and wavy black locks were long gone and
the hassle to restore even a hair's worth of them was beyond
pointless. Easier to stick with the drawn sullen mugshot it had taken
him over a year to perfect. Xavier zipped up his dirty blue flight
jacket, and rubbed a knee through his stained khakis. He flattened a
foot against the floor and pulled at the flap of sole from its worn
boot. He stayed put until the boy had been thrown into the back of a
squad car and the policeman had driven away. Once the coast was clear
he headed downstairs and outside to the alley.

With
all his time on the street, dumpster diving had never been much
Xavier's style. However, the kid had tossed away
something
he didn't want the cop to find on him. That could mean valuable. It
could mean a few pints of the good stuff for a change. As he sifted
through the mess of things he deemed best left unidentified, he soon
found what he was looking for wrapped in an old copy of
National
World Weekly
—a tabloid often better for crude
insulation and toilet paper than reading. How it made enough money to
still justify paper copy, he’d never understand. He extracted
the bundle and unwrapped two specific pieces of indictable boodle.
The first was an old .38 caliber revolver, nickle-plated with a
bulldog grip. No different than the one that belonged to his
grandfather as Xavier recalled. When he was eight, Granddad Willie
caught him playing with it following a fishing expedition through the
downstairs pantry.
It was the only time the old
man ever got mad at him.

Xavier
threw open the gun's cylinder and saw five Smith & Wesson bullet
rims staring back at him along with one empty chamber.
This
piece wouldn’t even scare off a schoolyard bully
, he
thought. Modifiable magnetic accelerator guns—or MAGs as they
were often called—were the standard weapons of choice between
your average street punks and gang members these days. If the kid
ever got into a shootout, he might as well be packing a squirt gun.
The other item in the wrapping was an oddly-shaped piece of metal
with a cylindrical stem, roughly three inches long. It was an
automatic powered lockpick—a handy little gadget, incorporated
with a series of individual rotors and upgradeable software designed
to simultaneously decode an interior locking matrix. It literally
made the correct key, electronic or otherwise from inside the lock.
The kid probably had an apprenticeship with a local crew. Those punks
had gotten awfully organized in the past few years, co-opting tricks
of the trade from the pros and fortifying themselves with ex-gang
muscle. They’d committed a shitload of high-scoring robberies
and had every homeowner in the tristate area cashing out their kids’
college funds for security upgrades. Xavier weighed the idea of using
it, and then pictured himself getting shot by a retired investment
broker’s twenty one-year-old trophy wife. Regardless, he
pocketed the items and headed back into the house. At least, now, he
might have
something
that could defend him from his next unwelcome encounter with
sobriety.

Washington, D.C., August 25,
8:13 a.m.

As
Isaac made his way to the senator's office, the echoing webscreens
drowned out any hope he had of not having to cancel his date with
Vera Stucky from the secretarial pool. The entire country was either
waking up to the smell of fresh brewed coffee and or the frantic news
flash about MIT. Isaac pinched his nose. The camarilla of corporate
news heads would just love to stamp this one on Beaumont's Washington
time-sheet. In the last three months, the senator had been firing
some real curveballs at the biotechs—just getting back into
shape after recovering from rumors of his indirect ties to Chad
Maguire and his delinquent son; to accuse the senator of spurring on
these attacks would make for blockbuster ratings. To his credit,
Isaac had had Beaumont mostly steering clear of the more “few
rounds shy of a full clip” theories, until Beaumont proved that
a number of insurance companies were selling their genetic stock from
coverage exams. Although it wasn’t in the realm of little green
men infiltrating Capitol Hill—or worse, Wall Street—it
had managed to add some buoyancy to his assertions of technology run
amok. Antiglobalization, corporate plutocracy and radical
environmentalism were all
big
issues inciting
small
minds. But
none
matched the painful growth spurt of biotechnology and its detractors.
The duplicating technologies of the already rife biotech firms made
them monsters, omnivorous moneymakers, and on average, they were
being hit three to four times a year. And, yes, many had significant
financial relationships with higher education. But, until now, no one
had had the stones to actually hit a
school
—
let
alone the likes of an MIT.
This
would change things
, Isaac thought.

In
his prime, Shane Beaumont had made a name for himself as a staunch
liberal activist and cutthroat attorney, honing a reputation for
being the steel thorn in the side of big business. He'd won more
billion dollar judgments on behalf of the American consumer than any
attorney in history. Given that he maintained this
unique
integrity, even post the formative years of his Washington career,
Isaac was fairly confident that, press-wise, he could keep things to
a dull roar both coming and going. Unfortunately, with the incidences
of domestic terrorism having nearly doubled in the last five years,
the
public
was really
jonesing for a scapegoat. Nothing like a casserole of rising ocean
levels, corporate crime, and easier access to bomb-making materials
to bring out the worst in people.

Issac
paused just short of the senator's office door as a volley of
beltway-style profanities resounded from inside. “Fuck! That
little cowboy pecker-wood son-of-a...”, he heard...and then
thought,
Oh that's right, this
could be another public opinion windfall for the president
.
He pinched his lip, deciding to delay his entry until the all-clear.
That reminds me I need to grab
some ibuprofen on the way home tonight.
He
sighed into a hand as the cursing of the president’s name
continued to eat a hole through the office door.

Almost
three years ago, Pharmaceutical, health insurance, and biotech
company dollars had landed the president on the White House lawn like
fresh puppy poop. Beaumont knew drilling through the brickwork of
corporate money that had achieved such an end wouldn't exactly be a
walk in the park. Goodness knows it was proving next to impossible on
the Hill. However, in spite of such powerful and often cantankerous
opposition, Beaumont kept his fingers crossed, as there were swirling
press rumors that had the president being advised to temporarily
scratch his biotech campaign contributors from his Christmas list.
The low tide of re-election would rise to a tsunami before long, and
an act of selfless defiance might serve to undo the reputation of
pandering and corporate ass-kissing, which his democratic opponents
were using to frame their campaigns—a task which had only
gotten easier in the years following the election. Just weeks into
the new administration, a Boston-based biotech company, ArtiGen, was
accused of illegally cloning a human. The reproduced child was
rumored to have suffered massive physical complications and ensuing
ailments that eventually led to his death. Yet, for every such
sensational account nipping at the heels of the growing biotechs,
their egregious expansion never waned. The ubiquitous entities had an
addictive stock appeal that nurtured a love/hate relationship among
the public and as much as that fact may have worked in Beaumont’s
favor, it made a dead security guard at MIT the
last
thing he needed.