Bastion Science Fiction Magazine - Issue 7, October 2014 (11 page)

Quinn can feel the air around them growing somehow colder, but he may be imagining it.

"I had a life. I had a purpose. I was my own person. Then I got pregnant, despite my best efforts, and my husband simply droned on and wept like a child until I thought he was right about wanting to keep it. I thought that way for nine months, until a small mewling thing that looked just like him came into the world and he expected me to care for it solely. From that moment on, my life was not my own. It became an endless parade of idiot children and grandchildren, and now, great-grandchildren. An entire brood of moronic things created by one moronic act. By my weakness. My momentary sympathies for his cretinous ways. I loathe them all."

Something sick rises in his chest at the thought of it. Something bilious and hollow that makes him think of his sister and how much he can't bring himself to hate his own family. Realizes too late his reaction to Missus Pearsson's words. He tries to hide it, tries to keep it off his face. She sees it and cocks her head to one side—a curious, weathered old magpie considering its dinner.

"Do I sound harsh to you?" she asks. "I must. But understand this: I have spent seventy years of my life watching my family grow and spread like a sickness, knowing for a fact that I was the point at which it began. Seventy good, usable years gone, and now, cancer? No. I refuse to let it end like this. I know you've read my file, Mister X, but make no mistake—there are worse cancers in my life than the one devouring my pancreas.

"Now is my chance to escape them all, forever. To become the person I was always supposed to be. The woman I was always supposed to be, free of obligation or tether. Free of all the things they shackled me to, free to pursue all the things that they took away from me. Another lifetime to finally become myself again. Which is where you come in."

He feels this ancient woman's terrible intensity, the cold fury encased in her being, and suddenly all he wants is to be gone from this place. He feels his nerves start to twitch and skitter. Everything is going wrong.

"You have to understand something about my family, however: they will never let me go. Never. Thanks very much to the codependent dynamic cultivated by my dimwit of a dead husband, they've come to rely on me for every little thing, even in my old age, and they will continue to leech mercilessly off of me until I am dead. If they discover what I've done tonight, their demands will never cease. Their children and their children's children will have another lifetime of mine to drain. So you see, a clean break is not only preferable, but necessary. They need to believe that I am truly dead and gone. Which I will be, for all intents and purposes. With your help."

"Meaning?" He knows what she's going to say, but needs to hear her say the words.

"Meaning, once I am extracted from this rotten husk, I will need you to use that knife of yours to cut its throat. I imagine the extraction leaves a specific mark of some sort on the body?"

A little spot on the back of the neck, a pinprick at best. Visible if you know what you're looking for. Like a single little track mark. He nods, though he doesn't want to. Automatic.

"I thought as much. I need you to extract me, and then, when that is finished, I need you to kill me."

"Why?"

"This was always the plan, Mister X. Not that I could explain this in my meeting with your Director, but a woman's got to have her secrets. No, it was always going to happen like this. It always had to look convincing. Or weren't you curious why you weren't given a key? Didn't you wonder why you had to use the fire escape instead of the front door?"

He doesn't say:
No
.

He wasn't. He didn't. Just another quirk. Like the howling mid-orgasm. Like crying for the dear departed daughter, alone in her bed. Just another finicky, eccentric nothing not worth paying attention to. Not worth considering. Just part of the job.

Quinn stares at this woman, hears the things she's saying, and he imagines that he is anywhere else, having any other conversation with any other person. Not being asked to carve a soon-to-be corpse like a Christmas goose. Closes his eyes in a long blink and tries to ignore the memory of another soldier on loan from another squadron, some psychopath on a savage trip, cutting up a dead body for kicks under the desert sun. How sick watching had made him. How so many of the other soldiers had cheered. He breathes, tries to calm his bad nerves, but it only half-works.

He tries to remind himself that he's here, now. He can still get out clean. Get out of the apartment. Call Management, tell them everything. Tell them to refund her money. Tell them to never send him to a job in this neighborhood again. It's enough to get him to his feet.

"Thank you for your time," he says, trying to force the nervous shake out of his voice. "Find a different operator."

"Is that what I'll have to do? Why not you?"

"Not a killer," he says.

"I'm sorry, Mister X," she says, "but I'm afraid that's not up to you."

She casts the blankets off herself—underneath, she's totally nude, her body wrinkled and angular and withered. Quinn's first response is to avert his eyes, but then he hears her shriek:

"RALPHY! RALPHY, HELP! HELP YOUR GRAMMA! THERE'S A MAN IN HERE! HE'S HURTING ME, RAPLHY!"

She's still smiling at Quinn when, moments later, the young man bursts through the bedroom door, swinging a baseball bat.

Quinn only has time to think,
she lied
, before everything goes to hell.

#

It's hard for Quinn to say exactly what happens next. A lot of things happen at the same time, but as best he understands, it's like this:

The young man, screaming
"Gramma!"
bursts through the door with the bat raised, and the old woman flops back on the bed, screaming nonsense syllables of feigned anguish. Quinn is already dropping the SCED and moving toward the young man, inside the swing of the bat to minimize any possible damage.

The bat glances off his shoulder, and pain blooms there like a lotus. His hand goes inside his left coat pocket. Comes out holding the knife. A flick of the wrist, and the blade swings out and locks in place. The only thing he can think is
danger danger, threat
.

Acting on instinct, stress, fear complex, whatever, Quinn crossbars his forearm into the young man's throat and jams the knife through his chest, just underneath the xiphoid process and up into his heart. The young man goes stiff as wood, then stops breathing. Quinn feels a hot wetness on the back of his hand. Pulls the knife out. The boy drops. On instinct, Quinn steps away from the pooling blood on the carpet.

On the bed, swaddled in the covers once more, the old woman is laughing.

"Perfect," she says between chuckles. "Just wonderful. My lord. You're better than my surgical oncologist. Thank you for that. Dreadful boy." She sighs. "Well. That went even better than expected. You are quite good at what you do, Mister X. When they find him, and this former body of mine, they'll have to assume it was the work of some random malefactor. Well done."

He stares at her. She doesn't understand. She doesn't even notice, for a moment. When she does, though: "Are you quite all right?"

"No." He kneels. Picks up the SCED. Tries to wipe the blood off on his coat. Only half-successful. "Didn't need to happen."

"Unfortunately, it did. You see, he paid me a visit yesterday afternoon, my moron grandson. I fell asleep, and the selfish little lout took it upon himself to snoop around, looking for money or some similar such. He happened upon my copies of the extraction agreement. The papers. He
knew
. He would have told
everyone
. He asked me about it, naturally. Fortunately, I was able to convince him that my extraction wasn't scheduled for another two weeks. He was never much of a reader. Asked him to stay the night. Promised him I would explain everything in the morning, after a good night's sleep. He believed me, and went to sleep like a good boy. Perfect timing, really. I almost couldn't believe my luck.

"So, no. It couldn't be avoided. I'm sorry for deceiving you, but it was necessary to secure my future. My
great escape
. You must understand that. Don't you? This was always the plan, to cover my tracks like this, but a botched home invasion, especially one with so much, what's the term?
Collateral damage
? It's so much more convincing than
Gramma got sliced up alone
or, even worse,
Gramma got herself downloaded and vanished.
Things are so much more permanent this way. We're really quite lucky, when you think of it like that."

He looks at her. "Sure."

She smiles again. Genuinely. Honestly. Like a grandmother would.

"I'm glad to hear it. Well. Shall we get on with our work, then?"

Quinn looks down at the dead boy on the floor. No older than seventeen. Seventeen forever.

Quinn thinks,
all he wanted was to protect his gramma
. He died thinking that he was doing the right thing by her. A woman who hated him on an existential, genetic level. Quinn doesn't know if the kid was good or bad, or just sort of both like almost everyone else in the world. It doesn't matter now. All those potentials reduced to a zero. All thanks to a piece of sharp metal stuck into his heart. Thanks to him. Thanks to her.

He looks up at her again.

Alma Pearsson, age 91. Great-grandmother. Client number whatever-it-doesn't-matter-anyway.

Terminal.

"Sure," he says. "Turn around." She does. "Pull your hair away from your neck." She does that, too.

He stands at the side of her bed, thumbing the sweet spot where her neck meets her head meets her brain stem. Like a surgeon, or a lover.

"You really should tell me your name," she says, rolling her neck against his touch. "After I get my new body, maybe I'll let you take me out for dinner and maybe a little extra something. You know. As a thank you."

"Sure."

"So? What is it, handsome?"

He thinks about it. Feels his stress, his fear, his anger buzzing through his body like a series of rough electric arcs.

"Quinn," he finally says.

"I like that name," she tells him. The smell of her is overpowering.

He doesn't say anything.

"You sure this isn't going to hurt?" she asks.

Only if I do it wrong
, he thinks.

"Quinn? Did you hear me? Is it going to hurt?"

He puts the tip of his open knife against the sweet spot.

He does it wrong.

#

Outside, the night air is cool bordering on cold. He's sitting out on the fire escape waiting for a panic attack that hasn't come yet. He keeps thinking about the kid. The look of surprise on his face when the knife bit into his heart. The way he hit the floor right after. The way it made him feel, taking away all those tomorrows. The way he knew exactly what he had to do to fix it.

Quinn doesn't know if what happened after made it right, balanced the cosmic scales, or if it just made more mayhem. But it feels good to regret something instead of letting that something drown him. Normally, he'd get on with trying to forget this. But this isn't normal.

He's done a lot of terrible things in his life. Tonight, he only did one.

He's not having a panic attack, he just feels awful.

And for now, that's okay. Everything is okay.

Inside his coat, his phone begins to buzz. He fishes it out and punches Answer.

"Quinn."

"Operator, are you anywhere near the client's home?"

He doesn't pause, not even to think. "Negative, Management. Ran into traffic. Why?"

"She just went flatline," the voice on the other end says.

"You sure?"

"We're sure. She's gone."

"Alright," says Quinn. Then, "Am I being reassigned?"

"Looks like there is one job open. Crosstown. Operator called in sick. Yours if you want it."

"I'll take it. What's the timetable?"

"Scheduled extraction at... six AM sharp. Can you make that?"

"Easy," he tells them. "Send me the details." Snaps the phone shut. Pockets it again.

Three hours to kill.

Plenty of time to clean himself up.

Plenty of time to remember.

###

Matthew Lyons is a writer living in New York City with his wife, where he works in corporate advertising to support his pathologically unsafe spending and drinking habits. He is unquestionably a danger to himself, others, and his marriage, and he must be stopped at all costs. Join in the fight against this monster at
twitter.com/goddamnlyons
.

Bastion Science Fiction Magazine is an imprint of Bastion Press, releasing original works ranging in length from 1,000 to 5,000 words on the first of every month. As a new publication, our success rests on you, the reader. We do our part to put together the very best stories we can find, and continued growth and stability depends on the support of our readers. If you enjoyed this issue, please consider purchasing copies of additional issues. Word of mouth is also vital, so please tell your friends about us. Finally, donations are welcome as well and go directly to funding payments for our authors. You can read about all this and more at
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