Executioner's Lament

by Justin Rishel

  Soon, he saw emptiness, literal emptiness. The yawning emptiness of the Great Atrium below him. He was floating in the center of the great cylinder of air.

  Was he still falling? Was time arrested for him as his death raced toward him? Would he spend eternity watching his end come frame by frame?

  Something against his face convinced him he was no longer falling. He managed to twist his head and felt a scratch against his cheek. With all the will he could muster he lifted his neck and head. He was laying in the middle of a nest. No. A rope ladder. Some patchwork of white and green material stretched across the atrium and somehow, Aubrey had managed to find it.

  His body was stuck like a fly in a web. And like a fly, he couldn’t move if he wanted to. And he was fine with not moving. He was happy to wait for help and in the meantime, he’d get a little rest.

  31

  Rest for the Weary

  Aubrey didn’t know how long he’d been unconscious. When he opened his eyes, he was on his back staring at a gray ceiling. White tubes of light rushed by overhead. His eyelids were heavy. The world winked in and out of view as he strained to stay awake and alert.

  A voice next to him spoke, “We’ll get him stabilized for travel. Then, he’ll get in a drone and fly back to the city for further treatment.”

  His head rolled toward the voice. A man in a white lab coat, a doctor’s coat, walked along beside him.

  Another voice. “Thank you, doctor,” said a woman from somewhere over his shoulder.

  “Will you be meeting him there? I can have a passenger drone sent to take you,” said the doctor.

  “No. Too much to do here.”

  Aubrey knew the voice. He tried to raise his hand to get their attention, but all his energy was only sufficient enough to lift one finger. It did the trick.

  “He’s waking.” The woman came into view. Platinum hair, black cloak. Francesca. “Hello, Martin. They’re going to take care of you and get you back to a hospital in the city.”

  He tried to speak. He had a question about someone. Someone he’d been thinking about. His lips moved but the words were stubborn, refusing to leave his throat.

  Francesca’s head bent closer, turning her ear toward him.

  “Malina,” he said in barely in a whisper.

  “She’s going to be fine. She’ll be on her way to the city also.”

  “R-ru-ru …”

  Francesca’s face fell. Her eyes filled with sadness. She shook her head.

  Aubrey felt his finger fall. He couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer and the light vanished.

  * * *

  June 17, 2043—One week after the riot

  Malina Maddox sat at a table in the back corner of Le Grind Coffee. Her hoodie pulled over her head, she watched the entrance of the coffee shop. It was late in the day so customer traffic was light. The baristas busied themselves cleaning tables, restocking the pastry display, and surfing their devices.

  She was one of four customers seated in the long narrow shop. While the other customers’ heads were buried in their computers or tablets, Malina’s was stock still, waiting and watching. The sound of ceramic cups clinked against a granite countertop. An espresso machine hissed. The faint sound of easy listening music bled through speakers somewhere overhead. She heard all this, but her focus was singular—the door.

  When Desmond Varela’s face appeared in the oval window of Le Grind’s front door, she tensed. Would he do it?

  Desmond stepped inside, looked around for a moment, then spotted her. His face was blank when he sat down across from her, adjusting his tweed jacket as he did.

  He cleared his throat.

  “I have to admit, I was surprised to hear from you.” He scanned the shop as if checking for anyone in earshot. “I’m the one who seeks you out. Usually, I’m the one who needs something from you. Now, it seems you need me.”

  “Yes, well, we all need people, don’t we?” She slid a small square of paper across the table. He took it. “Memorize these. You’re not leaving here with them.” On the scrap of paper, she’d written a pass code for access to a digital dead drop on the web.

  Desmond nodded slowly as his eyes took in the numbers. Folding the paper and passing it back to Malina, he said, “What will I find there and what am I supposed to do with it?”

  Ignoring the first question, she said, “I need you to write a story.”

  * * *

  “Do you think he’ll do it?” Martin Aubrey asked Malina as she handed him a coffee in a paper cup. He removed the lid and blew on the surface of the hot liquid.

  She looked back in the direction of Le Grind, two blocks from the street corner where they stood. Squinting against the sun of late day, she said, “This story will define his legacy. He’ll do it.”

  “And he’ll leave us out of it?”

  She smiled. “I left a little Easter egg in the dead drop so he knows what will happen if he reveals his sources. A little something to remind him of what we can dig up when properly motivated.”

  Aubrey sipped his coffee, savoring the bitter, earthy flavor.

  “Did you see the news this morning?” she asked.

  He nodded. Three more children had been found with BSS. Triplets whose mother had been Vice President of product development at Ventana, Inc.

  “This will help,” she said, pointing a thumb back toward the coffee shop. “People will know what’s really happening, they can stop taking Zentransa, and the doctors can finally look into the real cause instead of flying blind looking for cures in all the wrong places.”

  “Yeah.” Aubrey was unsure of how to feel. What he and Malina had uncovered would certainly make a difference, but was it enough? Or was it too late?

  “So, why don’t you want credit for any of this?” She punched his arm playfully. “None of this would be possible without you. Even if they can’t cure BSS, they can prevent it now. Why don’t you want people to know it was you?”

  He smiled at her. “Why don’t you want credit?”

  She smiled back. “I’m off the grid and want to keep it that way.”

  He tilted his head back and looked at the sky. “If I don’t take credit for it, who do you think people will suspect was the source? Based on all the evidence we gave Desmond?”

  She pushed her hood back and brushed her fingers through her hair. Her forehead creased for a moment. “Naturally, they’ll think it was Alkorn and his team. People will assume they had some deal with Desmond to release the story if something happened to them.”

  Aubrey raised his eyebrows and cocked his head.

  “And …” she started, but when she saw his expression, she appeared to change tack, “and that’s exactly what you want. You want them to be the heroes.” She shook her head. “I should have seen that coming.”

  “You’re going to make a great detective, Miss Maddox.” He turned and the two of them began the short walk back to his apartment. “I can’t wait to do this again.”

  “Less violence next time, please,” Malina said.

  “Sure thing,” Aubrey said. “I’ll make sure the bad guys know that in advance.”

  Epilogue

  July 5, 2043

  Gilda Elmyr clutched her purse under one arm and with the other she dragged the two-wheeled wire frame cart packed with bags of groceries. She still liked to shop the old-fashioned way. Delivery to her building was available, her doormen were trustworthy, and she could certainly afford the concierge service where they would even put the food away for her, but it was best not to trust others to do something so important. Who knows where those delivery people had been before touching her food. No. She trusted one person to do her food shopping—herself.

  Besides all that, it was good to get out. Living alone was hard on a woman, but she was used to it. Had been alone her entire life so she knew how crucial it was to get out and move around a little each day. This had been especially true in the five years since her retirement.

  She reached her building
and began climbing the gratuitously wide marble steps to the front entrance. As if waiting for her, a smiling doorman rushed down the stairs.

  “Let me, Ms. Elmyr,” he said, gently lifting the cart with two hands.

  “Thank you, Riley.” Gilda let the man take the cart up the stairs without complaint. He was dressed in the usual forest green uniform the men wore in the summers. As long as he didn’t touch anything in the cart, she was okay with letting him help.

  When she reached the front entrance, Riley held the wide, brass-trimmed doors open for her. Her cart was already inside where another door man scurried over to take it the rest of the way to the elevators.

  She chose this building for these little niceties—the attentive doormen, the in-house dry cleaning, and the exquisitely decorated lobby that made her feel like she was walking into a palatial luxury hotel every time she entered. She also loved the spacious apartments and, of course, the privacy. She had an entire floor to herself and if she so desired, and she did so often, Gilda could altogether avoid seeing any of the other thirty-five residents in the building.

  Her neighbors probably thought Gilda was a wealthy widow or a benefactor of an inheritance from a moneyed family. She let them think that. Friends from her old life probably considered her choices opulent or luxurious. She let them think that too.

  She deserved everything she had. She’d devoted her life to helping others. To helping children. So many had better lives because of her. So many had families because of her.

  Gilda retired from the Maryland Department of Human Services one day after turning sixty-five. Having worked twenty-three years for the department as Director of the East Region Orphanage on New Aberdeen’s southside, she’d built up quite a bit of equity in the state’s pension fund. The pension itself provided her with enough to live off if she had chosen a different lifestyle. But she’d wanted this lifestyle. So, along the way in her career, she had to make different choices regarding her income streams.

  Her choices had reaped benefits beyond anything she could have imagined. Most former directors from Human Services couldn’t boast her cash savings. She knew of a few other directors who could come close, four exactly, but no others.

  Gilda stood at the elevator door waiting for it to open. Her face reflected back at her in the gleaming golden doors. Her white hair was in short curls. Lines stretched from the corners of her eyes to her temples. The bags under her eyes were heavy, drooping lower than normal. Her lips pursed in their usual look of dissatisfaction.

  She gripped the handle of her cart when the light above the elevator illuminated.

  Of course, there had been questions about her choices as Director of the Orphanage. There had been investigations. And she still ended up here. Still made it to retirement.

  Gilda had been helping the Order of the Coppice, after all, and she’d never known of any investigations into the Order to have any teeth. If she had been exposed, the Order would have been exposed. Simple as that.

  But she always had to remind herself, she had done it all to help the children. “Mustn’t forget that,” she told herself aloud. “I was helping the children.”

  * * *

  The birds sang overhead and the breeze rustled his hair. Martin Aubrey wondered if he’d ever paid attention to the sounds of birds before. He found himself noticing things like this lately. He stopped on the street to pet a cat two days ago. He used to hate cats. The strangest thing, he hadn’t thought about returning to the police force at all since the Keep.

  Aubrey talked to police while he was still in the hospital and had visited the station several times to answer questions. But not once did he feel the old familiar sting of regret and emptiness. He missed the people he had worked with, but he wasn’t filled with the overwhelming longing to have his badge back.

  He sat on a park bench across the street from a luxury apartment building. The forty-story building looked like something out of the Victorian era supplanted into the ultra-modern architectural landscape of the city. The park around him bustled with activity. Children played, adults ran and exercised, old men battled across chessboards. On the street in front of him, the cars buzzed past, pedestrians walked to work, school, or to do their shopping.

  Life around him looked normal. It was as if no one had heard the news released days ago—Zentransa was poisoning children through gene mutations in their parents. Production of the pill had been halted until further notice by a federal judge and upheld by an emergency session of the U.S. Supreme Court. Pharmacies, however, were permitted to continue selling the Z they had on hand until the investigations into Boarding School Syndrome and its causes were complete.

  Ventana Inc., was busy doing damage control after their stock plunged as a result of not only the temporary death of their most popular product but also the very permanent death of their CEO, Chairman, and founder James Sarazin.

  Aubrey had expected a monumental shift in the socio-economic fabric of society. The toppling of long held beliefs, traditions, and societal mainstays had a knack for throwing things into chaos. Instead, it appeared as if most people intended on carrying on with life as usual. It reminded him of the stories he’d read about revelations about cigarettes in the twentieth century. Even when everyone knew it was bad for them and those around them, people still smoked.

  Everything, at the moment, felt normal, like it always had. There were signs of things to come, however. According to his sources on the Metro Police Department, there had been an uptick in the manufacture and sale of street Z.

  Almost as soon as Zentransa was released to the masses, some enterprising street chemists reverse engineered its chemical makeup, giving birth to what was referred to as street Z, dirty Z, or just dirt. Some street Z was a legitimate clone of commercial Zentransa, chemically identical. But like all drugs, the higher quality meant a higher price tag. High end street Z often cost more than real stuff.

  If there were no real Z, however, street Z would suddenly become infinitely more desirable and more expensive. Even the real dirty stuff.

  Aubrey was in the process of weaning himself off Zentransa altogether. He and Malina both felt like the consequences of long-term use weren’t worth the gains. He wanted kids, eventually, and he thought that quitting sooner rather than later was probably better. Even weaning off Z slowly was a huge adjustment for him. Suddenly sixteen hours seemed like not nearly enough time to fit in a whole day of work.

  And, he thought, if it had been a difficult adjustment for him and Malina to slowly get off Zentransa, then he hated to imagine the ripple effect of millions of people forced to go cold turkey.

  Another breeze rushed over Aubrey. A child pushed a scooter down the sidewalk across the street. The silent river of cars all flowing in one direction.

  Movement at the front of the luxury apartment building caught his attention. The doorman in his green uniform darted from the door and down the wide white steps. He disappeared momentarily behind a passing crowd and when he reappeared, the man in the green suit was bending to lift a small two-wheeled grocery cart from the hands of a white-haired woman in a gray cardigan and navy-blue skirt that stretched down past her knees.

  Aubrey tapped his watch and a phone rang inside his earpiece. As it rang, he watched the woman climb the steps, no worse for wear after seventy years, he thought to himself. He raised his phone and snapped several pictures of the woman.

  “Yeah?” Malina’s voice said in his ear.

  “Yeah? That’s no way to talk to your boss, Maddox.” He kept his eyes on the old woman as she entered the building’s tall doors.

  She huffed on the other end of the line. “I don’t work for you, man. We’re partners, remember?”

  “Oh, right, I keep forgetting.”

  “So … do you have her?” She asked in his ear. “If you do, I need to inform our client.”

  “Yes. I have her,” Aubrey said. “Tell Francesca we found Gilda Elmyr. She is alive and well and will be here when Francesca decides to p
ay her a visit.”

  Before you go

  Just a couple of things before you move on.

  Martin Aubrey and Malina Maddox are going to continue kicking ass in future thrillers! Stay up to date on new releases by joining Justin’s mailing list. Just go to justinrishel.com to sign up.

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  Do your fellow readers a favor and leave a review for the books you read. Maybe start with this one? Your preferred bookseller or wherever you like to find and discuss books would be a great place for leaving reviews.

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  About the Author

  Justin is an author of thrillers, science fiction, and technothrillers like the Martin Aubrey Series.

  Before becoming a writer, Justin was a U.S. Marine, a high school history teacher, a woodworker, and a corporate schmuck. Born and raised in Long Beach, Mississippi, Justin now lives in Tennessee with his wife, three kids, and the family dog.

  You can connect with me on:

  https://www.justinrishel.com

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