All this time, I’m sobbing. All this time, Armand is cradling me against him, kissing the top of my head. “It’s over,” he whispers. “Finally. This time. It’s over.”
It’s maybe five minutes before I gather the strength to lift my head, and he kisses me gently on the mouth. “It’s over,” he repeats.
“No,” I say, and I think that, even through my tears, my smile must be radiant. “My life. This time it’s just beginning.”
MR. POSITIVE, THE ETERNAL OPTIMIST
LARRY CORREIA
“Here, just take my money. I don’t want to die!”
“Well, good,” the man pointing the pistol at him said, “because I don’t want to kill you.”
“Okay.” Stanley handed over his wallet.
“Thank you.” The mugger opened it and scanned the driver’s license as if to confirm something. Satisfied, he looked back at Stanley and smiled. “I still need to shoot you in the heart though.”
“Wait . . . what?” Stanley hoped that he’d heard wrong, and that he would just take the money and leave him alone. “But if you shoot me in the heart, I’ll die.”
“Not if I do it just right.” The mugger squinted as he aimed the little black gun. “So you need to quit shaking so much. Really, you’re making this quite difficult for me.”
Stanley looked around, desperate, but there weren’t any witnesses. The two of them were the only people in the parking lot. The one single time in all the years he’d worked at this office building that it wasn’t stupid crowded and lousy with traffic was when a nutjob came out of nowhere and stuck a gun in his face.
The thing was, his assailant didn’t really look like a nutjob at all. He was dressed the same as Stanley was, khakis and a button-down shirt, the uniform of boring business casual. While Stanley was short, pudgy, balding, and generally dumpy looking, the mugger was an average height, physically fit, well-groomed and clean-cut, fortysomething. He wasn’t a crazy-eyed hobo or posturing teenage gangster, and Stanley had been robbed by both of those before because he was sort of a magnet for attracting assholes, but this guy seemed normal and rational. Like he shopped at Target.
“Just be cool, man.” Stanley had to think back to all the previous times he’d been mugged, threatened, beaten up, bullied, pushed around, or otherwise victimized in his life, and . . . wow—there were a bunch—but calling on his copious experience, Stanley tried to calmly talk him down. “I don’t want any trouble. You don’t want to shoot me.”
“No, really, I do. Sorry. This is probably going to hurt a lot.”
He pulled the trigger. Stanley flinched.
Click.
When he opened his eyes, he saw that the mugger was looking down at his little gun, puzzled.
“Huh . . . there should have been a bang. Give me a sec. I’ll figure this thing out.”
Stanley turned and ran for his life.
“Whoops.” There was a metallic clacking noise as the would-be assassin fiddled with his weapon. “I forgot to put one of the projectiles in the tube thingy first. My bad. I can shoot you now. Hey, come back here!”
This was the first time Stanley had exercised in several years, but it turned out having a lunatic try to murder you was a remarkably powerful motivator. He dashed between the rows of cars, shouting, “Help! Somebody help!” He looked back and saw that the mugger had started after him, and not having the lung capacity to call for help and sprint at the same time—Stanley wasn’t really into cardio—he shut up and kept running.
“It’s only a little bullet, I swear!” His pursuer was having no problem keeping up, talking as he jogged along.
Of course Stanley had to end up with an athletic psycho killer.
Red-faced and gasping, Stanley reached the row he’d left his car in. Even though he’d worked at the same giant data-entry company for six years now, he still didn’t rate a designated parking space. Oh no, he had to park way out in Bumfuck, Egypt, and walk back and forth like one of the temp scrubs. If only he’d gotten that promotion to assistant manager—then he would’ve had a parking space up front and never even would’ve run into this guy, but he had been passed over again. Why did the universe hate him so much?
“Seriously, Stanley, you aren’t looking very good. Don’t have a stroke or something. If you die, I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do.”
“Get away from me!” Stanley managed to gasp. But there was a glimmer of hope. He had almost reached his car.
Except his pursuer had easily caught up and was right next to him. “You’re looking really red in the face there, buddy. I’m concerned about you. I wasn’t supposed to do anything other than shoot you, but I’m going to have to restrain you now for your own good. I’ll try not to break any of your bones in the process, I promise.”
Before the killer could grab hold of Stanley’s collar, there was a screech of tires as someone hit their brakes, but the driver had reacted too late. A red vintage sports car zipped past, narrowly missing Stanley but absolutely nailing his purser. The man went up the hood, cracked the windshield with his skull, and did several flips through the air before landing with a wet thud.
Stanley slowed down, stopped, and had to put his hands on his knees to keep from flopping over, because it turned out running while fat made you dizzy.
The car skidded to a stop, and the senior VP of marketing, Mr. Knudsen, leapt out. “Aw, not another pedestrian!”
The mugger-slash-pedestrian was lying in a crumpled heap, motionless. There was a whole lot of blood and white bits that were probably bones sticking out. Everything had happened so fast that Stanley was having a hard time wrapping his oxygen-deprived brain around it.
Mr. Knudsen was that type of senior management that had really nice hair and a trophy wife. “Did you see that? That wasn’t my fault. You two came out of nowhere. Is he dead?”
“I think so.” Stanley tentatively reached out and bumped one limp arm with his shoe. Nothing happened. He had never seen anybody die before. It was pretty messed up!
“I wasn’t even drinking this time,” Mr. Knudsen muttered. “My insurance is going to go through the roof.”
“You saved my life. He was trying to murder me.” Stanley pointed at the gun lying there.
“Really?” Mr. Knudsen mulled that over. “I can’t possibly get in trouble for running down a criminal. Is vehicular self-defense a thing?”
“How would I know?”
“Aren’t you Coopersmith from legal?”
“I’m Stanley from IT!”
“Oh.” Mr. Knudsen wasn’t very good at telling the underlings apart.
Then, like something from a horror movie, the assassin opened his eyes.
Stanley yelped. Mr. Knudsen jumped back. “Shit!”
“Wow. I’ve never been hit by an automobile before. That really does a number on the old spine.” He seemed rather chipper, all things considered. “The guys at work are never going to believe this. Okay, back to business.” Groaning, he reached for his gun.
It was pure instinct, but Stanley reacted and kicked the pistol, which went sliding beneath a nearby parked car, out of the gunman’s reach.
“That was very rude, Stanley.” He sighed as he crawled over, reached beneath the car, and began searching around for his weapon. Then he noticed the VP standing there. “Oh, hello, eyewitness person. Since I’m not allowed to violently silence anyone else, should any of your law enforcement authorities ask, this was just a simple armed robbery that went horribly wrong, resulting in Stanley receiving a gunshot wound to the chest. Very tragic, so on and so forth.”
It would take the mugger a few seconds to retrieve his gun. He had to get out of here! Stanley’s car was nearby. But it was a Kia Sportage with 120,000 miles on it. While Mr. Knudsen’s restored custom Mustang was sitting right there, still running. Stanley hesitated. Mustang. Sportage . . . Mustang. Sportag
e . . . What the hell was a Sportage supposed to be anyway? So he ran over, jumped in the one named after a manly horse, and slammed the door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Mr. Knudsen demanded.
“Escaping.” Stanley tried to shift into first gear, but it had been a long time since he’d driven a stick. “Call the police!”
“Fine. But don’t grind the gears, you monster!”
Stanley burned rubber, literally. If he lived through the next few minutes, he was going to owe Mr. Knudsen a new set of tires. As the Mustang took off like a rocket, he glanced back in the mirror and saw that the killer had retrieved his gun and was looking a little disappointed that his target was making his getaway, but rather than give up, he sprang up and took off after the car on foot.
The dude was fast.
Stanley watched the mirror in disbelief as the mugger began to actually catch up.
He had to be on PCP or bath salts or something, but then Stanley had to tear his eyes off the mirror to keep from hitting any of the other parked cars.
By the time he skidded out of the parking lot and onto the street, he was doing fifty. Stanley spun the wheel to keep from hitting a passing garbage truck, but he managed not to wreck the VP’s car. Once he was safely out in traffic, he looked back again but didn’t see the guy who’d seemingly come back from the dead. Surely, he must have shaken his pursuer, but he wasn’t about to slow down just yet.
And then something landed on the roof.
“What the hell?”
There was the thump thump of footsteps above him, and then the mugger casually hopped down onto the hood of the speeding car. Stanley screamed and swerved back and forth. He honked the horn. That part didn’t even make sense.
The killer knelt on the hood and took careful aim through the glass. But then he frowned and held his fire. “All this bouncing is making it worse.” He shouted to be heard over the wind. “You are making it really difficult to be precise here, Stanley. Would you please slow down?”
So Stanley floored it.
They were zipping down the street crazy fast, Stanley the IT guy screaming incoherently, and the guy on the hood calmly holding on.
“Okay, then. I’m just going to have to go for it. Don’t complain to me if I hit you in the brain or something important.” The killer aimed. Stanley instinctively ducked.
This time the gun did go off. Stanley didn’t know much about guns, but the killer must have been telling the truth that it was just a little bullet, because it wasn’t nearly as loud as expected. More of a pop as it punched a hole in the window glass and a thunk as the bullet lodged in the leather seat.
“You move pretty past for a chubby guy.” Even though he was shouting, it still sounded like he meant it as a sincere compliment. “You’ve got to sit up though. I can’t get a good angle if you’re lying down like that.”
Neither could Stanley steer, nor see out the window.
The Mustang clipped the back of a truck.
The killer went flying off the hood. Stanley hadn’t had time to put his seat belt on, which was good in that it had kept him from getting shot in the heart, but bad that he wound up bouncing off the dash and getting squished against the floorboards as the car went spinning wildly through an intersection.
The Mustang rolled to a stop.
Wiggling, Stanley found he was mostly stuck, but the only thing truly injured was his pride. It took him a few seconds to scramble back up so he could see out the windows. There were other cars stopped in the intersection, and some immediately started honking angrily at the interruption. Other drivers were staring, concerned or surprised. Panicked, he looked around for the gunman, but there was no sign of him . . . until he spotted the lump lying in the road fifty yards away. The mugger had gotten tossed like a beanbag and, from the look of things, had bounced off the side of a bus hard enough to leave a man-sized dent in the sheet metal. Momentum was a hell of a thing.
Hands shaking, eyes blinking rapidly, Stanley just sat there, astonished to be alive.
And then the killer sat up again.
“Aw, come on!”
Despite being super messed up, the man took one look at his surroundings, saw that he’d been flung into a bus, and then gave Stanley a very approving thumbs-up, as if to say, Hey, man, good job eluding certain doom. Respect.
“How are you so cheerful?” Stanley screamed.
The Mustang’s engine had died. The right front fender was smashed, but the car was otherwise still in one piece. He tried the key, and surprisingly the engine started up with no problem. People had come running to see what was going on, some toward the Mustang and others toward the guy who was miraculously alive after being hurled down the street at ludicrous speeds. So Stanley laid on the horn to warn them to get the hell out of his way.
The thing was, since the bad guy was directly in his path, Stanley didn’t really have a good way around him, but he could go over him.
Even though Stanley considered himself a peaceful, reasonable, nonviolent man, it turned out that when emotions were high, the decision to run over another human being was a surprisingly easy one to make.
So never laying off the horn, Stanley put the hammer down. Everybody else got out of the way except for the one he was aiming to squish. It turned out that even somebody who was seemingly indestructible still took a minute to shake off hitting a bus. Right before impact the guy actually smiled and shrugged, like Oh well, that’s how it goes sometimes.
Bump bump.
Six blocks later, Stanley finally slowed down a little. His heart was racing, but at least it didn’t have a hole in it. That had been close! Since he was in a stolen car and had just committed a hit-and-run, he probably really needed to call the police. So Stanley got his phone out and dialed 911.
“Nine one one. What’s the nature of your emergency?”
“This maniac robbed me but then he tried to shoot me but the gun didn’t go off so I ran but then my boss hit him with a car and he got really messed up and I thought he was dead but then he got back up so I stole that car and he jumped on it but then I hit a truck and he fell off and now I’m calling you!”
There was a long pause, as if the dispatcher lady needed a moment to digest that panicked run-on sentence. Only the voice that spoke up again wasn’t the same one. This time it was a man . . . an annoyingly upbeat man. “Wow, when you put it that way, Stanley, you’ve really had quite the adventure today.”
“You . . .” He stared in disbelief at his phone, but sure enough, he had dialed 911. “How did you reroute my call? No. How are you alive?”
“Both of those are excellent questions. But first, I just want to give you my compliments. Most people, when I have to do something painful or scary or fatal to them, they don’t react nearly as decisively as you do. They hesitate. But you acted. The thing with the car? Bravo, Stanley. You are way tougher than you look. Let’s face it. You are kind of a badass.”
Stanley didn’t get compliments very often and was momentarily taken aback. “Uh . . . thanks?”
“I still need to shoot you in the heart though.”
“Oh.”
“But I want you to know it’s nothing personal. You seem like a really nice guy. After meeting you I am kind of surprised you have so few friends and such a negative and pessimistic outlook about quite literally every topic.”
“How do you know that?”
“I checked your Facebook feed. But anyway, to answer your previous questions, the communications devices of this time are rather simplistic and easy to manipulate if you have a phased quantum field generator. And next, I am alive because I can’t really die. Well, I could, and I have before, but not here, or now. It’s really complicated. Anyway, would you mind pulling over so I can catch up with you?”
“No!” Stanley reflexively mashed the red button on the screen to hang up. But nothing h
appened. The call wouldn’t disconnect. His unrelenting assassin kept on talking.
“If you don’t mind my advice—not that I don’t think you’re doing a terrific job on your own—but you shouldn’t drive distracted. You might get in another accident. I’m going to put myself on speaker.” And sure enough, somehow, now he was on speakerphone. “That’s better. This way you can keep both hands on the wheel for safety.”
Since he was an emotional wreck and trying not to plow into any other cars while violating the hell out of the speed limit and a whole bunch of traffic laws, that was actually helpful. Stanley almost reflexively thanked him, but that seemed inappropriate, so instead he shouted, “Who are you?”
“Oh, sorry. Normally I don’t have a chance to introduce myself. I’m Chris.”
Chris? That wasn’t a very dramatic psycho killer name at all. “Why won’t you just leave me alone, Chris?”
“This is my job.”
“Going around shooting people?” Stanley was flabbergasted. Why would someone hire a hit man for him?
“It’s not all mean. Sometimes, I get ordered to do nice things for them instead. But if I’m being honest, there is a lot of shooting. Stabbing too. And strangulation, sabotage, arson, spreading diseases, poison, that sort of thing. But it’s been a really long time since I’ve had to use a projectile weapon. I’m pretty embarrassed about forgetting to put one of the ammunition thingies into the shooter tube.”
“You are the worst hit man ever!”
“I’m not a . . . hit? Man? What is that? A man who goes around hitting people? That sounds barbaric.”
Stanley was so very confused. “What do you normally shoot people with, then?”
“A graviton lance, obviously . . . Wait. Do you guys have those yet?”
Stanley tossed his cell phone out the window.
Except now Chris addressed him from the car’s radio. “That was really clever. You probably realized that I might be tracking you through your phone. Good job, Stanley!”
Fantastic Hope Page 7