That hadn’t been what he’d been thinking at all, but it wasn’t like he received positive affirmation very often. He worked in IT. “Yeah! You can’t catch me that easy, Chris.”
As Stanley searched for the off knob on the radio, he realized he had to think of something and fast. Not only was Chris apparently immortal, he also had access to some really high-tech gadgets. How did one escape someone so powerful and obnoxiously enthusiastic?
Stanley found his answer. Unfortunately, he found it by rear-ending a police car while he was distracted and messing with the radio.
* * *
—
Later that night, Stanley was lying low, or hiding out—or whatever you called it when you were trying not to be found by a homicidal maniac—at a bar. Because Chris had seen his license and knew his home address, Stanley was afraid to go back to his apartment. Though he had called his neighbor and asked her to feed his cat for him. Fluffles would be very upset if he didn’t get his supper. Stanley couldn’t go back to his office, because that was where Chris had already found him once, not to mention Mr. Knudsen was still really pissed off about his muscle car.
Home, where it was just him and Fluffles, and work, where it was a bunch of virtual strangers he never really had an actual conversation with, were the places he spent about ninety-five percent of his time. Which was kind of depressing when he thought about it.
So after the police had questioned him and then kicked him loose, he had fled to the place he spent the last few percentage points of his time, a sort of Irish-themed pub called Ox Knuckles that was midway between work and home, across the street from the hospital. He frequented this establishment because it had $12.99 bottomless loaded nachos and a weekly trivia night. Stanley loved nachos and trivia.
Now Stanley sat in a booth by himself, sullenly eating his nachos while holding an ice pack to the bump on his forehead caused by Mr. Knudsen’s steering wheel, and feeling generally miserable. The police hadn’t found any sign of his attacker. He’d told them about the trick with the radio, and how Chris had walked away from not one, not two, but three fatal car crashes, and so he had asked for protective custody, except the detectives had just kind of laughed at that. They’d said that Chris was surely just your run-of-the-mill, off-his-meds, lunatic stalker, who would most likely show up at an emergency room or morgue soon due to his injuries. Until then they’d just send a patrol car past his apartment once in a while. Other than that their hands were tied, budget cuts, so on and so forth.
Ox Knuckles was crowded with a happy, cheerful, Thursday after-work crowd. So if Chris did show up to murder him, at least there would be lots of witnesses. Plus, nachos.
But poor Stanley’s head was still spinning. The more he thought about the day’s events, the less sense everything made. There was no way he had imagined the weird bits due to stress, like the detectives had suggested. He was pretty sure Chris wasn’t normal, and if he wasn’t normal that meant he was abnormal, or maybe paranormal. And that idea really freaked him out, so he shoved it out of his mind.
“Hey, Stanley.” He had been too distracted to notice the most beautiful woman in the world walking past his booth. “What happened to your head?”
“Lisa, hey. Yeah. Car accident.” Because Lisa was basically a goddess, he tried to play it cool. “No biggie.”
“Bummer. You doing trivia night tonight?”
“Trivia? What? That’s tonight? No.” As usual, when he saw her, Stanley struggled to form coherent sentences and turned into a stammering idiot. “Tough day. Tired. You know.” He gestured at his nachos like an idiot. “Stuff to do.”
“That’s too bad.” Her smile made him even dizzier than he’d been before, and that was saying something since he’d headbutted a steering wheel earlier. He didn’t know what Lisa did, or where she was from, or anything about her because every previous attempt at conversation had degenerated into him being unable to use multisyllable words. All he knew was that Lisa was superhot, and that she was smart enough she usually dominated Ox Knuckles’ trivia night. “You’re my only real competition. Maybe next time?”
“Yup.” And as with every time he talked to Lisa, his brain made it so he could not word good no more. “Bye.”
Lisa left. He watched her go, then sighed and went back to ruminating on his inevitable assassination by a possible cyborg who might be from the future.
Stanley had started worrying that it probably wasn’t a good idea for a man who only had three natural habitats to hide in one of them, and that was confirmed when Chris suddenly appeared and slid into the booth next to him.
“Hi, Stanley. Please don’t scream again. That would frighten all these nice people.”
Stanley realized he was trapped between Chris and the wall. Why had he picked a booth! Why hadn’t he sat in a chair? Chairs had multiple escape routes! Stanley made a pathetic squeaking noise and started trying to slide beneath the table. Only he was too portly and got awkwardly wedged between the table and the seat.
“Wait. Please, stop sliding down. I’m not here to shoot you.”
Stanley froze, halfway under the table. “You’re not?”
“Not right now.” Despite being hit by a bus and run over, Chris looked perfectly healthy. He had ditched his shredded and bloodstained clothing, and was now dressed to fit in with all the other bar patrons in jeans and a T-shirt. “My orders are to only shoot you between the hours of eight a.m. and six p.m., Monday through Friday.”
“That’s oddly specific. Why?”
“I do not know. But since it is almost seven, you are perfectly safe . . . for now . . . Ooh, what are these?”
Stanley peeked his eyes over the top of the table to see what Chris was marveling at. “You mean my nachos?”
“Naw chows . . . Fascinating.” Chris reached for a chip, then paused. “May I?”
“Sure.” Normally Stanley wasn’t big on sharing, but he made an exception for people who were inclined to murder him. “Go for it.”
“Thanks.” Chris popped a loaded chip into his mouth and chewed. “Oh my gosh. That is literally the best pseudo-cheese byproduct covered carbohydrate I have ever tasted.”
“I know, right?” Stanley wiggled his way up until he was sitting normally. Maybe this psycho was telling the truth, and in whatever crazy delusional fairy tale Chris was living in, Stanley really was safe until regular business hours. “You promise not to shoot me?”
“I promise not to shoot you until tomorrow. I came to speak with you about my mission, in the hopes that you would quit being so difficult. May I have another? They are very good.”
“Knock yourself out. They’re bottomless.”
Chris stared at the plate in disbelief.
“I mean, they are all you can eat. When these are gone they’ll bring out more.”
“Bottomless naw chows . . . amazing.” Chris went to town on Stanley’s dinner. Between bites he managed to say, “It always boggles my mind how in a time and location of such incredible treasures, so many of your people can have such a sour outlook on life.”
“You were on Facebook again, weren’t you?”
“Yes. It’s how I discovered you often come to this establishment to engage in battles of knowledge, in order to establish your intellectual dominance over others.”
Shoot. Stanley hadn’t thought of that. That’s what he got for bragging about his occasionally winning trivia night. Lisa usually won, but that was because she got all the science, history, and art questions. Stanley was good at tech stuff, pop culture, and sports. Not actually participating in sports, mind you, but he had a brain for the stats.
“You come from a curious culture.” Chris continued pontificating, between mouthfuls of nuclear yellow cheese, canned ingredients, and generic tortilla chips. “Though your people are extremely adaptable, and by all historical comparisons most of you are thriving, it seems many of you
like to signal your gloominess.”
Stanley was feeling a little defensive about his general gloominess. “The world sucks, Chris. I keep up with the news. There’s global warming, and overpopulation, terrorism, and war, and soil erosion, and straws kill all the turtles, and rising sea levels, and poverty, and disease, and bigotry, and racism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia! Other phobias! And climate change, and the ozone hole, and crime, and global warming—”
“You already said that one.”
“Well, that’s because it’s super bad, Chris! Everything is awful and we’re all going to die.”
Chris had been nodding along listening to Stanley’s litany of tragedies. “That does sound pretty awful when you put it that way.”
“What other way would you put it?”
“I don’t know. Though I’m not sure what several of those things are, and I suspect that you just made some of them up right now, that sounds like a lot of bad stuff. Have you ever tried making a list of all the good things in your world to see how it balances out?”
“Uh . . .” Stanley stared at him blankly. “Huh?”
“It’s just that you seem to put such emphasis on the negative that it begins to seem insurmountable. Perhaps you should pause to look at the positives? Like the entire time I have been here, I have yet to see anyone suffering from Ebola-AIDS.”
“I don’t think we have that here.”
“Exactly. And I’ve not seen a single person get mauled by a land shark.”
“That’s a thing?”
Chris shrugged. “I don’t know. Have you guys discovered genetic sequencing yet?”
“Yeah.”
“Then give it a few years. But anyway, back to why I’m here. While I was going through your social media looking for clues of how to find you, I was struck by how even though you in particular are a very negative person, you tried extremely hard not to get shot today. Normally when I run into someone who is truly Malthusian in their outlook, they just kind of curl up into a ball and die. So I thought if I just tried reasoning with you . . .”
“That I’d just let you shoot me?” Stanley snorted. “Fat chance of that.”
“If life is so terrible and doomed, why not?”
Chris asked that so simply and so sincerely that Stanley didn’t have a good answer. He didn’t know why he wanted to stick around this crap-sack world . . . But he kinda did. So he sat there awkwardly for a minute instead and then tried to change the subject. “Are you a time traveler?”
“Something like that. I could try and explain it, but it is very complex.”
“Yeah, right.” Even though Chris had demonstrated some uncanny abilities, that still sounded too far-fetched to be real. “Go ahead and try to explain.”
“Okay. I was given some education on the popular culture of your people so I could blend in.” Chris gestured proudly at his T-shirt, which though it was the right color for the city’s NBA franchise, read Go Local Sports Ball Team. “To put it into terms you may understand, you know how there’s always that thing in your movies, where someone goes back in time to kill that one Hitler fellow to stop that medium-sized war you people had? This is like that.”
“Wait . . . I’m going to turn into someone like Hitler?” Stanley was rather offended by that. Sure, he didn’t have many friends, and he knew he could be a dick at times, but he wasn’t a genocidal dickhead!
“Maybe. I kinda doubt it though. You seem like a pretty cool guy, Stanley. You might just be the next Hitler’s grandfather. I don’t know. I don’t make up the assignments. Nobody tells me why I do what I do, just what needs to be done for the good of the universe, and the parameters I have to work within to achieve those results. I think we’ve already covered my assignment’s parameters pretty thoroughly, so now we just need to get on with the heart shooting.”
“Hold on. If you don’t know why you’re supposed to shoot me, how do you know it’s the right thing to do?”
“That’s a great question. You really are sharp.” And Chris wasn’t being the least bit sarcastic. “I’ve just got to go on faith that the big boss knows what’s best.”
“Wait . . . Are you implying that you’re an angel?”
“Don’t be silly, Stanley.”
“Oh, good, because that would’ve sounded really crazy.”
“Right? My boss is the crystal core of a burned-out star which gained sentience six billion years ago. It’s basically a moon-sized supercomputer which searches for pivotal distortions and then sends facilitators like me to make improvements to the time stream. Angels are totally different.”
Stanley nodded slowly, wishing the whole time that he’d ordered something for dinner that would’ve come with a fork so he could stab Chris in the throat with it.
The waitress came by and dropped off another plate of nachos without even asking if Stanley wanted one. He was a regular, so she already knew. “Hey, who’s your good-looking friend?”
“Hi, I’m Chris. I’m from out of town.” He pronounced that like it was the name of a place.
“Nice to meet you, Chris from out of town . . . What’s wrong with your eyes, Stanley?”
Stanley had been trying to get her attention that he was being held hostage and to call the cops, so he’d been blinking SOS in Morse code. When Chris glanced back at him, Stanley tried to act normal. “Nothing.”
“Good. I thought you were having a stroke or something.” And then she went back to work.
Chris had not noticed Stanley’s escape attempt because he was really awed by the concept of all you can eat. “Your world is amazing, Stanley. There are several different animal proteins, mashed legumes, and . . . can it be? Are the black circular things olives?”
“Yeah.”
“They haven’t gone extinct yet? Fantastic!”
It was weird to see someone get so excited over something so mundane. “I don’t get you, Chris.”
“And I do not get you, Stanley. Your world is relatively very nice, and you live in the nicest part of it. Your time is an anomaly of luxury. Kings and pharaohs didn’t live like this. Your houses are the size of castles. You warm the air in winter and cool it in summer. You have cured most diseases. You live three times longer than your ancestors. Even your poor people are plump. You have this thing called electronic dance music. All that and no land sharks! How can you have all this and still remain grumpy?”
“Well . . .” Stanley had already listed the general concerns that all right-thinking people were supposed to be freaking out about. “My job isn’t very fulfilling. I feel stuck and I work for a bunch of jerks.”
“I work for an inscrutable crystalline entity that makes me travel through time and space to kill complete strangers.” Chris reached over and patted him on the arm. “So I get you. We are bonding. In the spirit of camaraderie we should drink alcohol together.”
* * *
—
Stanley the IT guy and Chris the time-traveling assassin drank a lot of Ox Knuckles’ finest that night.
Stanley wasn’t sure how many beers he had, but it was a lot. They just kept coming, as did the Jell-O shots, because Chris had been intrigued by the concept. Stanley knew he shouldn’t have, but he didn’t know what else he could do at that point—if the psycho killer wanted Jell-O shots, he wasn’t going to be the one to get in the way of that. He normally didn’t drink much, but he was a bundle of nerves, and a few beers took the edge off. But then he kept taking the edge off until there wasn’t any edge left at all. It turns out you can put down a lot while spending hours arguing philosophy with your polar opposite, and Chris was definitely a glass-is-half-full kind of dude.
“I’m just saying, Stanley, you can’t see the stuff that I’ve seen and not have a positive outlook on life.”
“You just said you lived through the black plague!”
“Yeah, but it got bet
ter.”
“But stuff doesn’t always get better,” Stanley insisted, realizing that he had crossed the threshold from drunk to emotionally drunk. “You’ve got to admit sometimes it gets worse.”
“I never said otherwise. Life kind of fluctuates, up, down, sideways once in a while. But it goes on. Mostly.”
“Life’s not fair,” Stanley muttered.
“Obviously. Sometimes terrible things happen to the nicest people, and there’s not a thing they can do about it.”
“Like getting shot,” Stanley said pointedly.
But Chris seemed completely immune to guilt trips. “Among other things. I knew some really nice folks in Pompeii, until big rocks fell out of the sky on them. That was terribly sad. But after bad things happen, if you survive, you go on. And you can either try and make life better, or not. It’s usually up to you. But I’ve found that working to improve your circumstances usually comes out better than sitting on the couch being angry that someone else has something you don’t, while eating frosting right out of the can.”
“You stay off my Facebook page!” Stanley drunkenly threatened. He probably shouldn’t have posted about his frosting binge, but he’d really deserved that promotion. He drained the rest of his beer and then belched loudly.
“Whoa, nice one!”
Stanley looked up to see Lisa the Trivia Warrior standing there. Chris wouldn’t even need to shoot him, because Stanley died of embarrassment right there on the spot. “Sorry, Lisa. That was gross.”
“It’s cool. That was impressive. It had reverb. I missed you at trivia.”
“Did you win?” he asked stupidly.
“Crushed it. I’m still the Ox Knuckles reigning champion.” Then she noticed Chris. “Hi, Stanley’s friend.”
“Hello.” Chris waved. “I’m from out of town. Would you care to join us for naw chows, fermented beverages, and jellied alcohol?”
“No thanks.” She just kind of shook her head at the weirdo. “Anyway, I gotta go. Work tomorrow. You’d better not sit out next time. I need good competition to keep me sharp. Even totally wasted you’re still probably the smartest guy in the room. Bye, Stanley.”
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