IGMS Issue 38 Read online

  Rusty agreed with my request to waive opening statements. I didn't want to give up everything before I even started. The judge was surprised, but probably pleased, and we proceeded straight to the prosecution's witnesses, which meant the cops who found Dr. Farmer dead and Ed sprawled next to his body, blood on his shirt. Which they calmly and meticulously described, one after another. I asked each of them if they had noticed anything about the scene that had not gone into the official reports. Each said, "No."

  And that was that. Eight times over.

  I had a little more leeway with the crime techs who tried to recreate the scene.

  "Can you point out," I asked, "where my client was struck on his body?"

  The tech obliged me by using his laser pointer to indicate where his report, mounted on an easel, showed a gash on Edward's head behind one ear.

  "Isn't that indicative of a blow from behind, not the kind of injury you would receive in a face-to-face fight?"

  "I can't answer that. I don't know how Jan'i fight."

  I fixed him with a stare, sensing weakness. "But in your professional experience, aren't injuries sustained in a fight typically to the face, not the back of the skull, as would be the case if the victim were hit from behind by an unknown assailant?"

  "Objection," Rusty said loudly. "The question is compound. And the witness has already testified that he is not an expert on Jan'i hand-to-hand combat techniques."

  "Your honor! Dr. Farmer was a 49-year-old research scientist. If the prosecution is going to argue that he struck such a serious blow against an opponent trained in hand-to-hand combat, then the People's case will hold even less water than it does now."

  Judge Roddick frowned at Rusty before he spoke. "The People were using a term of art -- which they will refrain from repeating. The objection is sustained."

  "Your honor, if I can't challenge the People's expert, I don't have a lot to work with."

  "The objection is sustained. Move along, Mr. Goudreau."

  The audience cheered.

  In the end, the prosecution had no witnesses and nothing to rebut my client's claim that he came on the body after death. I was not naïve enough to think that mattered.

  I wanted to put Ed on the stand, but I was afraid of what Rusty might get him to say. Our one chance was if I could use Regina Farmer to establish that there had been another person present with motive to kill her father, and create reasonable doubt.

  In other words, we were screwed.

  Regina looked nervous as she took the stand. At my suggestion, she was wearing her thickest glasses, and she seemed to have some trouble mounting the step to the box. After the initial surprise at her summons, the courtroom was silent.

  I covered the preliminaries gently but swiftly.

  "Ms. Farmer, can you tell us what you saw and heard on the morning of April 3 of this year, the day your father died?"

  "I was asleep in my room when the gardener woke me with his leaf blower. He always comes early Fridays, and he wakes me up. My father had spoken to him about it, but Jorge always said he would try to be quiet, but it never changed."

  "That would be Jorge Sandoval?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you see Mr. Sandoval that day?"

  "No."

  "Have you seen him since?"

  "No. I heard he'd been deported."

  "Objection . . ."

  "Sustained."

  "Please stick with what you know, Ms. Farmer. Now, did anything happen after you got up?"

  "I was in the kitchen getting some breakfast," she said carefully, looking at the judge as I'd suggested earlier. "The kitchen window is right over the basement where my father had his laboratory. I was going to close it because the house was cold. I heard him arguing with someone. It was Jorge. They were arguing about his leaf blower again. My father was getting upset, not just because of the noise waking me up, but because he had to interrupt his work to speak to Jorge about it."

  "And did Jorge answer, or argue back?"

  "Yes, he was angry about some work my father wanted him to do on the back fence, but my father wouldn't pay for more men." She smiled weakly. "My father was a bit of a tightwad."

  The audience chuckled.

  "Did you hear anything else? Anything to suggest there might be violence?"

  "Objection. Calls for speculation."

  That one was sustained too, but I'd made the point. I turned her over to Rusty, who approached.

  "Good morning, Ms. Farmer. Please accept my condolences on the loss of your father. And I also understand you're not well. If there's anything we can do to make you more comfortable, please ask. But I won't be keeping you long."

  Regina smiled and reached into her purse for a tissue, which she used to wipe her eye.

  "Ms. Farmer, did you hear the tape of the 911 call to the police that morning?"

  "Yes."

  "And was that caller, in your opinion, Jorge Sandoval? I assume you're familiar with his voice," he added hastily.

  Regina shrugged. "I couldn't say."

  That wasn't what she'd told the police, but Rusty let it go.

  "Ms. Farmer, does it make any sense to you that, if Mr. Sandoval had had a fight with your father, as the defense seems to be implying, that he would then call the police to report his own crime?"

  "Objection."

  Rusty turned around to glance at me. Turnabout was fair play. His question was stricken, as mine had been, but he'd made his point too. He sat down.

  "Mr. Goudreau? Re-direct?"

  "One moment, your honor." Regina's remarks made me think back to the morning of the murder. It had been raining the night before; how cold had it been? Cold enough to affect the temperature of the body? Could the time of death be wrong?

  I got up and slowly approached the witness stand, my mind on whether I should re-call the crime scene tech.

  "Ms. Farmer, uh, you said heard your father arguing with Mr. Sandoval that morning, correct?"

  "Yes, when I went into the kitchen. That's when I heard them. But then I closed the window."

  "Of course. You closed the window because it was cold." I retreated a step, and I must have lost track of a few seconds, because Judge Riddick called me back to the present.

  "Mr. Goudreau, do you have any more questions for the witness."

  "Yes, your honor," I replied automatically, but I was thinking about something else: I was thinking about who was lying, who was covering up, and who had killed Dr. Farmer.

  "Regina, did the air smell nice, after the rain?"

  She stared at me a moment. "Yes . . ."

  "Your honor," Rusty called. "Is Mr. Goudreau going somewhere with this weather report?"

  I ignored him. "But you had to on your gloves, because the house was so cold?"

  She took her time answering. "Yes. Yes, I did."

  "So you were already wearing your gloves when you heard your father and my client arguing through the window."

  "No, I said I heard my father and Jorge."

  "And since you were wearing your gloves, when you hit your father over the head with a microscope, you didn't leave any fingerprints. And by using the back stairs from the house to get to the lab, you didn't leave any footprints on the grass."

  "I don't -- What are you talking about?" She fumbled for her tissue.

  "Regina, does Jorge usually cut the grass when it's wet?" I didn't wait for an answer. "You didn't know it had rained all night, did you? You thought he'd been there, because it was his day to come, so when you had to call the police, you imitated his voice." I lowered my voice so I wouldn't be heard in the gallery. "You heard Ed and your father arguing about his research, and you realized he wasn't working on a cure like he told you. Even though you have the beta virus yourself. That's why you killed him, wasn't it, Regina?"

  She stared at me for a long moment and collapsed into tears. Judge Roddick lost no time in clearing the courtroom.

  "This case is dismissed," Judge Roddick intoned stonily. "However,
I am imposing a gag order. No one is to speak to the press or anyone else regarding Ms. Farmer's testimony. The defendant is remanded to custody until he can be transferred to a federal holding facility."

  I'd saved Ed's life, but lost his freedom. He turned to me.

  "I need to speak to you." The marshals were already bringing the shackles.

  "Back off," I said. "He's still my client. I promise he's not going anywhere." I glared until they retreated.

  "I wanted to thank you," he said more loudly than needed, and clasped my hand. He pulled away, leaving a small object in my palm. "Keep this," he whispered. "It burrows under the skin. It's solar-powered, and activated by your brain's electrical impulses. It will work for you."

  Questions bubbled up through my throat, tangling until none could get out. I had no doubt what it was, the secret of the Jan'i. I finally whispered, "Why?"

  "I can't use it any more. But you might need it. You know things you're not supposed to."

  "But I'm not going to say anything. They know that."

  "You trust them. But do you trust them to trust you?"

  I thought about a government that would try to weaponize Jan'i viruses in secret. I thought about how Ed's cell had been bugged. I thought of people like Rusty, who tried to get me to throw the case, and the talking heads on TV who weren't even sure I was human, and the protestors outside my house, who wanted to teach me to stand with my own kind. Who did I piss off to get this job? Everybody.

  The judge wasn't going to be able to keep this secret. Soon people were going to start asking questions about why Regina had killed her father. Questions would lead to speculation, speculation would lead to rumors, and we'd already seen what rumors could lead to, fifteen years ago.

  Although Ed's gift felt like a loaded gun in my hand, I slipped it into an inside pocket.

  "I'd better go talk to the prosecutor about your transfer. I'll try to see you later."

  And I let them take him away.

  A Little Trouble Dying

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  Artwork by M. Wayne Miller

  * * *

  Waiting for the last contaminants of the plague to pass, I had sat in my underground bunker, surrounded by 55-gallon plastic drums of distilled water and mountains of canned vegetables with peeling paper labels. I had scribbled the days and weeks and years onto the wall like a prisoner marking time in solitary.

  And that's exactly what I was: a prisoner. Except I hadn't been forced into a cell for crimes against society; I had gone down there alone, voluntarily, to escape death.

  If only I had known quite how thoroughly I would accomplish my goal . . .

  You see, until yesterday I had been alone, waiting, lingering, without seeing another living being in exactly two-hundred-fourteen years, eight months, and three days. But I was still here, still young, still healthy. Still exactly the same.

  I was having a little trouble dying.

  Now, I know what you're thinking, and no, I'm not crazy. I may have become a little obsessive about counting things, but you try spending 3,264 days alone in an underground bunker -- no matter how well-stocked it might be with books, games, digital music and movies -- and another 75,146 days above-ground but still alone, foraging for anything that might help ease the boredom, and see if you don't come out obsessed with something.

  And I think it's important that you know I never intended to go into that bunker alone. Despite being told repeatedly what a paranoid fool I was for building the damn thing in the first place, I was a social person. I loved being around people. They say the difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that the former derives their energy from being alone; the latter derives their energy from being with people. I was no introvert.

  But when I told my co-workers at the lab that I thought the N7HV3 virus was about to explode across the planet, none of them grasped the urgency of the situation. And when I told my family and friends the same thing, I got the same response. They called me a 'Doomsday Prepper' and told me I should go on one of those reality TV shows.

  Reduced from logic to cajoling, then pleading, I finally had no choice but to go into the bunker alone.

  Six weeks later they were all pounding on the double-paned, bullet proof window next to the entrance, their eyes bleeding and their flesh flaking from their bodies in great gray chunks.

  But by then letting anyone else in, even my sister and her infant daughter, was no longer an option. All that was left to do was talk--and sometimes cry--along with them, through the intercom, until they died on my doorstep.

  A lot of people died on my doorstep.

  I hated each and every one of them for making me watch them die like that. Hated them with a passion.

  That's when I started counting. I counted family and friends as they died a few hermetically-sealed inches away, and I could feel myself age with the passing of each one.

  Several centuries later, I'm still in the habit of counting things -- but I haven't aged since.

  And I only hate them a little . . .

  Despite my scientific background and having little to do but ponder the situation, I had no idea why I stopped aging. At first I thought it might've been related to the N7HV3 virus, or some mutant strain of another virus I worked on in the lab. Both of those theories made as much sense as anything else I could come up with. Unfortunately I lacked the equipment to test them, and by time it was safe to come out of the bunker, the lab where I had worked -- along with everything else mankind ever created -- had been reduced to so much rusted, rotted, moldering junk.

  But as with so many other things, after the first century I stopped questioning it. A man can only stew for so long on the same problem without finding answers before he moves on.

  Then, yesterday, over two hundred and five years after I determined it was finally safe to live above-ground again, I was standing in front of the entrance to my bunker when Death came to visit me. Actually, he walked right up to me.

  He was about six foot two, had blonde hair and hot pink eyes, and wore black jeans and a black t-shirt with a pirate's skull and cross bones printed on it. It was overkill in the most absurd sort of way, but there could be no doubt who he was.

  I had never been so happy to see anyone in my very long life.

  You see, I had thought about killing myself plenty -- I had planned it out 407 different times -- but I had never had the nerve to do it. Now Death had finally come. He would do his job and I would be free.

  He sauntered up to me like it was a birthday party. "Jared Peterson?"

  "Yes," I said excitedly. I extended my hand to shake his. "Yes, I am."

  I had spent years talking to myself for fear I might forget how to speak, but it still felt odd to have someone standing in front of me as words came out of my mouth. Death looked at my hand as if it were covered with cockroaches and immediately stepped back, raising both hands in a gesture that was familiar even after two centuries of solitude.

  "What's wrong?"

  "No, no," he said quickly, firmly. "No touching."

  "Why not?" But even before I had finished asking the question, I knew the answer. "Because if I touch you, I die," I said. "That's how it works, isn't it?"

  He nodded once, decisively. "Pretty much. It takes a full second of contact, but if you touch my skin, that's the end."

  Suddenly the sun didn't feel quite so warm on my face anymore. What kind of cosmic injustice was this? Death had finally come -- and he wouldn't take me?

  "But it's time for me to die. It's past time."

  Death stared softly at me, as if measuring which words he might use. It seemed like he was purposely dragging this out.

  "Well . . ."

  "What do you mean 'well?' Do you have any idea how tired I am of living alone?" I lunged at him --

  . . . but before I had completed my first step, Death was gone. Vanished.

  I staggered, I fell to the ground. It's not easy lunging at nothing.

  Had I finally lost m
y mind?

  But no, he was still nearby; he had merely moved, apparently too quickly for my eye to follow. Now he was perched, squatting, settled atop the raised concrete entrance to my bunker. The afternoon sun was directly behind him, making him look like an ominous, blonde-headed crow as he hopped down.

  "It's actually painful for me to move this slowly. It's like choosing to be the Tin Woodsman after he rusted by the side of the Yellow Brick Road. I'm only doing it for your benefit, so don't try anything like that again. Otherwise I will leave you here, alone."

  "No!" My stomach cringed at the thought. "God, please, no."

  Death spread his hands. "No more nonsense? No more 'sudden' moves?"

  "No," I agreed quickly. "No. I promise."

  Death sat down in the tall green grass, his legs crossed in such an unusual way that I'd swear he had just bent his knees in the opposite direction. He said, "Let's chat, you and I. You must have questions, and I haven't spoken with anyone in nearly a century. Let's spend a few moments together."

  I grew increasingly convinced he was stalling when he gestured grandly to the Eden-like world around us. "Impressive, no?"

  It was an undeniably gorgeous world. Every river ran as clean and clear as an infant's conscience; fish and birds and animals teemed like snowflakes at the North Pole; fruit and berries filled the bushes thicker than people had once filled New York City.

  Frankly, I didn't care about any of it. I might have once, but that was so long ago I couldn't even remember any more. Now I only cared about one thing.

  "Why won't you take me?"

  I was still on my feet, standing before him, looking at him longingly. And all the while, I kept thinking that there was no way, absolutely no way, he could avoid me if I threw myself at him.

  Problem was, I was terrified to try.

  In all the years gone by, I had never been able to come up with a means of killing myself that didn't look like it would hurt like hell -- or worse yet, leave me suffering if I failed. My greatest fear was that I was somehow immortal and would live on in agony if I cut my throat or threw myself off a cliff. And believe you me, I'd stood at the top of a lot of cliffs since that first one 73,186 days ago.