Dues of Mortality

D
u e s

o
f

M
o r t a l i t y

A
Novel

by

Jason
Austin

Jason Austin. All rights
reserved

#https://twitter.com/JasonAustin14

It is my greatest
hope that this novel serve as a testament

to the endless
and unconditional love of Janice Louise

Austin,
who not only gave me life, but saved it
.

I
love you Momma…forever.

Cleveland, Ohio, August 25,
8:34 a.m.

The
news would probably call his death a result of posttraumatic stress
disorder. Or more likely, the coroner’s report would say it.
The terribly tragic story of another homeless corpse wasn’t
exactly a reason to cut into the coveted primetime webisodes, even
for the most revered of combat veterans. Any mention at all, of
course, was assuming his body would actually be found. Shit, three
square blocks of this neighborhood could be blown to smithereens
without anyone complaining about the noise. Xavier pressed the gun's
barrel to his lips, pushed down hard. Preferably, the bullet would
enter just above the tonsils and exit through the back of his skull,
splattering a healthy mass of gray matter against the crumbling
drywall. There was a small margin of error, but if he did it right,
it would be quick and
hopefully
painless.

He
wasn’t wearing a comwatch or anything, but if his hemorrhoids
were any indication, he’d been warming the corner floor the
better part of the morning. His brain site-surfed at a queasy speed;
he couldn't focus for shit. A droplet of rusty water splattered on
his nose and it felt like he’d been punched.

Jesus
!
He dug the barrel into his temple.
Just
pull the trigger
.
He bent at the wrist and the cold
metal scraped a purple blotch beneath his right eye.

“
Ouch!”

What happened last night?

****

Twenty-four Hours Ago

Somewhere in upstate Ohio

Having to be anywhere near this
place was the only thing that ever made Gabriel second-guess his
career choice. Not because his three-hundred-dollar Italian shoes had
to clap through a stronghold, housing enough weaponized agents and
their by-products to wipe out nearly half the planet...but the people
he had to contend with were just plain
nauseating
.
That Japanese Mafioso was hooked on the very narcotics he
sold—disgustingly unprofessional, and that vile prince from the
Middle East: nothing but a thuggish little pervert completely
enamored with himself. A who's who of draconian cutthroats
masquerading as diplomats and public or religious servants. Not that
Gabriel cared about that. He made his living keeping such human
refuse out of prison, and made sure they remained free to torment
their respective societies for years to come. What really drove him
up a wall was the fact that they were just so...
disingenuous
about themselves. Naturally, they couldn’t reveal to those
“respective societies” what they really were; fair
enough. Gabriel wasn’t exactly upfront with the press about his
own dubious nature. But when you’re trolling around a facility
that isn’t supposed to exist, buying weapons that aren’t
supposed to exist, with money that wasn’t supposed to exist,
you left your fucking theme music at home! Yes, yes, they wanted
proof that someone with a direct line to Wallace was overseeing the
process. They wanted to make sure someone cared enough to do things
right. But
to hell
with all their phony pomp and circumstance! Christ! As if Wallace or
anyone in charge gave a flea’s fart about their pointless
cause, their temporary government, or their fucking foreign
rebellion.

“
We’ve
increased the potency of the Saffron toxin so you can minimize the
delivery system,” Gabriel assured his guest. “It will be
ready by the end of next week, well ahead of schedule.”

“
Good,”
the pouty-lipped woman answered. “It should give us the last
bit of leverage we need to put our demands on the prime minister’s
list of priorities.”

Gabriel
smiled at her openly. Smart move, on the general’s part, to
send such a sleek and leggy attaché from—where was
it?—Uganda or something like that—to tie up the deal, he
thought. Otherwise, Gabriel might have passed her off to the head
lab-man and been on his way back to Cleveland. He needed to retrieve
the information from the deployed prototype and be done with it. He
lost an hour of sleep for every minute the damn thing was still
active. He ogled the attaché and smiled warmly, hoping she
would notice. Maybe he could snag a quick lay after sealing things
up. Besides, after having to actually sit just five feet from a
hermetically sealed chamber while a deadly nerve toxin was unleashed
inside, it was the least she could do.

****

Cambridge, Massachusetts,
August 24, 11:02 p.m.

A winsome bar of
“Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” tweeted from Stanley Edinburgh's lips
as he strode through the new biotech wing inside the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology’s University Park. He was still on a
high from his epiphany following another verbal death-match with
Dolores and, although, being a security guard at the institute was
never exactly like policing the dark alleys of Roxbury—in that
there was no need to wish he were somewhere else—tonight
Stanley found his twilight rounds as soothing as an oriental massage.

The
argument had begun as usual; Stanley came home to find a soggy herbal
cigarette butt floating in the toilet and his wife with that markedly
“satisfied” grin on her face. Since Dolores didn’t
smoke and presumably went to the bathroom within the nine or so hours
he was gone...well, it at least made the need for a detective
obsolete. Stanley didn't even have to open his mouth. He just looked
at her, shook his head as if to say, “how stupid do you think I
am?” and that was all the excuse she needed.

“
What's
your problem?” she blared, leading off with the classic
reversal technique. At least she still managed to feel a
little
guilt. From
there it segued into how he didn't make enough money and how she was
tired of driving a goddamn bus every day to make ends meet.

“
You're
the
man
of
the house, you should be paying the bills anyway,” she'd said.
Funny how when it came to paying the bills he was the
man
.
The other twenty-three hours and fifty-nine minutes of the day, he
was everything from loser to dickless wimp.

“
As
if being dickless was much of a problem for you,” he'd said out
of earshot. Stanley got offhand reports of Dolores and other, usually
younger
men, like Bigfoot sightings—in
and about town, ducking from motel to restaurant with her hanging all
over them like seaweed on a beached dolphin. Somewhere, there was a
stupid undergraduate sapling bragging to his buddies about the
forty-nine-year-old, borderline MILF who was buying him designer
jeans and edifying him about the fabled g-spot. That's where all
her
money was going, by the
way...along with hair salons, skin treatments and gym memberships,
which weren't cheap and if it meant dipping into a nearly depleted
401k and driving on a drained battery, so be it. A shame really.
Dolores wasn't at all unattractive when she put her best foot
forward. But in regard to her own husband, she was the meanest,
nastiest and most evil bitch in the history of evil bitches.
Ultimately, there wasn't enough pancake or perfume on earth to cover
that.

Stanley's
long overdue epiphany had happened somewhere
after
“worthless fuck” and
before
“biggest mistake of my life”. It was amazing. At the
absolute apex of all the smiting and gnashing of teeth, it was as if
the clouds had suddenly parted and he couldn't help but recognize
that it was all past the point where he gave a shit anyway. How or
from where it had manifested, he had no clue. But, without missing a
beat, he just smiled at his wife and said, “I love you too,
dear.”

And
he meant it.

Not
in the romantic “forever and ever” way he once did, but
in the “it's all going to be alright” kind of way.

“
You're
crazy,” she bitched.

“
Well,
I might be crazy,” he rebutted, then paused for effect, “
but
I sure ain’t miserable.
”

The
look on Dolores's face when he left for work was
priceless
.

As
Stanley rollicked in his newly discovered liberation, he used his
baton flashlight to tap on his shoulder the beat of another song he
had queued up in his mental ApTunes. Abruptly, a soft clatter, from
what seemed to be one of the student labs, floated out into the
dimmed corridor. He beamed his light at a pair of double doors just a
few feet from his left. Keeping the light trained on them, he walked
to the doors and selected a code key from his belt. He decoded the
lock and eased the door open while stepping sideways and aiming the
light inside.

Carefully,
but without alarm, Stanley angled inside the lab. He holstered the
flashlight and rested a palm over the low-charged MAG strapped at his
hip. He commanded the lights and a lusty whiteness saturated the
room. Millions of dollars’ worth of state-of-the-art computers
and 3D microscopes sat atop row after row of powder blue, laminate
casework. Shelves filled with beakers, bottles and boxes of
god-knows-what were hunkered beneath the raceways of industrial pipes
traversing the ceiling. Stanley never forgot the disaster potential
that existed in these rooms. He always regarded them as one stray
shot away from Fukushima.
I
should have stayed in school
, he thought. He continued to
look around the lab in an imprecise manner, feeling his reflexive
stomach-knot loosen with every undisturbed sight. It rebounded a bit
when he perceived something odd about the air vent to his right.

Squinting
suspiciously, Stanley walked over to the vent and found a piece of
black knit cloth protruding from its slots. He redrew his flashlight
to inspect it. He unfastened the vent’s catches and found that
the cloth was actually a shoulder strap to a lumpy black dufflebag.
He removed the bag and, when going to place it on the nearest table,
glimpsed what looked like a faint boot-print on the otherwise
spotless surface. He cautiously laid the bag on an adjacent table and
reached for his radio. The bag had an unzipped flap over a side
compartment and, before uttering a word, Stanley curiously flipped it
up with the tip of his light. His eyes locked instantly on the bold
red LED numbers.