Author: Alexander Fawn

The shopping centre was busy with people.

She sat at the back of the café, sipping her coffee and daydreaming. She did that a lot. Her reverie was broken by someone calling out. He waved as he approached. “I thought I’d find you here.”

Unnerved by the stranger’s sudden appearance, she said, “Pardon?”

He was an old man, somewhere in his nineties, she thought. He eased himself into the chair opposite and squinted at her. “I reckoned you’d be here. I thought they’d never leave.”

“What?”

“Leave… I thought they’d, you know, never leave.”

“Who?”

“All of them! Lord there must have been at least a dozen of them, all jabbering away at once. These people keep coming to my house, I think they think I’m somebody else. You know how they go on.”

She gave a sardonic smile. “No, I don’t actually.”

“Of course you do. You were there when the old guy came in with the blueprints, weren’t you? Oh! Perhaps not. Well, I think they’re planning something. It’s bound to be something bad.”

She looked around in desperation. “Look,” she began, “I think…”

He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. His agitation was growing worse. “You know, they just kept talking. I thought they’d never leave. I don’t want any part of it. They wouldn’t let me in on what they’re doing… just kept on about how society was going down the drain. Do you have any idea what they are up to?”

She paused. “Well, I…”

“Thought not; anyway, I must let you get on. Just glad I caught up with you, to let you know. Remember, you really can’t trust them!”

“Sorry, I think you’ve got me muddled up with…”

“Bye for now. Take care.” He got slowly to his feet and disappeared among the crowd of shoppers.

A few weeks later, it was all over the news. The police had uncovered a plot. A group of terrorists had planned to blow up parliament. In the workplace, everyone was talking about it. It just went on all day.

That evening she sat watching the top story on the news. She turned the television off and sat for a few moments with conflicting thoughts. Then, she came to a decision.

She would say nothing.

She’d lost track of how many times she’d upgraded her computer.

It was a nightmare, she was always running out of space on her computer when she least expected it. Doing this wasn’t cheap, and she had the feeling the guy at the shop could see her coming. So, on this particular evening she turned to the internet for help. She looked at a number of sites before finding one that said she could have her computer free up space by getting rid of files she didn’t need, like temporary files. She did this. When it was finished, she looked in ‘settings’ at ‘storage’. She’d given the machine’s capacity an extra five percent. Not to be sneezed at, but not a real solution.

She researched a bit more and found she could individually compress her own files, the ones she had created. She gave this a go. It took an absolute age. So many files! She looked back at the storage; she’d gained another seven percent. She thought about it for a while before researching further. After a while of reading more information about compression, she found an article that explained how to actually compress absolutely all of the files on her computer. Even the ones she might have missed, she thought. This sounded more like it, so she carefully followed the instructions. When it was done she returned to the storage section and saw that a further ten percent had been freed up.

Feeling that she was on a winning streak, she kept looking and found yet another site that said she could compress her entire hard drive on her computer. Now, this was really something! She could do this by just following a few simple steps. This she did. When the process was complete she saw that an additional twelve percent had been gained. She was very pleased with what she’d accomplished and was ready to take a well-earned break when a strange looking advert popped up unexpectedly. It promoted a free trial of a new auto-compression program for people needing more working space on their computer. Although she had no idea how she had found this, and had a creepy feeling that it was part of the dark web, she opened it up to take a look.

It was a weird looking screen that had all sorts of strange hieroglyphics scattered around the borders. It said it was a program that used a newly discovered method of automating the compression process. It stated that the program had a remarkable feature of allowing a repeating compression mode to gain the best results. After giving this some careful thought, she clicked and started the program. It had run for a couple of minutes before she realised that she was watching the computer, shrink, or compress, or whatever. She looked on dumbstruck as the screen, keyboard, mouse and speakers all grew smaller and smaller. She considered stopping the program, but the keys on the keyboard were so tiny that she could barely read them. There was a soft pop and it was gone. All of it was gone!

She couldn’t believe her eyes and placed a shaking hand into the space where, moments before, the screen had been. There was another pop.

The chair she’d been sitting in swiveled slightly… and was empty.

The last words he remembered echoed over and over in his head.

By some inexplicable means he was familiar with them, but was unable to recall them. They were muffled. Maybe they were spoken immediately before what had happened to him. What had happened to him? Try as hard as he could, he had no memory of it. He only knew that he was laying, perfectly still, with his eyes closed. Could he move? He wasn’t sure. Did he want to try? There was a burning pain in his head. He moved his arm and felt the pain at the back of his head burn even more with an unbelievable intensity. He relaxed his arm and waited for the agony to subside.

He could hear voices; distant mutterings. With effort, he willed his eyes to open. He shut them immediately, squinting. The brightness of it, searing into his head, restarted the pain shooting through his skull. The voices grew louder and a rustling of something. Whatever covered him was being moved. Loud voices now. Very close.

“When was he admitted?”

“Let me see… ten-thirty this morning. We’re still waiting for x-rays.”

“I’ll be back this afternoon. I’ll look in on him then.”

“Thank you doctor.”

He heard them, but they made no sense. He drifted off into sleep.

Sometime later he woke and found there was less pain when he opened his eyes. He knew some time had passed because the glare of the lights had been replace by a dim glow. Despite the discomfort he slowly turned his head to see black through the gap in the blind. He peered around at the hospital ward’s surroundings. He managed to ease his arm out of the sheet and feel his head, with less discomfort than he felt earlier. He felt bandages. What had he done? Had he taken a fall or was he hit by something? It was so frustrating that he couldn’t remember. He realised that sooner or later a nurse was bound to come by, and he could ask.

However, within a few minutes of him lying awake, the need for this to happen became unnecessary. The whole thing gradually began to unfold. It all became clear as he remembered the last words spoken.

Those last words that now echoed over and over in his head.

His mum: “Please where your helmet.”

Him: “Mum! I don’t need one.”

She left her grumpy boyfriend sleeping, as usual.

Her job at the fruit cannery was pretty boring, although the people were nice. It didn’t pay well and she was never able to make extra money through the company’s productivity bonus scheme. On her meagre wages she was barely able to feed them both. She couldn’t remember the last time she bought a new piece of clothing. She avoided paying bus fares by walking the two miles to work and back each day. She’d lost touch with her parents for some time now and she had no real friends to speak of. For several months now she hadn’t been sleeping well. She felt she was coping with life, rather than living it.

When she got back, the place was empty. She found his note by the kettle. It read, ‘Sorry, babe. Found better digs. No hard feelings.’

In that moment a euphoric feeling swept over her as she realised that her whole world had just got one hell of a lot better!

From day one, she didn’t like his cat.

She thought it was fat and lazy. She tried to stroke it a couple of times, but it just hissed at her. On the other hand, he was very fond of it. He’d had it from the time it was a starving kitten. It had been abandoned, just a scraggy tom cat mooching around the neighbourhood streets. He saw it several times, most times it was looking for food around the dumpsters behind the cafe. Eventually, he took it in and fed it. It had been his companion ever since. It was very affectionate and he couldn’t imagine getting rid of it.

The whole thing came to a head one evening. He was sitting in the lounge reading when she stormed in.

He looked up from his newspaper. “What now?”

“It’s your cat, that’s what!”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “OK. What’s he done?”

“He peed on my best jumper! Want to smell it?” She held it up. “No, I didn’t think so. It smells absolutely disgusting. I’ve no idea how I’m going to get the stink out.”

He said, “Wow! That’s amazing.”

Her face reddened. “Why is that amazing?”

“Because he’s never done that on any bit of clothing I’ve left out. In fact, he usually curls up on it and goes to sleep.”

At this, she balled the jumper up and threw it at him. It missed.

She put her hands on her hips and said, “That’s it! You really have to choose now, because one of us has to go!”

He looked at the cat, curled up on the rug and frowned.

He got up and went to the cupboard under the stairs, took the shoebox down from the top shelf and opened it.

He returned to the lounge and shot her.

The young man had always felt personally threatened by storms.

He had often been told how silly the idea was by just about everyone that found out about it. People would point out that it was only an aspect of nature and in no way was it directed at an individual. Everyone, that is, except his father, who had used his fear of storms to discipline him saying that it was sent to admonish him for not doing his homework or for having an untidy bedroom or any other thing he could think of at the time.

This night, the storm that raged outside with its bright flashes and deafening thunderclaps seemed to be testimony to his beliefs.

The knife, his bloody hands and his father’s body had made the raging tempest particularly angry with him.

She came out of nowhere.

He’d just got off the bus in the middle of town when it happened. It was embarrassing, standing there cuddling, with pedestrians eyeing them as they stepped around them. She stepped back. “You remember me, don’t you? The party last year…” she waited.

“Of course,” he lied. She was quite a stunner.

“I’m so glad we bumped into each other again,” she said, her eyes flashing bright and her lips pursing.”

–

The writer put down his pen. He had scribbled these lines weeks ago. He was stuck. Each time he came back to them, nothing was added. He wondered where it was going to from here. He had thought of a number of possibilities.

Did she hiccup and say that she was sorry, that she’d been drinking, probably too much, then quickly walked away?

Maybe she stood back and squinted, then put her glasses on and apologised for having the wrong person?

Was she embarrassed and excused her behaviour on the basis that the medication she was taking was messing with her head?

At that point, did a group of people nearby start giggling, which caused her to admit she had done it as a dare?

Could it be that the girl had lifted his wallet when they cuddled?

Was it the case that she simply laughed and apologised, saying that she’d always wanted to do that?

Maybe he should leave it unfinished. It could be a kind of cliff hanger, allowing the reader to come up with an ending that suited them, according to their own taste.

What a cop-out!

The island was small, away from the mainland, secure, private and not talked about.

Well, within government circles it may get discussed by a very few. No governments like to advertise the sort of research that went on there. The development of robots for military purposes isn’t very nice at the best of times, but at this facility it was all about the delivery of highly toxic chemical agents designed to wipe out a great number of combatants quickly and with minimal human involvement. Robots were being built and programmed to do this very thing, and the relatively small group of scientists that lived and worked on the island needed a peaceful environment in which to design and construct their machines of death.

The island consisted of a large laboratory complex where thirty odd specialist scientists worked, and a small residential area where they were housed along with a small administration and maintenance staff. A population of around fifty that had very little contact with the outside world and were only visited once a year by a supply ship. As working groups go, their provisions were plentiful, their needs were met, and they lived in an environment of relative luxury. This would have stayed this way had it not been for two things. The first, being a frivolous decision and the second a failure in the matter of storage.

At a committee meeting it was decided that the contentious issue within the maintenance staff regarding who should be responsible for putting all of the dustbins out and bringing them in again should be resolved once and for all. Considering how many highly advanced test robots they had in storage, it would be easy to programme a group of these machines to operate on a daily schedule of keeping the entire complex free of rubbish, thereby resolving the issue. Within a few days these were programmed and put to work. All went well. The robots took out the bins, and the regular driverless trucks collected the rubbish and took it to the landfill site at the far end of the island. No human intervention was required. Whether all this came about as a welcome distraction from their more serious duties will never be known.

The second, and more important issue, was the storage of several large canisters of the project’s deadly poison that were held in a warehouse built for the purpose. The building was spacious enough to use as an assembly point for the robots that dealt with the rubbish. It was never considered that the weekly mass movement of robots coming and going on a weekly basis could vibrate and weaken the racks that held the canisters. However, it was on the third week of all this busy coming and going that one of the main legs of the rack system gave way, distorting the framework sufficiently to topple all canisters to the ground. Only three of the ten containers broke open, but this was enough; more than enough.

There was little wind that day, allowing the heavy, invisible and odourless gas to slowly but surely cover the entire island in an ankle-deep layer of deadly vapour that would be stirred by the early morning movements of the inhabitants;  those that were still alive. By mid-morning there was not a living soul on the island. As a result of the extremely virulent nature of this particular chemical agent all tissue and bone matter was reduced to dust inside of a week. Only piles of clothing remained.

The authorities on the mainland knew nothing of this for several weeks. When a complete lack of communication became a concern, a small patrol boat arrived and a party of security officers landed to make enquiries. The small team was quite safe, owing to the natural elements having dispersed the toxic agent within the first few days of the spill, but they were shocked by the devastating scene that confronted them. Not to mention the fact that a dedicated team of robots were observed to be diligently carrying out empty bins, that were tipped into an empty driverless truck, to be taken to the dump where it tipped its empty load onto an undisturbed rubbish site.

After the almighty explosion of glass and metal, he peered through the windscreen.

Driving without turning on your car lights on a wet winter’s night was never a good thing. The impact had really shaken him up. He didn’t feel well. The inside of his windscreen was fogging up and he looked around for something to wipe a hole in it. He found a sock. He wondered how it had got there. With a fierce belch, it came back to him. He’d had his son for the weekend. The silly cow had complained about returning him fifteen minutes late. He grinned at the thought of her hunting around looking for his other sock. Meanwhile, he used it to wipe a clear patch. The vehicle in front was sitting sideways, and he was just able to make out the word ‘Police’.

The man chuckled as he watched the burly occupant hammer the inside of the car’s door frame. The officer was obviously trying to get out. The door would only open enough to get a couple of fingers through. The rasping and creaking of it reminded him of the time he caught his son trying unsuccessfully to jimmy open his locked tool box. The little bugger wouldn’t tell him how he knew he kept his supply of drugs for his pushers in there. He wasn’t a bad kid really; just a bit of larceny and the odd grievous bodily harm. He chuckled to himself again, with a sense of pride. It was the sort of thing any kid of twelve would get up to.

He leaned forward and smirked as he took note that the driver still couldn’t get out. His partner seemed to be slumped over somehow. That side of the vehicle was jammed up against a wall. It had no doubt been pushed there by his vehicle bearing down on it. He wondered whether he would get the blame for any of this. Probably! It was always the same, the smallest thing goes wrong and the finger gets pointed at him. Like the failed marriage; when in fact no part of it was down to him. It was her fault that he’d lost his licence to drive over a year ago. That’s why the car was not registered or insured. She had so much to answer for. He had a good mind to go round there…

He was brought out of his reverie by a loud tap on his window. He wound the window down slowly. “You managed to get out then?” He burped and grinned. “Whoops! What can I do for you, officer,” he said in a happy-go-lucky tone.

The policeman was looking weary, from braking out of the damaged police car, and naturally anxious about his partner, who was still unconscious. He kept his composure and made his request in a professional manner. “Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?”

He pushed the door open and fell out, then clambered to his feet and leant against the car. He sighed deeply, sending out a cloud of invisible yet pungent alcohol fumes. The sound of an ambulance was growing louder.

In a more severe voice, the officer asked, “Have you been drinking, sir?”

His head wobbled around before he said “Nah.”

“It’s my duty to check your alcohol level but…”

He was interrupted by the ambulance screeching to a halt.

“As I was saying,” he went on stoically, “it is my duty to breathalyse you, but my vehicle is not available to me at present.” He looked back at his vehicle.

The other belched and said, “Sorry to hear that.”

“Yes. Well, we’ll get you to the station shortly. It might be best if you get back in your car and wait, sir.”

As he climbed back in, he saw another emergency vehicle pull up. He sat there thinking. He always tried to do the right thing, didn’t he? That was his nature. He watched the guy get out the jaws-of-life equipment. He’d probably get the blame for this too. Being known to the police, they’re bound to search the car. They’re sure to find the drugs. It’s not his fault that his regular pub closed early. Nobody could blame him for putting his foot down a little in order to make it to a pub that was still open. He looked outside. The rain had started again. It was the weather that caused it.

Surely, nobody could blame him for that!

When he got home he was still thinking about his strange encounter.

He had got off the train, still mentally working on a crossword clue that he hadn’t been able to solve, and he was on his way to the bus stop when he was approached by the young man. Quite out of the blue he had asked if he had time. If he hadn’t been trying to solve eleven across, he might have noticed the way the stranger had asked the question. Anyway, naturally enough he pulled out his phone and told him the time. The reaction to this was perplexing. The other replied with the statement; “No, not the time, just time.” What was he expecting or better still, what did he want? If he wasn’t drunk or on drugs, what was he asking for? He seemed sane enough and quite lucid. More than anything, he wanted to understand the question.

He had a very strong feeling that the stranger’s question was important, but he didn’t know why…