Dues of Mortality Read online

  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.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 1

  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. Stan
ley 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.

  The timer was at three seconds.

  For the second time in his life, Stanley felt the presence of divinity that had told him to say “I love you” to Dolores, leaving her, looking like a deer in the headlights.

  He turned his head as if someone were in the room with him and said, “Boy, I sure hope nobody else gets hurt.”

  Chapter 2

  Cleveland, Ohio, August 25, 3:16 a.m.

  Xavier gazed into the heart of the burning streetlight above his head in a lame attempt at some ad hoc, sadomasochistic ritual. He had a destination all squared out, but could only remember that this wasn't it. A half-minute was about all he could endure, before he looked back at the duplex, trying to blink away the light's dancing imprint. The horrific eyesore of an abandoned home had seemed to just materialize under the brim of Granddad Willie’s old baseball cap as Xavier wandered the streets of a particularly gritty section of East Cleveland. The first thing he noticed was how the bricked concrete steps leading to its porch were cracked in a way that resembled tiers of giant teeth smiling back at him. There wasn’t a single square inch of paint that wasn’t chipped or peeling, and every window on the bottom apartment had been boarded-over with sheets of compressed wood. Perfect, he thought as he tossed back a shot of gin from his old stainless steel flask, flexing his jaw on the swallow. He then tucked it back into his jacket pocket and marched to the rear of the house.

  Xavier found the back door to the house completely unobstructed and breathed a sigh of relief. Earlier, he'd tripped over his own feet and smacked his face on the gummy ground outside the liquor store. He was reticent to attempt anything that demanded genuine athleticism. He was as quiet as he could be, despite the minimal risk concerning noise. Many of the surrounding homes were, as well, vacant and the ones that weren't likely contained folks who were dead asleep or just wouldn't care. It took him almost ten minutes to divorce the stubborn door from its jamb. With a few good kicks and the unwitting aid of a heavy branch from a blown over tree, he considered it record time.

  Once inside, Xavier surveyed the first floor as best he could through the combination of murky space and drunken stupor. The road-mapped ceilings ran brown with water stains and scraps of old wallpaper formed curls of striped leaflets desperate to escape the remains of plaster. The parquet floors creaked ominously under his feet. They were shy a few boards in some spots, so he had to watch his step. If he wasn't careful, he could easily discover a ten-foot drop to the basement. A damp musty stench clung in the air—a mélange of rotted wood and rat droppings that bombarded him with all the mercy of the Japanese on Pearl Harbor.

  “In a world of shit now,” he said, and segued seamlessly between chuckling and gagging.

  Then Xavier felt the wave wash upward and he began to sweat. What it had taken to get inside would not be without a price. Dropping to his knees and leaning over one of the larger holes in the floor, he heaved violently; his eyes nearly spurting from their sockets. Echoes of vomit splashing against the basement's cement reminded him of frying bacon, which added an extra wring in the pit of his stomach. Afterward, empty and exhausted, a dry corner of the room appeared to him like a blissful desert oasis. He crawled over and crumpled into it with the wispiness of a dust bunny, in hopes that tomorrow’s sunrise would be kind enough to pass him by.

  ****

  “Hold it!” the voice exploded. It cut through Xavier’s short hours of heavy slumber like a jackhammer through concrete. During the night, wood rot had claimed a victim among the boarded windows and the sounds tailed in on the morning breeze.

  “I said hold it, you little shit!”

  The voice made Xavier’s head feel like a basketball being dribbled down court. He warily pushed himself to his feet and stumbled over to the sounds of running footfalls along the side of the house. Looking down, out of the window, he spotted the frame of a boy—adolescent, twelve, maybe thirteen. The kid was zipping through the small alleyway between the house and the old brick building next door. To the rear of the building, a trash dumpster gave the boy the barest pause as he lobbed something into it. He then spring-boarded for the chain-link fence that divided the property from the adjacent street. A misshapen piece of fencing caught the hem of the boy's pant-leg like a bear trap, and it wasn’t long before a huffing, burly policeman had his prey by the scruff of the neck. The instant Xavier saw the police uniform he plunked
beneath the window and peered cautiously over the sill.

  “Little bastard,” the policeman said. He was panting uncontrollably, angry as hell that the youngster had incurred such extreme physical exertion. “Bet if I broke your legs you’d think twice about running!”

  “Fuck you, man,” the boy hollered back. “I ain’t do nothing!”

  Xavier watched as the boy was carted away. He was grateful that he hadn’t been spotted by the uniform. He’d already filled his weekly quota of dirty looks from suburbanite cops with hard-ons for the homeless. He had yet to actually be dragged in and had resolved to keep it that way. Though he had been pretty badly rousted and even shoved around a few times by the worst of the bunch. Those jerks never learn, he thought. One would think the corruption scandals would have straightened them out, but if anything, they were just taking out their added frustration on people like him. He supposed he could take more care not to look so much the part, for all the good it would do. But then he'd think, why bother? His boyish head-turning features and wavy black locks were long gone and the hassle to restore even a hair's worth of them was beyond pointless. Easier to stick with the drawn sullen mugshot it had taken him over a year to perfect. Xavier zipped up his dirty blue flight jacket, and rubbed a knee through his stained khakis. He flattened a foot against the floor and pulled at the flap of sole from its worn boot. He stayed put until the boy had been thrown into the back of a squad car and the policeman had driven away. Once the coast was clear he headed downstairs and outside to the alley.

  With all his time on the street, dumpster diving had never been much Xavier's style. However, the kid had tossed away something he didn't want the cop to find on him. That could mean valuable. It could mean a few pints of the good stuff for a change. As he sifted through the mess of things he deemed best left unidentified, he soon found what he was looking for wrapped in an old copy of National World Weekly—a tabloid often better for crude insulation and toilet paper than reading. How it made enough money to still justify paper copy, he’d never understand. He extracted the bundle and unwrapped two specific pieces of indictable boodle. The first was an old .38 caliber revolver, nickle-plated with a bulldog grip. No different than the one that belonged to his grandfather as Xavier recalled. When he was eight, Granddad Willie caught him playing with it following a fishing expedition through the downstairs pantry. It was the only time the old man ever got mad at him.