Flash! Fiction 3 by Peter McMillan - HTML preview

97

My apartment. They'd be waiting. My roommate. Too late. She'd never believe me anyway. I couldn't warn anybody. My father in the Saint John Fire Department back home and my sister, a medic in Afghanistan. They wouldn't go after first responders, would they?

God, what kind of hell had I fallen into?

Out on the sidewalk in the bright sun, I could have sworn the subway entrance was surrounded by black SUVs and men in black with bad haircuts, like mine. And the marquee across the street read "The Life of Brian." Obviously a taunt. Everybody knew Monty Python was dead.

Having escaped the hot zone, it occurred to me that once they had the kid and the phone, they wouldn't need me and they'd stop chasing me. Without the audio, I'd be just another wacko conspiracy theorist. I mean, who's gonna believe a brain can be taken out of a living person, kept alive in a vat, tested by tens of thousands of electrical impulses, and then reinserted? Really?

"Hey buddy, sidewalk's closed. There's construction overhead.

How'd you get through the barricade?"

It took a firm hand on my shoulder to stop me. The words — I didn't think he'd been talking to me. Would've been ironic I suppose if a steel beam had fallen on my head.

Maybe not, going back to my original train of thought. Maybe they wouldn't stop chasing me if they found the teen and my cell phone.

How hard would it be ... to create an accident? Wouldn't it make sense to tie up all the loose ends?

Meanwhile, if I had a good option, I sure couldn't think of it. Not a chance of happening on a futuristic laser weapon to neutralize the bad guys like in a cheap video game. Pity this wasn't fiction.