Mad, Like a Simile, Aaron Redfern [best value ebook reader .txt] 📗

didn’t make any sense.

“You did it,” she said. “You killed all of those people.”

“Now that,” he puffed through a thin, casual smile, “is just silly.”

Every week. And he’d even put the clues there, so she would pick up the trail and apprehend some hapless person, week after week. How many people had she had arrested? Some of them had even confessed to the killings. After Harry had gotten through with them, mostly.

She took a step forward, and her hand reached deeper into her purse. “You set the murders up. Was it every single one of them? Did any

of them happen without you?”

“Sure,” Harry said. The cigar stuck from between his teeth, burned down to almost nothing, like the last inch of a bomb fuse. “Why don’t you just--”

“Shut up, Harry,” Eddie said. She whipped the gun out of her purse. It went out in front of her almost like it was moving on its own, and she wavered there with it fixed on his heart. That, if nothing else, was a point that she could drive home. “Shut. Up.”

Something crashed to her left. The table was thrown up and on its side. the champagne glass smashed against the floor. Dick lumbered at the edge of her vision, fumbling for his gun. To her right, the kid didn’t seem to know where to put his hands.

“Jesus,” said Dick.

“Jesus,” said the kid. “Oh Jesus.”

Harry did not change at all. He leaned on the window sill, and smoke streamed from his mouth. “You should probably put that down.”

Ironically, it was the kid who managed to find his gun first. “Drop that,” he said feebly. “Put your weapon...down...” He finally managed to raise his own pistol in her general direction.

She rotated and shot him between the eyes. His head snapped back, blood fountaining straight upward from the wound as though he were zealously winning the most misguided spitting contest that had ever been held. He collapsed.

Eddie turned back to Harry Mason, who still hadn’t moved. Dick had his gun trained on her. “You crazy bitch!”

“Are you in on it too, Dick?” she asked. “You must be. You’ve been around too long. It must be all of you. One man couldn’t have done all those murders on his own. Poor kid.”

“I’m probably gonna like this,” Dick said.

Eddie ran forward. She was only two yards from Harry when she started, only one when she heard the shot, and she was almost on him when she felt the bullet somewhere in her back, between ribs. The pain tore at her, blinding bright like the sun, but she smashed into Harry with all her weight, all the strength of a body too big and cumbersome for the woman inside it, and she carried him backward through the window. Glass shattered and flew all around them like a storm of confetti, like it was a wedding, and the two of them pitched through the space where nothing was, between the two halves of a wall, and they went down and down.

Harry’s face was inches from her own. He grinned.

* * *

Eddie was pretty sure that she was dead. There were sounds in her ears, and lights in her eyes, and none of it made sense.

She felt like she was floating. She was on her back, and somewhere above her was the sky, but it was far away, and its blue-white was so brilliant that she wanted to turn away, but she had no head to turn. It seemed to be pulling away from her, and she felt rather than heard a sucking sound as it went. Harry Mason was gone. Maybe, Eddie thought, through some bizarre twist of the rules, he had gone to Heaven, and she had finally made it to Hell.

Her eyes opened. She was in a room, huge and black-walled and mostly empty. Three spotlights shone on her from the upper edges of the room like cloned suns, bright and close.

She stood up, shaking, and looked around. The floor was concave, and trails of tiny lights led from the walls down into the center, at her feet. Some sort of steel balcony ran along the outer edge, twenty feet up from where she stood. A man stood on the balcony. No, maybe it was not a man. A woman?

Eddie realized she couldn’t tell. The figure’s face was blank, androgynous, almost inhuman in its perfection. It wore a white suit that looked like skin, and its body was eerily, frighteningly featureless. It was like a door that could not open.

“You should stop resisting, Eddie Reynolds,” it told her.

She raised the fingers of one hand to her forehead. Her body felt subtly different. She realized, suddenly, that it was the body of someone who had been born a woman.

She looked up at the figure in white. “X,” she said. The name had come to her without warning.

Other thoughts came to her in flashes. Some kind of spectacle, others watching her, like the gladiators in an ancient Roman pit. It was a punishment for something. This creature had come for her.

“You will have to go in again,” said X. “To a new setting. Always, you resist. But we will always put you back.”

She had killed someone. A mistake, though not an accident. She remembered the pain that had driven her, but could not yet remember what had hurt so much. X had come. It always came for killers. And it had put her inside of the show, for everyone to watch. A new murder every week. A brilliant detective who always reached the solution. She had always been quick, had always noticed things. They had tailored this for her. Everyone watched her drift in Hell. It entertained them.

“Please,” she said. She had intended to say something better, but it did not come. “Please don’t put me back in there.”

“Always, you twist the reality you are given to suit the reality you want to remember,” said X. “You fight. When you stop fighting, it will be easier for you.”

Something about justice and redemption. They had put her there for a reason, but she could not remember it. Already, she was forgetting the world she had lived in until minutes ago, and true memories were slow in coming to take the place of the false ones. She had no self. That was the worst thing they could do to her, to take away who she was and replace it with something else. They wanted something out of it. Something was expected of her.

She knew she had little time, and her mind raced to put details together. She could do this. Her mind was quick. She noticed things. They wanted her to solve crimes, over and over again. They had put someone in the world with her to set up murders. They could have done it another way. They had made her a man, or tried. In her past life, she had killed someone. She remembered a window, and the way someone had stood against it, and her sorrow.

Think,

she willed herself. Think, Eddie.

“X,” she said. “I swear to God, if you just give me half a chance...”

X reached out and touched something on the balcony railing. The lights on the floor glowed brighter, and began to pulse.

“This is what you have earned,” it said.

There had to be a way. She had to keep a piece of herself, so that she could find the clues and put them together, and find a way.

The room went white, and she felt herself pulled away. Out of the whiteness, a grassy lawn began to form, and trees. She was someone else. Young, and female. Her knowledge was streaming from her head and rushing away like birds flying from a falling tree, and other things were being forced in. Deep down inside of her, something screamed.

What a strange feeling,

she thought, and she wondered where it had come from. She shouldered her backpack and headed down the driveway, away from her father’s towering home. The mansion rose up behind her, but it trailed away as she walked, like an unwanted gift tossed from the window of a fast car, disappearing in the rear-view mirror. She had so much to prove.

The day was bright, and hot as Hell.

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Text: Aaron Redfern
Publication Date: 07-06-2012

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