William Rabkin - Mind-Altering Murder

The old man flew off the ladder, smashing into the wall of bottles, then crashed to the floor in a rain of broken glass and cheap scotch.

Gus stared over the counter at the shopkeeper’s bloody corpse. “Why did you do that?”

Shawn stepped up to him, thrusting the. 44 Magnum into the pocket of his leather duster.

“The question,” Shawn said, “is, why didn’t you?”

“Why didn’t I what?” Gus said. “Murder an old man who was trying to help me?”

“Is that what you call it?” Shawn said.

“Murder is what the law calls it,” Gus said. “It’s what the Bible calls it. It’s what everyone in the world calls it.”

“I could be wrong about this, but I seem to recall hearing that in different countries they have different words for things,” Shawn said as he stepped over to the shelves of snack foods and gave an exploratory squeeze to a package of Twinkies with a pull date from before the turn of the millennium.

Gus couldn’t pull his eyes away from the dead man lying on the floor in a pool of blood and whiskey. “Why did you kill him?”

Shawn put down the Twinkies and turned his attention to the freezer chest loaded with ice-cream bars. Or, as he discovered when he tried to take one out, loaded with a single ice-cream bar, as all the smaller units had melted and refrozen into a cube six feet on each side.

“Because it was him or you.” Shawn took two running steps, then leaped over the counter, landing in a crouch next to the body, his duster sending waves through the puddle spreading across the floor.

“What was he going to do?” Gus said. “Throw the bottle at me?”

“Worse. He was going to give it to you.” Shawn pulled the bottle of Glen Graggenlogan from the shopkeeper’s cold, dead hands and looked it over carefully. Then he pulled out the cork and turned it upside down. There was a rattle of metal on glass, and a small olive-colored device fell into Shawn’s hand.

“What is that?” Gus said.

“Doesn’t matter what it is now. What matters is what it would be if you walked out the door with it,” Shawn said.

“And what is that?”

“The ultimate theft-protection device,” Shawn said. He jumped back over the counter, opened the door, and tossed the device out onto the street. The thing bounced twice on the asphalt and then exploded into a fireball that took out two cars and the area’s last remaining pay phone.

It took a few seconds for Gus’ ears to stop ringing. He spent the time staring at the crater in the center of the road and trying to figure out how far his body parts might be separated by now if Shawn hadn’t stopped him from taking the bottle.

“I thought that was the thing I was supposed to bring Morton,” Gus said finally.

“Apparently you were supposed to think that.”

Gus looked around the liquor store in despair. “So what is the object?” he said. “What is it we’re supposed to collect here? Because I haven’t seen it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Shawn said. “You were staring at it all along.”

“I wasn’t staring at anything all along,” Gus said, then realized he wasn’t completely right. “Except…”

Shawn nodded. “Except.” He jumped back over the counter and fished around under it in the area the old man had kept his hand, then came up with a machete.

“Morton’s people would never allow us into his lobby carrying a weapon like that, let alone into his penthouse,” Gus said.

“The machete isn’t going anywhere,” Shawn said. “Except through a couple of vertebrae.”

It took Gus a moment to realize what he was hearing. By that time Shawn had already raised the machete high over his head and was beginning to bring it down toward the old man’s body.

“Stop!” Gus shouted.

Shawn froze, the machete poised in midair. “You want to do this?”

“Of course not,” Gus said.

“Then what’s the problem?” Shawn said. “You can kill a couple of cops when we leave here. Then we’ll be even.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Gus said.

“You’re no fun,” Shawn said.

“I am fun,” Gus said. “I am huge amounts of fun. Entire barrels of monkeys spend their lives yearning to be as fun as I am. What isn’t fun is shooting unarmed people and cutting off their heads.”

Gus reached up and grabbed his own ears. He gave them a hard tug, as if he was trying to pull his head off his shoulders.

“He had a grenade in one hand and a machete under the counter, which strongly suggests he wasn’t entirely unarmed,” Shawn said.

Despite his best efforts Gus’ ears remained stubbornly in place. “What about the little old lady you gunned down in the park?”

“She had that dog,” Shawn said.

“A bichon frise,” Gus said. “A Muppet would have been more of a threat. That didn’t stop you from putting three bullets in her.”

“I admit I got a little overeager there,” Shawn said. “But I paid the price for that. The cops came down pretty hard on me.”

“Until you ran them all over with your Hummer,” Gus said.

“Which dented the fender and put the car out of commission,” Shawn said. “Why do you think you were able to get here first?”

Gus gave his ears another yank, then grabbed his nose with one fist and twisted fiercely. “I wish I hadn’t. I wish we had never started this in the first place.”

“But we did,” Shawn said. “And now we have to finish.”

“I am finished,” Gus said. He squeezed his temples between his hands, then twisted his head furiously. The last thing he heard was the crack of his neck snapping.

Gus blinked against the sudden harsh light, then turned to see the cyclops next to him. It wore Shawn’s traditional khakis, along with a plaid shirt open over a white tee, but its head was a solid sphere of white plastic. It stumbled through the empty room, waving its arms in front of it like a small child playing zombie.

Gus grabbed the cyclops by the shoulders, then pulled the globe off its neck. Freed from the helmet, Shawn glared at him.

“You’re never supposed to pull someone out of an immersive reality like that,” Shawn said. “You could have destroyed my brain.”

“The only thing destroying your brain is that stupid game,” Gus said.

Shawn stared at him. “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t recognize you with all that hair and the new tan,” he said finally.

“I am not some grumpy old man trying to unplug the computer because you’ve been playing Monkey Island for sixteen hours straight,” Gus said. “Although I’m beginning to see his point.”

“What, that people shouldn’t be allowed to have fun?” Shawn said.

Gus put the two helmets into their slots on a low shelf that ran along one side of the handball court-sized room. As soon as they were back in place, there was an electronic click and the door set into one wall sprang open.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Shawn said. “I hope this game saves itself automatically, or we’re going to have to start all over again. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like hijacking another bus full of schoolkids.”

“You didn’t have to hijack the first one,” Gus said. “You didn’t get anything out of it.”

“I got major street cred,” Shawn said. “Especially after I threw the driver off the bridge, then landed the bus on top of him.”

“Listen to yourself,” Gus said. “You sound like a maniac.”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” Shawn said.

“Your measures aren’t desperate. They’re stupid,” Gus said.

“The whole point of the game is to take over Morton’s crime syndicate, and you can’t do that unless you can win his trust and get close to him,” Shawn said. “So first thing, you’ve got to establish yourself as the new face of crime in Darksyde City so he’ll invite you to join his organization. And you call that stupid?”