Free The Fearsome Particles by Trevor Cole

“You’re not going to leave it jammed are you?”
    “Actually, I –” He pointed vaguely down the hall.
    She squinted. “What’s that on your neck?”
    He touched the skin above his collar. “We have a cat. I have to go.”
    “That looks nasty. She must not like you.” Sandy grinned. “I assume it’s a she.”
    Gerald, backing his way down the hall, shrugged. “It’s not our cat.”
    He made it as far as the framed poster for the International Window-Fittings Conference (hosted by Spent Materials Inc., 1989) when Sandy raised her hand and dangled an index finger over the copier like mistletoe. “I don’t know how to fix this,” she crooned.
    Gerald felt his desire to flee crumble under duty’s oppression. He reversed course and walked back to the copier with head bowed. It was unbelievable, really, the bind he’d gotten himself into; he doubted anyone would even
read
this humidity column.
    As he swung open the copier’s flimsy door and reached in amongst the inner workings, Sandy laid her folder on the top of the machine and lifted out a typed sheet. She rattled it at Gerald as he was bent over.
“This
is what I wanted to talk to you about. I thought, while I was waiting, I’d get everything down on paper.”
    “Your crazy idea?”
    She rose up on her toes. “My crazy, earth-shattering idea.”
    “You were going to make copies of it?”
    “Well” – her expression turned pert – “I was anticipating your enthusiastic approval and I was getting ready for the meeting with Bishop.”
    He pulled the offending sheet from the copier’s entrails and tossed it, crumpled, into the recycling bin. “Jumping ahead a bit maybe.” As he smudged black toner dust off his hand, heassessed his options and the punishments each entailed. He could hear Sandy out for a few minutes and bear the pain of her disappointment when he said no, or he could let her go around him and drag Bishop into a headache he didn’t need. He considered that there might be value too in being seen to be open to new ideas, and that this might serve to instil a little useful fear in Trick, whom he judged to be floating these days like a goose on a warm thermal breeze. “Why don’t you come to my office after five and we’ll talk about it,” he said, then punched the reset button and pulled his issue of
Sheet and Screen
from the glass. “There you go.”
    “Five-fifteen?”
    “Make it six.”
    F rom his office, Gerald called Vicki’s cell phone. She wasn’t answering, most likely because she was setting up the house on Lightenham and had stored her purse under a sink somewhere. Why she didn’t keep the cell on her belt or in a pocket so that people could reach her when they needed her was a great, impenetrable mystery to Gerald. “Vicki,” he said when her voice mail kicked in, “hope things are going okay over there. I’m just letting you know that I have a meeting at six, which shouldn’t go too long, and so I should be home around seven. As long as the traffic cooperates.” He was about to hang up but brought the phone back. “By the way, I am sorry about this morning.”
    It had been bothering Gerald most of the day – to be accurate, since 11 a.m. – that he had, in the night, set Vicki’s bedside clock to the correct time. This was his admittedly petty responseto being woken, from the best sleep he’d had since Kyle’s return, by an attack from one of his wife’s more savage toenails, which had dug a finger-length gouge out of his left calf. It was a wound so deep he couldn’t let it wait until morning, although part of him had wanted the satisfaction of showing her the blood on the sheets. While he’d padded into the ensuite and repaired himself with a generous daubing of liquid bandage, he’d let his mind run with a visual loop that had him flinging off the duvet before Vicki’s horrified gaze to reveal a
Godfather
esque level of gore.
(See? See?
his expression would say. He wouldn’t even need to